Classic movie site with rare images, original ads, and behind-the-scenes photos, with informative and insightful commentary. We like to have fun with movies!
Archive and Links
grbrpix@aol.com
Search Index Here




Saturday, June 13, 2009




Warner Week --- Part Two





My favorite Warner star vehicles from the late fifties are the dinkiest ones. Crossover casts from television, over-lit sets, and all eyes fixed upon economy were guiding principles among movies designed for an indiscriminate fan base still buying what was left of glamorous old Hollywood. Warner talent got their pictures in the paper, but little else. They were the Legion of The Underpaid. Stars as broadly defined by WB were always walking out on and/or suing their employer. James Garner played at tycoon-ing in Cash McCall, but he’d never attain such wealth on measly paychecks drawn for Maverick and spun-off war/action features. Garner’s case against WB slave-masters got press and doubtlessly enhanced his credibility as a millionaire always jumps ahead of competition, though Cash McCall was otherwise watered stock meant for teens gaga over Jim and Natalie together at last. It’s sort of a comedy, minus being funny, or maybe a melodrama, albeit one bereft of conflict. Without reading the novel, I’d have to assume it hit harder, being the same author wrote Executive Suite, which had lots more punch when Metro filmed that in 1954. Cash McCall emulates television for setting up minor misunderstandings and clearing same within requisite feature length, this arrived at torturously with viewers always two reels ahead of CMc's plot. Still, I like it. There are sets, or should I say one set primarily, that’s supposed to reflect wealth and luxury we'll bask in through pages of dialogue about business deals consummated somewheres else. In fact, we never see any industry Cash purports to buy or control. Teens watching spots on Sugarfoot or Bourbon Street Beat probably understood corporate jargon less than I do now, and were likelier there to see Garner come on to Wood (and note that’s pretty much all this ad is selling). Their love scene in flashback looks cribbed from a Garbo/Gilbert silent, with Natalie impiledly nude as Jim looks on. That part surprised me and must have titillated adolescents for whom this alone would have been worth price of admission. A darker influence was cigarettes both leads draw on with constancy throughout. Natalie Wood confirms transition to adulthood by smoking lots, and with our own restaurants and even bars now banning tobacco on 2009 premises, you notice it all the more in older films. Cash McCall really gets you into a fantacist's groove of 1960 as then-audiences dreamed it. Private planes, convertibles, martinis very dry, and Natalie Wood stripping in front of your hearth ...







It’s not necessarily a ringing endorsement when a picture is lauded Best and Most Wholesome Of Its Kind, but that was about the only way a 1960 audience would accept any biographical treatment of Franklin Roosevelt, such was his God-like status among ticket-buyers. Sunrise At Campobello became compulsory viewing for me one night at age thirteen when Greensboro’s Channel 2 ran a syndicated print in prime time. You really need to watch this, my mother said, parental encouragement to engage any movie being sufficiently rare as to pique my curiosity. The comforting familiarity of Ralph Bellamy, he of The Wolf Man and Ghost Of Frankenstein, saw me through 144 minutes chopped down to who knows what by Channel 2’s besieged editors, bound as they were to jam Sunrise At Campobello into a two-hour time slot with commercials (weren’t they the ones, after all, that removed Psycho’s shower scene, in toto, a few years later?). I knew at the time I was watching something more to be admired than enjoyed. Would effect still be the same upon revisiting SAC on Warner’s Archive Collection DVD? It was. Being complete (ouch) and uninterrupted (took four sessions to finish) was sufficient history lesson for my week, though I’m guessing backstage drama on this project might have been more engaging. Writer/producer Dore Schary read his script aloud to members of the Roosevelt family toward secure of their blessing, so clearly no revisionist or scorched earth depiction of the family was intended. He tells the story in his book, Heyday, wherein Schary labors to position himself as someone other than the guy who sent Metro down disposals. That’s about all we remember him for now, yet here for a shining season was the toast of Broadway and Tony Award winner for Best Play of 1958. Warners handed Schary control of their movie adaptation and let his stage director, Vincent J. Donehue, perform similar set-bound duties here. It’s all dignified and cautious as to potentially thin skins among still-living characters. Bellamy plays on mannerisms that must have been irritating in the event Roosevelt paraded them about his private life as his double does here. If all great men were so affected, we can most of us be thankful never to have had to live with one. Greer Garson plays Eleanor at slow cadence with prop teeth Jerry Lewis might have donned among his Family Jewels gallery, while Roosevelt offspring are harmlessly bumptious and quick to apologize whenever childish petulance intrudes upon FDR’s meditation. Sunrise At Campobello was intended for roadshow greatness. There was a souvenir book and major drum beating after Warners sunk $2.6 million into the negative. Results were calamitous. Maybe 1960 was too late to mine Roosevelt lore, for this trip down memory lane (events happened in the twenties) realized just $943,000 in domestic rentals, with foreign showing customary indifference to Americana subjects (a piddling $135,000 there). Waves of red ink amounted to $2.4 million lost, the worst drubbing since The Spirit Of St. Louis and among WB’s all-time biggest losers.









They’d need tongs nowadays to handle dialogue that’s bandied in I Was A Communist For The FBI, Warner’s salvo from quaint days when movie folk more or less agreed that Communism was bad medicine. It’s really less political screed than another Big Sedan Ride, where 50’s cars lumber like elephants with interiors lit from below as though Fritz Lang built them. Characters step into automotive equivalents of the River Styx for rides to and from places foreboding and from which they may not come back. The Steve Cochrans and David Brians took wheels once Bogarts and Cagneys drove off Warner stages, and money spent lending modicum of individuality to sets and backlot streets was now withheld in a postwar environment where you could no longer tell one drab walkup from another. If life were so austere as this, why not join the Party just in hopes of variety in yours, as Frank Lovejoy apparently does here. His undercover status is revealed early, having maintained an astounding nine years being spat on and called traitor by family and friends. Did/do real-life agents sacrifice themselves so readily? A pouty son calls Frank Dirty Red as though no worse expletive could be hurled, which caused me to wonder if high-schoolers in 1951 felt so passionately over possible agitators in their midst. Did features like I Was A Communist For The FBI arouse a public’s vigilance or were they dismissed as simplistic melodrama? There seems no concrete reward for being a Communist operative. Lovejoy enjoys champagne and caviar at one point, but is otherwise under constant suspicion by comrades. They’re constantly tailing each other. Every two shot finishes with one or both eyeballing the other as potential turncoat against the Party. Authority is conferred, then withdrawn just prior to exiles being taken for a ride (sinister sedans again). Warner Communists are mostly gangsters minus charismatic leaders (thus avoiding Code censure for being too glamorously depicted). The idea was to present them (always) as sneaks and weasels, beneath anyone’s impulse to emulate unsportsmanlike conduct embraced by the Party. At least Little Caesar operated by some kind of honor system.

4 Comments:

Anonymous East Side said...

During my TV-watching youth,I presumed "Sunrise At Campobello" was very important and was probably a hit in its day -- the same way I thought about another Warners' clunker, "The Story of Mankind." How naive I was...

7:27 AM  
Anonymous Griff said...

It's not simply that SUNRISE has few cinematic qualities... it has so few real dramatic qualities, I'm hard-pressed to understand its success as a stage property. Such dull respect and reverence generally doesn't directly translate to a Tony-award winning smash-hit -- not now, and not even in the '50s.

East Side reminds me of my genuine puzzlement that the ripely unique THE STORY OF MANKIND wasn't among the initial Warner Archive offerings. Ah, well, there's always the next batch....

6:35 PM  
Anonymous Jim Lane said...

I've never seen or read Sunrise at Campobello; as a kid the subject didn't interest me, and as an adult I'd learned enough about Dore Schary to decide he was one of the smarmiest, most destructive mediocrities in motion picture history. Even so, I've always had a nagging feeling that I should at least give Campobello a look, since Schary (and everyone else) always seemed to consider it the pinnacle of his career. Well, now you and Griff have planted fatal doubts and I probably never will.

And y'know, I'm entirely okay with that; truth is, it's probably just another 144 minutes of my life saved. (Interesting, isn't it, to reflect how low Schary's career could climb and still reach a pinnacle...)

10:05 PM  
Anonymous R.J. said...

Jim --

Here, here, in total and complete agreement with you about Schary. Whatever you say about Mayer, he was a showman all the way -- and a competent, experienced administrator. What happened to Metro would have certainly happened anyway, sooner or later, but I believe that under Schary, the whole destructive process of the studio and it's reputation was merely accelerated.

John,

Sad to say I no longer have that letter from Stan Laurel. But imagine this man going to that kind of trouble!

R.J.

7:23 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

grbrpix@aol.com
  • December 2005
  • January 2006
  • February 2006
  • March 2006
  • April 2006
  • May 2006
  • June 2006
  • July 2006
  • August 2006
  • September 2006
  • October 2006
  • November 2006
  • December 2006
  • January 2007
  • February 2007
  • March 2007
  • April 2007
  • May 2007
  • June 2007
  • July 2007
  • August 2007
  • September 2007
  • October 2007
  • November 2007
  • December 2007
  • January 2008
  • February 2008
  • March 2008
  • April 2008
  • May 2008
  • June 2008
  • July 2008
  • August 2008
  • September 2008
  • October 2008
  • November 2008
  • December 2008
  • January 2009
  • February 2009
  • March 2009
  • April 2009
  • May 2009
  • June 2009
  • July 2009
  • August 2009
  • September 2009
  • October 2009
  • November 2009
  • December 2009
  • January 2010
  • February 2010
  • March 2010
  • April 2010
  • May 2010
  • June 2010
  • July 2010
  • August 2010
  • September 2010
  • October 2010
  • November 2010
  • December 2010
  • January 2011
  • February 2011
  • March 2011
  • April 2011
  • May 2011
  • June 2011
  • July 2011
  • August 2011
  • September 2011
  • October 2011
  • November 2011
  • December 2011
  • January 2012
  • February 2012
  • March 2012
  • April 2012
  • May 2012
  • June 2012
  • July 2012
  • August 2012
  • September 2012
  • October 2012
  • November 2012
  • December 2012
  • January 2013
  • February 2013
  • March 2013
  • April 2013
  • May 2013
  • June 2013
  • July 2013
  • August 2013
  • September 2013
  • October 2013
  • November 2013
  • December 2013
  • January 2014
  • February 2014
  • March 2014
  • April 2014
  • May 2014
  • June 2014
  • July 2014
  • August 2014
  • September 2014
  • October 2014
  • November 2014
  • December 2014
  • January 2015
  • February 2015
  • March 2015
  • April 2015
  • May 2015
  • June 2015
  • July 2015
  • August 2015
  • September 2015
  • October 2015
  • November 2015
  • December 2015
  • January 2016
  • February 2016
  • March 2016
  • April 2016
  • May 2016
  • June 2016
  • July 2016
  • August 2016
  • September 2016
  • October 2016
  • November 2016
  • December 2016
  • January 2017
  • February 2017
  • March 2017
  • April 2017
  • May 2017
  • June 2017
  • July 2017
  • August 2017
  • September 2017
  • October 2017
  • November 2017
  • December 2017
  • January 2018
  • February 2018
  • March 2018
  • April 2018
  • May 2018
  • June 2018
  • July 2018
  • August 2018
  • September 2018
  • October 2018
  • November 2018
  • December 2018
  • January 2019
  • February 2019
  • March 2019
  • April 2019
  • May 2019
  • June 2019
  • July 2019
  • August 2019
  • September 2019
  • October 2019
  • November 2019
  • December 2019
  • January 2020
  • February 2020
  • March 2020
  • April 2020
  • May 2020
  • June 2020
  • July 2020
  • August 2020
  • September 2020
  • October 2020
  • November 2020
  • December 2020
  • January 2021
  • February 2021
  • March 2021
  • April 2021
  • May 2021
  • June 2021
  • July 2021
  • August 2021
  • September 2021
  • October 2021
  • November 2021
  • December 2021
  • January 2022
  • February 2022
  • March 2022
  • April 2022
  • May 2022
  • June 2022
  • July 2022
  • August 2022
  • September 2022
  • October 2022
  • November 2022
  • December 2022
  • January 2023
  • February 2023
  • March 2023
  • April 2023
  • May 2023
  • June 2023
  • July 2023
  • August 2023
  • September 2023
  • October 2023
  • November 2023
  • December 2023
  • January 2024
  • February 2024
  • March 2024