Charles and I repaired to his place to watch the
two-videotape set I’d just picked up at the Wherehouse, a tribute to James Dean
consisting of the documentary The James Dean Story (the 1957 Warner Brothers production, co-directed by
George W. George and Robert Altman — “Yes, that Robert Altman,” I hastened to assure Charles) and an
ultra-obscure (and deservedly so) 1951 telefilm called Hill #1, produced for “The Family Network” by a Catholic
organization, which turned out at the end (I kid you not!) to be a one-hour infomercial
for rosary beads. This truly bizarre production was directed by Arthur Pierson
(a name which sounds vaguely familiar, though at this time I can’t think of any
of his other credits — probably that’s just as well) and begins in a war scene
(either World War II or Korea, I couldn’t tell which, since it was obviously
shot in the Hollywood hills anyway, though the dialogue did identify the battle as taking place somewhere near
or around the Pacific Ocean), then suddenly flashes back to Jerusalem, A.D. 29,
after the Crucifixion and before
the Resurrection. The leap is explained by the fact that the soldiers in the
opening scene are bitching that now that they’ve taken Hill 46 (just after they
took Hill 39) they’re just going to be sent into battle to take Hill 51, and
their chaplain (who is dressed in an identical uniform, except his helmet has a
cross painted on it) is going to tell them the story of Hill Number One and how
it was taken by one man. The scene then cuts to the palace of Pontius Pilate, well
played by Leif Erickson in what is far and away the best acting job in this
bizarrely inept film. The Jewish merchant Joseph of Arimathea is begging for
the body of the recently crucified Christ, and a reluctant Pilate gives it to
him. At this point I leaned over to Charles and said, “This film is on the edge of high camp, but at least it hasn’t gone over the
line.”
A moment later it did, as Joseph and his friend Nicodemus did a secret
visit to the spice lady (I’m not kidding) to get the anointing oils and spices
to prepare Christ’s body for entombment. Joseph and Nicodemus showed us they
were on a secret errand by pulling the flaps of their turbans across their
heads (one would think that would only make them look more conspicuous, but that’s “B” filmmaking for you), and
the actress who played the spice lady managed to underact so baldly she created
no impression at all (except for a warning that worse was to come). Worse came
when Mary, the Mother of God, came onto the screen; Pierson had undoubtedly instructed
this poor actress to enact sorrow by hanging her head down in every scene and
speaking all her lines in a drugged-out monotone, and she followed orders all
too faithfully. As the film rolled on I got the impression that, apparently,
Pierson had allowed the actors playing Romans to act with some amount of
emotion (in fact, too much
emotion — the writing of Pilate’s part in particular almost seemed to demand relentless overacting, and Erickson complied), but
the actors playing Christ’s disciples were instructed to speak their lines in a
“reverential” monotone and pose with all the animation of the wooden figures of
the Christmas Nativity scenes in Balboa Park. Not only that, but Pierson had
his camerapeople light and stage these scenes to resemble those horrible
religious paintings that are found on church calendars and postcards, and while
this look isn’t quite so bad in
black-and-white as it is in color, it’s still pretty dreadful. Although the
producers of this film were Catholic rather than Baptist, Charles concluded
that what we were watching looked very much like what Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s
religious movies would have
looked like had his producers been able to finance them on the strength of the
“profits” from Plan Nine from Outer Space. So where does James Dean fit into all of this? He plays the Apostle
John (not John the Baptist, as
the “Quality Video” box maintained) and gets all of about four lines of
dialogue, hardly enough to judge his acting — though even when he’s silent he does get some of those long, burning close-ups that did
become a trademark of his later acting style. — 6/21/96
•••••
Charles and I broke out the James Dean: The Television
Legacy boxed set I ordered not long ago
containing the bulk of Dean’s surviving work on 1950’s TV. We started at the
beginning, with two one-minute commercials for Pepsi-Cola — which so emphasized
the “bounce” you would supposedly get from drinking it I wondered if they were
still sneaking in cocaine even after Coca-Cola had drawn back from it (and substituted
caffeine, which is not a natural
component of the coca plant, because it was the closest they could come to
cocaine and still have something legal) — which featured Nick Adams and showed
Dean lurking in the back. I couldn’t help but think of the exchange in the film
Citizen Kane in which Bernstein
(Everett Sloane) recalls of Kane (Orson Welles) that I was with him “before the
beginning — and now it’s after the end.” Nick Adams was in Dean’s film career
both in these “before the beginning” Pepsi commercials and “after the end,”
when director George Stevens realized while he was editing Dean’s last film, Giant, that Dean’s recording of the final speech was
unusable and, with Dean dead, called in Adams to dub it. Then we ran the
peculiar 1951 filmed TV show (most of Dean’s TV work was live, but this one was
shot on film and had at least somewhat better production values than usual) Hill
Number One, produced by Jerry Fairbanks
Productions along with a couple of outfits called “St. Paul Productions” and
“Family Rosary Crusade” — reinforcing the impression Charles had of it when we
first watched it together from a Madacy video two-pack in the 1990’s that it
was “an infomercial for rosary beads.” The time we saw it before Charles and I
thought it was pretty useless — Charles joked that though the inspiration for
it was Catholic instead of Baptist, it was like what Ed Wood’s religious movies
would have looked like if he’d got enough money from Plan Nine from
Outer Space for him and his Baptist backers
to finance them — but it came off a bit better this time. It begins with a modern-day sequence set during the
Korean War that’s actually pretty good even though it’s War Movie 101: an
artillery crew is shown (first via stock footage but then in new film showing
the actors hired for it) shelling Hill Number 46 to try to support the infantry
in taking it. The soldiers — including Roddy McDowall as “The Professor,” the
intellectual in the company — are wondering what the point of all this is.
They’re also waiting nearly an hour for a pot of coffee they’ve been promised,
and when the coffee arrives it’s brought by a chaplain (Gordon Oliver) who’s
readily distinguishable because his helmet has a small white cross painted on
in front. The chaplain explains that it’s Easter Sunday and therefore it’s a
good time for him to explain that the point of all this fighting was made by
the man who 2,000 years earlier took Hill Number One — Calvary — and took it
alone.
The film then flashes back to one of the less often dramatized parts of
the Christ story, the three days between Christ’s crucifixion and his
resurrection (indeed, one reason I was showing this now was that Holy Week is
coming up and it seemed like an appropriate time), and the uncertainty among
Christ’s apostles and supporters in the Jewish community — including his mother
Mary (Ruth Hussey), Joseph of Arimathea (Nelson Leigh), Mary Magdalene (Jeanne
Cagney, James Cagney’s sister, wearing one of the tackiest blonde wigs of all
time), and Nicodemus (Regis Toomey) — over what they’re going to do now that
the “Master,” as they call him, is dead. Joseph of Arimathea goes to Pontius
Pilate (Leif Erickson, who impressed me the first time I saw this but now seems
to turn in one of the most horrendous overacting jobs of all time — still, he
has star charisma of a sort which the rest of the ragbag of actors cast in this
production don’t show) and begs permission to claim the body of Jesus and bury
it in the tomb he’d already set aside for himself. Pilate agrees as long as the
entry to the tomb is sealed with both a rope and a stone to make sure nobody
steals Christ’s body and then claims that it was resurrected. For two days
nothing much happens except that Pilate misses his wife Claudia (Joan Leslie —
so this tacky TV production reunites two cast members from the great 1942
musical Yankee Doodle Dandy, Joan
Leslie and Jeanne Cagney); Cassius Longinus (Henry Brandon) says that he stuck
Christ with a spear while he was hanging on the cross (I thought the Gospels
had this happen while Christ was actually walking through the streets of
Jerusalem before he was put up on the cross) and the mixture of blood and water
that came out of the wound splashed into his eyes and cured them of the twitch
and partial blindness that had afflicted them all his life (though if he was
partially blind how did he get into the Roman army in the first place?); and
both he and the Centurion (Frank Wilcox, playing a role John Wayne would later
play in The Greatest Story Ever Told)
thus became convinced Jesus was indeed the Son of God, as he claimed. (I
believe the actual Biblical texts are a bit more ambiguous as to whether Jesus
himself ever said he was the son of God.)
Then the news comes that Christ has
indeed exited the tomb — the rope is untied and the stone rolled away — of
course on the production budget available to Jerry Fairbanks and his director,
Arthur Pierson (who has three feature-film credits on imdb.com and quite a lot
of TV work) all they could do is show us the tomb with the rope untied and the
stone rolled away, and I found myself wishing they could have licensed the
footage of the actual Resurrection from Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 silent The
King of Kings — unless the cost to use it
would have been through the roof, it would have been a good idea to go after it
rather than this lame cop-out that simply showing us the tomb after Christ’s exit without depicting that actually
happening. Arthur Pierson directed two films with Marilyn Monroe — Dangerous
Years (1947), in which she had a bit part
(it wasn’t the first movie she made but it was the first in which her footage survived to the final
cut), and Home Town Story (1951),
a peculiar political movie which begins as Frank Capra and ends as Ayn Rand
(the story looks at first like it’s going to be about a corrupt businessman
who’s polluting the local environment and is responsible for an industrial
accident in which a child is trapped; later the film takes a hard Right turn
and the businessman turns out to be the good guy) — and also helmed the odd
1949 TV version of A Christmas Carol
(retitled The Christmas
Carol) narrated by Vincent Price (though he made a bad mistake in
having Price merely tell the story instead of playing Scrooge, at which he
would have been better than the actual actor in the role, Taylor Holmes). But
this is the first Pierson production I’ve seen in which he directed but didn’t
write — the writer is uncredited but imdb.com lists James D. Roche — and the
writing sometimes comes close to the reverent power Pierson, Roche and their
producers were obviously hoping for, but most of it is the usual religious
treacle. Also, virtually everyone in the cast overacts — though Ruth Hussey,
perhaps overcome by the obvious challenge of playing the Mother of God, underacts so extremely she comes off as a zombie (the White
Zombie/I Walked with a Zombie type of
drugged-out living corpse rather than the Night of the Living Dead type of mindless brain-eater), and James Dean,
virtually alone of the cast members in the Biblical part of the story, tries to deliver a performance that’s actually credible as
a normal human being.
He’s playing the Apostle John (not John the Baptist, as the Madacy video box had it —
of course, as Charles pointed out when we first saw this, John the Baptist had
been dead quite a while before the events in Hill Number One happen!) and he’s only in two scenes, one in which
both the Jews and the Romans are lurking around the tomb and a later one in
which the surviving apostles and Jesus’s backers meet to discuss what they’re
going to do next. (Perhaps the most convincing thing about Hill
Number One is how well Pierson and Roche
dramatized the confusion any tight-knit group of activists goes through when
their founder and most charismatic figure gets killed — no doubt this is also
what the Mormons went through after Joseph Smith was lynched and what al-Qaeda
went through when Osama bin Laden was shot down by U.S. SEAL’s.) Dean only has
about four or five lines in the show, but he speaks them in a crisp, clear tone
of voice — the Brandoesque mumbling was to come later — while he already had
the sullen stare down pat. He’s also the only actor playing a Jewish male who doesn’t have to wear a full and outrageously false-looking
beard. During the show I joked at one point, “Cue the dumb stock music,” but in
fact Hill Number One had an
original score — albeit by Charles Koff, not exactly one of the major names in
film scoring then or now — and, at least partly because it was shot on film
(albeit on some pretty familiar locations — the site of the tomb had previously
featured in so many Republic Westerns one expected to see cowboys and/or
Indians ride by), it had far superior production values than most early-1950’s
TV, but it’s still a pretty silly religious program and it’s weighted down by
the risible closing sequence in which Father Patrick Peyton, who may have been
a real priest but was also the “type” Central Casting would have sent if the
producers had called and said, “Send up an Irish-American priest,” delivers the
rosary-bead pitch and defines “meditation” as the act of praying while
fingering the beads. That definition sits rather ill these days when even the
least-informed Americans generally associate the term “meditation” with a quite
different spiritual tradition from Catholicism or, indeed, any form of
Christianity or Western religion generally. — 3/19/16
