by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago
I screened a rather
interesting 48-minute TV-movie we’d downloaded from archive.org called Hollywood
Without Makeup, a production of a man
named Ken Murray who had had a minor career as a bit actor in the 1920’s and
had taken a home movie camera to the sets of films he was working on and shot
candid off-screen footage of the stars. Though he dropped out of the creative
end of picturemaking shortly after, he continued to work as a Hollywood
journalist and film the movie stars both at work and at play — and this film
takes his documentary history all the way up to 1963, when it was compiled and
first shown, offering backstage footage of Fred MacMurray working on the Disney
lot in the then-new film Son of Flubber (there’s a charming bit of MacMurray taking some kids for a drive
around the Disney backlot in the Model T Ford he drove in the film, and
Murray’s narration tells us that the kids kept asking MacMurray, “Make it fly”)
and closing with footage of the recently deceased Marilyn Monroe at a movie
premiere, waving to the audience and looking utterly gorgeous and plastic
(Murray didn’t get any truly candid footage of her and so we don’t get the side
of Marilyn we see in some of Milton Greene’s stills or in her best-looking
movie, The Prince and the Showgirl — in which Jack Cardiff photographed her artistically for the first and
only time in a color film, taming her aggressive looks and making her sensual rather than blatantly sexual).
One of the most
fascinating aspects of Hollywood Without Makeup is how accurate the title was — you really did get to see at least some of the stars without
makeup and being essentially themselves instead of playing to the camera — and
though some of them (notably Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart) proved every bit
as charismatic being photographed by Ken Murray’s camera as they were getting
the full-dress professional treatment in their actual movies, others (including
Norma Shearer) turned out to be quite plain-looking, only ordinarily attractive
without the help of makeup and studio lighting. People who knew both Rudolph
Valentino and Marilyn Monroe (that’s two different sets of people, but they
made strikingly similar comments) both said that off-screen they were no more
than decent-looking people, physically easy on the eyes but nothing special —
yet on film they acquired a glow that made them seem far sexier than they were
in person. “The miracle happened on the film emulsion,” said Billy Wilder on
Monroe (he directed her twice and she gave him such a hard time that he joked
the Screen Directors’ Guild should award anyone who made more than one film
with her a Purple Heart) — and what’s most interesting about Hollywood
Without Makeup is not only that some of
the “candid” footage appears to have been staged (notably an early-1930’s toy-car
race between the young Jackie Cooper and Groucho and Harpo Marx — the ½ to 2/3
of the Marx Brothers were in full on-screen regalia rather than their rather
ratty off-screen appearances) but the layers on layers of image-making that
went into even a “casual” appearance by a star in the glory days.
It’s also
amusing to hear Murray’s narration referring to Hollywood’s glory days as if
they were already in the past — and it’s fascinating to see some of the footage
at San Simeon (William Randolph Hearst is virtually the only person depicted
here who was a celebrity but not a movie star), which Charles (who’s been there) pointed out had been
used in the official videos shown at the state park (and the commentary there
duplicated some of Ken Murray’s mistakes in his narration). Also worth note is
the sequence from Murray’s TV show in which Kirk Douglas appears as a guest
star and complains that his mother thinks Murray is a bigger star than he is
because he has a new TV show on once a week whereas Douglas only releases a new
movie every three or four months. It would be nice to see Hollywood Without
Makeup in better shape — the
print we downloaded from archive.org was in terrible condition and looked like
a silent movie rescued just in time before it decomposed completely (and the
disc we’d burned from the download had its own set of glitches, often jumping
ahead a full five-minute chapter) — it is a really charming film even though it’s something less than the glimpse
of Hollywood stars totally letting their hair down (figuratively, and sometimes literally) Murray
promised us in his narration.
