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| It's 1962, and Look at the Line a 1946 Musical is Luring |
Art of ... '62 Crowds Converge for Clouds, What Glorious Night This Weekend Was
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| Watch Him As Bruno, Look Again at This, and Be Creeped Out |
Other aspects of Till the Clouds Roll By would fade as well, for
instance thrill of a bandleader seen from behind who turns around, and it’s …
Van Johnson! … singing, dancing in most unexpected and uncharacteristic ways. And
more for Ripley, Johnson was billed first of all the big stars performing in
Till the Clouds Roll By, even over Judy Garland. Since when did that happen to Judy after the early forties? Also there is a scene where Jerome Kern
and wife, him played by Robert Walker, arrive by train and assume a waiting
crowd is for them, only it’s Esther Williams they’ve come to see and get
autographs from. She isn't identified, just smiles and
signs for a wordless cameo. No patron alive in 1946 would fail to recognize Esther Williams in 1946, but by 1962? Creative
managers at those revival matinees might well have offered free popcorn for
anyone who could name the mystery guest and not lose so much as a box of the
concession (on the other hand, loyal late shows watchers would ID her right away). Till the Clouds Roll By still is richly enjoyable, but as an antique, and
principally for those who revere MGM musicals however obscure they’d seem to a
general viewership. I feel less connected even to old movie fanship every time
I delve into lessers from the Lion, Clouds differing little from Words and Music,
Thousands Cheer, any of a dozen powerhouses of their era less known since. Devotees are not gaining in numbers I suspect, though song/dance extracts thrive on You Tube/Tik-Tok, elsewhere. Cultural observer Ted Gioia checked Netflix recently
and found they have virtually nothing left of a deep library, not Kane, not
Casablanca, not none. What would happen if TCM shut down? Gather up physical media while ye may. |
| He Loves Her, He Loves Her, But Was Jack Sort of Shining His Partner On, and Us? |
HIS GLORIOUS NIGHT (1929) --- Look at this ad: the problem was always
the pleading part. Repeated “I love you” would have sunk Wm. Powell,
Colman, anybody we credit with an ideal voice for talkers. Gilbert legacy fate got
sealed by producers David Wolper and Jack Haley, Jr. when they featured stand-alone
horror of Jack-as-doormat opposite Catherine Dale Owen, latter an utter nobody
by 28 November 1962 when Hollywood: The Fabulous Era ran first on ABC. Sight,
let alone sound, of great romantic John Gilbert begging Miss Nobody for a crumb
of affection embarrassed older viewers who knew the star from youthful filmgoing,
while the clip got not titters, but guffaws, from offspring who wondered
how Mom ever thought this guy was the hots. Gilbert seemed funnier even than Rudolph Valentino over at Silents, Please, running concurrently on NBC. The Fabulous Era defined John Gilbert for decades to follow 1962, nothing
else of His Glorious Night available to see. My Cinecon glimpse came in 1997 at
the Alex Theatre in Glendale, CA, no sighting since. GPS would recall '97's view in 2006
and defend Gilbert, a habit ingrained here. TCM this past weekend re-premiered His Glorious Night and I stayed up to watch just like for Shock
Theatres way back, again will assert Gilbert’s voice was fine, mindful as usual that it's my
opinion and maybe not shared by others. |
| Image Montage Issued by Metro to Boost Gilbert's Full-Length Talkie Debut |
Nobody speaks like Gilbert today but maybe we‘d profit by leaves off his
clear and well-modulated book, and add this re His Glorious Night: it’s a
comedy, source Molnar of then-distinguished reputation having framed it for fun, most of cast in accordance, much being funny, intentionally so. His Glorious Night began as Olympia at New York’s
Empire Theatre in October 1928. It had thirty-nine performances into
November. Ian Hunter took the Gilbert role. Don’t know if Olympia has been
revived on stage since. His Glorious Night cast,
including John Gilbert, enjoy selves, as so can we, with open minds. Was Jack spoofing his
Great Lover line here? He's ardent to nines with Owen, operating at multiple
levels of deceit before this farce is through, scheming to have the girl and yes, he ultimately will, Gilbert's ruse cunning in hindsight, apparent I Love You, I Love You chump who’ll
prove a champ carrying Catherine to consummation on precode terms with post-coital
morning after to wrap a whimsical narrative. Sure it's stone-age creaky cinema, but there is solid story here, if endlessly chatted before director Lionel Barrymore’s nailed-down camera. What else should we expect from talkers
at stolid start? Lubitsch or Rouben Mamoulian might have saved this bacon, but
do we really want His Glorious Night other than gloriously primitive? Gilbert drama of decline played into everything he'd do from this point on. His Glorious Night is essence of this at beginning, and for all of misfortune attached, should be treasured, old Hollywood stumping toes and priceless for precisely that. Curiosity
if sometimes grim pleases where satisfied, faithfuls to the rescue of relics
disdained by a mainstream. Were it my dying wish for friends and family to
watch His Glorious Night with me, no doubt they’d turn me down, there being but so
much one could expect from civilians. His Glorious Night is to watch by oneself, or with very kindred spirits. Robert Harris and James Mockoski oversaw the restoration, and there is a Blu-Ray of His Glorious Night forthcoming.
11 Comments:
Great review of HIS GLORIOUS NIGHT, John. Gustav Seffertitz and Hedda Hopper are both quite hilarious in my humble opinion. I find it ironic that longtime owner Paramount chose to finally make it available the very same year that it fell into the public domain. Any idea how MGM allowed AS THE CLOUDS ROLL BY to fall into the public domain in 1975?
I was told in 2006 how that happened by a friend who used to work there. It's in the column about TILL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY from the same year:
https://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.com/2006/11/till-copyright-renewal-notice-rolls-by.html
A frustration of those VHS and DVD bargain bins was discovering different companies' releases of a given PD -- say, "The Snow Queen" -- were all source from the same lousy print or transfer. Especially when blurbs made claims of remastering and or restoring "from best surviving materials".
MGM also produced a Spanish version of HIS GLORIOUS NIGHT, under its original title, shortly after.
Your review of His Glorious Night matches my opinion exactly. I was stunned how funny it was supposed to be. Lubitsch might not have been able to improve it technically -- it looks like every 1929 talkie -- but his touch would have certainly lifted it to a higher level. Gilbert's voice is fine, but it probably didn't match what his fans thought it would be. Most of his other talkies are fine, while he's as good an actor as almost all of his contemporaries.
Dan Mercer considers John Gilbert (Part One):
The other day, I was watching "West of Broadway," one of those movies strewn in the wake of "His Glorious Night" as M-G-M worked out its contract with John Gilbert. It's interesting for Gilbert's fine, charismatic performance and the support he receives from Lois Moran, with her sincerity and heart-breaking beauty Otherwise, it is not very good. The screenplay is poorly written and the characters underdeveloped, which is a shame, as the production could have been much better. Gilbert plays a rich man who was a hero during the Great War and now has personal problems and drinks too much. You would think that the studio would have found a way to relate this to the star of the "The Big Parade" and the suffering of men back from the war, but the possibilities were ignored for a predictable melodrama.
What is just as interesting, however, is that such a mishandling of Gilbert's career had been in progress long before the coming of sound pictures. While many like to date the decline in his stardom to the fiasco that "His Glorious Night" became, the fact is M-G-M had given him little more than potboilers to do since "Bardelys the Magnificent," other than the pictures he made with Garbo. While it was not uncommon during the studio era for stars to be cast in relatively minor or inexpensive pictures to fill out the schedule of releases, studios ordinarily tried to preserve and enhance that stardom through pictures tailored to the particular appeal of a star. With Gilbert, that was being neglected. He remained immensely popular, however, which is not surprising when you consider that "The Big Parade" was still playing two years after its release. A "Twelve Miles Out" might be offered, but audiences would remember Gilbert's Jim Apperson and look forward to his next picture. And there were the pictures with Garbo, when Gilbert was, if anything, the more popular player.
That popularity was a reason why M-G-M, despite the apparent antipathy of studio-head Louis B. Mayer, offered him a very lucrative contract to stay with it. Loew's, which was the majority stockholder of the studio, was in negotiations with Fox for a merger of the two studios, and wanted to be sure that Gilbert, as one of its stars, was still in its fold. Mayer, who would almost certainly been cast out by Fox, worked behind the scenes with his contacts in the federal government to have the Department of Justice threaten an anti-trust action if the merger went through. Loew's and Fox backed off and Mayer, now more firmly in control, had even less reason to ensure Gilbert's success, whom he personally disliked.
Part Two from Dan Mercer:
Still, that lingering popularity was exploited to enhance the studio's prestige. Gilbert was featured in its talkie "Show of Shows" and the advertising material for "His Glorious Night," his first talkie to be released highlighted his romantic image. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake, though an inadvertent one, as nothing in it suggested that the picture was a comedy and not to be taken seriously. In a comedy, lines like "I love you, I love you, I love you" from a manipulative seducer to a prim princess susceptible to such blandishments would have been amusing. Not so, if they were taken seriously, or when they were taken out of context to suggest how inadequate he was as an actor with the coming of sound.
"His Glorious Night" was followed by a prolonged denouement for Gilbert. There had always been drinking and partying, even in the heyday of his stardom, but it remained in balance with his love of life. To read the articles he wrote then—the radiant purple of the prose betrays his own hand as that of the author, and not that of some studio hack—is to find a man enthralled with the possibilities opening up before him. That his studio did not share this vision became obvious, but, oddly enough, the selection of “Redemption,” from Leo Tolstoy's "The Living Corpse," as his first sound starrer probably reflected a meeting of the minds. There was a morbid streak to his character and, together with his artistic ambitions, he would have found in such a subject a worthy vehicle, just as he did in “Man, Woman, and Sin” or “Downstairs": films that are much more interesting to us today than they were to paying audiences of the time. What is apparent is that no one was looking out for him at M-G-M, least of all himself.
I believe that Gilbert's career need not have been resolved in so tragic a fashion as it was, with death at early age from an alcohol-induced heart attack, had there been an interest in developing it with more care and subtlety. His voice, though so often criticized, was to my mind--and ear--perfectly fine: a light, well modulated baritone which might have fit in with any of the roles he played. It was distinctive, as the voices of so many stars are, and, as with the better players among them, he could bend a role to his own talent and personality. With the notable exceptions of “Phantom of Paris”--intended originally as a vehicle for Lon Chaney--and “Downstairs,” however, almost all of his sound films suffered from poor screenplays or production, or in the case of "Way for a Sailor," from both a poor screenplay and noticeable technical problems.
Possibly this was the result of indifference or something worse, but it is just another of the imponderables in the career of this man.
Thanks John, I now dimly recollect reading that 19 years ago! And thanks for the reference to its inclusion in "Hollywood: The Fabulous Years'' (1962), a real time capsule of a documentary that, much to my delight, is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
Always had a perverse attraction to those life-of-a-tin-pan-alley-composer musicals from the 40's and 50's. The supposed biography portions were usually comically stilted and just plain awful, but the specialty numbers were often terrific. TILL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY is a perfect example. MGM, Warners and even Fox cranked them out. THREE LITTLE WORDS is probably the closest any of them came to actually being good all the way through.
And think how musicals are so enormously enhanced by Blu-Ray release. It's a whole new viewing experience to have them that way.
They had to invent a temporary breakup for Kalmar and Ruby, where other bios deal with real breakups by inventing deathbed reconciliations with partners, lovers, relatives, etc. Another item in Hollywood biographies is uncluttering love lives, reducing multiple wives and lovers to a composite or two.
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