Foreign for Fun Plus Art

 

Bava Best Served Raw

I’m lately into Mario Bava au naturel and minus subtitles, never to return with minor exceptions. We know the Italian director for admired, cultish Black Sunday, Black Sabbath, Planet of the Vampires, these conceded best from his kit. American-International distributed the trio following surgeries minor or more so. Domestic versions ran years before fan-ship demanded “true” editions in native language and faithful to Bava intent. My goal was to get along without subtitles and to enjoy visuals minus reading that for me spoil art on otherwise display. So how trustworthy have translations ever been (let alone dubbing)? Look at forwards written for fresh deliver of classic offshore literature and they’ll all claim finally-got-fixed wording, for instance debate over Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina with lines drawn among scholars and barriers they build. Speech thing re Bava is the more complex for there appearing to be no legitimate language as spoke or intended for his films, players gone multilingual ways during respective shoots and everyone knowing it would all be post-dubbed for varied consumer countries using versions customized to commercial fit, banquet set round the world with each territory wanting meal served their particular way. Features were prepared a la carte as are any that talk, Bava in AIP hands being altered re spoken word, sound-effects, music scoring, editing, color rendition, everything in terms of what we saw and heard. Anyone seeking pure Bava experience could fold right off, no such dream fulfilled. Let eyes instead enjoy what there was of visuals, relish in Planet of the Vampires to see how deep Bava goes into his frame, players down seeming tunnels into some or other infinity, Planet design, and presumed forced perspective, to make of studio interiors a distant world we could prefer to our own, this on strained budget the bane for Bava in this and other projects engaged during sixties peak. Nearest route to rapture is a same applied to any foreign favorite, Bava bliss a matter of juggling what varied region discs have so far surfaced.

We were having a spinal meningitis scare when Planet of the Vampires played the Liberty in January 1966. For that reason I didn’t go. Don’t recall being forbade to go, just didn’t go. Was it more lack of enthusiasm for the concept of vampires dwelling a distant planet rather than our preferred own? Planet of the Vampires was retitled for TV syndication and seemed the more obscure for it. Either way, I passed. Finally saw a video and liked Planet of the Vampires more than expected, estimate going up with each revisit. It now ranks for me favorite of all sixties sci-fi. For throne so set, you want near as possible to the white light, thus plod through DVD, Blu-Ray, then another Blu-Ray, each the US version monkeyed with by Jim-Sam, who for financing Bava’s venture were entitled to monkey. After reading Glenn Erickson’s review of a Region Two Euro release edition, which he cited for best quality so far, I went for the now out-of-print disc, OOP in no time it seemed (lesson: if you want limited editions, don’t wait --- good ones go fast). Once I knew Planet's story enough to no longer need subtitles, off came training wheels.  As said, subs get on my nerves and distract from what I'm there to see, which is 100%, or near as I can come to that, of the Bava experience, Planet of the Vampires akin to a silent feature with me looking rather than eye-bouncing to read. This imported disc beats American releases to a standstill. I’ll not ever go back so why keep domestic Blu-Rays? --- Barry Sullivan’s English-speaking voice not so essential as, say, Boris Karloff’s in Black Sabbath. I’m told Planet cast members uttered their own (differing) languages while filming, so never mind an “authentic” version, same with the Leone westerns done around a same time. International filmmaking: quilts of many colors.

AIP advertised Planet of the Vampires as in “Colorscope” when really it was 1.85 and never anamorphic. Worse was “color” meaning Pathecolor, which was the lab Jim and Sam were wedded to. We can’t know what Pathecolor looked like when AIP pics were new for prints turning eventual red  (Mike Cline early-seventies played Premature Burial at his drive-in and the 35mm looked like a fire hydrant). Take my word that 16mm prints, at least the scope ones, were gone as to varied hues, Pit and the Pendulum and The Haunted Palace late seventies acquired on take-or-leave basis (I took), neither to be had with decent color unless you were blessed with a British IB Tech 35mm print, of which there were precious few (only aware of a single collector who has any). Why care what with Planet of the Vampires better even than what Euros saw sixty years back. What winding paths we take to arrive at ultimate-place, horizon as in just-over because how we do we know what really is a best when bars keep upping? Where seeing Bava new is memory distinct, like mine with Black Sabbath from August 1964, there is authority as in Yes, this is how it looked then, and never mind being ten-year old and hardly in a position to properly evaluate prints or presentation. AIP found Black Sabbath a little too scary in parts, at least as monitors if not the PCA might find it. Children after all were watching. So Karloff brandishes a dismembered head? Not in our version. Bava bumps were also US-augmented with sound screeching and music as aggressive, cues for where we should jump. Region Two subdues the din and scores subtly, us left to react as we will to what Bava serves, that plenty enough w/o AIP over-frilling.

Relaxing and not worrying over what players say permits me to watch expressions closer, again like with silents, and having served time previous with dubs or subtitles, I know words, at least intent, even though same words tended to differ between what titles said in Euro prints and what AIP put in actors’ mouths for stateside consumption, so never mind dialogue, let alone language, spoken while the film was in production. We as result get the Black Sabbath we want, interpretation of actions our own, these to amend each time we watch depending on maturity developed to the moment. Will Black Sabbath I see today be a same Black Sabbath I’ll revisit in ten years? Hope not. All films are sort of this way, perceptions changing as we change. Those in native tongue are fixed more firmly it's true, which is why for me at least, watching foreign films minus familiar talk, subtitles, let alone dubbing, has a liberating effect, interpretation all my own and not theirs to impose. Never mind freedom of speech ... for offshore viewing purpose, give me freedom from speech. It's said by plenty that watchers become creatives as much so as creators, which I believe the more for rewatching, and in a sense, discovering as if for first time, Planet of the Vampires and Black Sabbath. I don’t go on a limb to call these art films … any passive or even indifferent viewer can see they are something special, which of course makes them art. Bava had impressed Nicholson and Arkoff from a first time they saw Black Sunday in 1960, nothing like it having crossed their way before. Jim/Sam called Sunday and its director “different” at the time, and though neither would classify Black Sunday, or follow-ups, as art releases, fact is Mario Bava fits the category, and while it’s a shame he didn’t get enough recognition, we’re blessed that his best were mainlined to matinees, drive-ins, whatever place masses met, our kind of art films served on our kind of terms.

More of Black Sabbath at Greenbriar HERE and HERE.

Watch and Read List for 12/9/2024

 

Watched/Read: Hootenanny, Pearl White, Charley Chase, and Earnest Endeavor

Earnest means “showing sincere and intense conviction.” To that let’s add uphill climbing. Loving old film, old music, old anything, means coming to all its rescue, the wrest from underserved obscurity, shouting to all what they are missing. Some shout till hoarse, eternal champions for the forgot. I can talk of Hootenanny, Pearl White, and Charley Chase at Greenbriar and be understood, nowhere else though. Was that case in the sixties and seventies when vintage was supposedly venerated? (it was, sort of, but nothing, I submit, like now). Back then Hootenanny was fresher memory, Pearl White known if faintly for the Perils of somebody or other, and oh yes, Universal in 1967 did a new Perils of Pauline with the Dodge Rebellion girl. Today Pearl White is remembered about like Pamela Austin (who?) is remembered. Charley Chase has always been just on the verge of being rediscovered and properly celebrated. Mountain first scaled by Robert Youngson now has flag planted firmly by Kit Parker, Richard M. Roberts, consortium of collectors, archives, dedicated rescuers of reputation Charley Chase never lost, was ours to find and finally did thanks to tireless dig for what was left of Chase legacy, prints that is, ones-of-kind in much instance, us in nick of time to enjoy comedies he did in 1927 instance. Again to point of so many more caring about classics back in our precious era that now is as past as we then were from the films and stars themselves. If we were so much more appreciative back then, how is it seven, closer to eight, hundred names get credited on Kickstart, Go-Fund-Me discs every time a new silent is fan-financed and released? If those folks aren’t earnest, I don't know who is. Repeat as I have to being tiresome: Vintage has never had it better than right now.

Michael Hayde sat before the family Philco and saw Hootenanny when it first-ran. The series lasted about a year and a half, between April 1963 and September 1964. ABC was the presenter, and for North Carolina at least, that meant fewer people saw it, ABC largely snow country in our territory. Hootenanny was never syndicated, so poof and the show was gone after ‘64. “Eighteen of the forty-three total programs (originally 13 half-hours for season one and 30 hours for season two) exist whole or in part …” according to author Hayde. Folk music was the format, performers brought on to do music other than mainstream or rock and roll. Much of this was popular, as there was taste for things besides pop or watered down beat. Hootenanny came smack before and during Brit and Beatles invasion. Did that hasten its demise? Hayde answers in detail, telling how controversy dogged the series almost from start and certainly to a finish. Folk artists were protest before protest got hip. In fact they were hip, saw answers blowing in wind far back as Peter, Paul, Mary singing such words in 1963, “peace, war, and freedom” topics A, B, and C which lined up even with others of the Folk movement. Groups like P,P, and M got hot along with the Kingston Trio, one of whom hailed from my home county, these boys singing of foothill dwelling anti-hero Tom Dula, popularly rechristened Tom Dooley, hung locally and long ago for a love crime. Here’s miracle that surely fated Michael Hayde to write a book on Hootenanny: His father recorded much of the series on audio tape during the 1963-64 run, thereby preserving performance otherwise lost to time. You could almost say Michael was born to write Hootenanny --- The Craze and Controversy of TV’s Folk Music Series. If he didn’t, who would? After all, he has those tapes, and surely no one else does. This is a great book, being music history, TV history, social and political history, the works. I read it quick because I couldn’t put it down.

Then there is Pearl White, whose remarkable story William M. Drew tells. Mr. Drew is one of our premiere film historians. All I need see is his name on a cover and I will want the book, this declaimed previous in Greenbriar coverage of The Last Silent Picture Show and Mr. Griffith’s House with Closed Shutters, both splendid and revelatory. William Drew does with his newest what has long needed doing, a Life and Times of serial queen Pearl White: The Woman Who Dared, who’s been ignored in part because so much of her film past has gone with nitrate winds. Not all however, for there are tantalizing pieces at You Tube, much uploaded by Eric Stedman of The Serial Squadron. Is it reasonable to expect all fifteen or more chapters of any silent serial to survive? Those that do and feature Pearl White are fascinating and yes, she did stunts herself, and no, I don’t see how the woman survived knocks and falls she took. Pearl made serials when everybody went to serials, not just kids like later would be the case. Girls who’d become famous were her devoted fans. Norma Shearer hopped up on the running board when Pearl’s limousine passed on parade in Norma’s Canadian hometown. William Drew tells the life and the drama and gives us a history well beyond just perils Pearl braved onscreen. In fact, she braved a good many in public life apart from movies, being progressive before progressive was fashionable if not expected. Her name was remembered best by those who grew up watching her exploits. Once these were gone, and eventually the films too, who was left? My father saw The Perils of Pauline in 1915, kept it in mind enough to speak of it fifty years later, so yes, Pearl White was meaningful, and still should be. Maybe William Drew’s fine book, and peruse of those serial chapters at You Tube, will get that accomplished. Either way, there is plentiful joy in both.

Charley Chase burns bright at Greenbriar, the more so thanks to Kit Parker DVD and Blu-Ray, where volumes have issued forth of the talking comedies, and now silents dating from 1927, all here in whole or surviving part thanks to search and reclaim by Chase devotees. Pretty much whoever follows classic comedy follows also Charley Chase, who used to be hard to access but really isn’t anymore with so much now available and more to come. These silents, as with so much of silents once they are restored and re-presented, routinely surpass what we expect. Several with Chase surprise for elements I don’t expect, always something not noticed before. When you sit alone in a room and laugh out loud, you know a comedy is working. Here’s kick beyond Chase and anyone he shares the screen with --- those titles by H.M. Walker, Hal Roach staff man who was Greek chorus to happenings we’re looking at, launching laughs before we even see Charley or the rest. Wit of Walker astonishes me, him having plied trade a hundred years ago. Who else of funny folk as far back score mightily as him? They say Walker while a maestro of clever titles fell down with dialogue once talkies arrived. True? Charley Chase wrote, directed, conceived lots of what went before cameras in addition to himself starring, an all-purpose comedy man with a brain thinking funny for all hours awake, probably in dreams too for ideas he’d show up for work with. Were great comedians taken for granted during the twenties? You’d think so for there being so many, and each so prolific. This newest Charley Chase set is replete with gems, plus there are bonuses to flesh out life and works from the Hal Roach lot, from which comedy emerged its sunniest. 

Count Your Blessings #2

 

CYB: To Catch a Thief and Moonraker

CARY GRANT AND GRACE KELLY EAT FRIED CHICKEN IN 4K VISTAVISION --- Films are fun to wander through, lightly graze upon, especially where polished to sheen not thought possible, to wit To Catch a Thief in 4K, streaming at Fandango (formerly Vudu) and available on UHD disc. It no longer matters if this Hitchcock works on level of drama, suspense, or comedy … just to look will do, sharpness beyond dreams past, color at hysteria pitch of vibrancy. To Catch a Thief was designed as travelogue much or more than narrative or even stars, Vistavision much a thing following White Christmas for holidays 1954, French Riviera a place few saw or would ever see first person. To Catch a Thief addresses objects and lifestyle, never more than now when being there as object of all film consumption was truly accomplished. Thief is of costumes, food, interior design, up-to-moment fashion, flesh as fetishized and draped by jewels. It celebrates things rather than themes, 4K viewership finally in receipt of gifts Hitchcock teased but only now fully delivers. To extent of decoration alone, To Catch a Thief may be a greatest of his achievements, increased to yearly will-watch just to realize again that it is possible to step inside a movie and comport with characters who acted and interacted long ago, now and henceforth on startlingly intimate terms with us. Will there, is there already, capacity to enter fictional scenes and participate in action, even determine outcomes? To do so seems inevitable, go-to events recorded generations ago a miracle I’d dare not imagine till recent. Now, and having seen To Catch a Thief and others of similar vintage on 4K, there's reason to know it will someday happen. If we are able to talk with Cary Grant, will he talk back? AI generators would say certainly, and soon, if not right now.

I watch To Catch a Thief in chunks as one might snack from cookie bags, not to empty same or finish the feature, instead to satisfy sweet tooth then wait for next time to again address urge. “Flaws” I notice are no deterrent to joy, Cary Grant groaning under exposition and obliged to repeat over/again that yes, he was the notorious “Cat” once upon prewar time, but no more, and how to unmask a currently busy jewel thief imitating his style? Gab along this point is repetitive, “John Robie” pleading innocent to one accuser after another for much of 106 minutes, all OK for amidst locations stunning as never before in movies. To watch To Catch a Thief is to call back memory of what it looked like over sixty year passed exposure. Television used 35mm for network runs, then IB Techicolor prints went to local stations dealing later with Paramount. Latter was lovely if full-frame, thus head room and square shape not in keeping with what Hitchcock would have seen through viewfinders. Moon Mullins let me have a 35mm IB trailer in 1979, closest glimpse I’d get of what 1955’s public saw. Now what we have is more immersive than anyone could have imagined then, technology allowing corner-to-corner perfection on home screens to approach bigness of theatre screens. Beautiful people of then are the more so now, Grant and Grace Kelly other-worldly attractive in ways you’d not think possible for moving images captured seventy years ago. Hitchcock especially gains in 4K for visual flair he lent everything … whole new levels of his art are revealed as each enhanced release comes to us, latest a North By Northwest you’d swear was 70mm if homes allowed for such installment. How’s for someone writing book-length, Hitchcock on 4K --- A Reevaluation. Lots of fresh insight might come of that. When a Hitchcock underestimated as To Catch a Thief does such nip-ups upon fresh digital delivery, is any sky the limit? Question of whether you’ve “seen” To Catch a Thief must now be addressed anew. Seems to me this and other Hitchcocks are at last fulfilling hopes he had when making them.

BOND AS 4K BEYOND --- Moonraker along with whole of Bonds can be streamed at Vudu/Fandango in 4K, each of entries thus rewarded uptick just for being so enhanced. Pleased to see Jaws and his girlfriend survive the end title of Moonraker but was concerned that he’d have to answer for killings committed in The Spy Who Loved Me, then realized Jaws could join MI6, be given a retroactive license to kill, and act as Bond’s majordomo in For Your Eyes Only plus Bonds beyond it. Missed opportunity was this. Re Michael Lonsdale as Hugo Drax, I’ve read they very much wanted and tried to get James Mason to play Drax and he refused. I’d have handed him a blank check and said fill in any amount you want. Why did Lonsdale choose to play his villain so flat? Why does Lois Chiles too seem non-committal? There is a way to perform in a James Bond film that some actors get and others never do, but my attitude suggests Bond never changed, not true as he constantly did, and maybe Lonsdale/Chiles sensed that and accommodated themselves to it, being effective counterweights to sillier aspects of Moonraker, as also is John Barry’s splendid as always score, plus Moore who could please and even surprise where Bond has a near-miss and takes a while getting bearings back, like aftermath of the centrifuge ride. We cared less about Moonraker in 1979 for it not approaching The Spy Who Loved Me, but I recall screening a 16mm print of the latter during the early nineties and one of viewers pointing out that it was “too disco,” as good and accurate a capsule review as one could seek. Barry scores alone place certain Bonds above others whatever quality of the underlying film, advantage Moonraker over The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only which followed. Barry was so essential to 007 ensemble that to leave him off left gaping hole nothing else, let alone inferior scoring, could fill, here being series equivalent to Herrmann association with Hitchcock and the Ray Harryhausen fantasies.

Moonraker for this reason and others seems much improved, or is it me with no one else in agreement? Comedy weighs but is isolated. Drop Jaws, the pigtail girl, and a gondola chase and Moonraker would play reasonably straight. Apart from these is Roger Moore investigating, pry-into desk drawers and poking about warehouses, same sorts of things Connery did and to that extent 007’s differ but little. Moore reminded me of Errol Flynn in some of his expressions and line readings. Did Moore know Flynn? Haven’t read any of his books, does he say so in them? Moore Bonds went overboard seducing every woman in sight, even one sent to aid his mission, which to me sort of cheapened them both, whereas Connery in Thunderball had Martine Beswick as “Paula” who although they share a hotel suite, keep to individual bedrooms and private baths like professional colleagues they are. A weakness of Moores was trading on film fads of a moment as in Live and Live Die and The Man with the Golden Gun. Even Jaws got his name to evoke Universal’s shark. Moonraker has an aural gag spun off Close Encounters of the Third Kind which got laughs when I was there in 1979, but who’d know or care now? Outer space stuff is where a lot of budget undoubtedly went and it is spectacular, idea to beat Star Wars at effects game, but here again was poaching off trends rather than develop your own. Easy to forget what an enormous fad sci-fi became in the late seventies, not having abetted since. Moonraker from what I understand was enormously profitable and by accounts most so of the Roger Moore Bonds. Yes, Jaws was back because the public wanted him back, the series having reached point where bonus baubles had to hang off each 007 tree. Was it no longer enough to simply be James Bond?

Inspired by Greenbriar Book of the Same Name ...

 

The Art of Selling Movies #1 --- Carolina, The Country Doctor, and The Fan

CAROLINA (1934) --- At left is what they used to call a “mini-window card.” Sample shown is apx. 8X11, a blank margin likely trimmed off at some point. Idea was to print or hand-write playdates in the white space, then post cards on cooperating store windows. Merchants used to assist one another that way. A Fox Films production and release before the merger that birthed Twentieth Century Fox, Carolina was gone for a lot of years and essentially still is, though eagle eyes will find it streaming here and there. Carolina is of plantation drama school, based on a play put on by Group Theatre members, or future members of same. None of creatives apart from director Henry King seem Southern, Janet Gaynor, Lionel Barrymore, Robert Young, others of Carolina cast. I wonder if King and John Ford flipped a coin over which would direct. However way, King won. Think what Griffith could have done with this. He was but a couple of years past his last feature when Carolina went before cameras. Would it have been so beyond likelihood for Fox to hire him? Especially for a project so ideally suited to him. As it is, Henry King may well have looked to DWG example when he composed shots for Carolina. What more likely informed him was likes of Only the Brave, a less serious treatment of war and loss, the theme dated since nineteenth cent stages wore it out. What Carolina captures is grievances if not glory active for decades past conflict, the Lionel Barrymore character reflective of real lives never the same after shooting stopped. Pity the film is so barely known, even if no rediscovered classic. In fact, Carolina is anything but sought after. Hard to imagine it being programmed anywhere, even given freer access. A surviving print (the only one?) is held by the George Eastman House. There are a lot of jump splices with sound occasionally motorboating.

Gaynor plays as Gaynor generally played. I kind of get why audiences tired of her. She’s a Yankee with southern antecedents who wants to grow tobacco on gone-to-ruin grounds owned by a family living on past we flashback to, balls attended by Thomas Jefferson, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee (all at once!). Lionel Barrymore as former combatant for the Confederacy hallucinates to spooky effect that Gaynor is a lost Ante-Bellum love. She, along with Robert Young represents attitude changing and by a finish, winning. Once-granduer falling down around them signals a family spent and better served by youth that might at least salvage something. Shooting was at what looks like real crumbled South setting (was it?), a boost to conviction. Ceilings seem thirty feet high and most look real rather than glass shots. Director King emphasizes ceilings. Had dwellers built them high so sweltering heat would rise above people having to breathe it? I’ll guess King scoped out an ideal location near his own ancestral home (Virginia) and maybe flew cast/crew in his private plane to do the job. How many ante-B Southern mansions are left? There’s still one in my family. I could shoot a remake of Carolina there. A happy ending finds the family prospering at tobacco growth and making industry of it, which my great-grandfather did in real life. Someday I must write about him and the movie I’m convinced was based on his story, Bright Leaf. Carolina came up in ante-bellum days of Greenbriar (February 23, 2006), our Allen Theatre having brought it back in 1941 to compete with the Liberty’s big vaudeville show up the street. Maybe the Allen’s old nitrate print was what the Eastman House ended up with.

THE COUNTRY DOCTOR (1936) --- More Fox fan feeding, this two years after Carolina with Zanuck in charge and all eyes trained on ultimate freak act that was five babes born to a Canadian couple who, with delivering doctor, made quints pay and pay till mere mention of Dionnes on marquees was enough to fill auditoria. The Country Doctor was Henry King again at helm, rising above simple exploitation this project was. We can see it too, if not streaming then via DVD as still sold by “Fox Cinema Archive,” an on-demand service that surprisingly continues to service ones who care. It’s a variable lot quality-wise, but The Country Doctor looks OK, being very definition of obscure, but there’s no ignoring sensation those five girls were from infancy on. There have been books since, dark accounts of greed and such, to read in event you seek to be bummed out. Two of the Quints remain, ninety now (born 5/34). Plenty of them and sisters are in The Country Doctor, ergo admissions paid to see an otherwise programmer. It would be Fox’s biggest profit picture of 1936, next to whatever Shirley Temple was up to. Jean Hersholt is the title character. William K. Everson said Will Rogers would have had the part had he been alive. Director King makes this a good picture even without the kids. Once they arrive (a six reel wait), it’s quint-essential we focus on them for remainder of running time. Marbro and Uptown patrons would surely have insisted on that. These Dionnes were rock stars of their day, like five Taylor Swifts lined up. Note bonus short with The Country Doctor --- simply “Will Rogers” as in further words superfluous. Grieving still was going on, his features to be reissued, funds set up in his name. The Dionnes would be back as well on same terms, a short and two features, all for Fox. Here was one company that knew how to bleed rocks.

THE FAN (1949) --- You can take Oscar Wilde off the page, but you can’t take the page off Oscar Wilde, there being awkward proof I’ll never be Oscar Wilde, but neither would Fox for talkie go at Lady Windemere’s Fan, Ernst Lubitsch having lent inimitable touch to it in silent days, that silent part the cancel to Wilde wit we expect, though still good for visual wit that was Lubitsch’s alone. You can see his Fan on one of those silent treasure DVD collections, and the ‘49 remake from Fox Cinema Archive (quality quite good). Otto Preminger directed the talker, his go not too well regarded it seems, though I ended up liking it despite restless moments. Had Lubitsch lived, he would surely have done this, having been at Fox employ for 40’s most part, The Fan a second time Preminger succeeded to projects associated with Lubitsch. A cast is fine: Jeanne Crain, Madeleine Carroll, George Sanders, Richard Greene … Sanders has a gorgeous scene, played utterly sincere, where he pleads with Crain to leave her husband and run away with him. Pictures like The Fan would not have a whole lot of time left. In fact, its time was already past, $1.4 million spent on the negative, a ruinous $450K in domestic rentals, worse $283 foreign. Loss to Fox was a million, not that they weren’t losing as much on others ’49 released, and conditions would only get worse. Look here at the Roxy splash it had, confidence unbound, but then Fox was same-way about Unfaithfully Yours. The Fan as a story was fine, and undoubtedly worked swell on the stage. How could the play miss when new, Oscar Wilde coming out to take bows and tell the audience what good taste they showed for making it a hit. Would Oscar have liked any aspect of either version of Lady Windemere’s Fan? He didn’t live long enough to experience movies, around till 1900 it’s true, but broken before that by imprisonment and being ostracized after. He put a lot that was good into Lady Windemere’s Fan, and the two films made from it (are there more?) couldn’t help glowing at times thanks to him.

UPDATE -- 11/25/2024 --- Scott MacGillivray supplies further and much appreciated data on the Will Rogers newsreels before and after his death.

Hi, John — The “Extra! Will Rogers” mentioned in your newspaper ad is one of the Rogers one-reelers originally released by Pathé in 1927. These were travelogues chronicling a flying tour through various international destinations. Amity Pictures reissued them in 1934, presumably without Rogers’s participation. I can’t imagine a small states-rights distributor paying Rogers his current salary to record new spoken soundtracks for these shorts. 

After Rogers died, Fox was deluged with exhibitor requests for the Rogers features, but Fox denied all of them out of respect for his recent passing. Fox honored repeat bookings one year after his death.

Amity’s 1934 purchase of the Rogers shorts was during Pathé’s fire sale. The company was then selling off its film backlog, and that’s when Harold Lloyd bought back whatever Lonesome Lukes and early Lloyd reels were still on hand.

How Long Will a Cutting Edge Still Cut?

 

Hep As Was and Maybe Still Is

From Mark Vieira’s book, Into the Dark: The Hidden World of Film Noir, 1941-1950, here is thought expressed by critic John T. McManus for PM magazine, circa October 12, 1944: “That ultra-aware modernism, “hep,” is a very handy word to have around for a picture like To Have and Have Not.” So what was it to be hep? Simplest definition suggests awareness of what is fashionable or new. Hep itself is progenitor to things or people we now call “hip,” or more often, “cool,” latter used enough to now be tiresome. Hep as descriptive goes back over a century. Jazz musicians kept it among a slang arsenal. As for application to movies, I would say hep is more knowing not only what will amuse today, but what will amuse for generations to come. Does anyone luck into being hep? Chances are better they are clairvoyant with eyes toward the future for what they and those to come will find funny. Hep then has everything to do with humor, for where are/were hep dramatists? McManus sees the future of To Have and Have Not when he refers to its “ultra-aware modernism,” latter to embody “modern character of quality of thought, expression, or technique.” McManus went on to credit To Have and Have Not for knowing “all the angles,” hepness “all over it.” He cites “healthy, democratic flesh tone, and it is not only skin deep.” Here was a critic eighty years ago who I believe was on to something. He “got” an entertainment that others then and since appreciate on “skin deep” and deeper levels. Does To Have and Have Not for us play ultra-aware modern as McManus proposed? It stays funny in ways we expect from Howard Hawks, and there’s no better “Bogie” to service his cult (assuming one remains), but hold … the Bogart cult at student level is no more. Does that rob To Have and Have Not of hep? We could say no for movies no longer cultish at colleges, for when are movies, any movies, projected to gathered groups on campus? To Have and Have Not nevertheless strikes me still as hep. TCM thrives on it, as do streamers and those who collect Blu-Ray. Question becomes who or what else is hep, long ago plus now? A list I’ll propose is short, coming down, and not surprisingly, to a single name which for me exemplifies not only hep, but exclusive membership to American folklore shared by no one else film-bred. Can anyone else guess who I mean?

As stated, hep in Greenbriar quarter equates with humor. That unfortunately lets out most of those we associate with drama. A hep movie need not be comedy, but must, I’d propose, have aspects of levity. Bonnie and Clyde is funny, more so violent, everything that happens still somehow unexpected. Bonnie and Clyde is in short hep. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is on the other hand un-hep for being self-aware hep, my impression of it since 1969. Film noir as a genre was defined late as such and so is hep by default, even where member titles are not necessarily so. Billy Wilder made hep noir with Double Indemnity but would not commit further, his Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole less clever than caustic. Laura is hep for clever plus caustic, and not self-congratulatory as to either. Few from the forties please in such modernist ways as Laura. Robert Mitchum, also of noir incubation, seems hep to a fault in Out of the Past, but less so after his reefer bust and a coming decade where a hipster stance seemed more studied, though I’ll credit him with great hep stand that was His Kind of Woman in 1951. Dick Powell relied on Chandler and Philip Marlowe to seem hep in Murder, My Sweet, being more so in the later Cry Danger, his last feature stand in noir category and a repository of wit as applied to otherwise familiar content. A truest hep of Classic Era stars may have been William Powell, who surprises still those who’d call past personalities irrelevant. I’ve mentioned before a 1973 classroom run of The Thin Man to apx. 30 in attendance expressing delight that any actor as long past could come across so pleasingly modern. I’d not hesitate calling Powell hep for now and whatever future most of us have left.

Steve McQueen seems hep until you factor out Bullitt and The Great Escape. Like Paul Newman, McQueen did not appear in enough hep movies to rank hep for the ages. What both did offscreen, racing cars, cycles, and such, helps maintain the image in still-capture sense, as is also a case for one woman I might rank as hep, Louise Brooks, membership more for style and miles-high stack of portraits, which will have to do because so little of her survives in motion. Notice no Clara Bow as hep for her belonging resolute to an era she thrived in, but could not vault beyond. Women who did comedy stay in “screwball” category for a most part, and that dates the whole of them. Women in drama are dealt out surely as men given to same pursuit. Bette Davis, Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, would not have cared to qualify as hep even if extended the laurel, just as Gable, John Wayne, Cooper, certainly Brando and Clift to come … hep crown to set uneasily upon these brows, however others read them (did Brando wish to be cool even where celebrated so?). Cary Grant can delight, even seem modern for being timelessly appealing, but I’d not call him hep. There never was a Cary Grant cult, perhaps for his being so continuously and mainstream popular. There are moments however when Grant plays modern to startling degree --- look at North by Northwest in a crowded house, Grant registering in ways to still surprise, or maybe not, because audiences expect Cary Grant to deliver as if he was doing his act just yesterday. Maybe then we should call him hep/hip. Fred Astaire strikes me as a performer very hep once you get to know him. Anti-heroes might emerge hep even where not expected, let alone intended, like Paul Newman as Hud, James Dean as Jett Rink, others. Among horror icons, there is Vincent Price who was distinctly hep, ultimately cool, for knowing we saw through his act and appreciated his knowing. Was there ever a westerner who was hep? I might nominate The Man With No Name as embodied by Clint Eastwood, but it’s mainly the third one of those (Good, Bad, Ugly) to get that job done. As to hep born of television, and in western guise, could anyone apart from possibly James Garner as Maverick hope to qualify? But then Maverick was long ago, and not much seen today, so however hep he seemed in 1958, that was 1958.

Committed comedians were too often fall guys to be hep. Chaplin disqualified himself for pathos signaling. Harold Lloyd was so twenties entrenched as to seem quaint by the forties, another Clara Bow and then some. Harry Langdon was too strange to be anything other than object of niche devotion and baffled curiosity otherwise. W.C. Fields looked for awhile like a heppest clown around, but something skidded after protest times were passed, and now it seems we can’t give him away. Abbott and Costello, forget it, too forties if seeming wildly fresh upon then-arrival. Laurel and Hardy endure within their fully committed fanship, hepness or not a non-issue for devotees. None of Three Stooges seem hep, Shemp coming closest, Ted Healy too, the more so Ted, maybe a most modernist of long-gone comics. Bob Hope is another to belong too much to then, even as he tried swimming in streams that ran to seeming infinity, but think if Bob had gone down with one of WWII troop carriers he hitched rides on. He’d be a hep legend snatched from us in prime. The Marx Brothers seem obvious choices for hep placement, Groucho to rank prominent, his siblings just odd w/o him. The Marxes seem also to have fallen from current grace, or maybe it isn’t reasonable to insist on their continuing as favorites, like demanding students again swallow goldfish or jam into phone booths. One can go on speculating … argue even for Walter Catlett or Roscoe Karns as somehow hep, indeed make an argument for anybody, but comes now reveal of that name I earlier said was hierarchy of hep, one beyond comedy, beyond approach in fact by any other film personage, the single likeliest figure to sit everlasting upon Olympus that is popular culture, except he’s beyond mere “popular” and more like forever spirit capture of creative man. So who's this at summit of hep and so much else? I say Buster Keaton.

Trade Talk #2

 

What Trades Told: Tempting Hoppy ... and Bing, Where Superman Flew Again, and Kroger Babb's Non-Pursuit of Quality

HOPPY AND HIPPY? --- William Boyd had been around the business long enough to know everybody worth knowing, many social contacts among filmic royalty. Hopalong Cassidy was Boyd’s preferred monicker. He'd stay the character, if henceforth for television, fed by oldies Boyd now owned, plus a fresh-filmed series to augment vaulties. Late forties fad for all things Hoppy stunned a staid industry. Who dreamed a B cowboy could achieve such latter-day glory? C.B. DeMille was a Boyd intimate. Latter’s last appearance in a feature was a cameo for The Greatest Show on Earth. DeMille wanted Bill to play Moses for The Ten Commandments, which come to think of it was a swell idea. Another major project appears to have come close to fruition, “Thataway” proposed teaming of Hopalong and Bing Crosby, to be directed by Leo McCarey. The mind indeed boggles. How close were they to reality? I recall another proposed project at Paramount, a late thirties teaming of John Barrymore with W.C. Fields. Publicity stills were taken for that too. I have a few for which back caption promises the pair in “Everything Happens at Once,” which unfortunately, never did happen. The Hoppy-Bing announcement came in 1950, a point where Crosby needed a hit, his last several having been soft. Would Hoppy have been the stronger draw in event of their co-starring? Would Bing’s singing be drowned out by Hoppy’s hoofbeats? Such notion maybe gave Bob Hope casting ideas for Son of Paleface, where he used Roy Rogers to overall benefit. Roads not taken … and we wonder who backed out. McCarey prospects might have been uncertain, his last with huge result The Bells of St. Mary’s of five seasons before. As to Cassidy-Crosby together, we’ll make do with this still and whatever other print and image might have been generated for “Thataway.”

ATOM MAN VS. SUPERMAN (1950) --- I’m through Chapter One and still waiting for Atom Man, though it is unlikely he will amount to much. How could owners have entrusted such IP as Superman to Sam Katzman? Easy … especially if you consider utter absurdity of anyone referring in the forties to Superman as an “intellectual property,” yet look at him after eighty-five years in flight, beaten perhaps by other heroes, yet unbowed. Atom Man vs. Superman is a scrapbook, more scrappy book, of stock footage, chases where 40’s autos careen suddenly among 30’s autos, this for consorting with trims from whatever Columbia programmer was pillaged. All of characters check in, and that counts for plenty. To consult early serial birth of figures later iconic is to observe buds from which oak grew, us to recognize all greatness must begin somewhere. Superman “flies” with help of cartooning, and someone please inform if children laughed where first seeing this, or did they storm management and demand refunds? I bet Disney could have made these effects look real, at least realer. Imagine if he were licensed Superman, but when was Walt willing to borrow a thing rather than create and thus own it? (a bitter lesson was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit). I find flying in Superman serials a quaint and thus warm thing, also the cheapness, plus “Butch” of Our Gang as Jimmy Olsen, and Noel Neill at cutest. Kirk Alyn is an adequate alter-egoer, would seem better were there not George Reeves to compare with later. Alyn was another of collector convention guests who would morph eventually into a dealer like scratch-after rest of us, and I used to wonder how much he needed modest cash off these shows. Sad too was Kirk talking up chapterplays no one could then see. Now both Columbia serials are on DVD, nobody’s idea of restorations, but being rarities, one takes what one can get.

PROUD TO PEDDLE JUNK --- A reason I like showmanship and exhibition is revisit it affords to films thought favorite or worth visiting again. To proudly push bad merchandise seems an affront to those watching, let alone those who’d pay to watch. Did Kroger Babb’s conscience ever bother him? He seemed to neither know nor care as to good or bad, the good merely what drew money, the bad that which did not. I haven’t seen any of features he cobbled together, and based on what I’ve read as to how he did it, am not inclined to. There certainly were firms that measured purely to formula, the series westerns, short comedies made and sold in bulk. American-International drew posters first, then molded movies out of them. Lots enjoy these because for all of cheapness and rush, talent could and did peek through, plus whatever the defects, most seem at least sincere, as were people who made them like Roger Corman, who despite Babb-ish aspects did not scavenge so brazen as Kroger, nor express as freely contempt for those who’d buy his goods. Ads here for “Hallmark Productions, Inc.” reveal much. Hucksters Hiring Hucksters, none with pretext of pride in product. Hallmark wanted hustlers and never mind niceties past that. “You earn what you get, you get what you earn” sounds to me like code for eighteen-hours as daily expected. “Get Wise, Get Up Early” it says, sleep be hanged if you want in for real money. Babb recruited for men of his own stripe, Over 21 and Under 50 a base requirement, Honest and Clean and Nice Looking a help. Wilmington, Ohio was corporate address. I checked Google and found no record of Hallmark in Wilmington, except the greeter cards. What, no historical marker? Kroger was born in Lee’s Creek, Ohio, which today has a population of forty-two. What, no statue?

Hallmark distributed such things as Mom and Dad (childbirth footage), She Shoulda’ Said No, and Wrestling Jamboree. Hottest merchandise came with a lecture to assure patrons of pure intent behind what otherwise was purest prurient. Hallmark statement of intent sounds like a Boy Scout pledge: “There is no substitute for Honesty … no rule so sound as The Golden Rule … no battle so worthwhile as a Fight for The Right.” Question arises as to whether Kroger Babb lived by such precept. I’ve no reason to think he didn’t. Just handling dishonest films does not make dishonest men, or does it? Kroger and his Hallmark partner were Ohioans. Did not realize until seeing these trade ads that people of that state are called “Buckeyes.” We of North Carolina are sometimes referred to as “Tar Heels.” End of geography lesson. Among Hallmark output, Wrestling Jamboree sounds nifty… for about ten minutes. That sort of sums me up for near-all of exploitation features, one reel in, then time to bail. Babb’s Mom and Dad is said to have earned untold millions, all evidently based on a segment no mainstream release would dare touch. I’ll guess Babb outran more county sheriffs than Larson E. Whipsnade, there being something imminently arrestable about him. I hope he died rich, which surely he did, unless income taxers fell on him. Might have been fun to be one of Babb’s “Elliot Forbes” presenters, traveling with Mom and Dad to lecture patrons and assure all they were seeing it for their own good, though I’d have preferred backstage doors to the alley for a fleet exit where needed.

UPDATE (11/11/2024 --- 7:47PM) --- Scott MacGillivray checks in with further data on Kroger Babb.

Hi, John — I thought you might be interested in these Kroger Babb trade clippings. First, we have Kroger Babb and his partner Jack Jossey heralding their triple-threat company H. P. Inc. (comprising Hallmark Productions, Hygienic Productions, and Hollywood Productions), with four offices in America and in another six in other countries: “We’re still just those same two country showmen with fresh shoeshines." This trade ad dates from 1948 and highlights THE LAWTON STORY, an Easter pageant filmed in Lawton, Oklahoma with local talent. The exhibitor comment I’ve seen is mostly from small-town and rural theaters, which reported favorably on the homespun content and the unusually high grosses.

Babb reissued THE LAWTON STORY as (THE LAWTON STORY OF) THE PRINCE OF PEACE, and mopped up.

Next we have a clipping from Boxoffice magazine (1961) in which Kroger Babb himself describes his methods:

Here is one more peek into the world of Kroger Babb. It develops that WRESTLING JAMBOREE was really his expansion of a five-reel streamliner of 1953 called THE FALL GUYS. I was surprised to see Clyde Elliott credited as producer — this is the guy who directed BRING ’EM BACK ALIVE two decades before.

Nice to see Kroger Babb still in the game in the sixties!

Best wishes — Scott