Ten Films from the 1930's--#4 "Design for Living" (1933) Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper, Fredric March

"It is not that Design for Living is filled with nudity; there is none.  Or foul language; nary a dirty word is to be had–although there is a certain frankness in the use of such ordinary, non-obscene words as “sex” (in terms of the act, not gender) that one suspects to be far more representative of the language uttered by everyday Americans than that of most intra-Code movies.

"No, Design for Living’s taboos are purely of the situational.

"Gilda Farrell (Miriam Hopkins) meets struggling playwright Tom Chambers (Frederic March) and struggling artist George Curtis (Gary Cooper) on a train to Paris.  Tom and George are roommates, and both fall in love with Gilda—who falls in love with both of them.  When Tom and George realize that she is seeing both of them, they agree to forget her, a promise that quickly vaporizes when she comes to their apartment.  Unable to choose between them herself, Gilda makes a pact to be their friend and a muse of sorts to advance their careers—with no more sex."

From a review in Collider.com by "Jackson"  http://collider.com/design-for-living-criterion-blu-ray-review/134513/

Well, "no sex."  That's the situation by the middle of the film anyway.

"Design for Living" is one of the famous of a certain number of American films in the category of "Pre-Code Hollywood".  This covers a period from the first year of nearly full-on sound film features (1929) to 1934, when a man named Joseph Breen, a former official with the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency, was put in charge of the enforcing "The Production Code", a set of parameters of censorship that covered everything from "crime never paying" to making sure men and women slept in separate beds even if married. 

 

  The reason for all this, despite the success of these films,  was that blue-nosed pressure groups became more and more alarmed  by the racy content of American films.  Traditional Hollywood studios--run mainly by first and second generation Jewish-Americans who were desperate to incorporate themselves in "the melting pot" of American life,    had always been skittish about "going too far" and angering  mostly gentile middle American organizations.   Most people I'm sure would have loved to keep th movies as they were, but they weren't organized the way church-based groups  were.

 

 These changes after 1934 are today generally seen by film historians as detrimental to having strong and independent female characters in movies.   Mick LaSalle, critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of "Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood" offers an overview of this period. 

"In the pre-Code Hollywood era, between 1929 and 1934, women in American cinema took lovers, had babies out of wedlock, got rid of cheating husbands, enjoyed their sexuality, led unapologetic careers, and, in general, acted the way many think women only acted after 1968.

"Before then, women on screen had come in two varieties-sweet ingenue or vamp. Then two stars came along: Greta Garbo, who turned the femme fatale into a woman whose capacity for love and sacrifice made all other human emotions seem pale; and Norma Shearer, who succeeded in taking the ingenue to a place she'd never been: the bedroom. In their wake came a deluge of other complicated women-Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, and Mae West, to name a few. Then, in July 1934, the draconian Production Code became the law in Hollywood and these modern women of the screen were banished, not to be seen again until the code was repealed three decades later." 

   

 The career of comedienne and screenwriter Mae West in particular was a target of the puritans, who seem to gather strength against the film industry as the Great Depression wore on and men became more threatened by women due to the loss of their economic status as breadwinners. 

  Ms. West's  fall from official favor was swift not because she lost her way with dialogue writing and delivery  but because her use of double-ententes and attitude of not taking male companions seriously was compromised.   The star of this film, Miriam Hopkins, was another casualty. Both ladies dropped from their status as Top Ten box-office stars after the kind of pictures the general public wanted to see them in were so altered.

Why did things change so much from the early sound era to 1934?  Mick LaSalle, author of "Dangerous Women" offers this assessment.  

There was also a loss of reality between man and women in films, especially those who weren't married to each other. 

Thankfully in that five year period when sound films were freer from the heavy hand of censorship, some very mature films of redeeming value today were produced, one of those being "Design for Living" an American adaptation of the hit Noel Coward play.  The film makes many changes from stage to screen, but the idea of a woman having a sincere regard and attraction for two men who happen to also be friends was too racy no matter how erudite and plain funny the work of Coward was , and how  screenwriter Ben Hecht and the great producer-director Ernst Lubitsch could make it sizzle.    

 

Some American films were re-released after the Breen Code went into effect and had to be face cuts to get by the new requirements. But when the head of Paramount Pictures, Adolph Zukor,  approached the Motion Picture Board about re-releasing "Design for Living" in 1938, he was told the whole film was a no-go for re-distribution. 

 

 It became something of a lost classic for a few decades until retrospective/art house  film theaters brought it back for screenings.   

          Criterion Films released a restored version of the film on DVD in 2011.  Seeing it again after a while, I can say it was probably the funniest comedy "released" this last year. Certainly the most enjoyable for me.     

In addition to the stars  there is some great work by Edward Everett Horton as Max Plukett, a rich American whom Gilda is involved with. He is played as a stuffed-shirt, an over-aged adolescent who pretends he is all for decency and prudery to impress his rich clients back in a hick burg in upstate New York.  Mr. Horton played many characters like this in films of this period and the gentle ribbing his type of figure  got from the leads (and the writers and directors) in films  like this probably was also a factor in getting so many "respectable" Americans on their virtue-bound high horses.     

 

 

Ten Films from the 1930's #3--The Marx Brothers in "Horse Feathers" (1932)

Frank: "Dad, two of the greatest football players in the country hang out in a speakeasy downtown." 
Professor Wagstaff: "Are you suggesting that I, the president of Huxley College, go into a speakeasy without even giving me the address?" 

 

This was the fourth and arguably the funniest film Groucho, Chico, Harpo (and sometimes Zeppo) did in their cinematic hey-day.  To the left you see their success as purveyors of comic anarchy inside the hallowed halls of mythical  Huxley College earned then the rare honor for a comic team---a front cover on the nation's most influential news magazine, "Time".

 

The plot, like most of the Brothers films, defied logic as often as not,  but the premise is irresistable.  But once Groucho is placed in the  position of president of a prestigious American college, one over looks plausibility. 

From Imdb: "Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff has just been installed as the new president of Huxley College. His cavalier attitude toward education is not reserved for his son Frank, who is seeing the college widow, Connie Bailey. Frank influences Wagstaff to recruit two football players who hang out in a speakeasy, in order to beat rival school Darwin. Unfortunately, Wagstaff mistakenly hires the misfits Baravelli and Pinky. Finding out that Darwin has beaten him to the "real" players, Wagstaff enlists Baravelli and Pinky to kidnap them, which leads to an anarchic football finale." Written by Rick Gregory <rag.apa@email.apa.org>    

What university experience would be complete without some off-campus "tutoring" from the local college widow, especially as soon as her gangster boy friend has his back turned?  Or turning  a learned but clueless professor or two into  straight men for your best one-liners?  And winning a big Saturday afternoon football game, even though you're not officially on the team roster? 

   And most importantly learning the passwords to get into one or two  local "speak-easies" (underground locales for illicit drinking during the Prohibition Era.) It's one thing for a nation to be headed into Herbert Hoover's Depression but to do so without the ability to hoist a legal drink in a gin joint or saloon?   That's really "Un-American".  The Prohibition Amendment  was repealed in January 1934.    

;

 

The gags in this film come as fast and furious as any film you're likely to have seen.  And if you don't laugh at one of Groucho's quips or Chico wordplay or Harpo's masterful pantomime, there will be another set-up and punch-liine coming along in a few seconds that will delight.

.     One thing to note about what made "Horse Feathers" so funny is that some of Broadway's best musical comedy writers in this period had come West to Hollywood to write for early talking pictures like these. (The great New Yorker-style writers of humor and satire of that era, men like George F. Kaufman, Morton Ryskind and S.J. Perlman and others of like mind and ready wit more than earned their keep under the palm trees of the new American El Dorado. )  This next clip features President Wagstaff juggling administrative tasks with some dating procedures with Connie, the college widow.  She is played by Thelma Todd, a beautiful blond actress who worked well with Groucho in an earlier film "Monkey Business". 

   

 

A sad coda: Ms. Todd  did a number of successful two-reel comedies with the Hal Roach studio where Laurel and Hardy did their best films.  She died at 29 in  December of 1935, three years after this film. Her body was found beaten in a garage with a running car engine. It is believed by many that Thelma was killed for not being willing to sell her coast-side Santa Monica restaurant/night club to the gangster Lucky Luciano.

Because of fear of Luciano and his East Coast mob--that were then establishing themselves in Los Angeles, no witnesses were willing to testify to that effect and the case was ruled an "accidental death", a very unrealistic verdict.      

Ten Films from the 1930's--- #2-- "M" (1931) Peter Lorre, star, Director Fritz Lang

You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre/

contemplating a crime --Al Stewart, "The Year of the Cat" 1977. 

 

"M'  is a classic 1931 sound film made by Fritz Lang, who was then one of the top directors in Germany.  His reputation as a anti-Nazi film-maker was such that it was one of his last films in his own country. After 1934, the film was banned in Germany. The film was based on a serial killing in Dusseldorf by a man known as "The Vampire".

 His films "Faust" (1925) and "Metropolis" has already secured him an international reputation.  Very much an autocratic director, he relished having total control over his films. Until he had to mellow a bit after  going into exile in Hollywood in 1934, very few actors, especially,  enjoyed working with him those first few years of his career. 

Peter Lorre, who plays the villainous child-murderer in the film, gives an amazing performance in this disturbing film.  A German Jew, he too left Germany in the wake of the rise of Hitler, and went to England where he appeared memorably as the leader of a coven of foreign assassins in Hitchcock break-out film "The Man Who Knew Too Much"(1934).  A year later he, like Lang, was working at MGM and other major studios.  

 Eighty years after it's release, the film holds a level of suspense all the way through.  The story is simple--a child-killer is on the loose in a German city.  The police seem powerless to stop this wave of horrific murders of innocent kids, but they plod on looking for a break.  Meanwhile, citizens begin to panic and pull innocent people off of streetcars, claiming they are the killer.  The police commissioner demands action, so the police detectives send in flying squads to break up the activities of the criminal underworld.  Alarmed by their operations coming under  such unusual scrutiny, the criminal syndicates unite  to call out all their informants and street operators to also independently track down the killer.  

 

Both the police and the underworld hold conferences are very similar in tone and formality.  There's some social commentary by the film-maker here and its no wonder the Nazis were offended.  Parts of the film were later re-edited by Joseph Goebbels Ufa studio lackeys into an anti-semitic feature film for German audiences.

The noose tightens.  The real killer is identified (ironically by a blind man) and a boy marks his back with a chalk "M" to direct the criminal vigilantes to a hot pursuit.  He is cornered in a warehouse and given a taste of justice underworld style.  Here's the intense "courtroom" scene where the gangsters prepare to do him in and the murderer offers his defense.

 

 

The film ends not with a bang-up shoot out like the American television and films of modern times, but with a dire warning from three mothers sitting on a bench in a police station--"You should keep better watch over your children."        

What makes "M" great to me is the care Lang and his writers took to making the police and the gangsters seem extraordinarily real in the film.  Both worlds--the men of law and the outlaws--have their own hierarchy and they want ot protect their turf.  The killer, played so well by Lorre it's shocking that this is  his first film, is partly a sympathetic character. He cannot control his impulses.

 

Were he an innocent man, the story would be a tragedy, but this story is something more  complicated, and raises the issue of how such terrible acts can be dealt with in a society. 

There were a lot very good films in 1931 that have enjoyed enduring praise---James Whale's "Frankenstein" with Boris Karloff at Universal  and Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney's triumphs as gangsters in Mervyn LeRoy's "Little Caesar" and William Wellman's "Public Enemy", respectively.  But "M" stands a little above them all in my opinion.  This is a film which, while disturbing, is more relevant than the other griim films that were made in '31, the beginninng of a long and dark period on both sides of the Atlantic.    

Ten Films from the 1930's--#1--"All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930)

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another."
-All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 10”
― Erich Maria Remarque

"All Quiet on the Western Front" was  a major best -selling novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970), focusing on the young (and older) men who are wounded or killed literally due to mechanized warfare.   Many were also wounded in the psyche from  experiences that seared into them for the rest of their lives.   In many ways it is timeless--all the realities of modern  "post-traumatic stress" for the returning veterans, for instance, seems totally honest and believable  both in the book and the film. 

     Published in the late 20's it was first set to be made into a silent film by Universal Studios in Hollywood.  The popularity of sound films changed that strategy and it was reset for sound. Seeing the film again, one is struck by how raw it all seems--the sound is not smooth as it is in today;s films, and the scenes of battle are not computer-generated but look more real for being depicted by real men in conditions that, while staged, look as one could only imagine they MUST have felt at times to those on the actual front. 

Many people who saw this film when it first was released must have wondered how, in less than ten years, Europe would be drawn into another disaster involving even worse death tolls.    

The film centers on a young German   named Paul who goes to the front in 1916 after getting a patriotic pep-talk to his class by a professor. Germany needs "Iron Men",  the teacher tells the class with a bravado that is all ballyhoo and no reality.  Many then rush to the recruiting office even before they are to be conscripted.

 

Some months pass at The front. The optimism of a quick war that had been believed by many on both sides is long over.  The front lines are an endless horror. Gas attacks. Futile charges against machine guns.  The life among the dead and the shell-shocked and the blinded and suffering.  Only with his fellow soldiers in short lulls in the war--where they talk of putting all the leaders of the nations in a ring and letting them fight the war they are stuck in--provide some  brief respite  for the young man.

On leave, Paul realizes he cannot talk about war to his family or friends in his home town.   They have no concept.  In the book by Remarque, Paul returns home to his room and the books he read and was inspired by as a young man.  They have lost their significance in a world that is torn apart by the reality of war.    

In one of the best scenes in the film,  Paul later returns on leave to the class with the same teacher and tells the students what war is really like.    The film has many great scenes like this, and, thanks to the lax censorship of the times there is a maturity to the film about matters  such as sexuality in wartime which are not graphic but refreshingly without prudery.    

In a world where leaders on all sides talk rather easily of preparing for conflicts, this material (as a book or a film) is both a relevant and poignant testimony of a human folly that cannot seem to stop.     

W.C. Fields, Part Two

http://dnoakes.multiply.com/journal/item/395/W.C_Fields_Part_One_

 Much of the analysis I have about WC  Fields is in the first section of this blog (see link above) Here in the second part I want simply to  play a couple of his most popular comic sketches. The quality speaks for itself.

(above ) W.C. in a candid shot at a Hollywood party is joined by another timeless comedian, Groucho Marx (sans his trademark greasepaint mustache. ), likely sometime around 1933-4 when they both were under contract with Paramount Pictures.Whatever they are talking about must have been  funny.

(below) Fields has a cameo role along with several other Paramount comedians (including  George Burns and Gracie Allen) in an early screwball vehicle called 'Six of a Kind" in 1933. 

 Here he plays small town Nevada sheriff named  Honest John.  The material here is based on a portion of a vaudeville routine with a special  pool table that Fields used in his live act.  

Interestingly Fields starred in many silent films although its hard to imagine him without his trademark voice.   His first silent film was a knockabout short called "Pool Sharks" in 1915.  (See the photo at the top of this page.) The film itself is only of interest as a curiosity for the 35 year old Fields is just a wise guy fighting over a girl with another potential suitor and there's  a good deal of trick photography in the pool game scenes. .  There's apparently none of that here.   

  

   

Below: W.C. Fields first starring talking feature, 1934's "It's A Gift". This classic bit inspired a lot of comedians, including John Cleese of Monty Python who worked the idea of a set-upon proprietor  into his frustrated English hotelier series "Fawlty Towers". Cleese acknowledged Fields as his favorite sound-era comedian.         

  

 

W.C Fields, Part One

 

Was there ever a comedian more in tune with the dissatisfactions of domestic life in America  than one William Claude Dukenfield? Born in 1880  near Philadelphia, he later came to be known simply as W.C. Fields to his legions of fans and later as "Uncle Claude" to his younger friends and just plain Bill to his older peers.     His father was an immigrant from Sheffield, England, who went on to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War.  His mother was of German heritage.    

 

Some memorable quotes from Mr. Fields:  

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Yes I do like children ... Girl children...about eighteen or twenty.

'Twas a woman who drove me to drink, and I never had the courtesy to thank her for it.

Sex isn't necessary. You don't die without it, but you can die having it.

I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast.

The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try, and try again. Then give up. There's no use being a damned fool about it.

Start every day with a smile and get it over with. 



A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.

Once ... in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to live on nothing but food and water for days.

I feel like a midget with muddy feet have been walking over my tongue all night.

Madam, there's no such thing as a tough child - if you parboil them first for seven hours, they always come out tender.

You're drunk! Yeah, and you're crazy. And I'll be sober tomorrow and you'll be crazy for the rest of your life.

The only thing a lawyer won't question is the legitimacy of his mother. 

It's hard to tell where Hollywood ends and the D.T.'s begin.

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Fields began his career in show business as a juggler.  He liked to say he ran away form home at 11 or 12 years of age but the truth was he had a talent for "eccentric juggling"  and after making a success at talent and church shows around Philadelphia,  he took an offer to go on the vaudeville circuit at 18 with the apparent blessing of his parents.

He was such a good juggler that he played not only all over the world in major vaudeville and music hall bookings  but in special engagements for European Royalty, including Edward VII and family at Buckingham Palace.   

(The clip above is from "The Old Fashioned Way" in 1934.  It is the only film clip of Fields' doing one of his complete  stage juggling acts.)  

Fields was an autodidact and very well-read.  Before going on an engagement to Australia he read so much on the young country when he arrived there in 1910 that journalists who interviewed him were impressed that he knew more about the country than most of its regular inhabitants.

Fields married his female assistant, Hattie Fields,  around  1900. She grew tired of the constant travel of a stage performer.  She wanted Fields to settle down in one place and get a regular job.  That was a deal breaker for "Claude Dukenfield" as he was known as a young man. He stayed on tour and his wife and he separated around 1907.  They had a son, also named WC Fields, who was estranged from his father during his youth. Fields blamed Hattie for poisoning the young man's opinion of his father.   In most of Fields "domestic" films (where he plays the put-upon head of a dysfunctional household)    it is always the older women--wives and mothers-in-law-- who are shrewish toward him, a legacy of his unhappy domestic situation.  

 

Fields also started getting roles in legitimate theater around the time he and Hattie separated.  He went on to star in "The Zigfield Follies" in the 1920's with such other major stars as Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice and Will Rogers. He started appearing in silent films as well, directed by the likes of DW Griffith and his longtime friend Gregory La Cava. 

One of W.C.s favorite authors was Charles Dickens.  Fields wanderings about in show business  as a young man made him identify with the likes of David Copperfield  and Oliver Twist.  One of his favorite roles in films was as a co-star in a 1935 MGM version of "David Copperfield" as none other than   Mr. Micawber, a perfect role for him   It was the only major role Fields ever played on screen where he didn't try to improve the dialogue of his scenes.        

Here's Fields in his 1939 comedy "You Can't Cheat An Honest Man".  He plays Larson E. Whipsnade, a carnival owner and reprobate. (This was the other type of role Fields played in films, besides the henpecked husband.)  Almost all of Fields comedies were either written by him or in collaboration with others. He used the alias Charles Bogle or Mahatma Kane Jeeves for his gag and scenario writing at the film studios.  When Whipsnade's  son is about to marry into a high society family, the young man makes the mistake of bringing his iconoclastic father along to a party.      

 

"Lost Horizon", 1937 Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt (Dimitri Tiomkin, Composer)

"An endearing scene where Ronald Colman pursues stunning Jane Wyatt (Sonda) on a wild horseback chase over hill and dale!"

Dimitri Tiomkin (1898-1979) composed a magnificent score for this film. The Russian emigre had left his native country a few years after its revolution. He worked in Germany and France before coming to America in the early 1930's.

"Lost Horizon" was his first major Hollywood triumph, and earned him an Academy Award nomination. He would go on to win the award for composing the classic Gary Cooper/Grace Kelly Western "High Noon" (1952), "The High and the Mighty" (1954), and "The Old Man and the Sea" (1958) .

His work covered great scores for many action films and also he had a great romantic touch as you can listen to here.

Frank Capra's "Lost Horizon" was based on a James Hilton novel with a screenplay by Robert Riskin. In the story, six Westerners are flown out of the turmoil of a Chinese city under attack and hijacked to a mysterious Tibetan kingdom called Shangri-La. Here beauty, tranquility and longevity abound. Ronald Colman plays Robert Conway, an outstanding diplomat who is brought here, perhaps to save the rest of civilization from the destruction of war. In the end, he and some of the party brave the peaks of the Himalayas to return to their world--and they discover that some things can only exist in Shangi-La.

An excellent film, and one that was neglected for years until the UC-Los Angeles Film Archive restored the movie in 1985 to it's original running length. Some parts of the original 137 minute film could only be restored by using production stills and the soundtrack.

I was fortunate enough to see a premiere showing at the Pacific Film Achieve inBerkeley shortly after the restoration. It was worth it! What was a sad case of a valuable film that was chopped up and had parts badly neglected in storage by its studio (Columbia) now survives nearly whole as it was meant to be.

This is a small selection from the film. Tiomkin's romantic side as a composer is right on the mark.

"The Bride of Frankenstein" and "Gods and Monsters"

Universal Studios  "The Bride of Frankenstein" (1935)  is generally considered to be, along with "King Kong" at RKO Pictures to be the penultimate early sound horror films of the American screen. The Bride was directed by James Whale, who had come to Hollywood in 1930 to make 'Journey's End", a popular play about British rank soldiers and officers in the trenches during World War I. He also directed the original "Waterloo Bridge" 

 Because of the success of that play-to-movie he got the job of directing the original "Frankenstein" (1931) released in time for Christmas of that year.   A good deal of the film's "outdoor" sets were for the World War picture were reused for this version. 

Universal  originally wanted the Biggest horror star of that all, Lon Chaney, Sr., to play the monster if they could get him on loan from MGM.  Chaney's death from cancer prevented that option, so the role was next offered to Bela Lugosi who had scored well with audiences as "Dracula". But Lugosi to his later regret turned down the role because  "the Monster" had no dialogue. 

Director Whale then saw Boris Karloff in the commissary at the studio.  (from the Moviediva website.)   

"Karloff was the last to be cast in the original Frankenstein, the monster's look conceptualized by Whale and then detailed by make-up's mad genius, Jack Pierce. Whale told the NY Times, "Karloff's face has always fascinated me, and I made drawings of his head, added sharp bony ridges where I imagined the skull might have been joined. His physique was weaker than I could wish, but that queer penetrating personality of his I felt was more important than his shape, which could easily be altered." There had been Frankenstein plays, and on stage, for some reason, the monster's skin had often been blue. This might have influenced Pierce's choice to color the Monster's skin with a blue-green greasepaint that would photograph "a corpse-like grey." They envisioned the top of the skull like a cigar box, "We had to surmise that brain after brain had been tried in that poor skull, inserted and taken out again. That is why we built up the forehead to convey the impression of demoniacal surgery. Then we found the eyes were too bright, seemed too understanding, where dumb bewilderment was so essential. So, I waxed my eyes to make them heavy, half-seeing," said Karloff. The result: "This, like the face of Garbo, is one of the icons of our time." (Alberto Manguel).

"Karloff reported for work at 4:00 am, fortified by continual rounds of tea and cigarettes (and was endlessly photographed in his make-up, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes.) The make-up took four hours to apply each morning, and he was padded up and out to 7 feet 6 inches with at least 50 pounds of suit and heavy weighted shoes. The long hours and grueling working conditions led directly to his becoming one of the founding members of the Screen Actors' Guild. The actor's suffering was real, and created an aura gentle pathos. Children were afraid of him, but wrote him fan letters none the less. As one of his biographers pointed out, what was the monster but a child whose parent no longer loves them?

 (below, Elsa Lanchester on the set, wrapped up in her work but still getting her 4 pm tea time with the rest of the cast.)    

      This despite the fact that "Frankenstein" incorporates a lot of German  Expressionism  (The cameraman was the German-born Karl Freund) adds greatly to the sense of menace that pervades the first to films of the Frankenstein series. 

Karloff himself became a major star after the film was released, also playing "The Mummy" (1932) and having a memorable turn as a crazed alcoholic butler chasing around poor Gloria Stuart in "The Old Dark House".  The latter film had many comic and macabre touches that later found their way into the sequel to the Promethean classic, "The Bride of Frankenstein".  

The latter film benefits in many ways from the first with the addition of the crazed Doctor Pretorius (Ernest Thesieger) who lures Dr Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive ) back into the reanimation business.  By the time the second film was made Clive himself was a dying man, with alcoholism and tuberculosis eating away at his health.)  

James Whale's own life, at least the last year of it, became the subject of a well-made Hollywood film in 1998 with Sir Ian McKellan, Brenden Fraser and the late (and very missed by many) Lynn Redgrave.  The film was "Gods and Monsters", based on a book about Whale's lifestyle as a gay man in the 1950's and his lost career and the pain  of separation he experiences from a wartime romance he tries to replicate four decades later,this time  with a young American man who is not gay. 

There is also a great film score by Franz Waxman in the 1935 film that makes the sequel one of the rare instances where a commercial film surpasses the original.            

The Marx Brothers- Capt Spalding's Adventures in Africa/ "Animal Crackers" (1930)

In the early Seventies, the Marx Brothers films and their anarchistic collisions with authority in high society, grand shipboard cruises, the halls of government and the groves of academia were very popular on American late-night and sometimes prime-time television. The main surviving Marx Brother, Groucho, was a celebrity above celebrities and could be seen from time to time on talk-shows, expounding his own wit and talking about the great scenes in his films.

The brothers honed their talent on the vaudeville stages of America and Canada.

Oddly enough, when the brothers first played in England, their act, a tried and true spoof of a school room, did not go over well and the audience threw pennies at them! Something didn't translate in the sketch. Later, of course, their stock went up "over there" when the movies came out. .


Otherwise their career was quite successful. W.C. Fields, a comic juggler and no median wit himself, actually refused to go on stage one week in Ohio when he was booked in a vaudeville show with the Brother Marx as the opening act. They literally wore their audiences out with their mayhem. "The only act I could never follow!", the great Fields later said.

The first two of their sound films, including this one, were originally stage plays and were shot in an early sound stage for Paramount studios near New York City.
The Marxes, particularly Groucho, ad-libbed so much on stage it drove the writers of the shows around the bend! "Hold on!" the prolific scribe George S. Kaufman said from the wings at a Broadway performance of "The Coconuts" , "I think I heard a line I actually wrote!"

Buoyed by the efforts such great comic writers as Kaufman--who wrote "The Man who Came to Dinner" and many other comic and dramatic hits--as well as the equally famous S.J. Perlman, Harry Ruby and Mort Ryskind, the brothers took to Hollywood where original screenplays were put together at Paramount and later MGM studios to suit their blend of physical and wise-cracking comedy.

Here is one of Groucho's best bits--as the famed but likely fake African great white hunter Captain Spalding in "Animal Crackers". Enjoy.

The Tuscaloosa is a river in the state of Alabama just so you know.

Gold Diggers of 1933 - "We're in the Money"

This film was one of the biggest hits Hollywood put out in 1933, the very teeth of the Great Depression, and the biggest film at the box office for Warner Brothers Studios in that year.

While the story varies little in the way most musicals of the time carry their slender plot-lines, it is still I believe a landmark film. The movie combines a popular and "high-kicking" attitude with the grim realities of a land of opportunity now totally veering toward a place as "tapped out" as any country that any emigrant came to America to get away from.

in this clip Ginger Rogers performs one of the most popular songs of the period. This is the opening sequence of the film, and its important to note that the film audience here is being intentionally mislead--this upbeat production masks a hard reality. The police are on the way to close the theater and seize the costumes and sets of the would-be Broadway production. Even the things that make for frivolous entertainment --uptempo songs that stay in your head long after the show, sexy costumes, romantic love scenes with attractive stars--are not immune to an America with one quarter of its labor force out of work, soup kitchens and hundreds of banks closing from sea to shining sea.

The film opening features Ginger Rogers singing part of the lyrics in "Pig Latin"--an innocent bit of fun she did in rehearsal with the other ladies of the chorus. She later confessed she thought that diversion might get her fired when the producers overheard this clowning about. Instead the musical director, Busby Berkeley, kept that interpretation in the number.

This also features an early use (in sound films at least) of a super camera close-up of the aforementioned star. I'm sure shots of Miss Rogers uncapped choppers had many dentists in the film audience quite engaged by the spectacle.

Not all of the film is so bally-hoo of course, as the last production number "Remember My Forgotten Man", makes clear. (The second production is viewable in the comments section below.) This one--which seemed so remote and distant to me when I first saw it years ago--has a familiar ring to it today. Joan Blondell, a forgotten star of musicals and comedies, delivers some very soulful goods here in a lament fro the lost dignity of soldiers, farmers and industrial workers cast aside by harsh economic conditions. The finale, with an army of "dough-boy" soldiers in retreat from a unseen battlefield, shows the mixed nature of what people wanted from films of this popular caliber---escape, yes, but also a recognition of the struggles facing most people just outside the doors of the local movie house.

The Three That Sent Up The Nile: "Cleopatra's Nightmare" (1933) - Jack Wilson, Joe Kepple, Betty Knox

While looking up some material for a brief blog celebrating Queen Cleopatra's impact on history I happened upon this video of a music hall trio (pictured above in 1932) that started in the 1920's and continued for decades. I found it both bizarre and curiously enjoyable.

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A bit of background, courtesy of Wikipedia:

"Wilson, Keppel and Betty were a popular British music hall act in the middle decades of the 20th century who capitalised on the trend for Egyptian imagery following the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Their stage act, called the "sand dance", was a parody of Egyptian postures, combined with references to Arabic costume. The lithe and extremely lanky Wilson and Keppel, who wore long mustaches and made up to emphasize the sharp angularity of the features so as to appear almost identical, would demonstrate their impressive suppleness in adopting wild gestures and dancing in identical "stereo" movements (using gestures vaguely reminiscent of Egyptian wall paintings), while Betty watched their antics. Theirs was a soft-shoe routine performed on a layer of sand spread on the stage to create a rhythmic scratching with their shuffling feet. The act was usually performed to the familiar Egyptian Ballet (1875), by Alexandre Luigini.

"Jack Wilson (29 January 1894- 24 August 1970), was born in Liverpool in England, and emigrated to the USA at a young age, making his stage debut in 1909 as a high-kicking dancer. He then travelled to Australia, where he joined Colleano's Circus. During the First World War Wilson served with the Royal Navy. Returning to Australia after the war, he met Joe Keppel (May 10, 1895- 1977), who was born in County Cork in Ireland. Like Wilson, Keppel had emigrated to the USA at a young age, and in 1910 made his stage debut in Albany as a tap dancer. During the First World War he served in the Royal Flying Corps, and after made his way to Australia, also joining Colleano's Circus, where he teamed up with Jack Wilson.



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This clip is apparently from a 1933 variety-show movie. Betty Knox--the fetching lady in the middle of the group --was an American-born dancer and comedienne, originally a vaudeville partner with the great comedian Jack Benny. The trio came together for what was supposed to be a brief engagement in London. Their act lasted as a long-running music hall staple.

Betty later "retired" form the act in 1940 and became a war correspondent. She also covered the Nuremberg Trails. Her daughter, Patsy, became the new "Betty" in the act, which kept going well into the Fifties in such venues as London's Palladium. After a couple more "Bettys" danced with them in various routines, Jack Wilson and his partner retired in 1963.

Musical Dynamos: Four By Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart

With a song in my heart
I behold your adorable face.
Just a song at the start
but it soon is a hymn to your grace.
When the music swells
I'm touching you hand
It tells that your're standing near, and ..
At the sound of your voice
heaven opens his portals to me.
Can I help but rejoice
that a song such as ours came to be?
But I always knew
I would live life through
with a song in my heart for you.

(Rodgers and Hart, "With a Song in My Heart" from "Spring is Here")   

Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) and Lorenz (Larry) Hart (1895-1943)  began their  collaboration  as Broadway and later Hollywood musical-comedy  composers in 1919, when they both met while enrolled at Columbia University in New York City.  After working on reviews and selling individual songs to stage shows, they finally broke through big time with a New York production of  "Garrick Gayities" in 1925.  Success nearly came too late for Rodgers, who almost left show business  to become a underwear salesman.  

   By the time their partnership ended with Hart's death (to a combination of double pneumonia exacerbated by alcoholism and acute depression) little over  two decades after their meeting, the duo had written 550 songs for  twenty six broadway shows and over a dozen Hollywood films. Many of the songs from these shows are still sung in cabaret shows, musical revivals and on CD by popular contemporary performers like Diana Krall and Rod Stewart. 

The American musical story form that pervaded Broadway in the 1920's was a pretty tame medium, with librettos almost entirely based on threadbare romantic boy-meets-girl plots with cardboard characters and predictable situations.  Rogers and Hart came to dominate this form and, when audiences were more receptive, transcended it with more sophisicated songs, culminating in the landmark 1941 production of "Pal Joey", based on a John O'Hara story that featured a main character who was a dislike able heel.

In 1927, one of their first major hit musicals was "The Girl Friend".  Here's the title tune by the Savoy Orpheans:

    

 

From Wikipedia:

"Time Magazine devoted a cover story to Rodgers and Hart (September 26,1938). They wrote that their success "rests on a commercial instinct that most of their rivals have apparently ignored". The article also noted the "spirit of adventure." "As Rodgers and Hart see it, what was killing musicomedy [sic] was its sameness, its tameness, its eternal rhyming of June with moon."

 "Hart's lyrics, facile, vernacular, dazzling, sometimes playful, sometimes melancholic, raised the standard for Broadway songwriting. "His ability to write cleverly and to come up with unexpected, polysyllabic rhymes was something of a trademark, but he also had the even rarer ability to write with utmost simplicity and deep emotion." Rodgers, as a creator of melodies, ranks with Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin."

Here's an apex of early American musical films--"Isn't It Romantic", from "Love Me Tonight (1932),  performed by Jeanette MacDonald, Maurice Chevalier, an aging budding groom, a taxi-driver, some Hispanic extras playing gypsies, an effete songwriter, and  a lost patrol of French infantry men marching aimlessly  in the San Fernando Valley above Hollywood. If this isn't romantic, then nothing is!   

   

    

This next song is from the Rodgers and Hart Broadway hit, "On Your Toes".  Produced in 1936, it was the first Broadway show to combine jazz music with classical ballet, featuring an extended ballet sequence with the music to "Slaughter on 10th Avenue".  It was conceived originally as  a movie vehicle  for Fred Astaire, but he thought the ballet was "too highbrow" for his film fans, and he was equally reluctant to trade in his debonair image for the role of a meek professor.   

"Glad to be Unhappy" was recorded in February, 1955, for a Frank Sinatra album called "In the Wee Small Hours".  Some music critics have noted that his marital break-up with Ava Gardner helped bring a greater poignancy to his superb voice.      

 

Here is a 2002 recording of for a PBS Special saluting Richard Rodgers. "With a Song in My Heart" is performed by Ron Raines,  Rebecca Luker, Audra McDonald, Douglas Sills, Mary Testa, and Lillias White..

After Hart's death, Richard Rodgers collaborated with Oscar Hammerstein on a series of other major musicals like "The King and I", "The Sound of Music", et al.  But, in my opinion, this was his best and least pretentious  work was with with Lorenz Hart, a great lyricist not replaceable.  

 

Errol Flynn: The Centenary of Hollywood's "Tasmanian Devil"

David Niven and Errol Flynn were close friends in Hollywood's Golden Era (just before World War II) and shared a home in Beverly Hills as bachelors about town. (Errol was a semi-bachelor, technically, since he was just separated from his first-wife, the long-forgotten Lili Damita.)  Between squiring ladies about town and going on weekend sailing expeditions in the Santa Catalina Channel off Los Angeles-sometimes with a nearly all-female crew--they also did films at Warner Bros  they were teamed up for "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1936) and a remake of the 1930 film, "The Dawn Patrol", filmed eight years later.  

Niven said of his friend, whom he saw sporadically after the Second World War and unto the latter's death in 1959:

"The great thing about Errol was you always knew exactly where you stood with him because he always let you down.  He let himself down, too, from time to time, but that was his prerogative and he thoroughly enjoyed causing turmoil for himself and his friends."

He was born almost exactly a century ago (June 20,1909) in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Recently one of his three children, Rory Flynn, went back to Hobart for a film festival and ball celebrating the island's most famous former resident on the centennial of his birth:

If you're interested, here's more on that recent event from an official website: 

 http://www.inlikeflynn.com/

     

As a youth he became a first-rate amateur boxer, shipping clerk, boat captain, plantation supervisor (on a rubber enterprise in New Guinea), gold prospector, etc.,  and later found his way to England, leaving in his wake a capacity for seducing women and living beyond his means. 

  He went into  acting on the advice of friends.  Plucked from the theatrical provinces to appear in a couple small British films, he was soon flown to Hollywood by a Warners' scout.  A year after his arrival he was a major star, thanks to "Captain Blood" (1935), a costume adventure that cemented his reputation.  He also did a variety of other films--straight dramas, screwball comedies, a lot of Westerns, et al, but it was as Robin Hood and the Elizabethan "sea hawk" John Thorpe that made him one of the biggest stars in the world. 

His desire for younger women brought infamy in two statutory rape trials, one famous one in Hollywood and another in France.  He escaped being found guilty thanks to having good lawyers and the fact that some of the young ladies were more opportunists than innocents. Along the way, he tried marrying and settling down and having children, but that never lasted long.  

   It seems he never quite learned--or could control his desires--for too much.  Too much alcohol.  Too many drugs. (He probably would have smoked crack if somebody had invented it back then--he settled for regular cocaine.)  Too many young ladies, married women, etc ,etc.  In the latter case it certainly is easy to judge him too harshly--how could I know what temptations I could withstand  were I handsome and driven as he was to seek excitement in everyday life?    

The other side of Errol Flynn is also interesting.  He found time to write three books (two novels, and a memoir "My Wicked Wicked Ways", co-written with Earl Conrad) do some oceanography--his father was a professor of marine biology back in Hobart, and appeared at USO shows in Alaska and other remote spots during World War II and the Korean War. 

 Biographers note that Flynn himself was given an Army induction physical in California in 1942 and was declared ineligible to serve due to an enlarged heart, tuberculous and a few other lingering illnesses picked up from  his days in the New Guinea ports and jungles.  He later said not being in the war was his greatest regret.  I rather think it was at least a major regret since he went by his own volition to Spain during the Spanish Civil War as a sort of celebrity journalist and in 1958 he went into the guerrilla hideaway of Fidel Castro for an interview on Cuba. 

The author Charles Higham claimed in a bestselling 1981 book "'The Secret Life of Errol Flynn"  that Flynn had been a Nazi spy.  That he knew a shadowy German doctor named Hermann Erben, was was either a Nazi or a Communist pretending to be a Nazi depending on the source you look up.  Simple guilt by association. (Flynn was investigated by the J Edgar Hoover's  FBI, but so was any other star, especially one who raised a bit of hell in his off-hours.)  

 Higham is the type to always put a scandal in his books to sell more copies.  No one who knew Flynn from those days and were still around to refute the book, including David Niven and the rough-and-tumble actors and stuntmen Flynn hung around with, believed such a curious theory.  

The most important thing about Errol Flynn today is the legacy of great films he played an intergal part in. Besides great supporting casts and outstanding directors and composers, he is the lynchpin of exciting movies like "The Adventures of Robin Hood", "Gentleman Jim", and "The Sea Hawk".  His non adventurous roles, such as that of Lord Soames in "The Forsyth Saga" (1949) and as an older adventure seeker in  "The Sun Also Rises" also proved he had real talent to move an audience without need of gun or fencing foil. His persona is as recognizable of John Wayne's steely American gunfighter or as Clint Eastwood's anti-heroes.  And, for my money,as natural for the roles he played as the both of them.     

Here's Flynn cleaning up an old Spanish bed and breakfast when the service turns sour in "The Adventures of Don Juan" (1949). Note the great film score by Max Steiner.  He and the magnificent Erich Wolfgang Korngold did the scores for all the best Flynn vehicles, as well as a variety of other film work.   

Futuristic Fashions for The Third Millennium (as seen from the 1930's)

A British newsreel from the Thirties shows how fantastically far-off they were in determining what women (and in one example, men) would be wearing in seventy years or so. I definately don't like the look of the headgear for the guys.
"Oh, swish!"

www.itnsource.com
Pathe BP200339118416

Movie Magic: King Kong, Skeletons With Swords,Roping Dinosaurs, and Dogs On Windshields

Before computer-generated imagery (CGI) became available to film-makers, one of the techniques used to create spectacles beyond what the camera could capture on a single set was stop-motion animation, a process that was used in movies in one form or another almost from the beginnings of cinema. Using the process, a miniature model of a giant ape used 1933 classic "King Kong" would be placed against the back process of live actors on a sound-stage or, later, in outdoor location photography. 

"King Kong" (1933) is the best known of all films utilizing stop-motion animation.  Released in America and around the world at the height of the Great Depression, it became a box-office sensation. The man behind the pains-taking effects was was Willis O'Brien (1882-1962).  It was O'Brien's use of special effects that producer Merian C. Cooper and Director Edward Shoedereak utilized to position live actors (Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray, et al )  against the 'mighty' Kong, who was in reality a series of models, some only  only '18 inches tall.   The actors played all their "scenes" with Kong against a  blank screen, to which the animated figures of Kong and various dinosaur models and such were added later.     

A young man who was transfixed by watching "King Kong" as a teenager later grew up to be O'Brien's technical assistant onther films was Ray Harryhausen (1920-).  His achievements in special effects starting in the late 50's set the standard for many decades. Here is a bit of his most imaginative work--Greek argonauts versus skeletons with militant tendencies in "Jason and the Argonauts".   RayHarryhausen.com - Greetings

 

 

Although not as good as "Jason" by a long shot, this is one of my favorite camp films--and it also happens to have a Harryhausen connection.  It's 1969's "Valley of Gwangi", a movie that pits cowboys versus dinosaurs in a remote Mexican valley.  The story is very similar to "King Kong"--a egotistical promoter takes a giant creature out of its element and things go really, really wrong fast.

"Gwangi" was based on an original story and model designs by O'Brien from the 1930's as a follow-up to "kong".  The producers at RKO Studios decided that a "dinosaur rodeo" movie wasn't what the public wanted, and perhaps they were right. Certainly a cold blooded and hungry dinosaur holds nothing like the sympathy a chained-up big simian with a crush on beautiful Fay Wray could.  It was thus-ly shelved and was not made for thirty years. Changing tastes in movies--this was the year of "Easy Rider" and Midnight Cowboy"after all--and a lousy second-billing release slot by Warner Brothers on its initial run did not help matters.    

 Ray Harryhausen is a legend and, nicely, a legend still living and still reportedly at work on film projects even in to his 80's.  The "Wallace and Gromit" films of Nick Park, although  more sophisticated and just as painstaking, owe a great deal to men like O'Brien and Harryhausen.     Aardman Animation

Alfred Hitchcock and "The Man In A Spot"

Sir Alfred Hitchcock made over 50-odd movies, several of which are some of the best cinematic thrillers ever produced, either in the UK or Hollywood.  Of all the different variations on the thrillers genre he succeeded at, one of the most satisfying for me were his films about, as he put in an interview, "The Man in A Spot".  

The basic plot for this story is simple and existed long Hitchcock mastered it: an ordinary but intelligent fellow finds himself in over his head, usually accused of a murder or two he didn't commit, despite the fact that the circumstantial evidence indites him in the eyes of the police.  To save himself, he must not only flee from the police inspectoprs who are dead set to hang him, but also find the real killer(s).  Along the way, he meets a beautiful lady (usually a blond) who is convinced he's the killer.  Through the circumstances of being thrown together--or literally handcuffed together, as in the case of Robert Donat and Madelaine Carroll in "The 39 Steps"--she discovers he's really an innocent man, and takes on the task of helping him stay out of jail and catch the real culprits.

He's a clip from "The 39 Steps" (1935), a film which has been adapted into a recent award-winning  comic play that gained success on the West End and now on Broadway.  Based on a John Buchan novella, this was the 35-year old director's first international success and established him as an "A"-list director.

 In this scene, fugitive Richard Hannay (Donat) plays a nice Canadian ex-pat in London who helps a female stranger out with a chaste place to stay the night after she begs for his help at a local music hall.  The poor chap.  He wakes up the next morning to find his chivalry unrewarded: she's been murdered in his bedroom (through no fault of his own. ) He escapes via a train (The Highland Express) but a squad of policemen  catch up to him on the railway.  

 

 

Twenty-four years later: same situation almost, and another train scene. It's  from "North By Northwest" (1959) .  This time the wanted man is Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant). He manages to have a more successful tete-a-tete with a lady on a train than Hannay.  I love the look on Grant's face in this scene when he realizes Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) is decidedly NOT playing hard to get on the 20th Century Limited. 

Funny, but in all my youthful train trips in and around the States, I don't remember anything close to this type of personal service available on Amtrak.    No brook trout.  No cocktails.  No blonds. *Sigh*

  

    

 

Finally, here's a bit more of the "man on the spot" sub-genre. It's from Hitchcock's 1942 version of this familar plot, a  lesser known film called "Saboteur" with Robert Cummings, Priscilla Lane and Norman Lloyd as the guy who framed Cummings character, Barry Kane, for a murder in a defense plant in California. The climax of he film takes place at a studio mock-up of the Statue of Liberty, fulfiling Hitchcock's fondness for   placing scenes at the landmarks of American or British Power and Influence.  There's always something a little sinister about these places after you've seen a film like this.

 

 

Three By Laurel and Hardy

 

The most beloved "double act" in American comedy started out together in 1925 at the Hal Roach Studios near the west LA town of Culver City, California.  Stanley (Jefferson) Laurel (1890-1965)was an English music hall comedian whose father was a theater manager.  He grew up wanting nothing but to be a stage comedian.  Laurel came to America around 1912 on a tour with the Fred Karno Troupe, which also included a young Charlie Chaplin. After a respectable solo film career in short films-- as both actor and later director--he continued to work almost exclusively with Oliver Hardy in a series of over ninety films, mostly short "two reelers" of about 18-20  minutes in length.       

Laurel was the creative force behind the films.  He worked out a lot of the classic scenes, helped edit them together with their director of the moment, and then worked on sharpening the comedy when the films were shown to preview audiences by gauging what worked and what could be cut or improved on. 

Oliver Hardy (1892-1957) was a native of Harlem, Georgia, and started his own career out in films in near-by Jacksonville, Florida.  Sometime between there and his migration to Hollywood, he acquired the nickname "Babe".  A great deal of his early work was in playing "heavies" or villians.  In their first few films, the first 30 of which are  silent, the chemistry was not set.  Sometimes Hardy was the more agressive partner, sometimes it was Stanley.  By 1927 the formula began to set as millions remember them from films and later television broadcasts of their work: Oliver as the bossy fellow who always got worst of the situation, and Stan as the more passive and polite friend who, inadvertently,  could turn any job of work or sticky situation into a complete disaster.

Here's a clip from one of my favorite shorts of theirs, called "Hog Wild"(1930).  It seems Mr Hardy's wife wants him to put a  radio antenna up on the roof of their house so she can listen to a broadcast from Japan(!)   Mr. Laurel tries to help out as any good neighbor would.  The ending to this sequence is a great example of how they not only used slapstick humor, but would slow down the mayhem a bit to give the audience time to laugh over the situation and then "drop" in a gag at the last part ("a topper")  to complete the scene.       

     

 

 

Here "The Boys" do battle at a swank  Hollywood night club in the 1934 feature, "Hollywood Party".  The woman who gives as good as she gets is Mexican singer-actress Lupe Velez (1908-44) who was then married  to the most famous movie Tarzan, ex-Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller.    

The last one here is a bit of charming whimsy from the film 1939's "The Flying Deuces".  As they are about to go on an unauthorized skip-out from the French Foreign Legion, Ollie and Stan give their comrades in arms a little musical farewell.     For more on these great entertainers, check out the L & H Website    Official website

 

"The Autograph Seeker": Ginger Rogers and Future Blogger Collide!

 

I am not a person who asks film or sports celebrities for autographs. Part of the reason for this is the fear of rejection.  Another part is that I'm naturally shy, so the few times I have been at an art gallery or a park or a film festival in or around San Francisco and had a chance to ask for an autograph, I couldn't go through with it.  I  imagine these people were bugged enough already and I certainly didn't want to be seen as some kind of awkward intruder.      

But because I grew up at a time when a lot of older films played regularly on late-night television, I got in the habit as a teenager of either staying up late to watch the older films or getting up early depending on if I had a paper route.  I and a few friends liked the older films and one of us--I don't tjhink it was me actually, but I wish it was--once said that "the only people in movies I'd really want to meet are already dead."

  Later on I my twenties, I had a job that required me to work a "swing" shift (3 to Midnight) which had me home at right about the best time to see a lot of the old Warner Bros./RKO pictures that played on one or another of the Bay Area stations in California.  

In my teens I liked gangster melodramas, straight comedies and Westerns for late-night diversions.  It was in my twenties that I really discovered the Fred Astaire--Ginger Rogers films.  These movies like "Top Hat", "The Gay Divorcee" and "Swingtime" were fun little farces set against fabulous art deco sets and, for the popular cinema at least, witty and sophisticated dialogue.  The dances in these films were incomparable. The plots were nothing too avaunt-gar-de: Fred woos Ginger, Ginger plays hard to get, Fred dances with her, she thinks maybe he's not so bad after all, etc, etc.) But these great monochrome escapist films featured music by an absurd number of great composers Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter.   Because of this and the seemingly-effortless style and grace of the pair in action, I became a fan of both Mr. Astaire and Miss Rogers, together and separately, and added their films to my "guilty pleasure" reading lists of books concerning The Golden Age of Hollywood.     

Which brings me to the one time I broke this rule, or overcame this crippling shyness, take your pick.  The year was 1994 and Ginger Rogers was doing a book signing of her autobiography "Ginger: My Story" at an art gallery in Medford, Oregon.   Miss Rogers had made Medford her home-away-from-Hollywood for about 50 years when she bought a 1,000 acre ranch north of the city.  I had moved there a couple years earlier and ran into people who told me about seeing the lady herself, sadly now in a wheelchair, about town being escorted by an assistant on shopping trips. She rarely gave interviews to the local press so the book-signing was rather a big deal.  The fact that she was obviously in ill health also made this appearance more poignant. 

To make a long story short, after some encouragement from my wife Shirley to stop pretending I wasn't a star-struck fan and actually meet an icon of film history, I stood in line one drizzly Saturday afternoon in 1994 to buy Miss Rogers book and a program she had for her night club act and  have her sign the memorabilia. On my future wife's strong recommendation, I bought some flowers to present to the one-time box office queen and Oscar Winner. (In 1940, as the leading lady in the exceptional melodrama "Kitty Foyle".)The turnout for this signing was big--Ginger Rogers had been a fixture around the area since she made war bond appearances during World War II and sent the milk from her cows at "Rogers Rouge River Ranch" to nearby Camp White during the war to help keep soldiers in lactose.   She had also appeared at charity events in the 1980's when her health was better.  So a couple hundred or so local fans were already in line on Main Street when I turned up at noon to what I thought would be a much shorter line. What I thought would take a couple hours wound up being more like five.    She was supposed to only be signing autographs until about 4 that afternoon but graciously someone came out of the gallery and said to us "latecomers" (who had actually come on time) that she would stay a couple extra hours to meet and chat briefly with everyone. This act of graciousness was my undoing.  I let my guard down.  Since Miss Rogers' assistant seemed to encourage people to talk to the lady, I made up my mind to actually ask her a question of some kind other than just exchange pleasantries. But what to ask her, I wondered.  Surely nothing about Fred Astaire.  I hadn't read a lot of material on Ginger Rogers personal life, but I did know she was rumored to be less than pleased if people saw her pairing with Astaire to be the be-all and end-all of her career.   It was here that the bad idea formed in my head:  she was at RKO Studios the same time as Katherine Hepburn.  They had made a movie together and had been said to be rivals.  But, heck, that had been nearly fifty years back!  Surely they had buried that hatchet. And, since Hepburn was still alive perhaps they even spoke to each other over the phone occasionally. 

     Then I finally got inside the little gallery and I saw Ginger Rogers herself.  She looked a bit plump and had the telltale looks of aging, but she was also looking rather bright and alert for someone who had been meeting folks all day.  People right in front of me were getting their books and programs signed.  Miss Rogers looked happy and responsive. Cole Porter music was playing in the background. A large blow-up full- length photo of her from the 1930's graced an easel next to where she was signing books.  It looked like this would be a pleasant meet-and-greet   experience, one to cherish even.

Finally, it was my turn. I presented the flowers to her.  They were now wilted but she thanked me none the less and made me feel at ease. As she was signing  the book I put in front of her, and smiling at me for a moment, I sprung the trap on myself:

"I wonder Miss Rogers," I said, "if you are ever in touch with Katherine Hepburn these days?" 

I remember the hand she was holding the Sharpie pen with shook slightly and then she looked up at me.  Her eyes narrowed and, most amazing, I would swear I saw her nostrils flare. 

"I have nothing to do with Hepburn," the great lady shot back at me with a frown. "She was an eccentric. I didn't like her." She closed the cover of her copy of the  book as if I was a reprobate nephew who had just been written out of the will.

The brief encounter was ended and I managed a brief and very staged smile and thank you. I beat a respectable retreat from the front of the table.

I said earlier that I didn't read much about Ginger Rogers' personal life as most of the other stars.  It turned out, when I actually read her book, that bringing up Hepburn was about as bright a move as suggesting to her that she had hosted Joseph Stalin up at the Rogers Ranch.  Ginger turned to be in her younger days a staunch anti-Communist whose mother had actually willingly named names of suspected and actual Communists during the Hollywood Blacklisting Period.   Ginger also was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a group which was about as revolutionary in her day as the Romanov Dynasty of old Russia. 

 

The fact that Katherine Hepburn was an FDR liberal who was decidedly sympathetic to those who were blacklisted--and condemned the actions of such groups that hounded actors and directors out of work just short of being blacklisted herself--had apparently cemented  permanent animosity  between two of the last surviving leading ladies of that pre-television era of Silver Screen enchantment. The one thing I learned from this experience was similar to what George Orwell said about Salvador Dali in one of his essays: that one could admire the work of an artist but deplore their personal conduct.  Also, sometimes it's better to just say something ordinary to a star rather than go for saying something risky.   So Ginger Rogers AKA Virginia McGrath, born in humble circimstances in Independence, Missouri, USA  wherever you are now, be glad to know you will be the first and last person I'll ever ask to sign an autograph.  But I still enjoy quite a few of your movies, may Eleanor Roosevelt have mercy on my soul.

 Hers's my favorite Fred and Ginger scene: the dance to "Night and Day" from "The Gay Divorcee" (1934) and the  rousing dance-studio number from  "Swingtime" (1936).  

I also have a brief scene of her and Fred from "Roberta" (1935) posted on my main page featuring more of the Astaire-Rogers magic chemistry.