Just A Small Announcement


Owing to what I’m told has been excessive posting and obsessive attention to Greenbriar Picture Shows (since when is every waking hour obsessive attention?), we are obliged to modify the killing pace that’s been maintained since day one, and cut back to two or so stories a week as opposed to showing up with something new every time the cock crows. That’s not to say that Greenbriar is closing its doors. By no means. There are several features in the pipeline now, and many more to come. It’s just those silly things like sleep and getting outdoors occasionally that interfere with the really important business of feeding this webpage. Most of my blogging peers, many of whom are listed on the Greenbriar links page, have the good sense to maintain balance along with a high standard of quality in what they contribute, and they’re examples worth following. As for the Monday Glamour Starters, they will continue, though not necessarily on Mondays, and not on a weekly schedule. On the topic of outstanding sites, there’s a new one that has been dazzling me on a near daily basis for several weeks now. Vitaphone Varieties is devoted to the early days of sound, with articles and research that are breathtaking in their detail and erudition. Jeff Cohen is the host, and he’s got info/images I’ve never seen anyplace else. Go there and get some serious film history!

Of Dallas and Comfort Westerns


It must have come as quite a shock when Gary Cooper received the script for his fourth starring vehicle under the Warner's contract he'd signed in 1948. After three classy features (The Fountainhead, Task Force, and Bright Leaf) with first-rate directors (King Vidor, Delmer Daves, and Michael Curtiz), Dallas was a distinct comedown. It had been announced for Errol Flynn, but Cooper was assigned at the eleventh hour. The studio's choice of journeyman Stuart Heisler to direct was hardly a vote of confidence. If you look at Cooper's gag cameo in the previous year's It's A Great Feeling, you get a pretty good idea of how his new employers regarded the star. The appearance is brief --- Cooper is carelessy photographed (at a time when age was starting to betray him), and the exchange with Dennis Morgan trades on old yup and nope routines that had dogged him since the beginning of his career. Two decades of fine performances had taken Cooper way beyond that insulting cliche, yet here he was, engaging in self-parody that had to rankle. To some extent, Dallas is more of the same. There is Technicolor, though it doesn't flatter him (in 16mm, his hair looked almost orange at times, even on original dye-transfer prints), and the whole thing has a slapdash, backlot feel about it. So my recommendation? You must get this movie! It's practically a textbook on the declining careers of a pre-war generation of great leading men, that fallow period during the late forties when youngsters like Gregory Peck, Burt Lancaster, and Robert Mitchum were getting the really interesting parts, while veteran stars---Gable, Flynn, Cooper --- were having to get by in studio product with no allowance made for changing times, or the leading man's advancing age(s). Gary Cooper is fabulous in Dallas, giving his best to a bad job. He's winging dialogue, peppering dull scenes with quirky mannerisms; in short, making plenty out of nothing --- getting a lemon, and giving us lemonade. Watch for his introductory scene --- it's a classic --- and only Cooper could make it look so good; burning that wanted poster and lighting his cigar --- great. The leading lady is Ruth Roman --- I guess that's where Warners saved some money. After all, Coop didn't come cheap. For the record, Dallas had a negative cost of 1.390 million (significantly below the money spent on his previous WB's), and final worldwide rentals were 4.490 million, so Cooper in a western was still boxoffice. Too bad WB didn't think enough of him to put a little more effort into the piece. I still love it though, and what a kick to see Raymond Massey in a seedy land-grabber villain role (and Steve Cochran's his brother!). Bet Massey loved telling that one to his lunch companions at the Player's Club. Barbara Payton's there too. Read her sleazy auto-bio, watch this movie, and think about it. There's lots to like in Dallas --- a wonderful Max Steiner score --- Cooper masquerading as a "dude" --- and a sock finish when he finally corners Massey. High Noon was a year away, but you could argue this one’s more fun….




Cooper no doubt wondered when a Broken Arrow or The Gunfighter might arrive to rescue his western prospects, but for stars too high-priced, if not overly typed , these bolder projects seemed denied. Warners found it simpler, and more lucrative, to continue on autopilot with increasingly formula vehicles along the lines of Dallas (1.9 million profit), Distant Drums (2.2, one of WB’s biggest that year), and Springfield Rifle (1.3). What’s the sense of challenging the Cooper audience with thoughtful scripts when these were pulling such figures? Dallas is really little more than a variation on the Randolph Scott model, and those were being turned out two to three a year by directors no more inspired than Stuart Heisler. It works, as little care seems to have been applied, so unlike pretentious westerns of the Broken Arrow school, it’s loopier and more unpredictable. Dialogue comes out of left field. You don’t get a sense of anyone looking over writer’s shoulders. What’s at stake when you know the fans will be there in any case? Cooper’s less inhibited and more willing to fall back on old tricks. Dallas gives full vent to his way with breaking up lines, flexing trigger-fingers, and doing that showdown walk reserved for westerns he couldn’t otherwise take seriously. Confusion over whether Dallas was serious or send-up merely enhances the fun, for Cooper seems to have come in some days willing enough to play straight, while on others he’s back in Along Came Jones mode, less self-consciously this time and all the better for it. You can’t help feeling sorry for Raymond Massey, though. There’s one agonizing scene where they put him on horseback --- a real horse --- and the man looks terrified. Only two years previous, he’s wearing three-piece suits behind the owner’s desk at The New York Banner, and now this (but worse was yet to come, for within a few months, he’d be tangling with Randolph Scott in Sugarfoot!).




High Noon (an outside picture) might have turned the tide at anyone else’s home studio, but Warners saw no reason to elevate Cooper toward more challenging work --- thus there was Blowing Wild, which had him hauling nitro and shunning Barbara Stanwyck. Opening sequences are near identical to Treasure Of the Sierra Madre, as though some of that quality might rub off. I’m only sorry Warners no longer owns this negative, for it would make a great addition to The Gary Cooper Collection --- Volume Two. Dallas is happily available however, and don’t let anyone kid you it’s among the lesser offerings. Any western that pairs Steve Cochran and Barbara Payton as desperado lovebirds has to be getting something right, even if unknowingly. I understand the two frequently repaired to remote corners of the backlot for R&R. This I would expect from Cochran/Payton, but where was Coop? Surely he exercised a leading man’s prior claim, and my understanding of B.P. suggests she’d have been more than willing, as even model of rectitude Gregory Peck succumbed to her charms when they made Only The Valiant a year later. There’s a major biography of Barbara Payton forthcoming, and the author’s website includes a sample chapter. Based on that, it should be definitive. In the end, I’d imagine Dallas to be the sort of commonplace western Dean Martin used to watch on his television instead of going out with Frank and the boys. No academic will write monographs about this one. It’s the ideal respite from intellectual and emotional demands made by The Searchers and The Wild Bunch, as one’s own advancing age makes these seem somehow more oppressive. I used to wonder why middle-aged men sitting in front of the tube made no distinction between a John Ford and an Audie Murphy. Now at least it seems a little clearer. I’d never have interrogated my father with regards the aesthetic gulf between Red River and an episode of Wagon Train. Dallas and Audie and the lesser Scotts entertain without imposing, and that’s well enough for those men who prefer enjoying their westerns without being turned inside out.

Monday Glamour Starter --- Claudette Colbert
I was in the Washington, D.C. airport about twenty years ago when an announcement came over the loud speakers --- Would Miss Claudette Colbert please come to the information desk? I stopped cold in my tracks, much as John Sheppard/Shepperd Strudwick did in Remember The Day (Miss Trinell!). Was I hearing things? No, they repeated it. Miss Claudette Colbert, please come to the information counter. Having my own plane to catch, what could I do? To this day, there’s no doubt in my mind it was she they were calling. I mean, how many Claudette Colberts could there be? Had that announcement come forty years earlier, there would have been a mass exodus toward that counter. I have to assume the attendant had no idea whom she was addressing. But here’s the remarkable thing --- Claudette Colbert was working at the time --- back on the boards with Rex Harrison after she’d passed eighty. It’s not as though she needed the money, for there was plenty of that, plus an estate in Barbados. If they’d passed out ribbons for Smartest Actress in the Golden Age biz, Claudette would have surely collected, for she never put a foot wrong. Success was mostly followed by greater success, and she enjoyed 92 years of it. Why can’t they all end up like this?




Did those mid-eighties audiences realize they were watching a sixty-year veteran of the stage? Colbert started on Broadway. She was one of its leading lights when talkies came calling. There was hesitation, owing to a bad experience with a single silent feature under Frank Capra’s direction (For the Love Of Mike). Legit having been largely wiped out by depression, she, like a lot of New Yorkers, took the Hollywood offer and tried again. For Colbert, it began with films at Astoria. She’d been raised in Gotham, though born in France. Her domineering mother maintained a strict household, addressing the children only in native tongue, which prepared Claudette to lend assist when Paramount needed French-language versions of The Big Pond and Slightly Scarlet. Early roles were along conventional paths --- her roles were interchangeable with Sylvia Sidney, Miriam Hopkins, Carole Lombard, Nancy Carroll (whom she resembled) --- how do you distinguish yourself in a bakery window filled with near identical sweets? For each step forward (The Smiling Lieutenant), there were three back (Secrets Of A Secretary). Getting noticed on assembly lines was never easy, yet this was an actress with authority none of the rest approached. Go listen to Colbert read lines in that excellent pre-code Torch Singer (if you can find it). Nobody handles dialogue so well. Apparently, it came easy. She knew she’d score from early on, and didn’t mind saying so. It wasn’t conceit … just a fact of (her) life. Acting is instinctive … either you have it or you don’t. Well, she had it in spades, and bore down from the get-go on employers who imagined they could dictate terms. Not only did Colbert get into serious money fast ($5000 a week by 1934), she took charge as well of make-up application and costume selection (and why not? --- she’d trained in commercial art at school and originally sought a career in fashion design). Hell On Wheels was how they described her, but so what when you’re right?





Absurd costume parts were not her strength, but they didn’t intimidate her. Playing Sign Of The Cross and Cleopatra modern seemed as good a way as any to deflect embarrassment. You could take her straight or imagine she’s sending the whole thing up. Either way was satisfying. The one that conferred immortality was It Happened One Night. I’ll depart from the standard orthodoxy where this show is concerned, and you know what I’m referring to. Nobody wanting to do it … Gable in the doghouse and being punished by Metro … Colbert slumming on Poverty Row, etc. All this made for good columns after smash ticket sales plus a clean sweep of Academy Awards, and published histories have carried the legend forward in lock-step since, but I’ve never bought into this all-too pat rags-to-riches tale. For one thing, Capra was a recognized major talent before It Happened One Night. He’d done Flight, Dirigible, The Miracle Woman, Platinum Blonde, American Madness, Lady For A Day --- all well received and critically well-regarded. How could any project under his direction be regarded a step down? I think a lot of this was Capra’s own myth-making helped in no small way by the thirty or so years that passed between the film’s release and his autobiography, together with a willingness on the part of latter-day interviewers to accept his colorful revisions without question. One thing’s sure --- Claudette Colbert was difficult on the set, but that would have been the case in any event, owing to her increasing clout and willingness to exercise a star’s prerogative. It Happened One Night might have proved a mixed blessing, for both she and Gable were fated to revisit this formula in any number of less inspired incarnations as the thirties wore on --- madcap heiresses and cocksure reporters became increasingly unwelcome figures as producers desperately sought to make it all happen just one more night.





Another tall story may be this business about Colbert’s refusal to be photographed from the right side. No doubt there’s some truth in it, but sets rebuilt? I mean, torn down and rebuilt? Did anyone have that much juice during the studio era? Probably another of those long-bearded press agent fabs that somehow transitioned into primary resource for writers all too willing to believe what they read in Hedda Hopper’s old dailies. Colbert was carefully photographed. She saw to that. They say this actress understood a camera better than Dietrich. Again, she likely knew best, for having remained seemingly ageless if nothing else. Her own explanation cited an avoidance of standard vices, and you can add the sun to this list. She stayed away from that and never wrinkled. Others did not and ended up looking like Randy Scott’s old saddlebag. Mother parts she embraced early on, unafflicted with (apx.) same-age Norma Shearer’s vanity in that respect (N.S. having turned down both Now, Voyager and Mrs. Miniver because she was "too young" for such roles). Since You Went Away was most triumphant of these, but there was other outstanding work during those apex years of the late thirties/early forties. She aged onscreen as Remember The Day’s lifelong schoolmarm. If there’s a better performance than hers in this, I’ve not seen it. Fox Movie Channel schedules R.T.D. often. Watch it next time. You’ll break down in tears. Fantastic movie. Then there’s Drums Along the Mohawk, grim, but a John Ford masterpiece. There’s a DVD of that. The Palm Beach Story is one of the better Preston Sturges comedies. Wish she’d done more of them. All those Paramount laffers with Fred MacMurray appear to be buried deep as Ramses’ tomb, but hope springs eternal that present owner Universal will unearth them. No Time For Love is among the funnier of these, but none are without interest. By 1945, Colbert would be out of Paramount and free-lancing. Her price? --- $150,000 per picture. Her motivation to work? --- probably not considerable, since she’d married well (a second time, to a prominent doctor). Her social life combined Hollywood’s elite with the richest among L.A.’s medical community. Colbert was becoming a social lioness if not a continuing boxoffice lure. The late forties saw the initial decline. Sometimes she got lucky in a fluke like The Egg and I, but that one hit because it introduced the Kettles (as in Ma and Pa), who’d go on to popularity eclipsing even Colbert’s. By now, she was noticed as much for parts she lost as ones she took. State Of The Union was a final clash with Capra. Such were Colbert’s demands that he finally replaced her with Katherine Hepburn. All About Eve was written with her in mind, but a back injury performing stunts (!) in Three Came Home paved the way for Bette Davis to move in and give perhaps her finest performance. The loss would rankle Colbert for the rest of her life, as there were no more offers so promising as this. Television was a port of call throughout the fifties. She even touted Maxwell House coffee on the small screen, but not from hunger. Work remained, as it had always been, something to keep her busy, though she’d acknowledge regret for not having been more aggressive in seeking better projects. DeMille offered The Ten Commandments, but was turned down (to do Ford Star Jubilee instead?). After playing Troy Donahue’s mother in Parrish, she hung it up on features (well, how do you top that?). Pleas for memoirs were ignored. What’s so interesting about my life?, she’d ask, and based on the common-sense way she’d lived it, maybe not much, at least in the way of scandal and sensation. Producers still wanted her. Much of the fan mail came from young people. Ross Hunter noticed and tried to induce her to join the Airport ensemble, but no dice. The surprise eighties reemergence found her back on the stage where she’d begun, skills undiminished, and a wider audience got a last look in a 1987 TV movie, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. She died in 1996.

Photo Captions

Claudette Colbert with Maurice Chevalier in The Smiling Lieutenant
Paramount Exhibitor Manual Portrait
Claudette as Cleopatra
Imitation Of Life Title Card
It Happened One Night Ad
With Herbert Marshall in Four Frightened People
With Henry Fonda in Drums Along The Mohawk
Title Card from Remember The Day
With Joel McCrea and Rudy Vallee in The Palm Beach Story
Window Card from Practically Yours
Paramount Publicity Portarit
With Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple in Since You Went Away

Warner Workdays and Frances Dee's Birthday


They say crews at Warner Bros., sometimes worked around the clock in the early thirties. Pictures that would take months to shoot today were wrapped up in weeks back then. Five Star Final is the show in progress here. Director Mervyn LeRoy is lining up an imaginative angle on star Edward G. Robinson. Chances are they’ve been at it for the last eighteen hours. Every interview I’ve read with Warner players talked about those grueling hours. Unions were not yet an effective industry force; thus stages kept humming right through the nights and many weekends as well.


On the topic of birthdays, this is year 97 since Frances Dee was born, and here she’s immersed in a fishpond located in front of Paramount’s administration building around 1932. Dee was a frequent guest at Cinecons until just a few years before her death in 2004. Her performance in Blood Money is one amazing Pre-Code exhibition. Too bad it's out of circulation today, but then, so are other good ones featuring Frances Dee --- King Of The Jungle, Murders In The Zoo, An American Tragedy. What a pre-code box Universal could gather if they were so inclined. Their recent Preston Sturges Collection is a step in the right direction. So is the forthcoming release of The Heiress and Arabian Nights. Could 2007 be the year Universal commits to classics on DVD?

Jack Benny's Making His List


Some of us are getting Christmas shopping underway this weekend, so it seemed as good a time as any to pass along one of Jack Benny’s ideas for gift giving. How could Jack have known back in the forties (?) how controversial that carton of Luckies would become in any number of households within a few decades? I just read about one town where they’ve outlawed smoking in homes. Wonder how Benny would have reacted to a headline like that! He’s certainly laid in a supply, and among the list of recipients, I do recognize George Burns, Gracie Allen, and --- is that Merle Oberon’s name? His neat little miniature violin model would be a Christmas gift I’d welcome. Anyone care to guess the date of this ad? I’m going to say late forties/early fifties…

Boris Karloff --- Part Two


Slide whistles in the main title theme of a Boris Karloff vehicle would seem neither welcome nor appropriate, but that’s just the opening bell for 66 minutes of derivative slap-stick-ery inspired by the success of Broadway’s Arsenic and Old Lace. The Boogie Man Will Get You was in theatres by October 1942, long before Warners could release its screen adaptation of the Karloff stage smash, allowing this pallid facsimile to give provincial audiences a taste of what they’d been reading about in Life and The Saturday Evening Post. Arsenic was black comedy of a sort new to movies, and Boogie Man treaded a ridge between harmless plagiarism and outright, actionable theft. This time Karloff’s misunderstood scientist was played for laughs, only here the yoks are few, so often the case when we’re force-fed zany antics by players straining too hard for the effect. Bodies are piling up in Karloff’s basement, but I had a feeling none of them were really dead, for if they were, he’d soon enough be facing the same electric chair that claimed him in previous Columbia outings. Sure enough, the "corpses" march unceremoniously through his lab just before the fade, arriving as if on cue to checkmate possible Code intervention. Karloff had a deft hand for comedy, and his parlays with Peter Lorre anticipate future teamings on Route 66 and AIP’s The Comedy Of Terrors, itself a similarly labored exercise in dark humor. The great thing about Arsenic and Old Lace (pictured below is a still from the Broadway production) was the prestige it conferred upon Karloff at a time when his career really needed a jolt. A "B" level comedy/horror for Columbia was tangible expression of the actor’s new status, but the truer reward by far was conferred by Universal two years later when they combined Technicolor with a big-budget musical thriller starring Boris Karloff …









The Climax is Universal-ly reviled by fans of Karloff, but when was any horror headliner otherwise entrusted with Technicolor amidst "A" trappings? The previous year’s Phantom Of the Opera was thought too lofty for the likes of Chaney, Jr., despite his familial links with the role and contract availability. Were it not for Arsenic and Old Lace, I doubt very much if Karloff would have gotten The Climax, even if Universal did play games with his billing (first position in the credits, but second to Susanna Foster in the trailer). I like this show because Karloff is at all times elegant and commanding. He’s also striking in Technicolor, enjoying plush accommodations denied him at Columbia and in lesser Universals. Horror fandom seldom overlaps with an appreciation for Susanna Foster, so I can understand the antipathy viewers feel toward The Climax. Universal would easily score bookings for a lavish follow-up to Phantom Of The Opera in theatres that wouldn’t dream of playing The Boogie Man Will Get You. Cheap horror movies were not for first-run houses. The Climax was sold as something quite different (and that's actress June Vincent with Karloff during an on-set break). Universal’s trailer emphasizes Karloff’s Arsenic antecedents. Romantic lead Turhan Bey, himself a veteran of previous horrors, is now celebrated as a romantic new star, acclaimed for his role in "Dragon Seed." The idea was to disassociate these players from low-budget monster movies, as premiere audiences of the day had no more interest in these than modern day Karloff fans have for Susanna Foster or Turhan Bey. With its emphasis on music, The Climax can’t help but disappoint horror mavens, but is it really any worse than the 1943 Phantom Of the Opera in that respect?




I don’t like seeing Karloff belittled and pushed around, least of all by the cut-rate likes of Stephen McNally, whose sole worthwhile accomplishment at the time of The Black Castle had been stealing Jim Stewart’s rifle in Winchester ’73 and engaging in some reasonably colorful villainy therein. Why diminish Karloff in these fifties costumed gothics? Was he regarded as too old to carry the lead? I wanted to see him play McNally’s part in The Black Castle. Imagine Boris with a patch over his eye, consigning victims to those same alligator pits McNally presides over so listlessly. And what twisted form of logic confers top billing and the leading role to past-his-prime Richard Greene? Watching The Black Castle was a bitter experience for this Karloff admirer. I’d glimpse him briefly fifteen minutes in, then he’d disappear for several reels. The role could have been played by Paul Cavanagh, Alan Napier (and both do lend minor support in The Strange Door), or any number of competent thesps. It’s obvious they only hired Karloff for his name, much as was the case with Bela Lugosi and Night Monster. There’s more effort toward selling Richard Greene as a swashbuckling romantic, Flynn-ed out in sword fights and tavern brawls. The Black Castle is no more a horror film than The Prince Who Was A Thief, The Golden Blade, or a dozen other Universal-International pageants, and I could as easily imagine Jeff Chandler or Rock Hudson playing this at about the same level of competence as Greene. As for Karloff, he was actually better served as Dr. Jekyll and (being doubled as) Mr. Hyde opposite Abbott and Costello.




Karloff doesn’t enter The Strange Door. He’s dragged in, thrown on the floor, and kicked by a top-billed Charles Laughton. Much of the film is taken up with the frustrated romance of two utterly vapid young players, Richard Stapley (once a Hal Wallis contract hopeful) and Sally Forrest (whose own billing was increased to equal prominence with Laughton and Karloff in a special pressbook supplement). Those tavern dust-ups so beloved of unimaginative Universal writers are given play in the opening reel of The Strange Door, and despite atmospheric graveyards and castle sets to come, we know horror themes will run a distant second to generic action-adventure content. Everyone seems committed to withholding Karloff’s presence. His is the mysterious eye peeking through walls for most of these 81 minutes, an impassive and largely offscreen observer of Charles Laughton’s flamboyant over-playing. The Strange Door was a step down for Laughton as well, though his motives were pure in that he wanted to finance his ongoing acting workshops and used fees from films like this (and Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd) to do it. If uninhibited Laughton is your meat, here is a banquet of same. Would that Karloff have had such a rich histrionic opportunity! As it is, he’s the loyal, self-sacrificing family servant (always the weakest role in any cast), whose voluntary forfeitures on behalf of undeserving masters seem pointless and unmotivated. No man (or actor) at 64 should have to endure two gunshots, night swims across a moat (after being shot), and a literal backstabbing from one whose part he should have played. Karloff might have managed all this twenty years before, but seeing him attempt it now, in the service of such a poor vehicle, makes you wish he could have collected the fee for less strenuous work --- live television perhaps, or another of his radio quiz programs (above at a broadcast with western great William S. Hart and Rudy Vallee). Considering the sorry state of horror films in the early fifties (and their further erosion as sci-fi took over), we can be thankful Karloff had the refuge of stage work (plus radio and TV) to sustain him. The Universal DVD box includes The Strange Door, The Black Castle, The Climax, Tower Of London, and Night Key. These represent lows and a few highs in his career, but all are well worth seeing, as are the Columbias, and the prices for both sets are irresistible.

Karloff Columbia Numbers

Here's a listing of domestic rentals for six films Boris Karloff did at Columbia. Considering the modest figures shown here, you can imagine why it was necessary to hold down the budgets for these shows. Karloff's vehicles were not unlike serials and "B" westerns in that respect ...

The Black Room --- $187,000
The Man They Could Not Hang --- $183,000
The Man With Nine Lives --- $156,000
Before I Hang --- $117,000
The Devil Commands --- $120,000
The Boogie Man Will Get You --- $160,000

119 Thanksgivings Ago, Boris Was Born! --- Part One


I don’t know if it’s by accident or design, but 2006 seems to have been the year of Boris Karloff on DVD. His name and image has been well marketed since 1993 when daughter Sarah took over licensing of same, and that’s been a good thing for the Karloff legacy, as he still commands enough fan following to be the star attraction in two box sets from major distributors. Pretty amazing for a man born 119 years ago today. Would kids notice Karloff on a Best Buy display rack? I’m in no position to say, being clearly prejudiced in favor of an icon I grew up with, but how much awareness do younger viewers have of these Universal horror films? Perhaps more than we think. Fans of middle-aged duration imagine them to have disappeared along with all those local Shock Theatres, but did they? The recent obituaries for VHS reminded me that home video’s been with us nearly thirty years, and the key Karloff titles have been available for most of these. Satellite television has delivered the Frankensteins and Mummys ongoing for nearly as long, but how wide an audience has AMC and TCM reached during these last decades? I keep wondering if there will be anyone behind my age group to carry the banner for these old horror films. Universal and Columbia must surely be counting on major boomer support for the Karloff obscurities they’ve recently released on DVD. Having plowed more fertile ground by repeated dips into the famous monsters of their respective filmlands, studios have exhumed all the Frankensteins, Draculas, and Invisible Men on hand. Now what’s left are runts from the litter we’ve awaited with even greater anticipation. Has anyone seen Night Key since the seventies? Not me. Columbias like Before I Hang and The Boogie Man Will Get You have gathered dust since the old Shock! package scattered in 1971. The only way you’d see these was on a collector’s 16mm screen or some bootlegged video off a monster-con dealer table. To have them so pristinely available is to realize a dream of years duration, for there’s no group of features so evocative of long ago late-nights as these.


Again, it’s not a question of whether they’re "good" pictures. I’d surely court viewer rejection and my own hurt feelings, were I to show The Climax to an uninitiated audience, for they’d be right in questioning my programming judgment. Both sets are for Karloff fans who understand. To enjoy these is to make allowances for them. They’re the ones you watch alone. Night Key was where I decided to start. No apologies or explanations necessary, for I enjoyed it by myself, thus spared the natterings of those who would remind me that it isn’t even a horror movie. So what’s wrong with a "B" crime melodrama, as long as Karloff’s in the lead? Doesn’t Night Key’s charter membership in the original Shock! group entitle it to respect? Never mind the misleading poster art shown here. It would suggest a vigorous Karloff up to old horrific tricks, not the frail inventor he actually portrays in the film, altogether immobilized by the mere removal of his eyeglasses. Topic A in this show is burglar alarms, so only hardcore Boris boosters need apply. I enjoyed Night Key because I’m happy to pan for gold in these sets. The visual splendor of this hitherto grayish and washed-out 1937 feature was enough to bear me upon wings of rapture throughout, as it never looked so good before. Columbia’s stoutest DVD offering is The Black Room. It’s a stand-alone gothic novelty as opposed to later off-the-rack thrillers. Karloff plays good/evil twin brothers and would show anyone here what a great actor he could be. This is where you'll quell scoffers and perhaps convert non-believers. I promise they’ll dig the scene where Boris has to sign a paper with his right hand (don’t ask, just watch it). You won’t have to set up your crowd for The Black Room. It’s plain satisfying (as well as satisfyingly brief) and itself worth the price of the set.


My aggravation with the Columbia science group lies in the fact that Boris Karloff’s laboratory findings are so sound, so obviously right, that to march him gallows-bound for advancing them seems churlish and altogether unreasonable. He’s constantly beset with small-minded functionaries determined to enforce the law, even when that means switching off his artificial heart moments prior to its revolutionizing medicine. Karloff’s informed arguments are never persuasive with these troglodytes. We’re always with him when he consequently seeks vengeance from beyond the grave. Last-reel endorsements of the status quo are insults not only to Karloff, but to our patience and intelligence as well. I wanted to see him pick off all those jurors one by one in The Man They Could Not Hang, and felt cheated when plot contrivances intervened. The science-gone-wrong quartet for Columbia was four strips from a single bolt of cloth. How maddening to see so many worthwhile experiments so utterly thwarted. As a child, I used to wish they’d just once let the poor man finish what he was doing. Maybe this was Karloff’s magic for boys growing up. Forever was he slapped down and persecuted despite reasoned explanations and pure motives, precisely those qualities brought to bear by ten-year olds during attempts to reason with misguided parents. Horror movie conventions decreed Karloff commit at least one murder, with a vigilant Production Code close behind to require the supreme penalty, always a harsh and punitive one to my mind. Be prepared to soothe the vexation of such injustice with perhaps a favored candied treat, or even stronger libation if indeed that’s what it takes to relieve your frustrated empathy on Karloff’s behalf.











Our birthday man takes greater command in Tower Of London, wherein he’s the one doling out executions and lobbing off innocent heads. Universal’s (though not necessarily other’s) idea of an "A" picture in 1939, this was really Basil Rathbone’s showcase, and though Boris walks tall (even with a clubfoot), he’s still playing in support to the bigger name. Tower Of London was never easy to see, as it wasn’t included in the initial Shock! packages, and tended to crop up (if rarely) among mainstream titles on programming schedules. Universal used shows like this to capture an audience beyond the horror niche. It could as easily be sold as historical drama, with even a nod toward Shakespeare’s Richard III. Cast members Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price were not then linked with horror films, and even Karloff’s association with the genre was deluded somewhat by his ongoing participation in tepid mysteries of a Mr. Wong sort. The double shot of Tower Of London and the preceding Son Of Frankenstein was his triumphant return to sinister parts, where Karloff’s own physical characteristics could again serve the characters he was playing. Mord The Executioner drags an arresting clubfoot in Tower Of London, but it’s those naturally bowed legs of Karloff’s that make it so effective. Chaney Senior could not have devised such a striking visual as Karloff manages here. His frightful countenance is further enhanced by tights he wears throughout, surely a first for this actor. Torture scenes are frequent and delightful, with Karloff gleefully presiding over varied sessions with assorted devices. I wondered if the Code police weren’t sleeping during much of this, but at least Boris fans were getting what they came for after what must have seemed a long drought. Tower Of London was the happy return of a physically active Karloff, as even his Frankenstein monster seemed excessively sedentary in the third round of that series he’d recently completed, and indeed, Tower's probably the best feature in Universal’s DVD box of five.

One Last Footnote On Bergman


At the risk of belaboring the subject of Ingrid Bergman, here is an image I came across that just has to be shared. It was taken in 1949, and purports to show Roberto Rossellini and the actress leaving Stromboli to ask Bergman’s husband for a divorce. Their troubled expressions would suggest it’s a true enough caption, and the weather that day can only have increased their misery. In light of the scandal swirling around them, I doubt this was anything other than an accurate rendering of what these two were going through. Put this under the heading of Photos Don't Lie.

On another topic, I note that several sites are taking a holiday break. For what it’s worth, Greenbriar will be open as usual tomorrow, as there is a very special birthday that’s shared with Thanksgiving this year, and we want to be here to celebrate (can anybody guess whose it is?).

Ingrid Bergman --- Part Two


The jinx may well have set in before the Italian debacle(s). The charmed professional life of Spellbound, The Bells Of St. Mary’s, and Notorious placed Bergman on better marquees throughout the nation. We may not revere Saratoga Trunk, but it’s down on Warner books as one of their all-time profit pictures from that era (3.4 million), and indeed, 1946 seemed a year in which an Ingrid Bergman show was playing around every street corner. So where do you go from the top except down? The Four Horsemen of Ingrid’s Apocalypse would ride in grim succession. Arch Of Triumph was 131 minutes of galloping pretension. Joan Of Arc was the role she’d obsessed on since making landfall in the US. Her Broadway triumph as Joan Of Lorraine suggested a warm reception for a movie adaptation, but cost overruns on the independent production (in which she was a participant) made Gone With The Wind look like something out of Monogram. Were it not for the 4.5 million spent, Joan Of Arc might have had a major pay-off, for crowds responded to the tune of six million in worldwide rentals, but reviews were spotty and viewers were bored. Bergman had been intimate with director Victor Fleming (he of a previous assignation with Clara Bow), but the veteran director dropped dead shortly after Joan was completed, some guessing he’d succumbed from the stress of it all. Under Capricorn was Hitchcock being experimental --- this was his run at independence after suffocating years with Selznick. He and Bergman were alike for having plowed fields for a producer who then harvested the bounty, but neither were equipped to administer production on their own, where one disaster could ring down the curtain on a whole company. Hitchcock had his with Under Capricorn, while Bergman finished her quartet of losers with Stromboli, a would-be art movie born with a gushing fan letter to its director, Roberto Rossellini, and ending with Ingrid’s career in ruins.


Post-war European filmmakers had to shoot in the streets for lack of indoor facilities, their stages having been blown asunder during the conflict. (Extreme) austerity makes naturalists of us all, and directors like Rossellini had little choice but to take to the sidewalks with non-professional casts and shoot whatever took place there. Pampered Hollywood was stunned by the harsh realism, and audiences responded to gritty, gloves-off pictures like Open City and The Bicycle Thief. Roberto Rossellini was the (apparent) autuer behind the former, and when Ingrid Bergman caught Open City in a New York art-house, she swore to one day work with the genius behind it. The Italian director had already negotiated with Selznick, who was himself impressed with neo-realists, and would indeed support future projects involving Euro talent, but Rossellini was too capricious and disorganized for even this producer’s taste, and their talks soon broke down. Bergman’s aforementioned letter was simple and direct. She’d come to Italy and work for Rossellini if he’d have her. This was opportunity banging loudly at his door, and Roberto was quick as a flash to arrange a meeting. Clueless Petter Lindstrom bade enter to the director, who then conducted a campaign of professional (and personal) seduction while a guest in the man’s home. By the time Rossellini left, he had Bergman in his pocket. Stromboli would be their first collaboration. There was no script. The cast was filled with interesting faces so beloved of the director, but none of them were actors. Its volcano location was nearly inaccessible, and an indecisive Rossellini frittered away weeks dreaming up something for the cast to do. Turns out capable assistants (including Frederico Fellini) were largely responsible for the stories that had made Rossellini’s previous pictures work. Without them, he was floundering. Bergman was beginning to realize this was an emperor without clothes, but he’d deftly talked the actress out of hers, with the result being a pregnancy out of wedlock (with him anyway) and a ravenous press poised for a slow kill.




Worse luck, her business manager had been systematically robbing Ingrid back in the states, and by the time anyone caught on, he’d taken the gas-pipe and left her stony. Husband Lindstrom set upon a vindictive course, and turned their daughter against her. Joan Of Arc was suddenly a devil incarnate, and broke besides. US exhibitors cancelled Stromboli bookings after her child was born in Italy. Rossellini married her in the wake of the divorce, but made it known she’d not work for directors other than himself. Senate members suggested her visa be picked up, a matter of little consequence in light of press so foul she’d not enter the US in any case. Bergman was restricted, if not condemned, to Rossellini films from here on, each one a step down from the previous. The visionary of Open City was spending money and racing about in Ferraris while debts piled up. What movie deals he got were owed to his wife’s diminished prestige, and what grosses they earned were restricted to the continent, as Bergman were strictly poison in the US (a 1954 re-issue of Saratoga Trunk took just $110,000 in domestic rentals). She’d be thoroughly deglamorized in bleak Rossellini projects he imposed upon her, not so bad an idea in itself were he not so intent upon it. Europa ’51 went nowhere in Europe or the Americas, and Viaggio in Italia was a more-or-less ad-libbed domestic drama with George Sanders, who was unflappable in most circumstances, but Rossellini’s lack of preparedness gave even Sanders a nervous breakdown. The latter was shot in English language, so it’s at least marginally more accessible than the others, and Martin Scorsese has been an eloquent champion of these films in his documentary, My Voyage To Italy, so there are clearly values here worth exploring. Too bad no such defenders arose when they were new, for the unhappy end result was a near-total creative collapse for Rossellini and years of career stagnation for his wife.




There had been feelers from Hollywood. George Cukor wanted her for a project, and others were anxious to assist in a comeback, but Rossellini nixed all such overtures. An actress with her gifts would only remain caged so long, however, and by 1956, she was ready to break out. Tea and Sympathy would be a stage comeback, followed by collaboration with noted director Jean Renoir, whose Elena and Her Men was perhaps too French for domestic palettes, but did at least suggest there was a star waiting to be reborn. It was released stateside as Paris Does Strange Things, but Warners collected a peaked $185,000 in domestic rentals, scarcely enough to justify the import. The original French-language version remained largely unseen until Kino released a stunning DVD last year, which showed this beautiful color production off to its best advantage. The real breakthrough was Anastasia, and that resulted in an Academy Award, so obviously all was forgiven. Indiscreet reunited Bergman with Cary Grant, who’d stuck by her through the bad patch, but time and stress had aged her beyond those parts that brought glory a decade before, and a new generation of leading ladies had emerged besides. She was a prestigious name for infrequent television appearances, but none of these features could put her back in a winner’s circle --- Goodbye, Again, The Visit, The Yellow Rolls-Royce --- too much momentum lost, and now she was firmly identified with old Hollywood. There was a comeback in the form of another Academy Award for a character role in Murder On The Orient Express, and distinquished work along these lines continued through the seventies. Memoirs were inevitable, and hers were more dignified than most, but in how many interviews can one explain what it was like working with Humphrey Bogart? She made a final TV-movie while gravely ill, having never lost the indomitable will to stay in harness. She died on her sixty-seventh birthday in 1982.

Photo Captions

Color Publicity for Selznick
Ingrid Bergman as Broadway's Joan Of Lorraine
With Cary Grant in Notorious
Holding a pivotal key in Notorious
Fan Magazine Color Portrait
Australian Poster for Joan Of Arc
With Joseph Cotten in Under Capricorn
Another Color Fan Mag Portrait
Stromboli
With Yul Brynner and Helen Hayes in Anastasia
One-Sheet for Paris Does Strange Things

Monday Glamour Starter --- Ingrid Bergman --- Part One


I’ve touched (and retouched!) on Ingrid Bergman before, and it was inevitable, I suppose, that she’d make a Glamour Starter eventually, but here’s a question I’d not considered until this moment --- Is Ingrid our tallest G.S. so far? I’m informed she was five foot nine. Now my mind races back to that dance floor in Casablanca, and the fact she and Bogart engaged in such a restricted box-step suddenly makes clearer sense to me. Can this account for his distance on the set? I’ll save that debate for another post, for today’s concern is an actress who surely achieved heights and depths undreamt of by such puny specimen as we now call celebrities. Furors and worldwide scandals are things best understood when we ourselves experience them. Those passed down by history seem remote and even unlikely. So Ingrid Bergman ran off with an Italian film director and had an illegitimate child by him. Why so much excitement over that? Granted the cultural landscape was different five-six decades ago, but to denounce a movie actress on the floor of the Senate? Did such a thing happen before or since? Trying to imagine what got so many people in such an uproar brought me to one conclusion --- they felt betrayed. Those who’d invested emotion in a saintly image for ten years now felt they’d been played for fools. Never mind she was just an actress and owed them no such fealty in her private life. The woman had been Joan Of Arc, for God's sake. Were we easier hoodwinked back in the forties, or have we become too cynical now? No pre-49 Ingrid Bergman could survive long in our present culture, though plenty of post-49 Bergmans thrive. Perhaps we’re better off for the more open discourse we enjoy with our celebrities (whether they like it or not), but each and all who bask in the people’s warm embrace should heed the warning of Ingrid Bergman and know that a public’s kiss one day may become its slap the next.


Bergman was a major name back home in Sweden, but what’s that? Their movies were like all the rest in Europe, auditions from which moneyed Hollywood interests could pick and choose the best and most promising. The nine films on home soil included a rough draft of Intermezzo, and it’s plain enough how she attracted the attention of Selznick talent scouts. Whatever presupposed concept we had of a fresh, unspoiled Swedish girl, she was it in the unblemished flesh. German interests came calling when UFA signed her to a pair of starring vehicles in 1938, but that contract was abrogated after the first was completed. Publicity dubbing her a Daughter of Germany might well have boomeranged on US ambitions, were it not for good will she’d quickly accumulate on our shores, and the fact her UFA association was one virtually unknown to stateside media. The $2,500 a week starting wage at Selznick acknowledged her Euro status, and the American Intermezzo was a near-photostat of the Swedish original. Selznick’s idea was to sell us something new in a movie actress --- none of that phony make-up (translation: less of it than customary), eyebrows left intact, and a stated determination to preserve her natural qualities (and that word was beaten like a drum in describing Bergman). She was the real-life rescue of Esther Blodgett from that cosmetic torture chamber D.O.S. depicted so vividly in A Star Is Born, and it paid off with immediate critical and public acclaim. Glamour was an unwelcome distraction from her kind of talent, and Selznick didn’t want it spoiled in a photographer’s hothouse of swimsuits and bear rugs. This is where that pristine image got its start, and casting such paragons was not so easy as her overnight popularity would suggest. There was a husband, acquired in the old country, with ideas of representing her in business matters. Petter Lindstrom didn’t trust anyone in Hollywood, least of all Selznick, but his dogged negotiations did at least have the immediate benefit of getting his wife more money than most newcomers to the US could have wangled out of that tight-fisted town.




Selznick wisely gave her latitude in developing stagecraft. There was an LA production of Liliom and a travelling Anna Christie. Both merely increased her prestige, as the vast majority of movie lights would have been dimmed by legit exposure. Movies were a matter of Selznick loans at considerable profit to him. The $125,000 he got for her services in Casablanca translated to $35,000 for Bergman, plus a show she had little interest in making. The one she wanted was For Whom The Bell Tolls, itself the very definition of prestige filmmaking in literary-conscious Hollywood. Her campaign for that lead was relentless, as was Selznick’s, but Paramount was stubbornly committed to its own Vera Zorina. As an actress, she was a great ballet dancer, as star Gary Cooper and director Sam Wood discovered after a few unproductive weeks on location. Now Paramount was ready to do business with Selznick for Bergman (well, after all, Vera, for every winner, there’s got to be a loser). When Ingrid got the call on a Casablanca soundstage, she let out a whoop. Had she but known history’s ultimate verdict on these two. For Whom The Bell Tolls would sink beneath the weight of its tedium and over-length, while Casablanca would follow Bergman like grim death as the (perhaps only) one everybody asked about. Her love/hate relationship with that one points up the irony of lives spent on celluloid. You do fifty, or even a hundred, and in the end, they all remember you for a single one. For Janet Leigh, it was Psycho. For Ingrid Bergman, Casablanca. Both must have grown sick of those broken records.






Against the drug- fueled industry we’ve observed over the past four decades, the idea of an actress imperiling her career with overdoses of cookies and ice cream seems quaint, if not refreshing. Bergman’s big appetites (she was a corn-fed, Scandinavian milk-maid, after all!) was frequently her undoing when it came time to squeeze into period costumes for things like Saratoga Trunk and Gaslight. She could play at being vixens, but her adoring public knew better. This was setting Bergman up for a big fall, especially since her marriage had long been in name only. A could-be affair with Gary Cooper was not remarked upon at the time, but considering they did two pictures in succession together, and being this is Gary Cooper we’re talking about, can one imagine a consummation not taking place? Bergman’s happiest collaboration, like a lot of other people’s, was with Alfred Hitchcock. I looked at Spellbound and Under Capricorn again before writing this. It’s true, folks. Hitchcock’s weakest is better than anybody else’s best, and though I can’t understand why Ingrid keeps chasing after someone as screwy as Greg in Spellbound (maybe I would were I female), there’s certainly no mystery as to how and why this triumphed at ticket windows. Psychology was an exotic hot button in 1945, what with all those sexual underpinnings and the fact they’d used it on shell-shocked combatants. What could have been more topical that year? As for Hitchcock, is it any wonder he fell in love with Bergman? That apparently drove him to the artistic heights of Notorious after all, so yes, his unrequited sufferings bore fruit, at least for generations of his fans. It just occurs to me that if you stripped Ingrid of Casablanca and Notorious, you might have --- Vera Zorina? For all her good fortune in landing those two, there was also Adam Had Four Sons, A Rage In Heaven, Saratoga Trunk (though I like that one), Arch Of Triumph, etc. These haven’t traveled well into the new century, while the scandal that enveloped Bergman in 1949 has survived as potent drama and cautionary fable for all those who imagine stardom to be a dependable, if not permanent, thing. More about that in tomorrow’s Part Two.

Photo Captions

Poster for the 1936 Swedish version of Intermezzo
Ingrid Bergman with Leslie Howard in Selznick's remake of Intermezzo
With Spencer Tracy and Lana Turner in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Euro Poster for Casablanca
Color Portrait --- For Whom The Bell Tolls
With Gary Cooper in For Whom The Bell Tolls
Insert Poster for Gaslight
With Charles Boyer in Gaslight
Color Publicity for Selznick
With Gary Cooper in Saratoga Trunk
The Bells Of St. Mary's
Half-Sheet Poster for Spellbound

It's Less About Movies Than Money


Charley Chase did a take-off on Bank Nights in his 1936 comedy short, Neighborhood House. Here’s a real one from that same year, and it looks as though the mechanics of giveaways and cash awards are taking preference over the offerings on the screen. This was bingo with a movie ticket, and the chance of picking up $150 after watching The Walking Dead must have been pretty irresistible to folks who might not attend the Boris Karloff thriller on its own considerable merits. I’d not feel cheated in the wake of a Bank Night loss, for look at those shorts they offered with the Saturday show --- Phil Harris in Double Or Nothing, a Looney Tune, Plane Dippy, Chapter 11 of Mascot’s Adventures Of Rex and Rinty, plus a newsreel. Who ever got all this plus $150 would have been one very happy patron that night!

Dateline April 28, 1939


Names are superfluous here. You know who they are. You’d not be reading Greenbriar otherwise. The year is 1939, and the event is Lionel Barrymore’s birthday. He was sixty-one years young the day this was taken. Back then sixty-one was old. If you made it that far, you achieved Grand Old Man status, at least at MGM. Norma’s firm hand-grasp might quicken the pulse of a man twice Lionel’s years, but he seems to be taking it all with equanimity. Mickey Rooney’s eighty-six now and the only survivor from this group. That’s got to be sobering. Couple of months ago, he was selling his autograph at an Atlanta sci-fi con. What a road he’s traveled. Be sure to read Life Is Too Short if you get a chance. That’s the one where Mick tells of his affair with Norma in graphic detail. Settles a lot of old scores as well. What a book. The lineup here, from left to right, as if it’s necessary to identify them --- Mickey Rooney, Robert Montgomery, Clark Gable, Louis B. Mayer, William Powell, and Robert Taylor. Seated are Norma Shearer, Lionel Barrymore, and Rosalind Russell.

Finally --- A Good Babes In Toyland DVD


Sometimes a new DVD will come down the pipeline and surprise you. I hadn’t expected much when I pre-ordered Babes In Toyland. It’s always been a problematic show, having passed through innumerable hands over decades of tangled ownership. Worse, there were title changes and edits --- lots of them. They called it March Of The Wooden Soldiers from the fifties on. Some renegade prints circulated about in the guise of Revenge Is Sweet, as bizarre a moniker as was ever hung on a family (musical) comedy adapted from Victor Herbert. And what about that colorized version? Indeed, Babes In Toyland was the great unknown among Laurel and Hardy features. Seeing it truly intact seemed as unlikely as rediscovering The Rogue Song, or finding decent prints of The Flying Deuces and Utopia. Well, there’s (finally) good news in DVD land. Babes In Toyland is now available in a restored transfer worthy of a holiday favorite too long out of quality circulation. The box art says March Of The Wooden Soldiers, but the print carries all the original MGM credits, including the Babes In Toyland main title. I couldn’t see anything missing. All the footage from any 16mm print I ever had appears to be here. There is a colorized version on the disc, but that’s in addition to the black-and-white, and the extras here are plentiful, but more about that later …





Are there any over-aged kiddie show patrons out there? I was one on several occasions during the seventies and eighties. Here’s the situation --- a theatre schedules a program you’ve just got to see. Trouble is, they only play it for matinees, specifically the ones designed for little kids. What to do when you’re 18, or 21, even 30, and there’s Gorgo, The Time Machine, or Jack The Giant Killer beckoning to you from a boxoffice lined with six-year-olds and their mothers, the latter casting uncertain looks in your direction as you gingerly approach the ticket window --- by yourself. Gosh, lady. I don’t want to prey on your child. I just drove down to see "The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad." Try selling that explanation to a doubtful exhibitor as you enter his auditorium with a gaggle of small fry. I don’t think they’d even let me in today. Maybe it’s as well they’ve stopped running things like Rodan, Horror Of Dracula, and Republic serials at kiddie shows, for even at the age of 52, how could I stay away? A first encounter with March Of The Wooden Soldiers was no small embarrassment in that respect, but it was worth it. To my utter dumbfoundment, the Winston Theatre (in Winston-Salem, naturally) played M.O.T.W.S. in 1972, and I can claim without fear of contradiction that I was the only high school senior attending that day. My peers, had they known, might assume I’d entered a twilight zone way beyond simple geekdom, but my best friend accompanied me, and he was only a year younger (are you reading this, Brick?). At least I distinguished myself in being the only kid in that audience who had to put coins in a parking meter, and better yet, this was a brand-new print. March Of The Wooden Soldiers never looked better. We stayed and watched it twice!





Hal Roach had started out writing his own treatment for the proposed Babes In Toyland. I’ve read his synopsis --- it sounds awful. Stan Laurel thought so as well. He and Roach fought over the story until the producer gave up and allowed Stan to do it his way. The estrangement that caused would fester with Roach into old age. He’d maintain Babes In Toyland was lousy, and a commercial disaster besides. Fans would argue it’s neither, though we lack the figures to show whether it made or lost money. Laurel wanted to do Babes in Toyland in the tradition of Christmas pantomimes he’d grown up with. The concept was simple and straightforward. Disney’s 1961 remake shows what can happen when you overstuff one of these pageants. Laurel and Hardy are better integrated into the story than is customary for their features. Usually, the narrative stops to allow for extended routines. Good as it is, The Devil’s Brother tends toward this, and later ones like Bonnie Scotland and Swiss Miss are pretty rough going when L&H concede the spotlight in favor of insipid romantic subplotters. Their situation was not unlike The Marx Brothers. Ninety sustained minutes of these comedians was thought excessive in those days. Audiences needed relief from too much fun making. Now it seems ludicrous to have turned the camera’s gaze away from our heroes, but no one seems to have questioned the formula then. Stan wished later that Babes In Toyland could have been made in color. Had it been four years hence, that dream might have been a reality, but no major studio was shooting Technicolor features in mid-1934, this being a transition period between the old two-color process and the introduction of a substantially improved three-color system. The only Technicolor sightings for audiences that year would have been novelty sequences in otherwise black-and-white features --- The House Of Rothschild, Kid Millions, and The Cat and The Fiddle. Granted Babes In Toyland would have looked fabulous in color, but its timing was wrong for that, and besides, with the print we now have on DVD, the movie looks as good as one could hope for in black-and-white.





Extras on this DVD are bountiful. There are actually Castle Films here! Christmas Toyshop was produced in the mid-forties. It’s the sort of reel Dad bought to show the family on their new home movie projector. 8 and 16mm camera sales boomed after the war. Parents who could afford it were anxious to capture their kids on film. Castle provided entertainment subjects to supplement the family’s own efforts. Judging by the volume of these reels that turn up on ebay, there must have been tens of thousands sold. Christmas Toyshop presents a comforting fantasy for post-war suburbia --- Mom, Dad, and the two kids listening to radio on Christmas Eve (and they haven’t even put up the tree yet!) --- kids dream of an encounter with Santa, during which he narrates them through an early thirties cartoon relic depicting his workshop. Meanwhile, Dad makes blundering effort to set up the tree and disguise himself as the Jolly Fat Man. All ends happily within nine or so minutes. According to Scott MacGillivray’s excellent Castle Films book, these subjects were often cobbled together from old Yuletide trailers done for theatres, animated footage of yore (some of it by Paul Terry), and whatever new material could be shot, very cheaply, to link it all together. The Babes In Toyland DVD also includes Castle’s Night Before Christmas and a really strange Howdy Doody’s Christmas, produced, according to Scott, in 1951, specifically for Castle. I’ve very little memory of Howdy Doody from television, and judging by this subject, that may be just as well. Guess this is one of those shows where you really had to be there. How many of these old kinescopes survive? For all I know, this may be the only time the act was captured on film, as opposed to being shot off a TV monitor. Is it me, or does Howdy seem overburdened with strings? I kept waiting for Clarabelle to come along with shears and collapse him altogether. What a traumatic moment that would have been! The clown’s routine made me flinch, especially when he (or she?) drove a nail into a mantelpiece with his/her forehead. I don’t know that I needed to see that. Buffalo Bob comes on strong toward the fragile Howdy, forever jutting his finger at the puppet and barking in his ear. For reasons too obscure to recount here, they all decamp to the North Pole (in a stock footage Flash Gordon rocket!), where a deranged stooge called Ugly Sam is holding Santa Claus prisoner. I assume Sam was a staple on the vid program. Suffice to say a little of his shtick goes a l-o-n-g way. Howdy stands (hangs) by impassively as Bob, Sam, and Clarabelle wrestle briefly on the floor. Santa effects a reconciliation and there’s a dissolve to his animated departure from the Pole (courtesy a Van Buren, Iwerks, Terry --- who knows? --- cartoon). Howdy Doody’s Christmas is one priceless artifact. No telling how many fathers threaded this one up on the Bell&Howell each holiday season between 1951 and 1961 (the years it was available from Castle’s catalogue). Kids at home must have been thrilled to watch Howdy on the family’s own movie projector. I know I was plenty thrilled to see it on DVD.

UPDATE: Lo and Behold, they've gone and released an even better Babes In Toyland since this posting went up in November 2006, this time from the negative's owner, MGM/UA. It's really terrific and highly recommended.

More Reasons To Love Looney Tunes


I may have mentioned before how much I’ve enjoyed those audio commentaries on the Looney Tunes Collections. The affection these animation experts communicate for their subject is an unending pleasure to listen to. Would that we all could have some one thing in life to embrace with such uninhibited enthusiasm. You get a whole new perspective on the cartoons, as well as a glimpse into the colorful personalities of the folks who talk about them. I particularly like the tag team commentaries. All these narrators grew up on Warner shorts, and there’s not a stone left unturned in their often light-hearted and always informative tracks. Porky In The North Woods was one of Mark Kausler’s contributions, and I found it particularly affecting. He’s an animator who’s written cartoon history since the sixties, a leading authority in the field. Toward the end of the cartoon, as another great Cal Stalling theme swells up for the finish, Kausler’s narrative voice breaks. Gosh, I can’t listen to this music without tearing up. I’m sorry, I love this music so much. He signs off with a recommendation that we watch the short again without his commentary, but I wouldn’t have missed this moment for the world. It was an honest, heartfelt, and undisguised expression of what we all feel for these wonderful cartoons, and I don’t know that I’ve ever heard it better conveyed than by Kausler. The emotion of this moment alone was worth the price of the DVD, but of course, there are fifty-nine other shorts here as well, plus voluminous extras. For my money, these Looney Tune Collections are the bargain of the century, and certainly the event of each year a new volume arrives (four of them so far).

Alfred Hitchcock Blog-A-Thon Today!


Better writers than myself have been flogging the Hitchcock oeuvre for the past forty years, and in deference to them, I’ll spare you my own ruminations on the deeper meanings of the Master Of Suspense and his films. The Film Vituperatem is the host for today’s Blog-A-Thon devoted to Hitchcock, and you can go HERE for coverage and events related to this auspicious celebration. There’s nobody I’d rather talk about than Hitchcock, having done it previously HERE and HERE, but finding fresh game to lay upon that table is something else again, for this is far and away the most discussed and (over) analyzed director in the history of movies. Well, why not? His work is so accessible. You don’t watch him out of a sense of duty. His shows are a pleasure even for teen-agers otherwise hostile to classic film. In all the college programs I’ve done, Hitchcock always rings the bell. You don’t have to justify Hitch or apologize for him. There’s never a need to put this director in historic context or make excuses for dated devises. There's no begging your audience to just give him a chance. Girlfriend Ann saw Psycho theatrically at the Liberty in 1972. We bonded on her memory of that day (but why wasn’t I there --- being an hour away at college was no excuse --- I should have walked home for that!). I did get to spend a day watching him direct Family Plot (then called Deceit) on a Universal sound stage, and stood there the whole time thinking what an epochal moment this was in my life. Hitch sat quietly as cast and crew members approached his chair and sought instruction. My USC class got in by virtue of some tie-in the school had with the studio. After forty or so minutes, he walked over and called Action on a garage set with Karen Black and another actor. That was the summer of 1975.



A lot of us saw our first Hitchcocks on NBC Saturday Night At The Movies. That’s where I encountered Rear Window, Vertigo, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. CBS premiered North By Northwest in 1968. What a night. We never dreamed so many of these would disappear shortly thereafter. Hitchcock had a deal with Paramount that called for negatives to revert to him after a specified period. Rear Window, The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo (along with a Warners release, Rope) were in lock-up by the mid-seventies. You couldn’t see them (legitimately) anywhere. I remember small ads in Variety around that time offering rights to them. I assume those were run by Hitchcock’s representatives. The asking price must have been prohibitive during his lifetime. All five negatives were said to have been improperly stored. The restorations that took place years later were all the more difficult because of this. For all I know, Hitch had the things shoved to a corner in his wine cellar. 16mm collectors occasionally ran across prints that had once been rented by Films, Inc. Most of these were three-color Technicolor originals. You can imagine how coveted they were. A friend of mine bootlegged a negative of Rear Window from one of these treasures. It looked almost as good as the real thing. Being able to exhibit this one at your party in 1981 was quite the status symbol. A few years later, Universal bought the titles from Hitchcock’s estate and ground out ugly prints no better than our pirated ones, but we chased after them anyway. A lot of these were done for airline showings (they were still running 16mm on planes in the eighties!), and sometimes we’d run across three or four copies of Vertigo shoved under a dealer’s table at a collector’s show. The price? As with Xanadu, no man can say, but generally anywhere from $600 up, and this for a yellowish blur on a full-framed mockery of the intended Vistavision frame. But why go on rambling about the old days of film collecting when we can buy a superb rendition of Vertigo on DVD for a mere ten spot?




I decided to tackle To Catch A Thief for today’s Blog-A-Thon (why do I keep wanting to type It Takes A Thief? --- I never even watched the old Robert Wagner series). This movie has never come in for much analysis. I’ve not seen charts, graphs, nor blueprints in any of those academic explorations on Hitchcock. People call it eye candy. I’m still surprised and delighted at seeing Hitchcock’s cameo --- I mean, actually seeing it after all those years of being cropped out on television and rental prints. Remember how that was? Cary Grant would look over on the bus at --- nothing. I checked my clock a third of the way in and realized Grace Kelly hadn’t shown up yet, other than a glimpse on the beach. Much of that waiting was spent with yards of exposition. How many times must Cary assure us he’s not the Cat? John Williams sums up the whole thing at one point --- It’s a kind of travel folder heaven where a man dreams he’ll go when he retires. Imagine that Vistavision banquet audiences enjoyed in 1955. Paramount had already done a series of two-reel travelogues using the process. This was essentially the same deal, only it ran 106 minutes. Suspense takes a back seat to sport cars and overlooks. Lots of kissing goes on here. Hitchcock was clearly infatuated with Grace Kelly. Having complained previously about Cary Grant and his chicken leg (HERE), I’ll not revisit that. If any stars can get by without a story, it’s these two. Yes, even at my advanced age, I find that fireworks encounter pretty intoxicating. There must have been a lot of boomer infants conceived in the wake of dates to see this movie. To look at the confidence Grant displays, you marvel all the more at stories of how fussy and uncertain he could be on the set, but perfectionism asserts itself in different ways. For C.G., it seems to have resulted in parts turned down that one regrets all the more in hindsight, but I for one would hate to lose Humphrey Bogart as Linus Larabee. Still, what if Cary had done Sabrina? His good-will outreach during a publicity tour for To Catch A Thief confirmed Grant’s position as a favorite among showmen, as illustrated by this photo of him with Vancouver theatre-men. Regret to say I got an uneasy sensation watching Grace Kelly behind the wheel on a twisting Riviera byway, knowing the fate that awaited her decades later on that selfsame road. Was any director so enamoured of process shooting as Hitchcock? They didn’t spend a minute longer on that location than was necessary.





For me, it always comes back to the plight of the poor exhibitor. This time, they’d gone to war with Paramount over usurious terms on new releases. Every time a showman got out from under one screwing, another was poised to take its place. Paramount ranked second among distributors they loved to hate in 1955 (Warner Bros. was number one!). Harrison’s Reports was the straight-talking voice of disgruntled theatre-owners whose houses were near the point of closure in the wake of declining profits. Cinemascope provided a shot in the arm, but by August of 1955, when To Catch A Thief was released, that novelty had largely worn off, and it was back to bread and water for most small venues. Paramount seemed to offer a lifeline when it promised to address problems affecting exhibition, particularly theatres on the borderline of continued operation. Pete Harrison assured his readers that it was a lot of double-talk. "Distress" assistance seemed limited to those theatres already on the ropes, according to Harrison. Before you can expect relief from Paramount, it will be necessary for you to first "attain" the status of a pauper. Many theatres were struggling on receipts of less than a thousand per week. To Catch A Thief was being sold on a 50% basis, as were most major pictures of that year. It would be at least sixty days after release before they’d drop down to 35%, but that was long after the initial publicity build-up has worn down, according to theatre owners. Hitchcock’s film brought back domestic rentals of four million against negative costs of 2.8. Rear Window had performed better (4.8 million), though To Catch A Thief would top subsequent films from the director, The Trouble With Harry (a significant loss with only one million in domestic rentals) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (3.5). A 1963 re-issue of To Catch A Thief, which billed Cary Grant and "Princess" Grace Kelly, returned an additional $293,000. Unlike the other Paramount Hitchcocks, this negative remained with the distributor. It is the only one of the group not presently owned by Universal.

John Wayne Learns His Trade


A Ken Maynard Blog-A-Thon is not a likely thing in our Web futures, yet his were the mighty shoulders upon which John Wayne stood when he did a series of six program westerns at Warner Bros. for the 1932-33 season. These are practically unknown today. I only saw them for the first time when TCM began unearthing its treasures. Now the half dozen are on two triple-feature DVD’s from Warner, each title clocking in at around an hour. Wayne himself said that each one was lousier than the last. That may be a harsh judgment, for the lousiness factor is not a cumulative one. There is enough of it spread among the six to disqualify them all from exalted position among Wayne credits, but their curiosity value alone places them high on the list for me. Ongoing musical chairs between Maynard's silent stock footage and Wayne's subsequent exploits is a game anyone can enjoy playing. Ken Maynard was a legendary trick rider and rodeo performer who’d been with Ringling Brothers and the Kit Carson Travelling Show through the twenties. He took breaks from these to do independent silent westerns. Ken’s stunt riding was like something out of Greek mythology. His near-total inability to act mattered not a lick. Neither did the epic-scale drinking, for his young constitution could stand abuse, and a few stiff belts only made him braver in the saddle. First-National grabbed Ken for a series in 1926, and legend has it these are among the finest and most actionful of all budget westerns. Front-row kids whooped it up through all eighteen and still remembered them years after the negatives were rotted and junked. Only one survives complete (The Red Raiders). I’d like to think those fans and films are reunited somewhere in a nitrate-based afterlife, for few are left among us who remember Maynard’s silent shows first-hand.


When Warner Bros. took over First-National, they discontinued the westerns. Talkies were initially regarded as incompatible with location work. The idea of merging old footage from the Maynards with new John Wayne programmers was both sound and economical. Ken’s Senor Daredevil had cost $75,000. Wayne’s Ride Him, Cowboy, augmented by the silent action highlights, was completed with a negative cost of $28,000. John Wayne was by all (conflicting) accounts a bargain as well. I’ve read four different figures as to what he was paid, so take your pick --- $125 a week --- $850, or $875, or $1500 per film --- the truth probably lands somewhere in the middle. He was under contract to Warners, having thudded badly with the disappointment of The Big Trail two years previous. Since that woebegone attempt at star making, he’d cast a line into various studio waters, but few seemed willing to risk him in leads. The still shown here is typical of how Warners used Wayne in modern-dress roles. The Life Of Jimmy Dolan was shot concurrently with the westerns, but as with Baby Face, College Coach, and several other 1932 releases, Wayne’s participation was limited to bits and walk-ons. Westerns were for hicks and adolescent boys, a necessary evil to quench the appetites of rural audiences. This would be the arena for John Wayne’s first starring series. His mount was also billed above the title. Duke was alternatively promoted as a Wonder Horse, or a Devil Horse, depending upon his respective disposition. He was also wise as Solomon, displaying remarkable cognitive and reasoning abilities quite beyond the capacity of ordinary steeds. Hey, Duke… Round up the cattle and herd ‘em into the mouth of that canyon! --- and hanged if he doesn’t do just that! On another occasion, Duke seizes the initiative and rings a warning bell in a village under outlaw attack, despite not being privy to uses and purposes of the otherwise unpresupposing instrument. Duke is a common thread through the series. So is Wayne’s mouth organ, or in less suggestive parlance, harmonica, which he plays often and with seeming dexterity.





Ride Him, Cowboy was the first. Wayne and Duke share the honors with grainy, undercranked footage of Maynard and his own miracle horse, Tarzan (so named by Edgar Rice Burroughs himself!). Whenever Wayne appears to do something truly spectacular, you can rest assured it’s Ken. Maynard insisted that stunts be performed close-up, so the audience would know it was really him. I don’t know how this man kept from getting his fool neck broken. Freeze-frames allow you to spot him in a number of chases and rescues. Wayne dons similar costumes to aid in the deception, but Ken’s easily recognizable when he takes over. They should have paid him that $150, or $850, or whatever. Some fine character actors lend support in these westerns --- Henry B. Walthall’s in two, Noah Beery’s a villain in The Big Stampede, Frank McHugh lends his irritating laugh to Telegraph Trail. Wayne’s labored comedy relief (s) tag along as surely and doggedly as did Porky in Drip-Along Daffy, only he was funny. Love interest is conveyed by way of actresses I’m unacquainted with, but Marceline Day’s in Telegraph Trail, and you may remember her in fetching swim attire as Buster Keaton’s date in The Cameraman.





Most of these Waynes were remakes of the Ken Maynards in addition to purloining their stunts (note the posters shown here for both the Maynard and Wayne versions of Somewhere In Sonora). That footage got quite a workout, for it was recycled not only in these, but in a late thirties Dick Foran group as well. John Wayne’s still working through kinks one encounters with any young actor getting his start and training on the job. He’s guileless, fluffs lines occasionally, and gives with a hearty laugh when occasions call for it (and sometimes when they don’t). There are vigorous riding inserts he handles well. Interesting that Wayne shunned horses off-screen, considering the time he spent sitting on their backs. I wonder if he ever regretted being locked into all those westerns. Socializing with John Ford throughout the decade must have been increasingly frustrating, as he was shut out of the man’s pictures for most of that time. I’m sure Wayne was genuinely surprised at being cast in Stagecoach, as by 1939, he’d probably given up on ever working with the director. He was dismissive in later years of these three-day westerns, as he referred to them. Schedules so grueling would have left a bitter taste for anyone charged with maintaining them, but Wayne’s past had a way of revisiting him. Warner Bros. reissued all six of the 1932-33 group in 1940, after Stagecoach catapulted the actor to "A" status, and one of them, Haunted Gold, was actually back in theatres for some 1962 bookings! Cheap westerns were that way because the profit margin was thin as a razor’s edge, though Wayne’s Warner group performed well in comparison with Poverty Row quickies and their State’s Rights distribution. Ride Him, Cowboy, remade from a Maynard silent of only six years before, took $93,970 in domestic rentals, and $60,000 foreign. Against those negative costs of $28,000, it ended $67,478 to the good. The average profit for the series was $60,912. Wayne left after that first season, however. Maybe Warners wasn’t interested in a second frame, or could be the money was better with Nat Levine and his serials (Wayne did three of them). Quality on these new DVD's is outstanding, by the way. You seldom see "B" westerns looking this good. I hope the triple-feature concept is something Warners will continue exploring, as it seems a congenial format for series titles they own. Nancy Drew, Perry Mason, Dick Foran, Tim Holt and George O’Brien RKO westerns, The Falcon, The Saint, Andy Hardy, Torchy Blaine, Dr. Kildare, Maisie --- am I overlooking any?

Monday Glamour Starter --- Louise Brooks


There’s a lot about Louise Brooks to appeal to the college sophomore in all of us. She spoke her mind, never suffered fools, walked out when she got bored, and so forth. She also got to be the hottest woman in the room, if not the universe, for a handful of years until that attitude of hers brought down the curtain and exiled this most self-destructive gal in the whole of American show-business to a menial life unworthy of such an instinctive acting genius. Well, there’s a mouthful, but how else do you sum up the object of such fervent cult enthusiasm? Tomorrow (November 14) is the Brooks centennial, and out in San Francisco, I understand crowds are hip-deep for any number of commemorative events. We all want to Be Louise at times --- the younger among us imagine they can --- but even Brooks found out that the path of a lifelong contrarian can be a lonely one, and I can’t imagine any of her acolytes wanting to end up the way Louise did. One thing’s sure --- she’s the blinding light among silent contemporaries whose images have not weathered the years nearly so well. You wonder what Paramount was thinking in the late twenties. Did they not have eyes to see? There was nobody like Louise. Not even Clara Bow. Maybe it’s only in hindsight that you can appreciate such a truly distinctive talent. There’s an abiding dream among fans to somehow go back in time and rescue Louise from the philistines. How could those moguls have overlooked such artistry in their midst --- especially with the looks she had?

It’s good she went over and made those three European films, because without them, there’d probably be no Brooks cult. So little is left of her stateside output. You could cry looking at the list of casualties --- The American Venus, A Social Celebrity, Just Another Blonde, Rolled Stockings. Imagine a DVD box containing all these. Beyond her Pabst triumphs, we have to proceed on faith. Surviving prints of American silents are either in rough condition (Beggars Of Life), or protected by copyright (in favor of a Paramount that couldn’t care less). The Canary Murder Case is a Brooks specimen best represented by the stunning posters designed to advertise it. The movie itself ushers her on and off within the first reel, and that odd juxtaposition of mismatched shots to cover patchwork voice dubbing is distracting even when you allow for early sound crudities. This, of course, was the one that got her in Dutch with studio executives and led to permanent cast-off status (she’d refused to report back and record dialogue for the talking version). As for those Euro ventures, I’d recommend switching off the English subtitles next time you watch them on DVD. Pandora’s Box, Diary Of A Lost Girl, and Prix de Beaute are about one thing, and that doesn’t require narrative explanation beyond the picture on your screen. Every man is obsessed with Brooks, and chances are one of them will get around to killing her before the fade. That’s about all you need to know. Titles are optional. In fact, they’re in the way. Who wants to read something at the bottom of a frame otherwise filled with close-ups of Louise? You can fill in the blanks easily enough. It all comes down to a handful of interchangeable lines for whichever doomed, discarded lover happens to be addressing her --- You belong to me, My life is in ruin because of you, I’ll kill you before I’ll let another man have you. There are no language barriers between any audience and a presence so bewitching as Brooks. She needed nothing beyond that face she had. It’s as well she never made it in talkies. Dialogue would have just been an encumbrance for this actress.

I’d have to call hers a fragile beauty. It didn’t seem so as long as she maintained the signature jet-black flapper bob. Cutting away those bangs was like Samson shorn of his locks, however, for something of the Brooks magic went with them. A look at thirties’ portraits and those final western roles (Empty Saddles and Overland Stage Raiders) reveals a face still striking, but difficult to reconcile with the Brooks we’d known. The very idea that Louise would finish up playing support to Buck Jones and The Three Mesquiteers is pure castor oil to her admirers, for a Brooks cultist is seldom partial to "B" westerns (Bill Everson was a notable exception). Their (elitist?) disdain for humble oaters would certainly make them persona non grata at one of our Charlotte Cowboy-cons. To quote samplings of latter-day Brooks appreciations --- Nondescript "Z" western (Overland Stage Raiders), one of the most static and silly westerns in Hollywood history (Empty Saddles), and bottom-of-the-barrel westerns (both). Had she known how vexing these two would be to her modern-day worshippers, Louise might have enjoyed the experiences far beyond that measly $350 they paid. Part of the reason she ended up in such reduced circumstances was the self-destructive streak mentioned earlier, and yes, there were those who inflicted worse upon themselves, but few were so willful about it as Brooks. Part of our ongoing romance with this girl lies in the paradox of someone so intelligent and beautiful spending years holed up in a grubby apartment turning tricks and drinking toward oblivion. The Rochester rescue seems not to have improved her attitude, but maybe she sensed the needs of masochistic fans who got letters returned to sender and doors slammed in their faces. A self-described mean old lady, she seems to have worked at being just that. There were articles Brooks wrote about her career and others in biz orbits, all typically unsparing. Most regrettable was the memoirs tossed into an incinerator before they could be published. She often went beyond the truth to paint a darker image of herself, claiming drunkeness and insensibility during Eastman House screenings of her films, though curator James Card confirmed that she was totally engaged and responsive during same. There was ongoing correspondence with writers, and some fans, but a slight misstep would find that Oscar Jaffe iron door closed against further contact.

Perhaps the only thing that matters in the long run is how long you’re remembered after you’ve gone. By that criterion, Louise Brooks is perhaps the greatest of all silent stars. She’s certainly the only one to have a newly published coffee table book devoted to her, and Pandora’s Box arrives next week in a deluxe DVD package. Ebay and the Internet are a movable feast of Brooks lore and collectibles. Original images go for obscene amounts. Considering her own preference for writing in bed and avoiding face time with followers, Louise would seem destined to have administered her own website. If tomorrow were her fiftieth birthday instead of one-hundredth, imagine the lively exchanges she’d be having with safely-at-a-distance fans. Those who pen-palled with the actress during the sixties and seventies have since given way to the temptation of prices those letters can bring. I once came across an album for sale at a collector’s show with dozens of hand-written L.B. missives and fifty or so original stills besides. All this for a then (1985, the year she died) considerable price of three hundred dollars. Imagine what a return you’d have on such a puny investment in today’s burgeoning Brooks market. I understand a lot of women like Louise. You could say she struck a blow for female independence. Nobody owned her. An image like that never goes out of fashion as long as there are young people seeking the same freedom. Watching the new DVD of The Fountainhead the other day, I was struck by how much Patricia Neal’s character reminded me of the off-screen Louise Brooks. Both seemed to have been bad news for anyone who tried to get too close, though old Coop did manage to get a rope around Pat by the end of the movie. Nobody seems to have come close with Louise. Maybe that’s the real secret of her lasting appeal.

A Truly Magical Show


What better to see a Charlie Chan film than on a tandem bill with a live magic show! Imagine showing up at the movies for a 9AM start. The Liberty used to kick-off at 10:00 on Saturday mornings. Now they don’t open until up until at least the afternoon. Charlie Chan At The Circus is included in the next DVD set. This candid of Warner Oland was taken during the shooting of Charlie Chan In Paris. As to the eventual fate of The Great Doctor "Y", I have no idea …

November 11 Birthdays


A couple of birthdays on November 11 that shouldn’t be overlooked. Clifton Webb was born 117 years ago! He might have gone down on the real Titanic, as he was 22 when it sank. Glad he waited until 1953 to make that trip, because no one could have bettered his performance opposite Barbara Stanwyck, as shown here (Norman is not your son). Titanic used to play television constantly as I was growing up. Channel 3 would start it at 7:00, and I’d tune in around 8:20 just as they yelled, Iceberg, Dead Ahead! That final third still delivers a wallop. Clifton Webb always traveled first-class. It’s as well he didn’t make it too far into the sixties. There was no place in the counterculture for his kind. Webb's ghost is said to maintain a baleful watch over several Hollywood addresses.



Pat O’Brien talked faster than any man I ever heard. He could have whizzed through a 400-page script in twenty minutes. Most of his screen time was spent coaching football and conducting mass. There may have been occasions when he did both. He had the patience of Job dealing with Cagney's raffish characters. These two did nine pictures together! Were any male stars paired as often in features (other than comedy teams)? Pat hit a real slump after he left Warners. I always had a feeling they’d punished him for not staying on --- maybe got the word out for others not to use him. He stayed away from WB for fourteen years after the split. His forties output was a real step down from glories of the previous decade. Fans still remembered, though, when Billy Wilder cast him in Some Like It Hot. Pat would be 107 today.

In Defense Of Satan Met A Lady


Warners recently issued a three-disc special edition of The Maltese Falcon. In addition to a substantially upgraded 1941 version, there are two earlier adaptations of the story that WB produced during the thirties. Both have been unjustly ignored, if not maligned, for many years. Their ongoing status as unwanted stepchildren was reflected by the modest cost of renting both during United Artist’s non-theatrical 16mm heyday. These prices tell the story --- The Maltese Falcon of 1941 was available at $125 per day in 1976, $175 by 1981. The 1931 Maltese Falcon played (few) colleges and film societies at $35, again in 1976, then a measly $60 for 1981. Satan Met A Lady went from $75 to $85 over the same period. I would love to know how many bookings each of these had. 16mm rental would have been about the only way most of us could see those first two versions until TCM came along. I’ll never take for granted the ease of access we now have to both. The memory of those tantalizing stills in Bill Everson’s The Detective In Film and Citadel’s Films Of Bette Davis books, and my mid-seventies conviction that I’d never get to see these movies makes all the more astonishing the fact that, not only can I buy them now … I can buy them at Wal-Mart. For those of us who used to stay up till 3 AM for once-in-a-decade showings of a single classic title on television, DVD and satellite TV are a continuing miracle. That first Maltese Falcon was known as Dangerous Female so as to avoid confusion with the Bogart picture. A lot of writers thought it was actually released under that title in 1931. I was delighted to see the original credits restored on the new DVD. The movie itself is no slouch either, despite pacing a little slow in comparison with other, zippier, Warner pre-codes of the period. Line readings seem overly measured at times. The 78 minutes it takes for director Roy Del Ruth to get the story told could have been disposed of in 65 by a Michael Curtiz. Ricardo Cortez was steeped in playing outright heels, so it's no surprise seeing some of that bleeding into his Sam Spade, but any show that counts Dwight Frye, Thelma Todd, and Walter Long among names in support is by definition a must-see. There’s just no way that John Huston wouldn’t have watched this in preparation for his remake.



Coming five years later in 1936, Satan Met A Lady was like a cheerful, preemptive rebuke to everything that would be taken so seriously in 1941. It is the whoopee cushion beneath the rear of every critic who has reverently probed the greater meanings of Huston’s classic. They had to give dishes away wherever "Satan Met A Lady" was shown, said a Warner publicity man shortly after the film posted initial losses, and yes, it was a "flop" --- negative costs were $195,000, domestic rentals topped out at $266,000, with foreign only $48,000. Considering that loss of $60,000, and the previous deficit of $75,000 on the 1931 version, you’d almost wonder why they kept remaking this thing. Bette Davis was top-billed, having come off an Academy Award win for Dangerous the previous year, and she’s part of the reason Satan Met A Lady fared so miserably in public hindsight. If you couldn’t see it on television (and we surely couldn’t here in NC), why not take her word that it was one of the worst pictures ever made? Reviews of the time backed Davis up. There is no story, merely a ferrago of nonsense representing a series of practical studio compromises with an unworkable script, said The New York Times. Imagine my surprise last week when I watched it for the first time and discovered what a delightful screwball mystery it is. Those who would uphold the sanctity of Dashiell Hammett should prepare themselves before watching, for his novel is altogether upended by an irreverence gleefully mocking detective movie conventions that were themselves years away from being established. They call Warren William Ted Shane in this --- a name that fits, and one he carries lightly. Sam Spade would have been too intense and burdensome for Warren, whose boisterous cad of a screen persona ran loose for a glorious half dozen or so years before Code strangulation and the actor’s own health issues curbed his activities. Those increasingly flippant Perry Mason mysteries seem to have limbered Warren up for Satan Met A Lady. As far as he’s concerned, this is pure madcap comedy, and he's brilliant in it. If anything, Bette Davis’ discomfort arose from her inability to keep pace with her co-star’s energy. Warren William left Warners shortly after Satan Met A Lady. The pre-code garden where he’d flourished had been plowed over, and his time was past.





















It was the obscurity of the first two Maltese Falcons that made a third one possible. The 1931 version would have undoubtedly been denied a Code seal had Warners submitted it for a re-issue in the late thirties, and Satan Met A Lady was adjudged a failure. The studio’s faith in the story was steadfast, however, and the 1941 remake went forward with a determination to finally keep faith with the Hammet novel. Toward that end, it succeeded, but Huston’s film also adopted a straight-faced approach that would have bemused Ricardo Cortez and Warren William. Stakes were never higher than in this Code-dominated world, and every action had real and immediate consequence. Light-hearted attitudes toward sex and crime were unthinkable. Sam Spade paid his dues. Were it not for the artistry of that cast, and Huston’s crisp direction, this would have been an investigation as labored as those conducted by John Hodiak in Somewhere In The Night, or Mark Stevens in The Dark Corner. There weren’t many laughs on the road to film noir. Detectives of a Warren William sort could not have survived here. The Maltese Falcon set the pace for many that would come, but pre-code and screwball elements were no longer welcome. No wonder the previous Falcon and Satan Met A Lady went into deep freeze. There was something almost irresponsible about them. Bogart’s Sam Spade carried the banner for all Code-compliant Hollywood detectives. The solid critical reputation of The Maltese Falcon effectively took it off the burner for purposes of further remakes. Had it not been so well received, I’ve no doubt we’d have seen it adapted again. Consider a possible fifties treatment. Frank Lovejoy as Sam Spade? How about Steve Cochran, or even Gene Nelson? Why not Dennis Morgan? Direction in the capable hands of Andre DeToth, perhaps, or Stuart Heisler. For all I know, the Falcon was remade on any number of 77 Sunset Strip episodes, or Hawaiian Eye. The property was too good to simply ignore. I’ll bet Stu Bailey cracked variations of this case on multiple occasions, with Tracy Steele bringing up the rear the following season with his own Falcon-derived investigation. Warners was shameless about recycling their old properties on those fifties detective shows. Why would The Maltese Falcon be any more sacred than the rest?

Till The Copyright Renewal Notice Rolls By


There used to be a nice lady who worked in the MGM legal department. Mildred Basch’s job was keeping up with the tickle list. It told you when to renew copyright registrations. A certificate was issued for every motion picture, good for twenty-eight years only, and failure to apply for a new certificate at the end of that period consigned your property to the public domain. After that, it was fair game. Anyone could buy, sell, or lease that movie. The tickle list was Metro’s record of what needed to be renewed from year to year. In 1974, Till The Clouds Roll By came up on its twenty-eighth birthday --- and MGM missed the deadline. It was not on the tickle list. My good friend Dr. Karl Thiede remembers his conversation with Ms. Basch. So how did such a big one slip by? The nice lady shrugged. Someone just forgot. For all the titles they had to keep up with, was it so unusual to have overlooked a few? Till The Clouds Roll By was most notable of these, but there was also Love Laughs At Andy Hardy, Royal Wedding, Vengeance Valley, Cause For Alarm, and The Last Time I Saw Paris to demonstrate that record keepers are, after all, only human (these titles are now PD). I recall being stunned at the announcement of Till The Clouds Roll By on Super 8 magnetic sound with color. Yes, we could purchase a brand-new print and show it anytime in our own homes! Footage from the 1946 musical would turn up time and again in compilations and documentaries. Video merchants offered Till The Clouds Roll By on dozens of labels. Never mind the miserable quality. Bargain baskets have them marked down to a dollar at your local super market. Until Warners finally offered a superb DVD from original elements, we’d forgotten how beautiful this movie could look.





Till The Clouds Roll By reminded me of those animated Harman/Ising candy-boxes I gorged myself on last week. Never have I entered live-action portals so resolutely unreal as these. Old-time Metro personnel in the seventies must have been thinking of this one as they took melancholy strolls through soon-to-be-dismantled backlots in That’s Entertainment and Hollywood --- The Dream Factory. This roving time capsule gives you a real sense of what it was like to live and work at MGM during the mid-forties, as it covers all the real estate and most of its personalities. Surviving cast members marvel at having experienced both that vanished era and our own. We needn’t laugh at its artificiality, for in the end, what’s the difference between Cloud's process screen fakery and the CGI effects we have today? Dinah Shore's not fooling anyone when singing in front of a mock-up Eiffel Tower, and audiences were surely in on the joke when Frank Sinatra crooned while poised atop a nosebleed-inducing ivory column (and that droopy tie makes him look like his own caricature in the WB cartoon, Swooner Crooner). Point-of-view placement with theatre audiences distanced me a little from the big musical numbers. Vincente Minnelli’s set-pieces with Judy Garland are the only ones that attempt to bring you into the action. Otherwise, we’re sharing seats with onlookers culled from extra ranks. For an opening pocket version of Showboat (running eighteen minutes), the device works pretty well, since it gives you an approximation of what folks experienced when the show played on Broadway. Otherwise, the stage routines look --- well, stagy. As to merit, they run hot and cold. There’s a rain-and-umbrella number with June Allyson wearing a frozen smile that evokes Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs. I was concerned she might never frown again, but this being June Allyson, she'd probably never want to. One of the Judy extravaganzas featured elephants. They seemed excessively clean and unnaturally poised in a way that made me wonder if they were real. Had Metro achieved a level of production expertise that now permitted them to manufacture automated pachyderms? I regarded the animals with increasing suspicion as they executed their roles with all too perfect grace. The same disquieting reaction enveloped me as Robert Walker (playing composer Jerome Kern) sat beneath a tree with sweetheart Dorothy Patrick while sheep grazed in back of them. Again, these were animals disturbingly composed, as if somehow understanding and responding to Richard Whorf’s direction. Their discreet and unobtrusive presence suggested an awareness that Walker and Patrick were not to be upstaged, and like any obedient Metro contractee, they adopted team player attitudes and maintained a respectful, though picturesque, distance. Again, I wondered if these were actual sheep, or robotic ones.




Robert Walker essays the part of Jerome Kern in Till The Clouds Roll By, but he’s living in a different movie from the rest of them. Bob’s first close-up tells the story. As the crowd applauds the opening of Showboat, he registers a sort of grim resignation and slowly makes his way through the crowd to a welcome (solitary) exit. Was this so different from Bob’s timid withdrawal after a typical MGM premiere? I re-imagined that scene in terms of Walker’s Get Me Out Of Here expression he wore at screenings of What Next, Private Hargrove, or The Sailor Takes A Wife --- any one of those lamentable vehicles they stuck him in after his beloved Phyliss decamped with Selznick. Bob lends real gravitas to this musical, even if it wasn’t the sort Metro intended. He’s mopey, disconnected, and magnificent, sailing along his own river Styx between the boyish naivete of Since You Went Away and the dissolution of Strangers On A Train. There are glimpses of Bruno here, a welcome discordant note in an otherwise efficient recital. You can’t take your eyes off Walker, because there’s always that faint suggestion he’ll walk off the set any minute and not come back. This, by the way, was around the time he disappeared for five or six days --- just split for parts unknown with no explanation. When he finally showed up again for work, Mayer wanted to apply woodshed discipline. Why don’t you just suspend me?, Bob asked. Well, what could be more disarming than that? The guy was bummed to the point of not caring less. Just for kicks, he’d call up the boss and invite him over for the weekend; I’ve only got a small bedroom for you in the back of the house, Louie, but whaddya like to eat? Anything for a little fun at management’s expense. They could fire him altogether and that’d be OK too. One of the great, unsung actors to trod the Metro board during the forties. Generous with his torments. Let us all in on them by way of many great performances. And don’t discount those lame, post- Menninger Clinic comedies (Please Believe Me, The Skipper Surprised His Wife). They’re priceless records of the Walker struggle, a man being passed through the final mechanisms of the studio meat-grinder before the penultimate triumph of Strangers On A Train. By the way, where is his final film, My Son John? A copyright search indicates Paramount still owns it. The last showing I recall was on ABC over thirty-five years ago. They say Bob surpasses himself in it. Are there any decent bootlegs around?

Unexpected Combinations


There are personalities you never expect to see together. A lot of fans are surprised to find The Three Stooges among the cast of Dancing Lady, yet there they are, cavorting with Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, and other Metro luminaries during that period when the Stooges were affiliated with the great Ted Healy. I like the way they wander in and out of scenes, disrupting the flow of otherwise conventional dialogue exchanges with their seemingly spontaneous antics. Look closely at those on-stage rehearsals in the movie, and you'll see the three constantly engaged in some obnoxious background activity --- be it arguing with Healy, or noodling around on musical instruments. Director Robert Z. Leonard must have liked their stuff. As for this visitor to Abbott and Costello's Universal-International set, I’d have to assume he was busy doing Against All Flags on a neighboring soundstage, as this pose is dated 1952. Errol Flynn was friends with the comedy team. He guested on one of their Colgate Comedy Hours, and shared their film-collecting hobby. Print exchanges were frequent among these three, as Flynn liked to show A&C comedies for his kid’s birthday celebrations, while the boys did the same with Errol’s sword-and-sash pics when they hosted their own child gatherings. One time Flynn mistakenly sent over a stag reel for one of Lou's parties, and boy, was his face red!

Mary Astor --- Part Two


The diary scandal that enveloped Mary Astor in 1936 might have derailed her career just as a similar incident damaged Clara Bow a few years earlier, but tabloid readers allowed some leeway for an actress who’d never pretended to be something she wasn’t. Featured player status had come to her rescue, for a truly prominent name, hamstrung with those expectations stardom conferred, would surely have gone down in flames. It’s one thing being accused of adultery by an estranged husband … another to have your own detailed account of the affair splashed all over the press. Hubby’s idea in waving the purloined diary was to blackmail Astor into submission with regards the contested custody of their daughter, but the actress instead took the stand and let the chips fall where they may. Tab editors had to blip her explicit exhalations over paramour George S. Kaufman’s boudoir supremacy, leaving readers to fill in various blanked out words from sentences she’d supposedly written. If excerpts contained in Kenneth Anger’s 1975 collection (Hollywood Babylon) are to be believed (and there’s plenty of reason they shouldn’t), Mary Astor was indeed still water that ran very deep. Considering the sort of best-seller reception Anger’s book received, at a time when many of the personages he covered were still alive, I’d venture to say that diary was talked about almost as much forty years after the fact as it was in 1936 (since 1975 was presumably the first occasion on which those excerpts were published in unexpurgated form). By then, Mary Astor was a resident at the Motion Picture Country House. It would be interesting to know what her reaction was when the book was doubtlessly mentioned, if not shown, to her.

Dodsworth was in production when the divorce went to trial, and as this was Astor’s favorite of all her screen roles, she merely went into the character for purposes of testifying. If her performance on the stand was a tenth as effective as what we saw in the movie, then it’s no wonder she wound up with both the kid and the house. Free-lancing was a mixed bag. She’d go to see movies starring Irene Dunne and envy that actress the better parts she got, but there were compensations. The Prisoner Of Zenda found Astor far more engaging than putative lead Madeleine Carroll, but The Hurricane was a hellish ordeal, thanks to a disaster finale that nearly swept away the ensemble cast. Three years later, it was crickets swarming over her in Brigham Young --- Frontiersman, where she was the most visible of the title character’s multiple wives. The real transition came with Listen, Darling, as it was here that Astor’s mould was poured and set in stone at Metro --- she’d seemingly play mother to every dewy hopeful on the lot. The MGM contract promised a steady check for forty weeks out of the year. All she had to do was show up and play the same part ad nauseum. Side-trips to Warners were more rewarding. The Great Lie won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Bette Davis virtually rewrote the show to Astor’s advantage, knowing that to hog the limelight on this occasion would further diminish an already weak product. Both actresses benefited from the arrangement, and Astor became another who would speak highly of B.D. in later years. The Maltese Falcon inspires less consensus, at least among viewers I’ve spoken with. Mary Astor was miscast as the double-dealing murderess … She’s not believable … The weakest link in an otherwise unbroken chain of great performances. I just watched it again a couple weeks ago, and I’m OK with Astor in this part. Maybe after forty years I’m used to her, and besides, what’s the point of recasting a thing so very nearly perfect to begin with? She certainly brings gravity to the role quite beyond the capabilities of a younger actress, even though she was only thirty-five when The Maltese Falcon was made.



The Mothers For Metro rut wasn’t entirely unrewarding, for there was at least Meet Me In St. Louis, the sort of movie cast members could dine out on for the rest of their lives (but what’s ever become of Joan Carroll, who played Agnes?). Mary Astor was less patient now with on-set pranksters and bratty kids. A Life On Film relates her impatience with Margaret O’Brien, who made life miserable for crewmembers in general and propmasters in particular. Judy Garland was also told off in no uncertain terms by the veteran actress when she held up production. It could be that Astor was bristling over the sameness of these enterprises, for St. Louis excepted, it did seem she was carrying the same maternal spear time and again. Alcohol provided a temporary out --- well, playing mother to those 1949 Little Women might send any performer on a quest for the bottle. Trouble is, the spirits took their toll on hers, and age began to tell. Astor was but forty-one and sparring with screen daughter Lizabeth Scott in Desert Fury, and though it was better work than she getting at Metro, there was no escaping the typecast she’d locked herself into. The best evidence of what those years had done was provided in Any Number Can Play, wherein Astor’s character cameo reunited her briefly with Red Dust co-star Clark Gable. It was hard to believe these two had smoldered under those pre-code lights only seventeen years before.




Some of Mary Astor’s best work may well have been on fifties television, but we can only speculate as to that, since many of those tapes and kinescopes have long since vanished. Her reminiscence of the period included a stressful experience she and Paul Lukas shared when they tried to execute a live broadcast with determined mutterer and non-communicator James Dean, whose own self-centered performance crowded the veterans out altogether. There was also stage work, much of that on the road, where accommodations evoked Boy Scout camp during a heat wave. Astor’s little stage company emoted once in a skating rink, and she had to apply make-up in a locker room only recently vacated by teenage athletes. You had to love your craft to put up with this. The movies seemed to have forgotten her, but there was still character work every now and then. Return To Peyton Place found her mothering (and tormenting) former Fly-head model Brett Halsey, but how could anyone rise above material bad as this? Still, she carried herself with aplomb and critics singled out the wheat from a field of chaff. She’d decided to retire after a Ben Casey episode, but was talked into another cameo for 1964’s Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, where she looked frightfully old. At least her little part figured into the keyhole that unlocked the film’s mystery, so again she was noticed. This really was the finish, however, and she dedicated herself now to the completion of A Life On Film, which was actually her second book of memories (the first, My Story, had raised the fifties bar for frankness). She went into the Motion Picture Country House in 1974, setting up Queen Bee residence among others not so famous as she. Shunning communal tables, she preferred dining alone, and fan appearances were discouraged. A 1980 Life magazine cover reminded everyone she was still among us, and at least one autograph collecting friend of mine got a signed photo back in the mail from one of her silents. Visitors were sometimes taken aback by language blunt and frequently salty. A facility showing of her 1930 version of Holiday saw Mary taking bows and fielding questions. She died in 1987 at eighty-one.

Photo Captions

Mary Astor with Walter Huston in Dodsworth
With Ronald Colman on the set of The Prisoner Of Zenda
With Raymond Massey and Jerome Cowan in The Hurricane
With Freddie Bartholomew, Scotty Beckett, and Judy Garland in Listen, Darling
With Bette Davis in The Great Lie
With Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon
With Judy Garland in Meet Me In St. Louis
With Lizabeth Scott and John Hodiak in Desert Fury
With Margaret O'Brien, Janet Leigh, June Allyson, and Elizabeth Taylor in Little Women
With Clark Gable in Any Number Can Play
With Cecil Kellaway in Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte

Monday Glamour Starter --- Mary Astor --- Part One


Mary Astor seems to have been born mature. I cannot recall her as an ingenue or girlish romantic. She’d had a career with that sort of thing in silents, but by the time talkies arrived, the girl/woman/matron phases had been seemingly traversed and it was now possible to cast this twenty-six year-old actress as the wife of George Arliss and Erich Von Stroheim! That worldly-wise, if not world-weary, expression conferred an authority her thespic peers could only dream about, but to hear Astor tell it in her excellent Hollywood memoir, A Life On Film, she was merely going through the paces like any other minion on the set. Having just watched The World Changes and Easy To Love, both from her early thirties Warner period, I’d argue she’s far too modest, for these performances are second to none among those I’ve looked at from that period. Indeed, I don’t know of any movie that hasn’t been richly enhanced by her participation in it. Mary Astor always conveyed a sense of having lived in the real world, as opposed to those who were just play-acting. When she came through the sound-stage door, she brought an aura of reality with her. A lot of that may have been the luck of a face that bespoke experience, or a manner that suggested past hopes ended in disappointment. Either way, Astor made you believe in whatever emotion she was selling, and even if this were only walking through a performance in her mind, it never came across that way to me.


This time it was the father who did the pushing. He was one of those high-flying types forever coming aground with harebrained get-there-quick schemes (He thought big and failed hard, she remembered). Dad’s daughter marketing had been preceded by an attempt at raising mushrooms in the cellar and investments in far-off walnut groves. He was the real-life W.C. Fields of grandiose business aspirations that would rescue him from anonymity, only Mary’s father didn’t share Bill’s benign onscreen regard for his offspring. Otto Ludwig Wilhelm Longhanke seems to have embodied Teutonic tyranny as it’s so often depicted in movies, and the mother ran him a close second exercising suffocating parental authority. Mary couldn’t go to a bathroom unescorted. Even as a silent luminary of some renown, she had to share sleeping compartments with both of them when traveling. It took a determined rescuer to loosen those filial bonds, and John Barrymore, being a seasoned connoisseur of teenaged innocents, set himself manfully to the task. Mom and Dad weren’t such fools as not to know what was going on during those private afternoon rehearsals at J.B.’s hotel suite, but they were certainly practical enough to recognize how they might profit by the forfeiture of Mary’s virtue. Leading lady status opposite Barrymore in Beau Brummel rewarded their relaxed vigilance, and attendant salary hikes put daughter and loving parents in a new house which they insisted be titled in all three names.




A Life On Film removes several layers of that glamour dust we associate with old Hollywood, and Mary Astor got tired of it all pretty quick. Her silent emoting was, by her own admission, little more than going through trick-dog motions while thinking about that night’s supper menu, but even Mary took umbrage at the foolish antics of repeated co-star Lloyd Hughes, himself so embarrassed by leading man duties that he constantly undercut love scenes with japes and wisecracks. Stardom in those days was no easy adjustment. How many had gone before to mark the way? In this infant industry, up-and-comers were ill prepared to handle such wealth and adulation. Mary got a cold splash when the once ardent Barrymore gave her the go-by in favor of Dolores Costello, and this just as they were embarking upon Don Juan in 1926. Other than the two Barrymores and a turn with Douglas Fairbanks in Don Q, Son Of Zorro, her silent work is largely unknown to us now. Indeed, she may have drifted out with the tide of so many other voiceless headliners were it not for an LA stage venture that got her noticed by talkie-obsessed producers looking for faces who could also speak. That local play was what saved her, for Astor had earlier made a sound test at Fox suggesting a too deep, masculine inflection, and the fallout might have scuttled her career but for the live performance. Now she was steeped with dialogue, and there were four talkies in 1930, followed by seven more the following year. Most were with RKO, where she had a brief contract, but few of these amounted to much. She noted later the unreality of her life at this time --- riding about in open roadsters swathed in furs, with the rest of the country mired in a depression. Movie stars like Astor spoke among themselves about the business and nothing else. No one had any interest in the personal lives of the other, except inasmuch as it related to movies or their career. Genuine friendships among these people were virtually unheard of. Everything was about appearance and maintaining it. No one had to look at breadlines, but they knew they were out there.




In A Life On Film. Mary Astor describes eighteen of the initial talkies as having been unworthy of her time and ours, but a look at that credit list from the early thirties reveals a lot of hidden gems she underestimated when that book was written in the late sixties. It’s hard to come away from these Warner pre-codes unimpressed --- A Successful Calamity (typically excellent George Arliss vehicle), The Little Giant (saucy gangster spoof with Edward G. Robinson), The Kennel Murder Case (glorious culmination of Bill Powell’s Philo Vance series), The World Changes (she does a mad scene that’s truly frightening), Convention City (if only I could comment on this one!), Easy To Love (I laughed till I cried --- honest!), Upperworld (how can anything with Warren William be less than triumphant?), The Man With Two Faces (Eddie G. again), The Case Of The Howling Dog (first of the Perry Masons --- Warners, give us these!), Page Miss Glory (deco time capsule, and a treasure). What actress wouldn’t revel in a filmography like this? --- but bear in mind, Astor’s career memoir was written nearly forty years ago, long before appreciation for these programmers came into flower. I’m sure if she could have sat down and looked at them again, there might well have been a reappraisal, but it’s enough that we can enjoy them all today, even if none have yet made their way to DVD (other than a PD release of The Kennel Murder Case). Outside the Warner gates, she kept distinguished onscreen company. The Lost Squadron found Astor joining the ranks of beleaguered wives for Erich Von Stroheim to abuse --- hard to imagine a show more entertaining. Red Dust was a classic even she acknowledged in A Life On Film, and may have been the last time Astor unleashed the passion behind that cool exterior. A stoic maintenance of subdued maturity relieved her of conventional leading lady duties most of the time, and by the mid-thirties, she was in a class virtually by herself. Too bad there weren’t more leads for actresses with such unique ability. From here on, it would be a matter of stealing limelight from those billed above the title. Audiences seeing her name down in the credits realized Astor would often as not be the one they’d remember.

Photo Captions

Mary Astor with John Barrymore in Beau Brummel
Lobby Display from Don Q, Son Of Zorro, with Douglas Fairbanks
One-Sheet from Second Fiddle, presumably a Lost Film
Lobby Card from Two Arabian Knights (it's been shown on TCM)
Dramatic pose from Don Juan
With George Arliss in A Successful Calamity
With Erich Von Stroheim and Richard Dix in The Lost Squadron
With Edward G. Robinson in The Little Giant
With Jean Harlow in Red Dust
With Warren William and others in The Case Of the Howling Dog
With Warren William in Upperworld

A Long Road To Hollywood

"Ole" Olsen and "Chic" Johnson had to start somewhere, and for these two madcap merry-makers, vaudeville in its decline was the ladder up, as shown in this 1935 stopover at a Rivoli Theatre of indeterminate location. Five shows a day on weekends must have been a killing pace, and you wonder if any of those 35 Glamorous Girls might still be with us. The stories they could tell. You'll note the magnitude of this attraction having rocketed admission prices to an astronomical thirty-five and fifty-five cent level. Good thing they brought in these boys, for that screen show looks like pretty weak tea (Hot Tip? --- don't know it). Olsen and Johnson went on to movie triumph themselves at Universal, though our chances of seeing Hellzapoppin (rights problems, I'm told), Crazy House (cameos include Rathbone and Bruce as Holmes and Watson!), and the rest on DVD are pretty remote (but who'd have thought Fox would release two volumes of Will Rogers?).

Kay's Back In The Warners' Stable


Here’s something offbeat. Madonna and child poses among contract players were never common, but every now and then you run across one. As far as I know, Kay Francis never essayed a screen role along these lines, but who knows? --- Maybe Warners was planning a Passion Play for Kay that never got off the ground. I do know this photo was issued by WB for Christmas 1932, a period in which Kay was otherwise engaged in a delightful series of naughty pre-codes. More Greenbriar Glimpses of Kay can be found HERE. Rest assured she's forthcoming as a Monday Glamour Starter. Meanwhile, consider this the first in our ongoing series of yuletide star poses for 2006. More to come!

Get Out and Sell Those Cartoons! --- Part Two


To update something mentioned in Part One, I did manage to have some conversations today with TV programmers from the Indianapolis area who gave me a vivid recap of what it was like buying and scheduling cartoon packages from the fifties through the seventies. According to these veterans, television appetite for kid product was insatiable. One independent manager recalled having three separate children's shows each day, and he was constantly on the lookout for animated material. Excessive repetition of cartoons was something to be avoided. Fresh stock was at a premium. A non-affiliated channel would buy up every package available, so long as the price was reasonable (although neither of the station managers I spoke to remembered playing that MGM 1960 group!). The deal on cartoons called for unlimited runs over a five to seven year license period. Terms were based on the size of your market. A typical group of several hundred cartoons might go for between ten and twenty thousand in the Indianapolis market. Salesmen were determined and persistent. A programming director received a half dozen "cold-calls" on any given day from field men dropping by after an appointment with a rival station. A lot of these guys were old theatrical drummers, and for some it was hard making the adjustment to TV sales. There were many occasions when they’d come through the door with no real knowledge of the product being offered, but armed nonetheless with a salesman’s bravado and the firm resolve to close a deal. One seller always wore a cape, which he removed with flourish upon entering the customer’s office. Another would follow any unsuccessful pitch by slamming shut his briefcase, snapping the fasteners, and apologizing with theatrical emphasis for not having done a better job for my company. These men sold the cartoons we watched every day on TV, but most didn’t know Droopy Dog from Dill Pickle. They might as well have been selling radial tires. A good field man was rewarded with placement in one of the major markets --- Chicago, LA, Houston. Beginners and non-starters scrambled amongst low wattage remnants, and that meant a lot of drive time hopscotching from one underfunded broadcaster to the next. Having bought a cartoon package, you were free to program it any way you liked. Goonland might play four times a week on the Popeye and Janie Show, while The Organ Grinder’s Swing never shows up once, but only because someone in the film room mislaid it among the Industry On Parade shorts. Rhyme and reason often went begging when it came to local programming. Employees in charge of projection would grab anything within reaching distance. You’d see Daffy Duck In Hollywood enough to figure it must be sitting beside the operator’s lunchbox, and he’s threading up that same cartoon day after day while finishing off his Little Debbie snack cakes.



Bravo to Warners for including so many MGM cartoons as extras with their classic DVD offerings. Several dozen have accumulated so far. I wish someone would compile an index of all the titles and where they’re located. I found The Milky Way with A Night At The Opera. Poor Little Me showed up with David Copperfield. I’ve tried to look at all of them, but I’m sure I missed some. Those Harman/Ising two-color Technicolor shorts are particularly interesting, coming about as the result of Metro's being foreclosed from using the new three-color system. Walt Disney had locked up exclusive rights after committing his Silly Symphonies to the process in 1932. This was a three-year deal, and no one else stood a chance competing with the rich, full palette of his already superior product. No matter how accomplished their animating skills, MGM artists couldn’t approach the Disney standard as long as they were restricted to such a limited spectrum. Tales Of the Vienna Woods and The Calico Dragon are notable, not for the colors they display, but for ones they cannot. I missed blue and yellow the most. You can’t blame it on bad prints, as these Warner transfers are the best available from original elements (note sample frames shown here). I played one of the Harman/Isings back-to-back with a Silly Symphony. The difference was night and day. Quality control was not a priority at Metro. You didn’t have someone like Walt riding herd to get out the best cartoon possible. He spent upwards of $50,000 on each subject by the mid-thirties. MGM tried to hold the line at less than half that. Average negative cost for the 1934-35 season was $15,209, and rentals averaged $44,157. Hugh Harman wanted to compete with Disney by spending more. His profligacy resulted in downward profit margins. 1935-36 saw costs rising to an average of $28,060, but at least three-color Technicolor was available, Disney’s exclusive license having expired. Subjects like Honeyland and Bottles give the Silly Symphonies a run for their money in terms of visual splendor. Developing ongoing characters for their cartoons was where MGM fell down. The Captain and The Kids was based on a comic strip that had been around forever, but audiences still weren’t buying. The Captain’s Christmas, at a negative cost of $27,419, brought back only $25,358 (the loss was even more keenly felt when you figured the total cost with prints, $38,605).




MGM made cartoons in order to resist the encroachment of double features. To persuade a theater not to book a second movie, they had to offer a complete program. Toward that end, the studio maintained a broad selection of miniatures (as shorts were often referred to in those days). Trade ads unmasked the evils inherent in combo billing, with the example shown here proposing an extreme remedy for one who has violated the orthodoxy of a well-balanced presentation. As long as they sought to provide an entire evening's bill of fare, MGM was obliged to make cartoons available to exhibitors. Once they established an in-house animation division in 1937 (its Culver City location shown here), the company was able to assure profits for their also-ran subjects. The Milky Way even managed to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject in 1940. This was an example of a Metro cartoon that made money and kept on making money. Initial negative cost was $29,416, and rentals for its first release were $44,060. A re-issue in 1948 yielded an additional $65,513. Ten years later (1958), $50,792 more. Finally in 1963, at a point when The Milky Way was presumably playing television (but in precious few markets!), another revival brought in $30,839. Quite a balance sheet, with theatrical rentals topping $200,000 on a negative investment of just $29,416.

Photo Captions

A Gathering Of Eagles: (left to right) Director Tex Avery; Background Artist Dan Shaffer; Story Man Harvey Eisenberg; Director Joseph Barbera; Producer Fred Quimby; Superintendent C.G. Maxwell; Director Bill Hanna; Sound Effects Technician F. McAlpin; Musical Director Scott Bradley.

A Two-Color frame from Tales Of The Vienna Woods (1934)
Producer Rudolph Ising, right, and W.D. Burness, animator.
Producer Fred Quimby regards his Oscars.
A Three-Color Technicolor frame from The Fishing Bear (1940)
One-Sheet for Tee For Two
Co-directors Joe Barbera and William Hanna at work on Tom and Jerry.
MGM's Animation Building
Typical hard-hitting MGM Trade Ad denouncing double features.

Where Were Those MGM Cartoons When I Needed Them? --- Part One


I’ll acknowledge having been a cartoon Main Titles junkie for virtually all of my life. Those logos and credits were actually more fulfilling than the short itself in many cases. Programs that excised openers and went straight to the body of the film were major downers. Walter Lantz introduced his Woody Woodpecker subjects, then went direct to a stark title card, omitting the credits. It wasn’t until these packages showed up in syndication around 1977 that I first saw a Universal logo on a Walter Lantz cartoon. Disney was as bad for depriving us of titles. The only time I can remember seeing Mickey, Donald, or Silly Symphonies on television was when one of the Mouseketeers took the little card out of its drawer to introduce that day’s cartoon. Was there even a main title on these? None that I recall, and I certainly don’t remember credits on any. Disney used shorts on the Sunday night NBC show as well, but often as not they’d fade up to the story from Walt's intro. It was only when I began collecting that I was finally able to see those neat RKO logos and United Artists legends on the main card of a W.D. subject. The frustration of going without credits was bad enough, but what about those cartoons that never showed up at all? For all I knew, Columbia never had its name on an animated product prior to Mister Magoo, and MGM’s only contribution was Tom and Jerry. I saw my first Metro Captain and The Kids shorts this morning on a DVD of A Day At The Races. I understand there were only fifteen of these, most in black-and-white. Does anyone remember seeing them in syndication? All we ever seemed to have around here in the way of vintage cartoons were Popeye and Warner Bros. Was it like this elsewhere, or was I merely deprived in North Carolina viewing markets? Metro shorts are a particular curiosity. After all, they made a lot of animated shorts. There’s not much information about the broadcast histories of those packages between the fifties and seventies (boy, would I love hearing from a station buyer from that period!), but apparently they were available from September 1960 …




MGM cartoons were supposedly the last of the major studios’ pre-1948 animated films released to television. The deal was struck with United Artists TV Distribution, but did not include the ongoing Tom and Jerry series, which remained a popular theatrical mainstay well into the sixties. From 1960, the Metros were leased to local stations as kiddie fodder, usually filling time between live host segments. Barney Bear was an umbrella title for some of these afternoon shows, as the package contained the first fifteen entries from that series, as well as thirteen MGM Bosko shorts, fifteen Captain and The Kids, and numerous Happy Harmonies produced by Hugh Harman and Rudolpf Ising. There were 135 cartoons in the group, and 120 were in color. By the time they became available, United Artists already had much larger packages of Popeye and Warner Bros. shorts in station berths across the country. The MGM subjects were in direct competition with name-brand animated products that had a four-year head start in clearing virtually every syndicated market in the nation. How could Barney Bear compete with Bugs Bunny? It must have been hard selling cartoons with no recognizable characters. UA salesmen in the field would have found it far easier to sell a Popeye group over these Metros. I’d assume MGM cartoons wound up with those stations that had been trumped in their respective market by rivals who’d grabbed off Bugs and Daffy before they could, but a question also arises as to what sort of terms UA exacted for the Metros. My guess would be high --- their lease with MGM was probably no bargain. Is this why so few of us saw these cartoons growing up? I’ve spent the last few days asking among friends around the country, and none of them recall seeing a Happy Harmonies on television (especially prior to the late seventies).




Owning MGM cartoons on 16mm conferred bragging rights unequalled by the more commonplace WB’s. Finding them was near impossible. A company called Pictoreel sold Harman and Ising shorts (that's Harman and cameraman Jack Stevens in the photo above left) outright during the fifties, and home viewers could pick these up in either black-and-white or Kodachrome prints. It would appear the two producers retained some kind of distribution rights in these subjects, as other MGM cartoons were never legitimately available to collectors in 16mm. As for random or scattered prints (that is, ones mislaid or otherwise appropriated from TV stations or rental houses), you’d grab a Metro almost sight unseen in those days. Often as not, they’d be pink --- which is to say, the color was faded or fading. All were pigs in a poke since we’d seldom or never seen them before on TV. Much of the time, that was OK, but there were disasters. I scooped up six MGM’s around 1976 for $30 each, which wasn’t bad for such rarities. The first one I watched was The Old Plantation, which had all the rich animation and lavish backgrounds one might expect from Metro. Up next was a cartoon so dreadful that the mere recollection of it sets my teeth on edge. The Tree Surgeon was surely the most nauseating seven minutes I ever spent in front of a 16mm tri-pod screen. I still have flashbacks from the experience. My request to Warners --- now that you own this negative, please burn it. Collecting cartoons got easier when TV stations started dumping them in the late eighties. Suddenly, there were entire runs of Tom and Jerry (they’d finally gone off-network and into syndication in 1977), and even the legendary Tex Avery shorts were starting to turn up. Some friends and I used to meet a longtime collector/dealer on the third Saturday of each month at a Shoney’s restaurant near Charlotte. After lunch, he’d pop the trunk and we’d do a deal for MGM cartoons out in the parking lot. He had a friend at one of the TV stations and they were converting over to videotape for all their programming. What we got would have otherwise been earmarked for the dumpster, had not reason prevailed. There were VCR’s by then, but nothing approached the quality and purity of these classics on 16mm, and besides, the prints were in virtually new condition. It was only after all the TV stations/rental houses were emptied that the supply began to dwindle out. By then, so was collecting, for now there was video projection and the remarkable clarity of DVD. We’d have never imagined it would end, but now it pretty much has. The old Big Reel newspaper we anticipated with such fervor each month has slimmed down to wafer size, and whatever’s left of 16mm gathering is now largely confined to e-bay. It was all great while it lasted, but film couldn’t survive in the face of digital technology (even theatres are abandoning it now!). Some of you veteran collectors out there should write a history of that vanished era. In tomorrow’s Part Two, I promise not to digress so far from MGM cartoons, for there’s more info at hand about costs and rentals, as well as how the studio used their animated subjects as a battering ram against the despised double feature policy.

Recalling Fueds Of Long Ago


There was a time when every kid in the country knew all about the Jack Benny/Fred Allen feud. For years, it was a national fixation. Now both comedians are sadly forgotten, at least by younger generations. You’d have a hard time getting recognition signals at the mention of Allen’s name from even folks in their sixties. He’s been gone since 1956, and a lot of his radio humor seems droll to the point of abandoning comedy altogether. His legacy would seem to have become the chief concern of serious airwave archeologists, while Benny’s humor can still click with listeners otherwise disinterested in vintage broadcasting. Fox is releasing O.Henry’s Full House on DVD in a few weeks, an omnibus for which Fred Allen did one segment cut prior to release. The Ransom Of Red Chief was only seen during a few initial engagements in 1952, but apparently it still exists. The director was Howard Hawks, which is reason enough to restore the footage. As it is, the title O.Henry’s Full House is itself a misnomer, since there are actually only four stories in the show as presently constituted. I’d like to think Fox has remedied that, but nothing in the DVD announcements would indicate they have. Update --- as of 8:12 a.m., there have been several readers who report having seen O.Henry's Full House on television, complete with the Fred Allen story, so I'm happy to report I'm mistaken as to its latter-day absence. The question now is this --- when did Fox put the segment back into the feature, as it was definetely cut for general theatrical release ... ?