BEFORE THERE WAS HOLLYWOOD

We are approaching, next year, 2010, the hundredth anniversary of movie stars. Motion picture photographic apparatus and film had been devised and developed by at least a dozen different people around the world twenty years before and short film clips that passed as documentaries proliferated from the mid 1890s in France, Britain, even America: trains coming into stations, boxing matches, royal events… It was never imagined at this early stage by one of its ‘inventors’, Thomas Edison, that it could be used for entertainment purposes.

Narrative fiction on film got underway around 1900, by consensus in France first. This was entertainment. But actors, who virtually all came from the stage, were loath to be recognised on screen — for having strayed so far from legitimate acting and sunk to such moral depths: these early entertainments were mainly appreciated worldwide by poor people, who couldn’t afford to go to The Theatre. By 1909 such brave souls as ‘Bronco Billy’ Anderson, the boss of leading Chicago studio Essanay, and comedian Ben Turpin who worked there, ‘came out’ and allowed themselves to be named in public.

The first international stars predated the worldwide fame of Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin by four years. The first American star named and promoted as such was Florence Lawrence, formerly the Biograph Girl, in April 1910 lured by Universal Studio founder Carl Laemmle for the huge salary of $200 a week. The Vitagraph Girl, protostar at Biograph’s rival studio nearby in New York, had started three years earlier at $18 a week, boosted to $24 a week for including in her duties sewing costumes while off set.

Now the lid was off and new record salaries continued to be set over the next few years. The best-publicized race for loot was between Pickford and Chaplin, each on effectively a million dollars a year by 1916. In the early Twenties, with Chaplin, Pickford and husband Douglas Fairbanks owning and running United Artists, they could name their own price.

Parallel with the conscious, hucksterish invention of stardom in the States, in 1910 superstardom in Europe was also flourishing. In early 1911 a Russian popularity poll listed:

1. Max Linder
2. Asta Nielsen
3. Valdemar Psilander

Linder is the recognised first comedy stylist of film. Having overtaken in popularity his Pathe studio colleague Andre Deed, who created the first internationally popular screen character in 1905, Max had been popular too for a couple of years and was just becoming known in America. He was Chaplin’s prime influence.

Asta Nielsen was a truly international superstar from Denmark, a small nation that became instrumental in the new film industry, especially via the Nordisk company that exported films to America. The Abyss, about sexual betrayal, made her a sensation across Europe by the end of 1910. She influenced fashions across continents (at first outside America) and became a powerful producer in Germany with her director husband Urban Gad. Known for her androgynous sex appeal, Nielsen went on to play Hamlet convincingly on screen. In different ways she was the forerunner of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.

Psilander, a fellow Dane, was the first heroic screen idol of Europe. In a few years, having foregone offers in America, the evermore dominant nation in film, he would sink with the fortunes of his nation and commit suicide in 1917. In the meantime, Ivan Mozhukhin (Mosjoukine in France) of Russia rivalled him in screen magnetism and became the most admired actor of silent film.

American popularity surveys in 1912 had brought Vitagraph veteran Maurice Costello (seven years before one of the first screen Sherlock Holmeses) to the fore, challenged by newcomer Francis X. Bushman. Bushman’s leading lady at Essanay studio, Dolores Cassinelli, was officially named the top female box-office star both that year and the following one.

In 1913, according to the first contemporary Photoplay magazine poll, that took eight months to complete, comedienne Mabel Normand

Mabel as 'Mickey'

of Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio was America’s most popular female star, until overtaken in the early months of 1914 by Margarita Fischer, Topsy in an early Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Kathlyn Williams, who had begun to star in her own adventure serial and was currently appearing in big western hits The Squaw Man and The Spoilers. When voting ended in April 1914 a surging Mary Pickford, former Griffith girl and the new favorite of Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Company (soon to become Paramount Pictures) was still some way down the list:

1. J. Warren Kerrigan (Victor)
2. Margarita Fischer (Flying A)
3. Arthur Johnson (Lubin)
4. Kathlyn Williams (Selig)
5. Mabel Normand (Keystone)
6. King Baggot (Universal)
7. Mary Pickford (FP)
8. Mary Fuller (Universal)
9. Francis X. Bushman (Essanay)
10. Beverly Bayne (Essanay)

Note the preponderance of females of high popularity (and accordingly high salaries) in an era supposedly of oppressed women — in contrast to today, when women are lucky to have one entry in the top 10.

Earlier, films such as The Count of Monte Cristo (Selig, 1907) had been shot in the Los Angeles area, and The Squaw Man directed by Oscar Apfel and Cecil B. DeMille for the Lasky Company in a barn locally popularized the district as a film colony. It was 1915 that a new generation of studios, including Universal and Fox, Famous Players and Lasky — soon joining to form Paramount — relocated from the East Coast to the district centered on Hollywood.

HOWARD HAWKS: Rio Bravo (1958) vs El Dorado (1966)

Famous man’s-man director Howard Hawks was primarily a maker of “action” movies, but in the olden days of Hollywood the tag was a thoroughly respectable one implying no aspersion on the audience of such films. Some of the most admired directors of silents, Rex Ingram, and Sergei Eisenstein himself, were action directors. In the Thirties came Michael Curtiz and Raoul Walsh, both today considered master craftsmen of fast-paced adventures made with intelligence, imagination and spirit: in other words, more than Spielberg, Lucas or other of their ilk have ever achieved, and bearing hardly any relation at all to today’s blood-and-gore fests dished up as standard fare for desensitized ghouls who pass as film buffs.

Modern cineastes have concluded that Hawks’ particular schtick was the theme of male comaraderie, starting notably with Only Angels Have Wings (1939) most familiar to modern film fans. But by then he had produced all-time classics in several genres: the similarly pilot-concerned Dawn Patrol, Scarface, Road to Glory, and not least, screwball comedy in Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday to follow shortly after with Sergeant York, his third classic on World War I. He came late to westerns with 1948’s Red River but only John Ford’s are admired more, and just a few including Henry King are said to rank with Hawks as authentic interpreters of the American scene. Rio Bravo was remade with the same director-star combination into El Dorado (and certain refrains were replayed in Rio Lobo four years later). Superstar John Wayne was accompanied by Dean Martin in the first, Robert Mitchum in the second. The Duke is his Mount Rushmore self in both, each time a former hired gun turned lawman (the town sheriff in the first; allying himself with the town sheriff, an old friend, in the remake). And each story centers on him supporting his co-star in rehabilitating from town bumhood brought on by a no-good floozie. Making up the rest of the male ingroup are Ricky Nelson/James Caan on the youth side and Walter Brennan/Arthur Hunnicut as the curmudgeonly but humorously persnickety jailkeeper.

Angie Dickinson and that famous shape in costume for 'Rio Bravo', 1958

Rio Bravo, for ill-defined reasons, is the more generally admired by critics. Maybe the prominent contemporary critics that greeted the remake in the Sixties were just more vicious: Pauline Kael, Richard Schickel … Hawks specifically remade it because he believed he could improve on the first version, and then believed he had. I too, maybe because a child of the Sixties, have always preferred El Dorado, though having just seen Rio Bravo again and giving it proper attention, I appreciate its niceties more than before.

Hawks knew what he was doing in remaking it. There seems to be more happening, backed with a booming wall-to-wall Sixties soundtrack. It is in every way less sentimental than its Fifties forebear. The female roles are less defined in the remake (spread as they are now between Charlene Holt and Michele Carey), almost perfunctory compared with Angie Dickinson’s fully defined one, more in the nature of eye candy. That by itself says more about how spectacularly constructed female stars were treated in the Sixties. Raquel Welch hardly ever got a whiff of the central roles Sophia Loren had been entrusted with at an even younger age a decade earlier. And compare ingenue Natalie Wood with, say, the later Sandra Dee — typical Sixties teen fodder; and Tuesday Weld not allowed to show her talent until almost middle age. Dickinson plays a hard-drinking professional gambler turning back to saloon singing for new beau Duke’s sake, while in the Sixties version Duke comes across all bashful as an old-friend-of-the-family even responding to all-grown-up wholesome Charlene Holt, who has a scene sashaying around in a revealing figure-hugging number for no apparent reason but the aforementioned eye-candy factor.

John Wayne and Robert Mitchum on the set of 'El Dorado', 1966

I would have thought by most measures El Dorado is a less compromised piece of filmmaking. The performances of Robert Mitchum and James Caan are more convincing than those of their prototypes. Moreover, the expanded, modified role of Caan allows a real relationship to develop between him and his mentor (Wayne). Maybe simply to give the ensemble cast more on-screen time, there is a conscious insert in Rio Bravo where singing stars Martin and Nelson get to do their thing — Dean crooning a cowboy song — ‘My Rifle, My Pony, and Me’ — with less C & W feel than anyone since Roy Rogers. Ricky bats his thick eyelashes and heavy lids for the girls rather irritatingly throughout, and almost pouts his more-generous-than-Elvis lips. Walter Brennan comes close to self-parody with his incessant cackling. On top of this, the original is far too wordy, especially for a western — courtesy of the screenplay by highly cultured Hawks favorites Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett.

MOVIE REVIEW: GENE KELLY — DRAMATIC ACTOR

CROSS OF LORRAINE (MGM, 1943)

Aside from the usual wartime flagwavers Hollywood came out with detailing the atrocities against “our boys” in the Pacific and other spheres, that stoked the home fires of those back home, the studios did their best on behalf of China, the Philippines and other allies to get the message out about foreign struggles for independence against the ruthless jackboots of the Axis Powers.

Each studio constructed moving if sometimes necessarily artificial vehicles for the voices of oppressed countries to be heard. Goldwyn’s North Star about a Russian village is the most (in)famous of them, with producer William Cameron Menzies enlisting the participation of writer Lillian Hellman, director Lewis Milestone, the photography of James Wong Howe, and the music of Aaron Copeland. These celebrated names and an illustrious cast including Walter Huston, Erich Von Stroheim, Ann Harding, Dean Jagger, Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan and Anne Baxter didn’t save it from being the target of communist accusations by red-hunters later and the condemnation of critics ever since who have judged the film by how Russian the actors weren’t. Fox’s The Moon is Down has overall the best reputation — about the resistance of a Norwegian village to Nazi occupation, written and produced by Nunnally Johnson from a Steinbeck novel. Warners’ Watch on the Rhine, Northern Pursuit (Mounties chasing Nazis), Edge of Darkness (another Norwegian fishing village), Columbia’s The Commandos Strike at Dawn (commandos returning to Norway), and MGM’s The Seventh Cross are other socko movies worth seeing. Paramount’s The Hitler Gang, Hitler’s Children (RKO) and Hitler’s Madman from Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) are other well-known contributions; the last about the assassination of Heidrich with John Carradine in the title role, and the Nazis’ monstrous revenge against the Czech village of Lidice.

Gene Kelly as the aggressive Jew, Victor.

Cross of Lorraine — named for the emblem of Joan of Arc — was a good effort from MGM, a stirring hymn to French patriotism and stickability. The story traces the fate of a French squad persuaded to surrender when their army looks doomed by the Blitzkrieg invasion of May-June 1940. The Nazi promise is of repatriation to their homes — and they are delivered to a repressive POW camp across the German border. The ‘civilized’ Frenchmen led by top-billed Jean-Pierre Aumont think at first there must be some oversight and continue trying to appease and understand the Nazi mentality, trying to appeal to a sense of fair play, even rationality, that (they believe) must lie somewhere under the surface.

The only ones to resist and keep their spirits intact through two and a half years of captivity and starvation are Victor, an aggressive Marseilles taxi driver played by Gene Kelly, and a Spaniard (Joseph Calleia) experienced against the fascists from his country’s Civil War. Reacting against the murder of their chaplain (Cedric Hardwicke), Victor is severely beaten and put in solitary confinement. He is at the mercy of brutal sergeant Peter Lorre, who, annoyed at Victor’s continuing bullish defiance, has him castrated.

The informant among them, Duval (Hume Cronyn), promoted by the Nazis to ‘translator’, has had a hand deep in his own comrades’ suffering, including reporting on the priest, and gets his future sorted out by them. Aumont’s character, promoted in his place, gradually sees how responsible he is in collaborating in his own men’s failing spirits, and determines to organize a mass escape by stealth.

Jean -Pierre Aumont, the civilized POW, getting in touch with his animal side.

While not on the same artistic level as Jean Renoir’s classic French POW drama, La Grande Illusion, I consider this film very rewarding and well worthwhile watching. Gene Kelly, in particular, gives a powerful performance of an ordinary man instinctively disgusted and provoked by every duplicitous gesture of the Nazis — every bit as intense as Gabin’s in the Renoir film, and more subtle. On his emasculation, he insightfully and intelligently portrays the fear and anxiety of a man with his animal power and all mental initiative suddenly taken from him.

BLACK HAND (MGM, 1950)

At times Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio of Middle American gloss par excellence, surprises you.

Self-made junk man Louis B. Mayer moved into movie production during World War I and ruled MGM as the amalgamation in 1924 of three medium-sized companies to form the new titan of the industry, surpassing the previously all-powerful Paramount in one stroke. Its readymade stars and early acquisitions included popular leading men John Gilbert and Ramon Novarro (The Big Parade and Ben-Hur, respectively, the two biggest world earners of 1925-27), exotic leading women Barbara LaMarr and Renee Adoree, supreme child star Jackie Coogan, “Man of a Thousand Faces” Lon Chaney, and a triumvirate of dramatic divas that would rule world screens with few interruptions from the late Twenties for more than a decade: Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford.

Mayer had to continually compromise with young and creative production head Irving Thalberg until the death of the ‘boy genius’ in 1936, after which, for the next 12-year period, he had clear running. Trouble was, by this time, immediately post-World War II, MGM began to be overtaken by Paramount, Fox and Warners. Audiences were no longer the same, and wanted to see real life rather than MGM’s customary rosy Hallmark-greeting-card view of the world. The solution of Loew’s Inc, MGM’s New York parent company, was to bring in Dore Schary, the production head at RKO who had successfully diversified that studio’s output to take it into large profits for the first time in its twenty-year existence. Schary bailed just in time, in 1948, as new RKO owner Howard Hughes began his steady elimination of the studio’s talent through witchhunts for communists and other paranoid purges that would leave his own property as barely a fond memory a decade later.

A thorn in Mayer’s side for the next four years until MGM’s ruling paternal figure was ousted sideways out of the way, Schary instantly led MGM to deal with the reality of the new industry: more reality, less candyfloss. Combining the noirish grittiness he had established in the most realistic films at RKO with the bigger budgets now available to him, under his new influence outstanding films of gripping topical reality were possible: Intruder in the Dust (racial discrimination in the rural South) and Abraham Polonksy’s Force of Evil (postwar rackets), and the following year his first hands-on production, William Wellman’s Battleground, an impressive war film with tour de force ensemble performances from Van Johnson, John Hodiak, Ricardo Montalban, James Whitmore, George Murphy and others.

Johnny Columbo (Gene Kelly) arrives back in New York City ready to deal to the Mafia one way or the other.

Black Hand, emerging shortly after, was a revelation to me in the performance of Gene Kelly among a number of intriguing elements contained in the film. A fixture at MGM since 1941 (excluding war service shortly after) at age 28, Kelly was of Pittsburgh Irish stock–arriving, according to his own testimony, “twenty pounds overweight and as strong as an ox.” When he was dressed up like Fred Astaire he still “looked like a truck driver.” So, with Fred Astaire the aristocratic dancer of Hollywood in top hat and tails, Kelly dressed in character, usually as a workman.

I’d seen him before in classic musicals of the mid Forties like Cover Girl with Rita Hayworth and Anchors Aweigh with Frank Sinatra; of the early Fifties in the iconic An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain and The Pirate; as a hearty, convincing swashbuckler–a particularly athletic D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers; even in a serious role in the dramatic wartime Cross of Lorraine.

Though I’ve since discovered he has been listed as 15th top actor ever in film by the American Film Institute, nothing had prepared me for how he pulled off this portrayal as a young New York Neapolitan (c.1900) caught up in the Comorra phenomenon imported from Napoli–as if born to it. Not only is perfect Italian speech intact, lithe movement and magnetic, brooding silences, but in this film he projects the macho, offhand persona of Sonny Corleone coming more than two decades later. At times the resemblance in mannerisms is so close I would be amazed if James Caan didn’t study Kelly’s performance before his Godfather role.

Gene Kelly -- a model for James Caan's Sonny Corleone?

Gene Kelly is Johnny Columbo, a law student torn between avenging his father’s murder within or outside the law. Also scoring high in the film are Teresa Celli as the hero’s ally and love interest, J. Carroll Naish as a dedicated local cop and mentor and Marc Lawrence as the elusive archvillain of the local Comorra. The urban sets, dating from the period, are dramatically set off by atmospheric lighting and (mostly) shadow. All aspects of treatment of the subject, down to casting, are spot on. It took just two weeks to shoot and, according to Kelly, took millions in profits around the world.

Though several contemporary reviewers gave Kelly his dramatic due for this one it’s a pity that few observers since have even mentioned Kelly’s dramatic ability. To posterity I suspect Kelly will always be what appears above the surface most often: the screen master of free-form creative dancing–the counterpart to Fred Astaire’s more formal rhythmic dance steps.

WARNER BROS DOUBLE FEATURE: MOVIE REVIEW

THE HIDDEN HAND (1942)

The curtain raiser of this Warners double feature of the war years — shown on the Turner Classic Movies Sky channel — is much like a glossy King of the Zombies (Monogram, 1941): a comedy horror full of mounting (and disappearing) bodies, revolving wall units and sparkling, unexpected wit and fast-paced fun of the kind you never expect in movies these days.

The whole premise is known from the outset as brother John (played hilariously by Milton Parsons) escapes from the lunatic asylum. The two bumbling cops tracking him play the game too, an argument settled by the sergeant with “Yeah, you’re just the guy who’d know where a lunatic would go!”

As adapted by Anthony Coldeway from a Rufus King play, directed by the studio’s B stalwart Ben Stoloff, lines are delivered fast and furious except when more careful timing is required for the special comedy bits. When crazy John Channing of the homicidally-inclined Channings turns up at his almost-as-eccentric sister Lorinda’s (Cecil Cunningham) mansion he approaches her bed full of intent, strangling hands outstretched. All stops in closeup as she opens her eyes, slowly comes to, and without blinking reproves him: “John!… Where have you been?”

He insists to her that he had to act mad in the asylum so he could be locked up “in a padded cell to get peace and quiet” away from the mad people. In escaping he hung a guard up in a tree: “It was fun… until he stopped moving… I suppose I shouldn’t have hung him up by the neck.”

There are no stars in this — Everyone is billed below the title in the opening credits. Top billed, who in their careers never progressed beyond starlets, are Craig Stevens, 24, better known from Fifties and Sixties television (especially as Peter Gunn); Elisabeth Fraser, 22, who peaked this year in the Columbia A-feature The Commandos Strike at Dawn with Paul Muni; and Julie Bishop, 28, who the year following this partnered Humphrey Bogart in Action in the North Atlantic and Errol Flynn in Northern Pursuit — both superstars, but in rather routine wartime flag-wavers so no breakthrough for her.

It’s the curse of the Channings, bumped off one by one as they await the bad news in the will of Lorinda, who’s faked her own death.

Willie Best in scared mode

With Milton Parsons and 54-year-old character actress Cecil Cunningham, comedy honors go too to Willie Best, doing an over-the-top black servant of the period, scared into bulging eyes and body tremors. One gem he delivers about the Japanese houseboy (Kam Tong) — this was released within a year of Pearl Harbor: “Just can’t trust them Japs.” But it’s a stereotyped role, not as satisfying as Mantan Moreland’s lead role as an uppity servant in King of the Zombies the year before this.

Overall, highly entertaining viewing.

THE SEA WOLF (1941)

This is the kind of medium-budget adventure Warners could slip into its schedule easily, without having to shell out the massive $two million required for the occasional extravaganzas starring Errol Flynn and Olivia DeHavilland — currently in They Died With Their Boots On, the story of General Custer and how the Mrs won, and lost, him. Still its stars, Edward G. Robinson, Ida Lupino and John Garfield, were well up the ladder at WB and outlay for their salaries alone would have accounted for a considerable portion of the budget. There is nothing flashy in the special effects or set departments — just enough to be thoroughly convincing without going overboard like so many boring blockbusters do today with ludicrous overkill. And the portrayals are top notch from all concerned.

Pug-ugly Robinson had been among the top flight of Hollywood stars in box-office popularity polls ten years earlier at the height of the gangster movie craze (Little Caesar, WB, 1930), which he ruled ahead of James Cagney long before Humphrey Bogart appeared on the scene, and was still highly paid in 1941 as an inimitable character star. He would leave the studio soon after this. John Garfield was an early method actor and graduate of New York City’s Group Theater — so an important onscreen figure but long before his time and accordingly under-appreciated compared with the smooth matinee idols who came along during World War II to take the places of established superstars who went into active service: if the likes of Joseph Cotten, Gregory Peck, Cornel Wilde, Van Johnson, Ray Milland, Fred MacMurray, etc, could ‘replace’ Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor and so on. Already a nominal star in Warner A-movies for three years and quickly listed in popularity polls, Garfield (Garfinkle) would never quite make the top twenty male draws though a fixture in the top thirty.

Similarly, Lupino, an iconic figure of film noir through the Forties, was never in big-budget movies to earn the superstar label. But she did go on to be one of fewer than a handful of females directing in the studio era. Of an illustrious English family of comedians, now at 27 (same age as Garfield) she was rising rapidly at Warners after arriving at Paramount eight years before as a bleached blonde. Now a hardnosed WB brunette, by High Sierra released early 1941 she was already billed above central character Humphrey Bogart. For Out of the Fog this same year she was paid $40,000 — impressive for a new star. A loanout to Columbia for atmospheric murder mystery Ladies in Retirement also boosted her.

Wolf Larsen (Edward G. Robinson) confronted by his crew

Lupino called herself the poor man’s Bette Davis, though that was really more applicable to the frequently mournful, over-emoting Susan Hayward at Twentieth Century-Fox a decade later. This was another period piece that was right up her alley — a gritty, dark tale from master storyteller Jack London. But as directed by Michael Curtiz it is fast-paced at the same time as being thoughtful, bearing no relation to the studio’s ponderous Thirties historical biographies such as The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Life of Emile Zola or Juarez – all of which, though praised in their time, came to weigh heavy on the career of thespian Paul Muni.

Garfield and Lupino are on the run (separately) from the law in fogbound San Francisco and in escaping find themselves in far more desperate straits on Wolf Larsen’s (Robinson) small sailing vessel — in business stealing seal pelts from genuine sealers. Larsen is so universally feared and hated that his own brother has sworn to send him to the bottom of the sea, and almost succeeds by ramming him broadside.

How will the crew, made up of press-ganged innocents and seasoned cutthroats, fare?

The featured cast includes Canadian-born Alexander Knox as cultured writer van Weyden, struggling through to maintain his integrity, and professional Hollywood Irishman Barry Fitzgerald as Cooky, Larsen’s stoolie and betrayed by him to be thrown overboard and lose a leg to a shark. Both are consummate screen performers and go on to fleeting stardom in 1944, via Wilson and Going My Way respectively.

Do young but disillusioned Garfield and Lupino find each other, or are they doomed?

Movie Review: Night Must Fall (MGM, 1937)

It’s been said by at least one film historian that by the end of the Thirties the technique of making talking motion pictures had been mastered and made into a new art form, with virtually all of its salient aspects having been explored and employed to utmost effect within that short period. The achievement encompassed in those first ten years after the demise of Silents absolutely dwarfs the so-called ‘progress’ in film in the further twenty years up to the collapse of the Studio Era, and throws into abject shame the backwards direction taken by the industry in the half-century since then — ever accelerating since George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and their many mini-clones in James Cameron, Peter Jackson and so on.

With special effects alone becoming ever more ’sophisticated’ but looking all the more unrealistic on screen, we must be just a few short steps from Alfred Hitchcock’s prediction: We enter a private chamber, the logical conclusion moving on from largely deserted, sterile multiplexes. We get wired up, and feel whatever shocks we prefer for the moment to whatever centers of the brain that turn us on, in vain attempts to get what passes for a satisfying entertainment experience today. The bar has risen so high technically, and dropped so low emotionally and artistically — so far below everyday human relations — that staying home for a good wank must surely be the higher human aspiration. All the better if you can get another to participate, never mind a lot cheaper.

Every now and again a true lover of human drama gets to revive his spirit through seeing a film made with some thought and imagination. It’s usually several generations old, and shown on pay television in the dead of night when few are watching. As far as I’m concerned, all the better for this exclusive experience — let the sheep go where they may, with the flow.

Originally a hit London and Broadway play written by and starring Welsh actor Emlyn Williams, this screenplay was adapted by London-born John Van Druten; a year after it was released on screen he was drafted in by David Selznick to improve the script of Gone With the Wind. A movie set and filmed in England under the UK branch of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Night Must Fall was produced by Hollywood staffer Hunt Stromberg and directed by Richard Thorpe. By all accounts Thorpe was no more than an efficient workman, so credit for the fine ‘look’ of this picture must go to veteran cinematographer Ray June and its sound to prolific MGM composer Edward Ward.

Also from the studio’s Hollywood staff came stars Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell. Homegrown stars remaining in Britain provided only a weak draw at the box-office, even at home theaters. It was believed that all the screen talent Britain had to offer was already in Hollywood: the likes of matinee idol Ronald Colman, admired thespian Charles Laughton, elder statesman George Arliss, child star Freddie Bartholomew, highest-paid Brit femme Madeleine Carroll, and Charlie Chaplin persevering with new silents at the rate of one every five years.

Publicity shot of the star taken for Night Must Fall (1937)

Yet in America, Robert Montgomery was no longer at the peak of popularity as he had been as a youth in 1929-30, and Rosalind Russell was still on the way up. So, with an English setting and including a sterling but very English cast in Dame May Whitty, Kathleen Harrison, Merle Tottenham, Alan Marshal, E. E. Clive and Beryl Mercer, the film was panned by your typical know-nothing film critic of the time (and they still rule the media). Variety had it that the movie was slow and dull. Studio head Louis B. Mayer disowned it. What better compliments can a film hope for? Naturally, over the decades since it has been greatly appreciated as a ’sleeper’ — a film with a relatively small budget, that was never supposed to be a hit, was largely condemned at release, and has proven all the better quality for that.

The striking aspect of the movie for me, which makes it so much worthier than virtually any modern film in general release, is its basis in ‘pure film’. Techniques in film language commonly used then are used with flair: sustained close-ups, long-distance panning shots, deep-focus group shots to contrast motives. The constant play of light and shadow over all indicates mood, heightens suspense and literally illuminates good and evil subconsciously to the audience. Nowhere is the gratuitous crushed skulls with flying gore and blood-spattering so necessary to get the message across to today’s clueless audiences. And gone, over generations, is the magic of film.

The action opens with a man walking his dog at night on the edge of a forest, and almost stumbling on to another man who whistles a merry tune but seems to be on the ground rustling in the fallen leaves — It later turns out he is covering up a body. In the next scene, morning, all is drenched in sunshine (a motif repeated throughout), suggesting that everyday life goes on regardless of dark undertones in this sleepy village — its inhabitants blissfully unaware, maybe not wanting to know.

A woman is missing in the village, and first to show real insight into her likely fate is the lowly paid, spinster companion (bachelorette is hardly appropriate — she wears hornrim glasses, a dead giveaway in film shorthand) of domineering dowager May Whitty, played by Ros Russell. She is incidentally the old lady’s niece and we learn how resentful she is of her aunt’s manipulative hypochondria, as she pretends wheelchair-bound helplessness. But Ros is seriously emotionally repressed, repeatedly rebuffing the affectionate advances of supportive solicitor (lawyer) Alan Marshal.

He is far too polite, nice to the core. Ros yearns for excitement and danger in her life. This must be why, though she very early suspects a new employee on the scene (Robert Montgomery), an obvious go-getting self-advancer, of being homicidal, that she colludes with him to win the old lady’s favor. She is strongly attracted to him. The mood gradually becomes more sombre as Ros neglects her self-indulgent, spoilt aunt, inviting danger into the home in the person of the suspicious stranger who ingratiates his way to be the lady’s trusted ’support’.

Ros sums up ‘Danny’: “You have no feelings. You live in a world of your own — of your own imagination.” Thus defining a sociopath, no matter to her. She collaborates with him in winning over her aunt: He spend’s a week’s wages on a shawl and presents it to the old lady as his dear departed mother’s. Just in time, Ros removes the price tag and Danny knows he has her in the palm of his hand too.

Curiosity about her loved one getting the better of her, Ros, the cook (Kathleen Harrison, playing wryly humorous in the kind of role that Thelma Ritter later made her own in Hollywood), and maid, Merle Tottenham, playing dithering and emptyheaded, supposed to be Danny’s intended, search his room thoroughly. They find evidence of a double life but he walks in on them before they can open his suspicious hatbox — just big enough for a severed head, they think.

Despite this, when the police detective calls round and is about to call Danny on the hatbox, Ros claims it as hers — thereby providing his escape route to continue murdering. He has already spied the old lady putting money in her secret hideaway. For the second time Ros goes to seek reassurance from her frustrated suitor and turns back — conveniently away long enough for Danny to strangle Mrs Bransom. She returns, she tells him, to find him out — but has no regrets that her aunt is dead. Suitor and police walk in in time to save the ever-ambivalent Ros.

While this film treatment could be called Hitchcockian in its view of the charming but murderous sociopath and annoying old ladies, it departs from the pattern of blameless beautiful woman as intended victim. Rosalind Russell plays here a woman who cooperates fully in the danger she is enmeshed in, and herself is seemingly oblivious or careless of others’ feelings as she focuses wholly on fulfilling her own fantasies.

Movie Review: Homecoming (MGM, 1948)

It is long past time that some neglected classic films were revisited and rehabilitated to their proper place — including this one. Having previously been put off by existing reviews of this old ‘women’s picture’ by high-priced professionals who go with the flow, late last night I was pinned to the armchair for the duration by Feline, Lucy and Tiger in a phalanx and so watched it right through for the first time on the Turner Sky channel. Imagine my happy surprise as an unpleasant duty as a reviewer slowly turned into a riveting experience. I found it, against all expectations, to be a very moving film — far from the manipulative tearjerkers tugging every heart-string with multi-G force that were put out in the studio era.

From the preeminent studio of the day, MGM, it was a rare exception at the glossy factory where as a rule output was geared to appeal to all-American sensibilities: in its genuine, low-key treatment of serious subjects, namely life priorities, wartime relationships and wartime separation. The director, Mervyn LeRoy, had been one of the Warner Bros hard-hitting armory of moviemakers plucking their stories from current headlines, often about gangsters and sometimes urging societal reform. Among his were classics Little Caesar (1930) and I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932). At the end of the Thirties he was lured by a huge pay hike and producer status to make the move and there followed a series of unabashed but effective wartime weepies including Blossoms in the Dust, Random Harvest and Madame Curie (1941-43) starring stiff-upper-lip Brit stars Greer Garson and Ronald Colman or upper-crust trans-Atlantic patrician Walter Pidgeon. This pool of talent was able to create a whole generation of trembling-lower-lip working moms in America and continue through the war with easily palatable sentiment served thick on a silver platter: not much was seen of real war or real people.

Which makes it all the more satisfying that this director turned around to make something genuine about war. Maybe most surprising of all was the fact that what made the movie was the performances of the four principals, Clark Gable, Lana Turner, Anne Baxter and John Hodiak, especially those of the two superstars heading the cast — who from their own time until now have been treated by movie reviewers and historians of all shades as lightweight “star” performers relying on their own personalities to purvey a strong screen presence rather than any acting ability they might (or might not) have.

In 1948 Gable was 47 and still the slim, trim figure and was as full of testosterone as ever. (In his fifties he would age rapidly, like the other male screen icons born within a year either side of 1900, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney — all roughing it without the aid of botox and casual cosmetic surgery undertaken today.) From what I have seen of Gable, and that includes more than thirty films stretching thirty years from 1931, this is one of his absolutely top-flight acting jobs, probably better than in Gone With the Wind, The Misfits or his Oscar-winning performance in It Happened One Night.

Yet this film is condemned by Leonard Maltin (Is this guy someone’s nephew?) as “dreary drama” and “one of Gable’s lesser efforts”. Is that because he doesn’t do as much huffing and puffing as Schwarzenegger or Stallone, or as much stony grimacing as Harrison Ford, or sweat and twitch like Anthony Hopkins or James Woods?

Portraying a social-climbing surgeon who enters the war indifferent to the strife of the wider world but is transformed into a genuinely compassionate well-rounded person, every nuance of human expression plays subtly across Gable’s face. (But not so subtly as to deliver an anonymous non-performance lacking any human impact at all, as do most of today’s “stars”.) His timing is natural and flawless — a true phenomenon and at least the equal to that of the screen’s finest comedians. See the extended bathing scene, where as a dignified middle-aged professional proud of his position in society, he is bashful even out of eyesight of earthy nurse Lana Turner’s nudity. Most satisfying of all, there was none of that sly-winking on-screen ‘fun’ where you can see Hollywood’s in-group stars smirking at how cute they are: Tracy and Hepburn in Adam’s Rib, Crosby and Hope in the Road series, the Rat Pack in Ocean’s Eleven and numerous others. The modern Ocean’s 11, 12, 13… are made, I think, so fans can see George Clooney’s, Brad Pitt’s and Matt Damon’s sparkling smiles, and Julia Roberts’ sultry sulk. All on screen in Homecoming are dedicated to contributing — making a good picture even better in whatever way they can.

Possibly the biggest surprise to me was the pitch-perfect acting of Lana Turner, at the pinnacle of her popularity here but trivialized by commentators as “The Sweater Girl” since her first movie 11 years before, for her jiggling scene walking down the street and observed by a predator in They Won’t Forget (WB). In an age supposedly limited by its “personality” performers, it strikes me that there is a greater range of realistic characterization shown by Lana between this role and her seductress in The Postman Always Rings Twice, than say, Meryl Streep in any two of her roles, which depend mainly on a switch of accent and arching of eyebrows. Lana was just 27 here but within ten years was playing middle-aged momish glamor in ‘Peyton Place’ and other glossy soap operas.

The first time I realised that Anne Baxter was capable of more than variations of Moses’ overheated temptress in ‘The Ten Commandments’ was with her natural, totally convincing playing in the western Yellow Sky (1949) and Hitchcock’s I Confess (1952). In this women’s picture she is a callow but single-minded society wife transformed by war separation into someone capable of enduring patience and understanding. John Hodiak too shows a wide departure from his more frequent hard-bitten roles in the likes of Lifeboat (1944) and Battleground (1949) as an earnest grassroots doctor working in the slums, initially infuriated by his friend Gable’s complacency.

Given the fact that this was a “women’s picture”, pivoting on wife Anne Baxter’s needy devotion and Lana Turner’s knowing desire despite the doctor’s faults, the film has been put down simply for that — Gable supposedly coming off second best or wasted. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whether under LeRoy’s direction or not, Gable’s powerful manhood is intact throughout and his change into a guy who’s had the stuffing knocked out of him by war and love lost is portrayed brilliantly.

See also my forthcoming article ‘WHAT IS ACTING?’

SCREEN HEROES: THE MOUNT RUSHMORE FOUR

If there are four screen stars with the granite jaws and steely gazes worthy of replacing the presidents’ faces on Mount Rushmore, they are those who rose as actor-producers in the immediate post-World War II era and projected themselves as larger-than-life characters on screen: Gregory Peck, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston.

Gregory Peck

[caption id="attachment_95" align="alignright" width="235" caption="Charlton Heston"][/caption]

Burt Lancaster

[caption id="attachment_97" align="alignright" width="234" caption="Kirk Douglas"][/caption]In their time and for long afterwards they were derided by critical cognoscenti for not being the same type of actor as Olivier or Laughton or Muni, totally losing themselves in their roles. I’ve come to agree with Bette Davis, who, remarking on her Warner Bros studio-mate Paul Muni, regretted that he submerged himself so far into his role that there was little real flesh and blood showing on the screen. Spencer Tracy, if not Fredric March, might have lent something to them — though he too was too much of a thespian and boozer to be a producer. Brando, too, in the end, thought little of his craft, dabbling in directing often to the detriment of his films, and bent as he was on being an activist.

The Rushmore Four were also liberal activists in their day, even Charlton Heston — sticking his neck out for others’ civil rights, like Burt Lancaster, on protest marches. Gregory Peck, particularly after he gained civil-rights iconic status through To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), was near the top of Nixon’s dirty tricks hitlist. As far as acting went, the Four were plenty disciplined enough (unlike Brando) and convincing enough to carry the central role in at least a hundred major films between them from 1945 to say, 1975, though the flow had thinned out considerably over the last decade.

Though all could be relied on best to project virility effortlessly on screen — something hardly captured by the Arnies and Sylvesters with all their huffing and puffing, in their biggest, pumped-up bodies — Burt and Kirk were from the start capable of considerable subtlety of emotion along with the naked power, and Gregory and Chuck improved with age. Burt (The Killers, 1946) and Kirk (Champion, 1949) were both launched to stardom at age 33. Greg and Chuck made it at 27 — vi Days of Glory (1944) and Dark City (1950) respectively, though a little less convincingly. None had difficulty filling the screen from the outset — better than say, contemporaries Richard Widmark, who just misses this bunch, with Robert Mitchum, missing only for reasons of lackadaisical anti-heroism — but only two of them made the annual top 10 box-office stars lists, and only twice each, Greg and Burt. Kirk and Charlton narrowly missed the honors list several times, as did Widmark and Mitchum. Sure there was more, and hotter, competition for places in those days. But there also wasn’t the all-fired rush for bigger blockbusters every time. Many of their films were actually made to be personally uplifting. Also, for whatever reason, in recent decades the Harrison Fords, Sylvester Stallones, Arnold Schwarzeneggers, Chuck Norrises, Samuel L Jacksons and Jackie Chans have been named top box-office draws when special effects afficionados would go along to see a trained chimp in their roles.

As far as their acting went, some of their roles have rarely been surpassed: Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life (1956) as Vincent Van Gogh and as the disillusioned colonel in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1958). Lancaster, after a swashbuckling period — The Flame and the Arrow (1950), The Crimson Pirate (1952) — applied himself to as versatile an oeuvre as Brando, including such classics as Elmer Gantry (1960) and The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). Watching him recently in Run Silent, Run Deep, up against the old warhorse Clark Gable, admittedly twenty years past his prime, Lancaster came across as fine — sensitive and subtle. Surely, adding that same year his frightening portrayal of abuse of power in The Sweet Smell of Success and of sexual frustration (pursued by Rita Hayworth at her most alluring) in Separate Tables gave him the acting honors for 1958. All of them infuriated a certain type of critic at one time or another — Peck especially for Captain Ahab in Moby Dick and evil Dr Mengele in The Boys from Brazil, “boring” or inert in other roles; Heston for being irredeemably dignified and monumental — as if he could be anything else in his best, most demanding roles; Lancaster for not being “method” enough to need a therapist — so definitely not the actor’s actor in the Fifties; Douglas, though more “method” and facile in displaying feelings, still too much of a hunk to please other, generally weedy actors.

Burt was an acrobat pre-acting, Kirk a professional wrestler, and Greg and Chuck similarly athletic. That by itself is enough in most circles to consign them to the monosyllabic Action Man category and disqualify them from serious artistic consideration today, when slightly built, androgynous Johnnny Depps, Brad Pitts, Matt Damons and Leonardo DiCaprios rule.

All four retreated to rather routine westerns in the latter 1960s to extend their commercial lives — and all were better for their presence. All boasted marriage partnerships of extraordinary duration, especially where Hollywood is concerned. And all lived at least into their mid-eighties, Douglas still going at 92, again maybe reflecting outstanding professionalism and discipline.

CHARLTON HESTON: AMERICAN ICON

Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur in William Wyler's film

The death of Charlton Heston two days ago at age 84 has once again brought out all the termites from the woodwork — those who think Anna Nicole Smith and Marilyn Monroe were equals in popular culture, and who feed on the downfall of Anna and great individuals just the same. Uppermost in reporters’ obituaries are a still of Heston as Moses parting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments (1956) — as if to imply Heston thought he personally had that power — his suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, and the fact that, in later life, he blotted his liberal copybook as head of the National Rifle Association. It’s hardly a unique failing for a star actor to believe they have superior abilities in other directions — Ronald Reagan, Shirley Maclaine, Arnie Schwarzennegger, to name a few — so I will concentrate on Heston’s legacy in the main event of his life.

At the height of his career from 1956 to 1968 he was the foremost screen figure in historical roles. It is hard to believe that he was something of a fluke for his role as Moses. From his mid-twenties he had played such demanding epic roles as Marc Antony, Andrew Jackson and Buffalo Bill. And Cecil B DeMille himself had used him as the central figure in the contemporary blockbuster The Greatest Show On Earth (1952). For Ben Hur (1959), made by William Wyler for MGM, Heston was some way down the list in line for the role, behind Burt Lancaster and Marlon Brando and one or two others. But it is hard to picture now anyone but Heston as the modern Ben Hur.

Kirk Douglas made good attempts to impinge on Heston’s historical epic territory with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Ulysses (both 1955), The Vikings (1958) and Spartacus (1960); Gregory Peck with David and Bathsheba (1951), Moby Dick (1956), The Guns of Navarone (1961) and a few other more tame costumers; Burt Lancaster the same. But The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur each set spectacular box-office records — the only films to even approach Gone With the Wind in earnings in the twenty years since.

Chuck went on in El Cid (1961) and 55 Days at Peking (1963) and then when overblown costume epics suddenly stopped returning their massive outlay — as with Cleopatra and, spectacularly, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) — one star carried on unaffected, still drawing crowds into The Greatest Story Ever Told as John the Baptist, The Agony and the Ecstasy as Michelangelo, The Warlord (all 1965), Khartoum (1966) as General Gordon, and of course Planet of the Apes (1968) as a futuristic hero of the human race.

Most of these films he carried by himself as sole box-office draw, and along the way out-acted such prestigious names as Laurence Olivier. Yet, never once did he appear in the annual top 10 box-office stars lists. This fact is incomprehensible in an age when Samuel L jackson can claim to be all-time box-office champion by virtue of appearing in some of the biggest box-office takers in history through an era of outlandish prices — even though unrecognizable in Star Wars and others.

It has been said by film historians that he was not overly popular with audiences because his portrayals were impersonal, not intimate enough to engage the viewers on a deeply personal level. If this is so, it is my guess they were suitably awestruck by the fact that Heston appeared to be whatever monumental figure he was playing and certain didn’t need — or wheedle for — audience sympathy in the way that ‘great’ actors like Brando, Olivier and Laughton did.

Clint Eastwood, American Hero: Happy 50th Anniversary!

Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, directed by Don Siegel (1971)

Let me be the first to congratulate Clint Eastwood for reaching fifty years as a star. At least, 1958 marked his first appearance in a featured/ensemble role, in Lafayette Escadrille, about the famous flying squadron, alongside Tab Hunter, David Janssen and Darren McGavin. It was only a moderate attraction considering it was directed by that air-ace movie expert William Wellman. But Clint seems to have taken it to heart because for the fifty years since he’s specialised in man’s-man movies with women used as not much more than decoration at best, often as rape fodder. I get the idea he made The Bridges of Madison County just so he could finally win the women over.

There’s no doubt in my mind that, along the way, he superseded the all-American hero that Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, James Stewart and John Wayne once represented. All of them had other strings to their bows of course, Cooper being the most limited in range; I’ve never seen him in a comedic role. Clint, apart from a couple of ape-slapstick movies, the same. Clint’s first starring role on tv, Rawhide, which began screening in the New Year of 1959, had some whimsical moments. Mainly, as the ramrod of the trail drive, he was a tough guy again. And when he became a full-fledged star in 1967, on the big screen, via the “Man With No Name” trilogy — A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, he represented the all-American for a totally new generation where most of the time it was hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Gable and Coop were dead, Fonda and Stewart semi-retired, the Duke at 60 still active but slowing down. The new generation of Kennedy-King survivors were anarchists thriving on (on-screen) violence, taking over from disillusioned peace-lovers — who probably weren’t moviegoers anyway, judging from box-office results.

My favorite Clint period must be his first decade, where he showed as much variety as he was capable of, before narrowing his focus down to what might be called “The Clint Eastwood Genre”; Sylvester Stallone and then Arnie Schwarzenegger further focused down to an ‘action’ formula that would infect Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford, even Anthony Hopkins among many others. Following on from his opening western series, Clint did war movies Where Eagles Dare and Kelly’s Heroes, the musical Paint Your Wagon — not as bad as it’s made out to be — and created the classic character Dirty Harry. Play Misty for Me and The Eiger Sanction were interesting and showed more variety, but his cowboys got ever nastier — Joe Kidd, High Plains Drifter — until the reformed outlaw, Josey Wales. For me this picture did what Unforgiven (1992) was hailed for doing, more artificially, sixteen years later. Here Clint plays a reformed gunfighter, a conspicuous man of peace, who in the last five minutes of screen time reverts to the Clint we all know, blazing away indiscriminantly with his six-guns: “Killed most anything that walked or crawled, one time or another…”

In between, amid a lot of dross, came the engrossing Escape from Alcatraz (1979), another of his best directed by Don Siegel, and spy thrillerFirefox (1982), almost as good in a low-key way. Toward the end of that decade he worked his way more into direction (Bird, etc).

This brings us to In the Line of Fire following up Unforgiven, when Clint was 63. This week must be the fourth time I’ve watched it on tv. Written by Jeff Maguire, it always seemed to me a well-plotted thriller with all the necessary suspense, etc, but only now am I grasping its underlying message, which is none too inspiring. And I would dispute Leonard Maltin’s assertion that Eastwood has never been better. As far as the theme goes, it makes a hero of a pretty dumb guy, despite his conspicuous jazz snobbery and ability tickling the ivories. I think the lesson of the movie is that you can bumble your way through life (he loses his wife and daughter) and your career (apparently in thirty years in the Secret Service he has never rated a promotion) and still qualify as an all-American hero. Throughout, he is pathetically led by the nose by the villain Mitch Leary, a.k.a. “Booth” played by John Malkovich; bullies his young partner (Dylan McDermott) to stay on the force through serious panic attacks and ends up directly responsible for his death; and despite being an obnoxious old fart wins the knockout gorgeous woman as usual — in this case Rene Russo, an exception in being only one generation adrift from Clint’s age.

It helps that his boss is his buddy (John Mahoney) and has saved his ass a hundred times from being terminated from the Secret Service since bungling his first big assignment: protecting JFK in the motorcade at Dallas. Never mind, despite the fact that there are “229″ people guarding the president at a banquet, Clint and girlfriend Rene are somehow at the center of things, barking orders at everyone in sight to ensure the president is saved. Clint also pulls through, unlike genius “Booth”. I can’t help thinking this is a movie deliberately contrived for a male audience that might vote in a dumb president because he is the one they “would most like to have a beer with”, even though someone as unexciting as genuine war hero cum intellectual John Kerry slaughtered him in a series of tv debates on the issues. Is it an accident that the genius is a paranoid, homicidal maniac and the hero a dumb, ordinary screw-up? Even catching a glimpse of his own personal file at some stage — Clint calls himself “a borderline burnout with questionable social skills” — doesn’t give him any insight into himself. Somehow, Clint’s character, Frank Corrigan, in his mid-fifties, the age he is playing, retains his professional confidence fully intact, even overblown to the point of arrogance; to say nothing of his sexual confidence, able to draw much younger women though coming out with some juvenile lines of sexual innuendo.

It only got better for Clint in the sex department at the end of the millennium, as he crowded seventy. I once did a review of a movie from 1999 where he seemed to have stepped into a Brad Pitt role that Clint had to take over at the last minute — an alcoholic this time, a full burnout, having lost his wife and child again, but showing off saggy abs and having nubile 23-year-olds falling all over him. I’ll have to dig it up some time.

Women’s Liberation in the Movies

No, I’m not talking about this era of the new millennium — when women movie stars are only superstars in magazines. I’m defining the era of more freedom in the media for women from the time commercial movies began. Men from all over the world had contributed to the invention and technical development of filmmaking apparatus, only for women to grab a bigger and bigger slice of the cake once it was obvious “The Movies” were turning into big business.

From the start, some of the most admired and successful screenwriters — Frances Marion, Jeanie Mcpherson, Anita Loos — and particularly starring actors, were female. In America, from 1910, Florence Turner and Florence Lawrence were as popular as any male star of the day, and from 1914-15, Mary Pickford, Pearl White and Theda Bara more so. Their equivalents in Europe were international superstars the androgynous, “mannish” looking Asta Nielsen who would play Hamlet, and Francesca Bertini, so seductively feminine she had perfume and fashions named after her from Paris to Tokyo. In 1913 a film starring 60-year-old French stage veteran “The Divine” Sarah Bernhardt, circulating the United States, made so much money it allowed Adolph Zukor to found Paramount Pictures — proving it was not just the “cheesecake” angle that was successful.

Gene Gauntier

At that period too, beginning before the First World War, Gene Gauntier of the Kalem studio was a combination of highly paid star and screenwriter, while Lois Weber at Universal was among the highest paid directors and producers — and usually starred in her films — moreover specialising in ‘modern’ women’s issues such as abortion and white slavery as her subjects. Alice Guy, head of production at France’s highly prolific and prestigious Gaumont, had formed the template at the turn of the century for such ‘behind the scenes’ women. Later in the US she started the Solax production company, admired for its high standards. But somehow, apart from directing the whole scenario as a screenwriter, not being able to show off in front of the camera didn’t appeal to most women attracted to showbiz.

The popularity of women on screen overtook that of men in the late Twenties and peaked through the Thirties. By the mid-Twenties, Mary Pickford, Norma Talmadge and Gloria Swanson were all on contracts guaranteeing them a million dollars a year; Barbara LaMarr and Colleen Moore similarly averaging $250,000 a film — equivalent to a great deal more than Elizabeth Taylor’s million-dollar fee in 1962, and considering there was then virtually no income tax to pay, probably more than Julia Roberts got at her peak.

La Talmadge: bigger at the box-office than Pickford or Swanson through the last six years of silents, 1923-28

Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich were the only stars to sustain these rewards into the Depression years, when austerity measures were introduced and even screen stars were taxed much more. The biggest box-office draw of the early Thirties, bar none, was the extremely homely, elderly Marie Dressler — a union activist in the movie industry and boasting a great comedic talent: everything but cheesecake. Behind her was sweet’n'wholesome Janet Gaynor, who necessarily adopted a policy of tight secrecy about her sexuality, succeeded by Shirley Temple at the very top through the rest of the Thirties. Other top female stars made appearances at the top of the pay heap through the decade: staunch capitalist Corinne Griffith, socialite Constance Bennett, Mae West, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, and into the Forties, Bette Davis, Deanna Durbin, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck and Ginger Rogers.

Money is power, and I needn’t belabor the point here that women have always been at least as adept as men at wielding any power that comes their way. Unfortunately, beginning around 1938, certain powers in the movie industry made sure that particularly independent-minded female stars like Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Mae West, Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn were tarred and feathered as “box-office poison”. All were ‘run out of town’, dead or drastically demoted in the industry. Only Hepburn, Crawford and Dietrich survived at all — because able to reinvent themselves at other studios. And it has never been remotely the same ever since for Hollywood women as far as the power game goes. Sure, more women are directors these days but that isn’t where the power lies.

Movie Review: ‘Love from a Stranger’ (1936)

Ann Harding in her young prime, c.1929

This is another of those old movies with a lot of things wrong with them but is still interesting enough to tempt me to stay up till 2.30am watching it on tv. I’d never seen it, or heard of it, but I was particularly fascinated because I’d never seen Ann Harding on screen before. I was unsure at first and thought it might be the English actress of the same name; she was using that popular trans-Atlantic accent required from ‘lady’ stars of the time who were trained to enunciate like English women born to the manor: Ruth Chatterton, Kay Francis, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn… She looked like the American star physically but surely there was something missing.

But no, this Ann Harding was the American superstar of very early talkies. A top attraction from 1929, her pay rate from the RKO-Pathe studio in 1933 was $9,000 a week — in all the Hollywood starlight behind only Will Rogers, Greta Garbo and John Gilbert second equal, Maurice Chevalier and Ruth Chatterton. Like Chatterton, Nancy Carroll, Elissa Landi and several other stellar women of the time, she was stereotyped in “women’s pictures” and quickly lost popularity.

This film was made in England by lower case company Trafalgar but had the supposed advantages of the American star — even one on the slide rated higher box-office than most top English ones — as well as a prestigious American screen writer and director. Before looking it up I couldn’t place it in time and guessed it must be around 1931, even ‘30; there was something primitive about the staging, even the lighting. And the directing was so unimaginative and static I thought it must have been made during that short phase on the introduction of talkies when filmmakers were still getting used to audio technology. And the director? — Rowland V. Lee, who if I recall correctly was the estranged husband of comedic blonde beauty Thelma Todd, murdered in mysterious circumstances less than two years before. Luckily the ingenious plotting and imaginative dialogue of Frances Marion, by this time a legendary screen writer for a quarter century, made up for it.

Certainly by now, though just 35, the gloss seemed to have gone off Ann. In the “Golden Era of Movies” around this age was considered the declining phase for screen females — unless you were Shirley Temple, then it was 10. At 38, Joan Crawford was dumped by MGM, and at 40 Bette Davis was playing middle aged in every sense. Even the thought of a sexually active 50-year-old in the mold of Jessica Lange, Ellen Barkin or Pam Grier — if it ever even occurred to any male mogul in Hollywood at the time — would have been considered outright disgusting. From earlier photos, Ann was highly attractive, with a luminous presence. A sedate and dignified blonde — a species totally extinct on screen since the Thirties.

Rathbone, the master villain, in costume in 1936

Here she might have been deliberately unglamorised to make believable for the role of a woman (on the wrong side of thirty and in danger of being left on the shelf!) duped into love by a charming roue. Her leading man was Basil Rathbone, looking her match aged 44, years before he got into his famous Sherlock Holmes series that sustained him another decade. He had been a much sought-after leading man early in the decade for the screen’s leading divas, and was now in his period as the best costume villain on screen, usually trying to foil Errol Flynn, in Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Mark of Zorro and so on.

The plot has it that after winning a lottery she dumps, after a minor spat, her long-time boyfriend — one of those teddibly, teddibly civilized, dependable Nigels or Lionels of the day who admirably played the doormat once shat upon. When she springs the news on him, in Basil Rathbone’s presence, that she’s thrown him over, he later apologizes for how he reacted, having left the room dumbfounded in the circumstances. Of course, he hangs around for the rest of the movie trying to keep her from harm. Neither her faithful sidekick (Binnie Hale) or boyfriend (Bruce Seton) can talk any sense into her. She even writes off the ex-boyfriend as a jealous cad interfering with her new-found but illusory happiness. Note that the template of the independent, wilfully self-absorbed female, totally lacking in judgment between male characters (or rather, deluding herself over her own motives), was not new in the Nineties.

As these things tend to go in real life — and remember this is written by a woman, and from an Agatha Christie story — the heroine’s love has been won by an unmitigated bounder and disreputable rotter rolled into one. It turns out several of his ex-wives are no more and he is quite a celebrated case, so much so that there are books about him floating around. Somehow the heroine doesn’t recognize him from the photo and anyway she only starts to object when he raises his hand to her.

The acting in the denouement is fairly ripe but expertly done, and incredibly subtle by today’s standards — where the actor-automatons just scrunch their faces up in unadulterated fury and beat the shit out of each other. The psychiatry here isn’t even half right — as usual mixing up psychotic and psychopathic characteristics — but that’s entertainment?! Not for the Arnie/Sly Stallone/Harrison Ford crowd or other special effects and pyrotechnics lovers.

Ethnic Humor: A Tribute to Mantan Moreland

Mantan Moreland at bottom right

Last night I sat up for one of those midnight Z-movies I usually expect to help me catch some z’s long before the end. It was King of the Zombies, made in 1941 by Poverty Row’s underfunded Monogram Pictures and released six months before Pearl Harbor, so just qualifying as pre-War. Looking it up later on the IMDb movie website I saw that the humorous side of the horror was provided by Mantan Moreland — a name I’d seen under supporting cast credits in movie books before but without knowing anything about who he was.

This guy was an all-out riot and virtually made the film, especially but not solely in his verbal sparring with Marguerite Whitten. She called him “Honey Lamb” and other endearments while he was mainly interested in how well she could cook. A highly amusing and imaginative courtship this was. Moreland showed perfect timing and delivery of a line that spelt TALENT with a capital T-A-L-E-N-T. So it was with considerable disgust welling up in my gorge that I read the IMDb entry on him, containing a long commentary virtually apologizing for his existence. The patronising implication was that Moreland was a poor dupe of a vaudeville entertainer for the white folks in his early career (he was 40 when this movie was made) but after the arrival of modern, enlightened souls like Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor, did his best to make up for past sins before his death. What a load of crap! This kind of slimy, condescending backhanded pity from an ignoramus sticks in my gizzard. Talent alone is what makes a movie special, and performing so-called ethnic humor is a field perhaps more demanding than any other. Even –especially! — if it’s your own ethnicity.

If you doubt this, take a look at Tortilla Flat, based on the story by literary titan John Steinbeck and made the same year with all the most expensive talent of gigantic MGM at its command. I watched it today, in daylight hours. It was directed by Victor Fleming, he of The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, and starred acting heavyweights Spencer Tracy and John Garfield among others. By the way, should the original Hispanic settlers of the Monterey area feel grossly insulted on ethnic grounds that Tracy and Allen Jenkins (both with Irish roots), Garfield (Jewish), Hedy Lamarr (Austrian), John Qualen (Norwegian), Akim Tamiroff (Russian) even attempted portrayals of individuals from a foreign culture? To my mind, only veterans Frank Morgan and Henry O’Neill in relatively minor roles came away with much credit. Overall the casting, seen today, is fatal; Tracy in particular sounds like he had studied for the accent under Chico Marx. But they can get away with it because viewers who don’t know any better don’t care anyway; and those who do mostly shrug it off assuming it’s a sincere attempt at a worthy Steinbeck work. To think that probably a dozen genuinely entertaining flicks could have been made by Monogram or Mascot with the dough MGM blew on this!

Comparing the two films, and Moreland and Whitten with their fellow cast members I could see no way that they had demeaned their race by their sparkling performances. In fact, I strongly suspect their modern critics guilty of a craven cultural cringe. Comparing their sheer screen presence and talent with the Caucasian principals in the cast — Dick Purcell and John Archer — no genuine person of taste and discernment would believe they hadn’t swept the floor with them, the genuinely talented Joan Woodbury excepted. Political activists must deal with their own sense of shame and not project it on to artists such as Moreland and Whitten. King of the Zombies was rewritten and directed by Jean Yarbrough with the necessary quickie imperatives, but this tended to only add to the humor. For example, towards the end, “Mac”, the Dick Purcell character, stops four bullets at point blank range from the zombie master (Henry Victor). Then when John Archer is asked how Mac is, he answers fine “but those bullet holes didn’t do him much good.” It all made for an expertly done, hilarious romp that you don’t even see approached anymore.

Review: ‘The Fugitive’ (1993)

Last night I watched the movie version of ‘The Fugitive’ on television — and for the first time right through. I’d always thought of it as one of those far-fetched Harrison Ford actioners, if not quite as outlandish as ‘Air Force One’. Now I see it is really Tommy Lee Jones, the Fugitive’s nemesis, who dominates.

It’s inevitable with all these remakes that we compare them to the originals. This one, as with what seems like at least ninety percent of the others, falls short. That’s despite the creator of the tv series, Roy Huggins, being executive producer. I have to admit a bias here, if that’s what it is. I could always identify with David Janssen’s special hurt furtiveness he brought to the role of Dr Richard Kimble, persecuted daily by the justice system and law enforcement officers, reliant on the kindness of strangers, etc… As well as his usual mannerisms — so well known at the time because ‘The Fugitive’ was the second of Janssen’s four distinctive series that I can remember. Each week he was in a different locale, with different guest stars, and a different flavor brought by new writers. There was something involving about his screen magnetism too.

David Janssen: the haunted face of The Fugitive (tv, 1963-67)

I suppose this is where Harrison Ford tends to leave me cold. (And not only him — I can only think of three modern star actors who have engaged me to the point where I can’t take my eyes off them: Jessica Lange and Ellen Barkin for their sexual magnetism, and Sean Penn for other abilities.) I once saw an interview where Harrison related a story about starting out at Columbia studio in the mid Sixties. A producer told him about Tony Curtis playing a janitor (or somesuch) but “the instant you saw him on screen you knew you were watching a star”.

The perpetually snarling face of Harrison Ford as The Fugitive (1993)

At this point, at least in the story as Harrison tells it, he replies like a wiseass that he thought “you were supposed to believe you’re watching a janitor”. Well, Harrison, that’s the absolute least a capable actor should be able to do. And you’ve been doing it for thirty years now.

As in the original, the Detective Lieutenant Gerard character here played by Tommy Lee Jones is an intensely ego-driven obsessive to say the least. (For some reason his christian name is ‘updated’ from Philip to Sam, maybe as a nod to the supposed true-life model for The Fugitive, the Fifties’ Dr Sam Sheppard.) But unlike the original, in which Barry Morse plays Gerard as a blinkered, determined functionary of a type well known in everyday life, this Gerard is jokesy-cool at the same time as blowing away an offender at point blank range without blinking an eye or twitching a hair. Also, while in the original series Gerard has no reason to believe Kimble is not guilty until almost the very end of a four-season series, Tommy Lee Jones is fed obvious clues all along the way but remains ruthless in his pursuit, including trying to shoot the cornered Kimble in cold blood.

Tommy Lee Jones as psycho-cop

Then in a sudden switch at the end he ludicrously transforms into the firm-but-fair cop with a heart of gold, and repudiates his “I don’t care!” mantra (about Kimble’s guilt or innocence) for an affable mano-a-mano chat with Kimble in the back of a squad car.

This is the kind of thing that must be expected since screenwriters started thirty years ago writing primarily for wookies and other creatures rather than humans — but it doesn’t make it easier to take.

Is 40 the New Teen?

Think of Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Leonardo Di Caprio, Matt Damon and a few others who have made it to the top in Hollywood in the past decade and what descriptive words pass through your mind, assuming you’re not a pubescent female? Juvenile? Weedy? Androgynous? Other Oscar winners like George Clooney and Denzel Washington might best be described as bland — I’m comparing them to their earlier equivalents, say Clark Gable and Sidney Poitier respectively.

Brad Pitt: looking boyish even behind the suit and grown-up moustache

And for all the gay innuendo passed off today about late-Thirties ‘pretty boys’ Robert Taylor and Tyrone Power, they were still willing to take the weight of the world on their shoulders when the time came — in a World War. War turned them middle-aged before their time. But think about it… At the age of 42, as Brad Pitt goes around wearing his cap backwards like a street kid — and is the breeding stock of choice for probably millions of women today — Clark Gable was fighting the good fight in daylight raids over Germany, risking his life daily as a tail gunner.

Leonardo DiCaprio: pedophile-candy, even in adulthood

As a general rule these days, young people take on less and less personal responsibility. Today I watched the Dr Phil show as he repeatedly berated a young man who in his early twenties had succumbed to deliberate sexual exhibitionism by a 15-year-old who came on to him. Dr Phil, a psychologist, again and again beat the young man up with The Law, purposefully ignoring his guest’s psychology to paint him as the bad guy. In his own defense this army veteran pleaded that he had experienced the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and as a stress coper became addicted to pornography, which gave way to sex addiction. Phil McGraw’s argumentative reply was “Are you qualified to make that diagnosis?”

Well, Phil is actually older than me, but I can’t help but think that for a good ole Oklahoma boy who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and has 30 years’ experience as a psychologist, he has seen very little of real life — or takes his own books too seriously. The first clue that would have occurred to most people is “war casualty”. Not Dr Phil. My grandmother, who was raised not very far from Oklahoma, was married and had a child by fifteen and a half. As were a lot of people in those days, she was ready and willing to take on full adult responsibilities. In contrast, Phil McGraw, admittedly to suit his purpose, kept referring to this 15-year-old girl in question as a “child”, when she might just as easily be a mother.

And, don’t forget, when it suits The Law, it is quite capable of treating 15-year-olds and younger as “adult offenders”. This must have slipped Phil’s mind.

WHAT PRICE STARDOM?

We seldom if ever give a thought to movie stars of a hundred years ago, partly because most people think they didn’t exist as early as that — but also because we live in a world that treats people as highly disposable commodities. Who can remember the divas that came after Madonna and disappeared before Whitney? The other day I struggled for hours to remember Kevin Costner’s name, even though — in his day — I had paid to see a couple of his movies, a rare thing for me: ‘The Untouchables’ and ‘JFK’.

Florence Turner, a great screen personality and a champion face-puller (gurner), taken on by Vitagraph studio, Brooklyn, in 1906 for a top wage of $18 a week

Actually, to call a film actor a ’star’ before about 1909-10 is, strictly, incorrect. Movies’ leading actors’ names were rarely publicized before that, for two main reasons:

1) Participating in movies at that time was even lower than performing in ‘legitimate’ theatre, only now shucking off its pariah status. Female performers in burlesque or novelty sideshows were previously thought no better than prostitutes, and were prey to the same social stigma, often purveyed by social climbers of their own sex. Performers of either gender hesitated to drag their family’s good name through the muck and would often appear for screen work under a pseudonym. In addition, for some seventeen years when the business of exhibiting movies was in its barely gurgling infancy, and until the courts finally ruled otherwise, it was believed that most movie production companies were illegal operations — that is, those who didn’t pay Thomas Edison royalties for using movie-making apparatus he held patents on. These ‘outlaws’, which included some of the best movie innovators of all, were reluctant to be thrown in the hooscow on old man Edison’s say-so, by his private police force.

2) Up to almost World War I it wasn’t necessary for movie actors to withhold their names because the studio they worked for did that — knowing full well that when a performer became a ‘name’, especially one with international exposure, he or she could command recompense in proportion to the size and popularity of that name.

The temptation became too much for Carl Laemmle, a diminutive German emigre who had worked his way up to own the biggest nickelodeon chain in the Midwest. In the spring of 1910, a year after he had made his first film (a single-reel version of the ‘Hiawatha’ story) for his own company, IMP — Independent Moving Pictures — he approached perhaps the most popular proto-star of her day with a promotional scheme that couldn’t miss. Florence Lawrence — not the kind of name a star would get away with today — had started on screen three years earlier with the then most successful American film studio, Vitagraph of Brooklyn, New York. In 1908 she had moved to local rival Biograph to be directed by the revolutionary D W Griffith, universally acknowledged as “Father of the Movies”, just shifting from acting. Florence, a year before Mary Pickford’s screen debut at the same company, quickly became the studio’s most popular ‘player’ (actor) — distinctive enough to be called by audiences “The Biograph Girl”. (Gene Gauntier was “The Kalem Girl”, Kathlyn Williams “The Selig Girl”, and so on.)

Florence Lawrence, the first American screen 'star', created in 1910

With matchless chutzpah (most of the second and third generation studio bosses were Jewish) Laemmle planted a story in newspapers that the Biograph Girl had been killed in a streetcar accident. Taking credit for her ‘rebirth’, he announced that she would reappear disembarking a train in St Louis. A huge crowd turned out for the occasion, and newspapermen and others insisted on knowing actual names. Thus was born a megastar with the mellifluous name of Florence Lawrence, “The Imp Girl”, officially the first* American movie star to be known by name. With a shipload of public sympathy behind his new prime leading lady, Laemmle was well on his way to founding Universal Studio. His initiative had revolutionized the industry, but other studio bosses, forced to top the exorbitant $200 a week he was paying Florence, didn’t thank him for it.

In 1915, the year Universal City opened for tours at the new base of Hollywood, and a new comic called Charlie Chaplin began his rapid rise to world stardom, Florence was badly burned helping a workmate escape a studio fire and was forced to retire for a time to recuperate. A comeback attempt failed. She continued in acting, though quickly forgotten by the fickle media. By the late Twenties she had been hired, like her early Vitagraph rival Florence Turner and other former stars fallen on hard times, by MGM boss Louis B Mayer for small, dignified parts on a steady salary. Studio shots of her in the early Thirties show her looking withdrawn, even distressed, far from the madcap camera hog she had been at her height. It is likely she sustained longlasting disability from the burns suffered in her heroic impulse to save fellow workers. In 1938, aged 52, she committed suicide by ingesting insect poison.

Sort of puts all the Britneys and Courtneys into perspective, doesn’t it.

*There is scholarly debate over what movie stardom precisely constitutes. G. M. “Bronco Billy” Anderson, who had appeared in very early films including the legendary ‘The Great Train Robbery’ (1903), from 1907 starred himself in highly popular westerns so that his name was generally known but without attracting the overboard ballyhoo that passes for stardom today. There is also international competition to enliven the discussion. In France, early comic Andre Deed had the popularity associated with stardom, but under his clown’s pseudonym. Following him, Max Linder, invariably playing the character “Max” from late 1907, and quickly accruing a vast European popularity that included Russia with its 30,000 cinemas, is said by many to be the first true international star of movies.