I ordered the Warner Archive’s Vitaphone Varieties collection because the transition to sound is one of two periods in movie history that particularly fascinate me (the other is the early “outlaw” years circa 1888-1912 with its patent wars, jockeying for supremacy and feverish experimentation). I also hoped that this new batch of 60 shorts would provide the grist for a post or two, like the MGM shorts package I wrote about here and here.
I got half a loaf. I found the collection interesting, but I don’t know if anyone else would agree if they don’t already share my penchant for the period.
Scott Eyman’s The Speed of Sound (perfect title!) chronicles the dizzy suddenness with which silents went out and talkies came in, even as many Hollywood insiders said it was only a passing fad. Only in hindsight do they look to us like dodos standing neck-deep in water shouting “There isn’t going to be any flood!” And only in hindsight does it look like it happened overnight; there were three long and confused years before silents finally bit the dust.
That’s the period covered by this collection, and it’s actually a little less than claimed at the WA site. There are no shorts from 1926, the earliest in the collection being the first, The Revelers (from April 1927, six months before The Jazz Singer). And truth be told, this batch of shorts is a little drab compared to an earlier 6-disc set, Vitaphone Cavalcade of Musical Comedy Shorts. That one covered nearly a full decade, 1931-38, with more familiar names than you’ll find in this one. The new collection has a lot of seven-to-ten-minute turns by vaudevillians that I for one had never heard of, and whom I couldn’t find in any of my vaudeville references.
They’re not all strangers. An amazingly young-looking Jay C. Flippen shows up in The Ham What Am from 1928. Still years from his character-actor heyday in pictures like Brute Force, Winchester ’73 or They Live by Night, or singing that the farmer and the cowman should be friends in Oklahoma!, Flippen regales us — from the usual incongruous Vitaphone parlor set — with a couple of songs and a lot of jokes, all while flashing a toothy, Joker-size smile and brandishing a cigar the size of a horse’s leg.
Codee may be harder to place from this picture, but her accent and dignified look kept her busy as Madame This or That: Mme. Borodin, the owner of Margaret O’Brien’s ballet academy in The Unfinished Dance; Mme. Bouget in That Midnight Kiss, and so on. Any sci-fi fan will especially remember her, as I do…
There are a few more familiar names and faces — comedian Joe Frisco, character actors Montagu Love, Franklin Pangborn and Henry B. Walthall — but they’re not plentiful. For the most part, what the entertainers in this collection have in common more than anything else is their utter and absolute obscurity, then and now.
Who are these people? Some of them seem to have based their act on the premise that they have no talent whatsoever. Like Jack Born and Elmer Lawrence here, using floppy shoes, a Jew’s harp, and a sad-sack dead-pan delivery in a vain effort to make themselves (and their jokes) funnier than they are. Did they ever really connect with an audience? We can’t know because the audience is, by and large, as gone as they are. Nothing ages like comedy, which is why when we find someone who’s still funny — a Chaplin, a Keaton, a Groucho Marx, even a Moe or Curly Howard — it tells us something. All we know for sure about Born and Lawrence is that they’re not funny now. (Neither, for example, is one Charles “Slim” Timblin, dolled up as a blackface preacher in Revival Day [1930]. Here we have confirmation that at least some people at the time weren’t amused: Sitting in Rev. Timblin’s congregation are a number of bona fide African Americans, and they don’t think he’s funny; rather, they look sullen and disgusted at the thought of what they must put up with for — what, a measly five bucks a day?)
Parade” before a phalanx of tap-dancing
kids in satin uniforms — and for childhood
Lost & Found: Alias Nick Beal
The Paramount mountain dissolves to a slate-colored sky pouring a torrential, whistling rain, riven by claws of lightning and rumbling thunder. There’s a crashing fanfare from composer Franz Waxman that sounds magisterial, commanding and insinuating all at once, then descends into a tortured, frantic violin scherzo. Next the names of the three above-the-title stars — Ray Milland, Audrey Totter, Thomas Mitchell — then the title itself. Alias Nick Beal is under way.
Beal came hot on the heels of Night Has a Thousand Eyes for director John Farrow, writer Jonathan Latimer and producer Endre Bohem — so close, in fact (the pictures were released less than five months apart), that I have to believe Beal was being prepared while Night was shooting, and being shot while Night was being readied for release. Without access to Paramount’s detailed records I can’t confirm that, but the two movies are simply too close a match, variations on a theme of frail little humans trapped in a web of which they can see only the dark and shadowy outline. The difference between them — the variation — is this: Night Has a Thousand Eyes speaks of sinister and mysterious forces beyond our understanding; in Alias Nick Beal the sinister mystery is entirely comprehensible, and it has a name — most of us were raised on childhood tales of it — but as adults, our belief in our own sophistication blinds us, makes us willfully refuse to see it until it’s too late.
Like many newspapermen accustomed to deadlines, Latimer worked well in Hollywood, and he got some assignments that have aged gracefully among movie lovers: the 1942 remake of The Glass Key with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake; They Won’t Believe Me (’47) with Susan Hayward, Robert Young and Jane Greer; and The Big Clock (’48) with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton. The Big Clock was directed by John Farrow, and Latimer reunited with him for Night Has a Thousand Eyes — then, in ’49, with both Farrow and Milland for Alias Nick Beal. In fact, Latimer worked with Farrow more than with any other director (and Farrow more with him than with any other writer), ten pictures in nine years, and the titles would be among the best on both men’s resumes — there were also Plunder of the Sun, Botany Bay and Back from Eternity.
Like Lord, Latimer also got into television, but at the other end of the food chain, writing for important network shows: Hong Kong, Checkmate, Markham (Ray Milland’s one-season half-hour crime series), and a whopping 31 episodes for the original Perry Mason — that last gig was as high as a writer could go in early-’60s TV. Latimer’s last credit was another top-of-the-heap assignment: a 1972 episode of Columbo guest-starring his old friend Milland.
Beal takes Foster to a nearby building, a rundown, darkened cannery where he presents Foster with the evidence he had sought that very morning — Hanson’s books, saved from the flames after all. Foster hesitates. He can’t take them, he says; he has no warrant. I thought you wanted Hanson, Beal says; here’s your chance. Foster continues to peruse the books. He doesn’t speak but we can imagine his thoughts: Here they are, can I take the chance on losing them again? I can always get a warrent tomorrow. When he looks up, Beal is gone.
Foster passes control of his soul to Beal by increments, one step at a time. The first step is both the smallest and the biggest, because once he’s started it gets harder to turn back, easier to go on, until finally he stands bewildered, unable to recognize himself. How did I get here?, he wonders. In a moment of self-knowledge, he realizes: “It’s not Beal, it’s me.”
Naturally, the mainspring of Alias Nick Beal must be Ray Milland’s performance, and he’s superb. His Beal is smooth, quiet, confident, glib. Nothing ruffles him. But don’t try to touch him. “I don’t like to be touched.” He says it simply, almost apologetic, but his meaning is clear: you won’t like what happens when you do something Nick Beal doesn’t like. When Beal once flares in anger, it’s over in an instant and his calm demeanor returns, but the moment is unnerving; though his eyes are angry slits in that moment, we can almost see the fires of Hell banked behind them.
Milland won a well-deserved Oscar for his tour de force in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, but I’m not sure he isn’t even better here — more subdued, certainly, his face often registering only the slightest movement of an eyebrow, a cheek muscle, the corner of his mouth. He’s the master puppeteer with no wasted motion, supremely in control, confident that his puppets will never feel the strings. Milland worked four times with director Farrow (not incidentally, all but one of them written by Jonathan Latimer), and they were an excellent match, never more so than here.
The phrase “banality of evil” was years in the future when Alias Nick Beal came out, but the theme is on display here. The banality of evil, but also its seductiveness, and the good intentions that pave the road to Hell. Above all, its persistence. You may vanquish the Devil, but he won’t give up; he’ll be back, and he’s patient. Beal tells us as much when he and Foster overhear a sidewalk Salvation Army convert’s testimony: “Glory be! I’ve wrestled the Devil and thrown him. I’ve pinned his shoulders to the mat…” Beal turns ironically to Foster. “I wonder if he knows it’s two falls out of three.”
Lost & Found: Night Has a Thousand Eyes
In using the heading “Lost & Found” for this post, I don’t mean to suggest a “lost” film in the sense that historians and archivists have come to mean it. I mean a movie that was once readily available — at least on TV, and in my neighborhood, in the days of local stations’ film libraries and syndication packages — but that now seems to have vanished entirely except for the occasional 16mm print or bootleg video.
John Farrow’s Night Has a Thousand Eyes is one of those movies. It presumably still exists in the vaults at Universal Pictures (proprietors of Paramount’s pre-1950 library), waiting for the day Universal finds it worth their while to issue a white-market DVD. The day may yet come; the picture does have its following. I tried to bid on a 16mm print on eBay a couple of years ago, but the price quickly went out of my range — and this at a time when 16mm features were hardly moving on eBay at all.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes originated as a novel by Cornell Woolrich, one of the more unusual creeps in the history of Hollywood (where creeps have never exactly been an endangered species). Born Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich in 1903, his parents separated when he was little. He lived with his father in Mexico until he was 12, then moved to New York to live with his mother — which, except for one brief interval, he did for the rest of her life. He dropped out of Columbia when his first novel Cover Charge promised success as a writer. Another thing Woolrich did in Hollywood was get married, in 1930, to 20-year-old Gloria Violet Virginia Blackton, daughter of silent movie pioneer J. Stuart Blackton. The marriage was never consummated, and Gloria eventually had it annulled in 1933, after Woolrich had gone home to Mother. According to Corliss (who cites Woolrich biographer Francis M. Nevins), when Woolrich moved out on Gloria he left behind a diary for her to read. In it, for starters (says Corliss), he had written that “it might be a really good joke to marry this Gloria Blackton.” The diary also went into “sordid and dreadful detail” about his daily sexual adventures with anonymous men; as Corliss says, while he never consummated his marriage, he was hardly celibate.
I say it again, the man was a creep — not because he was gay, but because of the diary, and because he left it behind for Gloria to read. Then there’s the fact that he lived with his mother until he was 53, when she died. By itself that would just be kind of odd; taken with everything else it tends to red-line the creep factor. (It sounds like Sebastian and Violet Venable in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer.) When his mother died in 1957, Woolrich fell to pieces and wasted away. Literally. He neglected a minor foot infection, dulling the pain with booze, until it became gangrenous and they had to amputate his leg above the knee. When he died, alone and miserable in 1968, he weighed only 89 pounds.
The doom-laden fatalism and frustrated self-loathing that lurk under the thin skin of Woolrich’s life surfaced in his writing when he turned from Fitzgerald Jazz Age society to the dank, shadowed recesses of crime fiction. It may not have made him rich or famous, but it kept him eating, and as luck would have it he caught the leading edge of the wave — first of the pulp-fiction detective magazines of the 1930s and ’40s, then of the dark, morally ambiguous movement in 1940s Hollywood that would become known as film noir. There were no fewer than 15 movies made from his novels and stories in the 1940s alone, and dozens more (for theaters and TV) since then. Probably the best of the lot — certainly the most famous — is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), originally published as “It Had to Be Murder” in Dime Detective Magazine (Feb. ’42). But there were others: Val Lewton’s The Leopard Man (1943, from Black Alibi), Phantom Lady (’43), Deadline at Dawn (’46), The Window (’49, from “The Boy Cried Murder”). More recently, too: Francois Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (’68) and Mississippi Mermaid (’69, from Waltz into Darkness), Mrs. Winterbourne (’96, from I Married a Dead Man), Original Sin (2001, Waltz into Darkness again).
Night Has a Thousand Eyes was published in 1945 under one of Woolrich’s pen names, George Hopley (his two middle names); later, in this ’50s-vintage paperback, under his other one, William Irish. But in 1948, when Paramount and director John Farrow filmed the novel, the screen credits named Cornell Woolrich as the novel’s author.Shawn senses some subtle, diabolical scam afoot and persuades his superiors to launch an investigation in the few days remaining. What is Tompkins up to? Is he up to anything at all? The novel then becomes a blend of police procedures, as detectives try to trace Tompkins’ “predictions” to their roots, and Shawn and Jean’s vigil at the Reid estate. As the two seek to raise Harlan Reid’s spirits and head off the perplexing prophecies, their forlorn efforts take on the futile aura of a death watch. It’s no spoiler to say that, along with a few unexpected turns, events work out precisely as Tompkins said they would. The novel ends on a note of trembling hope, but with the characters sensing that they are playthings in the hands of unbreakable fate, and that they’d have been far happier without that glimpse of the abyss.
Even Woolrich’s most admiring fans know that elegant plots were not among his strengths, and much of Night strains credulity; indeed, the supernatural element is often more credible than the ordinary goings-on (which may have been the whole idea). Nor was he much of a stylist; he often overwrites like a man who gets a penny a word and is determined to squeeze every cent he can out of his story. Sometimes his novel reads like the hard-boiled Mickey Spillane parody “The Girl Hunters Ballet” that Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote for the Fred Astaire musical The Band Wagon (1953), as funny unintentionally as Comden and Green were on purpose.
Rather than plot or style, what Woolrich’s novel has is mood — in spades, and maybe even to a fault — the chilling sense of being in the grip of some insensate force, powerless to resist. If Woolrich did happen to swing by New York’s Paramount Theatre when the movie opened there in October 1948, he might have noticed that that mood is preserved on the screen, even as his entire story and most of his characters are jettisoned.
Elements of the novel remain, recognizable but altered, as in a dream. The tormented oracle, of course. The opening scene of a young woman saved from suicide — only now her name is Jean Courtland (Gail Russell), and her rescuer isn’t a stranger but her fiance Elliott Carson (John Lund). The plane crash — only this time Jean’s father (Jerome Cowan) is on the plane and goes down with it. The police-procedural investigation by William Demarest as Lt. Shawn, the only surname to survive from the novel — only this time the aim is not to avert Jean’s father’s death, but her own. And as in the book, there are the cowardly servants deserting Jean, and treachery within the doomed tycoon’s circle of associates. Even the mysterious reference to a lion remains, and is similarly borne out.
The screenplay of Night Has a Thousand Eyes is by Barre Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer, and for me there’s no getting around the fact that they made major improvements in Cornell Woolrich’s original. The story is simpler and more interesting — positioning Jean as the damsel in distress is a much smoother sell than asking us to worry about a broken old man giving up and sitting around waiting for death.
Lyndon and Latimer’s biggest and most satisfying change is in the character of the psychic, the reason the story exists in the first place. Woolrich, with a typically heavy hand, gives us Jeremiah Tompkins (“Jeremiah”, yet!), cursed and burdened his entire life with a “gift” he doesn’t understand or want and can’t control, crushed by it long before he meets Jean or her father. He’s given up. He’s a haunted zero.
In the movie Tompkins becomes John Triton (Edward G. Robinson), a vaudeville and nightclub mentalist with a phony mind-reading act. Or rather, that’s what he was some twenty-odd years ago, as he describes things to us in flashback. As he plies his act in theaters and saloons from town to town, he finds himself — and he’s not even sure exactly when it started — getting genuine flashes, glimpses into the future: the winner in a horse race, the son of an audience member who is playing with matches at home and about to set fire to the house, an investment opportunity that will pay off. Carson, Jean’s fiance, sees in Triton a carnival con-man running some kind of game to fleece a wealthy and vulnerable orphan, and he takes his concerns to the police. But Triton’s game, if there is a game, is a subtle one. He asks no money, does nothing illegal, and cooperates with the police one hundred percent. “He puts up a good show,” says a skeptical psychiatrist. What is this man up to?
There is simply no end to the ways in which Night Has a Thousand Eyes is better than the novel it’s based on. The book may be a work of art that expresses the author’s nightmarish vision of an overpowering and inexorable universe (though I have my doubts on that score), but the movie was made by craftsmen who had the story sense (Barre Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer) and fluid style (John Farrow) that Cornell Woolrich lacked. In John Triton, the movie has a protagonist more complex, dramatic and interesting than the cringing troll Tompkins. Triton is a true Cassandra, a prophet fated to be disbelieved — not because people think he’s mad, but because they think he’s too sane, a slick and calculating huckster with a smooth line of patter. Which, once upon a time, he was.
In addition, and perhaps more important, the movie has Edward G. Robinson. Robinson once said of himself, “Some people have youth, some have beauty — I have menace.” In one of his other 1948 pictures, Key Largo, he menaced Bogart, Bacall, Lionel Barrymore, Claire Trevor and anyone else who entered a room with him. Billy Wilder used that menace to great effect in Double Indemnity, where Robinson played, in fact, a good man who (without knowing it) menaced the picture’s protagonist and actual villain, perennial nice guy Fred MacMurray. 
Night Has a Thousand Eyes is a specimen of a rare subgenre: supernatural noir. There aren’t many examples of that; parapsychology, the “spirit world”, and such things are not to be easily grafted onto the gritty, cynical urban landscapes of movies like Laura and Double Indemnity. But John Farrow, Jonathan Latimer and producer Endre Bohem would do it again the following year in their next picture together, just a few months after finishing this. The result would be a neglected classic — forgotten now but, once seen, unforgettable. I’ll write about that one next time.Harlow in Hollywood
I ended my last post with the shadow of Jean Harlow’s name on the directory outside the star dressing rooms at the MGM studios. It was a ghostly image; the haunting is considerably more tangible in another new book, Harlow in Hollywood: The Blonde Bombshell in the Glamour Capital, 1928-1937 by Darrell Rooney and Mark A. Vieira, published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Harlow’s birth (March 3, 1911). This sleekly sumptuous coffee-table volume does a great job of evoking both “H”s in the title. I can’t help comparing it to the late Ronald Haver’s David O. Selznick’s Hollywood, even at the risk of overpraising Harlow in Hollywood — at least in my own mind, since I consider Haver’s book just about the best single title ever published on Golden Age Hollywood. There never was such a visual and factual feast as that Selznick book, but Harlow in Hollywood is in the same league.
Rooney and Vieira’s text is essentially an artful paraphrase of David Stenn’s Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow, which the authors acknowledge right up front as “the definitive biography” of the star. (By the way, now that I’ve checked out Bombshell‘s Amazon page and seen the prices it’s going for, I guess I’d better never let my 1993 first edition out of my sight!)
What really set the new book apart are its visuals — the cascade of pictures (there must be 400 or more) from the authors’ own collections and what they’ve garnered from other sources (duly thanked in the acknowledgments), all dazzlingly arranged by designer Hilary Lentini. The evocative beauty of Lentini’s design extends even to the whimsical endpapers, adapted from a 1937 Starland Map and dotted with “pins” marking locations that were significant in Harlow’s life and career. These endpapers go far to conjure up a cozy, sun-soaked little cluster of everybody-knows-everybody communities — Hollywood, Westwood, Beverly Hills, Laurel Canyon — that’s a far cry from the cramped, smoggy, seedy melange of urban sprawl, faded glory and retro kitsch that greets visitors to the L.A. Basin today. (Of course, the map probably had more than a touch of gaga fantasy even then.)
If Harlow in Hollywood doesn’t quite match the visual splash of David O. Selznick’s Hollywood, it’s probably because it doesn’t have the Haver book’s riot of eye-popping color. Which is only fitting: Selznick was an early champion of Technicolor and used it when others told him he was a fool to waste the money; but Selznick figured color would pay off in the long run by adding shelf life to his pictures (and he was right).
Not that there isn’t color in Harlow in Hollywood — like these striking Carbro color images taken by George Hurrell in late 1935 or early ’36. These pictures are from her “brownette” period late in her career (nobody knew how late), when MGM sought to placate the Breen Office by softening the erotic edge of her platinum blonde image. It’s not as if they had much choice. Harlow’s hair really had that white-blonde sheen in childhood and adolescence (and she was only 17 when she started in pictures), but every blonde’s hair color deepens and thickens with maturity, and Harlow was no exception. Stringent efforts to retain that platinum blonde look — peroxide, ammonia, Lux flakes — had ravaged her scalp and hair to the point where she was in real danger of going bald. I suspect part of the reason for the Hurrell portraits was to prepare Harlow’s fans for her new look.
A Time-Travel Studio Tour
Hollywood backlots are endlessly fascinating, aren’t they? When I moved to Long Beach in 1977 I drove up to Burbank one day to check out the Walt Disney Studios on Buena Vista Street. I parked on residential South Lincoln Street behind the studio. Peeking through a knothole in the studio fence, I could just catch a glimpse of what I’m sure were the old sets for the Zorro TV series. I was never able to prove it, though, and I guess I never will now: the Disney backlot is gone — and for all I know, the fence, that section of Lincoln St., and the houses that faced it — subsumed into the Walt Disney Feature Animation building that went up in the 1990s.
In 1986 I attended a screening of Wisdom (in which I had a bit role) at the 20th Century Fox studios, and afterwards took a stroll around the grounds (that’s when I learned that once you manage to get inside a studio’s gates, people let you go more or less where you please, on the assumption that you must belong there). I saw the picturesque little Swiss-looking bungalow that had been built for Shirley Temple (later the writers’ building), and walked the stunted remains of the Fox backlot, all that was left after they sold off the 180 acres that became Century City.
Also, the book could have used a more thorough job of copy editing. There are far more than the usual number of misspellings (“Donald O’Conner,” “legers [ledgers]”) typographical errors (“The Barrett’s of Wimpole Street,” elsewhere called “Wimple Street”), malapropisms (“initialized” for “initiated,” “cache” for “cachet,” “skewered” for “skewed”), grammatical missteps (“…the sets fell in to disrepair…”) and other hard-to-classify errors that could be one or more of the above (“…the seeds of destruction…were sewn…”). You can hardly go five pages without one gaffe or another. (And by the way, was there really a “Red Square” set in Yolanda and the Thief [1945]? I don’t remember one in that picture, which took place in a mythical South American country, but the authors say there was one, and that Lot 2’s New York Street played the role.)
All quibbles notwithstanding, this book is a swell read, a step-by-step tour that takes us through each lot one by one, ushering us in the front gate and taking in every building (on Lot 1) and outdoor set (on the others) in turn. There are plenty of maps, starting with this one showing all MGM’s holdings at its peak. (The two lots on the left are the ones you can see in the picture above.) If you live in the L.A. area and have a passing familiarity with Culver City, it’s easy to get the lay of MGM’s land.
Changing the subject slightly, I just got a DVD on eBay comprised of Kodachrome home movies taken at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Seeing the place in color is a much more immediate experience than all those old black-and-white newsreels and photos, and what comes through most clearly to me in these 70-year-old home movies is that everything — from the Trylon and Perisphere all the way down to the Amusement Zone rides — looks so absolutely and completely permanent.
It’s like that too in the movies shot on the MGM backlot. I mean, I’ve lived on streets that I don’t remember as vividly as Kensington Avenue from Meet Me in St. Louis or Andy Hardy’s street — which was also Maple St. in the “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” episode of The Twilight Zone, and the street Bobby Van hopped down in Small Town Girl.
That’s just from seeing them in the movies. How much more solid and permanent they must have looked to the people who actually worked on them. Not that they would have looked or felt real, of course. An actor always knows when he’s on a set, and Mickey Rooney and Lewis Stone surely never had any illusions that the Hardys’ front door actually led anyplace — the company would have to adjourn to a set on one of Lot 1’s sound stages to continue that illusion.
But even so, there must have been a feeling that these sets would always be there, and it’s easy to imagine the wistful bewilderment people like Rooney and Debbie Reynolds and Ann Rutherford felt walking the backlot toward the end — after the carpenters and maintenance crews and greensmen had all been laid off, and there were weeds growing around the doorsteps and torn canvas walls flapping in the Santa Ana Winds. In fact, we don’t have to imagine it; we can see it in pictures like That’s Entertainment! and the documentary-cum-obituaries that date from the 1960s and ’70s. It’s there, too, in dozens of quotes in MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot, from stars and “backstage” workers alike, and always the subtext is the same: Jeez, what happened?? With the studio humming along on all cylinders, thousands of employees keeping everything fresh and ready to use on a moment’s notice, and packing the commissary every day at lunch, the MGM lots surely seemed as permanent as the pyramids.
