Thank You, Fox, For Mr. Moto

Peter Lorre once said he had no memory of doing the Mr. Moto series. This was years after the fact, of course, and we know he had a low opinion of these "B" (in name only) mysteries, particularly after the first couple of entries when he realized Fox had no intention of giving him the varied roles he craved. That quest to avoid typecasting was what brought him over from Columbia in the first place, but honestly, how could you avoid typecasting Peter Lorre? There was something vaguely sinister about his countenance (most of the time it wasn’t even vague) and that voice was never less than unsettling, particularly when it dipped toward a frenzied growl or soared upward to shrieking malevolence. I just don’t know how many conventional parts this man could have done. Mr. Moto probably comes closest, yet Lorre plays it in such wildly unconventional terms as to make Moto’s status as hero a little doubtful, which works very much to the film’s good. Maybe Lorre was just ahead of his time (there’s certainly no argument as to that among his fans), for his performances as Moto are so engaging, so unpredictable, that we tend to think of them as "modern." Not that modern filmmakers are likely to come up with a character as arresting as this one, but Lorre’s style has an appeal to present day sensibilities, for never at any moment does he pander to cliché, much less accommodate establishment notions of what a movie hero "should" be. There was something profoundly mysterious about this man, as if things were swirling about his mind that none of us could ever comprehend, let alone anticipate. Lorre gives these Motos a tension and menacing quality that only he possessed --- the idea of anyone else assuming that role is just unthinkable.










I was surprised and delighted to see Moto dispatching his opponents so casually. None of this shoot the gun out of their hand nonsense. He just fires away, then stands over the man’s corpse and softly intones the fact we’re well rid of him. Moto doesn’t subdue his enemies --- he finishes them off. Anyone mucking about with him is likely to die. I don’t know how the Code let some of this by. There’s a peerless moment in Think Fast, Mr. Moto where he interrupts a would-be shipboard burglary, judo-tosses the rather unpresupposing henchman about the room, then hurls the clearly defeated miscreant overboard into an ink-black sea --- so much for due process and "bringing them to justice." In Thank You, Mr. Moto, he manipulates the villains into killing each other off, then smirks off the whole thing whilst surveying a room littered with their remains. Who but Peter Lorre could execute all of this with such finesse? I understand he was tight in the grip of morphine addiction during production of these shows. Director Norman Foster said Lorre was so weakened that a mere flight of stairs was beyond him. In fact, the actor came out of a sanitarium to do the first Moto. You’d not know it by watching, though (and co-workers never detected problems either). Lorre picked up the habit in Berlin, where a combination of tuberculosis and a bungled appendectomy left him in chronic pain. Those procedures they did on Lorre (there were two whacks at his appendix) sound like something out of Dr. Moreau’s House Of Pain. Must have been hell getting sick in Berlin during the twenties.



Don’t confuse Mr. Moto with other mysteries. These aren’t plodding whodunits, but vigorous, globetrotting adventure yarns, quite belying their supposed "B" economies. Fox's backlot is loaded with extras, sets are handsomely appointed, and supporting casts are a who’s-who of character legends. You know you’re in good company when a door opens and John Carridine walks in, or Sidney Blackmer, or Sig Rumann --- the list goes on. I checked out a few numbers in an effort to figure out how such modest 65 minute movies could look so rich. Think Fast, Mr. Moto was the first in the series. It had a negative cost of $181,000. That’s a typical "B" budget, but this picture sure doesn’t look it. Producer Sol Wurtzel (shown here watching Shirley Temple’s wheelbarrow ride) had access to all the standing sets at Fox. After Four Men and A Prayer, The Baroness and The Butler, or some similar big one would clear out, the Moto unit would move in. All eight entries in this series made money. Think Fast was by far the biggest with $277,000 in domestic rentals, $226,000 foreign, and a final profit of $134,000. From there, the Motos slipped in terms of revenue --- Mr. Moto Takes A Chance was just $38,000 to the good, and Mr. Moto’s Gamble took only $27,000 in profit. Still, none of these pictures ever lost a dime, though I wonder if the series would have continued much longer, even were it not for the intervention of World War II. Of the Fox series in production around 1939, the Motos were the least remunerative --- Charlie Chan, The Jones Family, and Jane Withers were all performing better, though not by that substantial a margin (by the way, this little gag drawing of Chan, Moto, and Sherlock Holmes looking for their soundstage appeared in a 1939 Fox sales manual sent to exhibitors).


One thing that sustained the Motos was judo action introduced in the first, then emphasized further in subsequent entries after positive audience reaction called for more of the exotic combat technique. These were days Lorre could stay home, for he never went near any of the strenuous stuff, but had a stuntman, Harvey Perry, who matched him physically and proved an effective double for all the fights. My info suggests that Lorre started out with Fox in 1936 at $750 a week, but the record also reflects he got $10,000 for each of the Motos. That may have been the sweetener necessary to keep him on the job for these things, though it was nothing like $40,000 per show Warner Oland pulled down for Charlie Chans he’d done. On one occasion, crew member’s idea of a practical joke found Lorre’s wallet and ID replaced with a fake just before he left the lot for home. This would be the time he’d get pulled by traffic cops, but imagine their surprise when Lorre produced a card identifying him as Mr. Moto --- Japanese Spy. Fortunately, the movie fan patrolman understood the jibe on Lorre, and turned him loose, but picture such a gag being executed after Pearl Harbor, such a short time later. Just as he’d wearied of being spat on in Berlin for his all-too-convincing portrayal of the child murderer in M, now Lorre bristled at kids addressing him as Mr. Moto and asking for judo demonstrations. Fox added insult to injury when they sought him to play red herring for The Ritz Brothers in their sign-off vehicle for the company, The Gorilla. It was definitely time to powder out of Fox --- nearly four years of being "sold down the river" (as he put it) was quite enough for Lorre. As great as he’d later be with Bogart, Greenstreet, and other screen partners, he’d never have a part like Moto again. The best evidence of his greatness in that role is presently on display in Volume 1 of Fox’s new DVD box set containing four of the eight series entries. They are all fantastic. I only await reassurance from Fox that the remaining titles are forthcoming.

Monday Glamour Starter --- Gail Russell


Gail Russell’s fate was sealed when friends from school told a Paramount talent scout about the Hedy Lamarr of Santa Monica High, which was Gail alright, only she couldn’t act and didn’t much want to. This girl had as much business being a movie star as I would being an astronaut. The price she paid in showing up for that audition was a lifetime’s damnation, for no one got less joy out of celebrity-dom than Gail Russell. Nineteen when she walked through the gates, Gail’s looks got the pass others would have waited years to earn, but then, most of them would had have more experience, if not talent. Gail had neither. She knew it and so did Paramount, but they had departments to fix all that, and the girl was nothing if not pliable. Terrified might be a better word, for she was beset with stage fright approaching paralysis, and crying fits, then vomiting, would often as not conclude each take. She’d become a joke among producers in the know as to her limitations, but they were committed to the packaging and sale of Gail Russell, and toward that end, thrust her almost immediately into leads. Veterans such as Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland were patient with her --- perhaps they a saw a mirror of their own youthful fears in her doe-eyes, but directors like The Uninvited’s Lewis Allen were charged with getting a performance out of her, and that sometimes took hours, if not days, of blown takes and gentle guidance. Allen later said whatever useful footage they got out of Russell had to be cobbled together from brief takes and single line readings, but the camera showed mercy, and that perfect face would pull her through --- but how long could she keep such a face sneaking drinks to fortify her for the next shot?


I suspect the alcohol was there to salve a lot more than fear of a camera. Girls like Gail, that is to say fantastically beautiful girls with no confidence or protection, were fair game on Paramount preserves, as they would have been anywhere on that west coast Sodom, and I’ve no doubt she endured far worse things than the mere rigors of movie-making. If Golden Age actresses, particularly ones bereft of genuine ability or self-esteem (and that takes in a lot of them) ever told the truth about the price they really paid for stardom, we’d have a much better understanding of why so many lives ended tragically. As it is, most of them took secrets of studio abuse to (early) graves, but judging by oft-torturous paths in getting there, it must have been some really heavy baggage they were carrying. Gail reached a point where she didn’t make friends with anybody (maybe because those executives were all too anxious to make friends with her), and the work never really got any easier. She was congenial enough with Diana Lynn on Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (with her in this shot), but then Diana got her through with off-set coaching and relentless bucking-up. Gail’s temperament was well matched with Alan Ladd’s --- both crippled by insecurity, but their teamings didn’t click like Ladd’s with Lake (Veronica, that is). Fan magazine’s aptitude for invention really went into high gear with Russell --- she gave them just nothing to build from. Home life wasn’t something she’d talk about. Her parents favored a brother and made little pretense to the contrary. Playing the marquee lure off-screen was quite beyond her, since she never understood that game and couldn’t play it if she did.


John Wayne used Gail in two for Republic --- Angel and The Badman and Wake Of The Red Witch --- and gladly ponied up the loaner fee of $125,000 for her services. Of course, Paramount got the best of that deal. Some allege Russell herself was getting an appalling $125 per week. That’s probably low, but I’ll bet not by much. The one time she got credit for stirring up some dish was ironically a lot of fuss over probably nothing --- an alleged affair with her married co-star Wayne that was more likely a product of misunderstanding and a maniacally jealous wife poised to clean Wayne’s clock in a divorce court. That she did, using Gail as a battering ram, but by this time (1953), Russell’s star was in rapid descent, having been dropped by Paramount (for the drinking as much as public apathy). The work she got (practically none) plus the marriage she’d had (Guy Madison, with whom she’s beaching and nightclubbing here) were adding up to has-been status from which she’d never recover. Gail may have imagined she’d do better as an independent, but the reputation preceded her, and now without Paramount running interference, those DUI stops were landing on front pages all over town. In one particularly frightful incident, she ran her new Cadillac convertible through the front window of a coffee shop and injured the janitor on duty. It was 1957, and she was just 32. Here’s the photo taken right after it happened. Gail’s trying to find her driver’s license. Chances are she didn’t have one, as she’d racked up so many suspensions.



Nothing came harder than work for a discarded actress of a certain age in the fifties. Once they hung the dipso label on you, it became well nigh impossible. Director Joseph Losey told a sad story in which days (and nights) were spent trying to get one sustained take out of Gail. She finally confessed that anything beyond a line or two was out of the question --- unless she had a drink. Losey had been warned about that, of course, but left without a choice, he let her tank up and do the scene half-lit. This time he got what he needed (and by the way, Russell received excellent reviews for The Lawless), though she’d tearfully confess the real problem was that ongoing distaste for acting. With no other livelihood a viable option, Gail had to go on, but her road was filled with disappointment and false starts. A sanitarium layover in Seattle didn’t help --- how could she overcome the demons when there wasn’t any work? Once again, John Wayne lent a hand, casting her in a 1956 Randolph Scott western he produced, Seven Men From Now. That one didn’t get a lot of attention then, but now it’s a seminal fifties classic, and may prove to be her best remembered film. She’s good in it too, but wan, tired, and not at all what her fans expected to see after so long a wait. The final years found Russell vying for crumbs with other actresses who’d gotten the studio go-by --- a Perry Mason guest spot came down to the wire, but Martha Vickers took that dubious prize. They finally found Gail after several days quiet in her one-room apartment --- dead of a heart attack at 36. Bottles were all over the place. That was 1961, and columnists were reminded again of the sad afterlife of Paramount luminaries when Alan Ladd showed up at Gail’s funeral, drunk and muttering incoherently through the service. Maybe he was reflecting upon the fate of this sad girl, or anticipating his own, for he would die three years later under similar circumstances.

Still Stuck In The 21st Century

Just think, if it were only sixty years ago, you could turn on your radio tonight at 8:oo and hear Edgar and Charlie on CBS. This ad's been laying around the scanner for a long time, never seeming to find a place in previous postings (even though Bergen and McCarthy have been subjects of earlier Greenbriar stories --- go HERE and HERE). Of course, there are plenty of these old radio programs available on CD --- it's amazing how many of the biggest names did guest appearances on the Bergen show. I've read that Edgar expressed himself primarily through the dummies, and that he was actually a rather aloof individual when not in character(s), sort of like Michael Redgrave in Dead Of Night, only funnier. I suppose if you spent an entire career with a dummy in your lap, you might well lose part of yourself in the process --- of course, earning a million dollars with the dummy on your lap would no doubt compensate for a lot of that.

Around The Lot and On The Set


Just a few candid moments from around 1933 … A dapper Bill Powell reads the newspaper at Warners, while on another stage Loretta Young awaits the next set-up on her latest pre-code drama. George O’Brien exits the Fox Film Corporation’s elegant commissary, Café De Paris, on his way back to finish up another of those outstanding westerns he did for the company during the early thirties. Too bad these aren’t around on DVD, as they maintained a high standard for several years, and often included early appearances by contract leading ladies on their way up. Maureen O’Sullivan and Claire Trevor both co-starred with O’Brien in these, as did others. Many of George's westerns were Zane Grey adaptations, none were "B’s" as we think of them today, but all were rugged and well-made. The Café De Paris is still on the Fox lot as far as I know. They used to have a really lavish mural of thirties stars on the wall --- hope it’s still there.

Beginning Of The End For John Gilbert

I have never understood the collapse of John Gilbert’s stardom that followed the coming of sound. He’d been the screen’s "Man Of The Hour" (as witness this trade ad) and had appeared in an unbroken string of profit pictures, some of these among the biggest hits of the silent era --- The Merry Widow, The Big Parade, Flesh and The Devil. Even the least of his formula vehicles consistently went in the black --- The Show, Four Walls, Masks Of The Devil. The myth of a "white voice" was disposed of years ago, but it died hard, and carried a lot of persuasive force for many decades after Gilbert’s career had been smashed by its cruel implications. How could a man at the very summit of popularity find himself so completely discredited within less than a year, abandoned by the public, his pictures losing money one after another? It all happened between October of 1929 and the autumn of the following year, when The New York Times would refer to Gilbert’s following in the past tense. Contrary to legend, it was not an "overnight" plummet brought on by His Glorious Night. Indeed, that one was a financial success, and it wasn’t Gilbert’s talking debut in any case.



He’d started 1929 with another hit, albeit silent (featuring synchronized music and effects). That was Desert Nights, which opened in March. Gilbert’s voice had actually been heard from the screen prior to this, in a special short (Voices Across The Sea) commemorating the opening of the new Empire Theatre in London. He was shown exiting the lobby with Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, and Marion Davies, joining in their chorus of praise for the lavishly appointed showplace. This subject would have seen little play in the U.S., but it was John Gilbert’s debut in sound. Most of MGM’s other artists made talking bows in The Hollywood Revue Of 1929, which had its opening in June of that year, and ran through remaining months to enormous crowds ($1.1 million profit). Concern over voice authenticity resulted in an affidavit (shown here) in which all the stars "certify" they’ve not been doubled for purposes of recording. Gilbert and Norma Shearer contributed a rendition of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, first played straight, then spoofed up with twenties slanguage. Two-color technicolor augmented what surely was considered the highlight of this show and the stars even let their hair down for a comic exchange with director Lionel Barrymore. Gilbert plays the Shakespeare in earnest fashion, acquits himself well during the lampoon portion, then relaxes and appears to ad-lib in his concluding exchange with Shearer and Barrymore. This could not have been considered anything but an auspicious talking showcase for the actor, and audiences responded accordingly. No published review I’ve seen had anything other than praise for Gilbert in The Hollywood Revue Of 1929.



Was Louis Mayer out to get him? There was another of those real-life Hollywood dramas in which Gilbert was supposed to have punched the studio executive's face when Mayer made an indelicate remark about Greta Garbo, long recognized as The Great Love of Gilbert’s Life (here during a brief shack-up period they’d recently enjoyed). Greta had allegedly stood up Jack at the altar that very day, and tempers were running high, so much so that a bloodied Mayer swore he’d finish John Gilbert if it’s the last thing I do (or words to that effect). Later research suggests that Garbo was at work that day and never intended to marry Jack or anyone else. I suspect this is one of those stories too good to debunk, and since it had its origins with long-retired silent star eyewitnesses (Eleanor Boardman chief among them), how can anyone say with certainty that it didn’t happen? There was hostility toward Gilbert within Mayer’s camp, but this was owing to the fact that Loew’s head Nicholas Schenck had quietly pledged Gilbert to a renewal of his contract at fantastically generous terms (and without consulting Mayer) in December of 1928. This New York office chicanery tended to undermine the authority of the studio bosses where talent was concerned, but what could they do? --- Loew’s owned MGM, and Schenck required neither their permission nor approval. This was probably where John Gilbert really lost his moorings, and one couldn’t help but smell a rat by the time His Glorious Night showed up in October 1929.



The biggest stink bomb chucked in Gilbert’s direction came from Variety. None of the other reviews approached this one for sheer vitriol. I’m convinced it was a ringer, planted there to start him down the skids. A few more talker productions like this and John Gilbert will be able to change places with Harry Langdon. His prowess at love-making, which has held the stenos breathless, takes on a comedy aspect in "His Glorious Night" that gets the gum chewers tittering at first and then laughing outright at the very false ring of the couple of dozen "I love you" phrases designed to climax, ante and post, the thrill in the Gilbert lines. Variety’s snide review went way beyond other critical reactions to the film. Both Mr.Gilbert and Catherine Dale Owen contribute competent performances, said The New York Times, and exhibitor reaction, which could be tactless and brutal in the best of times, reserved their brickbats for the film itself and specifically Metro’s sound recording, while others praised His Glorious Night and limited complaints to what they considered unreasonable rental terms ($85.00 in one situation). John Gilbert returned from his European honeymoon with Broadway actress Ina Claire just after the picture opened (here they are at afternoon tea), and according to a later interview, found Metro publicists waiting at the dock in gleeful anticipation, scathing reviews clutched in their hands. Maybe Gilbert’s memory was colored by the truly awful developments he’d witness over coming months, because at this point, the only scathing notice was Variety's --- The love lines, about pulsating blood, hearts, and dandelions, read far better than they sound from under the dainty Gilbertian mustache --- another vicious quote from that very suspect review. General press coverage would eventually follow suit --- bad Gilbert pictures wouldn’t help. Redemption was actually shot before His Glorious Night, but adjudged so lousy as to be shelved for nearly a year. 1930 would see the release of that and creeping doubt as to John Gilbert’s boxoffice future. Mind you, Redemption was the first of his MGM output to lose money (His Glorious Night had returned $202,000 in profits). The power of suggestion (but whose?) had finally extended to The New York Times by September of that year --- John Gilbert, who was once the great lover of the silent screen, cannot be said to have maintained his lofty position since dialogue was coupled with films. He has only appeared in two films, which have not increased his popularity. He has recently finished work in another audible film called "Way For A Sailor", which so far has not been presented, and on which his future screen success depends largely. Well, in such circumstance as this, how could Way For A Sailor be anything other than a failure? Indeed, it would tank ($606,000 lost) as would every single Gilbert vehicle to come (excepting Queen Christina, but that was Garbo’s show, and Gilbert’s was charity casting). Chaplin tried to throw him a lifeline by announcing a forthcoming slate of silent dramas to star Gilbert --- in March 1930 --- but this was likely more of CC’s posturing against the encroachment of sound and not to be taken seriously.





I finally realized a near-lifelong dream of seeing His Glorious Night at the 1997 Cinecon. It was a movie I’d read about since Arthur Mayer and Richard Griffith’s The Movies book back in sixth grade, and Gilbert’s voice, though nowise approaching a Ronald Colman or William Powell, was still more than adequate, even if it’s not what we’d expect of the silent Gilbert. It seems to me the man was wiped out less by the failure of his performance and popularity than by the perception of failure, fed by a press and public easily influenced by rumor and suggestion. It happened to Burt Reynolds in the eighties, and we still see parallels today. The recent course of Tom Cruise’s career comes to mind, and there are others. Stardom was seldom so fleeting a thing as John Gilbert experienced it, but no actor, today or the day after tomorrow, should ever imagine that this couldn’t happen to him.

Liz Loose In London

Nobody talks about Conspirator anymore, but they sure did when it was new in 1950. Actually, it wasn’t new then, filming having started back in November 1948 and then withheld from release for over a year. Perhaps they wanted to spare audiences the shock of seeing a just-turned seventeen Elizabeth Taylor in the arms of thirty-seven year old Robert Taylor. Delaying the open may also have been recognition of the fact they had a weak picture that needed to play off quietly before the real grown-up showcase for Liz, Father Of The Bride, bowed in June of ’50. Whatever the reason, Conspirator was still big news for Taylor's fan base, whose excitement over the teenage star could only be quenched by reams of location and behind-the-scenes profiles celebrating her trip to England and first-time adult role opposite veteran Bob. The intensive marketing of average (or below that) pictures was certainly nothing new in 1950 --- goodness knows we have more of it today than ever --- but fan magazine coverage from that era reveals a lot about how the product was sold and who they were targeting. With Conspirator, it was teenage girls in the crosshairs of those monthlies; invited to share in the fantasy romance of an actress still in school whisked overseas to play at being a woman married to Robert Taylor. The British shoot was necessitated by that country’s freezing of Metro exhibition receipts collected in U.K. theatres --- such money could not be brought home --- it had to be reinvested in production over there, thus providing employment for native cast and crew. Conspirator had a British director (Victor Saville) and co-stars --- note the group taking tea here during a break in filming --- that girl on the right is a young Honor Blackman, her Pussy Galore still fifteen years in the future when she made this.




Metro had to fend off a militant Los Angeles Board Of Education when time came to book Elizabeth Taylor’s passage to England. As she was still a minor, there had to be provisions made for her schooling, and that’s where the schoolmarm shown here with Liz comes in. Her name was Miss Bertina Anderson, and columnists of the day assured us that she was accredited and experienced (small comfort there --- as most of my teachers were as well, but that didn’t modify foul dispositions or sadistic inclinations displayed by a number of them!). Miss Anderson is pointing out their destination here on the map. Yes, it looks like England, all right. I’m not so sure how Bertina’s lessons took with Liz, having been reminded of an interview I once read where Shelly Winters said the only things she ever observed Taylor reading were gossip columns and the trades. However futile her instruction may have been (even with Bob Taylor’s help, as shown here), the venerable educator is said to have strictly maintained the three-hour a day schooling that was observed in bite-sized increments between takes. As you’ll note from these stills, Liz made quite a splash around London-town, whether standing in queue for ration tickets (no way they’d let her starve in any event) or posing with guards at Buckingham Palace.




Liz may have looked the part of a grown woman, but didn’t quite have the voice to pull it off. She made Margaret O’Brien sound like Mercedes McCambridge by comparison. Liz was seventeen playing eighteen and acting like twelve. It’s difficult to fathom Robert Taylor’s interest in her --- wait a minute, what am I saying? After all, Bob did request of the cameraman that he shoot only from the waist up (Bob was 37 playing 31 and acting 17). Liz later said their love scenes were somewhat enlivened by her leading man’s tongue having wandered very near her tonsils. Further on-set complications included a Bob/Liz tangle wherein our girl’s bathrobe opened wide to reveal a breathtaking physical landscape surely the equal of any natural wonders to be found amongst the British Isles. The footage was carefully inspected back in Culver City… very carefully inspected. After twelve or so months of detailed consideration and repeated viewing, executives decided that the offending moment would, indeed, have to be discarded (never mind London After Midnight and The Rogue Song --- let’s find this!).





Well, I’ve ignored Conspirator itself so far, but you shouldn’t, as it’s one peach of a cold war Gaslight retread that pits child bride Liz against Communist traitor husband Bob, with England’s very future at stake! He’s a dashing British army officer, but that’s just on the surface. At night, he sneaks off to confer with spies in a Hammer-friendly back street London where I kept expecting Michael Ripper to turn up as a chimney sweep or barman. Here’s the question that nags --- why would a cool cat like Bob, decked out in tailored uniforms and practically tripping over medals and promotions (not to mention Liz awaiting him in their marital bed) want to tie himself up with a lot of cheerless Russkies? These guys always come off with the same lines --- One never questions the party … It is not permissible for you to fail again. Do Commie operatives act this way in real life, and if so, how do they ever get recruits? Rest assured your local Rotarians or Kiwanians would fast lose their membership if leaders acted so high-handed as this! So what’s in it for Bob, I kept asking myself, finally accepting the fact I’d never make a good Party man. Mind you, never once did those Reds thank Bob for all his treason on their behalf in Conspirator. What that crowd needed was charismatic, outwardly gracious, silken-voiced representatives along the lines of Sydney Greenstreet, Otto Kruger, or Claude Rains, instead of these weasely, dogmatic functionaries (Hitchcock got it right when he used James Mason in North By Northwest). Ever notice how Reds are always trafficking in microfilm or really tiny pieces of paper inserted within seemingly tinier pieces of paper. Like Grant Williams, their communiqués seem to shrink into a kind of infinity, and you’d think it would take a field trip to Mount Palomar to decode some of these messages. Of course, Liz stumbles across one of them in Conspirator, and showing quite remarkable perception for such an otherwise clueless character, promptly unmasks and reveals Bob’s perfidy (while they’re alone, of course, thus putting her life in immediate jeopardy). It’s all done in that over-the-top, higher octave woman’s gothic style of the Dragonwyck school, but this time with spies and espionage providing the Deus ex Machina. Conspirator is an obscure, but delightful, Metro star vehicle with a lot more to offer than its modest reputation would suggest, and it comes on TCM quite a lot. Well worth catching the next time if you’ve not seen it …

Two Endings For Bullets Or Ballots


Just watched Warner’s excellent new DVD of Bullets Or Ballots and hope I won’t spoil the party for too many readers when I reveal that Eddie Robinson dies at the end. Well, he does in the ending they released, though it seems an alternate final scene was filmed (with Joan Blondell), and as shown here, he survives the final staircase showdown with Humphrey Bogart to be reunited with Blondell in a hospital room. Warners may have tested both with preview audiences, and they opted for the downer. Audio commentator Dana Polan mentions the possibility of the two endings, having seen mention of them in Warner’s original production file. I don’t think Production Code influence entered into it, however. "Pretend" gangsters going undercover didn’t have to die. Look at all the variations on this story that WB later did --- Across The Pacific, Springfield Rifle, Northern Pursuit. None of those guys perished at the end. I think what finishes Eddie here is the fact that he violates his own code of the streets by not "playing square" with mobster Barton MacLane, and all the signals are up when MacLane makes a point of crediting Eddie with having done so in the past. In fact, there are several scenes where the gangsters pay tribute to Robinson’s being a straight shooter among lawmen, never taking unfair advantage or double-crossing them. When he goes undercover with MacLane’s mob, he does precisely that, and for such a breach, he must die. This was less a matter of observing a morality code than a writer’s code. Being on the "right" side of the law doesn’t entitle you to bring down your opponent in such underhanded fashion, even if he’s otherwise got it coming. To let Robinson live at the finish would have left a slightly bitter taste in the viewer’s mouth, and that’s why I think the ending we got was the appropriate one.

I'd Walk A Mile For A Black Camel


Watching a bootleg DVD takes me back to the sixties when I used to struggle to bring in stations we really couldn’t get in order to see movies I really wanted to see. Parents or siblings would pass through, glance at the set, and shake their heads --- Can you even see that? --- Doesn’t that hurt your eyes? Well, what else could you do in those days? An opportunity to see Doctor Cyclops may never come again --- and besides, they were my eyes, after all, and if I was willing to forfeit them for the sake of watching The Coconuts from a distant Tennessee channel, shouldn’t I be left alone to do just that? Sometimes I wonder if the reading glasses I’m wearing now might be a consequence of some long-ago viewing of The Giant Gila Monster on High Point’s elusive Channel 8. No doubt that lesson’s still unlearned, for here I am struggling to get through a "grey market" DVD of The Black Camel, home video’s assurance of premature blindness for those fool enough to subject themselves to its 71 minutes of fleeting image and bleating sound. Actually, we never made it to the end, my struggling player and I. Just as Dwight Frye pulled an automatic and tried to back his way out of the denouement, there was a frightful lock-up and a noise from the rear speakers that sounded like The Giant Behemoth. There’s a sort of fear that grips you during moments like this. Dwight’s face is frozen upon the screen, quivering slightly, as if poised to explode and engulf the room in flames --- perhaps my Panasonic player is nearing meltdown, and that violent conflagration will send shards of razor pointed metal in my direction. Cowardice thus forced me to turn it off, so I’ll manage this post as best I can without benefit of having seen the fadeout.





You know you’re hard-core when the authentic Hawaiian location footage makes an impression even on a disc so degraded as this. I just sat back and imagined myself at the Roxy back in the summer of 1931, watching The Black Camel first-run and marveling that Fox actually sent its cast and crew all the way to those islands for much of the principal photography --- and this was a Charlie Chan picture! Never again would that series enjoy such location splendor. There’s even the brisk sound of an ocean breeze to interfere occasionally with dialogue recording. Had this been something other than a seventeenth generation pirated DVD, I would have almost felt as if I were there! Much of The Black Camel was shot about the lobby and grounds of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, which they say is unchanged to this day. Quite a contrast to three-wall cardboard sets that confined Roland Winters in all those miserly Monogram Chans from the forties. The Black Camel is nothing if not spacious. Warner Oland hits the beach in search of murderer --- I thought he might even get around to surfing at one point. There’s more Hawaii in 71 minutes here than Warners would give us in four seasons of Hawaiian Eye. The mystery itself had me stumped. I guessed wrong about the killer, though I missed some clues when my DVD lurched forward a few times, no doubt exercising its own prerogative with regards to speeding up the pace. I’ll also confess to having dozed off a time or two, a gentle slumber borne upon the lilting strains of Warner Oland’s singular voice. His scenes with Bela Lugosi are a highlight, by the way. Masters at work, both looking dapper and fit amidst the Royal Hawaiian’s luxury. I understand Bela picked up a grand a week for doing The Black Camel, plus he got the red carpet works living right there where they filmed it. Nice to see Lugosi enjoying life (as here in the hotel’s dining room --- bon appetit, Bela!). I’ll bet he looked back on this happy sojourn years later with wistful fondness, maybe during breaks on Bride Of The Monster (though I’m sure he didn’t get many breaks on that one).





These arresting ads were specially designed for the Fox Theatres chain in 1931. Managers were carefully instructed as to the most effective techniques for selling The Black Camel. This picture is a much better story of Earl Derr Biggers’ Chinese detective, Charlie Chan, than was Charlie Chan Carries On, they said, and we’ll have to take their word, I suppose, because Carries On is lost and has been since a disastrous warehouse fire in 1937 that took out much of the Fox library, including four of the Chans. Regarding Lugosi’s character, the home office pointed out that because of the prevalent disregard of mysticism, we have played him down. Now what do you suppose mystics had done back in 1931 to get people in such a lather? Anyway, The Black Camel would be sold as a straight mystery story, leaving out all direct references to sinister forces and murder and weirdness. That’s rather like squeezing all the juice out of the orange before serving, but management felt pretty safe in predicting a satisfactory boxoffice total within these guidelines. Earl Derr Biggers came through with a ringing endorsement --- The Fox picture made from my novel, The Black Camel, delighted me in every way, and I feel sure all Charlie Chan’s admirers who see it will share my pleasure. Rarely, to my way of thinking, has the plot of a book been transferred to the screen so neatly and so successfully. Cast and direction are excellent, and the result is the sort of picture an author dreams about, but doesn’t always get. As for Warner Oland’s interpretation of Charlie Chan, in this second picture of the series, he settles the matter for all time. He IS Charlie Chan. Like all the Fox Chan mysteries, The Black Camel made money. With a negative cost of $223,000, the picture took domestic rentals of $357,000, with foreign adding another $114,000. Final worldwide total was $471,000 for a profit of $60,000.

Monday Glamour Starter --- Lili Damita

Lili Damita was some kinda hot French pastry --- hers was a brazen and unapologetic appeal to our baser instincts. If Lili’s kind of "It" had been a little tamer, she might have clicked on our shores. As it is, she had wildness coupled with a sometimes-impenetrable accent that made her largely unfit for domestic consumption. It was only when up-and-coming Errol Flynn took a dollop of her charms (and how he paid for it!) that Damita found immortality. Most of what passes for research on Lili is fraught with error (early first marriage to Michael Curtiz? --- no) and what little data to be found generally revolves around Errol, and even that begins with a myth and ends in mystery. Clearing up at least some of it up has come by way of kind assist from longtime friend and Flynn scholar Michael A. Mazzone. For a woman who almost made it to ninety, Lili Damita left very little behind in the way of personal info, but a few scribes got to her toward the end, always on the pretext of having fresh info on the fate of her son Sean Flynn, a journalist who’d been lost in Viet Nam and for whose return she never gave up hope (more on this anon).








She was French born (1904 --- we think) and came of money. There were Catholic schools and ballet classes. Maybe that formal upbringing gave her the itch, cause it wasn’t long before Lili doffed her schoolgirl uniform, shimmied her way onstage at the Folies Bergere and caught the eye of Euro film directors (including a pre-Hollywood Curtiz). US stardom looked to be in the offing when she was brought over by Samuel Goldwyn to replace Vilma Banky as Ronald Colman’s love interest in The Rescue, a 1929 silent (Goldwyn’s last) that barely made the cut before talkies assumed dominance. The partnership didn’t take --- her appeal perhaps too, shall we say, overt, for a Colman consort. More South Seas siren-ing came opposite Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe in their second Flagg/Quirt shout-fest, The Cock-Eyed World, which stood ‘em in the aisles in late ’29, but proves a hard sit today. For that matter, The Rescue is its own kind of ordeal --- Lili’s by far the best thing about both of these. Getting by on good looks wouldn’t cut it in the early thirties though, and she ended up with undistinguished parts, usually fiery ones, opposite fast rising leading men. Gary Cooper rode covered wagons with her in Fighting Caravans --- major careers were not likely to be forged from material like this --- neither would she win laurels as yet another victim of Warren William’s amorality, there’d been so many of those after all (here they are in The Match King). She bore the scars from Erich Von Stroheim’s whip most becomingly in Friends and Lovers (a TCM staple) , but would later take a supporting role in Frisco Kid with James Cagney. One really great pre-code was This Is The Night, long out of circulation, except for an isolated AMC run years ago and the usual archive shows I’d have to fly 3000 miles to see. Cary Grant was with her in this, his first feature, so please, please Universal, why not let us have the DVD?




With the Hollywood career having sputtered on lift-off, Lili returned to the continent, and that’s where she met Errol Flynn. Reflecting upon this fifty years later, she’d acknowledge it was love at first blink, and the pair got torrid all around Par-ee (he joined her on treks to those whispered about lesbian bars she frequented). By the time Errol scored his Warners (short-term) contract deal, he and Lili had sealed theirs and crossed the Atlantic pretty much as a couple, though maintaining separate staterooms for propriety’s sake. The whole fiction of the two having met on shipboard was cooked up later by WB publicity. Indeed, Damita had by now committed herself to the promotion of Flynn’s nascent screen career, and she sure had the Hollywood connections to back it up. We may safely thank this woman for our many hours of pleasure with Robin Hood, Gentleman Jim, and all the rest. Their feet had barely touched Yankee soil before she’d wangled invitations to filmland’s richest households, and it was these contacts, plus her long established association with Curtiz, that got Errol tested, and tested again, for Captain Blood. The fact he was able to win out over hopefuls George Brent and Cary Grant (imagine him playing pirate!) was further tribute to Lili’s abiding tenacity. How could they not have solemnized such an effective parlay with wedding vows? Of course, she’d never reckoned with Flynn’s serial, if not compulsive, womanizing, and the opening of Captain Blood in late 1935, sensation that it (and he) was, only put more female flesh on Errol’s banquet table. The following six or so years would be fraught with violent confrontation, passionate reconciliations, rinse and repeat (Errol would forever maintain that Lili was the best he’d ever had, bar none). Finally, after Flynn had made the big money score thrice and overflowing, she emptied his goblet in an L.A. courtroom and effectively put him on the run for the rest of his life --- hell hath no fury and all that --- well, Lili could write a book on this subject. Son Sean came at the end of the marriage line (born 1941) and she was determined he not be raised amidst Tinseltown squalor. She’d be otherwise done with Errol (but for his money, and eventually his home, which she seized) and the movie business.





The fate of Sean was the great drama of Lilli Damita’s third act. He’d grown up in boarding schools and military academies, spending weekends on campus while friends went home (Lili was generally off globetrotting). Sometimes he spent summers with Errol, but those visits were unpredictable at best, what with Flynn staving off creditors and leaping from one foreign shore to the next. Sean got his feet wet acting, but didn’t like it and wasn’t particularly good at it, in a couple of his father’s TV anthology dramas. His mother wanted a college education and a profession for the boy (there was a short stay at Duke University), but adventure beckoned and so did offers from international producers anxious to further exploit the still potent Flynn name by casting The Son Of Captain Blood with untrained Sean. That lure of easy Euro money and the high life that came with it proved irresistible --- there were more costumers, espionage thrillers, spaghetti westerns --- the usual sixties pudding from over there. A few would make the leap stateside, but Hollywood wasn’t clamoring for another Flynn --- perhaps their memories of the old one were still too fresh (Errol had died in 1959). Sean was freebooting about Europe, even Africa, when he wasn’t filming. For a while, he guided safaris in Kenya. Further excitement seemed imminent when he took up a camera and headed for Viet Nam as a war photographer. Some of his stuff got published and he was fearless enough, but his father’s prowess for getting out of scrapes was not there for Sean when enemy combatants on the Cambodian border picked him up along with another photographer during a shoot. Although it wasn’t (more or less) confirmed until years later, the two captives were evidently marched around that benighted region for nearly a year before being taken out one morning and unceremoniously executed. For all his mother knew, however, Sean was still alive, and Lili’s search would go on for as long as she’d live.





There was a million dollar life insurance policy on Sean underwritten by CBS that Lili Damita collected. She’d married again after Errol’s death (rich dairy farmer), so she had the ways and means to pursue her goal in finding Sean. Her residency in Palm Beach, Florida kept her in regular contact with neighbors George Murphy and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. They used their influence and contacts to aid in the quest, even though few believed Sean was still alive. Walter Cronkite was another who tried to help. He implored Lilli to give up, but she would not. Sean’s bachelor apartment in Paris remained sealed for over twenty years as his mother searched, waited, and continued to pay the rent. That finally stopped in 1991 when Lili’s own health became compromised. Observers said that the place was like some exquisitely preserved time capsule of the late sixties --- all of Sean’s furnishings, personal effects, and bric-a-brac left undisturbed and frozen in time. Even fan letters sat unopened on his bureau table. Lili would never know of this, as the Alzheimer’s disease had by now taken hold and she would only have a few years left. She died in 1994.

The Mickey Mouse Seventies Revival


Anybody remember Disney’s 1974 re-issue of six Mickey Mouse black-and-white cartoons from the early thirties? Actually, there were seven --- The Klondike Kid had been the test run for the group and must have been well-received, because these went out with new one-sheets and a distinctly modern ad campaign designed to cash in on the nostalgia craze of the seventies. Note the reference to gaudy black-and-white, Today’s Super Star, etc. The posters are quite collectable today as they were printed from the original plates used for the initial release of the shorts, only this time the art was black-and-white. Disney rentals weren’t cheap, which may explain why we scarcely saw these cartoons around my parts. A look back at the older figures shows what Disney originally had in the Mickey subjects. The 1932-33 season of 18 cartoons had a total cost of $359,614, with an average cost per cartoon of $19,978. Total domestic rentals were $768,555, and the average per short was $42,698, so they were certainly profitable (add to that foreign rentals of $745,527 and you end up with worldwide rentals of $1.5 million for the season). There were 138,813 domestic bookings for the Mickeys that year, with each film getting an average 7,712 engagements. $5.54 was the average amount paid by exhibitors for a Mickey Mouse during 1932-33. To take one specific example, The Whoopee Party had a negative cost of $14,952, with domestic rentals of $43,495, foreign at $40,137, for total worldwide rentals of $83,633. Stout numbers for a depression era cartoon series.

Dog and Pony Shows


Our nation’s boxoffices having been thoroughly sated on the likes of Superman and The Pirates Of The Caribbean, isn’t it time we enjoyed a good animal adventure, with a noble, nay majestic, dog or horse billed above the title, just so there’s no doubt as to who, or what, the star is? I’d go see a new Rin-Tin-Tin picture if they’d just make one. Same for Rex --- unsaddled equine sheik staining the wilds with human blood --- that’s for me! They say The Devil Horse is a honey of a show. Rex fights "outlaw" horses, mountain lions, and Yakima Canutt. You know it's bound to be great. I would very much like to have been in that lobby to see the fire-lit infernal horse head. And how about Rin-Tin-Tin --- in person. Five shows a day plus a fifty-piece orchestra. Why did I have to be born so late? The few Rintys I’ve seen are really good. He’s a better actor than much of what we have in the way of thespic talent today, I think. His emotional range is certainly more extensive. We need Rinty and Rex pictures on DVD! No doubt most, if not all, of them are in the public domain. Let’s deluge these studios with our demands! The wait for good animal thrills has gone on too long --- put these dogs and horses on our home theatre screens now!

The Confessions Of Rock Hudson


Back before we all got so damned ironic about everything, magazines used to run silly spreads like this, with major stars willing to enter into the spirit of fun. Here’s one that Rock Hudson and Doris Day did in the mid-sixties, and for what publication, I don’t know, but since Rock was something of a film buff (and collector) himself, I imagine he got a kick out of recreating "old time movie" moments for the sake of general publicity. Being uncertain as to a specific date on these shots, I’m going to assume they tied in with the campaign for Send Me No Flowers, the last feature these two did together. That Min and Bill pose would not likely have had much resonance with youthful sixties readerships, nor I suspect would the Rock and Doris/Nelson and Jeanette take-off. My favorites are the Laurel and Hardy Beau Hunks tribute (both of them got the expressions nicely, I think) and Rock assuming the role of all three Marx Brothers. Too bad they didn’t do a full-length movie revolving around these impersonations --- it might have been more entertaining than Send Me No Flowers.


Speaking of film collector Rock, I came across a really interesting interview he did in 1968 where he spoke very candidly (surprisingly so considering the legalities involved) about his favorite hobby. I have a print of just about every film I’ve appeared in, he said with what the mag reported as "boyish pride", all in 16mm. The only ones missing are the MGM’s. You can’t get them from MGM, they won’t let any of their prints go. It’s company policy, because somebody once charged for showing them at home and they couldn’t bear the thought of that. Rock, whose Metro pictures as of 1968 included only Something Of Value (1957), went on to make the shocking assertion that the only way of getting them was in the black market (wow --- pretty ballsy, Rock!). The interviewer then asked about his latest, Ice Station Zebra, for Metro release. The contract demands presented by Hudson to the studio included a provision that he receive a 16mm print upon the film’s completion. MGM approved every clause in the agreement except that one. It had worked with all the other companies, he said, but not with them. Rock finally had to surrender when they threatened to withdraw the offer altogether (as it is, he had been a last minute substitute for Gregory Peck). Some day, he added darkly, I’ll find a way. Bravo to that, Rock --- spoken as a true, never-say-die collector --- you go, big guy!


Hudson’s ritual for entertaining at home was to invite guests over for dinner, then show a movie following the meal, usually a Rock Hudson movie. He ran the 16mm projector himself --- none of those lavish 35mm booths for him --- besides, using 35mm equipment required the services of a union operator at $35 an hour (I never knew that before reading the interview). His most requested title? I guess I’ve run Giant fifty times since settling down in the house. The movie is three and one half-hours long, and this does not include the time it takes to change reels (I know how you feel, Rock --- my old 16mm Giant was on seven 1200’ foot spools!). The intervals run quite a bit as people repair themselves to the bathroom, and you mix fresh drinks and all that, so it’s usually four or five in the morning before they take off for home, everybody bombed. Boy, does this sound like fun or what? Other guest requests included Pillow Talk and A Farewell To Arms (wonder if they were scope prints).


Sometimes Rock liked to surprise company with a couple of dogs (those were held in reserve for double-feature nights). His favorite of these was Taza, Son Of Cochise --- the movie is terrible and I’m terrible, and they don’t know whether to laugh and be possibly very impolite or keep those straight faces --- and they say futile little things at the end like "that was a very good picture" or "you were marvelous in it." Actually, Rock, your friends may have had something there --- Taza, Son Of Cochise is not at all a bad picture (it’s a Sirk!), and if you’d had interlocking dual 35mm Naturalvision projection equipment set up in the den for those shows, you could have knocked them out of their recliners with those spectacular 3-D effects (your union operator would have sure earned his $35 for this show)! As to the eventual disposition of Rock’s film collection, I have no idea. Other collectors usually hear about a celebrity’s stash going on the market, but I don’t recall this one being mentioned. Maybe it went to a college or something. Rock Hudson also had "thousands" of stills from his films --- "complete sets" on everything he did. Those would sure be great to run across at a yard sale, but again, their fate is a mystery. Anybody know?

Favorites List --- His Kind Of Woman


Next time someone asks why noirs can’t be more fun, show them His Kind Of Woman, the only big laugh feel-good picture in the genre’s entire output. Howard Hughes put his inimitable, break-the-bank creative stamp on what was initially a workmanlike John Farrow action thriller that had been finished nearly a year before. Robert Mitchum once said that after they’d wrapped it the first time, Hughes had everyone come back and do it "twice more", till there was finally enough movie for at least three more trips to the theatre. Hughes then tinkered with those miles of film for his customarily obsessive, to-hell-with-the-costs eternity before releasing 120 minutes of his unique vision just before Labor Day weekend in 1951. Howard had learned a lot from his abortive relationships with better filmmakers than himself. He was said to have been a slow learner at some things, but he was patient, if not dogmatic. From Howard Hawks, he picked up the combination of relaxed patter, some songs, and memorable set-pieces to flesh out otherwise uneventful stories. Preston Sturges taught him the application of zany and unexpected comedy into situations a less imaginative producer/director would have done by rote. After years of frustrated attempts at collaboration with these two (on The Outlaw and The Sin Of Harold Diddlebock, respectively), Hughes was ready to take the wheel and dictate every aspect of his remade His Kind Of Woman. That control would extend to the selling campaign as well, but for now it was enough to direct the director, compose random dialogue, and do his usual obsessive thing with women’s wardrobe. If you have any inclination to go deep inside the skull of Howard Hughes, this is the movie to do it with. Did I mention that His Kind Of Woman is one of my absolute all-time favorites? It may well be the one movie I’d pack for lifelong solitary confinement if indeed they made me choose (Yikes! --- could be I'm headed for Hughes-style madness myself having made a declaration like that).




Bob Mitchum always winds up at a Mexican hellhole in his RKO thrillers. This time it’s an elegant soundstage resort, supposedly just over (or under) the border, but hey, it’s got the flavor of Mexico just the same, and there’s a lot more joy to be had here than in Bob’s last trip south, Where Danger Lives. That’s the very unpleasant one with Faith Domergue where Mitchum got conked on the head early in the picture and spends the rest of the show passing out and/or writhing in pain. Could it have been a blueprint for the initial completed version of His Kind Of Woman? If so, I’m really glad Hughes took over, because that old Farrow model really needed lightening up. So what about all the shipboard beatings Bob sustains this time, you ask, or that nasty business with the hypo needle poking into his skin? Well, somehow that never bothered me. In fact, it just plays like a morbid extension of the black comedy antics back on the beach with Vincent Price as he shoots up Charles McGraw and company before sailing out to rescue hapless Bob. Hughes was really hung up with that needle business, for reasons best left to a therapist I suppose, but the number of close-ups detailing the progress of that pincer toward Mitchum’s pulsing vein does reveal, if nothing else, a truly disturbed mind at work. They say Bob absolutely refused to let them jab him, and indeed, his nerves became so frazzled that he ultimately went on a set leveling rampage after near-endless retakes on a particularly bruising scene with blows to his solar plexus and a lashing with the buckle end of a leather belt. How do you say no to the crazy producer when he has all the money? That seems to have been the essential problem with Hughes. Nobody could yell Screw You, Howard, You’re Nuts, because, after all, he signed the payroll checks.
Boss from hell, indeed.



Among the myriad of pleasures to be had in His Kind Of Woman, there is Jim Backus as a lecherous Wall Street type out to compromise a member of the supporting cast during her honeymoon in a riff on a Casablanca sidetrip that Hughes (or somebody) must have remembered (you said it first in your excellent review, DVD Savant!). Backus combines a smarmy approach with that Magoo voice and the result is screen magic. Had the picture centered on his character, you could call it Thurston Howell --- The Early Years. I hadn’t mentioned Jane Russell, but she’s here alright, and all that fuss about specially designed dresses and/or cantilevers to best present her daunting assets seems odd in retrospect, for most of it’s modestly camouflaged with floral arrangements judiciously placed at the portal of joy (just as MGM would do two years later when Ava Gardner showed up a little too low cut for Knights Of The Round Table). For a more direct approach to salacious audience yearnings, I might point out this 1951 Got Milk? variation devised by RKO on behalf of the American Dairy Association. Not that Jane wouldn’t make an ideal spokesman for that venerable group, but was this some publicity staffer’s real-life adaptation of a cartoon from the back pages of Wink magazine, or mayhaps Mr. Hughes developed the idea of tying Miss Russell in with the beverage she evoked best.





It pains me to report that His Kind Of Woman lost money, but Hughes probably knew it would. He just didn’t care. The man put his dream on celluloid and I respect him for it. Negative costs could have been worse, considering what they all went through to finish it. $1.8 million is high for an RKO, but Metro would have signed off without complaint. Problem is the Mitchum shows weren’t doing all that well as a group. Holiday Affair, Where Danger Lives, My Forbidden Past --- each had lost money. His Kind Of Woman would roll up $1.7 in domestic rentals, $750,000 foreign, with a worldwide finish of $2.4 million. The loss was $825,000 (the grim revenue reaper would strike again the next year with a $700,000 deficit on Macao --- could this be why "the screen’s hottest combination" only did two together?). See that poster art of them lying horizontal like? It was used on all the posters. An artist named Mario Zamparelli designed it, under the very close supervision of Howard Hughes. Upon completion, Mario was instructed to drop the neckline on Jane half an inch. For the sake of children wandering past theatre fronts, H.H. was constrained from taking that décolletage even further, but the essential promise was conveyed, and the painting was blown up for a giant billboard on Wilshire Blvd. augmented with gas jets spewing twenty to thirty foot flames into the night air. Hughes’ own aesthetic reservations compelled him to take it down after one night --- more waste disposal in his eternal quest for perfection. The campaign madness continued when he leased three L.A. theatres in order to insure his Labor Day opening. The customary RKO showcase houses were tied up with Disney’s Alice In Wonderland, so Hughes simply took over the venues he needed --- "precedential direct action", industry observers called it. The happy group gathered here at the premiere includes Tim Holt, Vincent Price, Marjorie Reynolds, Mitchum, and exhibitor hosts. Holt was always a welcome presence in "A" pics --- he only made a few (including The Magnificent Ambersons and Treasure Of the Sierra Madre), while his day-job revolved around a crackerjack series of RKO westerns in which he’d outlasted almost all his cowboy rivals. The scene of Mitchum with uniformed police is not present in the final cut --- no doubt some of the discarded footage from earlier incarnations of His Kind Of Woman. This great, super, and terrific movie has just been released on DVD, with four other top noirs. You’ll have to buy the whole pack to get His Kind Of Woman, but it’s worth the total price by itself, as would be each of the others --- like all Warner DVD collections, it’s the bargain of the century (till their next box comes along!).

The Place To Be 55 Years Ago


Theatre television hit a jackpot in July 1951. The crowd above is waiting to buy tickets for a close-circuit broadcast of the Jake La Motta/Ben Murphy prizefight at Philadelphia’s Warner-Stanley Theatre. The match wouldn’t start until 10:00, but these fight fans are already out in force at 5:00 (the time this picture was taken). The bout would be staged at Yankee Stadium and picked up by a theatre network involving 11 houses in nine cities. To safeguard the gate at the Stadium, where 20,000 attended, no New York theatres carried the match. Participating showmen in Cleveland, Albany, Baltimore, and Richmond were sold out, and most of these advanced their admission price for the event. Early projection TV could be unpredictable. In Chicago, the apparatus went on the fritz and the audience missed the knockout punch in the last round. I’d hate to have been the manager of the Tivoli that night. Boxing action on theatre screens often led to unwelcome action in auditoriums, as bad behavior among patrons was particularly rife on these occasions. Fights and even shootings were all too commonplace, especially when closed-circuit equipment went on the fritz. New Yorkers had to attend the match live at the Stadium or miss it all together. Bitter complaints were lodged by bar and grill operators accustomed to having such events broadcast gratis on TV for their customers. CBS waited a week, then carried La Motta/Murphy on film. The socko boxoffice numbers led to increased sales for RCA theatre television units, which were adjudged "excellent" by circuit managers. It's hard to imagine these stone-age video projectors looking anything other than dreadful flashed upon those enormous downtown palace screens, but chances are sheer novelty of the thing made up the difference. I can just visualize ushers at the Warner/Stanley scouring the auditorium with flashlights after the last evening show of Strangers On A Train, flushing out any number of would-be freeloader patrons anxious to see Hitchcock and La Motta on the same ticket. I might have attempted such a gambit myself had I been there. What glorious adventure moviegoing was in those days …

Clara Bow --- Part Two


Talkies and other things had broken Clara Bow’s spirit before age twenty-five. The fun of movie making was largely gone before she stepped in front of a microphone --- sound's arrival supplied the finishing touch. There were scandals and tawdry episodes in her personal life to sour reportage, and the country was a changing place. Compare It with any of her talkers. The silent has an optimistic quality --- a sunnier disposition all around, and it's not just Clara's vibrancy. Even tenements in It have a hopeful appearance, whereas in The Saturday Night Kid, they’re just squalid. You look at Clara in a talkie and wonder how she got into such reduced circumstances. Her energy is drained and worse yet, she has to stand still --- all that action and movement circumscribed by a looming microphone. Bow hated that boom all the more because she knew what it was doing to her performance. One time she cursed and pounded the heavy apparatus as it hung overhead --- she knew by then where the fault lay for her decline. But even without the tumult of sound, Bow's career may not have lasted in any case, considering Paramount’s relentless recycling of dogmatic formulas. Other screen flappers were slipping before talkies arrived. Colleen Moore’s last three jazz babies went down in red ink --- Oh, Kay! lost $65,000, Synthetic Sin $75,000, and Why Be Good showed a $40,000 deficit. Colleen didn’t need sound to finish her in these roles. Neither did Fox’s Sue Carol, another aspirant to the Bow big leagues whose own hotcha series took a dive just as Carol first spoke for fans --- The Exalted Flapper, Watch That Girl, and The Big Party all lost money. Both these actresses would retire within a few years, as would Clara Bow, but being by far the biggest star, Bow’s descent was adjudged the most dramatic. Lesser lights could bow out quietly, but the press hounds would nip at Clara’s heels all the way to the train station.



Her popularity was at its peak when she did The Wild Party (45,000 letters in January 1929), but Paramount had rushed her into talkies, and the lack of preparation showed. The movie went out in April, months before consensus was reached among exhibitors as to the viability of sound. Talking pictures were still something you drove to. Big towns played them, but much of Clara’s loyal following lived in the rurals. My own small community played The Wild Party in a silent version. I suspect that’s how most patrons saw it. By the time little houses got wired (those surviving the transition --- many of them simply closed), The Wild Party had come and gone as a silent, leaving a lot of Clara’s fans to experience her in sound for the first time in either Dangerous Curves or The Saturday Night Kid. All three were released before the end of 1929 amidst unseemly haste. The eight starring sound features for Paramount are as many shadows today --- for all the exposure they’ve had in the last forty years, they might just as well be lost. Early television saw most of them back, but stations shunned the early titles among those bulging syndicated packages, preferring to run Hope, Crosby, or Ladd over these creaky Bows, and what little exposure they’ve had since has been limited to restoration festivals and reparatory screenings. I wish I could announce Universal’s forthcoming release of all eight (plus her song turn in Paramount On Parade), as they own them now, but the prospects for a DVD box look doubtful.








What if Clara Bow had been reborn as a "serious" actress? She was all set for City Streets in 1931, but Sylvia Sidney played it instead. Would we really enjoy seeing Clara doing Sylvia Sidney parts? I for one don’t much enjoy seeing Sylvia Sidney doing Sylvia Sidney parts. A few of Nancy Carroll’s roles would have been nice with Clara --- Hot Saturday comes to mind. These were the actresses Paramount was pushing in the new age of sound. Clara Bow’s contract was "settled" (she got nothing) and the actress announced she was through with movies. Married ranch life (her first) to future cowboy Rex Bell was briefly interrupted by a return to the screen for Fox Film Corporation. Two final curtain calls would be Call Her Savage and Hoopla. Savage is everything the title implies --- it flies off in a thousand melodramatic directions, but sure delivers pre-code goods, more so than anything she did at staid Paramount (it shows up a lot on Fox Movie Channel --- by all means, see it). It was also a hit --- domestic rentals of $571,000 and foreign at $230,000 against a negative cost of $476,000 for a profit of $13,000. Any gain was good news in 1932, but it didn’t last. Hoopla cost $403,000, but brought back less than Call Her Savage with $437,000 domestic and $148,000 foreign --- final loss for this one was $58,000. There was talk of Clara staying on to do Stand Up and Cheer, but she didn’t want any more of it (Hoopla had been an ordeal for her), so this time retirement was permanent. Mental illness rife in her family came to call within the next idle decade --- the time left before her death in 1965 was largely spent in treatment and/or seclusion.





A few notes by way of captioning these stills. That whip Clara brandishes will be used on hapless Gilbert Roland, an old off-screen lover and lifelong friend who would stay in touch with Bow for the rest of her life (both this and the on-set candid of C.B. in bed are from Call Her Savage). That open car is shared with just acquired husband Rex Bell, and the shot is dated December 1931 --- keep in mind this is a woman twenty-six, and look what those years have done to her. The Screen Personalities montage mentions Clara having entered that fateful magazine star search "in her junior year" --- fact is she didn’t get beyond grade school, but adult education courses taken during retirement would improve both her writing and typing skills. This nightclub shot with Martha Raye found them celebrating the opening of College Swing in 1938 --- Clara briefly dabbled in the restaurant business during this period and was still willing to accommodate an always-curious press. After 1940, she’d seldom be photographed. Everything about Clara Bow’s incredible life is set forth in David Stenn’s book. By way of getting an update, I asked David if there had been any interesting rediscoveries since his last updated edition of the biography. Here’s his response ---

I guess you already know about the UCLA Festival of Preservation -- which will include two Clara Bow films that have been in the works for a decade -- MY LADY'S LIPS and POISONED PARADISE. On the first title, additional footage (including CB) was found in another nitrate print (only two 35mm nitrates survived) at the last minute so luckily what got preserved is complete. As you know, the problem with the indies of that period is they got chopped up for censorship in each state, so reassembling them is complicated -- right now that's the case with MY LADY OF WHIMS, which (believe it or not) has never received a full preservation. It's in the works now though.

Actually, I didn’t know about those two finds, but I’m delighted to hear that more Clara Bow continues to turn up (much of that due to David Stenn’s own tireless efforts). Thanks for the bulletin, David!

Monday Glamour Starter --- Clara Bow --- Part One


The more I watch Clara Bow (and read about her), the more convinced I am that this woman was a performing genius --- not one of those "instinctive" talents, mind you. That’s always struck me as a somewhat condescending term applied to actors considered too stupid to comprehend their effect on an audience. Clara Bow understood exactly what she was doing. Her grasp --- her technique --- was never any accident. This was not some dumb animal taught by force of repetition to go out and fetch a stick, although she was certainly treated like one. If Clara had been better equipped to articulate her talent, if only she’d had a little more formal education and come from at least a marginally functional background, she might have been recognized as one of the truly distinguished actresses of her generation. But then, she wouldn’t be Clara Bow anymore. Instead, she might be Colleen Moore, or Sue Carol, or any one of those runner-ups so much better equipped at the time to protect themselves against the studio threshing machine that eventually finished Clara off. To hear observers tell it, and these were the top people in the business, Clara Bow was the most capable actress they’d ever worked with. Victor Fleming was still saying it twenty years after the fact, and he’d directed all the biggest names during that interim. We could appreciate Clara more if Paramount hadn’t allowed most of her pictures to rot. Even the few that are left remain largely quarantined --- Wings, ManTrap, and Hula survive, but their copyrights were renewed, so that steel trap is resolutely shut. The silent Bows in circulation are earlier, less polished efforts, and surviving elements for these are mostly 16mm. The Plastic Age, Dancing Mothers, Parisian Love --- all reveal glimpses of the magic, but not to Clara’s best advantage. Of those available, It alone gives us a shimmering Bow --- the DVD (and do please opt for the Milestone version, for it's by far the best) offers the sort of Clara Bow viewing experience audiences routinely enjoyed during her heyday. She was my mother’s favorite actress --- a ten-year old the year Clara made It. What’s left of her generation (my mother’s 89) is now the sole repository for first-hand memories of these --- Red Hair, Three Weekends, The Fleet’s In, Get Your Man, Rough House Rosie, Ladies Of The Mob --- the list of the lost goes on, and it would take an archiving miracle to turn any of them up now.




Part of the reason they loved Clara was because so many could identify with her. Women especially. She was the original shopgirl heroine. Who was early Joan Crawford but a carbon paper facsimile of Clara? The depression was better suited to cheerless ribbon clerks Joan would play, always knowing the score, but never seeming to get much fun out of it. Clara wasn’t the only personality hobbled by talkies --- microphones drained vitality out of all the Dancing Daughters --- leaving us with dour substitutes, or like Crawford, beaten-down working girls struggling to maintain virtue in the face of predatory playboys and lecherous landlords. Clara’s day had come and gone by this time and even her kind of effervescent, can-do flapper spirit offered little reassurance against joblessness and starvation. Just being Clara Bow would no longer be enough. The hell of it was that off-screen Clara understood better than any of them what it was to starve and deal with predators (her family being the worst of those). Beaten-down was a literal term as it applied to her. That Clara Bow even lived through her childhood is some kind of amazing (for an account of that, check out David Stenn’s definitive biography). Clara’s horrific ordeal of privation and abuse is not something I care to recount here. Just read the book, cause I’m skipping that whole ugly saga. I’ll go right to the movie star pinnacle, and it gets ugly here too ...









Should you want to see mere actors exposed as such, look at Clara Bow’s supporting cast in 1927's It. They function well enough --- adequate is the word best applied --- but it’s Clara really lighting up the place, and not just because the movie’s thrown to her. Every move and gesture is spontaneity itself, a primer on how to transcend limitations of a projected image in order to reach out and become one with your audience. She would soon enough become the pivot around which Paramount’s entire movie season would revolve. Exhibitors accepted any number of dogs in order to get a four per year serving of Bow that was part of the studio’s block book. The fact they were working a hopeless insomniac at eighteen hours a day was the insidious means by which those contracts got fulfilled. Quality was incidental since the public was buying Bow any way they could get her. She was their sow’s ear to silk purse girl, and formula though they were, her silents kept right on selling, almost despite themselves. Her jazz baby thumb-nosing at convention was endearing for a while, but Clara flew in the face of too many Hollywood sacred cows, and she was made to suffer for it by way of social outcast status unheard of among stars with her boxoffice cache. The men were there in droves --- she was well known for putting out, but that was just another reason for much of the town to hate her. Conquests (hers, not theirs) included the aforementioned Vic Fleming (here’s the two of them together), Gilbert Roland, a starting-out Gary Cooper --- she liked Cooper because, as she put it, he let her dog share the tub when he gave Clara morning baths. Scandal rags got in their licks, tall tales thrived right into the seventies with the publication of Hollywood Babylon, a tickle-me wool gathering of filthy anecdotes, one of them alleging Clara had serviced the entire USC football squad during nighttime orgies in her home. Author Stenn put that story to rout by tracking down surviving team members. Based on their chaste, and believable, accounts of their association with Clara, these boys sound more like college students in The Plastic Age than any product of Kenneth Anger’s fevered imagination.





This is how nice Clara could be to her fans. There was a kid who sent a letter to Paramount, lamenting the fact that his parent’s candied popcorn concession at Long Beach would soon go under owing to family illness and rising medical expense. Could Clara come down and help out? To the boy’s no doubt total shock, she did just that, showing up unannounced one Saturday morning to peddle the corn. All her idea too, not the publicity department’s. The 33,727 letters she received in May 1928 were no doubt sincerely felt. Nobody in the industry got more mail (here’s a trade ad touting the spectacular figure and a sample of the photo and envelope that went out to those thousands of fans). By this time, Clara was frankly sick of actin’ with my clothes off, but to the eternal gratitude of all and sundry (including us!), she continued doing just that. The curtain would begin to fall with the arrival of sound, just about the worst calamity that could have befallen a star of Bow’s temperament and limitations. That story’s for Part Two, but for now, here’s an ad heralding The Wild Party, wherein Clara’s voice would herald the beginning of the end for her screen career.

Colorful New Post-War Personalities


Those eager new faces that burst onto the scene during and/or after World War II were helped in no small way by the increased use of color photography in magazines and rotogravure sections. While there was certainly a color presence before the war, it was nothing beside the booming interest that came after. All four of these young players had their first major successes in the mid to late forties, and each of them figured into a multi-hued fan-mag culture where beautiful color layouts were the norm, and each could be seen to his best advantage. A lot of these portraits carried photographer credits, and publications took pride in their presentations. While we tend to think of Montgomery Clift as a primarily black-and-white star (he didn’t make a color movie until Raintree County in 1957!), his fan following enjoyed colorful photo profiles from the very beginning. Noirish denizens of the night Richard Widmark and Burt Lancaster were often spotted by the color lensman, and to good effect. Even with our TCM and DVD’s, we sometimes forget how effectively the print media worked in ongoing partnership with Hollywood to create these iconic images. Fledgling stars needed strong magazine coverage as much as good screen exposure. One couldn’t work without the other.

A Stage Act We Can Still Enjoy


Just watched Plane Nuts again on the Dancing Lady DVD. If you want the flavor of what a personal appearance by Ted Healy and His Stooges might have been like, look no further than this terrific 1933 two-reeler. Ted’s act is captured for all posterity in this short --- a no-frills transcription of the routine that he and the Howards (and Larry Fine) honed to perfection on the vaudeville stage. They’re interrupted by a couple of tiresome dance numbers, which seem to have been lifted from other features (Metro’s abandoned The March Of Time perhaps?), but mostly it is pure Healy and Company, and a joy to watch. Why must Ted be so abusive --- and so casual in his infliction of cruelties (but therein lies the beauty of the man!)? He looks to be ad-libbing much of what he does on stage (and here he is in a surly clinch with Joan Crawford from Dancing Lady), although you know every routine had to be fine-tuned to the last detail. I’m glad they preserved his act for all us future generations. This theatre ad is from 1932. For fifteen cents, you could see the whole thing live on stage. Boy oh boy. Exhausting work no doubt, probably six or more performances a day, but I’ll bet Ted and the Boys made every one of them look spontaneous. Warner has promised more of these early Healy/Stooge subjects for future DVD extra offerings. That’ll be something to look forward to.

Birth Of The Bogart Cult

When was the Humphrey Bogart cult born? The where is understood to have been the Brattle Theatre at Harvard. We’ve heard for years about students chanting dialogue as they watched, arriving in costume to see Casablanca, etc. --- all of this long before The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I’ve looked at a number of published sources, as well as mentions on the web, and have found so far at least five contradictory accounts. Maybe someone reading can help straighten this out. I’ve not been to Harvard, nor stepped foot in the Brattle. I do know they still run Bogart pictures often, because I’m on their schedule mailing list. From what I understand, they used to have a festival each year around exam time, and double features of Bogart titles were shown. This is supposed to have started during the fifties --- but just when in the fifties? The Brattle switched from legit to screen shows in 1953. Did Bogart live long enough to be aware of the beginnings of a cult celebrating his films and screen image? It's hard to be sure based on all this conflicting info. The Brattle’s own website is indefinite on the subject. There were a couple of sources saying they ran Casablanca initially on April 21, 1957, barely three months after the actor’s death. And yet, the Casablanca Bar, which later became a restaurant and was located adjacent to the theater, is supposed to have opened its doors in 1955, so I’d have to think the movie played the Brattle prior to that 1957 date. There was a published account of the first Bogart festival being presented during the summer of 1956, at least six months prior to his death. Is this accurate? I don’t know if the Brattle has maintained records of all their bookings from that period. I’d suspect not. Is there a reader out there who attended Harvard and might remember?





The Brattle is generally credited with having "transformed Humphrey Bogart into a global icon." Everyone assumes it began with the Casablanca revival, but I found a couple of sources crediting Beat The Devil for this. The March 1954 United Artists release did not do well theatrically ($975,132 in domestic rentals), but word got out among the intelligentsia that it was a "put-on" of straight crime thrillers Bogart had previously made, and it became something of an art house favorite. Bogart was aware of this --- he dismissed Beat The Devil as "a mess" and said "only phonies would like it." Apparently, they liked it at the Brattle, and indeed, it is said to have rung the opening bell for a Bogart celebration that would last decades. Bosley Crowther wrote a 1966 article about the Bogart cult for Playboy in which he referred to a Brattle booking of Beat The Devil in 1956, followed by Casablanca and others the following year. Was it Beat The Devil, then, that initiated Casablanca's revival and led to the the first flowering of Bogart-mania at Cambridge, or had Casablanca caught on prior to this? By 1960, the theater was running three weeks of Bogart a year. The owners were Bryant Haliday and Cyrus Harvey, Jr. They later established Janus Films as a means of assuring American distribution for foreign films they liked. I’m not sure if either of these men are still alive. I do know Haliday dabbled in acting --- he’s in Richard Gordon’s outstanding 1964 horror film, Devil Doll. I'd like to ask them about the origins of the Bogart cult. Would Lauren Bacall remember? Was her husband aware of this gathering phenomenon before he died? If so, it would be interesting to know what he thought about it. Bogart’s a little like Bela Lugosi and Oliver Hardy in that he seems to have barely missed a new generation's renewed interest in his work. For Lugosi, it was the release of his Universal horror films to television the year after he died, giving birth to monster kids nationwide. Oliver Hardy passed shortly before Robert Youngson’s Golden Age Of Comedy unleashed a torrent of favorable press and fan enthusiasm for the silent comedies of Laurel and Hardy. Bogart’s backlog was just making its way to widespread TV distribution when he died, and that surely would not have gone unnoticed --- other stars of his generation, including Clark Gable, commented on this to the press on several occasions. It’s been assumed that Bogart died without knowing of Bogie's rebirth among college audiences, but I wonder. Can anyone out there tell us just when this cult had its beginnings?

The Black Swan Arrives

It’s been six years since I watched The Black Swan. The new DVD just came in this week, so it was time to catch up. The following is a reflection dated March 14, 2000, right after I saw it the last time. Prior to 2000, a 16mm LPP print (which promised not to fade) was much in demand among collectors, but the new century brought with it a sharp decline in film collecting, and the prized Black Swan was no longer such a prize. I don’t know what one would bring now, but it couldn’t be that much, especially with a new DVD you can get for $10 or less. Here’s some Jane Withers/Black Swan trivia. An avid memorabilia collector from the time she was a child actress at Fox in the thirties and early forties. I’m told she used to crawl into the dumpsters on the lot in order to retrieve discarded stills, props, costumes, etc. One of the items scored was an original scale model of The Black Swan. The size was such it had to be stored in a warehouse. I’d heard this story for years, but was never sure if it was on the level. Finally, I got to meet Jane Withers at a Ray Courts autograph show in North Hollywood about seven or eight years ago, and the first thing I asked about was The Black Swan. Did she really have that ship? Yes --- and for several decades, until time and deterioration finally obliged her to get rid of it. As to when she'd acquired the model, I didn’t ask. Possibly at that big Fox auction they had back in the early seventies. Chances are the studio kept using it on through the fifties, maybe in things like Anne Of The Indes. Anyway, at least Jane got to enjoy it for a while. So back to that 2000 Black Swan essay, keep in mind I wrote it before those recent Pirates of The Caribbean movies, or else I would have surely mentioned them (the reference here is to the theme park rides) ---



If you've visited either of the Disney worlds, you’ve no doubt experienced The Pirates of The Caribbean --- well, here is its motion picture counterpart --- every bit as artificial as Disney's indoor sail through pirate waters. I’m convinced this movie was a direct forerunner and inspiration for the ride, as they're both deliberately overblown and kid-friendly. Zanuck conceived The Black Swan as schoolboy pirate adventure from the beginning --- opening scenes announce as much. Whereas the Errol Flynns functioned as straight period drama, this one casts a wink toward the audience from the first reel on --- even Power's own Son Of Fury, released within the same year, managed an intensity never approached by The Black Swan. I remember waiting with great anticipation back around 1980 when it resurfaced on the old "SFM Holiday Network" after having been years out of circulation (except for a few scattered B/W prints in 16mm). It seemed a letdown then, and compared with The Mark Of Zorro and Son Of Fury, frankly still is --- yet somehow, The Black Swan seems to gain on repeated viewing, and for that reason, I’d recommend it as a video keeper. Two elements alone justify ownership --- the color and Alfred Newman's score. Otherwise, there is a miscast George Sanders --- I know it's hard to imagine G.S. as an unwelcome participant in ANY film, but he's just too urbane for athletic excesses he's put through here (George was notorious for ducking stunt work) --- and that flaming red beard too often conceals the beloved Sanders sneer we know to lie beneath --- this one's clearly among the actor's "take-the-money-and-run" parts. Director Henry King was ideally suited for Americana subjects (see the wonderful Margie and Wait Till The Sun Shines, Nellie), but was versatile enough to hoist the Jolly Roger when necessary, though you sense he'd rather be doing something else. Maureen O'Hara's the usual spitfire (she even got around to playing a character named Spitfire a few years later with Errol Flynn) --- you wonder why these guys put up with so much aggravation to get at her --- then that fadeout clinch, surprising for a code pic, comes along to remind you. She and Power also do a bedtime variation on the old It Happened One Night gag that is actually the most suspenseful scene in the show. Don’t get your hopes up for a Zorro worthy climactic duel --- here it's undercranked and ludicrous --- like running a silent at the wrong speed. Tyrone Power was peeling potatoes by the time this got into theatres --- he'd never look so frisky again --- even in similar post-war projects, it was clear the party was over --- just compare Swan with Captain From Castile --- same star, color, director, composer --- but now the milk had curdled, and a noirish malaise had definitely set in. Power may have looked back on the Black Swan(s) of his past as childish unworthies (or "monuments to public patience" as he liked to call them), but this was the sort of vehicle that took him to the top, and would have kept him there, had the war and his own displacement by newer faces not occurred (think Burt Lancaster and The Crimson Pirate, virtually a remake of The Black Swan). In a sense, it’s Power's own swan song as the impossibly handsome matinee idol --- a status he would soon exchange for a marine uniform, and never really get back.




Fast forward to 2006 and another viewing of The Black Swan. These are not very dangerous pirates. They seldom do anything piratical. All of them talk about it a great deal, describing horrific acts of pillage and mayhem that have taken place offscreen, if at all. "Your fulminations, my Lords and Gentlemen, are filled with bilge and blather," says Laird Cregar, and indeed, this show is rich with fulmination --- never have I heard so much fruity and high-flying dialogue as this. At times it’s exhausting. Laird waxes eloquent on the subject of tearing out Power’s gizzard and hanging it from the highest yardarm, then tells Maureen O’ Hara how he’ll soon see Power dangling in chains from an even higher gibbet. Nothing remotely as violent actually happens in the movie, and certainly nothing in the behavior of any character suggests it will. The Black Swan is itself a lot of bilge and blather, but enjoyable none the less, if only for being on and off in 85 minutes (I understand the new Pirates of The Caribbean sequel runs 150 minutes, including four or five apparent endings prior to the actual one). I will say Laird Cregar is absolutely resplendent in period attire. This man could have lived and prospered three centuries ago, I have no doubt of that. Maybe someone should have taught Ty that No Means No insofar as his dealings with Maureen --- she gives a pretty convincing show of not wanting anything to do with him, and yet he persists. Come to think of it, this woman’s always pushing guys away --- remember To The Shores Of Tripoli, The Quiet Man, all those costume shows where she’d rather run the man through with a sword than go to bed with him (and don’t forget the time she gave Brian Keith that wicked black eye)? Man, I would just give up. So long, baby, it can’t be that good! The veritable treasure chest referred to in a trade ad shown here amounted to $5.7 million worldwide. There was $2.5 domestic, $3.1 foreign, and a profit of $2.3 million. This was the biggest money 20th Fox had seen in its history, and would not be surpassed until after the war and Leave Her To Heaven.

Edge Of Outside On TCM


Some nice TCM producers sent me a DVD screener to look at and review on Greenbriar Picture Shows. I said OK even though six months with this site should have confirmed the fact that I am nobody’s idea of a legitimate film (or documentary) critic. Lots of other folks out on the Web have no doubt appraised Edge Of Outside by now, and since virtually all of them know more about independent filmmakers than I do, you should read them and not me today. Here’s how ignorant I am --- you know the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of John Cassevetes? Condemned men don’t have to drill! He’s totally Franco for me! --- always will be --- and that’s how dumb I am about Cassevetes. Should I go out and find his movies? I mean those outsider movies he directed where the camera jiggles around and goes out of focus. Well, I still liked Edge Of Outside --- enjoyed it more than I thought I would --- and that’s no backhanded compliment. I’m just a little suspicious of those rebel filmmakers. Maybe because I’m too conventional. Judging by the clips in this documentary, those guys were really intense. There were all kinds of bug-eyed close-ups, people running from one thing or another, characters creeping up dark alleys, humanity’s refuse falling into the abyss. I see those things most mornings at the place where I have breakfast, so I was not terribly shocked, but didn’t any of these indie rebels ever try to be funny every now and then? They mentioned Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen during the show, but no scenes. Just more people getting their heads blown off. Edge Of Outside has vintage interview footage with Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray. If those old guys acted as kooky toward studio bosses during their directorial heyday as they do in these interviews, they’d have never gotten work. I always feel a little sorry for veteran filmmakers who lived past the mid-sixties and felt pressured from then on to establish and maintain their anti-establishment bonafides. Sam and Nick didn’t have to toot that rebel horn for a bunch of camp-following kids prodding them on to tell increasingly unlikely anecdotes about "subverting" Hollywood formulae. Their movies speak for themselves. Watching these old men bursting a blood vessel to show how non-conformist they’d been makes me wish I’d been there to say --- Hold it, Nick. Cool it, Sam. You don’t have to prove a thing to these brats. Have some cocoa and relax. You’ve earned it.


Old (before his time) Sam Peckinpah shows up too. Well, if he’s not a rebel, who is? Man, you could feel like a rebel just interviewing Sam. He sensed that too, cause he really plays up the image on these excerpts, going on about "good whores" and "bad whores" (as in directors) until I’d lost track of what the hell he was getting at. Do you suppose if Sam were around today they’d let him shoot the heads off those live chickens like he did back in 1973? Not me --- I think the dude would be sensitivity training-bound at the very least (and here’s my cue to post a nice shot of Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea from Sam’s Ride The High Country). Stanley Kubrick gets another airing as well. A critic named David Thomson, who wrote a good Biographical Dictionary Of Film a long while back, puts the needle to Stan --- something about the emperor having no clothes (but wait --- I like Barry Lyndon!). He also speaks of Orson Welles as though they were buddies. The whole time Welles was on camera, I kept wondering if he tied that elaborate Easter bow around his neck each day (you know, the one he wore with that ultra-oversized Paladin suit) or if it was a clip-on --- must have taken half the morning to get the thing just right. I have trouble enough with ordinary neckties, so I guess this is just further evidence of Welles’ genius. Did I mention that I liked this documentary? Well, I did, and you should watch it next time it’s on TCM. Just one more niggling concern as we close --- Is there anyone out there who doesn’t want to be a rebel? Don’t we all seek independent status, even when we order pizza? Since everyone identifies him (or her) self with the rebels, who’s left to fill the role of plodding, unimaginative functionary? Not me! I’m so rebellious that before this program was over, I was rebelling against the rebels. Where do I get the feeling that college students will like this show best? Honestly, it made me want to go out and shoot a feature myself, even though I’m way too old now. Wonder if there’s some place in town where I can get a flock of chickens …

Ann Sheridan --- Part Two
Periods of suspension could be weeks or months in hell, particularly when your employer was Warner Bros. Ann Sheridan recalled that during such periods, others on the studio payroll were instructed to ignore the outcast --- it was like having rabies minus foam around your mouth. The money faucet was cut off as well, and then as now, folks lived from check to check. Stars with hungry familial mouths to feed were quickly brought to heel --- Davis and Bogart were two who could ill afford to remain outside studio gates for long. Suck-up Hollywood columnists would always side with bosses --- it was all too easy to tar recalcitrant stars with the ingratitude brush. Who do these pampered, overpaid crybabies think they are, wanting more money while the rest of us are getting by on a fraction of what they make? Eventually you were either starved out or shamed into submission. Not that movie stars were the best judge of material --- Ann Sheridan turned down Mildred Pierce, and I can well envision her standing in front of her vanity mirror repeating Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! on Joan’s Oscar night. The bad had it over the good about two to one by the forties (her calculation was right on that score) --- there was Edge Of Darkness, which was good (here’s she and Flynn taking a break from that one), Navy Blues which wasn’t --- and then she says no to The Strawberry Blonde, so there were miscalculations on both sides. Late-in-life Raoul Walsh remembered the drinking she and Flynn had done on Silver River, and that helped run the negative up to $3.2 million, impossible to get back for a black-and-white western with two stars past their prime. Cessation of hostilities meant cessation of Sheridan’s wartime following. People just weren’t going to movies like they used to, let alone to see her. Buying her way out of Warners, she had to face the encroachment of age (on Sheridan, the mid-thirties looked to be at least that plus ten more), and an unemployment line filled with one-time contract names now on their uppers.


The free lance route had some potholes. I Was A Male War Bride was a nice break, but the move to Universal found her diving headfirst into a dry percentage well. It had flowed for the big names --- James Stewart had his legendary share of the gross for doing Winchester ’73 in 1950, then Tyrone Power netted over three quarters of a million for his piece of The Mississippi Gambler in 1953. Maybe those guys had better accountants watching the U-I books on their behalf, or perhaps it was just the fact that they were James Stewart and Tyrone Power and thus commanded greater respect. All Ann Sheridan got was a lot of big-money promises (toward getting her to forfeit up-front money) and four indifferent pictures of which only one paid out (Universal finally had to, she said later). She got her fee for Come Next Spring before the cameras turned, but producer/star Steve Cochran didn’t, and he’d chase Republic bookkeepers round and round for several years before finally giving up. This may be Sheridan’s best fifties work. Its latter-day obscurity is undeserved, for this is one beautiful slice of Americana. I didn’t know until reading Annie’s interview that Cochran had masterminded it --- and here I was thinking old Steve was good for nothing except cuckolding Dana Andrews and trying to bump off Jim Cagney (and both times for the sake of Virginia Mayo!). According to Sheridan, Republic made no effort toward good bookings for Come Next Spring, as they didn’t own it outright, so down it sank like a stone. Good luck seeing it now.




What’s an aging actress to do in the sixties other than Summer stock, horror films, or soap operas? Annie missed out on the shockers, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. She was happy enough to do one (or more), but no offers came her way, other than preliminary feelers for Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, but what actress of a certain age wasn’t considered (and eventually passed over) after Crawford took her powder? Sheridan was one of those who’d work round the clock if they’d let her. Another World at NBC was a mid-sixties address, and she happily rose at 4 a.m. to drive into Brooklyn for tapings. Stage work was a grind she didn’t mind; though she was wary of shark promoters anxious to trade on her name and run her through tank towns for a fast buck. Summer stock marathons tried her trouper patience when she found herself sharing footlights with local amateurs barely conversant with dialogue and likely as not to fall asleep on their cues. It must have been some thrill for a community player in Podunk to trod boards with Ann Sheridan, but it sure as hell wasn’t doing Ann Sheridan any favors --- that plus Howard-Johnson’s and blue plate specials --- she had to love her craft to endure this. By all accounts, she did indeed. Even when cancer took hold in 1966, she managed a series for CBS called Pistols n’ Petticoats, which Sheridan did despite the pain --- she died January 21, 1967.




A note on these stills, and a few of Ann Sheridan’s observations on the films. She said Cary Grant ended up winging much of his dialogue for I Was A Male War Bride, and pretty much ran the show as far as their shared comedy bits (not that Sheridan minded --- she knew it would help). Good Sam was a snake-bit pairing with Gary Cooper. She got along with him, but knew they had not one drop of chemistry. Funny how that can happen even when two actors as good as these get together. Nora Prentiss was a Warners effort to shoehorn Annie into a Mildred Pierce knock-off, but maybe she was better suited to a lighter touch, like the one she employed with Jack Benny in George Washington Slept Here. Did I read somewhere that these two had an off-screen dalliance during that one? Yeah, I think I did! Anyway, The Doughgirls with Charlie Ruggles, Jane Wyman, and Alexis Smith was one of those "bad" ones she talked about in the interview, but she loved working with Wyman and Smith. Women seemed to get along with Sheridan. She wasn't into the tooth-and-claw thing --- even Bette Davis calmed down on The Man Who Came To Dinner once she realized Annie had no interest in a rivalry. One odd postscript --- she raised and sold poodles (as in dogs) for over ten years (1948-59) in partnership with a vet friend. Profits were minimal as she kept giving the animals away to people she liked. Good-hearted woman. Nice writing about one of those.

That pioneering career article with Ann Sheridan was conducted by writer Ray Hagen and appeared first in Screen Facts magazine (Issue 14 --- published 1966). It has since been reprinted in an excellent collection of essays, Killer Tomatoes: 15 Tough Film Dames, which covers actresses of the Classic Era, including Sheridan, Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak, Gloria Grahame, and many others. Highly recommended!

Monday Glamour Starter --- Ann Sheridan --- Part One

Ann Sheridan may have had too much "oomph" for her own good. Like so many pretty faces, she suffered the indifference of studio bosses who assumed she couldn’t act, or felt her profit potential could best be served with grass skirts and evening gowns. She had to ride out a lot of bad pictures at Warners, or as she more accurately put it, I had to give them two bad ones for every good one they gave me. Sheridan had a wry appreciation for the absurdity of stardom, which was borne out of a stable upbringing and sensible values. Nobody ever got to beat her up or steal her money. She only made it to 51, but she'd come by more wisdom in that short time than most of her contemporaries ever would. Annie might have been another Bette Davis had it not been for Bette Davis. How do you get decent parts when the Queen Of The Lot cherry picks them all? According to Sheridan, any script that came to her bore Bette’s paw prints, and everyone from Jack Warner and Hal Wallis on down knew that meaty roles were wasted on oomph girls anyway (Ida Lupino was another Warner actress obliged to make do on Davis’ leavings). King’s Row may have been actor’s Heaven for Annie and the entire ensemble cast, but that was a real anomaly --- most of the screen work she did benefited her leading men far more than Sheridan.





Having come up by way of beauty pageants, Sheridan understood too well hopes that can be dashed against those studio walls. Her own Paramount contract, at $50 per week, was the result of winning a "Search For Beauty" contest cynically conducted by the studio as a means of garnering cheap local publicity. Young people from all around the country were drawn into the hope-for-stardom net, and it captured Sheridan in Texas, where she’d been raised. Thirty-three boys and girls were awarded the time-honored Free Trip To Hollywood, but only six would remain. Sheridan described their routine in a mid-sixties interview in which she reminisced about life at Paramount in the mid-thirties. Most days were spent filling extra spots --- bits if you were lucky --- standing in for someone’s hands or feet perhaps (or a Randy Scott western, as seen here in 1935’s Rocky Mountain Mystery). There was a "stock company" for the youngsters --- they’d put on plays for lot producers and front-office types who’d size them up for more substantive work. The group picture shown here includes Ann Sheridan on the right, Ida Lupino fifth from the right, and the one cast member with screen experience, Larry "Buster" Crabbe, fourth from the left. The play was The Double Door, and most of these youngsters would be sent packing within a few months. Out of the six contract winners in the "Search For Beauty" contest, Ann Sheridan would be the only one to achieve stardom. As to the rest, we can only speculate. Julian Madison, Colin Tapley, Gwenllian Gill, Alfred Delcambre, Eldred Tidbury --- what became of them? Did they go back to their (no doubt) small towns and sell insurance? Teach school, drama classes perhaps? People only remember the winners --- here I am writing about one of them --- but wouldn’t it be great to hear Colin’s story, or Eldred’s? I’d sure like to know what Gwenllian’s homecoming was like. All that build-up and expectation. I’ll bet a lot of them never went back home at all. It would have been just too painful.




Perhaps on the theory that oomph girls needed less to eat, Warners paid Sheridan just $700 a week, even after she’d hit the big time following several years servitude in "B’s." Paramount had let her go, and a resourceful agent got her on at WB. From this point, she’d at least have billing for everything she did, however low. The glamour quotient was low too --- mostly she was a wife or girlfriend --- put upon and pointing the way toward the villain’s whereabouts (as in Black Legion, shown here). Her lot was no worse than anyone else’s, and maybe it was conditions on the Warner lot that made her sad girl performances so convincing. Angels With Dirty Faces found her beaten down by the streets as usual, but this time it was opposite Cagney (shown here), and they had something together --- or maybe he just made all the leading ladies opposite him look good. Any doubts about their teamwork would be removed with Torrid Zone --- she’s the only Howard Hawks woman to appear in a movie not directed by Howard Hawks --- she and Cagney played more seriously to City For Conquest, and yes, it’s overwrought at times, but when the power’s on in this one, it delivers a shock (Googie’s death scene as enacted by Elia Kazan --- priceless!). Her bawdy dialogue with George Raft in They Drive By Night traded on the massive publicity garnered by the "oomph" label, all well and good for a Raoul Walsh action show, but Warners was selling King’s Row the same way, emphasizing Sheridan’s newly minted sex image with atrociously lurid ads. Bad pictures and poor wages led to rebellion, suspension, the usual Warner Bros. saga --- then independence, television, summer stock, and soap operas to follow --- all subjects for tomorrow’s Part 2.

But Which One Gets To Choose?


Well, first of all, this smartly dressed couple would be pretty incongruous in a movie theatre today, wouldn’t they? Sue’s hat and glove ensemble’s right at home for these stellar entries in Warner’s 1941 line-up, however. I've always been given to understand that the woman makes the ultimate choice as to what a couple will go to see, but Sue looks game for the whole shelf of WB offerings, as does her escort. In fact, she’s "almost as anxious" to see The Maltese Falcon and Sergeant York as she is to see her "darling" escort. Well, that’s understandable. It is The Maltese Falcon, after all. Jeopardizing the relationship for the likes of Navy Blues and International Squadron may be something else again, but in those days, you had at the very least a menu of short subjects or a co-feature to cover your losses from a punk attraction at the top-of-the-bill. Nine dates to Warner Bros. shows will surely be enough to seal the deal for this young couple --- love takes flight on the wings of Dive Bomber.

What's Frank Up To Here?


The Sinatra image obviously lent itself to this sort of advertising, but I do wonder what this Indian costume surrounded by the whiskey bottles thing is all about. Another ad? Somehow I doubt it. Anyway, it seemed the best idea was to pass along the frustration to Greenbriar readers, who by now should be accustomed to it. I don’t think I would have approached Frank’s table to admonish him about his smoking. He would likely not have had Clark Gable’s forbearance. I did read once that Sinatra seldom finished a cigarette once he lit it. Two of three puffs and he’d put it out. Of course, he’d light up another one moments later. No doubt Frank left a trail of barely spent fags in his wake. Maybe that’s why people followed him around so much --- just awaiting their chance to dive for his Chesterfield.

Out On The Town


Night club shots in color have a certain magic that makes you feel as though you’re standing right there --- maybe in the role of a star-struck waiter or pesky photographer. Either way it’s Hollywood artifice at its most endearing --- each of those celebrity-studded booths has a story to tell. These shots weren’t captioned, so if I misidentify one of the luminaries, be sure to call me on it. First we have Joan Crawford and, I think, husband Phillip Terry. Phil’s always been a chameleon for me. He can look dashing, as here, or tentative, if not weak, in a part like The Lost Weekend, where he played Ray Milland’s upright brother. I do know he sat up, rolled over, and barked for Joan. I’d guess Phil was mostly his Lost Weekend self when they were at home. John Payne’s with Ginny Simms on a wartime date. I know Ginny by her toothy smile (now watch someone come along and propose another toothy actress). She’d been Kay Kyser’s band singer and off-stage amour. Payne was leading manning it opposite Betty Grable and Alice Faye at Fox. He’d achieve postwar greatness as a gone-to-seed noir dweller in Kansas City Confidential, Slightly Scarlet, and other 50’s faves. Jane Withers reached for the glamour ring but never quite caught it. She comes close here with bobby-sox idol Farley Granger, but what chance would any companion have against that way-cool suit Farley sports here?

The Ghost Of Frankenstein

















As a monster-besotted boy in the mid-sixties, I was often heard whistling incidental Hans J. Salter themes in school corridors, having seen The Ghost Of Frankenstein on at least five occasions by the summer of 1966. Stirring music accompanying the villager’s assault upon Frankenstein’s castle was way more satisfying to me than the Beatles or Stones could ever hope to be, and there were magazines such as Famous Monsters and Castle Of Frankenstein (presumably written and edited by adults) to provide reassurance of kindred spirits being out there somewhere, even if few of them appeared to be living in my neighborhood. Exploring the web has since revealed to me astounding numbers whose childhood appeared to mirror my own. Seems we were all reading the same magazines, watching the same movies, and collecting the same Aurora models --- like some silent, invincible army unknowingly linked by a network of shared totems around which we all paid homage. What if we’d gotten together then? Imagine the power at our boyish disposal (yes, it was a boy’s world --- girls seldom applied)! Would we have started with a reign of terror, like the Invisible Man? Could we have made the world grovel at our feet? Society may well have been spared a terrible adolescent onslaught. Today, our numbers equal, if not surpass, the previous generation’s own cultural phenomenon --- the "B" western fan. Once they had conventions, published fanzines, wrote books. Now it’s our turn. The monster boomer era may well be at its summit, but it can’t last. What then, will take its place? When will we see the organized uprising of fandom’s next generation and what, or who, will be the object of their veneration?

Things get right down to business in Ghost Of Frankenstein. No sooner does the director’s credit fade out than we’re off to destroy the castle. There’s a get-it-done efficiency about these 40’s Universals I can’t help but admire, even with gothic atmosphere of the originals tossed aside in favor of speed and increased mayhem. Characters often fixate on unexplained disappearances at Universal. In Son Of Frankenstein, it was Benson, the butler. Someone’s always annoying Wolf about his whereabouts. Rathbone would have played a much better game of darts if only Elsa and Inspector Krough hadn’t belabored it so. Ghost Of Frankenstein has everyone dashing around in search of Dr. Kettering. He’s like an unseen Rebecca in the Hitchcock film (although as I recall, he is glimpsed). I have on occasion dreamed of Dr. Kettering --- one of those where they make me get up and go looking for him in my pajamas as though I were Ralph Bellamy. Speaking of Ralph, and other Ghost Of Frankenstein cast members --- has anyone noticed how they always stand with arms limp at their sides? I mean, just hanging there. No crossing, no hands in pockets nor playing with watch fobs or snuffboxes. Just limp and motionless as they stand there and discuss Dr. Kettering. I’ve read that an actor’s greatest problem is what to do with his/her hands, but this doesn’t seem natural to me. I tried it with Ann earlier today and she asked what was wrong with my arms --- but everyone in Ghost Of Frankenstein seems to be grooving with it. Arms hung down all around. Maybe actors are trained that way, or maybe director Erle C. Kenton insisted --- Ralph, you move that damn arm again and I swear I’ll come over there and cut it off!



I think Lionel Atwill is a paragon among actors. That’s why I’ve included a portrait of him here. His is the best performance in Ghost Of Frankenstein, and considering the fact he was personally up against it at the time makes his work all the more impressive. Seems Lionel served as host for some Bacchanalian Hollywood orgies in which aspiring starlets gamboled on tiger rugs before "roaring fires" as home exhibitor Atwill manned the 16mm projector for a series of hard-core stag reels. Blackmailers got him by the throat eventually, and the whole thing wound up in the tabs. Months of public humiliation and one perjury conviction later, Lionel found himself persona-non-grata in polite filmland society. The only lot in town where he could get work was Universal. I’d like to think his low-key (but nevertheless intense) presence in Ghost Of Frankenstein reflects greater turmoil going on outside studio gates, and that Atwill’s playing out bitterness he must surely have felt over raw deals he was getting from the DA’s office. By the way, the little girl on Chaney’s knee is Janet Ann Gallow, as if you didn’t know. Janet was a mystery woman and object of lifelong quests for monster fans for many years, but now she’s back among us. So is Donnie Dunagan, the curly-haired son-of-the Son Of Frankenstein (well, hel-lo!). Donnie’s resurfacing was better than finding Amelia Earhart and Judge Crater eating together at MacDonald’s. He’s become a kind of Holy Man and object of fan pilgrimages ever since. The fact that he’s a charismatic, got-it-together individual with a vivid recollection of his 1939 work in Son is just that much icing on a monster kid’s cake.



Weren’t we talking about Ghost Of Frankenstein? Then what’s this color pin-up of Evelyn Ankers about? Nothing except for the fact I’ve never seen it before, and am hopeful readers haven’t either. Evelyn was a major crush for boys walking around school humming Hans J. Salter themes (I was more a Sidney Fox/Valerie Hobson/Irene Ware man myself, but each to his own taste). This dripping-with-atmosphere black-and-white Universal ad has no doubt set off recognition signals among veteran Castle Of Frankenstein readers, as it appeared on the inside back cover of issue number six. I think it was seeing this image in 1965 that made me truly fall in love with vintage pressbook art --- and Universal’s was always among the best of it. With so many ongoing sequels in those days, they had to keep reassuring patrons that this was a new picture --- notice those three mentions in the Ghost Of Frankenstein ad --- and I’ll bet 1942 kids still asked, Hey Mister Exhibitor, are you sure this is a new picture? As always, I'm awed by marquee displays of the quality shown here. Judging by obvious effort that went into designing them, I would have been content to pay my dime’s (or whatever) admission just for the privilege of looking at this showman’s handiwork.

Captain Video In The Movies

I wish I’d been ten years old around 1954 so I could look at shows like Captain Video, Rocky Jones -- Space Ranger, and Space Patrol on a primitive black-and-white television with one of those peculiar roundish screens. By the appearance of (few) surviving episodes today, it must have been like watching animated cave drawings. These were puppet shows with people instead of socks. Guys would sit for thirty minutes in front of a "control panel" and talk endlessly about whatever galaxy they happened to be passing through, but we never saw anything other than painted backdrops. They say Captain Video’s TV adventures were filmed largely on an upstairs floor at a Manhattan hotel. Virtually all were unceremoniously dumped into New York harbor over forty-five years ago, so I’m unable to offer anything other than anecdotal evidence as to what Captain Video might have been like on TV, but I can tell you that Columbia’s serial spin-off is great. They shot it late in 1951 after two years of popularity generated on the twenty-four nationwide DuMont network affiliates (we didn’t have one in North Carolina). DuMont claimed it was the first television series adapted for the movies, forgetting the previous year’s The Goldbergs, and perhaps one or two others as well. Each hand washed the other, as theatres were encouraged to promote the Captain Video series in their lobbies (broadcast Monday-Friday), while DuMont followed TV episodes with a slide announcing Columbia’s serial.




Determined to sample early TV sci-fi, I put on a DVD of some Rocky Jones – Space Ranger shows. Within ten minutes, I was slipping in and out of consciousness to the reassuring monotonic recitation of various scientific principles as they apply to space travel and quelling interstellar despots. It was like that relaxing sensation you get when you’re lying in bed and it’s raining outside. Rocky’s adventures evoked a gentle downpour on a tin roof for me --- who needs Ambien when you’ve got a sleep aid like this? Anyway, it was as close as I could get to a real Captain Video episode, but if the Videos were as economical as the Rockys, then I’ll have to say this Columbia serial, cheap as it is, looks like Intolerance beside them. There’s the usual combination of rocket ships and 40’s sedans, each racing thither and yon to no discernable purpose, and the special effects have a way of reaffirming their determination to be as unconvincing as possible with each succeeding chapter. Animation is used to depict flights through space in much the same manner as Superman "flew" in those two Columbia serial monstrosities that preceded Captain Video. There are no women in this serial --- not one that I recall --- so you need not worry about mushy stuff, though I did ponder as to how the Captain’s youthful sidekick, "Video Ranger," could be expected to develop necessary social skills amidst such a total deprivation of feminine association, but perhaps I take these things too seriously.




The inspired use of Cinecolor allows us to view the various outlaw planets in a pleasing mosaic of tinted hues, as you can see here in captured frames. This really livened up the serial for me, even though each and all of those planets looked very much like terrain that had hosted Tim McCoy, Charles Starrett, Gene Autry, and maybe even the Three Stooges. Speaking of Autry, there is an "army" of robots (I counted three) whose service record went all the way back to The Phantom Empire in 1935 --- and even beyond that --- having made their initial screen appearance opposite Joan Crawford in a deleted musical number from Dancing Lady (1933)! Judd Holdren is Captain Video, or should I say Judd Holdren is Captain Video. Anyway, he's the titular character, and as it turned out, this would be one of Judd's few leads. Others have accused him of abominable thesping, as though he were reading lines off-camera not seen hitherto. Again, I don’t like to be hard on actors. Holdren is not a Gielgud. His resume did not likely include seasons at the Old Vic, and yet he’s perfect here amidst the cut-rate trappings of a Columbia 50’s serial, and so I doff my hat to his memory, and Larry (youthful woman-deprived Video Ranger) Stewart’s as well.




Captain Video delivered sockeroo coin and quickly took pride of place at the very top of Columbia’s serial grosser charts, ranking all time third highest behind Superman (domestic rentals of $856,000) and Atom Man vs. Superman ($528,000) with a tidy haul of $398,000, mighty healthy numbers for a serial in those declining years. Columbia really got behind the product too, as you’ll see from numerous tie-ins shown here. Those Post cereals were no doubt consumed on camera during the TV show --- intergalactic warriors frequently hawked mail-in premiums and bric-a-brac. I like that very stylish Captain Video playsuit --- I shouldn’t think a child would be remiss in wearing it to Sunday School --- sans holster, of course, though I’ve no doubt dress codes were somewhat more rigid in 1951. The Captain Video wallet probably lasted about as long as my cousin’s Famous Monsters Of Filmland billfold, which is to say no more than a month or so, though I still envied him that colorful accessory. Imagine a 1951 exhibitor ordering these comic books by the hundreds for two and a half cents apiece. What an annuity those would be today! Forward thinking showmen could build a place in Florida for what they're no doubt worth. Major studios weren't above using Captain Video to promote their own theatrical product. Here he is selling The Rocket Man, a 1954 sci-fi comedy from Fox. If I had the smarts to learn "Captain Video Talk," I’d probably chuck this site and apply to medical school. The serial is awash with technical mumbo-jumbo that would stump Stephen Hawking --- believe me, the words shown here are the easy ones. The Captain Video club card was a given for any serial --- theatres would issue one to each child with the first chapter, then punch out numbers as they returned for succeeding shows --- the payoff would be a free admission for the conclusion of the chapterplay. Exhibitors were also encouraged to "invite local scientists" to a screening of the first chapter, after which they would be interviewed as to the remarkable "harbingers of future triumphs" on view in Captain Video. Those future triumphs would include but a few more Columbia serials, as the company would throw in the towel five years later with the final chapterplay of them all, Blazing The Overland Trail.

They Did Get Back Together After All ...


I’ve always heard these two didn’t really hit it off during Gone With The Wind. I think the story got started with that Ann Edwards book on Vivien Leigh. Not that they actually fought or anything --- just weren’t each other’s type, apparently. But I’d always wondered if they ever met up again --- like at a party or a premiere or something. We know Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh never worked together after Gone With The Wind, but surely they occupied the same space at some point. Well, here’s two shots I’ve found so far --- the only two --- and since I don’t expect to encounter more, now’s as good a time as any to present them both for quick comparison. The first is from from 1940 --- Gable’s visiting the set of Waterloo Bridge --- the two look convivial enough here, don’t you think? He probably dropped over from Comrade X or Strange Cargo. The nightclub pose is ten years later, and you can really see the miles on both their faces. They’d both endured a war up close, Gable had lost one wife and unwisely took another, Vivien was headed toward her own emotional tumult that would shorten her career (although it was around this time, 1950, that she started work on A Streetcar Named Desire). If I could have approached their table that night, I would have probably told Clark to put out that nasty cigarette and never, ever smoke another one --- then when I regained consciousness out in the parking lot an hour or so later, I would perhaps ask the Mike Mazurki/I Walk Alone looking doorman/bouncer if he would please go to the kitchen and bring me back a piece of raw meat for my black eye. But I would have at least gotten that Surgeon General’s warning to Gable (even if it was fifteen years early), and done my good deed for the evening.

Pimping Our Gang At Metro

To say the 52 MGM produced Our Gang comedies are a scurvy and miserable lot would be to state the obvious. They had few defenders then and less now. Kids used to blanch at the sight of them on TV. In anticipation of writing this piece, I took down a laser disc and watched three --- Aladdin’s Lantern, Alfalfa’s Aunt, and Clown Princes. Now these are supposed to be among the better Metro gang-ers, but I found them torturous going. They took me back to Fred Kirby programs (our local singing cowboy Little Rascals host, and subject of a previous Greenbriar posting) where these shorts polluted otherwise good selections from among Hal Roach originals. I understand why Hal had to sell the Gang unit to MGM --- it was 1938 and short subjects were finished for him, but what Metro did to this venerable series was beyond shameful. The kids now lived among interchangeable Andy Hardy households (as opposed to the grinding poverty often depicted in the Roach depression era subjects), and each child respected his/her elders and minded parents at all times. Spanky, Darla, Alfalfa, Porky, and Buckwheat made the transition, but forfeited whatever was left of their spontaneity back at the Roach lot. Polished performers yes, but that was never what we wanted from these kids, and new cast members of the Mickey Gubitosi /"Froggy" Laughlin/Janet Burston variety could set teeth further at edge. Mickey (later Robert Blake) wept and whined endlessly. Froggy had a frighteningly coarsened voice that caused me to wonder if they’d made him drink bleach prior to each day’s shooting, and Janet was --- well, let’s just say there have been no efforts to track her latter-day whereabouts, only the hope that wherever Miss Burston is, she will stay there.



Metro liked to collect awards for their civic-minded outreach toward the betterment of communities, and weren’t above using Our Gang toward those ends. On this occasion, "The National Motion Picture Traffic Safety Council" crawled into bed with MGM and lent its expertise toward production of an Our Gang "comedy" (I use that term sparingly, as it applies to so few of these things) entitled 1-2-3 Go, which was a Spring 1941 release. The idea was to enlighten children (and their parents!) about the hazards of pedestrian walkway carelessness, and wouldn’t you know blubbering little Mickey’s the one that gets run over chasing his ball into the street. From here, the short degenerates into a litany of speeches about intersection safety and the need for greater caution on our nation’s street corners. Sheer agony. The Metro suck-up to civic responsibility continued apace with this ceremony in which distinctly uncomfortable Our Gang members (look at poor Froggy) were obliged to appear before an audience of "school traffic officers and faculty advisors from more than six hundred elementary, junior, and senior high schools." There were also city officials, church leaders, and officers of prominent women’s organizations. These were all catnip for Metro PR staffers, who saw a golden opportunity to emphasize all the good and positive aspects of motion picture patronage. That peculiar idol being presented to Mickey Gubitosi looks like something Eddie Robinson and his followers might have worshipped in The Ten Commandments, but it's actually an award MGM collected for having made 1-2-3 Go. Note the Our Gang kids receiving on-stage instruction from uniformed police --- the program included a segment wherein "student traffic officers" instructed the Gang on "the proper procedure for conducting people across the street." Can you imagine how insufferable those student officers must have been? Talk about institutionalized tattle tailing! Still I wish I’d been there. This had to be one stomach-churning afternoon of mutual backslapping, award whoring, and child manipulation. It shouldn’t have happened to dogs, let alone Our Gang kids --- even if they were MGM Our Gang kids.

Monday Glamour Starter --- Shirley Temple

Watching Shirley Temple kid-era pictures may have been akin to having your fingernails pried out with tongs, but she sure grew into some dish, and that’s the girl we celebrate today. The first time I saw Since You Went Away (great movie), I thought she was plenty alright, and it seemed odd that roving bachelor Joe Cotten didn’t cotton to her rather than aging matriarch Claudette Colbert --- but hold everything, Shirley was just sixteen (as in sweet), and Selznick was selling her accordingly. Toward concealing her comely attributes, he instructed studio torture specialists to strap down her expanding bosom (just as they had with our Judy) and dress her out in kiddy ribbons. Some of this plays out like a WWII Lolita, but Shirley was a gal who just couldn’t help it. According to her excellent memoir, Child Star (you can score a used hardbound copy on Amazon for sixty cents), there were any number of randy producers and execs who succumbed to her charms as well. For instance, here’s one that happened when she was twelve, and it was during her first interview with famed producer Arthur Freed. This was 1941, and Shirley was poised to sign with MGM after leaving Fox the previous year. They were sitting alone in Freed’s office when he suddenly "flourished his clothes" (exposed himself), to which S.T. responded with an attack of giggles. Art hadn’t expected that. Needless to say, it cooled his ardor. Could this be the reason Shirley only lasted for one picture at Metro (Kathleen --- shown here)?



Turns out Shirley was really thirteen when she thought she was twelve. Her mother made the startling confession on her birthday. Just one more deception practiced upon her by caring parents (hold on, Jackie Coogan and Mary Miles Minter, we’re coming!). Shirley’s memories of the dressing rooms at Metro are sure an antidote to that glamour blab Frank lays on us at the beginning of That’s Entertainment. According to her, the place stank. Literally. "A locker-room odor", as she describes it. And you thought you’d like to be an MGM star? Sounds like freshman P.E. (ugh --- lemme go lie down a few minutes). Critics noticed Shirley’s precocity in her next vehicle, Miss Annie Rooney (they classed her "between a paper doll and a sweater girl"), but co-star Dickie Moore, who bestowed her first screen kiss, found her plenty exciting company. So did a masher at the Hollywood Egyptian when Shirley and some of her girlfriends from school went to see I Walked With A Zombie there. This guy had the same idea as Freed, only he figured on letting Shirley’s fingers do the walking. In a crowded theater, yet! Couldn’t he have just been satisfied to watch what must have been a stunning first-run nitrate 35mm print of I Walked With A Zombie projected on carbon-arc equipment? I would have been (sorry, Shirley --- raincheck?).



Growing (fast) Shirley spent the best teenage years of her life under contract to David O. Selznick. He first came on to her when she was 17, and again a year or so later. She started bringing a pack of dogs with her for all their office conferences (Dave actually chased her around his desk once!). It was a town full of "copulating tomcats", she said (by the way, the auto-bio was written longhand, so I’d say it’s her voice we’re getting). How could she get any movies made with all these wolves nipping at her well-turned ankles? Besides Since You Went Away, they’re a mostly undistinguished lot. One good one was Fort Apache (shown here). It co-starred new husband John Agar, whom she made the grievous mistake of marrying when she was 17. He was but a child too (though in his twenties, at least), so we boomer sci-fi mavens are more inclined to overlook much of "Sergeant Jack’s" (her appellation) bad behavior during their wedded lack of bliss. Having encountered an elderly Agar at fan shows, he seemed like the sweetest guy in the world. It’s true he dealt harshly with oversized tarantulas, but these were actions appropriate to the occasion. Maybe it was the brain from planet Arous that made him suggest a three-way with a drunken pick-up he once brought home to Shirley. Anyway, things went kaput, but here’s a neat story Shirley tells. Remember the night they raided Bob Mitchum’s reefer party? A detective friend of Shirley’s invited her along for the bust! She declined, only because she didn’t want to get tagged at the scene and risk bad publicity.



I should mention that Cary Grant tried to have Shirley fired off The Bachelor and The Bobby-Soxer after he walked in on her impromptu, and highly exaggerated, impersonation of him before a howling cast and crew. Selznick made her apologize. When she did, Cary graciously accepted and told her the mimic routine was actually pretty good (guess he just needed to bring the wiseacre kid in line). Another cast member was not so forgiving. Veteran Ray Collins, of Mercury Theatre and Lt. Tragg fame, blew lines to a point where Shirley finally said, "You’re too old to be working." "Bitch…," said he, "Dirty little bitch!" before storming off the set. Oh, and lest we forget the parents. Does it come as any surprise that, out of $3,207,666 in gross earnings for her years of stardom, Shirley ended up in 1951 with $89,000 --- half in cash and half in the value of her old "doll house" she’d lived in with Agar? Slippery explanations from parents and their bookkeeper couldn’t account for such massive losses, but Shirley’s own investigation revealed that her father had misappropriated the better part of the money she’d made with Selznick, in addition to the cash from Fox that had long since been frittered away. For the sake of family harmony, she let it go. Forgiving woman. As things turned out, she got by fine with (successful) marriage number two and retirement from features, though she would come back for television and The Shirley Temple Scrapbook (I think some of those have come out recently on colorized DVD). She was far and away the biggest child star in talking pictures, and she managed to enjoy a happy adult life besides (she’s now 78). How many others can claim that distinction?

Why Pick On Orson?

There were plenty of people wanting to take Orson Welles down a peg or two long before Hollywood and Citizen Kane. He was like the smartest kid in the class that everyone resented. "Little Orson Annie" and "Little Boy Boo" were just two of the monikers hung on him by press wags who thought O.W. too big for his britches. Here he’s getting the razz radio's equivalent of schoolyard bullies that no doubt rode him unmercifully when Orson was growing up. Rudy Vallee, Bob Hope, and George Burns are giving him the business over that new beard he’s sporting (a cowboy actor was said to have lately snipped off his tie with a knife and instructed Welles to "get out of town"). Yeah, I’m sure it was "all in fun", but there’s a nasty undercurrent to a lot of Welles’ press coverage from that period just after War Of The Worlds was broadcast. The public didn’t enjoy being played for fools, let alone the media. A lot of this horseplay smells like payback of a faintly cruel sort, and I don't blame Orson for becoming somewhat imperious when real power finally came his way.


Does Paulette Goddard look a little bored in this shot? Well, at the time, Welles’ wife Virginia had just divorced him (shown here proferring the kiss-off), on the theory it’s no fun being married to a genius. Would Paulette concur? After all, she’d had her dish of that (remember Chaplin --- that supreme artist), and there’d be more to come (including Erich Maria Remarque). Chances are Orson won’t waste time pondering Shakespeare or Proust with the immediate post-Ghost Breakers (this is April 1940) babelicious Paulette --- he’ll instead be plotting their eventual retreat back to his private digs at the Garden Of Allah (wouldn’t you?). Meanwhile, back at the studio, fellow staff members get by on tuna sandwiches (if that) while O.W. digs into another Falstaffian repast (to paraphrase Preacher Harry Powell --- My, that steak looks yummy!).

Deanna, How Could You Have Let Them Do This?


I’m a big fan of Deanna’s. I even wrote her a fan letter once and she wrote back. That was before the internet when getting her address meant going to some real effort. Now it’s too easy, with the result being that Deanna and other (former) stars are inundated with autograph requests and what not. This otherwise gorgeous color still disturbs me in one particular way that you may recognize by doing a click and enlarge. Just look at the woman’s mouth. All that lipstick slathered on there looks like a clown’s mask. You can tell her mouth’s not half big enough to absorb all that paint. One thing I hate about glamour photography from that era is when they lay this stuff on so thick. Deanna, sweetie --- you don’t need it. What was it Linda Darnell said in A Letter To Three Wives? What I got don’t need beads. That’s the case here. For a Durbin shot of which I do very much approve, check out this leggy pose. That’s all. Just had to post these before they got mislaid.