Our Gang --- Part Two

By 1935, they’d honed off rougher edges and promoted the Rascals to a level of comfort and stability denied their early talkie brethren. Much of what would eventually undermine the series at MGM began here. Our Gang now ran lemonade stands and put on impromptu shows. Spanky was fussed over by Hattie McDaniel as uniformed domestic in a distinctly middle-class home (Anniversary Troubles) while prosperous parents Gay Seabrook and Emerson Treacy took him to professional photographer Franklin Pangborn in Wild Poses. Spanky’s well-fed appearance reflected a loosening of the depression’s grip. Stories no longer revolved around issues of survival. The He-Man Woman Hater’s Club and golf lessons supplied frameworks for comedy. Would Alfalfa sing in the annual Follies? There was still the ongoing threat of neighborhood bully Butch, but he wasn’t a patch on sinister forces that had once preyed upon the Gang. That bucolic, on-location schoolhouse from earlier days was now replaced by a spanking clean edifice constructed on a Hal Roach soundstage. Classroom mischief was no longer calculated --- just little misunderstandings resolved within a (now) one-reel duration by Roach ingenue Rosina Lawrence. Harsh truths reflected in the early Our Gangs were now innocuous bromides where children were taught life’s lessons and adults no longer represented a threat. If anything, the grown-ups were too ineffectual. Spanky’s future with a neutered Johnny Arthur as father and presumed role model seemed anything but promising. By 1937, Our Gang was the last shorts group still ongoing at Roach, done with precision befitting a newly retrofitted feature manufacturer. Things like Two Too Young (Spanky and Alfalfa think Buckwheat and Porky are too immature to have firecrackers --- who the hell are they to judge?) and The Awful Tooth (dentistry was always ill-advised subject matter for this series) were almost as excruciating as the Metros to come, so there was little cause for regret when Roach (seated here with the Gang at his desk) finally closed the sale in 1938.












No use rehashing the later Our Gangs. Suffice to say they wheezed out in 1944. All the kids were left to fend for themselves. You’d think Metro could have at least kept them on as day players, helped with admission to a trade school ---something. Those bleak early subjects might have prepared older Rascals for what they’d face now. Books have been written about whatever became of, etc. Leonard Maltin and Richard Bann authored the best one. The fifties were barren ground for the gang before television release of the old shorts revitalized interest. A reunion of silent cast members on Art Baker’s You Asked For It was eerily effective for the malaise it revealed among the group (and Mickey Daniels seems slightly demented, as usual). Viewers expecting a glimpse of the Gang they best remembered must have been disappointed, for the silent comedies had been out of circulation for years even then, and would remain so, other than mutilated excerpts on television’s The Mischief Makers, and a small handful in the Interstate syndicated package. We wondered what had become of the talking Rascals, but information along these lines was hard to come by in the sixties, when public curiosity may well have been at its peak due to TV exposure in virtually every market. Everybody knew Alfalfa died in a knife fight over $50 (one kid at school maintained this was Pete The Pup’s fate as well). My interest was piqued when word came that Spanky was distributing home heating oil in Hendersonville, NC (still not sure about that one). Tabloids would report the surfacing of a Fatty or a Stinky, but as these were characters unknown to any period within the Gang’s twenty plus year run, one had to assume Fatty and Stinky were either liars or madmen. There was one surviving Our Gang member I did locate, and to my youthful wonderment, she stood right before me every day teaching sixth grade band…




My instrument was the clarinet, but Priscilla Call knew I was faking most of the notes, as I had no musical talent and less initiative to learn. Mrs. Call had taught band around the county school system for at least ten years. Before that, she’d attended music conservatory. Her long past career as a child actress in movies was known as well, but that was a forbidden topic among we band students. The singing cowboy host of Charlotte TV’s Little Rascals Club was rebuffed when he sought an interview, and Mrs. Call had to deal with the persistent local myth that confused her with Our Gang’s Darla Hood. She was actually Priscilla Lyon during the Hollywood years, landing there by virtue of a Hal Roach sponsored talent show she’d won back in Virginia. It was 1935, the Shirley Temple gold rush was on, and Priscilla’s mother figured on mining some of it. Eventually, the whole family landed in Culver City. The seven-year-old tested for Darla’s part in The Bohemian Girl, then decorated the chorus of The Our Gang Follies Of 1936. Priscilla tap-danced on a shine box in The Lucky Corner, and got feature work where she could. There were more aspiring moppets than buffalo head nickels, so competition was intense. She almost got to play Becky Thatcher in Selznick’s Adventures Of Tom Sawyer, but Ann Gillis prevailed. The Hollywood scene never appealed to Priscilla, so by the time she got out (in 1942), there’d be no tears of parting. Most of the band kids left her alone about the Rascals, but Mrs. Call was aware of my overpowering (if not overbearing) interest in such things, and looking back on it now, I guess both of us knew that there would someday come a reckoning.





That final morning in band found me gingerly approaching the lectern as Mrs. Call conferred with fellow musicians about an upcoming concert. Perhaps she’d not paid sufficient heed to my question so as to realize the terrible consequence in answering … Mrs. Call, Did you ever meet Lon Chaney, Jr.? Her response was a casual yes. When and where? was my next query. Oh, he was making some picture about a werewolf and I stood on the stage and watched, she said, as if that amounted to something less than the supremely momentous event in anyone’s life. My twelve-year-old euphoria must surely have alarmed her. Was Claude Rains there? Did you see Lugosi? Was Jack Pierce on the set to attend Chaney’s make-up? The questions were as rapid-fire as they were relentless. Within five minutes, I’d been relocated to a corridor outside the band room with the understanding that classes would proceed henceforth without benefit of my presence. In short, I was booted out of band. Booted, my dear baron, for knowing too much. Later sightings of Priscilla Call, even in high school, were but fleeting. She’d see me in the hall, dart quickly around a corner, or beat a hasty retreat toward a classroom. I began to think of her as a faculty equivalent of the fabled Yeti, rarely glimpsed but definitely out there. It would be 1980 before she’d finally talk, and this was during her final illness. We spent at least two hours going through scrapbooks and noting credits, many of which were unknown, even to her. She’d been in a number of features in addition to the Our Gangs, and had quite a career in radio as well. Co-stars included John and Lionel Barrymore, Ronald Reagan, Tyrone Power, Shirley Temple, Claude Rains (his daughter in Strange Holiday) --- a real galaxy of notables. Priscilla was the only Golden Age celebrity my town ever had, and I was privileged to be the one to finally take down her story. Other Little Rascals may have been more noteworthy, but this was our Rascal.

Our Gang Creeped Me Out! --- Part One

Parents often go to great lengths to impress upon children how good their lives are, and how thankful they should be for what they have. Mine needn’t have bothered. The Little Rascals got the message over with greater clarity and eloquence than any parental lecture could have achieved. I thanked Dame Fortune each Saturday morning as I munched Zero bars and watched Stymie and Spanky beg food in The Pooch. I knew better than to complain about a small thing like no color television when Farina had to bathe his little brother in water out of a duck pond. My favorite Our Gangs were those primitive, austere early talkies. All the kids were grindingly poor, often homeless, and sometimes worse, inmates in an orphan asylum. Adults were dangerous and unpredictable in the Rascal’s world. Many of my darkest assumptions about grown-ups developed while immersed in their universe. Yes, these were comedies, but a lot of them scared me but good. There’s a dreadful, screeching old harridan in Mush and Milk that still gives me gooseflesh, and the sight of a clearly psychotic Max Davidson with his carving knife poised at Farina’s throat in Moan & Groan, Inc. was the stuff of nightmare for me. Were kids that much tougher in the depression? They had to be, for the gang seemed encircled by hateful, scheming adults unwilling to make any allowance for their potential victim’s tender age. The early talking Rascals were let loose in a survival of the fittest society where kids could be starved, pets gassed (by grown-ups who would enjoy it), and orphans enslaved in remote state-sanctioned hellholes. How could a pampered sixties youth complain in the face of such alarming social documents?





There was a picturesque little general store just outside the neighborhood a lot of us frequented often, very much like the one in Helping Grandma, only this proprietor was no kindly Margaret Mann. She was, in fact, a hard, wizened crone who never forgave that extra penny due for sales tax and always dropped the plain M&M’s on the counter with sufficient force so as to shatter the outer coatings. Myrtle also maintained a hairstyle identical to that of Miss Crabtree, the only person I’d encountered in the mid-sixties to have done so (the resemblance most definitely ended there, by the way). I used to imagine that Myrtle was perhaps the embittered latter day fulfillment of all Miss Crabtree’s lost hopes and dreams, assuming, of course, that Miss Crabtree was indeed consigned to continue her solitary life teaching successive generations of (off-screen) Our Gang kids without hope of raising a family of her own. She and Myrtle did part company in that sense, however, because Myrtle had a husband, who for the few years I knew him prior to his death, acted as a kindly buffer between us and his Mush and Milk wife.



My selection of The Kid From Borneo as the scariest motion picture ever made actually arose from a basic misunderstanding of the story that has dogged me from the day I first saw it some forty-five years ago. I thought the Wild Man really was Uncle George. For some reason, I failed to pick up on the letter in the opening scene that explains the whole set-up. The parent's baleful reference to him as a black sheep suggested to me that this was some sort of genetic missing link that had somehow cropped up in the family bloodline; a savage, inarticulate thing that had years ago been sold to the circus as a freak attraction. Now Dickie Moore and Spanky have to go and reclaim Uncle George on behalf of parents too afraid, or guilt-ridden, to do it themselves. "Uncle George" was every bit as terrifying to me as he was to the gang, all the more so because he was apparently related to them. I never laughed once at this comedy --- still haven’t. When Spanky feeds Uncle George all those contents from the icebox, I know the hapless child’s just buying time before being eaten himself. After drinking port wine, the giant takes off in pursuit of the children with a knife, and for all we know, intends to use it. No amount of slapstick could relieve the dread I experienced when the mother walked into that bedroom to be reunited with her "brother." Believing Uncle George to be the woman's actual sibling, I was consumed with childish horror when she pulled back the bedspread to reveal this frightful thing she’d renounced long ago, back now to seek vengeance for his childhood abandonment. Both the parents play these scenes straight. They’re genuinely terrified at the sight of Uncle George. The whole thing became so profoundly unnerving that I finally had to turn the channel whenever The Kid From Borneo appeared. I’ve since wondered if anyone else misread this short in the same way. Watching it again this week, I’d still maintain it’s open to alternative readings (after all, we never do see the real Uncle George). Perhaps the varied menu of interpretation works to its advantage in the end. Some can embrace it as one of the funniest Our Gang shorts ever, even as it remains for this viewer the most bone-chilling two-reel horror film of all time (and that's Uncle George holding up Gang members in this group shot).






The Kid From Borneo wasn’t the only Rascals comedy with disturbing images. I’m still stunned when Farina’s playmate whacks him full-face with a heavy board in Lazy Days, resulting in a grotesquely swollen nose for the fadeout (such violence would not repeat itself until John Wayne performed a similar service for George Kennedy in The Sons Of Katie Elder). When The Wind Blows finds Jackie Cooper’s father roused from bed when his son tries to enter the house and firing a pistol through the front door. Wheezer is repeatedly whipped by a vicious stepmother in Dogs Is Dogs even as he’s starved on a tepid diet of "mush" (I always wished someone would take a baseball bat to these adult oppressors). Free Eats has two repulsive midgets posing as babies in order to loot guests at a children’s party --- I always found these characters unsettling and not the least funny. Clarence Wilson and pinch-faced wife steal the gang’s new clothes in Shrimps For A Day, later forcing them to drink castor oil. A pirate with fangs and a blood-curdling growl menaced Stymie in Shiver My Timbers. The giant that corners the gang in Mama’s Little Pirate looks fully capable of broiling them in a stew-pot and eating them whole --- he ranks second only to Uncle George for evoking nightmares. Maybe other kids took these shorts in the proper spirit and laughed through them all. Would that I could have, but clearly mine was a more timid sensibility. Still is, apparently, for even now I found it difficult getting through some of these again. Funny how certain responses can again come calling, even after forty odd years. Tomorrow’s Part Two reveals the one-time Our Gang membership of my elementary school band teacher, and the long road I traveled in getting her to finally talk about it.

A Dream Lost In The Mists Of Time


Here’s a small town theatre circa 1914 called The Dream, and it’s well named, for my idea of a dream come true would be to somehow walk through those portals and see that combination of A Woman’s Loyalty and The Million Dollar Mystery. The latter was a serial --- back when chapterplays were just getting started and attracted huge audiences. Their stories were often serialized in print as well --- magazines and newspapers breathlessly reported each installment. These three and six sheets are spectacles in and of themselves. I’d have been down every day just to see the display changes. I really like the way the posters are spread out along that courtyard entrance area. Needless to say, a sudden cloudburst might complicate things for the Dream’s management. According to a caption on the back of the photo, the location is a place called Centerville (but in what state?) and this venue later became Ryan’s BarberShop. The rest, I’m afraid, is lost to history.

The Sci-Fi Boys and The Naked Monster

Director John Landis describes the Sci-Fi Boys as skinny little geek kids who were always wanting to make films when they were in school. Landis includes Steven Spielberg and George Lucas among this group, and judging by their current position, we’d have to concede that geekdom might not be an altogether bad thing. Surely it’s apparent that the geeks have taken over Hollywood, but that isn’t news. They’ve been in control for nearly thirty years, and you wonder if there’ll ever be an end to these multi-million dollar walks down memory lane. Seems Landis and his contemporaries really just want to pay homage to the pioneer monster-makers that influenced their childhoods, but yipes, this has been going on decades now --- what happens when future generations start paying their homage to these homage payers? Will the customers still be willing to pay? Recent erosion at the boxoffice would suggest a need for something new, but what can fans-to-filmmakers do but recycle? The Sci-Fi Boys is a DVD documentary that addresses the impact of fanta-pioneers (hey, have I just invented a new genre by-word?). Ackerman is chief among these, but there’s also Ray Harryhausen, Ray Bradbury, and the late George Pal. Somehow Landis made the biggest impression on me. He’s the only interview subject wearing a suit. The others are casual, sometimes ultra-so. I guess that’s what happens when the geeks take over.


Ackerman used to wear suits too, back when he was trying to gain mainstream respect for a movie genre critics had been blowing off for years. During the sixties in particular, FJA was a lone ambassador for the serious appreciation of science-fiction and horror, but all the thanks he got was in the form of letters written in ten-year old scrawl (mine included!). Those dark jackets and narrow ties were reassurance for the mothers of America that this was no disheveled pied piper leading their children to wreck and ruin. In fact, Ackerman cut a dashing figure and was similar in appearance if not temperament to another mustachioed notable, Vincent Price. The Ackerman images shown here illustrate the transition he made as the genre he championed gained in approval. On top, we see FJA delivering a scholarly overview of sci-fi’s history in an interview that was shot in 1970 (it’s an extra on the DVD). This well-groomed, professorial figure is determined to get respect for his passion, and despite his sometimes-pompous declamations; you really root for him to pull it off. As we now know, Ackerman’s vindication was still several years in the offing, but when it came, it was glorious. Within a decade, he’d go from a jack to a king. The bottom capture shows Ackerman after his side has won. It’s 1983, and he’s appearing on a talk segment commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of King Kong. Nobody (but FJA and his followers) cared less when Kong was thirty, or even forty, but this was a new day, a post- Star Wars day, and now Ackerman was riding high on a boxoffice rocket he and his magazine had helped launch. Endorsements from the very filmmakers responsible for these genre leviathans gave him cultural capital he'd not dreamed of when he did that 1970 interview. No more button-down for him --- open collars and leisure suits from now on! Forrest J. Ackerman is eighty-nine, going on ninety in November, and indisputably the grand old man of fandom. He collects honors the way his followers collect old Famous Monsters magazines, and The Sci-Fi Boys is a fitting and enjoyable tribute. It would be great to see him reach 100 and be feted again.


The Naked Monster is another of those homages, but this one’s different in that it spoofs sci-fi relics on one hand and pays tribute to their surviving cast members with the other (here's a still montage). Most of it was shot around 1984 when Airplane and its imitators were making fair game of old movie conventions, and scattershot parody was gaining ground as the fresh new formula for screen comedy. Now it’s twenty years later and this sort of humor’s been pretty much strip-mined, but producer-writer and co-director Ted Newsom has a real knack for the essential absurdity of his low-budget sci-fi prototypes, and laughs he gets are all the more impressive in view of the fact he shot this on Super 8mm (including video inserts) within a budget equivalent to contents of a very small piggy bank. Stock footage and library music was used. I really liked the overlay of familiar themes throughout, and fans can have themselves a visual Scrabble game trying to ID familiar shots from various trailers and public domain features. A real treat here is the parade of hallowed names from the fifties. Kenneth Tobey leads off, and there are cameos from John Agar, Lori Nelson, Gloria Talbott, and many others. Some of them don’t even appear to have left the house. Talbott does a telephone scene beneath a portrait of herself as a long ago ingenue. She would have been an interesting person to talk to, though for every one question she ever got about All That Heaven Allows or We’re No Angels, there must have been a hundred about I Married A Monster From Outer Space and The Cyclops. Newsom does a nice epilogue salute to these veteran players, most of whom have since passed on. Those who are still with us include leading lady Brinke Stevens and Linnea Quigley, two names familiar to me by virtue of each having appeared in close to a hundred low-budget horrors. These are staggering numbers compared with the comparatively few genre ventures their fifties forebears took on. Will Brinke (51) and Linnea (48) be called out of retirement someday for guest roles in some future fan homage to Cheerleader Massacre or Beach Babes From Beyond? It could be sooner than we think, as these two actresses have been around since at least the mid-seventies (you can get The Naked Monster HERE).

Monday Glamour Starter --- Cyd Charisse
Actresses like Cyd Charisse aren’t easy to write about, since there’s just no conflict, scandal, or tragedy to juice up the narrative. I’ve not come across the first mention of personal or professional travails, bad kids, substance abuse --- nothing. Then it occurs to me that if you’re going to dance for a living, a thing that surely requires a tremendously disciplined lifestyle, chances are there won’t be much time or inclination to devote toward those vices that laid so many Glamour Starters low. I do believe that Cyd Charisse is also the first of our Monday subjects to have remained wed for fifty years (well, 58 to be exact, with husband Tony Martin). After Mabel Normand, Gail Russell, and Gloria Grahame, she’s a breath of Spring. There’s an official website HERE, and I understand she still gets out occasionally for tributes and such. Cyd Charisse is eighty-five at present, and looks considerably younger. She’s about the last surviving member of the great MGM musical team, although watching Brigadoon last night reminded me that Van Johnson just celebrated his ninetieth birthday. Search results keep mentioning her legs. Well, she danced, so that’s natural enough, but she also acted from time to time. By the time the music stopped, it was too late to gain a foothold in drama, as the studio system had by then collapsed, and work was limited to television and features far less distinguished than those she’d enhanced at Metro.





There weren’t many ballerinas on studio payrolls in the forties. Vera Zorina was one, but she was back and forth between Fox and Paramount, and neither developed a niche for her. Ballet was a specialty even at dance conscious MGM, but there was often enough a need for someone accomplished in that area, so Cyd Charisse got a contract and plenty of visibility in a series of big musicals during the forties. Scattered amongst these invitations to the dance were supporting parts in melodramas and thrillers. Tension was a 1950 noir where she played nice girl rival to sluttish Audrey Totter, so guess who the notices singled out. East Side, West Side found her down the line behind two prominent females, Barbara Stanwyck and Ava Gardner. She’d been at Metro since 1946, but leads in musicals had collapsed in the face of accident and off-timing. She broke her leg and thus missed out on Easter Parade (that must have been traumatic), while Leslie Caron got An American In Paris when Charisse had a child. The big break arrived with Singin’ In The Rain, where she really commanded attention and MGM finally got serious about making better use of her. Unfortunately, the era of big musicals was itself headed for the rocks, and though she’d participate in some of its last glorious encores, Cyd Charisse would bask but a brief moment in stardom’s glow.




Dancing was where her genius lay. The singing voice had to be dubbed, for Charisse was said to have been "tone deaf." She also had an aloof quality that came across even in motion --- witness her cool vamping of Gene Kelly in Singin’ In The Rain and Fred Astaire during the Girl Hunt number from The Bandwagon. At five-foot nine, she was imposing, and more convincing when serious. She never had the line in perk that sustained Debbie Reynolds, Jane Powell, and the rest. Charisse was more the self-contained type, and that made her seem a little remote between dance highlights. She warded off Kelly and Astaire on several occasions --- their characters were usually obliged to work a little harder at winning her. The Bandwagon and It’s Always Fair Weather are probably her two best musicals leads, though Brigadoon played better for me than its reputation would suggest. She looks (and dances) great in Silk Stockings, though her Garbo update (of Ninotchka) requires she give partner Astaire the ice for much of the show. Could audiences have confused these chilly roles with the offscreen Cyd Charisse? Party Girl was an unexpected meeting with director Nicholas Ray and leading man Robert Taylor. Here she danced again and made beautiful music with Bad Bob in one of his darkest and most satisfying post-war performances (the French DVD is available at THIS LINK, and it’s first-rate). After Party Girl, there were features in Europe and television stateside. Two Weeks In Another Town was a reunion with director Vincente Minnelli, and though her part was said to have been heavily cut, this is still an unsung masterpiece, even better, to my mind, than The Bad and The Beautiful. She was unsympathetic again in Something’s Got To Give, but that never finished comedy would only be recalled as Marilyn Monroe’s final appearance on film. The Unsightly Seventies found Charisse among passengers on The Love Boat, and there would be a visit to Fantasy Island. Her participation in these was less dispiriting because you never felt as though she really needed the work. Desperation among veterans doing television "guest" work was something a trained viewer eye could unfailingly sense, but not here. Charisse has maintained her dignity and the public’s regard throughout a long and (we hope) happy retirement. Nice to see one turn out this way.

America's Boyfriend

Charles "Buddy" Rogers is best remembered as Mary Pickford’s last husband. He was also one of the more accessible of silent film stars when it came time for interviews or tributes to that long vanished era. Buddy outlived virtually all of his male contemporaries, mostly because he started young, and seems to have taken pretty good care of himself (living until 1999). He was an accomplished raconteur and steadfast companion to Pickford, even as she withdrew behind the curtains at Pickfair and remained in seclusion until her death in 1979. What a lot of people forget about Rogers is just what a big name he was in his own right. It didn’t last long, and came right on the cusp of Paramount’s transition to sound, but he was one of their principal names and headlined a number of early sound comedies and musicals that have all but disappeared today. Most of these were light and youth oriented. Buddy was billed as America’s Boy Friend and his vehicles were peppy and predictable --- as disposable then as they are forgotten now. When MCA bought the pre-49 Paramount library for television release in the late fifties, most of the Buddy Rogers oeuvre made its way to broadcasters, but it wouldn’t be long before these relics were consigned to distributor’s storage shelves, never to see the light of day again. Only one resurfaced later, and Buddy’s presence was only incidental to the early two-color Technicolor that distinguished Follow Thru, a 1930 golfing comedy that was amazingly well preserved and probably remains the best surviving example of the early color process.



Following Mary Pickford’s retirement, Buddy continued with his band (he could play almost any instrument) and dabbled in production. His Paramount work is now owned by Universal. The likelihood of a DVD release is nil. Too bad, because these would be interesting examples of what youth audiences was lining up to see during the early thirties. By the way, those Paramount contract lovelies flanking Buddy in this publicity shot include, from left to right, Josephine Dunn, Carol Lombard (before she added the "e"), Kathryn Crawford, and Virginia Bruce. The movie is Safety in Numbers, a roguish revel of love, laughs, and lyrics wherein the Joy Boy inherits millions and gets an education in song, dance, and lingerie from five luscious ladies on a skyscraper. Sounds sure-fire to me …

Lon Chaney Died 76 Years Ago Today

The monster magazines used to trumpet, Lon Chaney Shall Not Die!, and they were right, to the extent that still reproduction kept the man’s image alive, but for those of us confined to unimaginative television markets, the possibility of this silent actor turning up on our home screens was remote at best, other than an occasional glimpse on Fractured Flickers. It was TCM and laser discs that brought Chaney out of his archival refuge, and even though a number of the films were letdowns (particularly the MGM vehicles), there was no argument as to Chaney’s truly unique position in film history. He died August 26, 1930. Kevin Brownlow’s excellent documentary provides first-hand recollections from then-impressionable boys whose mourning over the loss persists to this day (and most of them would have to be in their eighties, or more, by now). Did they identify with Chaney as society’s truest pariah? Other stars dabbled in the role of outcast (recent subject James Dean among them), but you knew these guys could have any girl they wanted if their innate movie star appeal were switched on. Chaney’s the real Miracle Man who never played celebrity. He was the working man’s actor (note the cap in this portrait --- looks like he’s headed for work at a construction site) who declared there was no Lon Chaney after those stage lights went down.














Just to make the separation with Hollywood complete, he used to take vacations deep in the woods. Surviving home movies have an austere and rustic quality you’d never get from present day stars on holiday. When Lon, Jr. was apparently still-born, his father scooped up the infant and rushed him outside to a near-freezing mountain stream, where he induced breathing by immersing little Creighton in the water. Chaney was one actor who understood something (maybe too much) about real life. His kind of hardship was very nineteenth century, and it’s still a shock to look upon that weathered face and realize this man died when he was only forty-seven.



So what was his secret? In an era of celebrity that played at being aloof, he was genuine. Authentic Chaney autographs are about as plentiful as feathers on a frog. Fake ones are offered daily by dauntless e-bay hucksters --- I’ve seen a few signed with felt tips. Well, if collectors are gullible enough to buy these, why not just add Have a Nice Day with a smiley face and be done with it? Folks in the twenties reserved a special place in their complicated psyches for Lon. Writer David Skaal (all his books are great) says he evoked memories of the Great War and the horrific injuries inflicted during that. Others maintain he brought the forbidden pleasures of a travelling freak show into neighborhood theatres. It’s probably some of both, plus a lot of unwholesome explanations nobody’s yet thought of. A casual look at The Penalty will give you all the sick you need --- this 1920 corker can still shock viewers today with its unbridled depravity.






The Chaney mystery is abetted in no small way by the unavailability of his films. So many good ones are lost. Books have been written about movies we’ll probably never see. I know some guys whose first request in the afterlife will be a screening of London After Midnight, followed by, perhaps, A Blind Bargain. Any unseen footage of Chaney is like a rope of pearls. When they found an odd reel of the otherwise lost Thunder, it was an experience akin to entering Tutankhamun’s tomb. Somehow it’s appropriate that much of Chaney go missing. We can look at the surviving stills and dream of the miracles he wrought. Based on the expectations we’ve developed over the intervening decades, the features would almost certainly be disappointing, so maybe some of his mystique is best left to our imaginations.

James Dean --- Part Two

I thought I’d come to the wrong place when Rebel Without A Cause started and those three neatly dressed teenagers filed into police headquarters. Now granted this movie was there to demonstrate how delinquency was a blight upon middle and upper-class neighborhoods as well as the ghettos, but honestly, how could Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood, and James Dean have represented any kind of real challenge to the status quo, even in 1955? Natalie’s adorable in a Warnercolor Teen Vogue outfit that suggests anything but a troublemaker, while Sal looks ready to crawl into a bassinet. Imagine an officer’s relief today if juvenile cases could be so benign and non-threatening as these! Sal and Jim are even wearing coat and tie --- but then so were other Rebel Without A Cause cast members when Warners arranged a field trip for them down to the local station house. It’s only a glimpse on one of the DVD extras, but there they all are, dressed as if for Sunday school and showing proper respect for L.A.’s law enforcement community. It really was an idyllic world back then. Jim Stark’s high school is an orderly environment where all the kids wear neat outfits (Natalie’s scarf!) and even the gang members lean toward natty sport shirts and leather jackets any of us oldsters would be thrilled to own. There’s also Cinemascope and color to put a candy-coated gloss on this picture postcard of Southern California before the real cultural breakdowns got underway. Rebel Without A Cause depicts the Sunny Cal that Herb Vigron imagined during that train ride in The Bandwagon --- pure sunlight, breathtaking views from nostalgic locations (especially the Griffith Park Observatory) and "troubled" kids who just needed a hug from Daddy.


I can fully appreciate James Dean’s popularity, and ongoing cult status, after watching Rebel Without A Cause. He plays his part like a star. If this guy’s an outsider, we should have all been Jim Stark on our first day at high school. It's clear he’ll succeed Buzz as leader of the pack, probably within days of the incidents dramatized here. After East Of Eden, there’s no way Dean was really going to play a geek. The perhaps unintended leadership qualities Jim Stark displays may have been the natural consequence of James Dean’s dominance over his fellow cast members, with much of the dialogue emphasizing his feelings of inadequacy being continually undercut by Dean’s studied application of movie star charisma during what was said to have been oft-improvised exchanges. He and Natalie and Sal are no more authentic teen-agers than any contract player Warners might have cast. They’re auditioning here for the transitional leap into adult stardom, and Dean in particular cunningly plays the attractively confused teen we’d all like to have been.


Wouldn’t it be great to go back and experience Rebel Without A Cause with first-run audiences during that fall and winter of 1955? No matter the quality of today’s presentation (and Warner’s DVD is superb), none of us will ever really comprehend the seismic effect this one had when it was new. We can appreciate how brilliantly calculated Rebel was in flattering its youthful audience with personalities and situations designed to make them feel good (or better) about themselves. Hollywood today could use a Nicholas Ray (and his writers) to teach them a thing or two about manufacturing teen product. My only complaint was the contrivance in Act Three. The stuff in the old mansion was fine, but all that chasing around with the gang and the extended police standoff got things a little crowded toward the end. Still, this is my favorite J.D. movie. It isn’t nasty or unpleasant like The Blackboard Jungle (I could just kill that Vic Morrow) and it has all the gloss and big studio money denied to AIP cheapies along the lines of High School Caesar, Runaway Daughters, and the like. Certainly they didn’t get this kind of coin --- $3.9 million in domestic rentals for Rebel Without A Cause (as opposed to the $334,000 Runaway Daughters brought back). Rebel scored overseas as well, with an additional $3.2 million in foreign rentals, for a worldwide $7.1. Final profit was a stunning $3.9 against a negative cost of $1.4 million (good as this was, it couldn’t touch the fantastic $9.0 earned by The Blackboard Jungle, easily the king dog of all the juve dramas, with an eventual profit of $4.9 million).

















You think Dean’s cool? Well, after comparing Gig Young interview segments from the old Warner Brothers Presents series (included on the DVD), I’ve adopted Jim Backus as my role model for a suave and self-assured middle-age. The Dean footage we’ve known from a hundred documentaries and compilations --- he shuffles around in the Jett Rink outfit and mumbles something about road safety (and ironically, within weeks, he … no, I’ll spare you that). Backus I’d not seen before. His piece had been buried in Warner vaults since pterodactyls flew (or at least since the ABC 1955 broadcast date), so I had no idea what a cool, unflappable pro he was off-screen. Dean looks pathetic compared with this more than seasoned trouper. Could Jimmy have ever measured up to senior Jim’s level of relaxed professionalism? Imagine an alternate mid-sixties universe where James Dean not only lives, but winds up competing with Russell Johnson for the "Professor" role on Gilligan’s Island. I can imagine Sherwood Schwartz consulting with Jim Backus --- Hey Jim, you worked with this guy once when it looked like he’d be big; should we use him for this? Then Backus’ thoughtful reply, Yeah, why not? Maybe he’s learned a little something since then. Let’s give him a chance. After all, he was fairly good in that episode of Hawaiian Eye …

A 2006 Encounter With James Dean --- Part One

How come James Dean seems less interesting to me now than his various co-stars and supporting players? Maybe I’m tired of everything revolving around him. Among those casts of his three big features, there was plenty of drama to go around. I looked at the extras on the DVD’s this week and found myself pondering the fates of Jim Stark’s classmates who didn’t die young --- the ones that survived to pull their time in forgotten movies and disposable TV shows. Cheapo Warner programs seem to have been the alumni clubhouse for youthful movie hopefuls who’d sputtered on the launching pad. Richard Davalos had to watch Dean take all the bows for East Of Eden, but Davalos got to outlive Jimmy by fifty years (and counting), though his acting future would take him in the direction of Hawaiian Eye and any number of other 60’s vid staples. Same for Corey Allen, Dean’s switchblade opponent in Rebel Without A Cause. He did a Hawaiian Eye as well. All these young actors had to face a reality James Dean would be spared thanks to a premature death. Even those with promise faced the music of Surfside Six (Dennis Hopper), 77 Sunset Strip (Nick Adams), and God forbid, Frankenstein Conquers The World (Adams again). So what if Dean had lived? My own guess pretty much assigns him the career Paul Newman enjoyed, but wait, could Jim have delivered the goods for the next half a century as Newman would? I’m not so sure. He’d have likely been exposed before long (Humphrey Bogart speculated as much shortly after 9/30/55) --- imagine Dean submitting to Rally Round The Flag, Boys or The Secret War Of Harry Frigg. Well, actually, it’s easy to picture such an eventuality, but harder, perhaps, to envision Dean successfully running such a studio gauntlet. We do know that Jim was all but set to do Somebody Up There Likes Me and The Left-Handed Gun, both of which were ultimately played by Newman. Whatever career he may have ended up with, Dean was indeed lucky to go out with the pristine screen record he had. His fans would have certainly been disillusioned to encounter a middle-aged James Dean in decline, holding up one corner of a late sixties TV tent like The Bold Ones or The Name Of The Game, and yet, if he’d lived, it might have come to that …






Having checked out East Of Eden, I was again struck by the artful manner in which experienced character actors accommodated Jimmy’s ultra-mannered playing and very often pulled his inexperienced bacon out of the fire. Succeeding generations of aspiring players might well have chosen more seasoned role models over the Dean image they worshipped so unceasingly --- hey, I’d nominate Albert Dekker for one. That old reliable Dr. Cyclops is a steady pivot around which self-indulgent Jimmy can twirl --- Burl Ives too (you can almost feel his frustration with Dean in this still of them together). These guys stand there and deliver dialogue like the old pros they are, while Dean relentlessly mopes, sulks, and whines (Ann pointed out to me that if young men had really acted that way back in 1917, when the story takes place, they would have probably been put away). Raymond Massey’s the primary unfortunate we always hear about in those production anecdotes --- forever depicted as the stolid old performer clinging doggedly to inflexible line readings as this revolutionary genius of acting shows him a thing or two about spontaneity. Well, for my money, it’s folks like Massey that made Dean look good. They were noble (if unwitting) straight men to a show-off upstart from whom they might have expected a little more simple courtesy and professionalism. If Dean had lived long enough, he may well have gotten some of that same medicine from future hotshots --- imagine him achieving Massey's senior status and having to play opposite someone like Mickey Rourke.



I don’t want to knock Dean too hard here. He got a lot better on his second and third tries. Rebel Without A Cause (the subject of tomorrow’s Part Two) was an effectively deliberate movie star performance where he calculatingly turned on the charm for the fans he knew he’d accumulated since East Of Eden, and Giant is one of the great, if unintended, self-parodies in all movies. The problem with Jimmy in East Of Eden is that he’s such a crybaby. Did 1954 chicks dig that? The one I watched it with didn’t. Some happy day I hope to see one interview where a brave member of that long-in-the-tooth acting brigade who once worked with James Dean is willing to stand up and say, You know what? He seemed like a big deal then, but his stuff just doesn’t work for me anymore. Of course, that’s a sure way to get your footage jettisoned from any of the Dean documentaries that have so far emerged from that profitable ongoing industry, but I’d sure be glad to present the Courage award to any of those old-timers prepared to just once part from the standard verse. By the way, to clear up the matter of Marilyn Monroe’s presence here --- she served as volunteer usherette at the East Of Eden premiere --- handing Milton Berle his program in this shot.





Here’s something they did get right in East Of Eden --- the clothes. I swear I think that’s what got the serious youth money this one brought ($3.3 million in profit --- the equal of Jack Webb’s Dragnet feature!). Check out this still of Jim in his sweater and open collared shirt. Really sporty, not in 1917 perhaps, but it sure rang the bell in 1954. I could slip into any of these ensembles and look way cool today. To hell with all that period accuracy and verisimilitude stuff. These outfits, simple yet timeless, were exactly the way to sell East Of Eden (I must admit that Richard Davalos’ pompadour was a little beyond the pale --- although it nicely anticipated similar looks to come with Fabian and Rick Nelson). The costume tests for the three principals shown here looks to be among those later discarded. Rigid period sartorial adherence was well and good for Davalos and Julie Harris, but our boy Dean was far too valuable a merchandise to cinch up in heavy wool suits with celluloid collars. The smartest move Warners made was keeping him in those khakis and lightweight tops (it does at least explain why they wouldn’t let him wear something in the way of a jacket whilst hopping all those freights!). This was the kind of showmanship WB needed when it came time to cast The Spirit Of St. Louis a few years later. Were it not for casting conflicts (Giant), we may well have had James Dean as Lindbergh instead of an aging James Stewart. Imagine the boom in aviation wear we might have had with Dean as a fashion inspiration --- kids would have probably been wearing flight goggles to school! That Davy Crockett coonskin cap thing would have never gotten off the ground.

Shows On The Road


Erie, Pennsylvania welcomes the 1940 edition of Karston’s Follies Unusual with this ad promising 14 Big Scenes and A Cast Of 35. These travelling revues might be called "Burlesque Lite", as they promised all the elements you’d expect from a spicy girl show, along with reassurance of a Clean entertainment For The Whole Family. Much of whatever was left of old vaudeville could be found in these presentations. Sometimes they overlapped with their stagebound first cousins --- the Spook Shows. Both used magicians for specialty acts. Performers would sometimes alternate between the revues and the scarefests --- whichever happened to be in vogue at the moment. Karston was a veteran on this circuit. So was Count Berni Vici, whose Comedie Francaise wowed ‘em throughout the late thirties and forties with a French accented revue generally topping out at an hour’s length and supported by a feature movie, preferably a "B". Forty cents admission was indeed a bargain when Yvette Dare and Her Sacred Parrot performed Dances Of Bali…

The Liberty Then and Now

I’ve mentioned the Liberty Theatre a number of times since Greenbriar Picture Shows opened Dec. 27, 2005. It was a small town venue for many a great show, and remains today as our last surviving local showplace. Others came and went through the years. There was the Rose, which closed its doors when talkies arrived --- then the Orpheum, which became the Allen in 1941. That one burned in the early sixties. My best friend growing up saw Brides Of Dracula there shortly before the fire. The Liberty and the Allen had a product split. By the end of the war, they were the only houses left, so Hollywood’s bounty was divided between them. The Allen took all of Warner Bros., Columbia, Universal, RKO, and 20th Century Fox, while the Liberty was exclusive with Paramount, United Artists, MGM, and Republic (in a market like ours, the Republic concession was perhaps the most valuable of them all). In the summer of 1948, merchants and town officials got together and arranged for a documentary to be made about our community. It is the purpose of this film to bring to mind the vast opportunities existing in this area and to help interest its inhabitants in its future progress, said the producer, whose staff included a photographer from Fox’s March Of Time series and a narrator formerly with radio’s Theatre Guild Of The Air. The finished product was shot in 35mm and ran forty minutes. One nitrate print was furnished to the Liberty and shown on sporadic occasions over the next forty years. I saw it at a Chamber Of Commerce event around 1987. A video master was eventually made from the original, and that’s how I came by the DVD from which these frames were captured.



Dating the Liberty footage was a simple matter of checking the show on the marquee against ads in 1948 newspapers. The images shown here were made on either Monday or Tuesday, July 26 or 27. The program featured Tarzan’s New York Adventure, a 1942 feature which was revived by Metro in 1948. This was a time when you still had heavy pedestrian sidewalk traffic. Kids and teen-agers were up and down that Main Street all day and into the evenings. The Liberty routinely decorated their front with one-sheets on either side, two complete lobby card sets, and generally a three-sheet between the two entrance doors. The "comedy feature" was another oldie from 1942 --- About Face, a Hal Roach streamliner with Joe Sawyer and William Tracy. The Liberty maintained a policy of three changes a week and double features on Saturday right up into the seventies. Management duties were in the capable hands of Colonel Roy Forehand, who more than lived up to his rank with first-class showmanship and staff discipline, which he maintained in very much the military manner. As suggested in previous Greenbriar postings, Col. Forehand would brook no disruptive behavior in his theatre. Here he is with cigarette and a particularly arresting tie posing with other smartly dressed locals on that summer afternoon. The Colonel would manage the Liberty until 1973. The last show he played was Don’t Look Now. Go HERE and HERE for two other stories in which he’s prominent.

3-D and Cinemascope temporarily gave the Allen an edge over the otherwise dominant Liberty. As luck would have it, their exclusive Warners access provided them the best of Naturalvision shows --- House Of Wax, The Charge At Feather River, and Hondo, while the Liberty had to make do with things like Metro’s Arena and Paramount’s Sangaree. I remember coming across a Viewmaster display up in the Liberty’s storage attic one time in the mid-eighties. The slides for Kiss Me Kate were still in place, and you could check out scenes from the movie in 3-D. The Allen also got Cinemascope first by virtue of its relationship with Fox and a booking of The Robe. Unfortunately, they only had a twenty-five foot wide auditorium and the screen was a resolutely standard ratio frame. Several of those who attended told me years later that the anamorphic image was simply aimed toward the center of the flat screen, the right and left sides spilling off onto opposite walls. Patrons were obliged to view Cinemascope much in the same way they eventually would on television later during the sixties. The Liberty had essentially the same problem, which they solved by installing a new lens which would create a letterboxed image for all their wide programs.


These last sad photos are the Liberty as it looks today. Like so many single screen houses, it was bisected and made unrecognizable by a retrofitting process that jerry-rigged a pair of shoebox screening closets out of what used to be an auditorium and balcony that seated 700. It is, however, one of the few remaining independently owned downtown theatres in North Carolina. There’s no problem getting all the biggest shows because there’s no competition within twenty miles. How else could we be so lucky as to have both Snakes On A Plane and Talladega Nights?

Monday Glamour Starter --- Mabel Normand


Mabel Normand’s another of those ghostly figures that inhabit (mostly) bad prints of silent era movies. She was the Queen of Keystone comedies at a time when most of the laughs arose from people getting pitchforks thrust in their rear or eyes sprayed with raw milk from a cow’s udder. Even in the face of today’s unbridled vulgarity, Sennett’s bunch could still write the book on screen scatology. Mabel truly was a rose among some pretty unsightly thorns. Her leading men actually look dirty. Their hair is always a mess and those teeth are like something inside the mouth of a shark. Interviews suggest many of them merely played themselves. Like some luckless character out of the wild west, which is really all Hollywood was in those early days, Mabel just kept adding layers of scar tissue until finally collapsing under the weight of it all. Judging by the punishment she took both on and off the screen, it’s amazing she lasted until 1930, but why did this beautiful and talented girl have to play tackle dummy for all of the movie industry’s worst excesses?

Modeling in New York led to supporting work in Biograph shorts D.W. Griffith was directing, but Mabel wasn’t the virginal type he favored; though instinctive talent was already obvious to those who cared to look. Fellow beginner Mack Sennett saw the potential, and moved her west to help launch his Keystone operation, where one-reel (or less) laffers were made largely off the cuff and future comedy stars seemed to step off each passing streetcar. Charlie Chaplin was one of these --- so was Roscoe Arbuckle. Normand teamed with each, and both benefited. She got banged around a lot, but she was young, so what the hell? They could always fix her up with a little something from the pharmacy. You had to be tough in that racket. She did 53 comedies during the first 1912-13 Sennett season, then became engaged to Mack in 1915. There was a real beauty and beast thing happening here, for this guy was no Wally Reid --- in fact, he could sometimes look positively demented on those unwelcome occasions when he stepped in front of a camera. Nuptials eve found Sennett repairing to Mae Busch’s apartment for a bracer, which was doubly ironic because it was Mabel who’d gotten the woman her studio job to start with. Mack and Mae had shucked their outer garments and initiated love’s oldest ritual when Mabel suddenly caved in the front door and loosed the hounds of Hades. According to legend, Mae crowned the Keystone Queen with a handy vase and nearly killed her. Trade scribes cooked up any number of conflicting explanations for Normand’s extended absence, but in-the-know observers came to recognize this as the opening bell for her slow march toward oblivion. Headaches and sinus trouble resulting from the melee now joined occasional lung hemorrhages that caused her to cough up blood between car chases and tosses off the pier. That nice man behind the druggist counter had given her some all-purpose "goop" (as she called it) to take the edge off, though even cough syrup laced with opium, which this presumably was, couldn’t relieve the effect of tuberculosis, which she likely had. Hers was a killing pace, but an insatiable boxoffice demanded she maintain it --- meanwhile Normand’s relationship with Sennett would be forever compromised. He tried to do penance with the gift of a studio all her own (shown here), but after only one feature, she left altogether for Samuel Goldwyn’s company (only to return to Sennett's employ a few years later).



Mabel’s screen specialty was tomboys and live wires that flouted Victorian convention and enchanted audiences. She longed for something more elevated, but raucous comedy was how they liked her best, and in that category, she had no peer. Off-camera pursuits showed less caution. Wild parties enhanced with bootleg hootch and "nose candy" were vices of choice among Hollywoodites bored with the monotony of shooting formula stories over and again. Mabel’s myriad of health concerns were easiest forgotten with the help of a hip flask or narcotics fix, and who could blame her? She was well so little of the time --- why not take the fun where she could get it? Her link, if remote, with a series of movieland scandals was just appallingly bad luck, but the damage was considerable and lasting. First came the Roscoe Arbuckle mess. Mabel had co-starred with him, so that was enough to implicate her. The assignment of guilt by association became popular sport amongst yellow journalists of the day, and when director William Desmond Taylor was found dead with a bullet in his back on February 1, 1922, it looked as though the whole industry was going down for the count. Moralists incensed by the Arbuckle case noted Mabel as having been the last person to speak with Taylor before that fatal shot rang out --- inevitable letters and affectionately inscribed photos provided an even more damning coda to the investigation. Normand would be hounded by interrogators, both official and press appointed, for the rest of her short life --- all because she knew Taylor (albeit on a platonic basis) and just happened to be returning some books to him on the day of the murder. It seemed as though Mabel had taken up permanent residence behind the eight ball.

Always check those references before you hire. Mabel Normand didn’t, and consequently found herself with a chauffeur who’d recently sprung himself from a chain gang, effected a name change, and was now driving Mabel along Hollywood’s party circuit where alcohol and drugs often loosened tongues and shortened tempers. On one such occasion, Edna Purviance’s escort made some indelicate remarks about Mabel while in his cups and the chauffeur took after him with Normand’s gun. The shooting, while not fatal, would inspire a vigilant press to administer the worst beating yet to Mabel’s reputation, and prove once again what a violent and unpredictable town this could be. The natural attraction of the place was such that anyone, regardless of questionable character or background (often criminal), could insinuate him (or her) self into Hollywood social circles and prey upon its most prominent members. Roscoe Arbuckle, Clara Bow, and Mabel Normand were among silent headliners who were felled by ill-advised associations with such riff-raff. In the wake of relentless condemnation from a public who’d once idolized her, Normand tried the New York stage, but a weak voice wouldn’t carry beyond ten rows, much less expert pantomime better suited to a camera's scrutiny. Her final season in films was spent with Hal Roach's company, where an initial contract calling for eight features and eight shorts was scrapped after the first five entries due to worsening health and declining popularity. This was 1926-27. She’d gone into the hospital with bronchial pneumonia and lung complications. Her long suspected tuberculosis was confirmed around this time. Continued work of any sort was now out of the question. She summed it all up in a February 1927 diary entry, which simply read Who Cares? Her funeral three years later (at 37) was attended by virtually everyone who’d pioneered the silent film industry. Many of them no doubt pondered how things might have been if only they’d taken a little better care of Mabel.

Just Another Long-Ago Audience


These patrons don’t look very happy, do they? Is it because they didn’t enjoy Gloria Swanson’s talking debut in The Trespasser? Judging by the ceiling display, and the November 1929 release date of the picture, this is likely January 1930. Swanson got out The Trespasser in a hurry after the disaster of Queen Kelly and her realization that the much-heralded collaboration with Erich Von Stroheim would be more or less unreleasable (at least in the US). Dialogue sequences for that one were considered, but the idea was abandoned when Gloria was persuaded by director Edmund Goulding to go forward with The Trespasser. This Leow’s crowd looks to be feeling the effect of the Crash --- those ragamuffin kids seem to have gotten the worst of it. Could this be some kind of orphan’s benefit? Never mind Gloria Swanson --- these urchins could use a good scrubbing. I’d guess that at least a few of the kids shown here are still living. Wonder if any would recognize themselves in this photo taken seventy-six years ago…

The Ann(e) Darling Mystery

The name Ann (or is it Anne?) Darling wouldn’t mean a thing to anyone were it not for the fact that she briefly tended sheep in Bride Of Frankenstein and had a moment’s encounter with Boris Karloff’s monster. Otherwise, her career at Universal came and went within a season, a fate not unknown to starlets whose initial promise never came to blossom. Could she have been the next Sidney Fox? Perhaps Ann(e) was another Carl Laemmle, Jr. protegee, and he lost interest. I was told years ago that she’d retired to, of all places, Hickory, North Carolina. A lost Bride Of Frankenstein cast member lived within driving distance! Having no address or even a current name, I made no attempt to trace her specific whereabouts. Perhaps a Yellow Pages search under shepherdesses would have revealed her, but not likely. The imdb claims she died on August 3, 1991 in Los Angeles. Well, they’ve made mistakes before. Assuming she were alive, Darling would be 91. I’d like to think she’s still in Hickory, just waiting for someone like me to rediscover her so she could tell all about that day she worked with Boris Karloff.


When I Google searched Ann (and Anne) Darling, I got nowhere. One link explained how to remove skin tags from your dog’s eyelid. Another took me to a specimen of erotic fiction entitled The Reluctant Father Figure, a story told in nine parts which looked to run in excess of 60,000 words. I’d like to reveal the entire saga of Ann Darling, particularly the Whatever Happened To… part (maybe one of you can), but for the time being, these images will have to do. The step-by-step process with Jack Pierce is dated September 1934. Refreshing to see Jack applying something other than yak hair and bolts to a subject’s face. I’d gone years thinking he just made up monsters, but here’s proof that Pierce could deliver on the glamour treatment when he set his mind to it. Roman Freulich, Universal’s photographer in residence, made the portrait. Finally, we have Ann Darling spotting Boris Karloff from a soundstage hilltop in Bride Of Frankenstein.

The Great Man --- Part Two

Sixties Fields cultists preferred the charlatan. Domestic purgatory was a less inviting prospect for college audiences who were themselves on the cusp of lifetime commitment and adult responsibilities. Might we end up like Bill, with a hectoring shrew of a wife and rotten kids leaving roller skates in our path? It’s A Gift was a disturbing forecast of the darker possibilities of life after school. Better to enjoy Larson E. Whipsnade lording it over suckers and outwitting the sheriff. Fields was dominant in those situations. That’s still how we remember him best. Family Man Fields was submissive --- Carnival Fields prevailed. My own early exposure tended to favor Poppy, You Can’t Cheat An Honest Man, Mississippi --- anything with the promise of carefree maturity where chumps finished last and all your opponents came away with empty pockets. The flip side was more disturbing because this was where Fields sought to impart some truth about our futures, and You’re Telling Me, The Man On The Flying Trapeze, and especially It’s A Gift (great comedies all) reveal that life, particularly family life, isn’t pretty. He actually preferred making these. They allowed him to record incidents as he recalled them, people as he understood them. You just assume that everything happening to Bill in these features had naturally occurred in his real life. It was too honest and accurate to have been made up. There were writers, but everything in the end was his. Paramount had no choice but to let Fields run the show. No one else shared his demons, certainly no one could loose them in such a way as to produce the laughter he did.




Fields needed directors who knew comedy, preferably men who’d been on the road in stock and vaudeville as he had. Youthful talent like Leo McCarey (Six Of A Kind) was at first regarded with suspicion, and those who’d come from differing backgrounds, such as trained in art direction Mitchell Leisen, became sworn enemies. On The Big Broadcast Of 1938, Leisen’s antagonism was such that he simply turned over to Fields the management of his own comic highlights, the happy result being, among other things, the gas station and golf game sequences that open the film. As long as his comedies were made for a price (preferably a low one), Fields enjoyed a remarkable degree of creative freedom. I think another secret of his on-set control may have been an apparent willingness to just walk away. He’d avoided much of the personal overhead that otherwise chained contract talent to studios. Fields liked to plead poverty (according to him, nobody laughs at a rich man), but was always comfortable enough to give the bird to overbearing employers. Stills of Fields at home (seen in Part One) reflect contentment with a good life that included cooking staff (receiving menu instructions from him here) and private tennis courts (Fields was quite an athlete in his prime). Health problems were the real downfall, exacerbated by alcohol. It seemed as though each new Fields picture would be his last, and there were lengthy periods of absence from the screen. Radio was a happy solution at first, but the pressure of coming up with funny material on a weekly basis created stress beyond anything he’d experienced at Paramount, and broadcasting became almost as sporadic as his movie appearances.








Fields was long since estranged from wife and child, but they would resurface from time to time throughout his life, and in fact, he did have a reapproachment with son Claude toward the end. Otherwise, there was a series of mistresses in and out of Field’s life, most notable of these being the strikingly beautiful Carlotta Monti, who lived long enough to profit from the latter day revival with a memoir about their years together. She's (above) playing Field’s secretary, a real life role as well, in The Man On The Flying Trapeze (1935). I’d heard for years how Fields wrote stories on backs of envelopes and bamboozled fortunes out of Universal for their screen adaptation. Alas, that appears to be yet more studio banana oil Don Lockwood talked about, for in fact, Fields poured tremendous effort into preparation of four comedies he did for Universal. These would become the comedian's primary legacy thanks to successful theatrical re-issues mounted during the late sixties and seventies. Fields was fairly trapped by the flamboyant image he and press agents fostered over the years, so he was less a human being than some Dickens character brought to life (as most convincingly, in David Copperfield). That attempt to cast him as The Wizard Of Oz came very close to reality, but delays and prior commitment to do You Can’t Cheat An Honest Man put paid to that tantalizing possibility. Would his presence in Oz have been too overpowering? He’d surely have embellished the role, and we’d naturally want more of him. Fields might well have played off other characters more effectively than Frank Morgan --- but would The Wizard Of Oz have suffered for all of us just waiting for our man to show up?









This merry group you see with Bill includes a well-lubricated John Barrymore, John Carradine, and John Decker, among others. It was this sort of company that laid Fields low during final years when he couldn’t get insured to do another feature. Audience apathy was another factor. James Curtis writes that The Bank Dick and Never Give A Sucker An Even Break were both D.O.A. at the B.O., so Universal wanted no further part of him. From here on in, screen work would be limited to specialty appearances and "guest" cameos (here playing pool in one of them, Follow The Boys). The costume test is from Tales Of Manhattan, but Field's contribution to that omnibus feature was cut prior to release, despite preview audiences who said it was the best thing about an otherwise unremarkable show. Now it’s back at last, in a DVD compilation of Fox outtakes, and Field’s footage is alone worth the price. One of his secretaries from those idle years (could it be the one seated outdoors with him here?) recalled Bill only once using his stage voice, and that when they encountered some fans while out on a drive. I wonder what W.C. Fields did sound like when he wasn’t being W.C. Fields… Anyway, toward the end he speculated as to how things might have turned out had he left the whisky alone. A longer life perhaps, but he surely wouldn’t have been the Fields we know and revere.

The Great Man --- Part One

There was a time when W.C. Fields seemed eternal. His persona, his philosophy, seemed to embrace succeeding generations long after he’d left the stage in 1946. A fan following as yet unborn would replace the audience that filed out when he died. Field’s image was a pliable thing that somehow renewed itself and spoke to the children, and grandchildren, of those who saw him first. I grew up thinking he’d always be around, but by the present look of things, it would seem we’ve lost Uncle Bill. Universal’s DVD set of two or three years ago was seemingly their final word on the subject. You’d like to think they’d release the rest of them, but where are those teen-agers and college students of yore that lined up at revival theatres and University campuses to see him? Their numbers have not been replenished --- how can they when the films are long since out of general circulation? My generation had comparatively easy access to him. Kids today haven’t seen Fields on TV since TCM ran off a package at least five (?) years ago. Universal should have nourished this franchise better. Harold Lloyd was late coming back (maybe too late) and Laurel and Hardy remain lost in the wilderness (at least insofar as their best films are concerned), while Chaplin, Keaton, and The Marx Brothers have flourished. Is it still possible for W.C. Fields to (re)claim his rightful place on the comedy pantheon?



I recently listened to a radio program from February 28, 1956 entitled Biography In Sound (you can hear it too, and for free, right HERE). This episode was called Magnificent Rogue --- Adventures Of W.C. Fields, and Fred Allen was the host (Allen died within weeks of the broadcast). This being fifty years ago, there are some pretty incredible interviews spread over the hour-long program --- Leo McCarey, Mack Sennett, Errol Flynn, Baby LeRoy --- what a line-up. Coming within a decade of Field’s passing, this is very much a collection of show-biz anecdotes recalled while reasonably fresh on the minds of their tellers, and you really get a sense of Fields as the outrageous non-conformist they all wish they could have been. I gathered it was easier for these veterans to applaud Bill from the comfortable distance a decade had given them, for his actual life had been anything but cakes and ale.







The biography of Fields was written by James Curtis and published in 2003. It’s the best book on the man I’ve ever read. If you have any interest in W.C. Fields, you will do yourself a service ordering it HERE. Curtis really puts a human face on what had to be a difficult subject. I’ve always liked Field’s comedy, but everything I’d read led me believe he was little more than an unapproachable variation of the most anti-social aspects of his screen character, a person I would have actually been afraid to meet. It was the same way with Groucho Marx --- you just knew these guys would likely tell you to go to hell and leave them alone, whereas someone like Stan Laurel might invite one to sit down and visit a while. Those sorts of imaginings tend to color my perception of all these comedians --- yes, it does matter what kind of people they were off-screen. I’m now reconciled with W.C. Fields, thanks to Curtis --- at least I understand him better, although any real identification would require first-hand experience with childhood traumas and youthful influences I’d not likely have survived. Hardship Fields overcame shocks the conscience and makes you realize just how pampered most of us are in a computerized world of plenty. I’d not appreciated what a violent world he lived in. There were beatings from his father, street crimes in which he might be a victim one day, assailant the next. Fields routinely resorted to near-deadly force in settling arguments, and this didn’t necessarily end when he stepped before footlights. The Follies legend of how he broke a pool cue over Ed Wynn’s head during a routine was likely true. Fields didn’t like his rival’s on-stage intrusion and retaliated in accordance with his background and experience. He was a dangerous man to trifle with.




Vaudeville and variety must have been drudgery. Juggling was the start, but later the routines required custom props transported from town to town, and they didn’t fit in overhead compartments. The precision required precluded alcohol use, but when dialogue and verbal humor gained precedence, Fields took to the bottle with a vengeance, and movies allowed for an even more sedentary lifestyle. The silent Fields is largely unknown to us --- those ones that aren’t lost are seldom shown. He wore a grubby little clip-on mustache in all of them, just the thing to remove even the remotest possibility of audience sympathy for him. Ill-judged pairings with grotesque comics of a Chester Conklin sort emphasized retro aspect of these vehicles --- they even remade Tillie’s Punctured Romance in the late twenties (now lost). Many of the routines he’d immortalize in talkies were introduced here, but played silent, they were deadly, and real stardom wouldn’t be achieved until he could step in front of a microphone. Even then, it was slow getting to the top. Paramount used him in all-star concoctions --- this is the beginning of the Fields we know. Watching International House amounts to fairly equal doses of ambrosia and castor oil. When Bill’s on (especially in a parlay with Bela Lugosi), there’s no better comedy to be had, but when it’s Stuart Erwin and Peggy Hopkins Joyce bickering on a mock-up desert soundstage --- lights out. The best Fields work prior to 1934 may well be the four Mack Sennett shorts, which were actually the first exposure a lot of us had to Fields. They were available in 8 and 16mm during the sixties and seventies from Blackhawk Films (one of them, The Barber Shop, is shown here) and it’s no telling how many runs these things had in schools, libraries, YMCA’s, birthday parties, you name it. I remember playing The Dentist once in a gymnasium filled with college students for what we advertised as a BYOB show (that’s Bring Your Own Bottle for the uninitiated). There was something distinctly Fieldsian about that combination of his voice reverberating off cinderblock walls and drunken hoots and catcalls that accompanied the screening. Maybe this is just the sort of exposure his films could use today.

Kay Francis Gives A Party


Kay’s having some friends over, and judging by her outfit, this gathering looks to have a nautical theme. Richard Barthelmess is first from the left. I’m not sure what that is around his eyes. Has he painted rings around them? James Cagney must have come straight over from the set of Frisco Kid, as that costume appears to be one he wears in the picture. Kay looks smart in her admiral’s attire. Did she stage this party for her own amusement, or was it matter of much-needed publicity at a time (February 1935) when her popularity was beginning to slip? Maurice Chevalier’s to the right of her. According to a recent biography, they were involved at the time. That’s Joan Blondell and husband George Barnes completing the line-up. I’d always heard these parties could run into serious money, but stars regarded them as necessary evils. Such events got a lot of press, after all, and visibility had to be maintained if careers were to flourish.

Billy Wilder's Disastrous Flight

How do we explain the colossal failure of The Spirit Of St. Louis, Warner’s most resounding boxoffice defeat in its history as of 1957 (four million lost)? Elements were in place that would seemingly guarantee success --- Billy Wilder coming off a string of hits, James Stewart who could do no wrong, big studio backing for an adaptation of a 1953 best-seller by the most celebrated media figure of the twentieth century. Jack Warner would spend the rest of his life wondering how such a foolproof package could have tanked so miserably. Participants offered up theories, and second-guessing was rife in the wake of those crippling losses. Wilder said he never got to explore the character properly, having been restrained against exercising some of his bolder creative impulses by an iron-clad contract with Lindbergh which forbade anything other than a straightforward dramatization of the flight itself and events depicted in his book. Casting may have been the first mistake. This was a picture that desperately needed the youth market to put it over. Instead, we got forty-six year-old (when production started in 1955) James Stewart playing twenty-five year old (when his historic flight took place) Charles Lindbergh. Jim would have been great doing this back in 1936, but not twenty years hence when age was starting to tell on him. Why not a younger man? Well, John Kerr was approached, but turned it down (thankfully, as far as I’m concerned). I’m not aware of others being considered, and that’s too bad because I think they might have had the right boy there on the lot, although I’m sure he was never for a moment seriously considered …





So why not Tab Hunter? He’d been OK in Battle Cry. The kids loved him. They may not have cared a damn about Charles Lindbergh, but they’d have gone to see Tab. A strong director like Wilder could have seen him through. It’s ironic that Hunter was pressed into service for a nationwide tour on the movie's behalf --- an eleventh-hour desperate measure after the company discovered few patrons were even aware of who Lindbergh was. Here’s Tab making the rounds for The Spirit Of St. Louis --- accepting plaques and yakking it up on radio with Hit Paraders. A hard sell with hidebound establishment merchandise like Spirit --- even Tab couldn’t get the teens interested, despite fervent entreaties --- I had an overwhelming feeling that every American who belongs to this generation --- my generation --- should see the picture. I know what "The Spirit Of St. Louis" did to me, and for me. Because I’m one of them, I can get the word to young Americans, and I’ll be doing them a favor. Tab confessed in his recent (excellent) memoir that he scarcely enjoyed the junket, but did at least wangle an open-ended round-trip fare to Europe from Jack Warner for having postponed the trip he’d intended to take there before studio duty called.



When you think about it, selling Charles Lindbergh to a 1957 audience would be about like trying to get a Neil Armstrong walk-on-the-moon story off the ground, as it were, today. Well, who remembers Armstrong now? Might as well ask kids to go see a biopic about George Arliss. It had been thirty years since the New York to Paris flight. For pity’s sake, Natalie Wood hadn’t even been born yet, let alone Elvis (by the way, here’s Nat with James Stewart at the Hollywood premiere). If you’re going to watch Stewart fly airplanes, why not jets, like in Strategic Air Command? --- and by the way, where’s June Allyson? As Carl Denham said --- if this picture had romance, it would gross twice as much. Wilder actually had some pretty interesting ideas along those lines, but was afraid to even mention them to the remote and aristocratic Lindbergh. Meanwhile, there was seven million getting spent on the production (including a million plus recreation of the plane) and a general release delayed until April 1957, over two years after lift-off. That Hollywood premiere at the Egyptian (shown here) was star-studded in the extreme, but they were mostly old guard Bel-Air types hopelessly out of touch with a late fifties marketplace (Jeanette MacDonald?). Lindbergh was a no-show, his pact with Warners having assured him that no personal appearances would be required. Stewart posed with pre-war stalwarts Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and others, reinforcing the image of The Spirit Of St. Louis as a movie about old planes and old men flying them.




Warners went for nostalgia with its campaign --- the Roaring Twenties were back again! Flagpole sitters, "It" girls, Stutz Bearcats --- none of which had anything to do with this particular movie. The usual mindless ballys came into play (free simulated cock-pit flying lessons in the lobby, as shown here --- anyone?). Do you suppose Miss "Spirit Of St. Louis" is still out there someplace? If so, we’d love to hear from her. Those stewardess contestants look like so many Warner contract hopefuls. You think they might have thrown in Mamie Van Doren as a ringer? I particularly like the proviso about the "Lucky Lindbergh Coin". You got in free with one, but had to surrender it until after the engagement lest you be tempted to use it again or share your bounty with a friend. Didn’t those Warner brothers trust anybody? An Ed Sullivan broadcast of cropped, black-and-white highlights got Wilder plenty hot under the collar (it needn’t have, for that’s how a lot of us saw the feature on television for years afterward). The newly restored DVD of The Spirit Of St. Louis is a great movie reborn, however. You can really appreciate all the things they got right, despite the miscasting of Stewart (and mind you, he’s good, but damnit, the man was just too… well, I said that). I’d forgotten that it’s over an hour before the plane even takes off. If you lay all the flashbacks and expository stuff end to end, the flight itself really isn’t all that long. We know, of course, that he’s going to make it (1957 teen viewers may not have been so certain, assuming there were any teen viewers in 1957), but suspense is still maintained, particularly when Jim falls asleep at the controls due to ongoing sleep deprivation. Some of that comedy stuff arising from Lindbergh’s "youthful" exploits could have been trimmed, but no doubt pressure was brought to bear on Wilder to lighten it up where he could. The director was unduly hard on himself when he characterized The Spirit Of St. Louis as a failure. Commercially, yes (in spades), but it’s still a fine movie for all of that, and perhaps on DVD, it will finally get the audience it deserves.

Monday Glamour Starter --- Ann Dvorak

As if to confirm for all time that life isn’t fair, we have the career of Ann Dvorak. She should have been everything Bette Davis eventually was, and if her performances in Scarface, The Strange Love Of Molly Louvain, and Three On A Match are any indication --- probably a good deal more. Compare the two of them together in the latter, or two years later in Housewife. Dvorak’s younger than Davis, but a more seasoned actress. Bette could never sing or dance. Her rival could. Most importantly (to male viewers), Davis was not hot. Dvorak was smokin’ hot (well, see for yourself!). Were it not for a precipitous walk-out on her Warners contract, Ann Dvorak would have certainly become one of the screen’s most celebrated distaff stars. Just being good isn’t always enough, however. Perseverance and judgment count for at least as much. Davis had these, plus the talent. Her dedication to the career excluded all else, and she got immortality for her trouble, while Dvorak opted for husbands, war work, and early retirement. Chances are that in the end, it didn’t matter so much to her, but it’s a shame she couldn’t live long enough to enjoy the Pre-Code Goddess laurels that would surely (and deservedly) be heaped upon her by fans today.



Dvorak’s father had been an actor and director at Biograph. Her mother was in the biz as well. By the time she’d reached fifteen, Ann had left school and was supporting the family, Dad having powdered out some time before. Nightclub specialties were a teen-age occupation, followed by assistant dance director status at MGM before she was seventeen. Glimpsed among the chorus in a number of early musicals, she’s seen here fourth from the left behind the lead dancer in 1930's Good News. Very much a graduate from the school of life by the time Howard Hawks noticed her on the floor with George Raft (dancing, that is, and torridly), her casting in Scarface and an affair with the master director were all but a foregone conclusion. You can marvel at the maturity of her performance on the one hand (here with Paul Muni), but I suspect Dvorak was more than conditioned by experience to play these very adult roles while still in her teens. A comparison between this woman and any number of modern-day counterparts still impersonating ingenues and gamines in their thirties is quite a startling revelation for those who still imagine that movies, and actresses in them, have acquired greater sophistication since the thirties. For Scarface and a follow-up war comedy, Sky Devils (shown here with Spencer Tracy), Howard Hughes paid Dvorak $250 a week, then sold her contract to an anxious Warner Bros., who put her immediately into a showcase lead, The Strange Love Of Molly Louvain. Worthwhile parts were hit or miss afterward, and the salary remained at $250, but Dvorak’s lot was no worse than any other untried actress on the lot. Impatience and a confrontational nature were encouraged by a new husband, Leslie Fenton, an older British actor who made no disguise of his contempt for Hollywood and its varied perfidies (that’s Fenton pushing against her door in Molly Louvain). His manipulation resulted in a unilateral parting of ways, the announcement of which was tendered to Warner bosses by way of a perfunctory telegram dispatched just as Dvorak and Fenton prepared to sail for Europe. That was July 4, 1932, and maybe this was her idea of declaring independence, but it came way too soon for any kind of sympathetic response from fans or the press (unlike Davis’ similar walkout later in the decade). Dvorak took the ocean voyage, but it was her career that was sailing away.



It’s a tribute to Dvorak’s talent that Warners would even let her back in after such a display of effrontery, but perhaps they felt revenge would best be served on site, for the work that followed their so-called reconciliation was clearly beneath her (including a turn as an Indian in Massacre, shown here). Her period of compliance was brief --- by February 1936 she was back in court, determined to get a release. A year’s wrangling was more likely inspired by Warner’s effort not to be shown up by a contract artist, for within twelve months, Ann Dvorak was indeed set free. Her victory would be a hollow one, for she’d soon become a card game casualty --- one of those recalcitrant ingrates moguls liked to smear as they tossed chips into thousand dollar pots. This sort of informal blacklisting would slam the door on whatever prospects Dvorak might entertain for a screen comeback. She wound up on call sheets at Columbia and Republic (guess Cohn and Yates never sat in on those high-stakes games), then finally quit the US altogether in 1940 for an extended stay in England and admirable contributions to their defense effort (she drove ambulances during the height of the Blitz). By the time she returned four years later, there’d been a split with Fenton and new determination to get her momentum back. She was only 32, but seemed older to those who remembered the powerhouse thesping from nearly a generation before. Dvorak was just too far past her peak to ever imagine she’d scale it again.




Leading lady position in Republic’s tenth anniversary special, Flame Of Barbary Coast, may have seemed a mixed blessing, but this $600,000 splurge for the normally frugal company was at least an opportunity for Dvorak to put across a full plate of songs amidst reasonably lush period settings (Frisco just before, and during, the quake). She’s way too good for what amounted to a "B" western in neater attire, and the exposure didn’t necessarily lead to better things, unless you considered indies released through United Artists and Eagle-Lion a step up (here she is with George Sanders in one of them, The Private Affairs Of Bel-Ami). All of her work in these was fine, but the majors were still more or less shunning her. It would be 1950 before she’d get to demonstrate the old fire in an otherwise weak Lana Turner vehicle, A Life Of Her Own, wherein Dvorak played a suicidal washed-up fashion model who jumps out a window during the first act and pretty much takes the picture with her. A couple of years later, Dvorak would herself bail on the industry --- not even forty, but wise enough to realize it was over. She’d married again (and again), but never returned to performing. Dvorak became, of all things, an avid collector of rare first editions. Like a lot of self-educated people, she was, as she put it, a fanatical reader, as well as a devotee of language studies (funny how so many folks with degrees and diplomas never again pick up a book once they’ve completed their "formal" education). She lived under the radar for several more decades, and so far as I know, never sat for an interview. Ann Dvorak had been residing in Hawaii when she died in 1979.

An On-Set Break During Life With Father


Here’s an illustrious gathering from the Warner Bros. 1947 hit Life With Father. From left to right --- director Michael Curtiz, production supervisor Steve Trilling, Jack L. Warner, Irene Dunne, William Powell, and the authors of the Broadway play from which the picture was adapted, Russell Crouse and Howard Lindsay. With a negative cost of $4.7 million, Life With Father was the most expensive of all Warner Bros. projects as of that year (beating the previous record of $4.4 million for Night and Day) and though it did sensational business ($6.4 million in worldwide rentals), the eventual profit was only $131,000. The present day ownership of Life With Father remains a little cloudy. Some would claim it resides in the public domain. As to the negative itself, I assume Warners has custody. Competing claims and/or underlying literary rights may have delayed its appearance on DVD, though it would certainly be a welcome title for most collectors. I seem to remember CBS running it years ago as one of their prime time network movies. Otherwise, the only sightings I can report have been confined to super market bargain bins where Life With Father can be had for as little as one dollar. You can imagine the quality of those transfers. Until the rights question is (hopefully) settled, this will probably remain an orphan title…

Parking Lot Photography


Back when stars were frequent guests on radio, fans got wise to programming schedules, then staked out parking areas surrounding the broadcast location so they could grab neat autographs and snapshots. Most of these candids we run across today are surely one-of-a-kind, since amateur photographers would more than likely salt their handiwork away in personal scrapbooks or albums. My hat’s off to these dauntless and determined shutterbugs patiently awaiting celebrity arrivals and departures. Note the star’s dressed-to-the-nines look, particularly among the women. Vera-Ellen, Jane Withers, Evelyn Keyes … they really knew how to turn themselves out, even for a radio appearance where they’d be largely unseen, except by a studio audience. Love Eddie Robinson’s hat, by the way, and I assume that’s a camera around Red Skelton’s neck. Fans must have been a lot less intrusive in those days, as these star subjects don’t seem unduly annoyed by their presence. That gauntlet between the car and the station door was surely one these luminaries expected to run whenever they had a guest spot to fill. Indeed, their disappointment might have been greater had there been no anxious admirers awaiting their arrival.

Being Their Off-Screen Selves

Once you’ve pretty well covered respective canons of the three comedy pantheons (by that I mean Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd), chances are you’ll delve into their off-screen lives just to maintain the contact. A really dedicated fan isn’t content to merely watch the movies over and over. You want to follow them home, examine their family lives, ask yourself (and other fans) why that transition to sound did or didn’t work out, how come this or that marriage failed. Locations they used have become sacred ground. Keaton’s have been covered in one outstanding book (Silent Echoes) --- a similar work on Chaplin is forthcoming. All those ancillary figures in their lives take on fascination as well --- Lita Grey, Natalie Talmadge, Mildred Davis, all the wives. Children and grandchildren become objects of interest. Everything these comedians did away from the set impacts on their work in some way, or at the very least provides further insights into their characters. Any fresh image rediscovered and published tells its own story, provides new revelation. Details in the lives of these three are thankfully so plentiful that we can look at photos such as ones here and apply our own background comedy, or drama, depending on the pose and one’s mood.



Charlie Chaplin might have hung a sign here reading NO Custard Pies in the Organ Loft, for here is a man determined to be taken very seriously during quiet moments of contemplation at home. Could he actually play that organ he’d installed at great expense in the house on Summit Drive? Yes and no, from what I understand. He was no doubt better than I was before my own sixth grade piano recital debacle, though Chuck was no Jesse Crawford. I understand his noodling at the keys got on Paulette Goddard’s nerves, but what was he doing playing on that organ with Paulette’s available? She never liked the wheezing instrument and all those inscrutable servants creeping around a lonely, quiet house. I think this was where Kono finally hit the bricks --- Paulette said it’s either him or me (well, which would you choose? --- this is Paulette Goddard we’re talking about). Chaplin was way deep into showing off famous friends. If you’re judged by the company you keep, then it’s no wonder he was tagged as a genius early on. Anyway, Charlie was a seasoned collector of other geniuses. Albert Einstein was his date to the City Lights premiere. I wonder if either of them picked up concessions before going in to watch the feature. Baby Ruths were sold in 1931. That would have been my choice had I been invited along for a threesome.




Buster and Harold had a different approach to their portrait sittings. Keaton liked the brooding look. With him, it went beyond the stone face of silents. By the time he was securely imprisoned at MGM, Buster’s gallery expression took on a resignation and look of despair that betrayed his awareness of having made the defining error in judgment of his life. Harold, on the other hand, maintained the sunny smile of a man very much in control of his destiny (was there any comedian so dapper and handsome off-screen?). That jaunty way with the cigarette (above) was just another bit of fun for a man constantly picking four-leaf clovers in the garden of life. Boxoffice decline never brought him down --- Lloyd just picked himself up, dusted himself off, started all over … well, you get the picture (tough enough, though, to pick himself up from the hospital bed after that "prop" bomb accident that nearly finished his budding career). This man had plenty of hobbies to substitute for the business of making movies. With Harold’s kind of millions, who worries when stardom plays out? He had to be the most self-contained personality to ever work in pictures. Between Shriner’s duty, amateur photography, record collecting and what not, when did he have time to worry about Mildred’s drinking problem (she’s with him here) or the kid’s ongoing mishaps? I get the feeling Harold never let anything bum him out.




Poor Buster was something else. Trouble dogged him constantly from the time those Talmadge sisters advised Natalie to quit the marital bed and put a lock on her door. Too bad Keaton didn’t have the benefit of Rhett Butler’s exit line that day --- The world is full of many things and many people, and I shan’t be lonely --- for indeed he sought comfort elsewhere (Dorothy Sebastian, anyone?). That, along with the alcohol, was where his downfall really got underway. By 1932, when this still was taken on the Metro lot, Buster was only months, if not weeks, away from a divorce that would strip him of house, kids, and fortune. The "land yacht" shown here was like a burlesque house on wheels --- there was no Volsted Act enforced here --- a recent hair-pulling melee between two of Buster’s competing mistresses had given his rolling party boat a very bad name at MGM. This was probably one of the last times he’d see the two boys (shown here with their father, along with Jimmy Durante and Lew Cody) for a number of years. Natalie’s enmity toward Buster inspired her to change their son’s names from Keaton to Talmadge (suppose either of them ever changed it back?). She cursed Buster till the day she died a hopeless drunk in 1969. He got the last laugh with a good marriage in 1940 and twenty-six happy wedded years till his death in 1966.

Howard Hawks' Amazing Movie


Some writers have said that the prospect of making a science-fiction thriller embarrassed Howard Hawks. Studio memos suggest he wanted to distance himself from haunted house type horror pictures. The idea of serving up another Frankenstein was anathema to him. This was 1950. Were horror themes then in such ill repute? If so, why? A look back at the forties may provide an answer. Monsters had become the province of kiddie viewers. Universal had debased their gallery of terrors to a point where the only thing left to do was surrender them all to Abbott and Costello for a send-up. The comedy team was (profitably) meeting Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man in theatres across the country when Hawks began considering his sci-fi venture. Naturally, he wouldn’t want the project confused with such tomfoolery as this. Rather than use previous screen horrors as his model, Hawks wisely chose to vary his own formula, but slightly, for what would become The Thing (From Another World). The director’s combination of audience pleasing elements had worked before --- professional men in jeopardy, a sassy woman, lots of humor, and short bursts of action. Hawks didn’t need to go to old horror movies to come up with all this --- it was already road-tested in To Have and Have Not, Only Angels Have Wings, Air Force, and any number of others. Had he made this picture ten years later, Hawks would no doubt have been polluted by the dozens, if not hundreds, of catch-penny creep shows that followed The Thing. As it is, he was lucky enough to enter a brand-new field where none of the rules were yet in place, so he essentially got to write the how-to manual that others would follow for decades to come. Less imaginative filmmakers are still copying The Thing --- it’s the grand prototype for all screen sci-fi.



This really scary show (ask anybody who was there in 1951) might not have been so unnerving had stills of Jim Arness in make-up gotten out during the first run. Someone finally liberated them from an old RKO filing cabinet sometime in the late seventies, and they revealed a far less imposing creature than the one we glimpse fleetingly (and dimly) in the feature. Hawks knew these monsters work a lot better when you can’t get a good bead on them (for a cautionary lesson in the hazards of overexposing your title menace, check out It! Terror From Beyond Space). Watching The Thing again last night (and no, I never fall asleep during this movie) made me wonder --- why didn’t those guys just leave that block of ice outside? They could have watched it through the window --- instead of dragging the heavy thing into a nice warm room and breaking the glass to let in all that cold. Another concern of mine is Dr. Carrington. I think he has serious intimacy issues. He spoke longingly of organisms not encumbered by emotional or sexual considerations. Dr. Carrington wants to be a super-carrot, or at the very least be conquered by one, or better still, an army of them. Margaret Sheridan’s Nikki might well have snuck down to his cot one night (this being the North Pole where there aren’t many clubs or even Barnes and Noble book stores to meet guys) were it not for Captain Hendry’s providential arrival and Dr. Carrington’s complete indifference to her ample charms. I think he’s less an implied communist archetype than a forty-year old (or more) virgin who now prefers the society of alien mutations to that of his own admittedly limited supply of earthbound women.



I do like the part where Nikki ties up Pat and teases him with familiar Hawksian patter. Even in the midst of an extraterrestrial invasion, there’s still time for relaxed romantic repartee from Hawks’ old Bogart/Bacall playbook. This footage, and a few other minutes here and there, used to be the hotly pursued quarry of 16mm collectors determined to have a complete print of The Thing. A 1957 re-issue had shortened the film by eight or so minutes (the better to accommodate RKO double bill bookings) and the only full-length versions in circulation were non-theatrical rental copies that had been made up in the fifties. All the TV prints were the 1957 cut-down. A complete Thing was indeed a proud possession for collectors fortunate enough to score one. There’s always four or five things going on at once in The Thing. It’s actually a challenging movie to watch. I still haven’t absorbed all that rapid-fire dialogue, and I’ve been watching steadily since 1964. There’s plenty of humor as well, when you aren’t jumping out of your seat(how is it we never get used to that moment when Ken Tobey opens the greenhouse door?). The eternal debate as to who really directed The Thing (was it Howard Hawks or the credited Christian Nyby?) was settled once and for all by cast members reluctant to spell it out during Nyby’s lifetime. Most all would eventually agree that Hawks was the mastermind, but why confront Christian Nyby with the truth when he was enjoying so much the attention that credit gave him during his retirement? Most of the published info on The Thing, including much of what appears in this posting, originated in a wonderful article published in Cinefantastique back in 1982 and written by Ted Newsom (Volume 13 --- combined Issues 2 and 3). He interviewed many surviving cast and crew members at the time, and other writers have been cribbing from his work ever since.




Walter Winchell said, Compared to "The Thing", Dracula was a petunia. This set the tone for RKO’s campaign. Petunias were, in fact, installed around theatre lobbies, based on the Winchell blurb and patron’s awareness of it (he was still widely read at the time). Footprints with six toes were stenciled on the ground in front of boxoffice windows. Large blocks of ice secured with rope adorned theatre fronts, at least for as long as they took to melt (and that may have been a short wait, considering this was a late Spring and summer play-off). The teaser with the child in her high chair was in questionable taste, but surely got attention, while the "scientist" testimonial would be the first of many such dubious props for the supposed authenticity of sci-fi subjects. I particularly like that Find Your Own Seats --- Ushers Scared To Work announcement on the marquee. Margaret Sheridan is sharing a table here with some exhibitors at the annual convention of Motion Picture Owners and Operators of Georgia in May of 1951, promoting the recent release of The Thing. She’d been a Howard Hawks discovery back in 1946 when she did this portrait pose for the part in Red River that ultimately went to Joanne Dru. Sheridan got married and pregnant before shooting on the western could begin, and Hawks took a raincheck on her services, though he’d later maintain she’d lost her spark by the time he finally got around to casting her in The Thing. Domestic rentals for The Thing were outstanding --- $2.0 million. Adding $750,000 in foreign rentals made for a final profit of $35,000, a number that might have been higher but for the fact that negative costs had run to $1.2 million, quite an outlay for what was generally considered a straight exploitation picture.

Antidotes For Television

Exhibitors always understood, as they put it, the basic superiority of theatre-size motion pictures over small-screen television, but how to convince their dwindling movie-going public? Institutional ads were one answer --- devoted to audience appeal and professional standards. Stressing the idea of relaxing at the movies was the goal. Infra-red candid photography of audiences laughing uproariously at All About Eve (!) and Mrs. O’Malley and Mr. Malone were published in newspaper ads (presumably without benefit of waivers from viewers who might not have appreciated having their pictures taken while "relaxing at the movies") You must be part of an audience if you want to enjoy yourself, they said, but would those long-ago showmen embrace the same philosophy if they experienced our present-day theatre community, with its endless patron chattering, fire alarm cell phones, and oppressive commercials lurching toward overlong features?




Home-I-Tis was a common affliction exhibitors were determined to stamp out. Get Them Out Of The House was the shared mantra of co-op merchants and service providers who could all benefit if only those zombies in front of their televisions would leave the nest and seek entertainment in the public sector. During those bleak years of the early fifties before 3-D, Cinemascope, and Vistavision came along to grant temporary reprieve, theatres were joining hands with restaurants, night clubs, taxi companies, parking lots, gas stations --- any and all links between the TV set and their lobby door. By getting them out of the house --- regardless of where they go --- the people will again become motion picture conscious once they stop staying home, declared the Schine theatre circuit. Contests were inevitable. Winners received a night out, courtesy participating businesses. The lucky ones would enjoy – free! – a taxi ride to an outstanding restaurant for dinner, passes to the theatre; after the movie a visit to their favorite night club, hotel or tavern, and a ride back home. Imagine such an evening! Streamlined transport in a checkered cab, steaks and chops at a quiet dining retreat (no doubt much like the one Miles took Becky to in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers), screen hilarity with the newest Dean and Jerry, followed by generous libation at one of the local owl clubs, then you’re poured into that canary-colored chariot for the trip home (assuming you weren’t rolled in that tavern/clip joint). Sounds like a great night out, but who’s home watching the kids?

Don Juan and Vitaphone's 80th Anniversary












Don Juan opened at the Warner’s Theatre on August 6, 1926. It was the first feature with a synchronized music and effects score on disc. Those are the historical facts. They’ve been recited in countless documentaries during the eighty years that have brought us to this anniversary week. We can only imagine the thrill felt by that premiere audience. There are reviews and anecdotal evidence to suggest what it must have been like --- but are there any live witnesses left? You can watch Don Juan and all its accompanying Vitaphone shorts in beautifully restored versions today, but you’ll never experience emotions those people felt when this revolutionary thing swept down upon them. What in our lifetime can approach it? Color TV maybe. The introduction of compact discs. Our first glimpse of home computers and the Internet, perhaps. But those were mostly private moments, or encounters shared with but a handful of friends or family members. Whatever the impact, it wouldn't have been anything like sitting with 1,360 people in an auditorium quivering with anticipation as Will Hays (shown here) walked out on the virtual stage and spoke the first Vitaphonic words to those stunned listeners. This was the first time most of them had heard sound recordings reproduced electronically. The effect was --- well, electrifying. Never was there such clarity, range, or volume emanating from a mere shadow on a screen. It was truly a supernatural experience. Warners had bragged about the creative coalition between Bell Telephone, A,T&T, and Western Electric that made such miracles possible. These corporate behemoths were seemingly capable of anything.

The idea was to bring recorded music into every theatre. Those benighted venues in "far-flung hamlets" were the first concern of cultural ambassadors determined to give all of us the best in recorded sound. We could finally rid ourselves of upright pianos, washboards, slide whistles --- whatever primitive instruments urban dwellers assumed were being played to accompany silent movies in the sticks. Telephones had united the country. Now Warner Bros. would finish the job with Vitaphone. Dialogue was not a consideration at first. Don Juan had been shot silent in late 1925, and was intended for release that way, but was held back for a score to be grafted onto disc during the summer of 1926. Opera, vaudeville, and concert luminaries were also recorded during June and July (in the defunct Manhattan Opera House, hastily converted into a soundstage). A looming August 6 opening called for twenty-four hour work schedules among technicians assigned to install sound equipment in a theatre designed as a silent house. Speakers were planted in the orchestra pit, and by some accounts, off to the sides of the screen as well. Vitaphone was a process wherein a disc, separate from the film, played (hopefully) in synchronization with the image being projected. It seemed a magician would be required to pull off a thing like this, but Warners had the place filled with magicians, each of them dedicated to getting through that opening show sans any breakdown. With a largely invited audience of New York opinion makers filling their seats, Warners knew this night would either make or break Vitaphone.

Mechanical screw-ups had defeated would-be sound pioneers before. There were repeated efforts during the early twenties that went down in flames, but none of them had the muscle Warners flexed on August 6. The nearest thing to a resurrection, said one ecstatic observer. The Vitaphone shorts were the big noise that night. New York elites were flattered by the highbrow stuff aimed squarely at them. The Philharmonic played Richard Wagner’s Tannhauser, and the audience applauded as the conductor took his bow at the conclusion. It seemed as though he were right there in the auditorium! Giovanni Martinelli performed a selection from I Pagliacci and the crowd rose to their feet for a sustained ovation. Martinelli was sitting in the audience that night, but viewers didn’t know it. They were cheering a projected image. When have any of us ever done that? It’s true they’d soon tire of it. Subsequent Vitaphone shorts with performers taking on-screen bows would be met with stony silence, or laughter. Novelties then as now wear out quickly. Other snafus were minor. Opera soprano Marion Talley was hitting high notes the equipment couldn’t register, and some of her portion was out of sync. Picture and sound crashed a few times toward the end of Don Juan, but that was attributed to a nervous operator (nervous? I bet the guy checked into Bellevue the next day --- talk about pressure!). Margins for error were reduced by the near continual presence of recording engineer Stanley Watkins, who stationed himself in the audience with a telephone hook-up to the projection booth and a bank of push buttons to sound the alert upstairs if something went wrong during the show. As Don Juan enjoyed a nine-month run at the Warner’s, Watkins estimated he’d seen the whole program over ninety times.

The thing we lost with the introduction of Vitaphone was the comforting reality of a live orchestra. The personal, or human touch, is absent, they said. You had to get used to that metallic quality in the sound. It lacked the snap, or edge, of real acoustics. Most critics were agreed on this point. Mechanical sound was no substitute for the real thing, and in those urban centers, they’d been plenty spoiled by splendid accompanists down in the pit. All this reminded me of the debate over long-playing albums vs. CD’s. Record proponents will still tell you that discs lack warmth and body --- the music sounds too mechanical. Given enough years, of course, those of us who remember LP’s will have died out and gone, just as those defenders of live music were eventually supplanted by their Vitaphone successors. Everything’s replaced by something else eventually, but is the replacement necessarily better? No matter. Those theatre orchestras were headed for the scrap heap and no argument about their superior quality was going to save them. We’ll be hearing this debate again when digital projection finally replaces 35mm film, as it's pretty much a certainty that 35mm’s a goner. Once the media empires have made up their minds to scuttle it, we may kiss that format goodbye.

The complete Don Juan/Vitaphone program was released on laser disc back in the nineties. If you can locate one of these on ebay, you’ll see pretty much what played at the Warners Theatre on August 6, 1926. Getting through the shorts may prove a greater challenge today than for first-nighters, however. I surrendered to the refuge of my fast-forward button after the first few, but I did want to get the flavor of what it might have been like to experience these performances for the first time. Don Juan was something else. I’d seen it years ago, knew it was good, and was delighted to find it surpassed even my happy recollection of it. John Barrymore as the title character was in his forties at the time and looked it, especially in comparison with younger screen idols such as Rudolph Valentino, shown here with Barrymore at an awards presentation. The powdered wigs and sprayed on tights don't necessarily become him, but Jack's game for the dual role he plays (more convincing as father than son) and does it all with good humor. Barrymore’s prestige had a lot to do with Vitaphone’s initial success, as his very name implied the heady lights of Broadway, plus long runs and advanced admissions attendant thereto. He was worth the $76,000 per picture fee he got from Warners (here director Harry Beaumont and Jack Warner meet him at the train station). Don Juan would end up playing most of its engagements silent, as few theatres were wired at the time, but it was a solid hit --- against a negative cost of $546,000, it brought back $1.2 million in domestic rentals, with $435,000 foreign. Final profit was a stellar $473,000, a number that anticipated fantastic returns Warners would enjoy with forthcoming Vitaphone releases. Those successes of the next three or so years would put this company in the top bracket among producers and forever identify Warners as the pioneers of sound.

Monday Glamour Starter --- Gloria Grahame

Gloria Grahame is the actress with the funny mouth that got funnier as her career went along. The mutilated face she displayed for Lee Marvin at the end of The Big Heat was a grim precursor to the similarly distorted features Grahame would impose upon her own countenance via ill-advised plastic surgery meant to alleviate her obsessive fears about her mouth. It took a car wreck to do to Montgomery Clift what Gloria did to herself on a doctor’s table. Her appearance varied wildly from one film to the next. She was a girl who couldn’t say no to the cosmetologist. Unpredictable on-set behavior (especially after an Oscar win) and a truly scandalous scandal (known only to insiders at the time) were enough to put brakes on what should have been a major run at stardom. That Academy Award came in 1953. By the end of the decade, she’d dwindled down to spotty work in features with future prospects limited mostly to television. How she got there was a thing largely of her own making, but when Grahame was hot, she seemed unstoppable.


There was a mother to point the way, but this one was more benign than those maternal forces of evil that beset Mary Miles Minter, Linda Darnell, and similar unfortunates. Stage work led to an MGM contract, the kind where they look at you every six months with a pink slip in one hand and lousy parts in the other (here she is with Frank Sinatra in one of the better Metro gigs, It Happened In Brooklyn). The place was choked with girls who would never make the grade, and it seemed for sure Gloria had joined their ranks until a loan-out to Frank Capra put her into It’s A Wonderful Life, ironic that her first important part would be the one best remembered. Slattern roles were adjudged best to exploit her talent, but no one expected Gloria to be so adept as to score an Oscar nomination from one of them. That was Crossfire, and Dore Schary at RKO now owned her contract. Better parts and a shotgun marriage to Nicholas Ray led to a noir pairing with Humphrey Bogart that Ray would direct --- In A Lonely Place. That one took years to be discovered, but its reputation today is unassailable, and Grahame’s membership in various Halls Of Noir Fame are assured thanks to her having been so good in it. Home studio RKO was a bad place for an actress to be after Howard Hughes took charge, however, and second fiddle to Jane Russell’s lead opposite Robert Mitchum in Macao (Nicholas Ray would take over direction from Josef Von Sternberg) was not likely to yield any more Academy nominations. A breakthrough of sorts came with The Greatest Show On Earth, where she was the elephant girl and got to lie down in the sawdust with the brute’s foot poised just over her head, not something she would have likely done after the same year’s triumph in The Bad and The Beautiful. Grahame’s drippin’ Dixie accent in that one goes quite beyond any aural encounter I’ve had in a lifetime dwelling amongst genuine southerners, but those Academy voters have always been pushovers for affectation like this, and Gloria’s performance took home Best Supporting Actress prize.


Her eccentricities would bloom more fully in front of make-up mirrors, where Gloria stuffed cotton balls under her upper lip because she didn’t think it was full enough. That sort of thing is common today when actresses routinely come back from their collagen treatments looking like The Incredible Mr. Limpet, but back in 1953, everybody thought Grahame was nuts. The thing really got out of control when she showed up for work on The Cobweb with stitches around her mouth and a face beyond the redemptive powers of airbrushes and gauze. Suddenly, that Henry Jarrod make-up she’d worn following her coffee facial in The Big Heat didn’t look half-bad. Whispers around town spoke of a marital crack-up too hot for even Confidential magazine’s tongs to handle. Seems Nick Ray’s thirteen-year old son (by a previous marriage) showed up one afternoon after hitchhiking from military school and was promptly seduced by the subsequent Mrs. Ray. Nick caught the two of them dead to rights when he came home unexpectedly, and gave both the heave-ho. He later got the kid to spill the whole thing on tape so as to scotch any notions Gloria may have had regarding alimony. It was a well-guarded secret at the time, and only decades later would it come out in interviews. As for the thirteen-year old, he’d attain sufficient majority by 1961 to become the husband of Gloria Grahame and father of two children with her. Hollywood stories don’t get much wilder than this.



Gloria couldn’t sing a lick, but she often found herself poised on a bandstand. Here she’s belting out a number with the help of a voice double in Song Of The Thin Man. The voice she used in Oklahoma was her own, but every song had to be assembled from fragments, seemingly a note at a time, before a decent track could be laid down. Television was a familiar grind for actresses no longer in feature demand, and Grahame did a lot of that. One of her vid jobs was an Outer Limits episode, which I happened to have on DVD. That was always a show I had to struggle with on ABC in the sixties --- never could get decent reception --- and that bleak association continues to this day. Again, I slept through much of it, but I do remember waking up and seeing a young actor named Geoffrey Horne conversing with something that looked like The Blob, only this blob had a grotesque mouth (again the mouth!) and cultured diction besides. The whole thing left me in despair for the future of The Outer Limits as a cult talisman, as this made Roger Corman’s early stuff at AIP look like The Magnificent Ambersons by comparison. Gloria Grahame’s part was minimal. You know the groceries must have been running low for her to have done it. Those years before her death in 1981 at 57 were largely spent on unworthy projects, though there were bright spots on the stage and a few interesting made-for-TV movies. Gloria’s mother told her toward the end that she should have better applied herself to acting. Maybe so, but she was great on those occasions when opportunity and circumstance put her in the right parts, and any resume that includes In A Lonely Place, The Bad and The Beautiful, and The Big Heat need not go begging.

A Little Bit Of History That's Gone


Tony Franciosa’s checking out a famous backlot street at Metro in this late fifties shot. This is where Gene Kelly danced in An American In Paris and Singin’ In The Rain. No telling how many other MGM pictures were shot here as well. All of it came down eventually, of course. You can see a bit of the dismantling on an old ABC network special, Hollywood --- The Dream Factory, which was originally broadcast in 1972. I remember watching that while I was still in high school. It was the first time I’d seen many of those great highlights from the MGM classics, but melancholy shots of the abandoned backlot and that sleazy auction are what I recall best. So many beautiful costumes and priceless memorabilia thrown to the wolves. Wonder how much of it survives today. For all I know, there are hoboes bundled up in freight cars today wearing Walter Pidgeon’s wardrobe from Mrs. Parkington. They say that during the auction, there were hippies running around the lot wearing Lana Turner’s dresses. Everything was being torn off the racks as though it were a yard sale. Thousands of irreplaceable original still sets would be shipped to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and sold in the basement for nickels and dimes. A friend of mine found double weight photos from Erich Von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow during a break from the slots one night. Too bad he didn’t leave the gambling alone and buy all those stills when he had the chance. That would have been no gamble, for they’d be plenty valuable today. Back in Culver City, studio folk were busy junking unused musical numbers with Astaire, Garland, Kelly, etc. (only a few comparative few survive today). I assume the idiots that ordered that are still happily employed in the industry. Maybe not. Hope not. Anyway, Hollywood --- The Dream Factory is included as an extra on the Meet Me In St. Louis DVD, and it's well worth the price of the disc just to get this documentary.

We Think You'll Like It!


Endorsement ads are often suspect. When stars recommend a movie, you can usually detect some benefit accruing to them for having done so. Warner players would often rave in print over Warner pictures --- one hand washing the other. Then there are those occasions when the product really does merit praise, and the celebrity kudos neither bought nor coerced. Sunset Boulevard was a show that got attention, particularly in the town it dissected so brilliantly. I’ve no doubt that everyone in the industry wanted to see it, and most would likely be impressed, if not made a little uneasy by it. Could all of this happen to them someday? Yes to that, for many a Norma Desmond plies his/her trade most weekends at far-flung autograph shows. The only difference is most of them don’t have crumbling Hollywood mansions to go home to. I’m not sure that even Norma could have been reduced to peddling her signature for $15 a pop in some hotel ballroom, but her modern counterparts are sure doing it today. Looking over this ad, I see a few stars that were in bed with Paramount at the time --- Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Fontaine, Loretta Young --- were they just greasing some wheels, or did they really like Sunset Boulevard? Well, the question might be better put, How could they not like Sunset Boulevard? Joan Crawford often endorsed the other man’s product --- she was generous that way. Bogart was nobody’s whore when it came to recommending movies --- this is the only time I can recall seeing his name attached to an ad blurb. The columnists here were in the business of promoting films, so no surprises there, though I wonder if Hedda Hopper refers to Sunset Boulevard or her performance in it (Great!) --- probably both, and she’s right.

Favorites List --- Hard To Handle

James Cagney seems to have been many different people during a long life (he made it to 86). Liberal in his youth, conservative in maturity --- "urban barbarian" on screen, aspiring intellectual off (check out this off-screen shot of a subdued Jim at his piano) --- squeezing the last dollar out of Warner Bros. through bitter and ongoing contract disputes, then making donations to itinerant lettuce pickers. A somewhat remote personality, and difficult to know. He wouldn’t watch the movies he made and said most were rubbish, but he wanted to be paid handsomely for doing them, and few stars kept a closer eye on popularity standing than Cagney. Whenever it went up, he’d send brother Bill (William Cagney) up to Jack Warner’s office with demands for more cash. The spring and summer of 1932 found both Cagneys chafing under $1250 a week, a low number in view of Jim’s meteoric rise to stardom within the previous year, and a pittance compared with Dick Powell’s $4000 stipend. The bosses said he was an ingrate and dismissed him out of hand. Jim said Screw Acting and went to New York with every intention of applying to Columbia Medical School. He wasn’t bluffing either. There was enough money saved up, and besides, his brothers had gone into medicine and Jim didn’t want to end up like one of those old actors hanging around a theatrical club. Warners panicked in the face of exhibitor demands they kick in with Cagney bookings promised in sales annuals (here’s a relevant page from one of them). An arbitration sit-down at the Academy Of Motion Pictures finally ended the stalemate with a new deal --- $3000 a week, $1250 of the money to go into trust and held against further disruptions on Cagney's part (and yes, there would be more of those), with an understanding that by 1935, he’d be upped to $4500. The triumphant return to assembly lines would be Hard To Handle, and much publicity for that would revolve around the salary squabble.












All Is Forgiven, said the ads, but neither side would forget. Cagney made no disguise of his contempt for front office types, and that extended to in-laws and peripheral boot-lickers. Director Mervyn LeRoy was both of these, and Cagney would accuse him of congenital sycophancy (LeRoy married Harry Warner’s daughter). Jim felt that with a good script and cameras in place, any idiot could direct movies. He said LeRoy used to signal Action!, then amble out among players to give final instruction. Before calling Cut, he’d walk back onto the set and congratulate everyone for a scene well played. All this was for the benefit of front office bosses watching the dailies later on, said Cagney; just a device for LeRoy's showing off and emphasizing his own contribution. There could well be something to this story, for I noticed Mervyn popping up in several of those Warner Breakdown reels we’ve been seeing lately as DVD extras. By the way, that’s LeRoy pulling a rickshaw for Pat O’Brien and Josephine Hutchinson during Oil For The Lamps Of China in 1936. Just substitute any combination of Warner brothers for the two actors and you’ll have a pretty good idea of LeRoy’s image in Cagney’s mind.



They really piled on the caveman stuff in selling Hard To Handle. When That Red-Headed Sex Menace Kisses ‘Em, They Stay Kissed --- The Screen’s Prodigal Son-Of-A-Gun Gunning For Blondes --- He’s As Handy With His Misses As He Is With His Mitts. Hey, why can’t they sell pictures like this today? Hard To Handle finally showed up a few weeks ago on TCM after being MIA for awhile, and what a peach it is. The later Cagney classics may have more polish, but these Pre-Codes (of which this is most definitely one) are like listening in on a vulgar joke told at a men’s smoker, and wouldn’t it be nice if we could get back to movies that are on and off in eighty minutes or less? Hard To Handle revels in the nastiest aspects of human nature. Everybody’s got an angle in Cagney’s depression world. It really was the Age Of Chisel-ry. The public is like a cow, bellowing to be milked, he says, in one of the few lines I could comprehend during that rat-a-tat salvo Cagney opens with. Did urban dwellers talk so fast as this? Do they still? Down here where I live, you could get ninety minutes of footage out of the sixty seconds it takes for Jim to deliver what must have been ten pages of furiously cynical monologue. This picture has some of the zestiest writing I’ve heard in movies. Jim’s energy is almost maniacal (It won’t rub in! It won’t rub in!) --- like Cody Jarrett before he started robbing trains and killing people. Angry mobs are several times in pursuit of Cagney here, funny yet unsettling scenes as there’s real intensity in the faces of all those crazed extras. People played for keeps in those desperate times. I kept thinking if they caught up with Cagney, they’d kill him. Everybody looks so hungry in Hard To Handle. You’d have to assume those bits and day players got barely enough to eat on, and that gives even the smallest performances a sense of urgency and authenticity movies lost when the Code and better times sanded off the rough edges.



One of the things I like best about pre-code films is --- they’re unpredictable. Not so the grosses on Cagney pre-codes, however. You could depend on those like the sunrise. Numbers from the Strand in New York alone seemed enough to pull them through, for Jim’s urban audience was large and loyal. He was the identification figure that never let them down. Hard To Handle, like all his others, was shot in Warner’s bargain basement, thus a negative cost of just $215,000. With domestic rentals of $362,000 and foreign at $151,000, the final profit was $70,000, hard depression dollars. Having been off the screen over six months owing to his strike, audiences were thrilled to have Cagney back. The publicity attendant upon his battle with Warner Bros. only emphasized a rebellious image and increased the respect they had for him. In the end, that greater salary Warners would pay was well worth it. Jack L. acknowledged as much in his autobiography years later. Considering how quickly the studio turned these things out, it’s a miracle standards remained so high. There’s hardly a dog in the Cagney lot during this period. . I only hope that Warners will get around to putting some of them out on DVD, as I think they’d be a real discovery for a lot of viewers.

A Few Disney Moments
I always understood that in Hollywood, success is based largely on the company you keep. If that’s the case, then I guess we can say Walt Disney was indeed a very large success in 1932, based on the grouping shown here --- but what was Walt doing with the Royal Family? Ethel and Lionel are in costume for Rasputin and The Empress, and I’d assume they’re on the Metro lot --- do you suppose Walt has come over to ask permission to use their caricature likenesses in Mickey’s Gala Premiere? The Barrymores were no different from anyone around Hollywood in the early thirties --- they were willing, nay anxious, to pose with the youthful prodigy that had made animated cartoons top-of-the-bill attractions. All doors were open to Walt Disney --- I’d imagine that in the town’s social stratosphere, he’d have been a dream guest at any dinner gathering. The man was doing something utterly different in an industry that thrived on formula, and everybody recognized talent that approached genius, if for no other reason than the fact that so few had it.

Moving the clock forward to January 30, 1959, we now see Walt unveiling a bold initiative to introduce stereophonic television into our homes, by way of "three-source reception" combining radio and TV. The idea was to place the FM receiver on the left, the television set in the center, and AM on the right, separating each radio from the center set at a distance of four to six feet. Walt’s demonstrating the "simplicity" of the plan here, and according to the caption, ABC was right on board for the experiment, which would be conducted by way of the network’s broadcast, The Story Of Peter Tchaikovsky. I assume the program itself had a stereo track, but that’s easy enough to check if anyone has the DVD of Sleeping Beauty, which includes Tchaikovsky as an extra. I’m just sitting here thinking how neat it would be if you could reproduce this whole set-up today, with a black-and-white TV set and those two vintage radios on either side --- wonder what it would sound like --- probably better than you’d think. What a visionary this man was.


Here’s Walt close to the end. He’s visiting the set of The Happiest Millionaire, the last feature on which I understand he had hands-on involvement. That’s Fred MacMurray and Greer Garson standing with him. There are several generations of us who will always remember where we were at the moment we learned of Disney’s death. For me, it was in front of the television late in the afternoon. I was watching a local kid show called Clown Carnival, hosted by a station employee suited up daily as "Joey" --- sort of a Freddie The Freeloader for Charlotte area kids. Anyway, Joey broke character near the end of the show to announce that "we all lost a good friend today", and that’s when I learned Walt had died. At the time, it honestly didn’t seem possible, especially since I had no idea he’d been sick. That was December 1966. Only a few months before, my friend next door had sent a letter out to the studio asking for Walt’s autograph. He got back a slip of paper with the signature. At the time, I questioned its authenticity, as this looked nothing like the fancy scroll that often accompanied ads for Disney pics. Of course, now there’s no question in my mind it was the real thing. Walt Disney would never have sanctioned fake autographs going out to his fans (and don’t any of you dare submit any comments confirming that he did!).

Premieres and Premiere Parties


Just came across some neat images with various stars attending premieres and the parties afterward. Douglas Fairbanks Senior and Junior arrive together in what looks to be a mid-thirties shot, but I have no idea what the movie may have been. The Prisoner Of Zenda maybe? Senior observed that Junior’s role in that one (as Rupert Of Hentzau) was absolutely foolproof and would have made a star out of anybody. As it is, Rupert was one of the few murderers to go free at the end of a Code movie. A sequel had been contemplated and the idea was that he’d be punished in the follow-up. Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Tracy are checking their ducats here. I saw a recent picture of Tracy’s son (at an autograph show, I believe) and he was an absolute dead ringer for Spence. Norma Shearer and George Raft were an item when this pic was taken with Hedy Lamarr. As I understand it, Norma and George finally split because George’s wife wouldn’t give him a divorce. Party time sees Hedy with dashing Basil Rathbone and a dancing couple I’m not certain about. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to who they are? Tyrone Power and Annabella are greeted by someone at their table, but again, I’m not sure who that someone is. I do know that’s Priscilla Lane talking with Ronald Reagan. As I recall, Priscilla retired to Connecticut, and as far as I know, was never interviewed during those years. Too bad, as I’d like to have heard her reflections on those days she spent at Warners.