This Woman's World Now a House Of Strangers

How Many Do You Know That Would Recognize A One Of Them?

$125 K in 1954? That's Over $1.1 Million Today

A reason I can’t get as good sense of modern films is people in them being strangers to me. At what point do we stop following players, quit knowing them, stop being engaged by them? I met that crossroad some time back, am so far behind now as to never catch up. A friend handed me a Smart Phone with a digital image of himself with an actress named Jennifer Lawrence. I recognized her no more than moderns would Theda Bara. Worse was nonplus at Jennifer Lawrence being the highest paid actress of 2015 and 2016 (says IMDB). Going to current movies might help, but there's oblige to see Hunger Games or X-Men: Apocalypse, what’s left of life way too short for that. Why be incredulous, then, at viewers drawing blank to starry 1954 cast of Woman’s World? Buffs lifelong in the bag can’t conceive saying who’s that to Lauren Bacall, June Allyson, Clifton Webb … in fact, the whole ensemble. I mentioned Cornel Wilde to a woman once, and she said, “Oh yes, he was in an I Love Lucy,” me grateful for small crumb that was. Here’s a reason why civilians don’t cotton to classics: They have no, and I mean no, frame of reference. You might say yes, but Fred MacMurray was on My Three Sons, and Lauren Bacall was married to Humphrey Bogart. Well, first off, who’s Humphrey Bogart? --- and secondly, do we forget that My Three Sons went off network forty-seven years ago? By way of experiment with a lab rat of lifetime acquaintance, I ran Woman’s World to confirm bleak theory, which held, but here was salve: it still pleases, even to a least indoctrinated to Hollywood of old.

Jean Negulesco Directs Cornel Wilde and June Allyson

We need context, at least some recognizable element, to enjoy any film. What fun comes of being a stranger to a strange film? Bad enough watching old faces comport in older clothes, drive odd cars, use dial phones. They smoke a lot too, sometimes even cigars. For retro dwellers, that’s a comfort zone. We adjust to 1954 as easily as being cold outside in the winter. Not so friends who make error of letting us pick a movie to watch. For them, 1954 or any past year makes awkward fit. How often do even devotees “cringe” at what many call unenlightened times? Vintage films become more a briar patch every day. When does old simply become too old? We who care need to empathize better with those who don’t, and keep in mind that they are doing us a favor to watch Woman’s World or any relic we might impose in the name of “sharing.” Hopeful voices say Stan and Ollie will “bring back” Laurel and Hardy. The hell it will. The world that received Woman’s World in 1954 is too gone to retrieve even in part. So too are all the people. Never discount a mass of humanity who won’t watch oldies because everyone in them is dead. Billy Wilder once said he didn’t like repeat view of his past stuff for that very reason. So how to spring Woman’s World upon those willing to take a chance? I could propose a way, convoluted and wholly impractical, but it might work, given days if not a month of your friend’s focus, but who has that to give a pastime wholly unimportant to those outside the movie life? They could bone up instead on entrance exams to medical school and maybe get in.

Forget What Andrew Sarris Wrote --- Jean Negulesco's Cinemascope Pics Are Swell

Here’s the plan, utterly impractical as it is, but close as you’d get to making Woman’s World a meaningful sit. First show them what car design was like in 1954. There are product and promo reels on You Tube to help. They are time capsules of vanished style and technology. Did I forget to mention that Woman’s World takes place at a Gotham nerve center of auto manufacture with Clifton Webb as the tycoon owner seeking a second in command, to be picked from three couples auditioning? They are Fred MacMurray/Lauren Bacall, Cornel Wilde/June Allyson, and finally Van Heflin and Arlene Dahl. A knowing Webb looks as close at wives as their applicant mates. He realizes that it is indeed a woman’s world in terms of influence they wield over husbands, but Woman’s World does not imprint this with a heavy hand, being comedy at its root and dedicated more to fashion of the moment, as in 1954, and how best to amuse a casual consumer of films during that year. I should mention the obvious … that Woman’s World is a delightful show and as good a capture of high life in the year I was born than any more celebrated title that comes to mind. Why else would I compose such an exhausting primer on how to present it?

Back to my scheme then: Don’t give them Woman’s World cold. Start with introductory work its cast did before and after. For Clifton Webb, run Laura, maybe Dreamboat, certainly Titanic. Your individual or group will then love and anticipate him going into Woman’s World. June Allyson in Executive Suite, The Glenn Miller Story, The Girl in White (a favorite, if obscure). Tell how Executive Suite came out but months ahead of Woman’s World, latter a froth doppelganger. Similar comparison can be made with Van Heflin and way-darker Patterns. Cornel Wilde will be the challenge. Introduce him as the Great Sebastian, or Chopin, or one of the Columbia sword shows? The Naked Prey would not be amiss to show range. Anyway, you get the idea as it could apply to whole of Woman's World cast. Trouble is sheer heft of such a project, and all to make familiar ground of one movie. Sometimes too, even past familiarity can backfire. I once ran a hard-got 16mm print of Since You Went Away to my sister, who said on seeing Joseph Cotton, “Oh no, there’s that Uncle Charlie” (we had, the week before, watched Shadow of a Doubt). Impressions from past work feeds into each thing we see actors do. That was never so true as during the Classic Era (or should I just call it the Studio Era, as they certainly weren’t all classics). We embrace an ongoing star persona as much, or more, than whatever individual part they take. At least it was that way when fame was built on contract and merchandising foundations. For we who hang on by life raft that is TCM, the process yet thrives. Start-to-finish knowing of star lives and careers enrich Woman’s World and all the rest of an increasingly remote past. An enchanted place to be, even as it widens gulf between us and those we’d induct to embrace of old film, if only we could. Woman’s World is available on Blu-Ray. Get it by all means, and wallow.

Where Zanuck Supposedly Sassed Hoover

The FBI Crunches Down On 20th Fox

Tawdry to a fault, Pickup on South Street compared itself with The House On 92^nd Street and others of a postwar realist school that Fox put signature to, but those were docu-mild beside street abstraction the notion of Sam Fuller, who knew lowlife scenes from inside out, and showed them like nobody’s past vision of urban grit. Splashy surface that was Fuller’s own was rejiggered from Hot war formula of ten years before where urban musketeers pitted Runyonesque wiles against Axis evil, and won (Bogart in All Through The Night, Alan Ladd as Lucky Jordan, others). Now they’d match street smarts with Red spies and find renewed love of country in effort to retrieve stolen microfilm. Nothing new then, but Fuller composed a dirtiest alleyway yet from staid Hollywood, Pickup on South Street inviting more than usual censor interest during and after shooting. This was a nearest thing to precode sensibility since precode was buttoned down in 1934, Richard Widmark an update on James Cagney. I can see Zanuck dictating story notes from memory of his Warner days and plugging same wires to Widmark as for JC of yore. Trouble was the yarn spun around FBI use of thieves and a “B” girl to quell espionage, the Feds dealing off bottom as readily as an underworld and Soviet plants. To put kibosh on that came J. Edgar Hoover, in person.

Note the Red-Print Snipe, and They Weren't Kidding

Pickup Ad Revised for Chicago Open With No FBI Mention

Fuller wrote in his memoir of lunching with Hoover and Zanuck at Pickup close and the G-man’s blunt putdown not only of this movie, but the director's previous ones. We can guess that Hoover and Fuller’s perceptions of life differed. Zanuck would nix Hoover demand for changes and tell the FBI chief he just didn’t understand how movies worked, a little presumptuous as Hoover had dealt with Hollywood at least since Warners did G-Men back in 1935. Hoover didn’t keep so much a personal eye on these ventures as assign underlings to do so. If they reported a wrinkle, he’d straighten it. Maybe age, and focus on more vital things (like combating real Communists), kept Hoover from making a bigger issue of Pickup on South Street. Fuller framed telling in terms of Zanuck backing the Bureau chief down, but that was long after Hoover was gone and had become fair game to revisionists. What Hoover did do was forbid mention of the FBI in all promotion for Pickup on South Street, and that meant eleventh hour revamp of Fox's whole campaign, more a New York problem than Zanuck’s. The home office and branches had to let theatres and magazines, in fact all media, know that in no wise should ads refer to the FBI. “Very Important” said a revised pressbook cover, the accessory rendered useless to showmen because every suggested ad had reference to the Bureau. Under other circumstance, such edict might be ignored, but no showman, urban or stix-located, wanted trouble with Feds, so modify campaigns they did. A Hoover spank for inaction would have stung.

A Fox Trade Ad Safely Scrubbed

Did This Man Tell J. Edgar Hoover Where To Get Off?

Ads supplied by Fox were lurid as cheap paperback covers, Pickup living down to comparison with what genteel folks were used to in mainstream movies. Snip here/there and change of copy could get advertising out of harm’s way, but ads above, taken from the banned pressbook, would not show up in newspapers, unless a theatre was looking for trouble. So what was Hoover’s beef with Pickup on South Street? Mainly it was attitude of Samuel Fuller, and his film. “Skip McCoy,” as played by Richard Widmark, is a crumb who’d as soon traffic with Reds as any other lot that will pay for contraband. “Don’t wave the flag at me,” sneers Skip to cops when they explain peril to American life his conduct is causing. This deeply offended Hoover. No American could be so callous to the welfare of his country. I wonder if Fuller, or even Widmark, paid a career price for Pickup on South Street. What if Widmark or his agent went after The FBI Story six years later? All aspects of that production being carefully vetted by Hoover and staff, how quick would Widmark’s name be stricken off a leading man list? More I think about Widmark in The FBI Story, the more it appeals. He’d certainly have given more edge than James Stewart did, or could, considering heavy supervisory hand. Pickup on South Street is available on DVD, and there is a Blu-Ray from England’s “Masters Of Cinema” series, lukewarm considering the way this show ought to look, and undoubtedly did, in 1953.

Glimpse Back At What We Won't Get Back

Where Carolina Showgoing Had A Glow On

Seems to me that the older generation felt way more intensely about movies than we ever could. Photos like these suggest reasons why. First off, let’s agree that they simply had it better. Never mind if films then were superior to ones of a past fifty years, an argument to run in circles so long as there are minds to differ. But can we stipulate that going to theatres was a richer experience? Sampling here is 'nuff to neutralize argument to the contrary. I have a friend, now nearing ninety, who told of The Black Swan plus Marine recruits in stage drill, plus live swing, plus vaude acts of infinite range --- to which I pathetically propose The Gorgon with Curse Of The Mummy’s Tomb among my treasured moments. Want to be humbled? Go visit what’s left of fans that grew up in the forties or early fifties. I’m drifting off specific topic of these photos, all from Cabarrus County in North Carolina. Cabarrus is home to Concord and Kannapolis, satellite towns increasingly drawn into force field that is rapid-expanding Charlotte. They were small bergs with large showman spirit, as is vivid here. Every day was eventful for these sites. Want to sell The Ghost of Frankenstein by mobile means? Put a dummy on a bike and let your ersatz Groucho peddle him about town, preferably by schools as they’re letting out. Where’s the sense of Grouch as chauffeur to the F monster? None I’d guess, unless the costume was left over from previously-promoted The Big Store. Small matter, for look who’s coming soon, and in person. To bicycle owners as parked out front, there was no bigger name than Bill Elliot. They would rather have seen him than Ty Power, Robert Taylor, and Paul Muni in tandem. I met several exhibitors that hosted Wild Bill at NC venues. A nicer guy never was, according to all (not so Ken Maynard, but we’ll pass that). But who, you’ll ask, were the Rodrick Twins, performing in support of Elliot? Might be locals, however way I found no online reference to them.

Here was an era when aluminum scraps could buy your way into brought-back The Blue Bird, once only at 3:30, time enough to race home from your red brick schoolhouse, gather admission from Dad’s (or someone else’s) tool shed, and make fleet way to air-conditioned comfort where what would otherwise be junk is now ticket to Shirley Temple and Bob Hope, assuming management doesn’t clear seats after The Blue Bird. Youth was encouraged by all media to help in the war effort. Junior armies sprung from everywhere. We’ve forgotten what aluminum translated to on battlefields, but I bet then-boys knew. It’s been told/retold how theatres were community centers, especially in wartime. Something intense going on all the time. Is that a truck backed up on the left to receive the first offering? The photographer waited until the crate was full up before snapping. Onlookers appear as though this was routine occurrence … still, they’d congregate at theatre fronts because something was always happening there. Just the people in and out was enough to engage, and who knew what nutty stunt might roll out the front entrance and take to streets.

Again with the bicycles, only now it’s 1959. And Concord kids still trust neighbors with their bicycles. When did it become necessary to put locks on bikes? May we date cultural collapse to such turning point? Leaving anything today on a public street that can be carried off is assurance that it will be carried off. Not so then, or at least we like to think not so. Was 1959 really such an Eden? I’d say it was at least for Kiddie Shows still a weekly ritual in small towns and large. Serials and short comedies were kept in service through the fifties, and well into the sixties at many venues. Greensboro’s “Circle K” club at the Carolina Theatre was using Republic chapter-plays right through 1966, despite no new ones being produced over the decade prior to that. Note the time: 9:30 to 12:00, “Every Saturday.” This was where children were parked, warehoused, whatever, for much of a weekend when they might otherwise annoy elders. Two-and-a-half hours could expand to nightfall if staff didn’t mind moppets staying to see Five Gates To Hell two or three times. Not to be forgot is theatres as social mecca --- youth equivalent of lodge meetings or the corner bar. Can we wonder at intense feeling they had in retrospect? B-west conventions went decades longer than I dreamed they could (all gone now). Anyone wanting to make sense of that phenomenon need only look at captures like these to know the paradise they lost, and we never found.

Hollywood Gets A Ribbing

Stand-In (1937) Spoofs The Studio System

Odd duck of a romantic comedy where Leslie Howard is a buttoned-up efficiency expert sent by Eastern bankers to straighten finances of “Colossal Pictures,” a studio run by nitwits making movies for other nitwits. This then was concept most seemed to have of Hollywood and those who kept it ticking. No wonder so many moved out there in belief they could run things better. Maybe the town mocked itself so good naturedly to keep tax collectors and government snoopers away. Trust violation concerns were also no cause for levity. Ones who seemed most like idiots were no doubt getting the fattest. Howard’s “Atterbury Dodd” finds massive waste, plus props being stolen from Colossal by even their chief director, a Euro poseur cut from Stroheim, Sternberg mold. Stand-In was independently produced by Walter Wanger, so satire has a serrated edge, Wanger himself enough of an outsider to have felt snubs deeply where they were inflicted on him. There is even labor vs. capital to juice a third act, too late to be an overriding theme, and far afield of zany comedy so far the emphasis.

Director Tay Garnett Sets Up A Next Shot For Joan Blondell

Bogie The Top-Billed Man In What Looks Like Borrowed Art From Dead Reckoning, But Where Is Leslie Howard?

There’s a movie within the movie called Sex and Satan, jungle-set with a girl and gorilla. Made me wish there had actually been a feature called Sex and Satan in 1937, perhaps instead of Stand-In. What compensations there are come with the cast, besides Howard there is Joan Blondell, her character a one-time kid star now a secretary, which I’d guess was circumstance visited upon talent dismissed from bright lights. Did I read of Baby Peggy Montgomery reduced to civilian work around this time? It’s made clear that Colossal is a pawn in the hands of investors 3000 miles off, Atterbury with juice to close the lot down, this a touch of reality studios faced from parent companies that owned them, plus theatres in which their product was shown. There was a late-40’s reissue as humorous as content of the film, in-support Humphrey Bogart elevated to first billing for ads which had, among other things, a gun pointed by an unidentified hand. Leslie Howard’s name was altogether dropped from promotion, a consequence of the actor having died several years before, and distributors not wanting to date their product by mentioning him. Stand-In is mostly forgot thanks to obscure ownership and failure to surface at TCM, although there is a Blu-Ray lately announced.

All-Star Undead Cast at Warners

Selling Between Two Worlds (1944) Is A Life-Or-Death Call

It's stating the obvious that folks in wartime wondered lots more about what happens to us after death. What better time, then, to remake Outward Bound, an old stage property that explored souls in transit to a next world. There had been screen adapt in 1930, not especially good then, and creaky today as old talkies can get. Between Two Worlds updates the tale to backdrop of fresh conflict, its characters blown up in the blitz and set forth together on route to Heaven or Hell, determined by conduct of each in life. The property has built-in appeal, as who doesn't speculate on afterlife's pay-off? Is it really so simple as good rewarded, greed/avarice punished? Between Two Worlds would have us think so. Easy to envision paradise beckoning sweet Sara Allgood, or likeable lunkhead George Tobias bound for same, and few would doubt George Coulouris fated to hotter clime. Suspense, then, is left to whether attempted suicides Paul Henreid and Eleanor Parker will answer for their misdeed, or if cynic idler John Garfield will burn for mere bad attitude. What if final judgment does operate so neatly as movies portray it?

"Lasting Love" was ad-tendered as theme of Between Two Worlds, a misnomer of sorts, for who had nerve to declare it was all about death? In midst of war, this could spell doom to ticket-selling. Still a majority in 1944 had to contemplate loss, movies the means by which grim thoughts could be pushed from conscious minds for a few hours at least. This may explain well as anything how Hollywood enjoyed its World War boom. Publicity for Between Two Worlds walked a slick rope by comparing the title's implied journey to hereafter with servicemen "between two worlds" of peace at home and "a place unknown to them," this illuminating a need for us to keep in closer touch with them via letters and parcels. Warners was cautious then, to conceal what Between Two Worlds was really about. Ads told everything but the truth about this attraction, a given where selling of uncertain product went, but here was a curtain drawn tight against a theme thought risky no matter how patronage might be moved by it. Brave showmen could go the more explicit route, as did management of the Newman Theatre in Kansas City, a test run for which WB and the Newman art shop prepared ads to spell out the death theme and emphasize Between Two Worlds as “Too Eerie For Children.” Ads I found from elsewhere went safer ways, with romance and a star cast the emphasis, but these Newman samples must be admired for laying a dicey theme on the line.

Cleveland Opts for Safe Selling

"We're Headed For Heaven Or Plenty Of Trouble" says wiseacre John Garfield in promotional art, which could mean anything other than the Heaven this film is about, but on the other hand, who could complain they were misled? Studio press laid off that distinction and focused on offscreen Garfield as good-cheer ambassador for soldiers far afield. His volunteering to entertain troops got much emphasis. Had Garfield's public been served with notice of the star's compromised health? A bad heart kept him from taking up arms, but no one served so unselfishly on a homefront and at hazardous ports of call. Being primary marquee name put Garfield at center of virtually all ads, the better to conceal actual content of Between Two Worlds. An ensemble cast delivers well, this an occasion for actors to overcome type casting that dogged much of screen work, or to shade those types with richer-than-usual characterization. If less of it jells than we'd like, there are those efforts, plus novelty of the set-up. What's more arresting than a ship bound from the here to the hereafter? Between Two Worlds was profitable without being notably so. A best feature in hindsight might be the score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, reason by itself to have the Warner Archive DVD or catch Between Two Worlds next time on TCM.

Which Is The Digital Way To Go?

Can We Really Recapture Horror Of Dracula?

It is time for me to face up to Horror of Dracula as the dream from youth that cannot be realized again. Several lifelong favorites sit in that drawer. Horror is more acute because again there is effort to render a perfect one, via Warners’ Blu-Ray, and to be expected, fans are taking the knee. They want Horror of Dracula to be the experience it was when all of life was discovery, and Technicolor bled like from neck punctures. HoD is a great movie, but it can take us but so far back in time. I chased the unicorn from beginnings at collecting, this to salve hard truth of not having seen the 1958 chiller in a theatre. There were playdates missed thanks to theatres too far away, a reissue with The Curse of Frankenstein in 1965 that every house but the Liberty ran. Seeing Horror of Dracula for a first time on snowy TV is no fit way to see Horror of Dracula. Detail of this made part of three Greenbriar posts (2011) where I tried getting the monkey off my back, game again afoot what with a latest disc to parse over. When is enough enough?

Science says my eyes aren’t so acute to color values as they were forty-three years ago when I saw Horror of Dracula first in IB Tech. That was a 16mm print vibrant beyond nature or dreams. Quiver I felt on threading it won’t be surpassed by anything now or to come. Mere possession of movies was then nine-tenths of violating copyrights. My Horror of Dracula had been pinched from someplace, but I never asked where. Law abide was among first forfeit by collectors. The hot box my postman brought cost $350. The Blu-Ray is today had for $17.99. No wonder it shrinks by comparison. A thing hard got is always better appreciated. To watch the disc alongside my old print would sober me quick, but who wants rose-tint so cruelly bleached off memories? And so I will tell increasingly few who will listen how much better my long-gone 16mm looked than upstart digital. So little of Tech is left for many, if not most, to believe me.

A British distributor put out Horror of Dracula in 2013, loaded with extras and a cooler palette that I associate more with British Technicolor. Of HoD prints passed through Greenbriar portals (each fully digested), there were two 16’s in IB, and later a “brand new” low-fade liberated from a lab which had a longer staking scene for Lucy Holmwood (Carol Marsh), then 35mm bought out of a pool room from an old man who’d as soon cut you as stick a nickel in a juke box. Latter print was made up for the 1965 reissue that Seven Arts handled, had registration problems, so scratch prevailing myth of theatrical being what Horror of Dracula was/is supposed to look like (who truly knows as to that?). Some write that American prints were more saturated than British ones, which I suspect is true. IB color I’ve seen from UK labs does play cooler, less bloody reds or cobalt blues. Horror of Dracula works either way for me. Heating up hues can mean loss of contrast, plus penalty of softer detail, which I understand happened with parts of the Warner Blu-Ray. Instead of taking the yet again buying plunge, I got out the Brit Blu-Ray, watched again, and found it lovely. Lesson learned? Possibly that fault lies not in Horror of Dracula, dear Brutus, but in myself. Reflection on this makes watching an evermore rich experience I hope to repeat lots before sunlight or stakes or loose crucifixes release my restless soul.