Campaigning For Kane --- Part One

Citizen Kane lost $160,000. Historians recall both the film and its star as having gotten a raw deal. Opinions differ as to how much grief Orson Welles brought upon himself. Controversy he invited did hobble the boxoffice. First-run bookings were lost as a result of RKO’s war with William Randolph Hearst as well as profits Kane might otherwise have earned. It was hard enough for this company to score hits even in the best of times. Welles might have had a smash had he dealt with MGM rather than RKO, but Metro would never have given untried talent such carte blanche, nor backed him in a showdown with Hearst. RKO president George Schaefer hungered for, and was willing to gamble on, prestige names that would help RKO grab a bigger first-run market share. 1939’s The Hunchback Of Notre Dame pointed the way with 3.1 million in worldwide rentals. Could Orson Welles deliver unique product RKO needed to compete with powerful majors like Paramount, Fox, and MGM? Welles promised something new in screen entertainment --- plus longer lines and runs in downtown palaces Schaefer coveted. Big companies owning said temples had little reason to court unpredictable talent like Welles, despite remarkable strides he’d made onstage and in radio. RKO’s production machinery was not so well oiled as these monoliths in control of all the best theatres. Orson Welles would team with a studio losing money on pictures that might have clicked with stronger distribution muscle --- Vigil In The Night, Swiss Family Robinson, Abe Lincoln In Illinois, Dance, Girl, Dance --- all handicapped coming out of RKO gates. Their sole money star was Ginger Rogers. She and bandleader Kay Kyser supplied most of the black ink on company ledgers. The 1940-41 product annual called for two Welles productions, the first of which would be John Citizen, USA, among those several preliminary titles for Citizen Kane. It should have been released early in 1941, but for sundry threats, legal and otherwise, made by Hearst once he found out the story was based largely on him. This was where RKO’s express toward greater prestige and profit jumped the track …

As Winter 1941 dragged into Spring, Citizen Kane missed scheduled opening dates and bestirred much speculation as to whether it would be shown at all. RKO was sufficiently intimidated by Hearst interests as to delay public exhibition, though ongoing press previews assured a kettle boiling as corporate heads dithered. Orson Welles suggested they show it in circus tents, and volunteered to take Citizen Kane on the road like an old-fashioned medicine show. He’d even buy the negative! That idea still appealed to him decades later when interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich. If they’d only sold it to me --- they would have gotten out from under, and I would have been independently wealthy for the rest of my life --- everybody would have been happy. At least Welles had a role model in Charlie Chaplin. He’d threatened to hire halls, if not tents, to show The Great Dictator when circuits refused to come to (his) terms the previous year. Was Welles just posturing here? The practical realities of trying to seat audiences in makeshift auditoria for gerryrigged movie presentations was alright if you were running 16mm for school groups, but well-intentioned filmmakers doing battle with theatre monopolies stood little chance playing first-run million dollar investments in venues with sawdust for floors. Samuel Goldwyn actually tried it a few years after Kane when he opened Up In Arms with wooden chairs and telegrams from independents applauding his Quixotic gesture, though audiences for that Reno, Nevada "premiere" still preferred the comfort of plush theatre seats. Welles finally went public and threatened to sue RKO unless they released Citizen Kane forthwith. Radio City Music Hall backed out of a prior agreement to host the premiere, necessitating a quick overhaul of an old two-a-day vaudeville house RKO had owned since the twenties. The Palace Theatre was dressed out in a wall of light, four stories high (shown here). A lavish front cost $26,000 to dress, while other advertising and ballyhoo expenses stood RKO $53,000 before the doors opened on May 1, 1941. For all the confidence on display at the Palace, RKO remained tentative as to playdates for Citizen Kane elsewhere. "A few test showings" was all they’d promise --- these would include Chicago (a lackluster engagement as Welles would later recall), Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington. They called it a roadshow, and surely Citizen Kane was that in terms of limited bookings and a long, hot summer in which to lose momentum before the belated general release set for September 5.

Citizen Kane topped an indifferent slate RKO identified as the First Five For 1941-42. Trade ads were colorful and replete with critical plaudits. Runner-ups on the schedule included Parachute Battalion, Father Takes A Wife (remembered, if at all, as Gloria Swanson’s pre-Sunset Boulevard attempt at a comeback), All That Money Can Buy (stylistically similar to Kane), and Lady Scarface. Block-booking obliged small and independent exhibitors to play all of these. Parachute Battalion (eventual profit --- $128,000) held far greater promise for showmen than Citizen Kane. It was close as they could get to the blockbuster everyone wanted, Warner’s Sergeant York, which would go into general release September 27. Kane was getting a black eye from theatremen hearing crickets and fielding patron complaints as it wound through small towns. Negative comment in the trades was virulent. You’d think Anna Sten was making movies again. There was a World Premiere At Popular Prices in Reading, Pa., complete with parade and baton twirlers --- fresh ad art sexed up Citizen Kane and assured customers they’d not pay the $2.00 asked of roadshow attendees. Pressbooks offered a revised campaign abandoning cartoonish ad art and de-emphasizing an uninspired tagline, It’s Terrific! New one-sheets at last suggested quality product, but they came much too late. Major circuits refused to play the film. Fox West Coast Theatres contracted for Citizen Kane, then opted not to exhibit it, effectively shutting out runs in areas they controlled. Welles had indeed underestimated the enemy he’d made in Hearst. That deluxe trailer for Citizen Kane was a production in itself, and much as it delights us today, chances are Welles' confection baffled viewers unfamiliar with the screen newcomer and whatever it was he was selling. RKO’s season was thus a sinking ship, and George Schaefer would go down with it. Father Takes A Wife lost $104,000. Excellent though it was, All That Money Can Buy (now known as The Devil and Daniel Webster) was down by $53,000. Citizen Kane took $990,000 in domestic rentals and $300,000 foreign. That loss of $160,000 was not so egregious in comparison with other RKO features bleeding as much every year, and surely it was dwarfed by the blow Welles would take with his next, The Magnificent Ambersons, a loser to the tune of $620,000, and one of the worst lickings RKO sustained that decade.

One critic described Citizen Kane as the picture of a man who is not really worth depicting, and here is the film’s weakness, but was it Kane he rejected, or the actor playing him? Welles was at the least unfamiliar as a screen presence. That voice was known well, but could it have become too overpowering (intimidating?) when combined with Welles’ looming physicality? He’s surely no leading man in the conventional sense. Rubber-necked masks and skull caps do not a romantic leading man make --- and what of those not ready for prime-time Mercury players? Joseph Cotten would break into romantic leads. The rest were at best character support, and few fulfilled the bright promise Welles foresaw in his Citizen Kane trailer. I could suggest revisionist casting that might have turned the commercial tide had the picture been made but months later. Consider the young man among reporters wandering amidst Xanadu treasures in the final sequence. Attentive listeners will identify that unmistakable Alan Ladd voice as it’s heard several times near the end (the still shown here finds him standing in clear view with other players). What if Ladd had played Kane, just after This Gun For Hire? Imagine following the sensation of his breakout role in that Paramount thriller with Alan Ladd as Charles Foster Kane! Welles would have had an unqualified hit and juice enough to stay on and direct no telling how many more RKO projects. At the very least, Welles and Mankiewicz might have rewritten Citizen Kane to accommodate a shared lead with Ladd. Consider this for instance --- Two-fisted enforcer (Ladd) for Big Jim (more sinned against than sinning) Gettys goes after C.F. Kane (Welles), but falls in love with Emily (Ruth Warrick) just as he’s closing in on that love nest his quarry shares with "singer" Susan Alexander. For Emily’s sake, Ladd lets Kane off with a warning, exacts his promise to lay off Gettys and stay out of politics, then decamps with Emily, who’s decided she prefers this bantam with the heart her venal husband lacks. Think they’d have bought that in 1941?

My Idea Of A Filmgoing Oasis

Imagine --- sitting on a camel, corn dog in hand, watching The Cape Canaveral Monsters --- is that not a glimpse of paradise? Picture an ostrich race during intermission between The Absent-Minded Professor and a Three Stooge comedy. In the sixties, there were drive-ins … and then there were DRIVE-INS. The Oasis just outside Chicago was among the latter. I can’t believe such a place existed, and but for photographic evidence shown here, I still wouldn’t. Built at a cost of $555,000 over a twenty-acre spread, The Oasis sat 1,600 cars, along with seventy seats in each of two indoor theatres facing a 52 X 125-foot screen. The approach took you by desert tents and concrete camels with sheiks mounted thereon. Sand dunes were painted on fences running hundreds of yards alongside the entrance road. This was suburban Chicago, one minute from Oak Grove, Illinois, and 22 minutes from the city’s loop. Folks from the neighborhoods must have thought they’d cross hemispherical lines as they neared The Oasis. Plastic palm trees dotted the landscape. Waterfalls spouted forth from what appeared to be desert wells. It was a work of engineering and showmanship genius, the brainchild of one Oscar Brotman, exhibitor turned attorney, then back again to his first love (he’d run four theatres before turning twenty-one). Oscar was forty-four when he opened the Oasis in 1961. I thought how neat it would be to track him down and get some dope on what it was like running the most exotic drive-in anywhere in these United States, but then it hit me --- the man would be ninety today, if indeed he’s still among us.

Maria Montez might have ridden her Sahara caravan through these imposing mosque-like portals, though if you’ll observe closely, there’s several boxoffices therein for what must what have been ongoing boffo attendance. I’d have sat through four hours of Andy Pandas just to bask amidst such splendorous trappings, and so what if the movies tanked? You could still ride camels, or elephants, for a quarter. Ostriches ran nightly --- camels too (wonder if patrons wagered on the outcomes?). You could pet the tamer beasts; this in addition to petting that doubtlessly went on in cars. Oscar got the animals from Disney, shortly after Swiss Family Robinson wrapped. Never let it be said that Walt wasn’t the showman’s friend. This playground sure beat hell of the ones we had in elementary school. There were four cafeteria lines serving the usual fare, plus something called apple taffy, which is a new one on me, though I’d concede Northern palettes may run contra to my own. Advertising circulars went on every tray, pushing whatever attractions were headed for the Oasis. The point is all this could be had for an admission of $1.25, with children 12 and under free. "Early bird shows" kicked off at 5:00 on Sunday afternoons, presumably for those with vision adequate to divine moving figures faintly visible in summer daylight. With camels running dead heats around that track, I wonder how much difference it would have made what they flashed on the screen, never mind it's being discernable! Shopping sprees were not unknown among Oasis patrons. There were vendors salted in lounges throughout the concession areas, peddling combs, brushes, pens, lipstick, perfume, toothbrushes, and Mexican jumping beans. Why weren’t we all living near Chicago in 1961?

Oscar shunned sex pictures. Guess that meant no Brigitte Bardot, nor any of those nasty art pictures along the lines of La Dolce Vita and Satan In High Heels. No doubt he chilled on stateside sizzlers like Baby Doll and Peyton Place as well, though when you’ve a family friendly park as enticing as this, why gum it up with pictures likely to offend? Safer by far to go with attractions like those shown on the marquee here, and what’s wrong with a night spent watching Hondo, with an elephant ride in the bargain? Who among us would be so proud as not to take Oscar up on an entertainment offer like that? Our own Starlite Drive-In, located just off hairpin curves leading to Statesville, NC, was far more prosaic in its bill of fare. We had hula hoop contests, free (live) turkeys, nickel hot dogs, and pumpkin giveaways for thanksgiving shows. Sometimes you had to catch the turkeys, but that only enhanced overall gaiety. Our beloved Starlite was using remnants of prints long since abandoned by hardtops within a radius of two hundred miles. That stuff you saw on The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction about backwoods theatres running silent movies wasn’t too far off the mark where we were concerned. The Starlite unspooled The Oklahoma Kid and Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man in the mid-sixties. Red River and The Outlaw were still booking with us in the seventies. Were these somewhere concealed in the Starlite's hollow outdoor screen? No camel rides where I lived, but livestock roamed open drive-in fields, as I’ve alluded to before. All of which makes the prospect of an Oasis Drive-In seem all the more incredible, for if places like this truly existed, I can only imagine people lucky enough to have attended would carry those happy recollections to this day. Were any Greenbriar readers among them?

Rescue These Orphaned Noirs!

Accurately defining film noir has become an increasingly dodgy proposition of late. Distributors intent upon selling deep library product have affixed noir classification upon titles at best questionable as such. As I’m happy to see any and all vintage product out there, such gentle subterfuge isn’t the least offensive to me, but others have brought companies to task for capricious marketing of generic crime and police thrillers, calling them noir to reel in camp following impulse buyers. Meanwhile, hundreds of worthier prospects lay dormant in studio vaults. The four I address today may or may not be authentic noir. You tell me. Everyone has their own definition. Common elements are rife among this quartet. They’re cheap --- mighty cheap. I picture deals closed during late afternoon happy hour and memorialized upon a cocktail napkin. Neophyte investors sinking that small inheritance they should have put against the mortgage in hopes of striking gold with known (if faded) Hollywood pros. These were features only by virtue of being two or three times the length of a Racket Squad episode, booked if at all by exhibitors in need of something --- anything --- to reassure patrons there was some benefit to be had for coming in a grindhouse other than getting out of the rain or sleeping off a drunk. Actors headed down a sliding board toward television did these in hopes of staying on theatre screens a little longer, so who paid heed to Cry Danger, Shield For Murder, Witness To Murder, and The Killer Is Loose? Distractions are rife in a drive-in parking lot after all, and that was first-run port of call for these in towns with limited indoor venues. "A" houses preferred bigger names, preferably in Cinemascope. Consider these numbers --- The Killer Is Loose had 7,987 bookings, Kirk Douglas in The Indian Fighter (color and scope) scored 21,030 --- both from United Artists and released within months of each other. Witness To Murder was a near photo finish for Rear Window and beat it into theatres by four months besides, but Hitchcock’s thriller took 4.8 million in domestic rentals while the former settled at $683,029. Life’s just not fair sometimes, even if Rear Window was the tale more artfully told. Justice is finally served by way of frequent TCM broadcasts for these orphans. All four are richly deserving of that hour and a quarter you might devote to each. Wobbly sets and careening mike booms are more than offset by rich performances, terse dialogue, and you are there LA street locales. This is lean meat shorn of pretension and served minus big studio garnishment. For a single viewing of most Metro biggies, I’d look at Cry Danger a dozen times, and have.

Dick Powell mentored Robert Parrish’s directing bow and disabused the youngster as to notions of art just prior to starting Cry Danger. It’s only a movie. It’s not real life. It’s shadows on a screen. It’s nothing. It’s dreams. They were lunching at Preston Sturges’ Hollywood restaurant. We’ll make a quality movie for the price. That’s what it’s all about, Powell said. We’ll start on schedule in two weeks and we’ll finish on schedule twenty-two days later. They’d gotten money out of a mid-west theatre owner with producing aspirations. Howard Hughes pledged the rest along with distribution. Powell had an accountant’s brain with regards priorities. Anybody can direct a movie, even I could do it (and he would later on). I’d rather not because it would take too much time. I can make more money acting, selling real estate, and playing the market. Hard to reconcile such casual philosophy with great work Powell did over the years. Pragmatism can sometimes be a handmaiden to excellence, and I suspect Cry Danger wears well precisely because Powell and crew maintained grown-up, get it done attitudes throughout, unburdened by stylistic excesses indulged by so many of today’s neo-noir pretenders. Known less by its title than long standing identification as the one in the trailer park, Cry Danger scores, as do most of these budget noirs, with its location filming --- by necessity, according to director Parrish, as only $7,500 was allocated to set building. Nice to see characters enter dingy hotel lobbies from off the street, thus confirming we’re seeing the real thing. Actual bars and grocers stand in for clip joints and bookie parlors. You’d think Powell and company were making home movies but for guns they carry. Dialogue (rewritten) by ace scribe William (The Gunfighter, The Mob) Bowers was so good as to be highlighted in the pressbook ad shown here, indeed a rare thing among annals of movie salesmanship. Powell works his customary magic with props. Watch how he plays amongst contents of William Conrad’s desk drawers. The star’s economy with words mirrored offscreen dedication to get this job done and move on. Powell to Parrish: You can cut it with Bernie Burton, we’ll ship it, and then we can start thinking about something else. OK? RKO did indeed ship Cry Danger to final domestic rentals of $850,000, with an additional $250,000 foreign. Being an independent (Olympic Productions), the negative went from shelf to shelf and ended up with NTA for syndication packaging. By then, elements had degenerated sufficiently as to leave Cry Danger available, if at all, on duped 16mm. The two prints I collected years ago were (1) splicy original and (2) clean dupe. It seemed you couldn’t win with Cry Danger. The US Copyright Office still lists NTA as owner of the negative, but my question is --- Does that negative even exist anymore?

Barbara Stanwyck watches as George Sanders strangles a woman in an adjacent apartment window. She confronts him and goes to the police, but nobody believes her, except Sanders, of course. Witness To Murder opened in April of 1954. There were 10,092 bookings. Someone must have seen it and experienced déjà vu when Paramount unveiled Hitchcock’s Rear Window in August of that year, though critics seem to have ignored the many parallels. Variety never mentioned them in its review. Rear Window was the big studio elephant stepping over a modest indie despite its having been first in line to tell a remarkably similar story. I’d sound foolish submitting Witness To Murder as the better picture, though it’s hard resisting an impulse to boost UA’s David over Paramount’s Goliath. Noir legend John Alton photographed Witness To Murder. His compositions must have dazzled 1954 viewers. All of that’s lost today in what look to be 16mm broadcasts on TCM. Apartment dweller noir flourished in 1954. Columbia’s Pushover also dealt with renters peeping across courtyards and down hallways. The killer next door became a popular urban, as well as suburban, menace. Postwar Barbara Stanwyck either played murderers or was busy fleeing from them. She’d become a hard sell for romantic leads, and it wasn’t just an age issue (47 in 1954). Not for a moment could I buy Gary Merrill’s attraction to "bachelor girl" Stanwyck in Witness To Murder, for seldom was a woman so unapproachable on screen as here. The stridency B.S. could get away with in the thirties was now twenty years more off-putting, especially in contrived situations where she’s hurling opportunity in Sanders’ direction, inviting him to do her in. Acting is like roller-skating. Once you know how to do it, it is neither stimulating nor exciting, was a quote attributed to George Sanders, and his listless performance in Witness To Murder, four years out from the triumph of All About Eve, is proof enough he lived by those words. A somnambulant Sanders is preferable to most other players on their best day, however, so seeing him enact yet another would-be Nazi superman, albeit one transplanted to stateside environs, is a delight for fans of this actor, particularly when he lapses into Teutonic tirades. Imagine his character in Manhunt or Confessions Of A Nazi Spy beating it across the Atlantic and setting up shop in the Americas after WWII. That’s essentially the part Sanders plays in Witness To Murder. I suspect a nice 35mm print of this on a big screen, or a DVD release, would elevate its reputation quite a lot.

Aubrey Schenck and Howard Koch were an independent team in pursuit of whatever exploitation product sold at the given moment, whether it be shlock horror (Voodoo Island, The Black Sleep), exotic actioner (Desert Sands), or calypso music (Bop Girl). The rogue cop saga that was Shield For Murder amounted to just another day’s work for these two, and returns for the United Artists release was no doubt predictable as an average B western would have been a decade earlier. Anti-heroic Edmond O’Brien wears a drab overcoat and pistol-whips both friend and opponent. The sex angle is front and center via trailer bait shots of Marla English (shown here) donning brief attire for seedy nightclub duty (… and does Marla remain the elusive and hotly sought after object of would-be Filmfax interviewers? Has anyone found her yet?). Shield For Murder’s violence is sudden and vivid, beyond self-imposed mainstream limits of the time. Competing with television required haymakers surpassing what was given away on home screens. You had to raise the bar on whatever had come before. Serving up less was never an option. The black-and-white cop genre was eventually wiped out by increased proficiency of TV crews pushing their own envelopes. Shows like Dragnet, Naked City, and M-Squad offered real inducement to stay home. Had Shield For Murder come along five years later, I’m betting it would have sunk like a stone. As it is, the August 1954 release earned $442,919 in domestic rentals, with $432,000 foreign. Within a couple of years, it too was playing television. Could this be reason for that scene where crime boss Hugh Sanders enjoys prizefights (and a clear picture!) on his remote control set? Unusual to see such a positive TV reference at a time when Hollywood was still resisting the home screen’s encroachment. By 1956, police protagonists took a back seat to psycho stalkers. The Killer Is Loose focuses on near superhuman efforts of vengeful Wendell Corey to even a score with straight arrow detective Joseph Cotton. Corey was just this side of TV series work in Harbor Command, which would start up the following year. Had I been an Academy member in 1956, I’d have nominated him for The Killer Is Loose. The man is a revelation here. Formerly typed as a stick in the mud, forever losing the girl, Corey lights up his title role with one of the scariest meek-mannered head cases I’ve ever seen depicted in movies. There’s really nothing out there like him. Too bad this movie, with its modest $392,768 in domestic rentals, got so little attention. Budd Boetticher warms up here for all those Randy Scott westerns at Columbia. The Killer Is Loose moves fast, shocks frequently (John Larch’s death scene!), and delivers admirably within 73 crackling minutes.

Here's a tip. Go to Eddie Muller's Film Noir Foundation and join up. There's an informative newsletter that comes with membership, plus news of noir import and up-to-the-minute dope on happenings in genre underworlds. Muller's site is terrific too.

Mining More Rock and Roll Gold

How many of us had a barber silently reflecting upon short-lived rock and roll stardom as he cut our hair? That lady behind the florist window could well have danced and sang with pop music headliners in one of Sam Katzman’s quickies. The Whatever Became Of … list generated over years of R&R meteor showering grows ever longer and more obscure. Never did as many young stars flash so brightly and disappear so quickly. Cast lists from features I’ve recently watched run a gamut from faintly familiar to totally unknown. Where did all that promising talent go? Back to school (hopefully)? Jobs within the music industry perhaps? Chances are most (eventually) lived and worked among folks ignorant as to their past glories in vintage rock and roll movies. My imdb search turned up nothing beyond a single credit for many of these performers. I wonder where they did end up. Grocery clerking, bank telling, cobbling my shoes --- or yours? Teen idols of yesteryear frequent Ray Courts autograph shows four times a year in North Hollywood. Back when I attended, Tommy Sands, Michael Callan, and Edd "Kookie" Byrnes were accessible as a clerk behind your meat counter at Harris-Teeter, and at least as unaffected and free of star temperament. Fifty years ago, I’d have had to wade amongst thousands of screaming teenagers for but a glimpse of them. Imagine knowing such fame and adulation so long ago --- then to look back from comparative anonymity you’ve known since. Sands, Callan, and Byrnes have remained visible for those who looked closely, as have other luminaries from teen idolatry’s past. I’d assume most could peruse a Burger King menu without fear of molestation from youthful autograph seekers, though you figure they’ve got to miss it from time to time.

Bands featured in Rock, Rock, Rock! seem qualified enough for a gig at my local YMCA. Such relaxed casting standards among low-budget R&R producers lend roughhewn verite qualities to shows otherwise (and unfairly) dismissed as amateurish. Rock, Rock, Rock! combines missiles poised for career take-off (Tuesday Weld) with duds sputtering in a first and last audition for teen pic glories (Jacqueline Kerr and Fran Manfred, neither to appear in further motion pictures or TV). Campus catch Tommy Randazzo has that silken Duke Mitchell quality about his crooning that made me wonder if rock and roll was really such a departure from vocal styling that had gone before. Randazzo was another of those fringe performers I’d not heard of before seeing Rock, Rock, Rock!. An imdb search revealed further appearances in rock musicals of similar pedigree and many hits as a songwriter later on, yet Tommy might have had a hard time convincing most of us he’d once been (sort of) famous on screen. For the few that hit, there were thousands who didn’t, or like Tommy, sparked but briefly. Rock, Rock, Rock! otherwise delivers on the promise of its advertising. This is a real teenage musical, about kids and starring kids. Tuesday Weld, at thirteen, is dubbed by Connie Francis when songs are needed. 1956 was perhaps the final year girls wore white gloves like Tuesday’s when downtown shopping. The picture is just slapdash enough to be utterly convincing. Camera-awkward teens were what all these shows needed to connect with their intended audience. Compare Rock, Rock, Rock! with the following year’s Bop Girl Goes Calypso, a woebegone effort to catch a musical wave that failed to break on US boxoffice shores. Its title was ultimately shortened to Bop Girl when calypso references were deemed a liability, and post-release pressbooks made nary a mention of the now discarded fad. Producers seemed bent on denying young viewers screen access to their peers. Judy Tyler (at 24) was romanced by pre-Emergency Bobby Troup (38), with sideline kibitzers George O’Hanlon (best known as middle-aged, and eternally set-upon, Joe McDoakes) and surefire teen magnet Lucien Littlefield, fulfilling promise initially shown in 1914 when he started out with the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. Bop Girl is salvaged by unexpected forays into outer limits of rock and roll variation. The Goofers sail across the stage on trapeze rings as they (expertly) play trombone upside down. This band’s eventual fate is unknown to me. For sheer physical effort, they should have outsold The Beatles, but I’m betting they finished up in rural supper clubs. Amazing the talent people took for granted in those days …

Alan Freed was the man who put rock and roll on the map. He (literally) sang its praises on radio, first from far-flung Cleveland in the early fifties, then on NYC airwaves when he and the music got hot. Instinctive genius Freed saw what was coming early on (check him out here with Little Richard and Bill Haley). He’s featured in five rock and roll features as recognized King of the Big Beat, ruling unchallenged until a corporatized new order pushed he and his raffish kind out. Team players along the lines of smooth operator Dick Clark would then take over. Freed and Clark were the Goofus and Gallant of pop interlocutors. A 1953 auto pile-up rearranged Alan’s handsome features and left him with a crooked grin and scarred nose to complement raspy and staccato on-air delivery. Everything Freed did wrong, Clark did right, including testimony before a Senate committee investigating payola in the music biz. One could say Alan paid for Dick’s sins. Freed represented everything smoky, visceral, and forbidden about R&R in its opening act (and would, in time-honored fashion, die utterly broke and forgotten in 1965) --- Clark would skate, for decades, along a surface newly polished by major labels back in control. The contrast between Freed in Don’t Knock the Rock and Clark in 1960’s Because They’re Young is testament to times and how they were a-changin’. The former’s a go-getter and admitted charlatan, but at all times rock and roll’s champion (here with femme admirers at an in-person theatre appearance). Freed played himself in all five of those pictures he made, and no voice for the movement evoked its special qualities so well. Samples of his airchecks are online. Nothing I’ve heard summons up those early days of radio R&R quite like this. Dick Clark’s television shows are meanwhile unreleased on legit DVD. I’d hoped to see volumes of early American Bandstands available, but nothing so far. Must be music rights holding them up. The one item I did come across (among a dealer’s bootleg stock) was the 9-12-59 installment of The Dick Clark Beech-Nut Show, a teevee relic tying in with his screen dramatic debut in Because They’re Young by way of feature player Roberta Shore’s singing appearance. I could only wish now to have every Beech-Nut show Clark did, as this one’s a priceless time capsule. Freckled girls swoon over Paul Anka. The ghostly kinescoped image of Bobby Rydell sings I Dig Girls in a manner reminiscent of gaunt footage I’d seen of Hank Williams close to the end, and host Clark holds packs of Beech-Nut spearmint gum in flawlessly manicured hands (would hyperactive Alan Freed ever have sat still for a manicure?). All this was my build-up to Because They’re Young, in which Dick played an idealistic high school teacher helping troubled teens find themselves. It’s a masterpiece embracing the all kids are basically good philosophy Clark espoused in all walks of his professional life, plus there’s James Darren dropping in on prom night to warble the title song (otherwise played by Duane Eddy in a hit-bound instrumental I begged for, and got, when I was six years old). Michael Callan seduces Tuesday Weld, robs a warehouse, then effects an eleventh-hour reformation (oops, my spoiler). Dick Clark’s a relaxed and confident lead. He might have done more along these lines were it not for punishing schedules he maintained for television. Judging by the unavailability of pictures like this and Universal’s The Unguarded Moment (along with others less ambitious), you’d think the only high school dramas anyone made were Rebel Without A Cause and The Blackboard Jungle. I don’t recall Because They’re Young turning up anywhere before TCM ran it recently. Is it too much to hope that Sony might someday release it on DVD?

A couple of images worth noting here. That’s William Benton, manager of Stanley-Warner’s Liberty Theatre in Philadelphia, checking out a Rock, Rock, Rock! display with noted disc jockey George Woods, whose personal appearance in connection with the film’s opening is anticipated here by the crowd surrounding a standee announcing his forthcoming gig. Woods promoted concerts with early Motown artists and commanded a huge following in Philadelphia’s black community. He acted on occasion as Dick Clark’s laison to that audience, for whom Clark programmed much of his own radio and television content. Integrated downtown houses were always leagues ahead in terms of programming. My own examination of newspaper microfilm reveals shows I’d have walked (over broken glass) to see back in the sixties, and they were all booked into so-called "colored" venues. While "A" locations in Winston-Salem were running mainstream dogs like The Honeymoon Machine and Dear Brigette (as first-run singles), there was the Center down on Liberty Street unspooling triple bills of The Mummy, Curse Of The Werewolf, and Horror Of Dracula, while the Lincoln up the block would open at 10:00 am and grind out She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, Vertigo, and Vera Cruz --- and this was in 1964! Vintage rock and roll features played well into the sixties here as well, a happy result of prints still on hand in Charlotte exchanges and rental terms seldom exceeding $20 per title. Our own Liberty Theatre staged rock and roll parties during the fifties. I would have assumed Lloyd Arnold and his Rockin’ Drifters was some nowhere band out of the sticks that played our town plus a few gymtoriums, but I was happily corrected by websites celebrating a rockabilly group that still enjoys a loyal following. Warren Smith was another stellar name among southeast bands. We had him July 3, 1957, and more’s the pity I was only three at the time, for I’m sure this was one amazing show. The Liberty seems to have booked most of its live programs out of Memphis. They’d hosted country-western acts for years, in addition to cowboy star appearances along the lines of Lash LaRue and Johnny Mack Brown. What was rockabilly but an extension of these sounds? Of all regions in the country making the adjustment to rock and roll, we might have been best prepared for it.

Let's All Rock Out In The Lobby! --- Part One

Among stone tablets disgorged from studio vault recesses, few are so bewildering as those vanguards, now largely unwatchable, of rock-and-roll’s dawning era. It’s now one half a century since R&R took exhibition and its biggest target audience by storm. By way of evidence as to how potent an elixir this was, I submit wired-up teens shown here awaiting passage to see Rock Around The Clock at the Gopher (no kidding!) Theatre in Minneapolis one wintry night in March 1956. Those aren’t tennis balls descending from above --- it’s snow. How many of us brought along guitars and accordions to movie shows? I’d assume the musicians were management plants, but this impromptu swing-a-thon in the lobby bespeaks crowd spontaneity I experienced not once over years of ingressing and egressing the Liberty. High school student councils and newspaper editors were appreciative of the harmless quality of this youthful exuberance, said local press, though parents were less approving of similarly exuberant exhibitors with their round-the-clock rocking that kept flowers of youth standing on line way past reasonable bedtimes. Circling around the Paramount Theatre when they should be home and asleep inspired Miami gentry to seek mayoral intervention lest matters get out of hand. Five thousand kids jammed the house over a thirty-eight hour schedule at a dollar a head to see Rock Around the Clock, those sturdiest among cats and gators comped to coffee and doughnuts for the Saturday 7:00 am showing. We just let the kids have a good time and yell their lungs out, said manager Charles Whittaker. They are only young once, and maybe the rock and roll fad will last only as long as Davy Crockett. Dancing in aisles was not uncommon during engagements of Rock Around The Clock. Exhibs not yet hip to the revolution still called it jitterbugging, and yes, they drew a line at seat-slashing and screen-aimed missile launches, but when was the last time showmen had houses packed during off-days and sluggish matinee berths? Rock and Roll woke everyone up to a new day for selling movies. Mom and Dad were largely retired to their Philcos, and from here on, boxoffice negotiations would be conducted with their offspring.

Eight or so rock and roll features turned up on TCM recently. Most were from Columbia. They’d been on the slagheap since days long past when local channels filled off-hours with black-and-white cheapies they had to buy in order to get crowd pleasers like On The Waterfront and The Caine Mutiny. Teenagers who’d once waited on line to see Rock Around The Clock must have been stunned by latter-day televised reunions with such a drab little picture. These encounters no doubt increased appreciation for progress made since. Watching them now provides insight into just how starved 50’s kids were for helpings of the new sound, deluded though it was by penurious budgets and a tentative approach to still radical and possibly controversial music. Rock and roll was a kid phenomenon as seen through the eyes of cynical adults. Our (intended) emotional investment isn’t with teens and their problems, nor bands and their ambitions. Writers clearly flummoxed by entertainment demands of new youth reroute emphasis toward world-weary agents, jaded managers, and fighting to survive producers, characters inspired by selfsame hucksters trying to harness and exploit this peculiar, if frightening, movement. Rock Around The Clock belies its title by focusing instead on former swing promoter Johnny Johnston, mature beyond the point of being overly impressed with Billy Haley or his Comets, except inasmuch as he’s able to peddle them to gullible (and mostly offscreen) teens. Primary conflicts revolve around Medusa-like agent Alix Talton setting her cap for the agent, while romantic rival John Archer, increasingly puffy and careworn since mopping up Cody Jarrett's gang seven years before, waits patiently in the wings. Sets are cramped to a point of suffocation. Guest artists aren’t treated as such, being shoved into soundstage corners and coming off like so much stock footage from other movies. Haley’s band is depicted as a freak find in a podunk town, while legendary deejay Alan Freed operates an impoverished nightclub catering rock acts to a handful of overaged extras for whom music like his would surely be an unknown quantity.

Columbia’s get-it quick scheme was duplicated the following year by a Warners release, Jamboree, itself little more than a feature equivalent of Scopiotone reels strung together to fill 75 or so minutes of running time. The negative cost of $50,000 was exceeded by as many WB short subjects that year, though domestic rentals of $532,000 (with foreign $210,000) and eventual profits of $506,000 make you wonder why they didn’t do a peck more of these things. Maybe Warners didn’t want to associate themselves with such flashes in the pan. Again, it’s agents and their competition occupying center stage, a tedium interrupted by assorted bands and singers on and off as though appearing on Dick Clark’s Bandstand. He’s on board as well for a screen debut, along with numerous record spinners from radio markets nationwide --- all photographed against flatly lit, seemingly cardboard backdrops. Did any feature film talent get less respect that year? Jamboree highlights Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins, with beginner Frankie Avalon bringing up the rear. Focal point agents and handlers are of the customarily unsympathetic, seen-it-all variety, their indifference toward rock and roll artists mirroring that of writers and producers stuck with turning out these ten-day cheaters. Let’s Rock was Columbia again. This time balladeer Julius LaRosa resists the transition to R&R, but career reversals, and the influence of lovable kook Phyllis Newman, eventually bring him around. Maintaining resolute determination not to deliver the goods, Columbia indulges an entire first half of LaRosa singing precisely those tunes his audience proposes to reject, while guest bands tilt backward toward forties swing as opposed to the rocking out kids were there to see. Paul Anka, The Royal Teens, Della Reese, and The Tyrones represent a mixed bag of the newly hip and vaguely retro. TV personality Wink Martindale tells LaRosa he’s too square for kids at his taping, then sends the crooner out to do yet another ballad. Rock Around The Clock and its follow-up, Don’t Knock The Rock, had each done 1.1 million in domestic rentals, anticipating a miles-long ribbon of adolescent sucker bait, though diminishing returns were inevitable as the fad ran aground with increasingly weak product. Pictures like Let’s Rock were being rushed to market before workable formulas could be ironed out. Would kids go on enduring such disappointment, even as things got worse with Juke Box Rhythm, a 1959 release boasting George Jessel as m.c. for threadbare acts that would have been strictly persona non grata on the lowliest small market TV dance party? The title refers to a stage extravaganza for which Brian Donlevy (in cut-rate Warner Baxter/42nd Street mode) seeks funding, his featured act being a Spike Jones inspired geriatric team called The Nitwits, members of which, according to imdb, were born in the early 1900’s. This is what teenagers wanted in 1959? Decades old Vitaphone shorts might better have reflected musical tastes of that year.

Twentieth-Century Fox moved in at the end of 1956 to demonstrate what money and production values could do to elevate lowly teen fodder, but whatever good intentions The Girl Can’t Help It started out with were soon frustrated by studio personnel too hopelessly square to realize what rhythmic gold they were mining. Again, musical acts are segregated from principal players, despite sumptuous staging and rich color denied these same artists at Columbia. Startling indeed to see The Platters, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, and Fats Domino perform before anything other than simple curtains draped along soundstage walls. Director Frank Tashlin was forty-three here. The youthful and anarchic spirit of two decades before would have been ideal to capture the vitality of rock and roll, but now he prefers highlighting mainstream songstress Julie London, lovingly photographed in a fantasy sequence with leading man Tom Ewell that shows all too clearly where Tashlin’s preference lay. As with Columbia leads, Ewell plays surrogate for behind-the-camera veterans baffled by kids and their musical tastes. He’s a hard drinker and longtime combatant vis-à-vis women of London’s (mature) wiles --- hardly an identification figure for teens lured by rocking names on the marquee. Disdainful of the big beat when he bothers to listen, Ewell’s caught up in the travails of Little Caesar-inspired gang chieftain Edmond O’Brien and pneumatic bombshell Jayne Mansfield. Other than oddball child wonder Barry Gordon, his trailer featured song cut from the finished print, there are no young people among the principals in The Girl Can’t Help It. Comedy is of a leering sort that would probably have embarrassed teenage girls with their dates. Indeed, these situations play like wish fulfillment for tired organization men dreaming of Playboy models as they pour that second highball. O’Brien finally grooves with the band for a last reel tie-up, but his song, despite its humor and energy, is a withering putdown of rock and roll’s perceived (by middle-aged producers) excesses. The Girl Can’t Help It endures less for musical landmarks it captures than for adult attitudes it reflects. Tashlin and the writers seem hell-bent on telling their kind of (old-fashioned) story in spite of the overpowering cultural movement they’ve been commissioned to portray (if not exploit). This is one instance where youth’s takeover of Hollywood a decade later might have actually served a useful, if more profitable, purpose had it occurred instead in 1956. As it is, The Girl Can’t Help It realized much of an $896,000 profit from patrons anxious to check out Jayne Mansfield, her formidable image dominating ad art and relegating the rock acts to near-microscopic cameo status around the margins.

Monday Glamour Starter --- Elizabeth Taylor

Liz Taylor wrote a book (that is, one published under her byline) on how fat she used to be, and another about her fee-abulous jewel collection. There were in-person stops behind perfume counters (as nearby as Charlotte!) hawking concoctions to arouse passions fervent as those once inspired by 007 after-shave (imagine the sensory implications of dabbing oneself with both!). So how come she never talks about the lawn party (here) with Lou Costello, Bob Mitchum, and heaven knows who else? That’s the book I’d surely bound across Borders bargain bins to bag (or at the least click on Amazon used). Unfortunately, ours is not (yet) a world of Greenbriar-inspired trend-setters, so Dame Elizabeth won’t likely cash Simon and Schuster advances to look back upon work with Nigel Bruce, Harry Davenport, and C. Aubrey Smith (his arthritic, yet knowing hand forever squeezing my then-trim, but muscular, seventeen-year old thighs --- oh well, as Jerry Colonna used to say, we can dream, can’t we?). Daryl Hickman recently told Robert Osborne how much fun he had playing tackle football with budding tomboy Liz on the MGM lot back in the mid-forties. Had afternoon practice been like this at my P.S., we’d have all made varsity freshman year! Liz and Dick were unavoidable growing up, particularly for those of us canvassing magazine racks seeking Mad or Castle Of Frankenstein. They seemed to be on the cover of everything. There was one day my mother, sister, and I were in Winston-Salem, just across from the Carolina Theatre’s marquee with its glittering invitation to come see the newly married team smolder in The Sandpiper, a 1965 tamale best handled by adults with asbestos hands (but surely not ones with eleven-year olds in tow!). Well, they couldn’t leave me in the car after all, so we all three ventured forthwith to catch the Burton’s latest steam bath (sister being eighteen and presumably wise in such ways of the world). My senses were soon rivened by what I swore (and still do!) was a glimpse of Taylor’s unfettered breasts being captured in oils by artist/bohemian Charles Bronson. Yes, she covered them quickly as Dick entered from stage left, but one or two frames left permanent imprints upon my boyish mind, and I emerged from the Carolina’s auditorium that day forever changed. Our friends at Warners recently offered up The Sandpiper on DVD. My fast forward moved as if possessed to that scene. Did it live up to memories? Damn it all, no! Must surely have been cut, just like that spider fight in The Incredible Shrinking Man. Why don’t these movies ever play like they used to?

Consider that had she been born but a few years later, Liz would have been a fifties teen queen rather than a forties one. Instead of National Velvet and A Date With Judy … Rebel Without A Cause or maybe Jailhouse Rock. A Natalie Wood career perhaps, or a Gloria Talbott one? Forties teens seemed not teens as we understand them. Our concept of adolescence was forged with James Dean and has ossified since. Roddy McDowell and Scotty Beckett were teens once too, but who wants to be gawky, sexless, and so determinably respectful of authority as these one-time courtiers of youthful Liz? A look at any Metro musical/family comedy will find its youth well harnessed and submission to parental controls assured. Elizabeth Taylor might have, at the least, become some sort of sexual threat elsewhere, by looks if not temperament. Imagine her doing Fox noirs. Other girls in their late teens did. Movies let ingenues grow up faster then. Liz was just too adult/gorgeous to go on playing with Lassie dogs and as second fiddle to Jane Powell. Elsewhere she might have co-starred with Burt Lancaster or the aforesaid Mitchum. Post-war dictates wouldn’t tolerate ongoing girlhood for fruit so ripening, as a grown-up pairing (at seventeen) with Robert Taylor demonstrated in Conspirator. A schism developed here between that which fan magazines published and what people saw on screen. The high-school kid of proms and pinafores walked (an uneasy) hand-in-hand with the overnight screen siren. Again, it was looks as opposed to temperament, for beneath a throbbing bodice lay girlish naivete (as least as presented in Conspirator) and a voice seemingly developed at the Margaret O’Brien school of whining elocution. Still, the vault from early adolescence to adulthood was sudden and irreversible, a transition slowed only by the necessity of a ritual screen wedding that had less to do with story demands of Father Of The Bride than a nationwide readership’s hunger to see Taylor in her wedding dress going down the aisle, a scene she would shortly (and unwisely) duplicate in real life.

Favorite Taylor vehicles include those she made as an old-fashioned studio system collapsed around her. Things like The Girl Who Had Everything and Rhapsody were throwbacks to simpler forties days when all they needed was a star to show up and be beautiful. Teenage girls cut out her photos and pasted them lovingly in scrapbooks. Lots of these turn up on Ebay --- so many as to confirm the huge following Taylor had among those still willing to be starstruck even as merchandising wheels gathered rust within studios dumping contracts and their players seeking independence. Her sustained popularity in the face of such nothing pictures is itself tribute to whatever something she had, and a public’s patience waiting for her to display it. George Stevens was alone in having channeled real star magic, but it had been five years since A Place In The Sun, and now, to the rescue again, he directed Taylor in Giant. Finally she had a picture wider audiences might take an interest in seeing. A stalwart friend to those tormented or with something to hide, she kept secrets on behalf of Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift, and was rewarded with felicitous leads opposite them all. The shattered wreck of Clift reteamed with Taylor in Raintree County and showed what a delicate mechanism sex symbolism could be. Maybe it was his tragic example that resolved her to become serious about acting. Suddenly, Last Summer pointed the way, but skittish Columbia ignored Tennessee Williams in favor of publicity (indeed, their whole campaign) built around Liz crouched in the surf wearing a cling-tight bathing suit. Respect comes hard to women with looks like hers. Husband complications qualified Taylor for scarlet roles. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Butterfield 8 represented a summit, though as late as 1966, her steam quotient was such that a combo-ed reissue of the two (again) inspired posters heavily weighted toward the sex angle (as shown here), and thus generated way above-average encore business (both topped domestic rentals of $700,000).

Whatever was left of fan mags in the sixties weren’t napping. They’d long since given over to full-time scandal mongering, and no one sold like E.T. and her offscreen Delilah ways. Eddie Fisher was the husband stolen from Debbie Reynolds, this after Taylor losing just previous mate Michael Todd to a plane crash and winning short-lived tabloid sympathy thereby. Nearly dying herself may have helped as well (constant medical crisis became part of her ongoing drama). She was the biggest star not getting out pictures between 1960 and 1963, but the slow cooking Cleopatra was worth its weight (and wait) in hot press coming off European locations. The latest purloined mate was her ultimate prize, for co-star Richard Burton might have been a Barrymore were he born fifty years sooner. As it is, there was at least a finish not unlike poor Jack’s, with Taylor a higher profile modern equivalent of Elaine Barrie, but no less destructive to Burton's prestige and sobriety. Actually, the shows they did together aren’t half-bad in a sixties-hangover from what was left of the Code fifties way --- that transition between The VIPs and The Sandpiper to Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf is indeed a shocking one. I well remember schoolyard recitations of once forbidden profanities exchanged between ultra-deglamorized Burton and Taylor, and when I finally grew into seeing it a few years later, there was sure enough a newly seasoned actress in evidence. Few could have played that slattern part so well. Tab readers assumed it merely reflected what went on in hotel rooms between these volatile two, and sure enough, poor Burton was run ragged from one jeweler to another, spending fees he’d earned in slumming movies to buy moonrock sized finger ornaments for an increasingly difficult-to-satisfy wife. Exhibitors, particularly those in small towns, dreaded their ongoing team efforts, though it’s hard to imagine any ready audience for Boom, The Comedians, and Hammersmith Is Out. Taylor’s solo career went the way of discarded fashion and a culture so changed as to make her kind of movie star look like the second coming of Norma Desmond. Burton(s) spoofing in a 1970’s Here’s Lucy episode emphasized what viewers already knew. We’d never again believe in them as anything other than their outrageous selves --- and to think Taylor has lived another thirty-seven years beyond this. With acting at least a generation in her past, you’d have hoped she’d sit down and review that amazing career, not to mention remarkable personalities she worked so closely with. The only one she seems willing to talk about is Montgomery Clift (once for TCM, again for Paramount’s DVD of A Place In The Sun). What of William Powell, Larry Parks, and yes, even C. Aubrey Smith? Only a McFarland Press or university publisher would permit such obscure dredging, but I’d spring for a copy. Chances are those reflections would endure longer than silly tomes about weight loss and diamonds she’s worn. Won’t likely happen even if mainstream book sellers were interested, for this is a woman so often betrayed by media as to make candid cooperation a near impossibility, and we’re all the poorer for that, as Elizabeth Taylor’s nearly the last big-name survivor who could fill gaps on the studio system in its final flowering.

New images on Joan Blondell, Don Juan, and Mabel Normand in the Greenbriar Archives.

From Small Screen To Big

I may have seen episodes of the original Dragnet around age five, but not since. Universal’s got them locked up tight as Dick’s hatband. One of the 60's seasons came out on DVD a while back, but the fifties group shows up, if at all, on public domain releases culled largely from 16mm. TCM recently gave us a rare peek via their broadcast of the Dragnet feature released in 1954. So what’s more dated than a police show from five decades back? Viewers would opt for yet another Law and Order over 276 black-and-white dead sea scrolls filmed on cramped sets, but Law and Order never had Jack Webb. Like George Reeves and Superman, this man was Dragnet’s whole show. For me, nothing about Jack dates. You could say he’s so out he’s in. If Webb had eternal life, I’ve no doubt Joe Friday would yet be pushing a beat on some network. His kind of directness never loses its cool. We’re made to understand early on that Friday has no life outside his work, nor seeks one. You have to admire the man’s absolute single-mindedness. There’s a scene in the feature where Joe and sidekick Frank wait around a Natural Science museum to grill the curator. Frank points out an exhibit, but Joe’s indifferent. It’s only about the job for him. War Of The World’s Ann Robinson is the policewoman going (shallow) undercover, and there’s a moment when it looks as though Friday might have a personal interest there, but we get nothing beyond a tease. Joe and Frank do hallway repartee about crummy food they’ve eaten --- on-the-fly of course --- and this is close as we get to exploration of personal lives. Weekly viewers thrived on all this. Wish I’d been one of them. By the time Webb brought back Dragnet in the mid-sixties, he was older, jowlier, less given to patience. Hippies and dopers always got his goat. Jack/Joe was locked outside the counterculture, but this guy never wanted in. He preferred turning a key on the whole lot. A young Joe Friday had at least the hope of getting a girl and (maybe) entering the mainstream. Sixties Joe was too late and maybe bitter about it. The Jack Webb trajectory is one of the great dramas of movies and television walking hand-in-hand through the fifties and sixties. He was a genius thriving on overwork and cigarettes. Law enforcement organizations lionized him (as shown here, and yes, that's Jack Warner with Webb). He made police procedure everybody’s business. Jack was the first producer/director to put us inside the station house. Others had ventured close. Detective Story on stage and Naked City on screen were admirable, but Webb made us an ongoing part of the investigation, and he never allowed for distraction. To give Joe a life would have been slacking. We needed to keep our mind on the case at hand. I remember one color show where Friday shot a guy in the Laundromat, not so novel a thing in itself, but fairly startling when I realized Joe was there to wash his clothes, a process necessary to us all, but seemingly not a thing this character would have (or take) time to address. It was actually reassuring to know the job followed Joe wherever he went. Once he signed on for continuing education (in an uncharacteristically casual sweater as I recall) at one of those radical-infested campuses Webb despised, and it’s barely commercial time before he’s got cuffs on a student for brandishing reefers in class.

Here’s one for Ripley. The Dragnet feature ended with more black ink than anything else Warners handled in 1954, except The High and The Mighty. Webb shot it like a TV show, and finished for crumbs. That negative cost at $567,000 was nearly a third less money than WB spent on an average Randy Scott, but how many oaters brought back $4.4 million in domestic rentals? The profit of $3.3 gave impetus to a slate of Webb-directed experiments --- none conventional, all worthwhile (seen The D.I.? --- it’s terrific). Dragnet’s in Warnercolor. That’s all the concession Jack would make to a bigger canvas. No Cinemascoping for him. Imagine a flat picture coming out in the first year of wide screens based on something they could get free at home --- and it’s a smash. Tells you something about the popularity this man enjoyed. His format’s largely unchanged. It was 9:10 AM. I was working bunco (not really, but I like that word). The boss is so-and-so (actually, Richard Boone). I’ll bet theatergoers recited much of this along with Webb. Modern crimefighting equipment includes recording devices big as steamer trunks and even more complicated than my cordless phone. The metal detector they use looks like something Klaatu left behind. Director Jack shoots upward through the bottom of an ash tray for one scene. Bet Orson Welles went for his note pad upon seeing that. Judging by a donny-brook staged in the second half, Webb might as well have been composing for 3-D, for every punch here is comin’ at ya. The story was dug out of police files --- words like procuring are bandied about to let us know it’s real asphalt we’re smelling. Always great to hear Webb machine gunning dialogue. He fires off rejoinders to put modern-day ironists to shame. Polite with civilians, surly to suspects, Friday’s got a short fuse for witnesses that chicken out on line-ups. I wonder why there weren’t more Dragnet movies. Michael Hayde would know. He wrote a fantastic book about Jack Webb and all his works. I wish there were more Jack Webb movies. Of course, that would have meant an increase on the twenty-hour days he was already working …

That Lone Ranger’s so virtuous as to be nauseating. I wish he’d just once beat a confession out of a miscreant, but you’ll wait till next millennium for that, and I dare say his pants are ever less likely to split upon alighting the saddle, despite every law of physics that dictates they should. Was Clay Moore a good actor? One might better ask if that matters, for I wonder how many fans are left for this character (guess I’ll find out in the comments section). The Ranger makes with speeches every time he corners a heavy. You wish he’d at least have brought slides. I prefer my western heroes shoot first and save questions for later. The Ranger babbles on about federal marshals, warrants, and gathering evidence while bad guys make tracks out of town. This man’s plain dogmatic when it comes to do-gooding. Gene Autry looks positively anti-heroic beside him. You’ve gotta stack the deck to let this saintly masked man overcome combined villainy on the part of Lyle Bettger and Robert Wilke. They’ve both got him clearly outclassed. If backshooter Bob consulted the Ranger rulebook, he’d know his opponent could never gun a man on any account, making it easy to knock over such an impotent force for good, but damned that script for letting L.R. prevail over heavies stronger, and actors better. It’s actually Bettger and Wilke that got me through The Lone Ranger, as while both are slumming, they're game yet to give of their best even amidst this kiddie’s sandpile. The Lone Ranger is actually a good feature. Warners released it in 1956, although the negative eventually reverted back to Jack Wrather's company (explanation perhaps for the indifferent DVD we’re heir to). Action moves fast and those are real rocks the Ranger's passing, unlike papier-mâché mock-ups he camped among in the vid series. Exciting stuntwork punctuates fight scenes. I never saw so many guys plunged off cliffsides. Must have used gallons of mecurichrome on this show. The Lone Ranger was Junior’s treat to a western movie now that "B" series were phased out. Better he look at this than one of those neurotic exercises where guys shoot holes through Jim Stewart’s open palm, though the risk of insulting eight-year-old intelligences loomed occasionally. Since when did cowboy stars play both stalwart hero and dagnabit sidekick? Clayton Moore does, and I could do with less of that overripe coot he impersonates whilst among unsuspecting townsfolk. This disguise was donned on the series as well. Could it be one of the reasons I seldom watched? Moore Gabbys things up with bowed legs and stooped posture --- old pros Bettger and Wilke seem like Olivier and Gielgud by comparison.

Seeing The Lone Ranger also enables that revival viewing of Dodge City you've neglected on TCM, for virtually every money shot derives from this and other late thirties Technicolor outdoor specials. How many times have we seen those same wagons reflecting off the river as they pass? Trees felled in Valley Of The Giants would do so again in dozens more Warner westerns as narrators intoned the march of civilization, while I’m fairly certain Errol Flynn was sitting in long shot on a fence rail during The Lone Ranger’s mass cattle sequence. I actually wish they’d released a movie about the campaign for this one, as Midwest folk swarmed over Clayton Moore at every junket stop. This CBS camera in Jacksonville, Florida recorded a last minute Ranger rescue of WMBR’s tied-up kid show hostess, while theatre front appearances in Dallas found Moore surrounded by moppet admirers. You’re all at liberty to print and paste this keen Tonto headband to serve your own tracking and/or scouting needs. Just be careful using scissors and don’t apply scotch tape where it will show. The General Mills cereal box tie-ins raise but one question --- do any of these still exist? That is, original boxes from 1956 --- sealed --- with cereal still in them? Must be highly collectable if they do. The Lone Ranger feature was produced for a bargain $899,000, earning domestic rentals of $1.4 million. Foreign provided another $1.2 for a worldwide total of $2.6 million. The final profit of $1.1 million equaled the performance of Warner’s same year Helen Of Troy and Baby Doll. A second Lone Ranger feature, for United Artists release, found him seeking The Lost City Of Gold, but this time rentals ($506,099 domestic) totaled less than half what WB realized in their collaboration with the Wrathers. Television’s Ranger series had a shelf life extended by virtue of episodes (though not all) having been shot in color, while Clayton Moore continued wearing the suit to whatever super-markets needed opening, substituting dark glasses for his mask when courts forbade appearances in character. This 1979 showdown occurred as result of Wrather efforts to replace Moore’s ongoing (now elderly) persona with a thing called Clinton Spilsbury (their would-be feature successor), latterly an object of ridicule and derision among Ranger disciples. Updating a figure so venerable as T.L.R. for twenty-first century palettes would seem dicey at best (and what of faithful indian companion Tonto?), but with westerns now in their fourth decade of (more or less) commercial decrepitude, how likely are we to experience a Ranger encore?