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| First Ever Opportunity to Read One of J.J. Hunsecker's Columns ... Only at Greenbriar! |
Art of ... Sweet Smell of Success, Monsieur Verdoux, Judy Garland Revisit, and Cass Timberlane
FORGIVE AND FORGET? --- Ads called Sweet Smell of Success “The Motion
Picture That Will Never Be Forgiven or Forgotten.” By who exactly … Walter
Winchell, readers of New York tabloids, night club operators? Trouble among many
for Sweet Smell of Success was a mass public seeing nothing not to forget, let
alone forgive. Much ado about who cares was this, Gotham elite account of
things that mattered to no one else. Even tougher now to interest anyone in Sweet
Smell of Success, for who recalls ink-wet daily papers tossed in heaps to eager
readership, printed news extinct or headed there, and what columnist, assuming there
are still columnists, have anything like reach of a J.J. Hunsecker? Fans must
face it … Sweet Smell of Success is rarefied and removed from daily experience.
If there is a modern Hunsecker, he/she might be influencing at some corner of
You Tube or Tik Tok. Sweet Smell was snakebit from a start. Sophisticates stayed home. A mainstream and certainly showmen preferred Lancaster and
Tony Curtis on Trapeze highwires. Lancaster produced Sweet Smell, small comfort to him years later when
fans seeing the film for free on television called it ambrosia. Rule One among those who spent to make a
movie: If it failed to sell, it don’t matter how good it was. A dud is a dud where
too few pay. The “Cool” Loew’s State ad is busy, if talkative. Was cool their
conception of the movie, or did it refer to air-conditioning? (this was June
27, 1957). There was an added Disney short called The Wetback Hound which I’d
enjoy them trying to reissue today. Has it surfaced anywhere? The Loew’s
front had towering Burt poised to slap Tony. Most of slaps in Sweet
Smell of Success, however, were verbal. Such a shame when something so fine
fails. Loew’s State had been home to lushest of Metro output. Now they were cut
loose from Lion moorings, each booking a gamble all its own.CHAPLIN CHANGES --- CAN YOU? --- This was query UA put to patronage in
1947 when poor prospect Monsieur Verdoux sallied forth to empty cinemas and
disappointed remains of Charlie Chaplin viewership. He hadn’t worked since The Great Dictator, which was a hit, but dated now and surely to goodness CC wouldn’t
try being the Little Tramp again. He did not, but exhibitors hoped he might, at
least instead of “The Modern Bluebeard.” Was putting the Tramp in an upper left
corner teasing us to possibility? Loew’s advertising seems almost reluctant to
spell out premise of Charlie as a serial killer of women, him the offscreen conqueror
of oft-underaged fair sex, and to scandalous outcome. In fact, his last press in
profusion circled round drain that was le affaire Joan Barry, who with compliant
jurors and judges took Chaplin to edge of ruin and lightened
his purse toward support of offspring demonstrably not his. So here comes Monsieur
Verdoux to be schizo sold as “strange, haunting romance, shocking drama,” with “surprising
laughter.” Yes, they’d be surprised in view of rotten press Chaplin had been
getting, his recent meet with reporters, intended to boost Verdoux, being instead
a turkey shoot with Charlie the gobbler. Didn’t help when he opened the
conference by saying, “You may proceed with the butchery,” actually one of my
favorite lines Charlie ever uttered. He could have won the Irish sweepstakes
and still been in a hole. CC accused United Artists of dumping Monsieur Verdoux.
Maybe they did, but it would have taken a marketing genius with a forklift to
peddle these goods. At least Loew’s put best feet forward with a crowded Vaude
bill to support their star. I’m thinking Charlie would been better re-staging
his old Karno Night in the Show. At least this would have made for merrier
matinees. Disaster that Verdoux was, Chaplin would not give up on it. A 1964
revival booking in New York saw his broken toy redeemed and folks lining up for
weeks to see it. Raves ensued. We like Verdoux now for lots that Chaplin dared.
Criterion has a Blu-Ray flush with extras.
EARNING YOUR SEAT --- Would you walk through a
chest-high snowdrift to see Cass Timberlane with Blondie’s Holiday? I used Cass
as sample of a once-thought-important Metro special later reduced to ninety-minute
TV spotting by Charlotte’s Channel 9, just another of their “Pre-48 Greats”
leased from MGM and fed into broadcast chipper. Put yourself in the photographer’s
position. He or she had enough sense to capture the image, hail a cab, head
either home or to a bar. Me on the other hand would have braved elements to get
under that marquee, admire displays to shiver point, then pay ways in to
inspect the lobby plus concessions. No matter how high boots were, I’d still be
soaked to my shirt, or hopefully overcoat. Imagine sitting hours in such
circumstance. Would there be a Tom and Jerry or Tex Avery in support of the
feature? I figure shorts would have been less because Cass had company in
Blondie, which frankly I would not have stayed for, having avoided Blondie for
all of life so far. Channel 7 in Spartanburg ran them, me for switching whenever
one surfaced. Metro especially felt the postwar pinch
but try to make them stop spending as though it were blooming and booming early forties. 1946 was a record year, late 1947 and into 1948 to slip noticeably, result hard lesson learned by all the majors. Cass
Timberlane as I recall was an OK picture, well enough made to engage. They need
not all be great to impress. Trouble for thousand or more seat showcases was less people
inclined to come downtown for movies. What with war ended and families expanding,
they had more vital things to do. Farther-sighted Hollywood observers predicted
several years prior that this would happen, and now it did.
UPDATE (9/14/2026) 2:18 pm: Griff supplies a World Premiere Gotham ad for Monsieur Verdoux.
UPDATE --- 9/20/2026, 4:37 AM: Lou Lumenick, past master of New York theatre ads who can find rarities in any Gotham haystack, supplies the Loew's State display for St. Louis and Babes in Arms, plus he confirms that it was indeed February 15, 1952. Also see Lou's comment just added to that section, and be sure to follow his ongoing movie and TV archeological digs at X, where every day brings a showmanship surprise.
17 Comments:
Way back in the early 1960s I bought A 16mm print of MONSIEUR VERDOUX. It is my favourite Chaplin.
Always welcome Griff writes in to clear up the when-where of the Judy Garland double feature:
Dear John:
A quick note to point out that THE BIBLE was running hardticket at Loew's State the week of 11/11/1966 (it had opened in late September). Also, the exterior of the house was remodeled in the late 'fifties, which would suggest that this Garland reissue double-bill booking occurred sometime before then. But The New York Times indicates that Loew's State was showing DEATH OF A SCOUNDREL the week of 11/11/56, with Doris Day in JULIE opening the following week. So I can't say when the theatre would have run the Judy double feature. I do like the idea of the booking being day-and-date with her great success at the Palace just a few doors uptown.
Also, keep in mind that the Loew's State booking of MONSIEUR VERDOUX was UA's 'let's see if we can manage to squeeze some cash outta this' near-underbelly run for the Chaplin picture, which had failed to garner much domestic business after two different, elaborate marketing campaigns. They'd actually opened the movie twice. [Obviously, the controversy surrounding Chaplin and various pressure groups actively working against the film and discouraging its distribution were not helpful to the movie's gross.] In other words, this wasn't VERDOUX's premiere in New York, though it might have been the movie's first time showing in a theatre in Times Square; the Astor, Chaplin's preferred Times Square house, was in the midst of a long run of THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES when VERDOUX opened.
Regards, a tired
Griff
Did a quick poke around the net. "Wetback Hound" was a live-action two-reeler. Won a short subject Oscar in 57, and was later padded for an episode of the Disney hour. According to Wiki, the titular canine is abused by his Mexican owners (mountain lion hunters), so he runs away, swims a river, and finds a loving home north of the border. Sounds like it would need more than a title change.
Were audiences for grownup pictures still expecting a cartoon or short in '57?
Didn't Chaplin still own a large share of United Artists at the time MONSIEUR VERDOUX was released -- maybe as much as half? It seems unlikely that the company would "dump" a film made by one of the people in charge if they could avoid it.
According to a comment at cinematreasures the Garland double feature opened February 15, 1952. A mention in Showman’s Trade Review confirms the date.
Several places I saw where Chaplin charged UA with mishandling Verdoux's distribution. If the sales force has no confidence in a product, what will motivate them to get out and sell it, let alone with any enthusiasm?
Thanks for clearing that up, Eric. 1952 on reflection seems by far the likelier date.
UA should have faced it head on. WARNING: Chaplin is a killer. This film may kill you. I have done decades of street promotion in Toronto. The ads are meant to capture the attention of those who know little or nothing.
Dan Mercer delves into MONSIEUR VERDOUX (Part One):
Orson Welles’ credit in “Monsieur Verdoux” is “Based on an idea by Orson Welles.” Welles said that he had an inspiration on the subway for a film about Henri Desire Landrau, the French serial murderer of women, with Chaplin playing Landrau. He mentioned it to Chaplin the next day, who found the idea amusing, so Welles wrote a screenplay. I guess you’d call that a “spec job.” He was going to call it “The Ladykiller.” However, Chaplin decided that he couldn’t be directed by anyone other than himself, so he bought it and made it himself as “Verdoux.”
That’s Welles’ story, as told to Peter Bogdanovich during an interview. He was an excellent raconteur, which is a term meaning someone who tells great stories, even if he must make them up. Chaplin’s version is that Welles told him about the brainstorm of him playing Landrau and that he saw the comic possibilities in it. About five days later, however, he called Welles up and said that he’d simply like to use the idea. He offered $5,000 for it, to preclude any claims regarding it later. Welles was agreeable to selling it--$5,000 then would be worth about $97,000 today—and asked that if it was made into a film, he should get a credit, which proved to be the famous one in the film today.
Welles’ idea probably came as a relief to Chaplin. One of the entanglements of the Joan Barry affair was the possibility of her playing Brigid in an adaptation of Paul Vincent Carroll’s “Shadow and Substance.” Chaplin professed that she had been “breathtaking” in a recitation from the play and had an unusual “ethereal” quality. To a man enthralled, insanity apparently wears many masks. Such enthusiasm was put aside along with the relationship, apart from the continuing legal entanglements.
There was also the matter of his artistic reputation. Some critics of the time had come to regard him as old-fashioned and sentimental. His own estimation of his talents was somewhat vaster. “Verdoux” would be a startingly departure from his past work, bold and unsentimental. Just as war was diplomacy by other means, as von Clausewitz observed, the murders in this film would be an extension of business. However, an inversion of sentimentality is not necessarily unsentimental. Uncle Charlie in Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” also wanted to rid the world of wealthy widows “eating the money, drinking the money.” This was for him an end in itself. For Monsieur Verdoux, the killings were a means to an end. He had a son and invalid wife to care for, which he did as dutifully as any other father and husband with another kind of occupation.
Part Two from Dan Mercer:
As you note, the United Artists publicity department found “Monsieur Verdoux a hard sell. They played up his genius and indicated that this was different than anything he’d done before, but fudged even that, using the beloved “Charlie Chaplin” image to accompany it. Even the picture of Verdoux on the premiere poster, in a formal suit and hat, had a “Charlie Chaplin” brush mustache on his face, not the pencil mustache worn in the film. Those who saw the film would not have been properly prepared for it on that basis and probably would have been with my mother, when we took her to see “The Painted Veil,” from the W. Somerset Maugham story about infidelity and death during a cholera epidemic in China in the 1920s. “You know," she said as we were leaving, “there weren’t a lot of laughs in that one.”
Properly presented, however, “Monsieur Verdoux” might have become at least a minor hit. The screenplay has a mordant wit and humor, as when Verdoux justifies himself to a reporter, who said that other people don’t do “business” the way he does: “That’s the history of many a big business—wars, conflict, it’s all business. One murder makes a villain, millions a hero. Numbers sanctify.”
Leftist critics who understood the film loved it. James Agee referred to it in “The Nation” as “one of the few indispensable works” in a time when survival had become paramount. Arnaud d’Usseau thought Chaplin’s placing the moral burden for Verdoux’s murders on society brilliantly appropriate, for they were “a comment on those values our society celebrates.” Max Lerner in “PM” urged moviegoers to forget Chaplin’s politics and simply judge his art. “As for myself, I am content to take him as an artist and to face the criticisms of our institutions that his art implies,” as though Lerner himself would have been likely to put anyone’s politics aside or been as sanguine about Chaplin’s had they not so thoroughly marched in lockstep with his own.
Nevertheless, there would have been an audience there to exploit, if the United Artists flacks had had the moxie of a Dwain Esper exploiting other, unconventional perspectives.
William M. Drew explores further possibilities of AI as it relates to film reclamation (Part One):
Dear John,
I have some more ideas about AI, this time with respect to early sound films. One thing I'd neglected to mention was the situation with early sound feature films from 1928 to 1930, principally produced by Warner Bros.-First National but including some other companies, in which the Vitaphone discs survive while the visuals on film have been lost. Attempts have been made by some to resolve the matter by blending the sound with stills from the lost footage but I think it would be better to animate the stills through AI and carefully synchronize this to the dialogue and sound effects on the discs.
While I can see this kind of reconstruction relatively easy for films in which the Vitaphone records survive, what about films that have been completely lost with neither sound nor moving image surviving? That inevitably brings me to the early American talkie that has become as legendary among lost films as London After Midnight has for Hollywood silents--the famous pre-Code comedy, Convention City (1933). Whereas London After Midnight was accidentally the victim of a fire at MGM in the 1960s, Convention City was deliberately destroyed in the mid-1930s on the orders of Jack Warner after the studio was denied permission by the Breen office to reissue it even in a reedited version. With the rise of interest in pre-Code cinema beginning in, I believe, the 1980s, there was particular fascination with the one film that was the most obvious victim of the clean-up imposed by the Production Code in the latter half of 1934. Since then, there has been a continual search for surviving prints of Convention City but with no luck to date.
Might it be possible to somehow resurrect this film via AI? First of all, here is what material does survive from Convention City. Over 220 production stills of the 69-minute film are held at the George Eastman Museum, the Academy has a complete copy of the shooting script, and from the standpoint of film itself, background footage taken by Warners' cameramen in Atlantic City for the production has survived and can be seen online. From a purely visual sense, the method employed to animate London After Midnight could be used here but the factor of sound adds an entirely new dimension. For the particular joy of Convention City lay in the racy, risque dialogue that led to its subsequent downfall. Indeed, 32 years ago, as part of a pre-Code festival in New York, actors presented a live reading of the Convention City script.
Part Two from William M. Drew:
I do not know if any of the performers reading the script made any attempt at impersonating the actors and actresses in the film. In any case, for this kind of presentation reciting the dialogue was the main attraction. But for the type of AI recreation I am envisioning, in order to make it convincing I think you will need an exact duplication of the distinctive voices familiar to all devotees of 1930s films--Joan Blondell, Adolphe Menjou, Dick Powell, Mary Astor, Guy Kibbee, Frank McHugh, Patricia Ellis, Ruth Donnelly, Hugh Herbert, Grant Mitchell, Hobart Cavanaugh. While I don't recall hearing impressionists doing imitations of any of these, unlike with Humphrey Bogart, W. C. Fields, Bette Davis, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Jimmy Cagney, Charles Laughton et. al., I assume you could find those who could effectively mimic the players of Convention City. Would they be able, though, to avoid exaggeration in their imitations and really act? To be sure, another possibility would be AI simulation of the Convention City voices. But can they be made to seem comparatively natural and not mechanical? In addition, I think the sound quality itself for this reconstruction should be consistent with that of the 1930s and not be a current type of recording technology.
Another pre-Code film that is ripe for an AI reconstruction is Erich von Stroheim's final film and only talkie as a director, a production that began as Walking Down Broadway and was released in a heavily reedited version with additional scenes by other directors and retitled Hello, Sister! (1933). The current project of using AI to reconstruct Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, if it is successful, could provide a valuable precedent for resurrecting von Stroheim's original Walking Down Broadway. In this case, it is estimated that well over half of Hello, Sister! contains scenes directed by von Stroheim. In addition, his original shooting script survives along with a number of stills from scenes deleted from the 1933 make-over. With all of that, I think it could be reconstructed to von Stroheim's original vision with either actors or AI simulations providing the voices of the actors in the missing scenes as I noted in my suggestions regarding Convention City.
Warmest regards,
William M. Drew
I quite agree with William M. Drew. The stars and character players of Golden Age Hollywood had voices and a manner of delivering lines fully as distinctive as their appearance or way of moving. If a film was to be recreated by AI, especially if it is a sound film, those voices could not be neglected, if the recreation was to be successful. In that regard, however, you shared with a series of recreations of John Gilbert reading "My Life," the series of articles he wrote for Photoplay magazine. It was prepared by, I believe, Robert Fell, and I found pleasing and entirely persuasive. The source of the Gilbert voice would have been the sound films he made, though whether that was augmented by mimics, to provide some quality beyond AI's present capabilities, I cannot say. The words, taken from the articles, were probably originally spoken aloud by Gilbert and transcribed by a secretary, so there would have already been the conversational quality present in these AI transcriptions. The pauses, as Gilbert seemingly collects his thoughts or allows a word or line to resonate, are quite effective. For a film like "Convention City," the voices are already there and, as Mr. Drew notes, the complete shooting script has also been preserved. It would seem that what was done for Gilbert could also be done for this and other films.
Oh Dear Lord, I showed AMBERSONS to my Classic Film Club as part of a book-to-film series. I did give my regulars a heads-up, warning that it was very downbeat. When it was over, I opined that it was 88 minutes of unrelieved misery, not unlike being punched in the face for an hour and a half (I then lightened the mood by showing HOG WILD with Stan and Ollie). To its credit I did describe it as a flawed classic, telling the backstory of what might have been.
All this being said, I would face a restoration (AI or otherwise) with some trepidation. Like MONSIEUR VERDOUX, I've watched it twice and that'll pretty much do it for me.
Must say I don't find Ambersons downbeat or miserable, maybe because it goes so far back as a sentimental favorite. In any case, have seen it far more than Verdoux, which I wonder how many times will that unspool over what's left of my lifetime?
Lou Lumenick settles the ST. LOUIS/BABES IN ARMS question as only he can (see the amazing ad he sent on Greenbriar's main page):
Hi John,
Always great to see unfamiliar shot of Times Square theater in the snow. Every single one of them is gone -- the last, ironically, was the "new'' Loews State more than a decade ago. It was four auditoriums in the sub-basement of the mixed-use building that replaced the old Loews State.
Those green buses were around for a long time (you can spot them in both ON THE TOWN and NORTH BY NORTHWEST, released ten years apart) but were probably retired from service by 1966. They still pop up occasionally for nostalgia rides sponsored by our wonderful Transit Museum, which also runs subway cars going back to the early 1900s.
You were right about that double bill (a rarity at the State) being from 1952 -- February 15, to be exact. Here's an ad that appeared on that date in the New York Daily News. Feel free to use it if you like. On those 1966 dates you cited, Loews State was home to a reserved-seat engagement of THE BIBLE.
Hope all is well with you.
Lou Lumenick
Somewhere -- maybe here! -- I saw an ad for a third or fourth run of "Convention City" in the early 1940s. It was also shown overseas for the troops at the time, too. Not saying it still exists somewhere on a forgotten shelf at Warners, but it survived an extra decade after its alleged destruction.
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