Cinedrome Does Its Part

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A couple of years back, in my first post on the Debbie Reynolds Collection, I mentioned that my tentative plans to attend the auction, and maybe even bid on something, were torpedoed by a purchase I’d just made on eBay. That purchase was a 16mm kinescope of the live TV drama The Day Lincoln Was Shot.

For the benefit of those who don’t remember them (which is most people now), a brief explanation of “kinescope” is probably in order. In the days before the invention of videotape, a kinescope was the only way to preserve a television broadcast. There were certain technical refinements to the process — synchronizing the cathode ray scanner with the camera shutter, for example — but essentially it boiled down to photographing the image and recording the sound off a TV monitor. Videotape was in development all through the early 1950s, but was impractical for broadcast purposes until late in 1956, the year of The Day Lincoln Was Shot.

The drama was broadcast on the evening of Saturday, February 11, 1956 (the eve of Lincoln’s birthday) as the sixth episode of CBS’s Ford Star Jubilee. Top billed were Raymond Massey (who else?) as Lincoln and Lillian Gish as his wife Mary. But the largest role in the teleplay, and its driving performance, was John Wilkes Booth. In this publicity shot (it’s not a shot from the program) the actor playing Booth may look familiar. He should: it’s a young up-and-comer named Jack Lemmon.

Lemmon had been kicking around movies and live TV for several years, and just seven months earlier, in July 1955, he had premiered in his breakthrough performance as Ensign Pulver in Mister Roberts. A little over five weeks after the Lincoln broadcast, Lemmon would win his first Oscar, as best supporting actor in Roberts. In a symmetrical coincidence, Lincoln‘s director, Delbert Mann, would also win an Oscar that night for directing Marty, 1955’s best picture.

I saw that broadcast of The Day Lincoln Was Shot; I was even aware of Jim Bishop’s bestselling nonfiction book, on which it was based (though I wouldn’t read it for several years yet). The night of the broadcast, I had already seen Mister Roberts, but being only seven years old, I had no inkling that the men who played the happy-go-lucky Pulver and the brooding, obsessive, angry Booth were one and the same. Even if I’d seen both as an adult, I doubt if I’d have made the connection; the two performances couldn’t be more different.

Having seen The Day Lincoln Was Shot, and remembering it vividly all these years, I never dreamed that I’d ever see it again, let alone own it, but here it was. Watching it again after 55 years, I must say I was bowled over. The adaptation (by Jean Holloway and Denis and Terry Sanders) is that rarity, both good drama and good history, correct in nearly every detail. The studio reconstruction of Ford’s Theatre alone, which then still languished unused and unrestored after 90 years, was a marvel of accuracy. (The 1956 broadcast was in color, but it was kinescoped only in black and white — a frustrating omission, but probably a blessing in disguise. If they had done it in color, they’d probably have used Eastman Color, the cheapest process, and it might well have faded to nothing by now.) And Jack Lemmon was — there’s no other word for it — simply brilliant.

The cast of Lincoln certainly lived up to Ford Star Jubilee‘s name: besides Massey, Gish and the new-minted star Lemmon, the broadcast was narrated by Charles Laughton. Others in the cast included Herbert Anderson (later the harried father in TV’s Dennis the Menace), Raymond Bailey (banker Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies) as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and William Schallert (later of Dobie Gillis and The Patty Duke Show, among hundreds of other credits) as Secretary of State William Seward’s son Frederick. (Schallert, by the way, is happily still with us, turning 91 earlier this month; a belated happy birthday and continued long life to him.)

At Cinevent this year in Columbus, I mentioned my kinescope of Lincoln to my friend Larry Smith, a nitrate specialist in the Film Preservation Section of the Library of Congress. (You can read more about Larry here.) Larry’s interest was piqued, particularly at the thought of a TV performance by Lillian Gish; such performances were comparatively rare, and surviving examples of them are even rarer. He asked me to e-mail him a reminder about it when we both got home.

So I did, and Larry did a little research on the subject. He came back with news which, while it didn’t entirely surprise me, still gave my heart a not-so-little flutter: it seems that I have what just might be the only surviving copy of the kinescope of that landmark broadcast. At the very least, I can say this: if there’s another copy of The Day Lincoln Was Shot out there, the owner has never bothered to bring it to the attention of the Library of Congress. Larry told me that his higher-ups had agreed that, because of the broadcast’s clear historical importance, the LOC should borrow my print for digital scanning and preservation.

I placed my 16mm print in the hands of FedEx that very day, and it’s now safely ensconced in the LOC’s facility in Culpeper, Virginia. The queue at the scanner is long, so it’ll no doubt be a while before I get it back, but naturally I don’t mind. Upon reflection, I do wish I had held onto it one more day and screened it so I could have a few screen shots to accompany this post — the dearth of images on the Internet lends credence to my suspicion that this is the only copy. But I don’t mind about that either. We all know that the cause of film preservation won’t wait, and I’m grateful to have had the chance to make this small contribution to it.
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Browsing the Cinevent Library, Part 2

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John McElwee’s Showmen, Sell It Hot! and Richard Roberts’s Smileage Guaranteed were the two brand-new scoops to be had at Cinevent this year (Showmen is still awaiting its official release date), but they weren’t the only relatively new books on sale there. Two others I picked up from collector James A. Gresham are shown here: Children of the Night (2007) and They’re Here Already!. The subtitles of the two books tell the story: each is a 200-plus-page collection of posters, lobby cards and pressbook covers, all reproduced in full color on high-quality glossy paper, with text and commentary confined to the opening pages of each chapter.
 
The chapter arrangements differ. In Children of the Night posters are grouped by subject matter; thus Chapter 1, “The Dracula Series” covers from Dracula (1931) to House of Dracula (’45); while “The Frankenstein Series” ranges from the 1931 original to Abbott and Costello Meet… (’48). There are chapters on Boris Karloff’s other movies, and Bela Lugosi’s, and the pictures they made together; horror movies of the silent era and the 1940s; and so on.  The book essentially cuts off in the late ’40s, when space- and/or atomic-age science fiction took over the task of exploiting audiences’ sublimated fears.
 
And that’s where They’re Here Already! picks up. This one takes things not subject by subject but year by year, from ’50 to ’59, with all the posters, half-sheets, inserts and lobby cards (both domestic and foreign) you could ever want to see for everything from Destination Moon (1950), The Day the Earth Stood Still (’51), The War of the Worlds (’53) and Forbidden Planet (’56) all the way down to Robot Monster (’53), The Killer Shrews (’59) and Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (’58). 
 
The books do have their odd little quirks. The British sci-fi epic Things to Come (1936) is shuffled in with horror films of the ’30s, while Hitchcock’s Psycho, for Jim Gresham’s purposes anyhow, qualifies as 1950s science fiction.  Well, what the hell, I won’t quibble; both books are fun to browse through, and if the subtitle A Comprehensive Guide sounds like a bit of an overstatement, it sure ain’t by much. Some of the materials reproduced here are from Gresham’s private collection, while others were borrowed from other collectors and archives. Personally, I bought both books as potential sources of illustrations to use here at Cinedrome; you may wind up seeing parts of them in posts to come.

So much for the new stuff. Moving backward in the history of publishing about 85 years, I’ve always been a sucker for movie tie-in books. Even those 1950s and ’60s Signet paperbacks with their eight-page photo inserts (“Now! A Major Motion Picture!”). But especially the really old ones from the silent era, when movie tie-ins were a frontier as unexplored as the Wild West. My 1927 novelization of London After Midnight, for example; that one turned out to be a fun read in spite of me. (I’ll be running the annual reprint of my four-part synopsis next Halloween Season, but if you’re impatient you can find it here, here, here and here.)

I picked up two such Grosset and Dunlap motion picture editions from one dealer at Cinevent this year, both — against long odds — with their dust jackets reasonably intact. First, this novelization of the original 1923 The Ten Commandments, “a novel by Henry MacMahon from Jeanie Macpherson’s Story Produced by Cecil B. DeMille as the Celebrated Motion Picture…” Curiously enough, the cover reproduces a scene from the modern half of the picture, rather than the first half, which recounts the more spectacular story from the Book of Exodus. (Theodore Roberts as Moses adorns the spine of the book and — along with Charles de Roche’s Pharaoh, a cast of thousands, and a couple of pyramids — the back cover.) This one has an inscription on the flyleaf: “With a Merry Merry Xmas. To Mamie Masek From Sister Rose. 1928.” Judging from the handwriting, I’d guess that the sisters weren’t exactly young even then; wherever they are now, I hope their hearts can rest secure in the knowledge that Sister Rose’s Xmas gift has found a good home.

Then there was this one: Bardelys the Magnificent by Rafael Sabatini, “the Alexandre Dumas of Modern Fiction”. As to that comparison, personally, I’ve never quite managed to get into The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo, but I sail through Sabatini’s books like a knife through soft butter. You may never have read him, but chances are you’re more familiar with his work than you think: he was also the author of Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, The Black Swan and Scaramouche, all of which became high-profile movies, some more than once. Probably his most famous — or notorious — quote is the opening sentence of his 1921 novel Scaramouche: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” In 1932, these words somehow found themselves inscribed over one of the doors of the newly completed Sterling Hall of Graduate Studies at Yale. By the time the university’s administration learned that the quote came not from some classic poet but from a mere swashbuckling bestseller, it was too late to do anything about it. (Evidently, Sabatini’s Scaramouche wasn’t the only one born with a gift of laughter.) When Rafael Sabatini died at 74 in 1950, his widow had the grace to have that sentence inscribed on his tombstone.

Bardelys the Magnificent, the third of Sabatini’s 31 novels, published in 1905, was filmed by MGM in 1926, directed by King Vidor and starring John Gilbert and Eleanor Boardman, and this edition was published in conjuction with that. Bardelys (the film) was considered lost for over 70 years, one of a number of MGM pictures deliberately suppressed by the studio. For once, however, it wasn’t MGM’s fault. When they bought the rights to Sabatini’s book in 1926, the terms of the sale specified that it was only for ten years; after that the studio had to buy the rights again or destroy the negative and all prints. By 1936, a silent picture with a fallen and deceased star was of no commercial value to MGM, and they had nobody under contract to put into a remake, so into the incinerator it went. And there the matter stood until 2006, when a single nitrate print surfaced in a large collection of films purchased by Lobster Films of Paris. It was missing one reel and in poor condition, but was preserved and digitally restored by Lobster, with the missing material — a little under five minutes — replaced with production stills. This restoration crops up now and again on Turner Classic Movies and is available in a gorgeous DVD from Flicker Alley; also here from Amazon. Even after all these years, Sabatini is a great read, and you could do a lot worse than to dive into one of his elegant, broad-shouldered adventure-romances. If you do, you’ll find that Warner Bros.’ 1935 Captain Blood was almost page-for-page faithful to the book, but be prepared for a surprise if you pick up The Sea Hawk; by the time Warners and Errol Flynn filmed it in 1940, nothing but the title remained.
 

Which brings me to this. Warner Bros.’ 1940 Sea Hawk was the second picture of that title. The first was a 1924 silent from First National Pictures, directed by Frank Lloyd with Milton Sills, Enid Bennett, Lloyd Hughes and Wallace Beery. Unlike the Errol Flynn version, this one was quite faithful to the novel, telling the story of a nobleman of Elizabethan England (Sills) betrayed by his treacherous half-brother and sold into slavery in a Spanish galleon. He escapes, converts to Islam and, in time, becomes a dreaded pirate of the Barbary Coast: Sakr-el-Bahr, the Sea Hawk. When Warner Bros. absorbed First National later in the 1920s, it acquired the rights to Sabatini’s novel, and 15 years later — First National evidently having driven a harder bargain than MGM did over Bardelys the Magnificent — they made it into a vehicle for Errol Flynn, changing everything but the title and the time period. (Captain Blood, by the way, was also filmed as a silent in 1924. This was produced by Vitagraph, another company acquired in 1925 by the burgeoning Warner Bros. enterprise. Thus did the rights to this other Sabatini novel devolve onto Warners, where they sat for ten years before being dusted off and — after a false start with Robert Donat — making Errol Flynn a star. The 1924 Blood, unfortunately, survives only in a truncated digest form barely a quarter of its original length. It reposes now at the Library of Congress, waiting hopefully for more pieces to be discovered.)

But back to The Sea Hawk. What you see here is the cover to the souvenir program of the earlier, more faithful picture. I picked this up at Cinevent too — collecting souvenir programs is a favorite hobby of mine. This one is smaller than the usual program, only 6×9 inches, but it’s well designed and informative. The three-color illustration on the cover yields to two colors within, but I have to commend the designers for the number of pictures and the amount of information they managed to include — including a complete synopsis of the story (no doubt secure in the belief that nobody would read it until after they’d seen the picture).

This version of The Sea Hawk, unlike Captain Blood, survives intact, and it’s available here from the Warner Archive. It must take a back seat, of course, to the 1940 version; it doesn’t have Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s music, or director Michael Curtiz. Most of all, needless to say, it doesn’t have Errol Flynn. For all that, it’s a lavish and vigorous production, the DVD sparkles, and Milton Sills, while he’s no Errol (who was?), is a good swashbuckling hero.

One of my favorite dealers at Cinevent — and I daresay I’m one of his favorite customers too — is Larry Newman of Philadelphia, who specializes in souvenir programs, like the one above for The Sea Hawk. I probably buy more individual items from him than I do from anybody else, and it’s a rare year when his table doesn’t hold at least a few surprises for me. This year it had a whopper: a major Hollywood picture from 1925 that I had absolutely never heard of.  Here it is: The Wanderer, a Biblical spectacle based on the parable of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel According to St. Luke. It was adapted from a 1917 play by Maurice V. Samuel, which was apparently one of those touring productions that popped up in those days hoping to ride the coattails of the stage version of Ben-Hur (the Les Miserables of the 1900s and ‘teens). Judging from the programs (Larry also had a copy of the stage program, and I picked up that one too), both play and picture expanded greatly on the New Testament. Where St. Luke merely tells that the young man “wasted his substance with riotous living”, the movie gives us (if you’ll pardon the expression) chapter and verse. The picture also includes something Jesus neglected to mention when telling the story to his disciples: a climactic scene of our antihero barely escaping with his life while a righteous prophet and a rain of lightning bolts from God destroy the sinful city a la Sodom and Gomorrah.
 
The picture was directed by auteurist icon and colorful character Raoul Walsh, and it starred William Collins Jr. as the prodigal Jether (Collins, 23 at the time, had a busy career between 1916 and 1935; in fact, he’s in the silent Sea Hawk too). Others in the cast included Ernest Torrence, Greta Nissen, Wallace Beery, and as the prodigal’s forgiving father, none other than Tyrone Power. No, not that Tyrone Power; his father, Tyrone Power Senior, age 56 in 1925. Plus, in a dance-on bit at a bacchanalian orgy, 19-year-old Myrna Loy (not mentioned in the program, of course).
 
I couldn’t believe this picture had escaped my notice all these years. “Does it even survive?” I asked Larry; he didn’t know. (Answer: Yes, there’s a print in the UCLA Film Archive.) At least I wasn’t the only one to overlook it. It wasn’t even reviewed by Variety, and they reviewed everything. (I imagine Jesse Lasky had some words with Sime Silverman about that oversight.) It didn’t escape the notice of the New York Times, though; Mordaunt Hall reviewed it in the issue of August 20, 1925, the day after it opened at Manhattan’s Criterion Theatre. Mr. Hall allowed as how “[p]ictorially is is unquestioningly beautiful, and the players acquit themselves with distinction…” but he went on to say, “The parable in St. Luke [chapt.] xv is told in fewer than 500 words, and after seeing this effusion one wishes that the producers had been less imaginative.”

I bought some other programs as well: Lilac Time (’28) with Colleen Moore giving the performance of her career as a French mademoiselle, and an incredibly young Gary Cooper as a dashing aviator stationed on her father’s farm during the Great War. Sally (’29), the early musical with Broadway’s Marilyn Miller, which was shot in two-strip Technicolor but, except for one rediscovered musical number, survives only in black and white. I even found one for The Birth of a Nation — which by itself isn’t as rare as you might think; there are four for sale on eBay as I type this. This one, however, still has its onionskin outer cover with the floral pattern, which on most such programs seems to have been the first thing to disappear once whoever bought it got home from the theater.

But I’ll close with this one. Not because it’s a particularly good program or from a particularly good movie — neither is the case — but because it represents one of the sorrier episodes in 1950s Hollywood, and one that has a certain significance for me because it bears on my native state of Indiana.
 

Raintree County was the first and last novel of Ross Lockridge Jr. of Bloomington, Indiana (which happens to be 41 miles northeast of the town where I was born). It was published on January 5, 1948 by Houghton Mifflin and was chosen a featured selection of the Book of the Month Club. Almost exactly two months later, just as the novel was hitting the top of the New York Times bestseller list, the 33-year-old Lockridge committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in the garage of his Bloomington home; it was March 6, 1948 (which happened to be five days before I was born).

Why did he do it? At the time, some speculated that after the long effort to bring his 1,066-page novel to fruition, Lockridge was exhausted and depressed at the thought of how he would ever follow it up. My uncle once expressed the opinion that Lockridge had deliberately set out to write the Great American Novel — in fact, believed that he had — and was fatally disappointed when reviews, while positive and even occasionally rapturous, failed to acknowledge it as such. I think my uncle might have hit the nail close to the head. Reading Shade of the Raintree by the novelist’s son and biographer Larry Lockridge, one thing seems clear: it was little short of a miracle that this brilliant, troubled, unstable young man lived long enough to complete his huge book.

The setting of Raintree County is a fictitious county in rural Indiana, and (like James Joyce’s Ulysses) it takes place on a single day — July 4, 1892 — following its main character, 53-year-old John Wickliff Shawnessy, and his family through the events of the day. Throughout, there are flashbacks to the past, as long ago as 1844 and as recently as earlier that same year, presented non-chronologically as they spring to the memories of Shawnessy and the other characters. It’s an ambitious, sprawling, yet carefully structured saga that seeks to summarize wholly the American experience: both everyday life and great events, as well as the aspirations, lofty or squalid, of ordinary people, and the legends and inchoate yearnings that underlie their psyches and shared culture. The book won the “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Annual Novel Award” — actually just a publicity-savvy way of buying movie rights before publication, but it brought Lockridge $150,000. A tidy sum now, a not-so-small fortune in 1948.*

By the end of 1948, Raintree County had drifted off the bestseller lists and been aced out of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction by James Gould Cozzens’ Guard of Honor. Financial difficulties and internal power struggles at MGM put any plans to film the novel on a far-back burner.

Until 1956, when the movie that goes with this program went into production. In his biography of his father, Larry Lockridge remembered attending the world premiere in Louisville, Kentucky with his mother, brothers and sister in October 1957 (on their own dime, uninvited by MGM): “Critics agree that the movie we then watched is among the world’s worst.” This is overly harsh; the worst you can say about Raintree County — as a movie, considered by itself — is that it’s resolutely mediocre. That’s also the best you can say for it.

But that’s as a movie, considered by itself. As an adaptation of Ross Lockridge’s novel, however, there’s nothing bad enough to say about it. It’s as thorough a mangling as any novel ever got at the hands of Hollywood, and that’s saying something. Writer Millard Kaufman, a man of meager experience with little more than John Sturges’s Bad Day at Black Rock and a couple of UPA cartoons under his belt, was completely flummoxed by a book that would have challenged more talented hands than his. His solution was to jettison the flashback structure, narrow the time frame to 1859-65, and turn it into a would-be Gone With the Wind, with Elizabeth Taylor as a Scarlett O’Hara manqué. Taylor, to her credit, did her best and snagged the first of four consecutive Oscar nominations. But as John Shawnessy, Montgomery Clift (who was probably miscast in the first place) was in a near-fatal auto accident that held up production for two months while his shattered face was reconstructed, and the visible on-screen difference between his pre- and post-accident performances is a grisly thing to see.

Be that as it may, Raintree County the novel was as mutilated on purpose as Montgomery Clift had been by accident. The director was Edward Dmytryk, a workhorse as relentlessly mediocre as the Raintree County movie itself. Dmytryk later admitted — nay, boasted — that he himself had never read the book (as if we needed him to tell us that). Like The Sea Beast (Cinevent, Day 2), Raintree County is the kind of movie that gives Hollywood a bad name. My nephew, a college literature major who read the book at my suggestion, called it “definitely the greatest novel I never heard of” — and shook his head in dismay at what MGM did to it.

Imagine if David Selznick had served Margaret Mitchell as poorly as producer David Lewis, Millard Kaufman, Edward Dmytryk et al. served the dead-and-buried Ross Lockridge Jr.; would anybody ever have bothered to get Gone With the Wind right? Of course not. Nobody will ever bother with Raintree County either. And that’s just too damn bad.

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 *POSTSCRIPT: John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows informs me that only five MGM Novel Awards were ever given, and only two were ever filmed: Raintree County and the first winner, Elizabeth Goudge’s Green Dolphin Street (awarded 1944, filmed 1947). The other winners: Before the Sun Goes Down by Elizabeth Metzger Howard in 1945; Return to Night by Mary Renault in 1946; and in 1947 a special award in addition to Raintree County‘s, to About Lyddy Thomas by Maritta M. Wolff. In May ’48 MGM discontinued the award as a belt-tightening measure. While it lasted, according to Variety, the award had constituted “the heaviest literary award in history.”
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After a Brief Intermission…

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I haven’t forgotten that I promised a Part 2 to my post “Browsing the Cinevent Library”. Unfortunately, I’ve been dealing with some computer issues lately that have put more than a little crimp in my never-lightning-swift pace, including losing my image-editing software of choice — which, careless as I often am in such things, I can’t remember the name of and hence can’t find again to reinstall. I’m working to resolve all this as fast as I can (real life does have a way of interfering, doesn’t it?), and will get back to the subject at hand as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, here are a few afterthoughts about another of the pictures screened at Cinevent this year: Cry of the Werewolf (1944), a Columbia B-picture that took the screen in Columbus, appropriately enough, at midnight on Saturday, Day 2. This was the first directorial effort of Henry Levin, who would go on to a career not without its pleasant touches here and there: Mr. Scoutmaster, Journey to the Center of the Earth (’59), The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, Where the Boys Are. Unfortunately, Cry of the Werewolf isn’t one of them. But it’s not a total washout either. In the title role, believe it or not, is 19-year-old Nina Foch as a gypsy princess struggling with an ancestral lycanthropic curse. It’s Nina Foch all right, but it wasn’t easy to recognize her; in this she’s softer, less hard-edged and (no pun intended) cougar-tough than she would appear later in movies like An American in Paris (can you believe she’s only 27 in that one?), Executive Suite and Spartacus.

Beyond that rather interesting surprise, though, Werewolf is a pretty flaccid affair.  It’s clear that the boys in Columbia’s B unit — producer Wallace MacDonald, writers Griffin Jay and Charles O’Neal, et al. — took a look at what Val Lewton was doing over at RKO with pictures like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie and thought, “Hey, we can do that!” Well, no. That sort of atmospheric chiller, it turns out, is not as easy as Lewton and Jacques Tourneur and Mark Robson and Robert Wise made it look. It’s not as simple as sending a German shepherd sauntering through a darkened set and telling the audience it’s a wolf. Still, at 63 minutes, Cry of the Werewolf wasn’t long enough to waste my time; on the contrary, it demonstrated by negative example just how efficient and effective Val Lewton’s movies really were. Since “this utterly suspenseless film” (NY Times, 8/12/44) will probably never come out on video, it’s thanks to festivals like Cinevent that we’re able to make that kind of compare-and-contrast.

Browsing the Cinevent Library, Part 1

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The main reason my luggage is so heavy when I leave Columbus after Cinevent every year is the number of books I buy there. Lobby cards, stills, sheet music, even DVDs can weigh next to nothing, but books — that’s a whole other kettle of bound pages. There are books old and new on offer there, and two of the new ones I picked up this year should find a place on any well-stocked cinema bookshelf.

My friend John McElwee’s Showmen, Sell It Hot!: Movies as Merchandise in Golden Era Hollywood all but beggars description. John is the proprietor and sole contributor to Greenbriar Picture Shows, the premier classic movie blog — this in a field simply chockablock with first-rate blogs. If you haven’t bookmarked John’s blog, you should, before you read another word of this one.
 
John has a particularly keen interest in the advertising and promotion end of things — that is, as it was practiced on a theater-by-theater basis back in the days before coordinated multimedia campaigns for movies opening simultaneously on 6,000 screens all over the nation. That’s the focus of Showmen, Sell It Hot!, many of its chapters drawn from — and expanding upon — posts he’s made on the subject over the seven years Greenbriar’s been going. It’s especially fascinating to see how small-town theater owners used to ballyhoo their coming attractions; urban exhibitors could wait perhaps a week for word of mouth to kick in, but it was a whole different game for houses where the bill changed every two or three days. At that level, promotion was very much a seat-of-the-pants operation.
 
Not that the book neglects the major urban and studio-driven campaigns. There are also chapters here on the selling of the sensational new pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in 1933’s Flying Down to Rio (at the time, it was a toss-up which word in the title was more exotic, “Rio” or “flying”); the incredibly long “legs” of 1939’s Jesse James with Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda and Randolph Scott; the Marx Brothers’ second movie career at MGM, beginning with A Night at the Opera; the unexpected success of King Kong in its 1956 reissue; MGM’s conundrum over what to do with Saratoga (’37) when Jean Harlow died during production; likewise Warner Bros.’ scramble to sell James Dean’s posthumous pictures; the promotional campaigns for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Bonnie and Clyde; and more.
 
Written in John’s breezy vernacular style reminiscent of both Variety and Time Magazine in the 1930s, Showmen is a mine of amazing information. John makes the surprising — yet entirely logical — point that in the 1930s, installing air conditioning could do more for a theater’s bottom line than CinemaScope, 3-D or stereophonic sound 20 years later (“A lot of people went to the movies just to cool off, never mind what was playing.”). And he ferrets out eyebrow-raising information on individual pictures’ budgets and box office take. Did you know that the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup cost Paramount more than MGM spent on Grand Hotel, or RKO on King Kong? That the Brothers’ biggest box office hit was A Night in Casablanca (hardly their best)? I didn’t, but John’s got the figures here (heaven only knows where he finds them).
 

The publisher, GoodKnight Books, has given Showmen a production to make any author proud, and other authors envious. There are hundreds of illustrations — many (and probably all) from the Greenbriar site and John’s personal collection — all of them reproduced exactly as they are. If they’re black-and-white or sepia, one- two- or full-color, then that’s how they appear here — and thanks to editor and designer Mary Matzen and the super-rich production techniques at GoodKnight, they’re sharper and clearer than they ever were when John ran them at the Greenbriar site. Click here to learn how to get your copy of Showmen, Sell It Hot! with a pre-release discount. (On a side note, two other GoodKnight Books your shelf should make room for, if they’re not there already: Errol Flynn Slept Here: The Flynns, the Hamblens, Rick Nelson and the Most Notorious House in Hollywood and Errol & Olivia: Ego & Obsession in Golden Era Hollywood.)

It’s always an exaggeration to say somebody knows “everything there is to know” about a subject, but when the somebody is Richard M. Roberts and the subject is Hollywood comedy, it’s really not all that exaggerated. For years now Richard has been one of the go-to guys for Cinevent’s program notes, especially when it comes to 1920s and ’30s comedy: the Laurel and Hardy shorts sprinkled here and there all weekend, the annual tradition of spotlighting three Charley Chase shorts, and so on.  He performs similar service for Slapsticon, the annual festival of silent-to-early-sound comedy that’s coming up on its 11th installment at the end of June (at a new venue on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington).

So if Richard does not know everything there is to know on the subject, it’s not for want of trying to find out. And he’ll probably never give up. Which is good news for us, because his new book — the first in a proposed trilogy — makes us the beneficiaries of his efforts (and those of co-researchers Robert Farr and Joe Moore). Here comes the title (brace yourself, it’s a long one): Smileage Guaranteed: Past Humor, Present Laughter: Musings on the Comedy Film Industry 1910-1945, Vol. One: Hal Roach.

As Scott Eyman points out in his “Big-Time Celebrity Intro” (Richard’s title, no doubt), it’s simply insane that Hal Roach managed to live a hundred years without anyone ever writing a comprehensive biography. After all, here was the man who gave us Laurel and Hardy, Our Gang and Harold Lloyd; jump-started the careers of directors like Leo McCarey and George Stevens; and as Scott puts it, “more or less invented situation comedy as we know it”. Hal Roach has been gone 20 years now, and that biography still hasn’t turned up. Smileage Guaranteed may be as close as we’re likely to get. It’s not a biography, but it’s definitely comprehensive: a player-by-player, picture-by-picture, year-by-year survey and appraisal of the output of the Hal Roach Studios, the “Lot of Fun”.

Richard spends relatively little time on Laurel and Hardy, Lloyd or the Our Gang series; they’ve been amply covered elsewhere. Instead, the profusely illustrated Smileage Guaranteed concentrates on other performers on the Roach lot — Snub Pollard; Will Rogers; Max Davidson; the Parrott brothers, Paul and Charles (the latter of whom began as Roach’s ace director, then moved in front of the camera to gain stardom as Charley Chase); Harry Langdon at the beginning of his long career decline; Mabel Normand at the sad end of hers; and on and on. Not all of Roach’s brainstorms were as felicitous as Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang, and Richard covers the misfires as well — the Taxi Boys, for example, and the bizarre clown Toto (ne Armando Novello).

Fully 188 pages of the book’s 502 are devoted to an exhaustive filmography of every title Hal Roach produced (over 1,000 of them), followed by further filmographies for two of Roach’s major (albeit secondary) stars, Charles Parrott (aka Chase) and the Jewish comic Max Davidson.

All in all, Smileage Guaranteed could well warrant another subtitle to go with all those it already has: More Than You Ever Imagined There Was to Know About Hal Roach. Written in Richard’s wry conversational style, it is, like Roach’s studio, a lot of fun. And there are two more volumes to come.

These two tomes were my major acquisitions at Cinevent this year; between the two of them they took up three pounds and 234 cubic inches of my luggage. I’ll talk about some of the others next time.

Cinevent 45

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I’m home from Columbus, Ohio and more or less decompressed from spending four days at Cinevent, so I think I’m ready to give a quick rundown of the highlights I saw there. The Midwest’s venerable Classic Film Convention is always an embarrassment of riches, some of them quite obscure. It’s hard not to feel movie after movie passing in a sort of blur. Still, some stand out.

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Day 1 – Friday

Any day that includes a screening of Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen is bound to be dominated by that delirious Orientalist melodrama. The picture was chosen to open the Radio City Music Hall in 1933, but it performed so poorly that Music Hall management yanked it halfway through its contracted two-week run. The fervid theme of interracial sexual attraction packs a punch even today, even with the “Chinese” warlord played by Scandinavian Nils Asther, and it made ’em positively squirm 80 years ago — those who showed up at all. Barbara Stanwyck played the naive American missionary in the thrall of Asther’s General Yen (that picture on the poster doesn’t look much like her, does it?), but it’s the all-but-forgotten Asther who dominates the picture, in a performance of grace, intelligence and dignity that (like Luise Rainer’s O-Lan in The Good Earth four years later) wins over all but the most rigidly PC viewers today.

Other highlights of the day (for me, at least):  

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (’53), the Dr. Seuss fantasy that, in its way, was just as delirious as General Yen — and just as big a flop. (As film historian and biographer Scott Eyman said as we discussed the picture over breakfast that morning, “Yeah, [producer] Stanley Kramer lost a lot of money for Columbia.”) Still, Dr. T has found its audience over the last 60 years (though too late to do Columbia any good), and I’ve always had a soft spot for it. I still laugh out loud when, after the “whammy duel” between Peter Lind Hayes and Hans Conried, the two men collapse exhausted into each other’s arms: Conried: “Where did you study??” Hayes: “I just picked it up.”

The 1932 Fox western The Golden West, with an epic Zane Grey story that strained at the picture’s modest 74-minute running time, told the saga of two generations of star-crossed lovers, with George O’Brien playing the male half in both generations (and with an ultimately happy ending). This one featured an unusual supporting character: an Irish-Jewish peddler named Dennis Epstein (played by Bert Hanlon). There was also a buffalo stampede that was a real pip — thanks to the generous insertion of stock footage from The Iron Horse, The Big Trail and other Fox westerns.

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Day 2 – Saturday

 
Saturday’s headliner looked at first to be the 1926 silent The Sea Beast, even though it’s exactly the kind of movie that gives Hollywood a bad name. The Sea Beast was ostensibly an adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which by the 1920s was finally coming into its own as a pinnacle of American literature. But no pinnacle is so high that somebody can’t be knocked off of it, and that’s what writers Bess Meredyth and Rupert Hughes proceeded to do, supplying Melville with all the things he neglected to write back in 1851. Capt. Ahab’s last name for example: they decided it was Ceeley. And what’s a man without a woman, right? So they gave their Ahab (John Barrymore) a sweetheart named Esther, who by a remarkable coincidence was played by Barrymore’s real-life squeeze (and future ex-wife) Dolores Costello. Then, to add the dramatic conflict that was missing in all that business about the White Whale, they invented Derek Ceeley (George O’Hara), Ahab’s brother and rival for Esther’s affections. The result was, as Richard M. Roberts succinctly put it in his Cinevent program notes, “a REALLY Stupid movie.” Having seen the later (1930) talkie remake Moby Dick (also starring Barrymore, and where the title was the only shred of Melville to be restored), I thought I’d give this one a look for the sake of completeness. Alas, I wasn’t man enough. I got only as far as Ahab’s first run-in with Moby Dick and the line (in an intertitle, of course) “My leg! My leg! He tore it off!” — and decided I simply didn’t need to see any more. The Sea Beast and its 1930 remake may well represent the rock-bottom worst of Hollywood in general, and of Warner Bros. in particular: They got two chances to have John Barrymore, the greatest actor of his age, play Melville’s titanic Capt. Ahab — and they blew it both times. (To be fair, The Sea Beast was a box-office hit, whereas when Warners and director John Huston tried to do right by Melville 30 years later, that version of Moby Dick flopped. So you have to blame the audience as much as Hollywood or Warner Bros.) 
 

Upstaging The Sea Beast, and just about everything else shown at Cinevent this year, was a real discovery, an absolute bolt out of nowhere, a picture almost nobody had ever heard of. It was The Canadian (1926), directed by none other than William Beaudine. Yes, the notorious “One-Shot” Beaudine, who cranked out some 368 features, shorts and TV episodes over his 53-year career — including the sexploitation “documentary” Mom and Dad (’45) and, towards the end of his run, the camp titles Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (both ’66). But back in the ’20s, Beaudine was a director to reckon with, and The Canadian shows why. It’s a simple story: Young Englishwoman Nora Marsh (Mona Palma) is left penniless at the death of the aunt she’s been living with, and has no choice but to emigrate to Canada, where her brother is a struggling farmer on the frontier of western Ontario. Pampered, stuck-up and generally useless, Nora clashes with her brother’s no-nonsense wife, until at length the wife lays down an either-she-goes-or-I-go ultimatum. Nora impulsively marries Frank Taylor, a neighboring farmer (Thomas Meighan), and the rest of the picture tells how this prissy little snob learns to carry her weight in her new household, where she and her stranger/husband slowly grow to love each other.

Based on Somerset Maugham’s play The Land of Promise, The Canadian was actually a remake; it was first filmed in 1917 under Maugham’s original title, with Thomas Meighan playing the same role (opposite Billie Burke). By 1926, Meighan was a well-established and popular star, billed above the title (and with the title changed to give him the title role), and he’s certainly good in The Canadian. 
 
But the picture belongs entirely to Mona Palma as Nora (shown here with Meighan’s Frank early in their hasty marriage). She gives one of the most remarkable performances of the entire silent era — subtle, sensitive and finely tuned; her face is as immobile as Buster Keaton’s, and yet (as with Keaton) you always know exactly what she’s thinking. Frankly, for much of the first half of the picture, those thoughts aren’t pleasant, and Nora Marsh isn’t very sympathetic; as she gradually grows up and shoulders the responsibilities of her new hardscrabble life — as Nora Marsh becomes Nora Taylor — she wins our sympathy just as she wins over the other characters in the picture. It’s simply an amazing performance. Alas, it’s virtually all we have of Mona Palma. She made only seven pictures in her four-year career (three under her real name, Mimi Palmieri). The Canadian was her big break and first lead, but she made only one more picture (Cabaret, 1927) before retiring from the screen at age 29. She lived to the ripe old age of 91 but never made another movie.

 

The Canadian survives almost by accident, according to Richard Roberts’s program notes. Paramount’s nitrate print was donated in 1969 to the fledgling UCLA Film Archive, who refused it because it was a silent; it went instead to the American Film Institute, who preserved it. The AFI screened it at the L.A. County Museum of Art in February 1970 as part of its “Rediscovering American Cinema” program. The guest of honor was director Beaudine, seeing the picture for the first time ever. At the thunderous standing ovation afterward, Roberts tells us, the old man wiped away a tear. “I’m very surprised. I was quite a good director once.” A month later, William Beaudine was dead. (I wonder if anybody thought to drive up to Oxnard, Calif. and invite 72-year-old Mrs. Mimi P. Cooper, the former Mona Palma, to the screening as well. Evidently not.)
 

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Day 3 – Sunday

 
 

By Sunday, things are generally beginning to wind down at Cinevent; this year, certainly, The Canadian cast a shadow that the rest of the film program was hard-pressed to live up to. There were a couple of high-profile silents on view this day. 

First was The Nut (1921), Douglas Fairbanks’s last modern-dress comedy before devoting himself entirely to the costume swashbucklers that began with The Mark of Zorro (’20), and for which he’s best remembered today. The Nut was…well, if somebody asked me what was the big deal about Doug Fairbanks, this isn’t the picture I’d refer them to to find out. The Obnoxious Schmuck would be a better title, I think, as Doug plays an overbearing inventor whose every effort to win the heart of his beloved backfires in spectacular and embarrassing fashion. The program notes called the picture “episodic”; I’d call it “monotonous”, with the irrepressible Doug’s character decidedly off-putting.
 
Then there was Stella Maris (1918), one of Mary Pickford’s biggest successes. She plays a dual role: as the title character, a cheerfully sheltered and pampered heiress confined to a wheelchair by some mysterious unnamed disability; and as Unity Blake, a pitifully mistreated orphan whose harsh life contrasts sharply with that of the silver-spooned Stella. It’s a very well-made picture and Pickford is excellent in it, plus there are some first-rate effects when both her characters appear on screen together. But the story itself, from a 1913 novel by William J. Locke, is a specimen of the kind of sickly Victorian melodrama that was going out of fashion even then, and that only a star of Pickford’s caliber could pull off. 
 
Probably the highlight of the day — and certainly the most fun — was Hold That Co-ed, a 1938 musical with John Barrymore as a Huey Long-ish governor running for the U.S. Senate while simultaneously (and corruptly) trying to wangle a national championship for his pet college football team. Barrymore is a full-throated hoot, the songs are pleasant, and the supporting cast (George Murphy, Marjorie Weaver, Joan Davis, Jack Haley, George Barbier) delightful.
 
Other memorable Sunday titles: Nazi Agent (’42), with Conrad Veidt (Casablanca‘s Major Strasser) as a naturalized German-American taking the place of his Nazi spy identical twin brother; The Man Who Lost Himself (’41), another lookalikes-switch-identities drama, this time with Brian Aherne replacing his double, the tycoon husband of Kay Francis; and The Disciple (’15), one of William S. Hart’s early westerns, more a strong domestic drama than shoot-’em-up, with Hart a frontier parson determined to clean up a sinful town, even as his wife succumbs to local temptations.
 

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Day 4 – Monday

 
And so we come to the last day — or half-day, really. As usual, most of the dealers have packed up and left, as has a large percentage of the attendees. Still, there are pleasures to be had for those (like me) who choose to stay to the bittersweet end. I think my favorite was The House of Fear (1939) — not to be confused with the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes picture with the same title. This one is a niftly little mystery with police detective William Gargan posing as a theater producer to crack a year-old cold case in which an actor was murdered onstage during his opening night performance. Other titles on Monday were The Social Secretary (’16), a silent romantic comedy with Norma Talmadge at her most charming; and Henry Aldrich, Editor (’42), in which our Andy Hardy/Archie clone hero (Jimmy Lydon) tries to run his school newspaper, only to get in hot water over an arson investigation. These Aldrich comedies have been running for a couple of years now at Cinevent, and they’re always pleasant, well-made comedies. This one, according to the program notes, is widely considered the best of the series, and I’m not surprised.
 
The movies are only part of the fun at Cinevent, of course. There are also the dealers’ rooms, where you can find a vast array of items for sale — film, video, books, stills, posters, lobby cards, magazines, sheet music, souvenir programs and other memorabilia. As always, I stocked up on much of this — and, as always, I didn’t realize how much I’d bought until I had to pack it all up to come home. I get quite a bit of exercise dragging my luggage through airport security and heaving it up into overhead compartments.
 
Then there are the people themselves, who have become good friends, a cozy community united by their shared love of classic Hollywood. Two such are John McElwee (left) of Greenbriar Picture Shows and Richard M. Roberts. Both are major contributors to Cinevent’s program notes, and both were there this year selling their recently published books: John’s Showmen, Sell It Hot!: Movies as Merchandise in Golden Era Hollywood; and Richard’s Past Humor, Present Laughter: Musings on the Comedy Film Industry 1910-1945, Vol. One: Hal Roach. I’ll have more to say about both books next time.