Catching Some Rays

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For my share of the Monster Movie Blogathon I’ve chosen to honor a man whose movies (like Henry Hathaway’s) I loved even before I knew his name. By now everybody knows his name (at least everybody who’s likely to be reading Cinedrome or a blogathon about 1950s monster movies): Ray Harryhausen.

I knew about Ray Harryhausen myself at a pretty early age — before Hathaway, in fact — thanks to the late great Forrest J. Ackerman. Forry praised Harryhausen loud, long and often in the pages of Famous Mosters of Filmland, which I read religiously whenever I could find it. By the time The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960), Mysterious Island (’61) and Jason and the Argonauts (’63) came out, oh yes indeed, I knew who Ray Harryhausen was.

But when I saw The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, I didn’t. In those days they were just two movies I loved; I never had any idea they were made by the same guy. I picked these two for the blogathon because they were important for me, but they they were also important for Harryhausen himself: Beast was the first feature where he got sole credit for the special effects, while Sinbad was his first feature in color.

My brothers, our friends and I weren’t the only kids of the 1950s (or, for that matter, the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s) who were profoundly impressed by Ray Harryhausen’s movies. Nowadays, when it sometimes seems as if fantasy, monster and alien movies are the only kind Hollywood (or anybody else) ever makes, there isn’t a person working in any area of visual effects who doesn’t revere Harryhausen’s name — who didn’t grow up wanting to do the things and make the kinds of movies he did. Ray Harryhausen is probably one of the most influential filmmakers of the last sixty years, yet his pictures have almost always flown under history’s radar. He’s never even been nominated for an Academy Award — although in 1991 he did get a special Oscar, the Gordon E. Sawyer award given to individuals “whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry.”

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) was already a few years old by the time I saw it, at a Saturday kiddie matinee at the Stamm Theatre in Antioch, Calif. I don’t remember exactly when that was, but I do know I saw it at least three or four times, all of them well before The 7th Voyage of Sinbad came to the same theater in early 1959. (I also know it was after I saw King Kong on its 1956 reissue, so that narrows things down a little.)

Consider this: what’s the classic 1950s monster movie formula (non-extraterrestrial division)? Isn’t it the creature unleashed by humanity’s meddling with nature, usually in the form of unrestricted nuclear weapons testing? Men go settting off enormous bombs and before you can say Run for your lives! some gigantic this-or-that is stomping around putting us puny little creatures in our place, right? Well, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is the original, the “onlie begetter”. I’d call it the granddaddy of them all — except that its offspring began proliferating when it was barely a year old, too young to be a grandfather.

When I revisited the picture in prep for this post (the first time I’d seen it in at least 40 years), I was a little apprehensive about what I might find; it wouldn’t be the first childhood favorite to decompose before my startled eyes, like a clumsy piece of taxidermy. I needn’t have worried; Beast is as fresh and vigorous today as it was when I first saw it — back when I would hardly have thought to use words like “fresh and vigorous” (I probably said something more along the lines of “keen” and “neat-o”). It’s a lesson we can’t relearn too often: the cliches don’t pull you down when you invented them in the first place.
 

Beast was independently produced by B-movie specialist Jack Dietz, who had made his name cranking out East Side Kids programmers with Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall on Poverty Row in the ’40s. Ray Harryhausen says the negative cost was $200,000 — neither lavish nor shoestring in those days, just a decent, respectable B budget. (“Today,” Harryhausen says, “you can hardly buy a costume for $200,000.”) Dietz stretched his budget by hiring Eugene Lourie to direct. The IMDb says Lourie also served as production designer, though on screen he’s credited only as director. If Lourie did do double duty, it would make sense; the bulk of his career was as an art director, first in France, then in Hollywood (his last credit was Clint Eastwood’s Broncho Billy). This would also explain how Dietz, between Lourie’s design sense and the deft use of stock footage, managed to get an A-picture look on a B-picture budget.

The picture begins literally with a bang: an atomic test north of the Arctic Circle that frees the creature from suspended animation in the polar ice (audiences never tire of these stock shots of atomic explosions; they’re as fascinating now as they were half a century ago). The first man to see the beast is one of the attending scientists (Ross Elliott, in the designated role of First Expendable Victim). The second witness is the other scientist, our hero Tom Nesbitt (Swiss actor Paul Hubschmid, under the anglicized name of Paul Christian), and the movie’s first act follows Nesbitt’s crusade to prove to the skeptics around him — his military pal Col. Jack Evans (The Thing from Another World‘s Kenneth Tobey), paleontologist Dr. Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway) and Elson’s assistant Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond) — that he saw what he saw. Meanwhile there are a number of unexplained occurences, including the sinking of a fishing boat whose sole survivor is dismissed as a deranged crackpot when he claims it was the work of a “sea serpent” (the sailor is played by John Ford regular Jack Pennick, his grotesque teeth either straightened or, more likely, replace by dentures).

Another of these occurences is the destruction of a lighthouse on the coast of Maine, an episode straight from the Ray Bradbury short story that (according to the credits) “suggested” Lou Morheim and Fred Freiberger’s screenplay. And this is as good a place as any to discuss the movie’s origins.

The story first appeared in the June 23, 1951 issue of the Saturday Evening Post as “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms”. It was later antholgized in Bradbury’s collection The Golden Apples of the Sun, its title changed to “The Fog Horn”, and it is by that name that it’s been known ever since. My guess is that “The Fog Horn” was Bradbury’s original title and that the Post editors gave it the other one; it sounds about like the magazine’s style in those days. Since the movie’s original working title was Monster from the Deep, I’m also guessing that Dietz first hired Harryhausen for the project, then came across Bradbury’s story and decided to incorporate it, and to appropriate its title, as an afterthought. If so, then it must have been a pretty early afterthought, because the movie adopted not only the title…
 
…but, with modifications, the look of the monster itself, as you can see by comparing the frame from the movie above with this illustration from the magazine. In the movie the beast is identified as a “rhedosaurus”, a species that does not exist in the annals of paleontology. It’s fun to believe that the first two letters of the beast’s name stand for the “RH” of Ray Harryhausen (Harryhausen denies it, but I think perhaps he doth protest too much).
 
And doesn’t the title The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms have a great ring to it? Much better than Monster from the Deep. Scientifically, it’s nonsense; a fathom is a measure of nautical depth, six feet — or, at the rate of 20,000, 22.7 miles. The beast from 22.7 miles down, in an ocean (the Arctic) that never gets deeper than 3.4 miles? Even the deepest spot on earth, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, is only 6.9 miles. But never mind, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms sounds awe-inspiring, primeval, almost Shakespearean; kudos to that Saturday Evening Post editor for coming up with it. 
 
The Beast‘s money scene is the monster’s invasion of New York (not far, Kellaway’s Dr. Elson tells us, from where the only rhedosaurus fossils have ever been found), and the Big Apple hasn’t had it so bad since King Kong came to town. In fact, compared to the rhedosaurus, Kong’s rampage looks comparatively benign: a quick shot of newspaper headlines tells us there are 180 known dead, 1,500 injured, and damages estimated at $300,000,000 (and that’s in Eisenhower dollars; add a zero or two to get a current equivalent). “The worst disaster in New York’s history!” shouts a radio newsman, as the National Guard is trucked into town, hospital emergency rooms are overwhelmed, and New Yorkers cower behind their doors, afraid even to look out the window.
 
 
This sequence includes a moment that nobody who saw it in the 1950s has ever forgotten. An unbilled Steve Mitchell, playing an NYPD patrolman, bravely stands his ground, even advances on the beast, using nothing but his .38 caliber police revolver…
 
 
 
 
…only to be plucked screaming off his feet in the monster’s teeth and downed in one quick gulp. It’s a grisly death Harryhausen had practiced on a classmate in one of his experimental films as a teenager, and I’m sure Steven Spielberg had it in mind 40 years later when he had that T-rex snatch the cowering lawyer off the toilet in Jurassic Park. But in Beast it’s a moment of noble sacrifice (the cop is not made to look reckless or foolish), and our sad knowledge of September 11 makes it even more poignant when viewed today.
 
 
 
 
As the rhedosaurus wreaks its havoc on Manhattan, Harryhausen manages to fit in a nice little tribute to his mentor Willis O’Brien. As the beast claws at this building, ultimately reducing it to rubble (and annihilating an unlucky group of extras in the alley beyond)…
 
 
 
…the shot mirrors this one from The Lost World (’25), in which O’Brien’s brontosaurus deals out the same fate to a building in London (albeit with less explicit loss of life).
 
 
Ultimately, the rhedosaurus is cornered at Coney Island, wounded and enraged by a lucky shot earlier in the evening from a National Guard bazooka. Worse, the nuclear test that freed it from its icy tomb seems to have turned it into a carrier of some virulent radiation sickness; soldiers exposed to the manhole-size drops of blood falling from its wound have been keeling over without warning left and right. Tom Nesbitt announces that (for reasons the script doesn’t slow down to explain) the only way to stop the creature is to shoot a radioactive isotope into its wound “and destroy all that diseased tissue.” So Nesbitt and an Army marksman (an amazingly youthful Lee Van Cleef) don their haz-mat suits and ride to the top of the rollercoaster for a clear shot, and at last the monster’s number is up.
 
 
But not without a fight. Before the monster’s death throes have run their course, the rollercoaster becomes an inferno of flames (Nesbitt and the marksman make it safely to the ground), and the rhedosaurus gets a funeral pyre to match its gargantuan size. Harryhausen says that Eugene Lourie once accused him of having his monsters die “like a tenor in an opera”, and that’s what this one does:
 
 
Once The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was in the can, Jack Dietz tucked it under his arm and went shopping for a distributor. Eventually, he sold it to Warner Bros. for (according to Harryhausen) about $450,000. That represents a very tidy profit over his original investment, but with a fly in the ointment: Harryhausen says the picture went on to make “millions” for Warners — $5,000,000, as a matter of fact, at a time when that was real money; nearly twice as much, for example, as Bwana Devil, the surprise hit of ’53 that kicked off the first short-lived 3-D craze. More, too, than other 3-D hits of the year, like Charge at Feather River, It Came from Outer Space and Kiss Me, Kate (not quite as much as House of Wax, though, but pretty close, and without the novelty of 3-D).
 
Warner Bros. profited from Beast in another way as well. Barely a year (in fact, 371 days) later, the studio released its own homemade variation: Them! Warners knew a good thing when they had it, and they stuck close to the formula. Once again, nuclear testing unleashed a horrible freak of nature (this time, giant mutant ants), a major city came under attack (Los Angeles), and a beloved old character actor was along to play the movie’s senior scientist (Edmund Gwenn, in a role very much like Cecil Kellaway’s in The Beast). Other animals, insects, arachnids, even humans, would stumble into the atomic oven and thunder out their warnings of Things Man Was Not Meant to Meddle In, and plenty of them are on view in this blogathon. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms led the way, and proved there was gold in them thar radioactive hills.
 
 
After The Beast, Ray Harryhausen was on a roll:  It Came from Beneath the Sea, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. But in 1958 he, producer Charles Schneer and director Nathan Juran made a picture that represented an orders-of-magnitude leap forward on the keen-and-neat-o scale.
 
Partly because it was in georgeous, eye-popping Technicolor. But there was also the sheer volume of its visual effects. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms runs an economical 79 minutes, and its effects shots add up to (surprisingly) only 7 minutes 5 seconds — or 8.9 percent of the running time. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad runs 88 minutes, with 17 minutes 27 seconds of effects — 19.8 percent. More monster-time, but more monsters, too; more, in fact, than all Harryhausen’s previous pictures put together. The Beast, It Came from Beneath the Sea and 20 Million Miles to Earth each had a single animated creature. But Sinbad had more than you could shake a scimitar at.
 
This one, for example. It’s the first beast we see, not seven minutes in — the collossal Cyclops, encountered when Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) and his crew make an unscheduled stop at the uncharted island of (appropriately) Colossa.
 
Sinbad has been blown off his course as he sailed home to Bagdad after a diplomatic mission to the Sultan of Chandra. There he not only averted war between Bagdad and Chandra, but wooed and won the hand of Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant), daughter of the Sultan.
 
As Sinbad and his crew come ashore seeking food and water, the Cyclops appears suddenly, pursuing a man in a black gown who is calling for help. This is the magician Sokurah (Torin Thatcher), a crafty and devious man who, once they are all safely back aboard the ship, arouses Sinbad’s suspicions.
 
Sokurah tries to bribe Sinbad to return at once to Colossa, to retrieve a magic lamp that the Cyclops has stolen from him. He appeals to Sinbad’s greed, telling him that the Cyclops is a hoarder of treasure, not only Sokurah’s lamp, and that Sinbad and his crew can claim any amount of the treasure as plunder — once Sokurah has his lamp back. But Sinbad’s first duty is to his Caliph, and to keep the Princess safe from harm — not only for the sake of his love for her, but for the sake of peace between Bagdad and Chandra.
 
 
In  Bagdad, Sokurah performs wonders for the Caliph and the visiting Sultan of Chandra, including (briefly) joining the Princess’s serving woman and a serpent into this amazing, sinuous creature before returning the servant (and presumably the snake) back to their original bodies. Sokurah attempts to wheedle the Caliph into fitting out an expedition to return him to Colossa, but the Caliph remains firm; his mind is not to be changed even by such clever tricks as these. Perhaps, Sokurah mutters ominously, an even greater demonstration of my powers is called for.
 
The next morning, Sokurah has done his work. Princess Parisa is discovered in her bedchamber, alive and well but shrunken to the size of a tiny doll. The Sultan, outraged and grieving, vows to reduce Bagdad to ashes to avenge this insult to his daughter. His hand is stayed only when Sinbad seeks out Sokurah and gets the sorcerer to admit that he can return the Princess to her normal size — but only with a potion using the eggshell of the giant bird, the Roc, which is found (of course) only on Colossa. So the magician has at last extorted his expedition after all, to be led by Sinbad himself. But Sinbad fears — knows — that Sokurah can’t be trusted, and that he will have to be kept a wary eye on.
 
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was part of a movie vogue that was petering out by the time it went into production in 1957: the Arabian Nights adventure. The genre — at least this incarnation of it — had begun in 1940 with the phenomenal success of the marvelous, magical The Thief of Bagdad from Alexander Korda’s London Films. It spurred a flood of similarly-themed adventures throughout the ’40s — most noticeably in a series of campy Technicolor romps from Universal starring Jon Hall and Maria Montez (“the King and Queen of Technicolor”), but cropping up in other unexpected places, like MGM’s Kismet (1944) with Ronald Colman and Marlene Dietrich, and Warner Bros.’ update of The Desert Song (1943), with Dennis Morgan as a burnoose-clad freedom fighter battling Nazis in war-torn Morocco. 
 
It was during this time that Ray Harryhausen first conceived the idea of a Sinbad adventure, and he drew a series of preliminary sketches of the kind of thing he had in mind. There had been Sinbad the Sailor in ’47, but that was a conventional swashbuckler with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Maureen O’Hara; Fairbanks spoke of battling Rocs and Cyclops and dragons, but what the movie showed was far more mundane. Harryhausen’s idea was to make a movie filled with the things Fairbanks’s Sinbad only talked about. 
 
Unfortunately for him, in 1955, RKO Radio Pictures mogul Howard Hughes, while he was in the process of running his studio into the ground, produced Son of Sinbad with Dale Robertson, which rightly laid a Roc-sized egg at the box office. Wherever Harryhausen turned, the answer was the same: “sailor pictures” are dead, just look at what happened to Son of Sinbad. 
 
But producer Charles H. Schneer — with whom Harryhausen had already made It Came from Beneath the Sea, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and 20 Million Miles to Earth — believed.He even wanted to shoot in color, about which Harryhausen was dubious. Harryhausen had just developed a process — later dubbed Dynamation — with which he could combine live action and special effects animation on the same strip of film negative without having to resort to costly and time-consuming matching of negatives in the lab (the animation alone was costly and time-consuming enough), and he wasn’t sure it would work for color as well as for black-and-white. But Schneer had him shoot some tests to make sure, and they were on their way.
 
The picture was shot in Spain (another point on which Schneer and Harryhausen were pioneers; in the 1960s many Hollywood epics, and Sergio Leone’s Italian spaghetti westerns, would also be shooting there), and Schneer was as resourceful with a budget as Jack Dietz had been. He even secured permission to shoot in the Alhambra in Granada, giving him and director Nathan Juran access to lavish sets at a fraction of the cost of building them. (Later crews were less respectful than Sinbad‘s, and now the Alhambra is off-limits to movie production.)
 
 
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is a movie of endless wonders, thrills and delights. Time and again, Sinbad and his crew (and the tiny Parisa, helpless in her little doll’s cabinet) have barely vanquished or escaped from one fantastic creature before they are set upon by another — like this angry two-headed Roc, who takes exception to Sinbad plundering her eggs for the shell that will help restore the Princess…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…or the Cyclops again, preparing to barbecue Sinbad’s friend Harufa (Afred Brown) for his dinner…
 
 
 
 
 
 
…or the fire-breathing dragon guarding Sokurah’s underground castle, where Sinbad goes to rescue Parisa after Sokurah has betrayed them all and spirited the Princess away…
 
 
…or most awe-inspiring of all, the skeleton Sokurah brings to life and arms with sword and shield to duel Sinbad to the death. This scene was such a tour de force that Harryhausen couldn’t resist outdoing it five years later in Jason and the Argonauts, when the hero and his friends battle a cadre of no fewer than seven deadly skeletons.
 
The Arabian Nights adventure came in in a blaze of glory with The Thief of Bagdad, and after years of diminishing returns it went out in a blaze of glory with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. There would be other movies in the genre — Harryhausen himself would make sequels, and pretty good ones, in 1973 and ’77 — but these two movies, each in its own distinct way, are the unassailable peaks of the form, never equaled, much less surpassed.
 
The secret to the success of both movies, of course, is that they aren’t really “Arabian” at all. What they are, in fact, is Arabesque — an elaborate fantasia on the mere idea of the tales of Scheherezade, decorated with the filigree of genies, evil wizards, fabulous monsters, dauntless heroes and pure, chaste maidens in mortal peril.
 
 
 
Oh, and let’s say a word about that genie, Barani — the one in the magic lamp so desperately coveted by the wicked Sokurah. He’s played by 12-year-old Richard Eyer, one of the most ubiquitous child actors of the 1950s, who had already made his mark in such movies as Come Next Spring, The Desperate Hours and Friendly Persuasion, and on countless television series. His talent wasn’t spectacular, but it was real, and he brought a down-to-earth conviction to any role he played; he was a real kid, not a show-off Hollywood brat. And even though he was about as “Arabian” as a Fourth of July picnic, casting him in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was an act of sublime genius. Here, right in the middle of all these monsters and wizards and princesses, was a boy just like you or me — only he could do magic! I’ve never seen this commented on before, but I think Richard Eyer’s presence is crucial to the success of Sinbad, as much as Torin Thatcher’s ability to embody pure wickedness or Kerwin Mathews’s uncanny way of really seeing all the creatures that won’t be tipped into the scene with him until months after shooting has wrapped. Richard Eyer gives the kids in the audience — like my brothers, our friends and me — something they can identify with and hold on to amid the wonders going on before their wide and staring eyes. Richard Eyer had a very special place in my heart after I saw The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
 

 

 
 
 
 

The Museum That Never Was, Part 2

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The good news about the Debbie Reynolds Auction is that there was an auction at all. She saved all these items from oblivion, and now they’re around for us to see. Debbie’s main interest was in the costumes, but there’s plenty of other stuff in her collection, like this concept painting from the 1963 Cleopatra. Just to illustrate how things can change from the early concept stages to final production…

 
 
 
 
…here’s how the battle of Actium looked on screen. The painting has a dramatic grandeur that contrasts sharply with the frame from the movie, which looks rather stodgy and pedestrian — and which, as it happens, is pretty much how the battle scene plays out in the movie itself. The same is true of other Cleopatra paintings on display in the catalogue; they show an energy and drive that survives only sporadically (and sometimes not at all) in the picture as it finally played in theaters.
 
 
My point is: It’s thanks to Debbie Reynolds that I’m even able to make this comparison. Maybe 20th Century Fox would have preserved these paintings and sketches. Maybe. But they didn’t. In 1971, reeling from the financial debacles of white elephants like Dr. Dolittle, Star! and Hello, Dolly! (and for that matter, Cleopatra, which eventually turned a decent profit, but too late to do any good), and with Star Wars still six years in the unseeable future, I’m sure Fox was only too happy to pick up a little spare change by getting rid of things like this. And Debbie Reynolds was there to take them for safe-keeping.
 

Now that Debbie is relinquishing her stewardship, we can reasonably assume that, whoever may wind up with this or that individual piece, the collection as a whole is safe for the forseeable future; nobody pays $5 million for a dress if they’re planning to leave it wadded up on the bottom shelf of the linen closet, or set it out on the curb next time the Salvation Army truck comes around. But where are the pieces going, and what precisely is going to become of them? Collectors can be a secretive and territorial bunch, not always quick to share. (And who can blame them? There are a lot of unscrupulous people out there; see here for a mention of the mysterious fate of Marcel Delgado’s production photos from The Lost World [’25] and King Kong [’33].) In the auction catalogue from Profiles in History, there’s a special plea from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, asking for the loan of certain items in the collection for an exhibit on Hollywood costumes planned for October 2012 through January 2013. Debbie had promised curator Deborah Nadoolman Landis the use of any costumes she wanted — until the need to sell torpedoed the arrangement; it’ll be interesting to see if any of the new owners come through for the V&A.

So the Debbie Reynolds Collection existed in the first place, and it’s (most likely) safe now; that’s the good news. The bad news is that it won’t be a collection anymore. True, last month’s auction was only 587 lots out of whatever (5,000? 10,000?) is the total. Does Debbie intend to sell only enough to pay her outstanding debts, then start again at Square One with what’s left? Perhaps, but she certainly sounds as if she’s in the process of washing her hands of the whole kit and kaboodle. That’s perfectly understandable, but it’s still a shame.

I’ll miss having the opportunity to wander through the halls of the Debbie Reynolds Hollywood Movie Museum, and to go back as often as time and resources would allow; I suspect a single day wouldn’t have been enough to see it all. It’s comforting to know that these things are in the hands of people who’ll appreciate them, but having them all together in one place would have made the museum so much greater than the sum of its parts. As Virginia Postrel says, “To understand the past you need a large sample. Only then can you separate idiosyncratic variation from broad trends.”

I hinted at this idea in Part 1, when I suggested mix-and-matching a Cleopatra costume from the 1930s, ’40s and ’60s. How instructive it would have been to compare costumes from the 1925 and ’59 versions of Ben-Hur; or Mutiny on the Bounty ’35 and ’62; or how Adrian dressed Charles Boyer as Napoleon in Conquest (’37) vs. how Rene Hubert and Charles LeMaire dressed Marlon Brando in Desiree.

Or take this shot of Katharine Hepburn as Mary of Scotland (1936). You can see Mary of Scotland any time you like, and maybe you have. But while you were taking in the lavish settings and costumes captured by Joseph August’s richly atmospheric, deeply shadowed black-and-white cinematography, did it ever occur to you that the gown Kate is wearing here… 

Hepburn-MarybW

 

 

…really looked like this? We enter so completely into the world of any black-and-white movie (and arguably, Mary of Scotland is not one of the best) that we tend to forget that anyone ever thought of them in terms of color. We think, perhaps, that the studios wouldn’t spend money on something the camera wouldn’t see. But think that one through: The actors would see it. If Katharine Hepburn’s costume had really been composed of the shades of black and gray that we see on screen and in the picture above, she would surely have acted differently than she did in this sumptuous red and gold garment. And the camera would certainly have seen that.

This is one of the things I most noticed in looking through the costumes in the catalogue, the striking variety of color in costumes and set pieces built for black-and-white movies. That gold gown from DeMille’s Cleopatra is another example; it may look silver on screen, but no, it was gold.

 
 
 
 
 
Here’s yet another. It’s Tallulah Bankhead as Catherine the Great in A Royal Scandal (1945, begun by Ernst Lubitsch, who became ill during production and handed the direction off to Otto Preminger)… 
 
 
 
 
 
Bankhead-ScandalbW
 
 
…and here’s the dress she’s wearing, a “cognac silk
velvet two-piece period gown heavily jeweled with gold and white stones.” Talk about your Scarlet Empress! If you Ctrl-click on the picture to open it in a new tab, then “plus” it up to full size, you can see the exquisite detail in the jeweling, which probably went all but unnoticed by audiences at the time. (You can, alas, also see that time has visited its ravages on the gown — mostly, no doubt, between 1945 and ’71, when Debbie acquired it from 20th Century Fox.) Bidding on this one started at $3,000 and it sold for $7,000 plus another $1,610 for the house commission and sales taxes.
 
(And by the way, I said in Part 1 that I had no idea how much those Cleopatra costume pieces finally sold for. Well, now I know, thanks to the icollector.com Web site: Cleopatra [’34] gown, $40,000; Cleopatra [’63] headdress, $100,000; Caesar and Cleopatra wig and headband, $4,250. Maybe those “duelling Cleopatras” showed up after all. Also, Debbie’s How the West Was Won gown brought $11,000. All prices are before 20 percent “buyer’s premium” and sales tax.)
 
 
Marie-Antoinette03aW
 
 
 
 
 
I could go on like this all day, but I’ll just give a few more examples, all from the same picture: Marie Antoinette (1938), Irving Thalberg’s last project, a vehicle for his wife Norma Shearer that was eventually released nearly two years after Thalberg’s death. Because it was Thalberg, and because he was doing it for Norma, no expense was spared. For starters, here’s a silk brocade jacket and vest with breeches (a pair of pink-and-brown ribboned shoes came with) for John Barrymore as King Louis XV… 
Marie-Antoinette01W
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…and here’s a wool coat with black velvet buttons for Tyrone Power as Count Axel de Fersen, the would-be rescuer of the doomed Louis XVI (Robert Morley) and his queen…
 
 
 
 
Marie-Antoinette02aW
 
 
 
 
…while here’s a tunic worn by a servant attending the king at a royal ball. This costume, mind you, worn by a nameless extra whose own mother probably didn’t notice or recognize him.
 
These three samples alone — and the catalogue has eight more from the same picture — bear witness to the fact that the set of Marie Antoinette must have been an absolutely intoxicating riot of color. It makes us wonder what the movie might have looked like if Technicolor had been available (well, technically it was, but MGM was still timid about using it). Even more than that, it makes me (at least) think what an absolute Wonderland the set of Marie Antoinette must have been. Can you imagine? Well, you’ll have to, because you’ll probably never see these costumes all together in the same place again. 
 
That, again, is the bad news of the Debbie Reynolds Auction: the opportunity to browse through these exhibits is in all likelihood slipping away from us forever. They’re all safe enough from outright destruction, no doubt, but they’ve been spirited away God knows where, to some private mansion or mountaintop retreat or private hall or atrium or display case, to be shared, if at all, with only a small circle of friends.
 
That’s why I’m glad I ordered my own copy of Profiles in History’s catalogue, even though my vague ideas about going to the auction or putting in some bids never went anywhere. And it’s why I plan to get a copy of the next edition in December (who knows, by then I may even be able to bid on something). The catalogue is like a souvenir book from the gift shop of the Museum That Never Was, a memento of the last time these exhibits were all under one roof — something I can leaf through at my leisure and pretend that I actually spent a day or two in the Debbie Reynolds Hollywood Movie Museum and saw all this myself first-hand. 
 

If you’re interested in a catalogue of your own, you can (at least as of this date) order it here from Profiles in History. If you don’t want to pay the $39.95 — and don’t mind not getting the quality high-gloss paper it’s printed on — you can even download the catalogue for free on PDF. But be warned: It’s 312 pages and will probably take quite a while to download (and even longer to print), and it’ll probably take up quite a chunk of your hard drive when it gets there.
 

The Museum That Never Was, Part 1

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When I bought the catalog for the Debbie Reynolds Auction from the Profiles in History auction house, I admit it was with the thought that I just might be able to get down to L.A. for the event itself on June 18. Well, family plans closer to home made that idea a non-starter, but there was still the possibility that I might be able to bid on something by phone or on line. Then a 16mm print came up for auction on eBay that I set my cap for, and it wound up costing more than I expected, though less than I was willing to pay. (Not that you asked, but it’s a kinescope of a 1956 live TV dramatization of Jim Bishop’s The Day Lincoln Was Shot starring Raymond Massey, Lillian Gish and Jack Lemmon.)

So what with one thing and another, my hopes of getting to the auction or of taking home anything from it were not to be.

 
 
Not that I could have afforded much — that became clear as I started leafing through the catalogue.  Take this little number, for example. It’s the ivory colored rayon crepe dress Marilyn Monroe wore in The Seven Year Itch as she stood over that subway grate and let the updraft send the skirt billowing up around her 22-inch waist. The catalogue describes it as “the most recognized costume in film history.” Well, I don’t know about that; seems to me Scarlett O’Hara’s green portiere gown would give it some competition (to say nothing of Darth Vader’s cape and helmet). But never mind, this simple halter-top dress is recognizable enough, and it carries a frisson of furtive 1950s voyeurism that Scarlett and Darth never could. (By the way, Profiles in History said that that green dress would also be up for sale, but it doesn’t appear in the catalogue.)
 
Debbie says she paid $200 for this dress when she bought it from 20th Century Fox in 1971 — along with the rest of Marilyn’s extant wardrobe — at the pre-sale before the studio put what was left on the block. Profiles in History figured it would go for between one and two million dollars. They were too timid. By the time the gavel banged shut on it, the bidding had climbed to $4.6 million. When you figure in the auction house’s 20 percent cut, which is added to (not taken from) the sale price, that means somebody shelled out something like $5.52 million for this stylish summer frock. Marilyn’s “subway” dress was the top money-maker at the auction — in fact, it shattered the previous record for a single dress ($1.4 million in 1999, for another one of hers). And her red sequined gown from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes came close to that ’99 record, going for $1.2 million.
 
 
 
 
 Other pieces in the Reynolds collection drew similarly fabulous sums. These ruby slippers, for example. Do I really need to tell you what movie they’re from? Although actually, to be precise, they’re not really “from” The Wizard of Oz…
 
 
…and neither is this outfit. Both were worn by Judy Garland (with duplicates for her stand-in/double Bobbie Koshay) during the first two weeks of shooting. But when director Richard Thorpe was taken off the project, Dorothy Gale underwent a complete makeover from head (Garland’s blonde wig was out) to toes (which didn’t turn up on the slippers she eventually wore). The catalogue describes these two lots as “test” items; “rejects” would be closer to the truth. Nevertheless, the slippers went for $910,000, the dress and blouse for $510,00 to the same buyer (rumored to be representing Saudi oil money). That adds up to $1.42 million — and let’s not forget the 20 percent bump (another $284,000) for the house. Not bad for a cast-off ensemble that wound up never appearing on screen. That’s a pretty penny to shell out for a set of Judy Garland’s sweat stains, even at the rate two weeks of Technicolor lighting would have been bringing them on.
 
 
 
Cleopatra34aW
 
If you were in the mood to dress up as Cleopatra next Halloween, you might have mix-and-matched your costume from the auction, beginning with this gold lame boudoir gown from Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 take on the doomed Egyptian siren. Of course, you would have had to be ready to start the bidding at 20 grand, not to mention fitting into a garment cut to Claudette Colbert’s 18-inch waist.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Then you could have accessorized with this headdress,
worn 29 years later by Elizabeth Taylor for Cleo’s
miles-over-the-top entrance into Rome. On the
other hand, if you were daunted by the
$30,000 opening bid, or by the headdress’s
fragile condition…
 
…there was this three-piece wig and silver-beaded headband worn by Vivien Leigh in Caesar and Cleopatra, starting at a more modest $800 to $1,200. If you still wanted to shop around, there were clothes and accessories from a number of other pictures that might have suited you: The Egyptian, The Ten Commandments, even Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur or Julius Caesar might have done in a pinch.
 
Bear in mind that all the prices I’m quoting on this hypothetical Cleopatra ensemble are just the opening bids as they appear in the catalogue. I have no idea what the articles eventually sold for. It would take only two duelling Cleopatras with deep pockets and indomitable wills to send the bidding sky-high.
 
 
Not everything at the auction required the resources of an Arab oil sheik or a Japanese electronics magnate. There were props, furniture, lobby cards, posters, letters, and other items — all a tad high-end, price-wise, for most collectors but not entirely out of the question. I cast a covetous eye on a six-sheet poster for How the West Was Won (my all-time favorite movie, and the one in which Debbie Reynolds herself gave the performance of her career), but at eight feet square, where would I keep it? More reasonable, and in the same price range ($300 – $500), was this one-sheet from Kiss Me, Kate autographed by Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel (notice that Keel, perfectly in character for his Petruchio/Fred Graham role, placed his signature right in the middle of Grayson’s pert little behind). Before The Day Lincoln Was Shot diverted my attention and resources, I was thinking I just might be able to follow this item for a bid or two — maybe more, if the competition wasn’t too stiff.

 

While I sent for the catalogue in good faith (from the auction house’s point of view) and with nebulous dreams of getting some piece of the collection for my own, perusing the book once it arrived sent me off on a whole other train of thought. Like most movie buffs, I’ve known for decades that Debbie Reynolds was amassing this collection (she began in earnest in 1970, when MGM auctioned off everything but the studio’s real estate) with the idea of establishing a Hollywood museum. But until I actually started thumbing through the catalogue, I never quite grasped what a monumental collection she had managed to put together. And this seems to be only the tip of the iceberg — some 587 items, with Part 2 of the auction scheduled for next December. I read somewhere (and I can’t remember where now, so I can’t confirm it) that her full collection extends to over 5,000 pieces — meaning that this hefty two-pound catalogue represents barely the tenth part of the museum she hoped to set up. Truly, Debbie Reynolds is (or, alas, was) the Smithsonian Institution of historical Hollywood.
 
Evidently, James Smithson had less trouble persuading the United States to accept his endowment than Debbie has had with Hollywood. According to Virginia Postrel, writing on Bloomberg.com, the auction became necessary when Debbie’s most recent attempt to establish her museum collapsed in 2009. The museum was going to be part of a tourist attraction called Belle Island in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee; apparently, when the Belle Island project went bankrupt it took Debbie’s museum down with it, leaving her with a lot of bills to pay.
 
This begs the question: Why on earth did Debbie Reynolds have to go all the way to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee to find a home for her museum? Is L.A. that crowded? Just to take one obvious example, doesn’t the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences cherish the hope of someday establishing a museum as a “year-round Hollywood attraction”? That’s what they say on their Web site, anyhow. I don’t know why Debbie and the Academy couldn’t come to some agreement (for the past 40 years); maybe she was too married to the idea of the Debbie Reynolds Hollywood Movie Museum while they were dead set on the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. But that doesn’t explain why the Academy didn’t even try to bid on anything at the auction. (Way to go, Academy; you let a lot of choice exhibits slip through your fingers last month, and I suppose you’ll do it again in December. But then, if you weren’t interested when you could have had Marilyn’s subway dress for $200, why bother now? Maybe the revenue from the Oscar broadcast isn’t what it used to be.)

I’m not sure what Debbie’s vision for her museum was; myself, I’d have loved to see something like the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum — now known as the Autry National Center — in Griffith Park. (And by the way, if you thought a “Gene Autry Museum” would amount to little more than a collection of Gene’s old guitars and posters from his movies, think again. It’s a world-class facility honoring every facet of America’s western heritage, and belongs at the top of your must-see list if you’re ever in Los Angeles.) Whatever Debbie’s ideas were, they’ve come to naught, while she’s spent half her life (and apparently all her money) acquiring and properly storing and maintaining umpteen thousand pieces of Hollywood history — and trying to find a home for them.

Frankly, if I were Debbie Reynolds, I’d be mad enough to bite the bumper off a truck. In an interview about the auction with Idaho TV station KIDK, she said, with an air of philosophical resignation, “I’m a fan of all of these great stars and I wanted to save their moment for a museum for the future. I didn’t reach that goal, which makes me sad, but these things will be shared with people that love the stars as much as I do.” In another interview she sounded a little more like I’d probably feel (i.e., testier): “I am really sick and tired of it. I feel that I must call it a day now. Over the years, I have literally spent millions of dollars protecting it and taking care of it. If you were me, wouldn’t you give up after 35 years? There is no other road. I need a little rest from the responsibility of trying to do something it seems that nobody else wants to do. Hopefully everyone will have a good time with their piece.” 

All those years haven’t completely gone to waste. The day-to-day operations of Golden Age Hollywood are as over and done as the haggling in an Etruscan marketplace. We may still have the movies — and that ain’t exactly nothin’ — but it won’t do to lose sight of the nuts and bolts that went into building them. Being able to see and study these artifacts (like this gown Debbie wore as she crooned “A Home in the Meadow” in How the West Was Won) gives them a real-world texture and solidity that the movies alone, even HTWWW in all its 7-channel Cinerama glory, could never do.

Without Debbie Reynolds, the items in her collection — Charlie Chaplin’s derby, Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes Inverness cape, Audrey Hepburn’s black-and-white Ascot dress (and Rex Harrison’s clash-matching brown suit), Barbra Streisand’s entire Funny Girl wardrobe, the kids’ drapery outfits and Julie Andrews’s guitar from The Sound of Music, Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra sedan chair, palace decorations and Yul Brynner’s whip from The King and I, Bette Davis’s throne from The Virgin Queen, Empress Josephine’s royal bed from Desiree, Clifton Webb’s Boy Scout uniform from Mr. Scoutmaster, Howard Keel’s rifle from Annie Get Your Gun (or Clark Gable’s from Mogambo), the 20-foot miniature warships from The Winds of War, the Ark of the Covenant from David and Bathsheba — all might well be long-moldering somewhere in Los Angeles County’s bulging landfills. As frustrated and disappointed as Debbie might be, she can claim victory in (and we can thank her for) having shepherded all these things past the point where they were simply junk.

I’ll have more to say on this in Part 2…

Our Mr. Webb

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Clifton Webb is unique among movie stars. There are other (albeit lesser) tough guys than Humphrey Bogart; other blonde sex symbols than Marilyn Monroe; other western heroes than John Wayne; other Latin lovers than Rudolph Valentino. But there was nobody like Clifton Webb before his belated screen debut at 54 in Laura, and there has been nobody like him since.
 
Actually, strictly speaking, Laura wasn’t his debut. He appeared in a thin smattering of silents and a single 1930 talking short immortalizing a stage sketch he’d performed with Fred Allen. There was also an 18-month period in 1935-36 when he was under contract to MGM (Metro had vague ideas of making him their answer to Fred Astaire), but nothing ever came of that. For all intents and purposes, Laura was the beginning of Clifton Webb As We Know Him. For many movie buffs today, I suspect their knowledge of Webb begins and ends with that 1944 noir classic. Or it may extend to the other two pictures for which he got Academy Award nominations, The Razor’s Edge (’46) and Sitting Pretty (’48).
 
 
That last title, in fact, is the one my friend Dave Smith has chosen for his book on Clifton Webb: Sitting Pretty: The Life and Times of Clifton Webb. Amazingly, it’s the first full-length biography of Webb; even more amazing is the fact that it was written at least in part by Clifton Webb himself. He had started writing his autobiography and made it through six chapters before putting the project aside. (Webb’s proposed title was Mabelle and Me — Mabelle being his mother; like Cornell Woolrich, Webb lived with his mother for her entire life and didn’t survive her by much. The resemblance between the two men, however, most emphatically ends there.)
 
Dave Smith has retrieved Webb’s manuscript from (and with the kind permission of) the collectors who came into possession of Webb’s papers and memorabilia after his death in 1966. In addition to those six chapters, there were extensive — though often undated — notes for the remainder of the autobiography, and Dave makes use of them, and his own tireless research, in picking up Webb’s story where he left it at the Broadway opening of the musical Dancing Around in 1914.
 

Nineteen-fourteen!?! Yes, Clifton Webb’s autobiography cuts off a full 30 years before where most of us think his career even began. In fact, the movies from Laura to Satan Never Sleeps (’62) were his second career, the first having lasted on stage throughout the ‘teens, ’20s and ’30s. It was sometime during these years that he painted the self-portrait here (the date is unknown, but my guess is it’s from sometime in the mid-1920s). Webb was a super-elegant song-and-dance man, famous and sought-after for his ballroom skills and, later, his musical comedy abilities (among the songs he introduced on Broadway were “I’ve Got a Crush on You”, “At Long Last Love”, “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plans” and “Easter Parade”).

It’s almost startling to read Webb’s chapters on his early days in New York after his mother married (her second time) into the high society of the turn of the 20th century. Startling to realize that he spent his childhood and adolescence in the Manhattan of Edith Wharton and Diamond Jim Brady (“…completely settled only as far north as 72nd Street”), rose to his first fame on the Broadway of Jerome Kern and Charles Frohman, and went on to make his last stage appearance just off the gaudy Times Square of Damon Runyon (by which time, snob that he was, he found New York much diminished by the changing years).

For me, these early chapters are particularly fun reading because they are in Webb’s own voice, and we can hear him speaking them. Webb was a shameless name-dropper, and reading his roll call of the famous people he rubbed elbows with in the 1910s and ’20s is heady stuff. Better still, his writing gives a bracing whiff of what everyone who knew him says: that he was a wonderful conversationalist. (A favorite passage of mine is Webb talking about his mother’s pregnancy, almost as if he remembered it: “Mabelle has always sworn that the first sign of life I evidenced was a good hard kick when she was in the act of applauding the eminent Francis Wilson, and she floated home convinced that she was to be the mother of a great actor. Nobody to this day, I confide with a grave sense of responsibility, has disabused her of the notion.”)

That kicking baby was born Webb Parmelee Hollenbeck in Indianapolis in 1889. As a child actor young Webb used his stepfather’s name and was billed as Webb Raum. When Mabelle sent the elder Raum packing (not a minute too soon, by Webb’s lights), her son cast about for another stage name. He liked Webb well enough, and decided “Clifton” had the right ring of patrician dignity. Mother became Mabelle Webb and called her son “Webb” to the end of her life — naturally enough, since it was in fact his first name. He always called her Mabelle, and eventually they would be known as the happiest couple in Hollywood. Myrna Loy always said Mabelle “looked like Clifton in drag”, and this picture proves Myrna wasn’t exaggerating.
 
There’s a story — a legend, maybe — that when Otto Preminger (having taken over the direction of Laura from Rouben Mamoulian) wanted Webb for the vicious Waldo Lydecker, he was told, “You can’t cast Webb — he flies!” Meaning to say, he’s a flaming queen, too flagrantly swishy ever to pass for any kind of heterosexual. Whoever said that, if anybody really did, underestimated Webb. As he said himself, “I have destroyed the formula completely. I’m not young. I don’t get the girl in the end and I don’t swallow her tonsils, but I have become a national figure.”
 
Clearly, Clifton Webb didn’t believe in false modesty (or any other kind), but he had a point. By the time he said that, he had become a national figure. Webb’s big splash in Laura might have been only a fluke if it hadn’t been for one thing: Darryl Zanuck liked him and sensed a unique screen persona that, with proper care, could be developed into a valuable property for 20th Century Fox. Webb’s next picture was The Dark Corner for Henry Hathaway, playing a coldly calculating art dealer not far removed from Laura‘s Waldo. Then came The Razor’s Edge and another Oscar nomination as Somerset Maugham’s snobbish expatriate Elliott Templeton. 
 
Those first three pictures made Clifton Webb’s reputation as a character actor, but it was Sitting Pretty that made him a star (and got him his third Oscar nomination) playing Lynn Belvedere, a prissy intellectual novelist who takes a position as live-in babysitter for parents Robert Young and Maureen O’Hara. Critics and film noir historians have glommed onto the scene in Laura where Webb talks to detective Dana Andrews from a bathtub, but in Webb’s own lifetime this was probably the most famous scene in his career, where he dumps a bowl of oatmeal over the head of a misbehaving baby. (In real life the kid, 18-month-old Roddy McCaskill, was delighted at all the mess, and having a high old time; they had to dub the sound of crying in post-production.) 
 
My own favorite Clifton Webb moment comes just before this. First the set-up: The Kings (Young and O’Hara) think they’ve hired a college co-ed to sit their kids while they both take jobs to make ends meet — after all, “her” name is Lynn Belvedere. Instead, they get this humorless middle-aged bachelor with his nose in the air. This first morning at the breakfast table it begins to dawn on them that he’s liable to be as much a handful as their own brood. Webb has a long speech in which he explains to Mr. and Mrs. King the terms on which he will agree to work for them; I can’t remember exactly what-all he says but it goes on for quite a while, telling them what hours he will work, what evenings he demands off, when he expects breakfast, lunch and dinner, how long his eggs must be cooked, and so on and on. In the finished picture, precisely as Mr. Belvedere concludes his long-winded ultimatum, little Roddy McCaskill sneezes. Without batting an eye, Webb glances at the toddler and barks, “Gezundheit!” It’s obviously unscripted — there’s no way to get an 18-month-old to sneeze on cue — but perfectly in character all around, and Webb’s “gezundheit” deftly snatches our attention back from the adorable tot and turns that sneeze into an exclamation point to Webb’s own speech. It’s a hilarious moment and an example of Clifton Webb’s amazing presence of mind. (Kudos too to Robert Young and Maureen O’Hara for keeping straight faces and not spoiling the take.)
 
After Sitting Pretty — and two more Belvedere sequels — Clifton Webb was a major box-office star, and he remained so for much of the rest of his career. If movies like Cheaper by the Dozen and Stars and Stripes Forever (a largely fictitious biopic in which Webb was nevertheless ideally cast as John Philip Sousa) are less highly regarded today than Laura or The Razor’s Edge — well, that’s only natural, I suppose, and probably correct. But they don’t deserve to be forgotten altogether. Webb had a marvelous flair for comedy — and not just the bitch-wit of Waldo Lydecker or Elliott Templeton — and movies like these are worth seeing for it. So is the all-but-forgotten Dreamboat (’52), in which Webb plays a staid college professor mortified when the new medium of television unexpectedly resurrects his previous career as a silent movie heartthrob.
 
Sitting Pretty (that is, Dave Smith’s book) grows unavoidably cheerless in its closing pages as it recounts Webb’s utter failure to cope with the death of his mother (in 1961, at the age of 91). He was disconsolate and maudlin at what was after all the natural order of things — people are supposed to bury their parents — and his incessant grief, not only for Mabelle but for other friends and intimates already gone, sorely tested the patience of those who were still around (Noel Coward snapped, “It must be hard to be orphaned at seventy-one.”). Well, that’s part of the story too, if not the best part. For most of his life Clifton Webb was great fun to be around. His movies remind us of that, and so does Sitting Pretty: The Life and Times of Clifton Webb; it brings the man back in his own words, and we can once again bask in the pleasure of his company.

Auditioning for Immortality

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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.

And here was a surprise: the husband-and-wife vaudeville team of (Frank) Orth and (Ann) Codee. According to Joe Laurie Jr.’s chatty history Vaudeville: From the Honky Tonks to the Palace, written when many of the people he chatted about were still alive and working, Orth and Codee played their act all over the world in five different languages (she was Belgian-born). Like George Burns and Gracie Allen, she started out as straight-man to him, but he wound up playing straight-man to her. When the vaude circuits dried up, they both stepped easily into character work in movies, often uncredited. Orth’s stock in trade was cab drivers, waiters, bartenders (or barflies), and newsmen. If the face is familiar but you can’t quite place it, try this: he was Duffy, Cary Grant’s beleaguered assistant in His Girl Friday. 
 

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…

 
 
 
 
 
…as Dr. Duprey, one of Gene Barry’s
scientific colleagues in George Pal’s The
War of the Worlds (shown here with
Sandro Giglio as Dr. Bilderbeck,
seeking refuge in a church during
the destruction of L.A.). 
 
 

 

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?)

For some reason, during this young lady’s nine-minute Cycle of Songs (’28) I had something of an epiphany. Her name is Florence Brady, and she’s just one of literally dozens of people in Vitaphone Varieties whom I, who have been studying vaudeville history for nearly 40 years, have never heard of. She’s nothing particularly special, but she’s not bad; she has pep and a nice voice, and she presents herself well to a camera that is not entirely hostile (she’s like a young Rosie O’Donnell who can sing, and without the overweening anger). But I wondered: Did she make this short (and one other earlier in the year) because she was a name in vaudeville, or because she hoped to become a name in vaudeville?
 
Thousands of vaudevillians were thrown out of work when the two-a-day went belly-up, done in by the one-two punch of talkies and commercial radio. Some of them — the smart, the quick and the lucky, the Frank Orths and Ann Codees, the William Demarests and Jack Bennys and George Burnses and Bob Hopes — rolled with it and found work where the new money was. But for every one of them, there must have been many who struggled to sell themselves in a drying-up market until it was too late, then wound up teaching school or clerking in a bank or selling candy at Woolworth’s — and counted themselves lucky to get that. Maybe Florence Brady was one of those, along with Slim Timblin and Born and Lawrence, and Oklahoma Bob Albright, Carlena Diamond, Harpist Supreme, and Frank Whitman That Surprising Fiddler.
 
Or maybe not. Maybe these shorts aren’t really acts but auditions — a gig in a novelty medium, the Vitaphone short, that they hoped would get them some attention and a season’s contract with Alexander Pantages or B.F. Keith. Even as late as 1930 only the farsighted could see that vaudeville was dying — it had been around for over half a century, after all — so it could have looked like a smart career move in a competitive biz. (They just didn’t know how competitive it was about to become.) Unless somebody out there remembers these people (and surely somebody might) and fills us in, I guess we’ll never know. 
 
A recent 16mm acquisition confirms that these kinds of auditions didn’t die with vaudeville — and, not incidentally, restores my faith in Warner Bros. shorts, so badly shaken by Vitaphone Varieties. It’s Toyland Casino from 1938, another Vitaphone short (although by this time, of course, “Vitaphone” was an in-name-only thing). The premise is short and simple — a bunch of pesky kids annoy a hotel manager with their playing around in the lobby, so they compromise by having the kids stage a night club revue to entertain the guests. The picture gets that out of the way in a quick 45 seconds or so; the rest of the 20 minutes is devoted to song, dance, or both from every kid Warner Bros. could find who wanted — or whose parents wanted them — to become the next Shirley Temple or Jackie Cooper. The kids give it their best respective shots, with varying degrees of success, but for most of them there would be this one short and then — at least according to the IMDb — nothing more.
 
 
 
 
 
But not all. Take five-year-old Francine
Lassman, for example. Born Abigail
Francine, she dropped the first name
for this appearance — where she looks
and sounds like Our Gang’s Darla Hood,
singing “Five and Ten Cent Soldiers on
Parade” before a phalanx of tap-dancing
kids in satin uniforms — and for childhood
appearances on radio. In time, though,
she would drop “Francine” and rework
“Abigail Lassman” to become…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Abbe Lane, the sultry songstress and
wife (1952-64) of bandleader Xavier 
Cugat. Lane once boasted that she was
considered “too sexy for Italy” — hard 
to imagine unless you’ve seen pictures 
like this.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Then there’s 13-year-old Bobby Hastings. He shows up in 19th century garb a la Irish tenor Chauncey Olcott singing “In the Gloaming” with a sweet old-fashioned lilt. Hastings would go on to a pretty amazing run. He shortened his name to “Bob” and in the late 1940s played teen comics hero Archie Andrews on radio. There followed a long career as a journeyman actor in which he appeared in an astonishing range of TV series in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s: The Phil Silvers Show, The Untouchables, The Donna Reed Show, Ben Casey, Dennis the Menace, The Twilight Zone, Emergency, Adam-12, The Rockford Files, All in the Family, General Hospital, Lou Grant, The Dukes of Hazzard — you name it. If you remember the original McHale’s Navy, you might recognize him…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…as Lt. Elroy Carpenter, perennial suck-up to Joe Flynn’s Capt. Binghamton. 
 
I’m pleased to report that both Abbe Lane and Bob Hastings are still with us, 78 and 86 respectively at this writing. Continued good health to them both.
 
Right about the two-thirds mark Toyland Casino pops a real surprise — the Moylan Sisters, Peggy Joan (6) and Marianne (8), ride out on carousel horses and sing a close-harmony version of “My Little Buckaroo” that ties the whole short up in a ribbon and sets it in our laps. They sing with the sort of joined-at-the-hip sibling harmony that would later distinguish the Everly Brothers (without the rock-n-roll, of course). There are quite a few talented kids in Toyland Casino, but the Moylans are stars — and they know it. The other kids are doing their best to sell themselves, but Peggy Joan and Marianne are already beyond that — they’re selling the song.
 
The Moylan Sisters made it to stardom for a while, but not in movies (they made only four shorts like this one). Starting in 1939 they had their own 15-minute radio show Sunday afternoons on the NBC Blue Network. They continued at it through World War II and dropped out of show-biz about 1951. You can learn more, and hear samples of their singing, here. I understand that Marianne passed away in the early 1990s, but as far as I’ve been able to learn, Peggy Joan is still with us. If so, and if she reads this, I’d be delighted to hear from her.
 
I’m going to close with a real treat. Of all the auditions for immortality in Vitaphone Varieties and Toyland Casino, I think the Moylan Sisters deserved the best shot at it, so here’s a YouTube clip of their rendition of “My Little Buckaroo”. The song was written by M.K. Jerome and Jack Scholl for Warner Bros.’ 1937 The Cherokee Strip, where it was introduced by Dick Foran. It was a huge hit on record for Bing Crosby, and was covered by just about every singing cowboy from San Antonio to Gower Gulch. But I don’t think the song ever got a better performance than it does here from these two little grade-schoolers from Sag Harbor, Long Island. (If M.K. Jerome’s grandson R.J. happens to read this post, I’d be interested to hear his take.)