Sci-Fi Favorites With Bells On

War Of The Worlds and This Island Earth Never Had It So Good

Watched both these as fresh transfers, War on TCM, Earth a new-released Blu-Ray. Neither have looked better … ever. War of the Worlds is long venerated by my age group. Paramount had it back in theatres during the mid-sixties, leased to NBC for 2-21-67 broadcast, then did new ad accessories for a 1977 combo with When Worlds Collide aimed at theatres drunk on Star Wars and kin. Earlier upgrade for War of the Worlds exposed wires to hoist up Martian spacecraft, a trauma to some who didn’t like fx tricks laid bare. Latest tweak restores the illusion by erasing 53’s flaw, which wasn’t evident then due to IB Tech prints softer than dead-sharp imagery we are heir to. I can enjoy War, wires or no, being not a purist one way or the other. What pleases me is less movie magic than how Paramount creates a 50’s sound stage other-worldliness of theatre fronts (Samson and Delilah is playing, so why do townfolk bother about saucers landing nearby?), a campground with fire and tents where you can feel walls around Gene Barry and companions, then a square dance flavored by hot dogs and way of life that won’t be back. No wonder space invaders wanted us in 1953, life so serene as it appears to be here.

This Island Earth has a trick I never expected to see/hear on Blu-Ray, Perspecta sound, an ersatz stereo where voices could be heard from left or right according to player placement, a neat trick even if it won’t achieve high-fidelity as practiced by 20^th Fox in their multi-track releases. Perspecta was used by Paramount, MGM, Universal, others, as cheap alternative to true stereo. Theatres got a decoder to play back Perspecta as recorded on otherwise ordinary soundtracks. The Liberty had Perspecta, probably before stereo (MGM was enhancing tracks to some of their cartoons in the early 50’s), but the control panel, which looked like an elaborate ham radio, was put to storage and left there even unto the mid-70’s when I came upon it and wondered what-heck “Perspecta” was. There was a collector I met in the mid-80’s who put me wise. Turns out it was a simple process … you could get gear from Radio Shack and build your own decoder, so he said, not reckoning with my utter lack of tech skill. What perked ears was Michael’s assurance that any 16mm print of a Perspecta release that had a variable density track would play back with separated sound, provided you had a decoder. So here I apparently was with 16mm tracks I could bounce all over the room, only rub being lack of a device to rightly do it. Being not science-geek enough to construct that, I let Perspecta remain the stuff of collecting dreams. Now that comes true thanks to effort of master minds Jack Theakston, Greg Kintz, and Bob Furmanek, their study, then application, of Perspecta enabling us to experience the process anew after sixty-five years. This Island Earth is available from Shout! Factory, War Of The Worlds had on Blu-Ray and even 4K.

More Of Behind-Scenes Buffoonery

Part Two of It's A Great Feeling (1949)

It's A Great Feeling was the first Doris Day vehicle not helmed by her mentor Michael Curtiz. She's a commissary waitress who wants to be a star, if Dennis and Jack can arrange it. There are sunlit treks all over the lot as Doris carries trays and bumps into cameo-appearing Warner stars, one of which is Sydney Greenstreet, who'd made his last for WB, Flamingo Road, seen here for a first and only time in Technicolor. Guest celebs in their natural habitat are joy to behold, most playing in accordance with long-honed image. Gary Cooper responds yup and nope to Dennis Morgan inquiry, looking older than a last time color cameras addressed him (Unconquered). Cooper was forever the inarticulate cowboy, and no amount of Fountainheads or such off-casting would bend the perception. Ronald Reagan addresses Carson as "Jack Curtiz himself" in the studio barber shop, which looks like a welcome refuge on slow shooting days. Did Butler and Great Feeling company use actual studio locale for this spot?

Standing sets were used, a most ostentatious being the staircase built for Adventures of Don Juan, with Errol Flynn. This was a breath taker and nicely sums up WB's final splurge on Flynn, a star who'd slipped and would no longer be accorded top-level vehicles. But wait --- neither would anyone at Warners once spending clamps were applied. It's A Great Feeling came at least a year into belt cinching at Burbank, the Don Juan set being monument to extravagance past and gone. Culprit for reduced earnings and thus lowered budget was, among other things, the hell spawn that was television, and WB, like most of an industry, took swipes wherever opportune at the upstart medium. In Feeling's case, it is a bar-set segment where televised wrestling comes with drink and idle time. Behind-counter TV was a feature at watering holes nationwide, fewer among populace having sets at home. Lots visited bars as much to watch as drink, with accent on fact that, unlike theatres, this entertainment came free. Studios depicted tube fare as refuse off a junkyard, wrestlers summing up the best of what TV had to offer. Who but drunks and down/outers would watch? It's A Great Feeling was not alone among features getting fun at television's expense.

Not that Warners was above poking holes in themselves. Studio publicity is admitted to be fabrication from top to bottom. Producers live in fear of someone ... everyone ... having a knife out for them. There's ring of truth to hardship we're invited to laugh at, and who knows, maybe each job was vital to Jack Carson's keeping his house and car. Story credit was I.A.L. Diamond's. Did Billy Wilder see It's A Great Feeling and make mental note of a writer with ironic sensibility not unlike his own? Scribes credited include Jack Rose and Mel Shavelson in addition to Diamond, and the three likely loved taking down the factory a peg or three. It's A Great Feeling may be the Warner feature that comes closest to spirit of cartoons being made on the lot, so many of these having ridiculed live-action counterparts barely, if at all, aware of what went on in short subjects.

I'm not alone in considering Warner sound reproduction to be the best in the business. Their music department too was second to none. A man largely credited for this, by us if not his employers, was Ray Heindorf, who gets a longest cameo among guests in It's A Great Feeling. Heindorf was perhaps a least known of these, having but recently taken tune charge at Warners. He's shown conducting the studio orchestra and spars with horning-in Jack Carson. Dialogue between them gets way "inside," to a point where I wonder if some wasn't ad-libbed. "If you don't like it, you can take it up with Petrillo," says Heindorf to Carson during their argument, a reference to James Petrillo, head of the American Federation of Musicians, a trade union of which workings were well known by show biz. Petrillo was an unseen but known figure to radio listeners and filmgoers, his name evoked in features, cartoons, and broadcasts, wherever someone spoke of real power within the industry. Now he'd draw a blank among viewer/listeners, the name having retreated to obscurity like so many objects of 40's topical humor.

Remaining guest stars were Warner folk who'd for most part go elsewhere within a next few years as the company thinned contract rolls toward greater saving. As with Gary Cooper's bit, all traded on images long locked in. Joan Crawford amuses with a Mildred Pierce reprise capped by slaps to the face for Dennis and Jack. I do that in all my pictures, she says, and indeed she did, and would, for what had been and was left of melodramas at WB. Edward G. Robinson had lately done Key Largo to remind everyone that Little Caesar was alive and well. This time, he'd force a guard to open Warner gates for Jack and Doris, looking direct at the camera when saying he'll do what it takes to keep his studio job, that a prescient line in view of what came after Eddie got caught in HUAC glare. The biggest laugh, and coming as surprise for the finish, was Errol Flynn as boy-back-home Doris Day refers to throughout the show and returns to marry. A friend who saw It's A Great Feeling in 1949 told me that the roof nearly came off his crowded theatre when they recognized Flynn as "Jeffrey Bushdinkle." Such was joy audiences could still take in favorite faces, even as an industry that supported them began to rust.

Was There Such Craziness Behind Studio Gates?

It's A Great Feeling Captures WB Feeling Circa 1949 --- Part One

Based on a proposition that what went on behind studio gates was even wackier than fun we got in movies. All the studios gave glimpse of inner workings, most averring that stars/staff were plain folks subject to ego and foible that beset us all. Good natured was ribbing of a system actually closed tight to fanbase; the only way pic-goers peeked beyond was via sillies like It's A Great Feeling from WB, Variety Girl out of Paramount, or sundry moments elsewhere where civilians crashed a lot in search of stars or stardom. A lot of gloss was rubbed off by 1949 and It's A Great Feeling, the dream factories less dreamy now that other recreations were taking the place of moviegoing. Still, this was game effort at putting film forth as our best entertainment, and I always come away with a Great Feeling for having watched.

"Two Guys" Dennis Morgan and Jack Carson had been Warner joy boys after model of Bing and Bob for several years. They'd sing, dance, and double-cross in wise-guy way endemic to hopped-up 40's comic partnering. Unlike Hope/Crosby, their effort showed. Overflow patronage shut out of a full-house Road To Rio might head down a block for the latest Two Guys (From Milwaukee, Texas, wherever), postwar comedy's second choice. Morgan was for romance and tuning between quips, him the presumed femme lure, while Carson was lumpen serve of laughs, the sort who'd get the girl only if there was no other man left on earth. Surprising then, was Jack ending up with Doris Day in My Dream Is Yours, a finish that seemed in violation of Two Guy rules, and was, in fact, not part of that ongoing series. Notable too was Doris Day mentioning a few overnights with Jack in her memoir that revealed him as somewhat morose offstage, a not unexpected reality in view of how he sweat so for every laugh.

It's A Great Feeling is sarcastic from a start re Hollywood fakery, as if a war had made us wise to ways of glamour-peddling. Seems Jack Carson is going to direct himself in a musical, and yes, it's Jack playing himself, and no, there's not a person on the Warners lot who can abide him. Central gag is Carson going broke if the pic is cancelled, and Dennis not caring a bit, him on verge of triumph in a New York show (but would real-life WB have let Morgan off the lot to do a Broadway revue?). The reason Jack's been tabbed to direct is fact that no one on staff will meg him. This is where It's A Great Feeling goes in high gear and assures our staying for the length. Three we now revere appear as themselves: Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh, and King Vidor, each gagging it up in Technicolor and approximation of whatever perception a then-public had of them.

Curtiz makes with his signature malapropism, Tell him my third no is final!, which would have got reaction from ones that read Hollywood columns salted with samples of Mike mangling his adopted language. Curtiz was by 1949 set up with an "independent" unit at Warners, but wasn't business-savvy enough to realize that Jack L. and minions were loading up his account with overhead and cheating the master craftsman blind. Curtiz confessed his performing discomfit for publicity: Never again will I bawl out another actor! King Vidor sits at a desk, declares he's "a director, not a butcher," then hurls the reject script into a wastebasket. Vidor was less staff man than hire from outside; his recent two for Warners, The Fountainhead and Beyond The Forest, unsatisfactory to Vidor's mind, whatever their buoyed status since.

Raoul Walsh was probably the best and most capable sport, him the ramrod who pushed movies through like beef to market. Here is Walsh's public (and maybe private) persona summed up in seconds. He takes a break from in front of a mock-up airplane, unconcerned by its being a fake and we know it, to tell Bill Goodwin's desperate producer that he'll do anything for the team except direct Jack Carson. "Alright, let's finish up this clambake," says Walsh as he turns attention back to a studio scene and situation he'd handled a thousand times by this juncture of a long career. The credited director of It's A Great Feeling was David Butler, who was used to fluff and had even acted in plenty of it before moving behind cameras. He does a cameo too, coming across as amiable and addressing secretaries as "Honey." I'm guessing Butler was one of those who enjoyed a long run because he knew how to get along with people and a system they represented, to which add fact that Butler was competent and made at least a decent job of all his studio assignments.

Part Two of It's A Great Feeling is HERE.

Showmen Still Selling Them Hot in Mid-1934

Finishing School Is Hot Love's Address

Frisky Ads Promise the Moon, but Does Finishing School Deliver?

Interest is there for Finishing School, if lines at Hollywood’s TCM Festival are a barometer. Online scuttle said hundreds waited hours to see this obscurity on a large screen, so let’s not write off old movies as passion of a newer generation (or at least an emerging middle-aged one). I suspect RKO in 1934 knew from nothing about finishing schools, but it's a cinch they were agin' 'em, being they stood for a class that had no overlap with wage slavery at studios. Knocks on the rich increased as the Depression deepened. On one hand, wealth was celebrated for allowance of art-deco luxury that fans loved for a background and paid to watch. They'd not come for long to movies about poor people. And what of stars living large and sending daughters to finishing school? Maybe the concept was winding down by 1934; social/cultural historians know better than I how much longer such places would thrive. Writers here wield knives for schools that taught deportment and little else. In fact, student (or better put, inmate) Frances Dee becomes a virtual prisoner, her tormentors a cruel faculty and worse classmates. There is precoding amongst enrollment, Dee made expectant by struggling intern Bruce Cabot (Finishing School released but weeks ahead of PCA crackdown). RKO scraped nickels doing mellers under supervision of Merian C. Cooper, who believed in volume turnout.

Negative cost for Finishing School was $156K, a figure so low you'd think gain was assured, yet profit at the end was but $17,000, reason withal why budgets were kept to bare minimum once hard times got grip. RKO's advertising vocabulary might have made customers wish they'd gone to finishing school, or at least some institute of learning: a Sepulchral Hall Of Snobbery?? That one was a horse on me, so I looked it up: of, pertaining to, or serving as a tomb ... or pertaining to burial ... funereal and dismal. Either way, not a campaign to endorse finishing schools, and you wonder if what was left of academies took umbrage. Whatever anti-movie policy they had in place was probably strengthened after staff got a slant on Finishing School. Indifferent parents are more to blame than spoiled girls here, Dee's being silly Billie Burke and distracted John Halliday. A common touch was supplied by Ginger Rogers, up and coming as a personality thanks to well-received work with Fred Astaire in Flying Down To Rio and success in Warner musicals. Finishing School is a curiosity if not a lot else, and is available from Warner Archive.

1964's Laugh On Wilder

Comedy's Winning Streak Split Wide Open

The ad at left, from Statesville, NC’s Playhouse Theatre, captures small town policy re Kiss Me, Stupid as it spread through stix during early-to-mid 1965. KM,S was booked plenty around me because, with little Catholic representation, the Legion of Decency ban had no teeth, and since Billy Wilder’s comedy did get a Code seal, there was no immediate cause to shun it. Still, the Playhouse knew a hot potato thanks to wire coverage and LIFE magazine telling how Wilder licked censors. As films got friskier, the Playhouse balanced playdate scales with juve fare for daytime, hot stuff reserved for evenings, thus Island of Blue Dolphins prior to house clearance at 5:00. They had used a same device with The Carpetbaggers a few months before, would again for Harlow deeper into 1965. Matinees were a Playhouse firewall against hot merchandise they needed to keep dust off seats, but at a same time fulfill civic responsibility. It was a tight wire to walk. Our own Liberty Theatre took an easier avenue ducking Kiss Me, Stupid altogether, maybe from word off showmen tom-toms that it was a dog. Warning from a brother exhibitor could avoid snake-bite in a neighboring town, for weren’t their audiences pretty much alike? What I noted about Kiss Me, Stupid at the time was how many drive-ins played it, idea perhaps that here was a show best viewed in relative privacy of parked cars. Was small town patronage embarrassed to sit among neighbors to watch a dirty movie? Kiss Me, Stupid was smeared early on as just that, so going at all was tantamount to buying porn. Even United Artists didn’t want their corporate name on Kiss Me, Stupid.

First-Run in L.A.

There were fewer bookings for Kiss Me, Stupid (6,878) than previous Wilders (Irma La Douce: 21,181 --- One, Two, Three: 12,369 --- The Apartment: 19,632), impression being that in much of the country, the film was avoided by exhibition. Critics were for a most part hostile (columnist Abe Greenberg after the L.A. premiere: “ … a vulgar bit of inanity only a few steps removed from becoming as lewd as a stag film”), but that would not have stopped a public had they enjoyed Kiss Me, Stupid (Irma La Douce got mixed reviews, but did tremendous business). This Billy Wilder comedy was simply not liked, that the judgment of not just critics (who never much mattered in any case), but Mr. and Mrs. Ticket Buyer, a mass that had been loyal to Wilder up to now. Perhaps however, I should say Master and Junior Miss instead of Mr./Mrs., to account for far fewer mature couples bothering to movie-go by 1964-65. So were young people turned off by Kiss Me, Stupid? Dean Martin was seemingly an only name to draw them, Kim Novak, I suspect, beginning to dim by then, and who’d pay to see TV’s Martian, a Favorite one or not, in bleak black-and-white as on home tubes? To that last, how much was Wilder’s boxoffice damaged by his 60’s insistence on using B/W, this against backdrop of color TV booming? I wonder too if opinion makers were laying for Wilder after he got away with Irma La Douce, in fact, seemed to gorge on content barriers broke down. This time we’ll stop him may have been stance of standard-bearers backed into wall that was a collapsing Code and what standards of decency once stood for.

Peter Sellers Before The Collapse That Took Him Out of Kiss Me, Stupid

Could flap, then flop, have been avoided were Kiss Me, Stupid cast differently? Picture Marilyn Monroe alive and doing the Kim Novak role. Or Peter Sellers finishing his part, Wilder waiting out recovery from the heart attack Sellers suffered. But his star wanted to improvise, which Wilder could not abide, and Sellers’ British accent did not sit well with a resolutely American character and setting. My impression from interviews is that Wilder was almost relieved to see Sellers go. I think what sunk Kiss Me, Stupid was Ray Walston, who was not a bad actor, but was the wrong actor for a part that needed someone likeable enough to overcome a character not at all sympathetic until at least a second half, and then only tentatively so. Might Jack Lemmon have smoothed Stupid’s jagged edge? I read that Wilder wanted him to replace Sellers, but commitment to Good Neighbor Sam stood in the way. Walston plays abrasive for me, though this last time he seemed less so, but that’s probably because I’ve made myself adapt to him. Answer this: What if Ray Walston had played Jack Lemmon’s lead in The Apartment? Would that have tipped the Best Picture winner’s seamy aspects to censor and public outcry? I don’t underestimate Lemmon’s presence and performance that made Apartment goings-on palatable. Let’s say it's a perfect world and we have Monroe, Martin, and Lemmon starring in Kiss Me, Stupid. Could they have overcome then-smutty gags and Stupid’s sanction of adultery, latter the bomb ticking beneath Legion of Decency desks? Kiss Me, Stupid needed a cast for which a public would forgive most extreme of Wilder excesses. Some Like It Hot and The Apartment had such an advantage that Kiss Me, Stupid did not.

L.A. Christmas Attractions for 1964

It wasn’t a story problem. Kiss Me, Stupid is as splendidly constructed as any Wilder from this very productive period, and it all ties beautifully for a wrap, whatever one’s reservation re hook-ups, though minus the pay-off, Stupid would have been exactly that for copping-out and leaving its audience cheated if not morally outraged. The put-back Dean Martin-Felicia Farr finish makes the Blu-Ray a must for restoring integrity to a show that waited fifty years to become what Wilder intended. There isn’t a lot of footage, but it clears a marsh of foolish ambiguity. The cuts forced on Wilder in 1964 did as much ruin to Kiss Me, Stupid as anything cited then or now as going wrong. It seems we’ve needed the intervening half-century to cool down. Wilder never did get over the disgrace of having made Kiss Me, Stupid. He abhorred commercial failure ($2.7 million in the worldwide rentals till), maybe more than most great directors, and so deflected queries about Kiss Me, Stupid, saying that yes, it was a bad picture, and not much else. Maybe it is a bleak picture, as The Apartment might have been without its cast, or The Fortune Cookie would be even with its cast. Had Wilder become less “cynical” than disenchanted? The movie-making process was not so much fun for him by the sixties, a generational thing, and understandable. I doubt if Wilder had another “fun” project like Some Like It Hot in him by 1965, and of course, filmgoers still wanted fun. If Wilder wouldn’t supply it, there were lesser artists who could. Another what-if: Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis agreeing to do The Great Race only if Billy Wilder directed it. What might he have made of that?

There are those who swear by Kiss Me, Stupid and consider it one of Wilder’s best films. I have a collector friend who calls KM,S his favorite of all movies. R.E. once wrote Wilder to that effect, conveying his desire to someday become a movie director (BW’s reply, via his secretary: “Find something more practical”). R.E. met Ray Walston after a Charlotte dinner theatre performance in 1979. Walston was gracious if somewhat nonplussed. Kiss Me, Stupid was not a success, he said, “they just threw me in there,” after Peter Sellers dropped out. When presented with a still to sign, Walston was surprised that anyone would have, let alone keep, souvenirs from such a blighted film. Then there was Cliff Osmond, with whom R.E. corresponded. He had an acting school, said he had once driven through North Carolina and liked the place. Could he have guessed that the world’s biggest Kiss Me, Stupid fan lived there? R.E. and I commiserated on Kiss Me, Stupid playing frequent in our state. He saw it first in 1965, at age sixteen, and again in 1968, found out years later from historian and GPS reader Mike Cline that KM,S had more playdates in their home town than even he recalled.

R.E. Directs an Ersatz "Dino" in His Brother's Wife (1980). Note the KM,S One-Sheet Behind Him.

R.E. embarked upon remaking Kiss Me, Stupid, and doing sequels, in 8mm, from the late 60’s onward. I co-starred in a 1980 variant called His Brother’s Wife, where a Dino-inspired character shows up in NC to intrude upon R.E.’s domestic harmony. An awkwardly staged fistfight resolves the conflict. R.E. made four “official” follow-ups to Kiss Me, Stupid: Pardon Me, Mister, in black-and-white to preserve integrity of Wilder’s original, Visit To Vegas, where the Orville Spooner character reunites with Dino at the Sands. Then came Kick Me, Gently (by now it’s 1979), and finally Losing Streak in 1981. Who knows but what there may be another?, for which I would gladly essay the Dino part again. R.E. scored a 16mm scope print of Kiss Me, Stupid in 1978 for $125. In those days, buying it was about the only way you'd see it, because television could seldom (ever before pay cable?) be bothered. Query to experts: Did any network play Kiss Me, Stupid? R.E. still has his print, too precious a talisman to ever let go. Never mind that the general release version has been so improved upon by the Blu-Ray with the Dino-Felicia Farr scene properly restored. Kiss Me, Stupid is an artifact, very much of its time, and plain enough is fact it is not for everybody, but there isn't a more unique show in Wilder’s kit, and whatever the hostile response when KM,S came out, this was one he could take pride in (but didn't, sad to say). What a shame that poor luck and circumstance made hash of such a bold comedy stroke.