Picture Show No. 3 — Tying Off a Loose End

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Day 1 — Continued

So…Where was I? Oh Yes, Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). As I said last time, Buster Keaton’s last masterpiece would be a highlight of any weekend of classic movies, and so it was in Columbus this year. This is the picture with one of the most famous stunts of the silent era — or any era since, for that matter — where the whole side of a house collapses on Buster during a cyclone, with only an open window saving him from being smashed flat.

I used to screen Steamboat Bill, Jr. for my Film Studies classes at a local community college here in Sacramento, not only because it’s a masterpiece, but for a local connection to which my students could relate: Keaton shot the picture on the outskirts of Sacramento, building his fictitious town of River Junction on the west bank of the Sacramento River (doubling for the Mississippi), just above its confluence with the American River. The opening shot, panning from the American to the Sacramento and the River Junction set, is instantly recognizable to local residents today — if they can imagine the wide swath of Interstate 5 bisecting the frame.

Also recognizable, though less immediately apparent, is the building just visible on the horizon in this frame cap, between Buster and his leading lady, the fetching Marion Byron. It’s almost unnoticeable watching the movie, and not easy to make out even here. So here, below the full frame, is an enlargement of a section of it. See it now? Author John Bengston, in his book Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Buster Keaton, cites Paul Frobose of the Sacramento County Historical Society as identifying the building as the former California State Insurance Building at 10th and J Streets in Sacramento, three blocks from the State Capitol.

But I think a likelier candidate is this one on the left, Sacramento’s Elks Building, one block east at 11th and J. Recently completed in 1928, it was then the tallest building in Sacramento, the first one taller than the Capitol. Both the Elks and Insurance Buildings are still standing, but it’s too late to resolve the issue now; even if we could identify the exact spot where Keaton and director Charles Reisner placed their camera, too many newer, taller buildings have sprung up, on both sides of the river, in the 97 years since Buster and Marion stood there thinking wistfully of each other.

Among its many pleasures, Steamboat Bill, Jr. is also notable for giving character actor Ernest Torrence a rare opportunity to exercise his comic chops as Steamboat Bill Sr. At a towering six-foot-four, just seeing him standing next to the 5′ 5″ Keaton is already hilarious, but Torrence had a real flair for comedy that he too seldom got to deploy in a career where his size usually had him in more serious, even menacing roles — though he was also an extremely funny Captain Hook to Betty Bronson’s Peter Pan in 1924 (screened at Cinevent in 1999). He easily made the transition to sound, but an infection after gall bladder surgery in 1933 carried him off at 54; if he’d been granted even another ten or 15 years he might well have given Donald Crisp a run for his money.

My film studies students were usually unfamiliar with Steamboat Bill, Jr. — most of them were even unfamiliar with Keaton — but nearly all of them knew Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie. So they got that little light bulb of discovery when I pointed out that the title of Disney’s first Mickey Mouse cartoon was a play on the title of Keaton’s picture. “If you ever wondered why he didn’t call it Steamboat Mickey…well, now you know.”

Next came the first sound version of Henry De Vere Stacpoole’s 1908 novel The Blue Lagoon (1949), with Susan Stranks and Peter Rudolph James as children shipwrecked on a South Pacific island who grow up into Jean Simmons and Donald Houston, fall in love, and innocently found a family before being discovered by two other castaways (James Hayter, Cyril Cusack) of unsavory backgrounds and intentions. In Stacpoole’s novel, the two kids are first cousins, but this 1949 production bowed to the dictates of the Breen Office by removing any hint of incest and forgoing the nudity and overt eroticism that would later characterize the 1980 remake with Brooke Shields and Christoper Atkins. Photographed in beautiful Technicolor, director Frank Launder’s version hewed closely to Stacpoole’s idyllic Adam-and-Eve-in-the-Garden-of Eden theme. Audiences at the time, like later ones in 1980 (and presumably those of the lost 1923 silent picture), were left to wonder why the young man never grows a beard and the young woman’s legs and underarms remain primly shaved throughout their long desert-island sojourn. Perhaps beguiled by the beauty of Simmons and Houston in their winsome young-adult prime, nobody seemed to mind; they certainly didn’t in Columbus.

Day 1 rounded off with a late-night screening of a 1960 European horror film, as it had last year with Mario Bava’s Black Sunday. This year the program book promised us the French shocker Eyes Without a Face (French title: Les yeux sans visage) from director Georges Franju, the tale of a mad scientist (Pierre Brasseur) who tries, repeatedly and without success, to repair his daughter’s (Édith Scob) disfigured face by transplanting those of luckless young women kidnapped by his assistant (Alida Valli). After each failure, the victim’s mangled remains are then dumped where the ghoulish pair hope they’ll never be found. Eventually, the doctor’s daughter goes mad herself and wreaks a terrible vengeance.

What we saw, in fact, wasn’t Franju’s French original, but the edited (by about two minutes) and English-dubbed version released in the U.S. in 1962 by Lopert Films under the insanely nonsensical title Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. Either way, it’s a stylish (if such an adjective can be applied to such grisly subject matter) and effective chiller, highlighted by a startling, can’t-look-away scene of the obsessed “Dr. Faustus” (actually “Dr. Génessier”) at work in his operating room, his scalpel peeling a young woman’s face away from her skull. This scene had audiences in the 1960s (my teenage self included) either staring aghast or averting their eyes in horror, and the scene — the whole film — has lost none of its punch. The French original is available here on YouTube, and it shows up on Turner Classic Movies from time to time.

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That’s as far as I got on this post, back in June, when its original title was “Picture Show No. 3 — Day 1, Part 2”. Then, as I warned at the end of “Day 1, Part 1”, my coverage of the 2024 Columbus Moving Picture Show (May 23-26, 2024) was interrupted by previously scheduled vacation travels. I promised to resume as soon as possible, but I reckoned without — how do I put this? — an unexpected medical issue that arose in the midst of those travels and was allowed to deepen and worsen while I flew hither and yon, leading eventually to emergency surgery, a week in hospital, home infusions of antibiotics four times a day for six weeks, and a longer, slower recovery than I could possibly have expected.

That’s all I’ll say about that — there’s nothing more boring than hearing about somebody else’s operation — but the upshot of it all is that last May’s Picture Show weekend has grown less fresh in my memory — and besides, it’s old news now anyway. (Memo to self: You really must start taking detailed notes while you’re on the spot in Columbus.) 

My usual detailed rundown of the Picture Show weekend is no longer feasible — and possibly no longer of interest — but just for the record, here are some highlights of Days 2, 3 and 4:

Day 2

Three silent pictures — two renowned classics and one a bit of a rediscovered surprise — highlighted the remaining days of the Picture Show. First was Hearts of the World (1918), D.W. Griffith’s melodrama of The Great War. Griffith’s story told of The Girl (Lillian Gish) and The Boy (Robert Harron) separated on the eve of their wedding by the outbreak of war. The Girl wanders deranged on the battlefield, then is nursed back to sanity by The Little Disturber (a showcase role for Lillian’s sister Dorothy). Griffith’s hand with battle action and a desperate-dash-to-the-rescue climax, like his penchant for cloying character names, was as strong as ever. But his timing was beginning to falter: Just as his pacifist message in Intolerance (1916) had fallen on blind eyes with America gearing up to enter the war, his hate-the-Hun militarism was inconvenient now that the war was all but over and the Allies were looking to patch things up at Versailles.

Day 3

Tumbleweeds (1925) was western icon William S. Hart’s last hurrah — indeed, except for a cameo in the King Vidor/Marion Davies Show People (1928) and a wistful spoken prologue to a 1939 reissue of Tumbleweeds, it was his last film appearance ever. The old boy certainly went out in style. Tumbleweeds is among his best, climaxed by a rousing recreation of the 1893 Oklahoma Land Rush and featuring some horsemanship by the 60-year-old Hart that still makes men half his age gape in wonder. With a face that virtually personified the Old West, he was an icon indeed; with the exception of Owen Wister in his 1902 novel The Virginian, Hart had more to do with the creation of the archetypal Westerner than anbody. His understated acting and unerring eye for realistic frontier detail give his pictures the ring of truth even now, when most of them are more than a century old — further in the past, in fact, than the genuine Old West was when they were made. Later stars from Gary Cooper and John Wayne, through Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, to Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner, can all thank William S. Hart that they even had careers.

Day 4

A third silent on Day 4 is what stands out in my memory at this remove. This was The Enchanted Cottage (1924), the first screen version of Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1921 play. The play dealt with the fortuitous relationship that develops between a badly maimed veteran of The Great War (Richard Barthelmess) who banishes himself to a remote cottage to spare his family the sight of him, and a plain — even downright ugly — local girl (May McAvoy) who tends the cottage. In time, the spell of the cottage, and of the generations of newlyweds who have resided there, overcomes them and they see the sensitivity and inner beauty in themselves and each other, and the knowledge transforms them — if only in their own eyes — into the loving people they truly are.

I was familiar with the story only through the 1945 remake, updated to World War II and starring Dorothy Maguire and Robert Young. That version has always struck me as rather sickly-sentimental in a treacly Victorian way, and I found the lovers’ “ugly” sides — amounting to a couple of unfortunate scars on Robert Young and thick eyebrows and a shoddy dress on Dorothy Maguire — a bit of a tempest in a teapot, as if director John Cromwell and RKO Radio were unwilling to make their stars look really bad. Curiously enough, the 1924 silent (directed by John S. Robertson), by jumping into the Victorian sentimentality with both feet — and not least, by fearlessly making stars Barthelmess and McAvoy truly, well, unfortunate — gives the story a conviction that the remake lacks. The remake also lacks the play’s scenes in which the modern-day lovers are visited by the ghosts of honeymooners from centuries past; this silent version, made while the play was still treading the boards in regional theaters, includes those fantasy elements, and in so doing it better preserves and presents the enchantment promised by the title. The Enchanted Cottage (’24) is wholly superior to its better-known remake, and as one who has always found the remake completely resistible, I was pleasantly surprised.

There were other highlights of Picture Show Weekend that should not go unmentioned. A lovely Technicolor print of Green Grass of Wyoming (1948), a sort of second sequel to My Friend Flicka (1943) in the boy-and-his-horse genre. Though set in Wyoming, the green grass in this case was actually in Utah, and the Picture Show screening was introduced by historian James D’Arc, who was also there signing copies of the new Centennial Edition of his authoritative tome When Hollywood Came to Utah, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Beehive State’s career as a film and TV location. Then also, the customary samplings of comedy shorts from Max Davidson, Charley Chase and Laurel and Hardy. Angel’s Holiday (1937), with Jane Withers her usual impish self, a sort of live-action version of Little Lulu. And speaking of Little Lulu, one of Lulu’s cartoons, A Scout with the Gout, was a major part of Stewart McKissick’s annual Saturday morning Animation Program (like Stewart, I hope someday those Little Lulu cartoons, with their irresistible theme song, become available on home video). Slightly French (1949), a Columbia musical from director Douglas Sirk with Don Ameche and Dorothy Lamour ringing amusing changes on the Pygmalion theme. Take a Chance (1933), a Paramount Pre-Code musical with James Dunn, June Knight, “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and Lilian Roth doing a red-hot carnival dance previewed by Richard Barrios among his musical clips on Day 1. And, of course, the remaining chapters of the Spy Smasher serial, right up to the final triumph of the Good Guys in Chapter 12.

Sorry I can’t go into any further detail on the program as it played last May. You just had to be there. Now, for us here at Cinedrome, on to other things…

Picture Show No. 3 — Day 1, Part 1

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Once again the Picture Show opened with a serial, with its once-weekly episodes (twelve of them this time) parceled out among the four days of the convention. So it was that Day 1 opened with Episodes 1-3 of Spy Smasher (1942). Based on a caped hero introduced in the February 1940 issue of Whiz Comics, a sort of Batman-like vigilante battling sinister spies and saboteurs on American soil, the serial went into production at Republic Pictures on December 22, 1941, two weeks after America’s entry into World War II. This meant that unlike 1941’s King of the Texas Rangers (screened at the last Cinevent in October 2021), Republic didn’t have to pussyfoot around the bad guys, having villains speaking in pronounced Teutonic accents while coyly declining to state exactly which country they’re working for. Nope, here the spies being smashed are Germans, no doubt about it, led by a U-boat commander known only as The Mask (Hans Schumm), who dons and doffs his mask apparently at random. Episode 1 opens with Spy Smasher (aka Alan Armstrong, played by square-jawed Kane Richmond) being rescued from a firing squad in Nazi-occupied France and smuggled back to the States to try to thwart The Mask’s scheme to flood the American economy with counterfeit money. Oddly, while the comic-book Spy Smasher had a fiancée, Eve Corby, whose father Admiral Corby is high up in U.S. Navy Intelligence, the serial gives Alan Armstrong a twin brother Jack (also Kane Richmond) who is the one engaged to Eve. This change suggests that Spy Smasher having an identical twin will figure in the plot later on (spoiler alert: It does). Meanwhile, it leads to confusion early in Episode 1 when the Corbys mistake Alan for Jack, with Eve (a fetching Marguerite Chapman) running to his arms and planting a nice big kiss on his astonished lips. Understandably, he decides not to disabuse her of her error — although five minutes later the Admiral (Sam Flint) is calling him “Spy Smasher”, apparently forgetting that he ever mistook him for Jack.

Such lapses are frequent in Spy Smasher, but only the churlish will quibble when the thrills and suspenseful cliffhangers come this fast and frequently. William Witney (directing his first serial alone after co-directing 16 with John English and two with Alan James), after a somewhat leisurely set-up in Episode 1, keeps the actions barreling along like one of the cars, trucks, motorcycles and speedboats that the heroes and villains regularly resort to. Much of the action is staged with the back projections that were common at the time, but a surprising number of the stunts are the real McCoy, and excellently staged and executed (particular kudos here to David Sharpe, doubling Kane Richmond).

The first feature of the weekend was Moon Over Her Shoulder (1941), though at a modest 68 minutes it just qualified. Lynn Bari plays a woman whose husband (the ever-bland John Sutton) is a celebrity marriage counselor who, in his office, on his radio program, and in his bestselling book, advises couples — especially women — on how to keep their marriages alive and engaging. Meanwhile, this clueless dolt, in a textbook case of physician-heal-thyself, fails to notice that his own wife is bored out of her skull. He suggests that she find herself a hobby — painting, for example, which she dabbled in before they were married. Unbeknownst to him, what she finds is Dan Dailey (still sporting a “Jr.” in his billing), a sport-fishing yachtsman who shanghais her aboard his boat, thinking she’s despondent and he’s saving her from suicide. His romantic but chaste attentions stroke her lonely ego until even blind hubby sees the improvement in her (and in her paintings) but is still too blind to suspect the reason. As everyone in the audience can see coming, things get out of hand when the skipper falls for her and proposes. The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther dissed Moon Over Her Shoulder as a “flimsy bit of nothing”, but Variety’s “Char” was kinder, commending a “workmanlike” script and the “steady direction of Alfred Werker”. This hit closer to the truth, and “Char” displayed a gift for prophecy by saying Dan Dailey did “a swell job and appears to be destined for further importance.” Well, when you’re right you’re right.

 

Next was Lady and Gent (1932), a Paramount Pre-Code with George Bancroft, Wynne Gibson and, five steps down the cast list, a fledgling John Wayne. Here I insert the notes I wrote for the Picture Show program booklet:

The 1932 Pre-Code Lady and Gent caught George Bancroft midway in his transition from burly leading man to stalwart character support. Behind him were his days starring for Josef von Sternberg in Underworld (1927), Docks of New York (1928) and Thunderbolt (1929), snagging an Oscar nomination for the latter. Still ahead lay such roles as Jean Arthur’s editor in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), the father to Mickey Rooney’s Young Tom Edison (1940) and — arguably his best performance of the sound era — Marshal Curley Wilcox in Stagecoach (1939).

If Stagecoach was Bancroft’s best performance, though, his work in Lady and Gent ran it a good second. He was still being billed above the title, even if it was in a Paramount B-picture. Here he plays “Slag” Bailey, a prizefighter not yet aware that he’s over the hill — though he gets that rude awakening early in the picture’s 86 minutes. When we first see him, he’s still cruising the speakeasies and womanizing enough to exasperate his girlfriend Puff Rogers (Wynne Gibson): “If dames was a dime a dozen and you were a billionaire, you’d be broke in one week.”

The high-flying Slag is brought down to earth — or more accurately, down to the canvas — when he’s knocked out by the young up-and-comer Buzz Kinney (John Wayne). The loss throws his manager Pin Streaver (James Gleason) into a financial panic, and a desperate attempted burglary gets Pin shot dead by a night watchman. Feeling responsible, especially after he learns the reason Pin needed the money, Slag tries to set things right, dragging the protesting Puff along with him. From there, as it covers the next 15 years, Lady and Gent becomes an illustration of the old saw about life being what happens while you’re making other plans.

Bancroft is matched in Lady and Gent by Wynne Gibson, who is a bit of a revelation here. Granted, Grover Jones and William Slavens McNutt’s script gave Puff Rogers most of the best lines, but they also wrote a character that would test the resources of any actress: querulous, sharp-tongued, impatient, yet for all that, rather soft-boiled. As Slag says of her early on, “She’s a little screwy at times but she’s a good gal, and you can always depend on her to be in on the showdown,” — and it’s true, when the chips are down, Puff always manages (albeit grudgingly) to do the right thing. We meet her onstage at the speakeasy she bought with Slag’s winnings, warbling the Arthur Johnston/Sam Coslow song “Everyone Knows It But You” (a tune that will return to Puff years later with a very different and rueful meaning). Gibson would go on to a steady career through 1956, hopping around the B-units of various studios (plus what passed for A-pictures at Republic), and later on television, without quite breaking into the top ranks of Hollywood players. Later in 1932 she would re-team with director Stephen Roberts for another career highlight in the Paramount omnibus If I Had a Million, playing a streetwalker who uses her windfall to check into a deluxe hotel for a good night’s sleep, for once having the bed all to herself.

In 1932, director Roberts had finally broken into features (Lady and Gent was his second) after an apprenticeship directing one- and two-reel shorts all over town, 97 since 1923. He would go on to such varied fare as the notorious The Story of Temple Drake (’33) with Miriam Hopkins, which would do as much as any one picture to provoke the crackdown that ended the Pre-Code Era; One Sunday Afternoon (also ’33) with Gary Cooper and Fay Wray, later remade as The Strawberry Blonde with Cagney and de Havilland; The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo (’34) with Ronald Colman (screened at Cinevent in 2017); and Star of Midnight (’35) with William Powell and Ginger Rogers. Alas, his early promise — he might have become another Raoul Walsh or William Wellman — was cut short by a heart attack in 1936, when he was only 40.

Also fated to meet an untimely end was writer Grover Jones. He and co-writer McNutt would hit their stride in 1935, adapting The Lives of a Bengal Lancer for director Henry Hathaway. Jones’s work with Hathaway at Paramount would eventually result in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (’36), Souls at Sea (’37) and The Shepherd of the Hills (’41). The latter was a posthumous release for Jones; an infection set in after kidney surgery and carried him off in September 1940 at the age of 46.  

Lady and Gent was well-received. Variety’s “Rush” called it “so well played that minor flaws…fade into insignificance beside the human pull of the narrative.” And at the New York Times, “L.N.” called the picture “a good one along — well, sentimentally tough lines.” And Jones and McNutt were Oscar-nominated for their original story (they lost to Frances Marion for The Champ).

Paramount recycled Jones and McNutt’s story seven years later in a nearly-shot-for-shot remake (right down to the inclusion of “Everyone Knows It But You”) called Unmarried (’39). Helen Twelvetrees, making her last picture, played Puff Rogers (renamed “Pat”); cowboy star Buck Jones was cast against type as the ham-and-egger Slag. Robert Armstrong and Larry “Buster” Crabbe took over for James Gleason and John Wayne, respectively, and 13-year-old Donald O’Connor took the role played by Billy Butts in the original. Who know? Maybe one day a print of that one will become available, and Columbus Moving Picture Show-goers will have a chance to compare the two.

The first silent picture of the weekend was East Side — West Side (1923), a title so utterly obscure that I couldn’t find a review in Variety or The New York Times, or even an authentic image online — all there was was this composite, superimposing stars Kenneth Harlan and Eileen Percy over a New York cityscape obviously from several decades after the year the picture was made. To be honest, calling them stars is a bit of an overstatement; Harlan and Percy were definite B-listers. Still, they were both good here. Percy, the erstwhile leading lady of Douglas Fairbanks before he swashbuckled into costume pictures (Wild and Woolly, Down to Earth, The Man from Painted Post and Reaching for the Moon, all from 1917), played Lory, a young woman from the East (i.e., “Poor”) Side of New York, living in a one-room flat with two roommates. One of them is a tubercular invalid (Maxine Elliott Hicks) who brings out her motherly side; the other (Lucille Hutton) disappears early in the action when she runs off to be kept by her stockbroker sugar daddy in a Central Park West apartment — exactly the sort of moral compromise Lory is determined to avoid. The desertion puts the remaining roomies into financial straits, so a kindly doctor (Charles Hill Mailes) arranges for Lory to do some typing for a well-to-do writer. This takes us to Duncan Van Norman (Harlan) of the West (“Rich”) Side. He’s a writer, supposedly, but he’s also a high-society dilettante and stuffed shirt who writes (in the doctor’s words) “a lot of high-sounding, unadulterated bunk.” Lory’s typing gig evolves into a full-time job as Duncan’s secretary, in which position she humanizes him and urges him to write “a thrillin’ story that somebody can understand”. The course of true love runs smooth — until snooty society tongues start wagging about Duncan and “that girl he calls his secretary” — prompting Duncan’s mother (Lucille Ward) to intervene. All ends well, of course. The action did seem a bit truncated, probably because East Side — West Side survives only in one of those five-reel Kodascope condensations that George Eastman House made for the home market. So we have what we have, and if we feel like important scenes are missing, it’s not necessarily because they weren’t there in the first place, and what remains is enjoyable and well-acted. Eileen Percy in particular is charming enough to make us want to revisit some of her pictures with Doug Fairbanks to see if she held her own better than we recall. Meanwhile, East Side — West Side, obscure as it may be, is available on YouTube, albeit in a somewhat shorter and considerably more battered version than what screened in Columbus. Curious Cinedrome readers can check it out here.

Also, I see on IMDb that Kenneth Harlan, who amassed some 200 credits (mostly in supporting roles) between 1917 and his last picture in 1943, died in Sacramento, Calif. in 1967, age 71. This puts me in mind of an actor acquaintance of mine here in Sacramento, Dan Harlan, who was born in 1935, when Kenneth would have been 40. I do imagine I can see some resemblance between the two; I wonder if Dan (who I believe is still with us) or one of our mutual acquaintances can confirm or deny any connection?

Last on the program before the dinner break was More Songs in the Dark, More Dangerous Rhythms, another of the Picture Show’s (and Cinevent’s before it) welcome compilations of musical clips curated and introduced by historian Richard Barrios. The title refers to two of Richard’s books, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film and Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter (both are among the indispensable books on movie history; if you don’t have them, get them). As always, Richard’s compilation was an embarrassment of riches (where does he find these clips? I don’t mean the numbers, I mean the actual strips of film.) A complete list of the hour-long program would be exhaustive (besides, I neglected to take adequate notes), so I’ll just mention a few favorites. A genuine oddity — and not really a “musical selection” — was a Vitaphone trailer for The Jazz Singer, with silent-screen heartthrob John Miljan (about to embark on a long, graceful decline into supporting roles and old-times’-sake cameos through 1957) stepping out from behind a heavy curtain to nervously regale the audience about the imminent arrival in their theater of Warner Bros.’ latest sensation. Curiously, Jazz Singer‘s main selling point, hearing Al Jolson sing, is not demonstrated; instead, Miljan natters on over newsreel footage of celebrities at the New York premiere, then introduces a couple of silent scenes from the movie. (You can see it here on YouTube, in a darker and higher-contrast print than the Picture Show screened.) The delightfully piquant Lillian Roth teased her way through “Come Up and See Me Sometime” from Take a Chance (1933), giving a foretaste of the complete picture, to be screened on Saturday night (more on that when I cover Day 3). Then there were the two clips pictured here. TOP: A scene from Show Girl in Hollywood (1930) in which the title character (Alice White) shoots a production number for the film-within-the-film. The song, “I’ve Got My Eye on You” by Sam H. Stept and Bud Green, is catchy, but what makes the scene great today is its glimpse at the nuts and bolts of shooting a musical at the dawn of sound — the three cameras in their soundproof booths shooting simultaneously, the fourth booth recording the sound on 16-inch discs, the off-camera orchestra. It’s practically a documentary, and the sort of thing Hollywood usually (at that time) didn’t like to publicize for fear of undermining the magic. (And it’s easy to see the need for the booths: Those clattering cameras sound like wringer washing machines.) This one can also be seen here on YouTube. BOTTOM: “People Have More Fun Than Anyone” by Doris Fisher and Allan Roberts, featuring a spirited pas de trois by Rita Hayworth (singing dubbed by Anita Ellis), Marc Platt and Dorothy Hart, choreographed by Jack Cole. This elaborate number is also on YouTube here; what we saw in Columbus runs roughly between the three- and six-minute marks.)

After dinner came Malice in the Palace (1949), a Three Stooges short from the days after Shemp replaced Curly. (When I was a kid in the 1950s, Columbia was still producing theatrical shorts with the Stooges — Moe, Larry and Shemp — and I saw many of them first-run on my own hometown screen. Years later, when their earlier work began turning up on TV, I was nonplussed: “Where’s Shemp??? And who the heck is this Curly??!!??“) This one had the boys running a restaurant in some vaguely Arabic-looking desert emirate, then getting embroiled in a plot to steal a priceless jewel from the tomb of King Rootintootin. The short is a favorite among Stooge aficionados; myself, I took a pass in favor of spending more time in the Dealers’ Room.

Any true film buff knows that Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) would be a highlight of any weekend of movie-viewing, and so it was here. However, the time has come, as I mentioned in my previous post, for my vacation travels to take me away, before I can properly get into a discussion of Keaton’s last masterpiece — which, incidentally, was filmed barely six miles from where I sit typing this. More about that later. I’ll stop for now, and pick up where I’m leaving off as soon as I can. Please stand by, and thank you for your patience.

 

To be continued…

Picture Show No. 3 — Prelude

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First, before I launch into my annual recap of this year’s Columbus Moving Picture Show, a heads-up and an apology. I’ve got quite a bit of vacation traveling to do in the next few weeks, and that will probably prolong the time it takes me to prepare and post my coverage. I ask Cinedrome readers to please bear with me; I’ll get as much posted as I can before I have to leave, and get the rest up as soon as possible after I get back.

Al rightie, then, that said, here we go:

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As has become traditional, the long weekend kicked off on the evening of Wednesday, May 22 with a screening, in conjunction with the Picture Show, at the Wexner Center for the Arts on the campus of Ohio State University. This year the main attraction was a digital restoration of Bwana Devil, the 1952 surprise hit that launched the original 3D craze. Produced, written and directed by the eccentric Arch Oboler, Bwana Devil was loosely based on the man-eaters of Tsavo, a pair of rogue lions who went on a killing spree in 1898, slaughtering enough native African and Indian workers on the Kenya-Uganda Railway to bring construction to a standstill for months (the story was filmed again, with slightly more fidelity to the facts, as The Ghost and the Darkness in 1996). Coming when it did, with Hollywood reeling from the onslaught of television and desperate to lure audiences back into theaters, Bwana Devil made 3D look like just what the faltering movie business needed.

For a while, anyhow. There was a flurry of 3D movies throughout 1953, and quite a few good ones: The Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space from Universal; House of Wax (Vincent Price’s first foray into horror), Hondo (starring John Wayne in one of his many signature roles) and The Charge at Feather River from Warner Bros.; the survival melodrama Inferno with Robert Ryan as a husband left for dead in the desert by his scheming wife (Rhonda Fleming) and her lover (William Lundigan); Kiss Me Kate from MGM (with House of Wax, probably the best of the lot); Miss Sadie Thompson with Rita Hayworth from Columbia, and so on.

Plagued by quality-control issues, though, 3D proved to be a flash in the pan that first time around. The technology was cumbersome; the two projectors in a theater’s projection booth, normally used for changeovers from one reel to the next every 12 or 13 minutes, had to both run simultaneously to project the left- and right-eye images — meaning that even with the largest reels available, theaters couldn’t show more than about 50 minutes at a time, requiring an intermission in even the shortest movies. If one of the two films broke, the other reel would have to be mutilated to match it. If the projectors weren’t perfectly synchronized, the 3D illusion would be lost and might never be set right. The glasses, while not nearly the inconvenience that legend has it, depended on everything running perfectly, and if it didn’t, the glasses themselves could take the blame when things went wrong. By the end of 1953 and the beginning of ’54, the fad had petered out.  There would be the occasional one-off in subsequent decades, usually from fly-by-night outfits, but it would take another 50 years, and the advent of digital projection and computerized systems, for 3D to make a comeback with various superhero and adventure movies, plus such truly great movies as Hugo (2011) and Life of Pi (2012).

But those days were far in the future when Bwana Devil hit screens and caused such a sensation. So how about it? Well, unlike Hugo and Life of Pi, Bwana Devil isn’t a truly great movie. Unlike Kiss Me Kate and House of Wax, it isn’t excellent. Unlike Inferno and The Charge at Feather River, it isn’t even good. Indeed, Bwana Devil is arguably the worst historically important movie since Fred Ott’s Sneeze.

Nevertheless, it is historically important, and the new 2K restoration they screened at the Wexner Center gives us Bwana Devil looking better than it has since…well, probably ever. I’ve only seen the picture once before, in 2013 at a 60th Anniversary 3D Festival at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. That was a film screening, and considering the picture’s age the print was in very good condition. But nothing like this. Kudos are due to the 3D Film Archive and its founder Bob Furmanek (who spoke at the screening) for spearheading the restoration.

Also on the program were two 3D cartoons from 1953: Hypnotic Hick with Woody Woodpecker, and Boo Moon featuring (who else?) Casper the Friendly Ghost. Both were good, with some effective stereoscopic moments, especially in Boo Moon. In addition, there was A Beany Story, a five-minute short that ran as a prologue to Bwana Devil, in which actor Lloyd Nolan, and an attractive starlet, Nancy Somebody, whose last name I didn’t catch, introduced us to the Natural Vision 3D process, aided by Beany and Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent of the Time for Beany TV show. This, by the way, was the original 1949-54 incarnation of Beany and Cecil, as hand puppets manipulated and voiced by Daws Butler (Beany) and Stan Freberg (Cecil). This short is even available on YouTube. You can access it here, and if you happen to have a pair of anaglyphic (i.e., red/blue lens) glasses lying around the house you can even see it in 3D. (The screening at the Wexner, however, was Polaroid, not anaglyphic).

 

Before we move on, I want to share this photo with you. Maybe you’ve already seen it; it’s pretty famous. It’s a shot of the audience at the world premiere of Bwana Devil at the Paramount Theatre in Hollywood, taken by J.R. Eyerman and published in the December 15, 1952 issue of Life Magazine. I reproduce it here because, in one of those odd little coincidences that the universe throws at us every once in a while, this photo is the wallpaper in the bathroom of every room in the Columbus Renaissance Downtown Hotel, where Cinevent and the Columbus Moving Picture Show have been held since 2015. When you step into the shower at the Renaissance Downtown, depending on which way your room is facing, these 1952 moviegoers are either gazing off to your left or staring right at you. That can be pretty unsettling, and in nine years I’ve never quite gotten used to it.

Anyhow, with Bwana Devil looking brand-spanking-new the night before, and with this first-nighter Hollywood audience dressed to the nines the morning after (for some reason I find my eye drawn to those teenagers in the third row near the bottom corner; a first date, I imagine), there was a sort of continuity over the decades.

And with that we were off to the first day of the Picture Show proper. But we’ll get into that next time.

To be continued…

 

MERRY CHRISTMAS from Cinedrome!

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We’re undergoing some major home renovations here at Cinedrome, so my creation and development of new posts has been on a back burner for a while. But today is December 25, and I didn’t want to let the holiday pass unobserved. So here are a couple of reruns, one that has become traditional and another that was new last January, but which I’d like to remind readers about.

So…

 

 

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

Like everything else here at Cinedrome, “The Sensible Christmas Wish” is under copyright, and all rights are reserved.

 

 

 

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Next is my tribute — originally published last New Year’s Eve as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little ‘Star'” — to one of the very best (and easily the shortest) of all classic Christmas movies. It was produced by Warner Bros. in 1945, in an era when Hollywood was turning out holiday classics almost every year, sometimes two or three at a time. It made a big splash at the time, then languished long in obscurity before returning to the limelight courtesy of Turner Classic Movies and Warner Home Video. Read on: 

As we all decompress from the Holiday Season, I want to pause and pay tribute to a particular Christmas movie, one of the least known and one of the best. It distills the spirit of Christmas as well as — sometimes better than — more familiar titles, worthy as they are. Without being preachy or even overtly religious, it presents that spirit in the form of a parable — the form, in fact, favored by Jesus himself in the Gospels. And it’s only 22 minutes long.

It’s called Star in the Night, released by Warner Bros. on October 13, 1945. It opens on a cold night (Christmas Eve, as we later learn) somewhere in the desert of the American Southwest — Arizona, perhaps, or Nevada or New Mexico. Three cowboys are ambling along on horseback. Their arms and saddles are laden with toys, Yuletide decorations and other “doodads” which, in a spasm of holiday cheer, they have bought from a general store in the town they left back a ways, though they haven’t the slightest idea what to do with them or whom they might give them to. 

Suddenly, off in the distance, they see a star, incredibly bright and unnaturally low to the horizon, blinking on and off at random intervals. “Never did see a star as big and bright as that,” says one of them. “Let’s mosey over and see what it’s doin’ there.”

The camera takes us there long before the cowboys have time to arrive. It turns out the star the cowboys see is no astronomical phenomenon; it’s an advertising sign, illuminated by 102 light bulbs. Recently purchased from a defunct movie theater (“Star Picture Palace”), it’s been newly installed over a roadside inn, the Star Auto Court. As a lone vagabond approaches from the road, the Star’s proprietor, Nick Catapoli (J. Carroll Naish) struggles to keep the star lit, hoping its brilliant light will catch the eye of highway travelers for miles around.

The nameless vagabond (Donald Woods) is a hitchhiker weary of trying to thumb a ride in the cold dead of night and hoping the Christmas Spirit will move Nick to let him come in from the cold for a while, maybe even have a hot cup of coffee. But Nick is unmoved by the season. “This no flop joint,” he says in his pronounced Italian-American accent, “I got no business for the free lunch.” He claims — indeed, boasts — that he hates Christmas. All year, he says, people are stingy and mean, then at Christmas they smile, put on the false face. “Not Nick, I’m-a no phony.” For Nick, Christmas is a time of deceit and hypocrisy, not peace, love and brotherhood. The hitchhiker tries to coax Nick out of his cynicism: “Nick, you know better than that. Why, the good in people will be lighting the world a thousand years from now, Nick. Ten thousand years from now.”

 

Not that Nick doesn’t have his reasons for taking a dim view of humanity. His guests at the Star Auto Court, from what we can see, are a pretty querulous and ill-tempered lot. There’s Miss Roberts (Virginia Sale), driven to distraction by a caroling party in the cabin next to hers. The carolers, never seen, provide a melodic accompaniment to the night’s goings-on, but Miss Roberts hears only an annoying racket — “I’m getting up at five in the morning and I’ve got to get some sleep, you understand?” Adding to her short temper is the detritus of the caroling party — bottles, fast-food sacks, paper cups, etc. — which she hurls at Nick’s feet with an angry, “See how you like it!”

 

 

 

Meanwhile, inside the motel’s combination office and cafe, Nick’s wife Rosa (Rosina Galli) is confronted by another guest/resident, Mr. Dilson (Irving Bacon). His bone of contention is the shirts that just came back from the laundry where Nick and Rosa sent them. Brand-new five-dollar shirts, each of them, he barks, none of them properly cleaned and pressed, and one of them torn at the collar. Rosa promises him the shirts will be sent back and redone, but Mr. Dilson is unmollified. “Maybe if you did business with a better laundry — oh, you might not get as much commission, but you’d have more satisfied customers!”

 

 

 

Then two travelers (Dick Elliott, Claire Du Brey) arrive to check into the Star Auto Court’s last remaining cabin. They show signs of being just as persnickety and hard to please as Nick and Rosa’s other guests. “Better make sure about the hot water, dear,” the wife says; “remember how you couldn’t shave at that place we stopped at?” And, “These places are never warm; we’ll want some extra blankets.” Nick tries to reassure her, she insists, he takes umbrage: “Look, Mrs., if everybody’s like you I’m gonna need a million blankets.” Ever the peacemaker, Rosa steps in, offering the couple her own blankets, “just come back from the laundry”, and she leads them out to escort them to their cabin. “You see,” the woman sniffs to her husband, “you have to insist on what you want in a place like this.”

With each confrontation, Nick turns a jaded, I-told-you-so eye to the wandering hitchhiker. “That’s-a peace, brotherhood, love. Shame on you for bein’ such a fool!”

 

Things begin to change with the arrival of Jose Santos and his wife Maria (Anthony Caruso, Lynn Baggett), who pull up in a rattletrap old Model-A Ford that looks about to break down. For that matter, so does Maria, weary, distressed and on the verge of some medical emergency. She and Jose need shelter for the night — but alas, there is no room at the inn. Once again, though, Rosa offers a solution.

From that point, before Nick’s astonished eyes, everyone — Miss Roberts, Mr. Dilson, the traveler and his imperious wife — forgets their petty concerns and complaints to pitch in and help the young couple. Finally, with the arrival of the three cowboys and all those gifts they don’t know what to do with, this splendid little parable is complete.

Star in the Night began as a play by Robert Finch (1909-59) entitled The Desert Shall Rejoice (“The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.” — Isaiah 35:1), published on June 1, 1940 by Samuel French Inc. It’s listed on Amazon as a play in one act. In 2018 the 188-year-old Samuel French Inc. was acquired by Concord Music as part of its Concord Theatricals branch; their Web page lists The Desert Shall Rejoice as a “full-length play” with a royalty of $90 per performance, rather more than one would expect for most one-act plays. Neither Amazon nor Concord offers a perusal script of The Desert Shall Rejoice, so I am unable to resolve this apparent discrepancy.

There was an early television production of The Desert Shall Rejoice as half of a Kraft Theatre episode on Christmas Eve 1947; the episode does not appear to have survived, nor does any information about its cast or crew. What has survived is a half-hour radio adaptation broadcast as an episode of Hallmark Playhouse (a forerunner of TV’s Hallmark Hall of Fame) on December 16, 1948. The program was hosted by novelist James Hilton and starred John Hodiak as Nick. Unlike J. Carroll Naish, Hodiak’s worthy talents did not extend to an Italian accent, and he didn’t even try, opting instead for an angry middle-American snarl. There are other striking differences between this rather ham-handed Desert and Star in the Night, so many that it would be nice to know which version is closer to Robert Finch’s original play. The movie’s credits read “Original Story by Robert Finch/Screen Play by Saul Elkins”, suggesting that Elkins (a veteran writer and director of shorts and producer of B-features at Warner Bros.) may have considerably shaped and altered Finch’s “original story”. In any case, the finished product is a well-polished gem.

Star in the Night marked the directorial debut of Don Siegel, after a hectic six years at Warner Bros. doing montages (Confessions of a Nazi Spy, The Roaring ’20s, Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, etc.) and second-unit direction, often uncredited (Sergeant York, Mission to Moscow, Northern Pursuit, To Have and Have Not). It was a busy apprenticeship, bristling with classics, and Siegel’s distinguished directorial career was off to an excellent start. In later years (he died in 1991), Siegel was known to dismiss Star in the Night as “overly sentimental” — understandable, perhaps, coming from a man whose later work included Dirty Harry, Escape from Alcatraz, and the original versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Beguiled. But there is a difference between honest sentiment and sentimentality, and Star in the Night never slides from one to the other. It’s certainly no more sentimental than The Shootist (1976), one of Siegel’s (and star John Wayne’s) best late-career features. And right off the bat, Siegel gave us one of his most assured pieces of direction.

He had plenty of help. Besides the vaunted Warner Bros. production facilities, he had an ace cinematographer in Robert Burks (later an Oscar nominee for Hitchcock’s Rear Window and a winner for To Catch a Thief). Not to mention a cast of veteran familiar faces who, today, have a combined total of 2,217 movie and TV credits on the IMDb — nearly a quarter of them for the ubiquitous Irving Bacon alone (if you’ve seen any hundred movies from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Irving Bacon at least 35 times). But all those expert editors, art directors and actors also had the support of Siegel’s unerring eye for composition (which can be seen in these frame captures) and his correct-to-the-exact-millimeter instinct for camera movement (you’ll have to see the movie itself for that).

My late uncle remembered seeing Star in the Night as a 15-year-old and being deeply impressed. He wasn’t alone; at the Academy Awards Ceremony in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on March 7, 1946, Star‘s producer Gordon Hollingshead took home the Oscar for the best two-reel short subject of 1945. After that, Star in the Night simply dropped off the face of the earth and was as utterly forgotten as any film of the sound era has ever been. Myself, I had never heard of it before I stumbled across a 16mm print up for auction on eBay in 2008. The listing piqued my interest, and a follow-up check of the IMDb was an eye-opener: J. Carroll Naish?? Irving Bacon?? Dick Elliott?? Richard Erdman?? Don Siegel??? Academy Award?!? How do I not know about this??!??

I snagged that print, and it became a permanent part of the program at our annual Holiday Season screenings of The Polar Express (2004) for friends and family. One year, after I’d screened it eight or ten years running, as we broke for cookies and hot chocolate before the main feature, my brother gestured toward Star in the Night and said, “That never gets old.”

Indeed it doesn’t. It’s not only one of the best of all Christmas movies, it’s one of the best short subjects — period — ever to come out of Hollywood, in an era when even Poverty Row studios were turning out dozens of shorts (or serial chapters) a year. And fortunately (hooray!), it’s not nearly as unknown as it used to be, thanks to seasonal showings as a December “extra” on Turner Classic Movies. Thanks also to the fact that it’s a supplement on the DVD of Warners’ Christmas in Connecticut (also 1945). That Barbara Stanwyck/Dennis Morgan picture is an entertaining holiday romcom, but Star in the Night alone is worth the price of the disc. Do yourself a favor and pick it up; it’ll come in handy any time you want a quick 22-minute Christmas Spirit fix but don’t have time to watch a whole feature.

Happy Holidays!

The Annotated “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”

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Introduction

At the moment, I’m in rehearsals for a stage production of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s 1813 romantic comedy of manners chronicling the romantic vicissitudes of five English sisters. The youngest and silliest of these sisters is named Lydia — which naturally put me in mind of “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”. I say naturally, because once anyone has heard that song — especially as done by the Marx Brothers cavorting in a railroad car in At the Circus (1939) — it’s impossible not to think of it whenever the name “Lydia” is mentioned. It doesn’t matter if the subject is the Iron Age kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor;  Lydia Pinkham, the 19th century American purveyor of ladies’ patent medicines; St. Lydia of Thyatira; Lydia Becker, the British suffragette; Kenneth Roberts’s novel Lydia Bailey; or the youngest daughter in Pride and Prejudice. No matter what, if you hear or read the name “Lydia”, you automatically fill in with “…the Tattooed Lady”. 

But not everyone has heard the song. One night during a lull in rehearsal I sang the opening lines within earshot of the actress playing the part, and her eyes went wide: “What is that song?” she marveled. So I found the song on YouTube on my phone and played it for her. Now this young lady is by no means as silly or foolish as the role she’s playing, and she even chuckled at “Lydia oh Lydia that encyclo-pidia”, but halfway through the song I realized that most of the references in the song — which would have been perfectly familiar to a reasonably alert ten-year-old in 1939 — were two or three generations before her time. Aside from the fact that it’s in English, she could hardly be expected to understand a word of it. She confirmed this when we talked about it the next evening: “Social Security Number, I got that. And I know what a rhumba is…”

And that’s a pity, because “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” is one of the funniest and cleverest songs ever sung in English (interesting that it was written by Harold Arlen and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg the same year they turned out “Over the Rainbow”). The song is endlessly inventive. Compare it with another amusing song — more recent, but still an oldie — “A Boy Named Sue”, written by Shel Silverstein and a top-ten hit for Johnny Cash in 1969. Or another Silverstein song, “The Cover of ‘Rolling Stone'”, which put Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show in the top ten in 1972. They’re both clever, and fondly remembered, but they’re essentially one-joke songs. In “Lydia” the jokes come so thick and fast that you’re liable to miss one while you’re laughing at the one before it. Something must be done, I thought, to keep this treasure of popular culture from being banished to the darker reaches of Does-Anybody-Here-Understand-This? Land. Somebody (I further thought) should come out with The Annotated “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”.

Well, “somebody” turned out to be me, and here it is. Enjoy:

“Lydia the Tattooed Lady”

From the MGM Picture At the Circus (1939)

Music by Harold Arlen; Lyric by E.Y. “Yip” Harburg

 

She was the most glo-o-o-rious creature under the sun,

Thaïs1, du Barry2, Garbo3 rolled into one…

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh…

Lydia oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia?

Lydia the Tattooed Lady!

She has eyes that folks adore so

And a torso even more so.

Lydia oh Lydia, that encyclo-“pidia”

Oh Lydia the Queen of Tattoo.

On her back is the Battle of Waterloo4,

Beside it the Wreck of the Hesperus5 too,

And proudly above waves the Red, White and Blue6 .

You can learn a lot from Lydia!

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

When her robe is unfurled she will show you the world

If you step up and tell her where.

For a dime you can see Kankakee7 or Paree8

Or Washington crossing the Delaware9 .

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

Oh Lydia oh Lydia, say have you met Lydia?

Lydia the Tattooed Lady.

When her muscles start relaxin’

Up the hill comes Andrew Jackson10.

Lydia oh Lydia, that encyclo-“pidia”

Oh Lydia the queen of them all;

For two bits11 she will do a mazurka12 in jazz

With a view of Niag’ra13 that nobody has,

And on a clear day you can see Alcatraz14 ;

You can learn a lot from Lydia!

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

Come along and see Buff’lo Bill15 with his lasso,

Just a little classic by Mendel Picasso16.

Here is Captain Spaulding17 exploring the Amazon18 ;

Here’s Godiva19 but with her pajamas on.

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

Here is Grover Whalen20 unveilin’ the Trylon21.

Over on the West Coast we have Treasure “I-lon”22.

Here’s Nijinsky23 a-doin’ the rhumba24.

Here’s her Social Security Numba25.

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

La la la-a-a-a-a, la la la

Oh Lydia oh Lydia that encyclo-“pidia”

Oh Lydia the champ of them all!

She once swept an admiral clear off his feet;

The ships on her hips made his heart skip a beat,

And now the old boy’s in command of the fleet26

For he went and married Lydia!

I said Lydia! (He said Lydia!)

They said Lydia! (We said Lydia!)

La la!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Well, friends, there you have it, my modest effort to ensure that Arlen and Harburg’s funniest song — whose jokes, puns, and plays on words constitute an embarrassment of riches almost without precedent this side of Cole Porter and Gilbert and Sullivan — does not vanish in the benign oblivion of esoteric pop culture. Now that you’ve had a chance to explore it, I invite you to hop over to YouTube and glory in a song that fits the antic anarchy of Groucho Marx as perfectly as “Over the Rainbow” does Judy Garland, or “If I Were King of the Forest”, Bert Lahr.