AFI Life Achievement Award: 50th Anniversary Special (American Film Institute, Turner Classic Movies, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Saturday, December 30), I watch a couple of programs on Turner Classic Movies, a documentary salute to the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Awards – called, naturally, AFI Life Achievement Award: 50th Anniversary Special (the awards themselves were created by the AFI’s governing board on February 23 or 26, 1973 – online sources differ – so 2023 was technically the 50th anniversary) – and a showing of the 1956 film The Searchers, directed by the first AFI LIfetime Achievement Award winner, John Ford. The AFI special was hosted by Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz (grandson of Citizen Kane co-author Herman Mankiewicz and grand-nephew of All About Eve writer-director Joe Mankiewicz, family connections that led me to joke that Ben is “a nodule off one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees”), and what was most fascinating about the show was how the awards ceremony telecast itself has evolved over the years. Early on the awards went mostly to directors – John Ford in 1973, Orson Welles in 1975, William Wyler in 1976, Alfred Hitchcock in 1979 (making what I believe was his last public appearance before his death in 1980) – plus a few legendary star names from the Golden Age: James Cagney in 1974, Bette Davis in 1977, Henry Fonda in 1978. In the 1970’s the awards show was a mostly serious tribute to film in general and the honorees in particular. Starting in the 1980’s they invited more comedians to do stand-up routines about the honorees as part of the show, and in the 2000’s they also began including major musical numbers vaguely related to the honoree and his or her career. One of the most stunning performances was Jennifer Hudson’s rendition of Sam Cooke’s last record, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” predictably from a show honoring an African-American (there’ve been three Black recipients: Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman).

Also there have been two parent-and-child pairs among the recipients – Henry Fonda in 1978 and his daughter Jane in 2014; Kirk Douglas in 1991 and his son Michael in 2009 – and one set of siblings: Warren Beatty in 2008 and Shirley MacLaine in 2012. It’s ironic that he got his award four years before she did (the family’s original name was “Beaty,” without the second “t”) even though she established herself as a star at least a decade before he did. Also the 2016 award went to film composer John Williams, the first recipient (and only one so far) who was neither an actor nor a director. The first AFI Lifetime Achievement Award show I ever actually watched when it initially aired was the 1975 “salute” (that was the word they used then) to Orson Welles, in which instead of showing clips from his completed and released films he ran a clip from his unfinished movie The Other Side of the Wind, which featured John Huston (AFI Lifetime Achievement Award winner in 1983) playing a legendary film director getting ready for a live appearance at a film festival, and pleaded with the assembled industry bigwigs for completion money to get the film finished and released. The Other Side of the Wind was actually produced by an Iranian company called Astrophore and got caught up in the maw of Middle East politics; when the Shah of Iran’s regime (to which Welles had a personal connection since he’d narrated a documentary lionizing the Shah filmed on the occasion of the 2,500th anniversary celebration of the Persian Empire) fell and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s “Islamic Republic” took over, the film got tied up in international legal complications and was still unfinished when Welles died in 1985 and Huston followed in 1987. The American Film Institute is one of the awards Billy Wilder (winner in 1986) called, with his usual mixture of cynicism and humor, the “Quick-Before-He-Croaks Awards,” but the tribute was welcome even though there was one comment during the awards ceremonies I quarreled with: during the 2015 ceremony honoring Steve Martin one of the hosts was shown asking the audience who was the greatest stand-up comedian of the 1970’s – and I yelled back at the TV, “George Carlin!” There were also a few more lacunae in the awardees: Woody Allen was shown in a brief film clip honoring Diane Keaton (who won in 2017) but he’s never won it himself; yes, I know he’s become a pariah among the #MeToo fascists, but he still deserves to be honored and definitely fits the “works that meet the test of time” criteria.

British Rock: The First Wave (Archive Film Productions, BBC, 1985)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, December 28) at 8:45 I ran an interesting documentary from the BBC in 1985 called British Rock: The First Wave (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htnD55VAbH4), about the so-called “British Invasion” that dominated first Britain’s and then the world’s popular music from 1962 to 1966. It was co-directed by Patrick Montgomery and Pamela Page, and narrated by Michael York. Of course it began with the Beatles – with a British TV clip of them performing “She Loves You” – though it deserves credit for acknowledging the importance of London-based as well as Liverpool-based groups. It’s basically a “print the legend” version of the history of rock ‘n’ roll in both Britain and the U.S., though I give Montgomery and Page a lot of credit for presenting the actual music, if not in note-complete performances of whole songs, at least in snippets long enough to give a good account of the overall flavor and quality of the music. After the opening with the Beatles, the show flashes back to the birth of rock in the U.S. with Bill Haley and His Comets coming to Britain and performing “Rock Around the Clock” in the context of a standard variety show. It then goes on to document the culture shock by which this new American music (actually invented by Black musicians and then adopted by whites) entered the U.K.’s musical marketplace and the hapless attempts of established British acts to adapt to it. It shows this through a montage sequence of three songs performed by British artists with little or no sense of rock, including a pair of blonde white women singers vainly trying to cover Little Richard’s “Rip It Up” and making Pat Boone sound like an icon of soul by comparison. The show then gives a potted version of the real origins of British rock via “skiffle,” the music adapted from U.S. jug bands.

Skiffle really started as an offshoot of the “trad” boom; “trad,” short for “traditional” and meaning Dixieland jazz, was a huge fad in Britain in the early 1950’s. During trad performances, the rhythm section would play a few numbers alone to give the horn players a chance to rest, and one of these songs, Lonnie Donegan’s cover of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line,” became a huge hit in the U.K. and enough of one in the U.S. that Stan Freberg recorded a parody of it in which a hapless record producer asks the singer during his interminable narrative at the start, “Are you going to sing this song, or read it, or what?” (U.S. comedians doing parodies of folk music often ridiculed the endless explanations folk singers routinely gave of the songs they were about to sing, including Andy Griffith’s marvelous introduction of himself as “not a song-singer but a song-explainer.”) There’s a marvelous clip of Donegan performing “Rock Island Line” and doing so far more infectiously than he did on his record, an album track on a release by his then-employer, Dixieland trombonist Chris Barber. Then there’s a montage of three different versions of the song “Twist and Shout”: the original American R&B hit by the Isley Brothers (though they weren’t the first group to play the song: another Black group, The Top Notes, were), an unnamed British group and The Beatles. The show gives a glancing reference to the difficulties Beatles manager Brian Epstein (who’s shown here in an archival clip) had in getting The Beatles a U.K. recording contract, but it doesn’t go into details – though later they include a clip of a cover of The Contours’ early-Motown hit “Do You Love Me?” by Brian Poole and The Tremeloes, which famously got the contract from Decca Records that the Beatles auditioned for and were turned down. (Dick Rowe, the executive in charge of pop music for Decca, said it was simply because the Tremeloes were a London band – actually from the suburb of Dagenham – and he thought they’d be easier to work with than a band from Liverpool.)

Following the Beatles’ success their manager, Brian Epstein, created a pipeline to “break” other Liverpool bands, though the only one that had enduring success besides the Beatles was Gerry and the Pacemakers. Epstein’s formula included getting them a record contract with the executive who’d finally signed The Beatles – George Martin at EMI’s low-prestige label, Parlophone – and often outfitting them with a song by John Lennon and/or Paul McCartney. But for Gerry’s first record he recorded “How Do You Do It?,” a pop song by professional songwriter Mitch Murray that George Martin had first given to The Beatles. George Martin had signed The Beatles even though, as he frankly admitted, “I didn’t think their songs were any good.” He figured he’d need to get them professionally written material to keep them successful – and he went on thinking that until The Beatles auditioned “Please Please Me,” which John Lennon had originally written as a Roy Orbison-style rock ballad. Martin had rejected that version, but when Lennon sped it up Martin was knocked out and thought maybe, just maybe, The Beatles could build long-term career success on their originals. (They did.) Gerry Marsden’s recording of “How Do You Do It?” was actually considerably better than The Beatles’ version; while The Beatles had played it as rather dull straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll, Gerry gave the song a ragtime and swing feel that put it over and made him and The Pacemakers the second Liverpool band to have a British number one hit. Gerry and the Pacemakers are actually represented here by a later record, “It’s Gonna Be All Right.” Then the show detailed groups that came from other parts of England, including The Hollies from Manchester (The Hollies named themselves after American rock legend Buddy Holly, and The Beatles also got their name from Holly; it was the name of Holly’s backup band, The Crickets, that gave John Lennon the idea of naming his own band after an insect.) The Hollies are represented here by a cover of “Just One Look” by African-American woman singer Doris Troy, and I joked that when she heard it she probably thought, “It was bad enough when we had to worry about white Americans stealing our songs, but white Brits?”

Then the show acknowledged the harder-edged more blues-based bands from London, notably The Rolling Stones, whom they said were graduates of art college and therefore higher on the British social pecking order than The Beatles and the other Liverpool bands (though John Lennon had gone to art college and had met the Beatles’ original bassist, Stu Suttcliffe, there). The show introduces the Stones via a sound clip of Muddy Waters playing “I Just Want to Make Love to You” followed by a TV version of the Stones covering it, and it mentions that the first time the Stones made it to the British charts was with a version of The Beatles’ “I Wanna Be Your Man.” Actually the Stones recorded that song before the Beatles did; they got it via Andrew Loog Oldham, who’d been a member of Brian Epstein’s organization and still had contacts with The Beatles. He asked them if they had any songs that would be suitable for the Stones, and John Lennon replied, “Yes, we’ve got a few songs that are more like their image than ours.” Lennon in particular was notoriously bitter about the way the Rolling Stones built themselves up as the bad boys of British rock in comparison to the cute, cuddly and “safe” Beatles. In his 1970 Rolling Stone interview he said that in their early days in Liverpool and Hamburg, Germany (where The Beatles served a grueling apprenticeship that turned them from a barely acceptable band into the greatest rock group of all time) they’d worn leather suits and duck’s-ass haircuts and had been at least as bad-ass as the Stones ever were. The show features a clip of the Stones doing “I Wanna Be Your Man” (and I still think their version is much better than the Beatles’, thanks largely due to Mick Jagger’s more impassioned vocal than Ringo Starr’s). After brief mentions of two more British bands, The Animals (doing their star-making hit “House of the Rising Sun”) and The Kinks (doing “All Day and All of the Night”), a London-based band originally called The Ravens, the show then shifted its attentions to the United States.

In 1964 American rock ‘n’ roll had largely lost its edge; a terrible combination of death (Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, Eddie Cochran), near-death (Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent), scandal (Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis), religious conversion (Little Richard) and the draft (Elvis Presley) had depleted the ranks of the original American rockers and left the field open to wimps like Frankie Avalon and Fabian. About the only enduring artists making rock hits in the U.S. in the early 1960’s were Ricky Nelson, Del Shannon, The Four Seasons and The Beach Boys. This show features a TV clip of Chubby Checker doing a song I didn’t recognize but which sounded like it was called “Lose Your Inhibitions Twist” – oddly Checker was the only Black performer actually shown on this program, though The Isley Brothers and Muddy Waters are heard via sound clips of songs British Invasion bands covered – and argued that the British bands basically gave rock ‘n’ roll back to the country that had invented it. There’s a clip of some women fans of The Beatles singing “We Love You, Beatles” (a jingle adapted from the musical Bye, Bye, Birdie, about an Elvis-like rocker who gets drafted) before The Beatles themselves appear on American TV with “I Saw Her Standing There.” Then the show depicts other British bands that made it across the Atlantic: Gerry and the Pacemakers with “Ferry Cross the Mersey” (the Mersey River, the main one that runs through Liverpool); Freddie and the Dreamers with “I’m Telling You Now” (the lead singer of Freddie and the Dreamers so self-consciously modeled himself on Buddy Holly that he wore the exact same glasses frames); Manfred Mann with “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy”; the Rolling Stones with their cover of Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around”; and The Animals with “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” Manfred Mann was a white South African who emigrated to London with his friend and musical partner, drummer Mike Hugg – their first band was called the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers – and he was particularly upset at the assumption in the U.S. that all British rockers were from Liverpool. When his first U.S. tour was billed as The Mersey Sound of 1964 Show Mann protested, “I’ve been to Liverpool exactly once, and that was when we were asked to play there,” and when Mann was asked how things were in Liverpool, he said, “Well, there is a place called London, too!”

As the British rock scene evolved, it broke not only pop-style bands like Herman’s Hermits (represented here by “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” in a live clip in which their lead singer, Peter Noone, gets the audience to sing the song themselves in a ritual that’s since become standard) but also harder-edged bands like the Spencer Davis Group (not shown here but heard in their early record of “I’m a Man,” written by their singer and keyboard player, Stevie Winwood, but sounding very much like Muddy Waters’ song of the same name), The Who (shown here doing their first hit, “I Can’t Explain,” as well as a later clip from the 1967 film Monterey Pop doing their reputation-making song, “My Generation,” and ending with both guitarist Pete Townshend and drummer Keith Moon destroying their instruments on stage, a gimmick derided by folk-rock singer John Hiatt in his song “Perfectly Good Guitar”) and The Yardbirds (shown here doing “Heart Full of Soul”; they launched the careers of ace guitarists Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, but they’re not as well known as they should be mainly because of their lead singer, serviceable but not great Keith Relf – one of their last records was an early version of Page’s “Dazed and Confused,” which doesn’t come off because Relf’s voice just isn’t right for the song, whereas Robert Plant’s was when Page revived it for the first Led Zeppelin album). By 1966 rock was making a comeback in the United States and American bands were beginning to compete with the British ones. The show particularly emphasizes the San Francisco psychedelic scene, though it only represents it with a snatch of the Monterey Pop performance of the instrumental “Section 43” by the Berkeley-based band Country Joe and the Fish. Then the focus returns to Britain with an explosive clip of “Tales of Brave Ulysses” by Cream, and after the Monterey Pop clip of The Who’s “My Generation” the show closes with a non-visual outro of “She’s Not There” by The Zombies.

Of course the show also mentions the attempt by the Columbia movie studio to create their own imitation of The Beatles, The Monkees. They held open auditions for people responding to a classified ad called “Madness!” and got a surprisingly good group together for a band of professional actors who would play a rock band on TV. Though heavily indebted to The Beatles in general and their 1965 film Help! in particular, the TV show The Monkees had a sort of free-wheeling exuberance – John Lennon said he never missed an episode – and the albums they made, especially after the first two when The Monkees insisted they be allowed to play their own instruments on the records instead of just singing to pre-recorded backings by studio musicians produced by Don Kirschner, were quite capable and credible pop-rock for the late 1960’s. British Rock: The First Wave was a surprisingly well-done look at the British rock scene in the mid-1960’s and how it conquered the world, though it was made at a fraught time in the history of music as the punk-rock movement (which largely defined itself in opposition to the peace-and-love ideals professed by the 1960’s bands, even though The Beatles in general and John Lennon in particular recorded quite a few songs that anticipated punk: “Good Morning, Good Morning” from Sgt. Pepper and his solo songs “I Found Out,” “Well, Well, Well,” “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier” and “Gimme Some Truth”) had come and gone by 1985 and the British rock scene then was dominated by vaguely punk-ish synth-pop.

Much later in the evening Charles and I watched a British TV program from 1965 called Blackpool Night Out featuring The Beatles in a variety-show appearance (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru4yNVr_ouA) where they’re introduced by two comedians showing the British “goon humor” tradition from which Monty Python emerged. The Beatles perform “I Feel Fine,” “I’m Down” (on which John Lennon plays mellotron, an early synthesizer the Beatles used extensively; it’s about the only song they ever played on stage where John, Paul or George played an instrument other than guitar or bass guitar), “Act Naturally” (their Buck Owens country cover in which Ringo introduces his own vocal, admits that he’s going to sing out of tune, and blessedly pronounces the “t” in “often” twice), “Ticket to Ride” (in a much tighter version than the one The Beatles played in their fourth and last Ed Sullivan Show appearance a month later), “Yesterday” (a real surprise because Paul played it solo, with just himself on vocal and acoustic guitar and the Blackpool Night Out studio orchestra supplying the string parts; in other performances The Beatles reworked “Yesterday” into a rock ballad and all four participated, and if you want to hear this version look up the 1966 concert films from the Circus Krone in Munich, Germany and the Budokan Arena in Tokyo, Japan), and a scorching version of “Help!” The sound mix on this clip blessedly gives us little of the insensate audience screaming that usually accompanied The Beatles’ live performances (which Paul McCartney later compared to trying to perform a rock show in front of a 747 being warmed up for takeoff), and the show closed with a gang of go-go dancers cavorting to the live band’s instrumental version of the Beatles’ song “Can’t Buy Me Love” (which The Beatles performed on British Rock: The First Wave). It’s a welcome reminder that The Beatles revolutionized the world of show business but did so from the old order’s own redoubts!

The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Leather and Lace" (South Pacific Pictures, NZ on Air, GPB, WETA, PBS, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

In between British Rock: The First Wave and The Beatles’ 1965 appearance on Blackpool Night Out, my husband Charles and I watched the first 2015 episode of the quirky New Zealand-based policier, The Brokenwood Mysteries. This one was called “Leather and Lace” and it begins with a young blonde woman in a red dress being chased by a man in a car – though we don’t know yet who he was or why he’s doing this. Then the show cuts to the discovery of the body of Arnie (Phil Vaughan), coach of the local rugby team, The Cheetahs, which has lost 50 games in a row. Arnie is dead, tied up to one of the rugby field’s goalposts, and his body is discovered by the team members doing a warmup run. Police detective Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea) disqualifies his young, sexy red-haired officer Sam Breen (Nic Sampson) from serving on the investigation because he’s a member of the rugby team himself. Arnie was strangled with a pair of black lace women’s panties stuffed down his throat, embroidered with the initials “G. G.” Writers Timothy Balme and Nick Ward are able to fill the show’s 90-minute running time with a lot of red herrings, including Arnie’s widow (they’ve been separated for four years but have never divorced); Steve (Ben Barrington), the hot-headed young man who just got suspended from The Cheetahs for starting a fight with an opposing player during a recent game; and three other players who gathered outside Arnie’s window on the night he was later killed and called out to him to come out and “face the music.” Steve and the wife were having an affair, and that may have given Steve the motive to kill Arnie, but as it turns out the real culprit is Liam (at least that’s the name I thought I heard on the soundtrack; he’s identified on imdb.com as “Len” and is played by Jason Fitch). Ten years earlier Liam’s brother, a member of The Cheetahs, beat another player to death on the field during the game, and Arnie never got over it. Liam’s brother, Brooke, committed suicide a few weeks later somewhere on the rugby field, and Liam (or Len) never forgave Arnie and blamed him for his brother’s suicide. As part of a long-term revenge plot Liam/Len joined the team, not on the field but on the sidelines playing a drum during the games, and waited and bided his time. His time finally came when he was able to lure Arnie to the field after dark with a phone text ostensibly from a woman with the initials “G. G.”

The only local woman with the initials “G. G.,” whom the police have been searching for because of the initials on the murder panties, is local librarian Gloria Ginsberg (Jodie Rimmer), whom Arnie was attracted to but who begged off of a relationship with him because she’d been married twice before, and both her husbands had died in bizarre accidents that had left her suspected of murdering them. It also turns out that Arnie was a secret cross-dresser; like Ed Wood, he liked to wear women’s clothing and the red dress the three rugby players who gathered outside his window saw through it and assumed he had a girlfriend (or trick) over was actually one he was wearing. Even while he was out in public dressed in male clothes, he generally wore women’s underthings under them, and when Liam/Len ambushed Arnie on the rugby field he was genuinely shocked at Arnie’s embroidered black panties and decided to use them to kill him. Mike Shepherd and his main police partner, Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland), are able to deduce this because the local library’s three books on embroidery are missing. Rather than risk public embarrassment checking them out in the normal fashion, Arnie simply pilfered them from the shelves, took them home and used the information in them to hand-embroider the “G. G.” initials on his panties. Also Arnie was a big fan of classical music in general and Richard Wagner in particular (the cops find a DVD of Daniel Barenboim’s Bayreuth recording of Tristan und Isolde among Arnie’s effects), and this becomes part of the solution to the mystery because Mike Shepherd is told by Gloria Ginsberg that Wagner, too, wore women’s underwear. (Actually he didn’t; Wagner had a rare skin condition called erysipelas that made it agony for him to have any fabric rougher than silk in direct contact with his body. So the chronically broke and in-debt Wagner spent a lot of money he didn’t really have to make sure all his clothes were made of silk.) I quite like The Brokenwood Mysteries and it’s been fun watching them (though last week I missed this show and watched the film Fitzwilly, an old favorite of mine, on TCM instead) even though Charles says he doesn’t like it as much as the program it replaced on the local KPBS schedule, Midsomer Murders (maybe because the principal cop in Midsomer Murders has been married only once while the one in The Brokenwood Mysteries has been married three or four times; in fact his marriages have been so perfunctory even he can’t remember for sure how many times he’s been hitched!) and neither show impresses him as much as his memories of the more conventional hour-long PBS mystery shows he remembers from his younger years.

The Body Disappears (Warner Bros., 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, December 27) I put on Turner Classic Movies and caught three out of the six films they were showing on the subject of invisibility. They began the cycle with James Whale’s classic 1933 version of H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man and then the quite good 1953 spoof, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (about a prizefighter who uses the invisibility formula to make himself disappear so he can catch the gangsters who wanted him to throw a fight … or else), and they ended it with a truly terrible movie, The Amazing Transparent Man (1960), a film shot back-to-back with another awful sci-fi cheapie, Beyond the Time Barrier, in two weeks total in a Texas studio and directed by Edgar G. Ulmer (ah, how the mighty had fallen!). In between they showed the three films I actually watched, including a Warner Bros. comedy from 1941 called The Body Disappears that was actually by quite a wide margin the best of the movies I saw last night. It’s essentially a screwball comedy about a rich young man named Peter DeHaven (Jeffrey Lynn) who gets royally plastered at his bachelor party on the eve of his scheduled wedding. The bride is Christine Lunceford (Marguerite Chapman), who’s supposedly from another 1-percent family but they’re actually broke. The bachelor party is crashed by Robert Strock (Craig Stevens), who insists that Christine is his “girl” and she should be marrying him instead of that other guy. Strock is there to beat Peter up, but Peter’s friends intervene and keep Strock from being able to land a punch on him. As a prank, Peter’s friends decide to take him to the local medical college and lay him out on a slab in their dissecting room, pinning a lily to his chest with a note explaining what they’ve done.

Meanwhile, a teacher at the medical college, Professor Shotesbury (Edward Everett Horton), is conducting experiments in bringing the dead back to life. He’s already succeeded with a monkey named Charlie, and as his first subject he wants to kill his Black servant Willie (Willie Best, who usually played the typical dumb Black stereotype – in fact he was originally billed as “Sleep ‘n’ Eat” until Bob Hope, an anti-racist before anti-racism was cool, interceded with the studios and got Best billed under his real name – but here he gets to stretch out at least a bit and show some dry wit) so he can bring him back to life. Willie not-so-politely declines, and Shotesbury then hits on the idea of raiding the college morgue to get someone who’s already died, albeit recently, as his test subject. Naturally he grabs Peter even though Peter, when he comes to, protests that he’s not really dead. There’s some bizarre slapstick as Shotesbury and Willie try to maneuver the corpse out of the dissecting room and onto a gurney so they can take it home. When Peter revives Shotesbury is convinced that his life-reanimating serum actually works, though it has a side effect of rendering its user invisible. The Body Disappears is closer in mood to Universal’s comedy The Invisible Woman (made in 1940, a year earlier) than to any of the more serious Invisible Man films in Universal’s cycle. There are a lot of jokes about Peter DeHaven’s need to go about naked so no one can see him – the scenes in which he’s partially dressed were done the same way Universal’s effects crew did (wrapping the actor in black velvet and having him wear his clothes over it so the black would be clear in the black-and-white negative), but Warners’ effects technician, Edwin DuPar, didn’t do the process work anywhere nearly as well as Universal’s John P. Fulton did and there are plenty of the tell-tale lines around Jeffrey Lynn’s body that indicate badly matched composite shots.

When Peter arrives at the home of Christine still invisible, he brings a small suitcase containing his clothes and the suitcase ascends the big stairs of the Lunceford home apparently floating in mid-air. While Edward Everett Horton as the dotty scientist at the root of the action isn’t as convincingly droll as John Barrymore was in The Invisible Woman, he’s fine and so is Jane Wyman as Shotesbury’s daughter Joan. The gimmick is that Peter falls in love with Joan after he overhears a conversation between Christine and Strock in which she reveals that Strock is the man she really loves and she was only going to marry Peter for his money. Jane Wyman looks oddly hard-edged and it’s hard to match this workmanlike performance from the finely honed work she’d turn in later in her better-known films, but she’s effective. The plot involves Shotesbury getting sent to a mental institution by a friend and fellow professor who saw him chasing after his invisible monkey and the other members of the faculty board, then having Peter and Joan sneak him the invisibility formula so he can escape and give Peter the antidote before the time window closes and Peter becomes invisible for the rest of his life. The final shot shows Willie Best sitting on a needle attached to a syringe containing the formula, so he becomes invisible, too – meaning no fewer than four characters (including Wyman’s female lead) spent at least some of this film without being seen. The Body Disappears is well directed by D. Ross Lederman (a journeyman “B” director who has one genuine classic on his résumé, the 1932 pro-Native Western End of the Trail starring Tim McCoy, which is basically Dances With Wolves 48 years early) from a script by W. Scott Darling and Erna (not Emma!) Lazarus, and it’s a fun little comic romp and well worth seeing.

The Invisible Boy (Pan Productions, MGM, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home early from work and joined me for the next two films in Turner Classic Movies’ invisibility cycle, The Invisible Boy (1957) and Invisible Invaders (1959). The Invisible Boy was concocted by producer Nicholas Nayfack and writer Cyril Hume, who had previously worked together on MGM’s big-budget science-fiction film Forbidden Planet (1956), to reuse the prop of “Robby the Robot” built for that movie. It’s based on a 1956 short story called “The Brain Child” by Edmund Cooper, though the story apparently didn’t contain a robot character. The central human being is 10-year-old Timmie Marinoe (Richard Eyer, fresh from playing Gary Cooper’s younger son in the 1956 Civil War Western Friendly Persuasion, with Anthony Perkins, of all people, as Eyer’s older brother!), who feels “invisible” at home because his parents, physicist Dr. Tom Marinoe (Philip Abbott) and Tom’s wife Mary (Diane Brewster) ignore him. Tom Marinoe is in charge of the world’s largest supercomputer (and one of the most fun parts of the movie is seeing how filmmakers in 1957 envisioned the computers of the future; like the one in Desk Set, also from 1957, it looks incredibly retro in terms of how we think of computers today!), which is kept behind locked walls in a military-style bunker to make sure that the people who in Hume’s script called “our friends from beyond the [North] Pole” – i.e., the Soviet Union – don’t steal the secrets and build a supercomputer of their own. Timmie visits the supercomputer with his dad and it hypnotizes him and makes him a whiz at chess – a game he’s previously been unable to master, but with the computer’s knowledge at his disposal he’s able to checkmate dad in six moves. It also gives him the smarts to repair Robby the Robot, which was brought back from the future by a now-deceased scientist who’d invented a time-travel machine.

As a prank, Timmie asks Robby to make him invisible, and he spends part of the movie running around the Marinoe home playing poltergeist and loudly slurping his soup at the dinner table just as he’d done when he was visible. Fortunately, Timmie’s clothes disappear along with him, so he doesn’t have to run around the house naked; also the soup he eats becomes invisible as soon as it enters his body, rather than remaining visible until he digests it as in Wells’ novel and the 1933 film. I had remembered The Invisible Boy as light-hearted science-fiction fare for children, but the second half becomes surprisingly dark as the computer decides it no longer has any need for the human race, so it’s going to take over the universe and annihilate all biological life forms. The conceit of a supercomputer deciding it no longer needs people was actually a common one in 1950’s science-fiction; in Frank Herbert’s Destination: Void a computer is programmed to contain all of human knowledge, and it orders its creators literally to worship it. (There was a joke in the sci-fi world about a computer that would be programmed to contain all human knowledge, and then the scientists who ran the project would ask it all the questions humans had been debating for millennia. The first question they asked the computer was, “Is there a God?” – and the computer answered, “There is now.”) In The Invisible Boy the computer also has been programmed to contain all human knowledge, only as Tom Marinoe discovered by looking through its punch-cards, it has managed to hack itself seven times in 29 years and override the programming that was designed to keep it from getting too big for its britches. The one thing the computer needs is the code to unlock all its functions, which Tom Marinoe is the only person who knows (he’s placed a copy in a safe-deposit box that’s to be opened only after his death under highly secure circumstances), and the computer seeks to get it from him by using Robby to lure Timmie aboard a spaceship and then kill him slowly and torturously unless Tom gives up the code.

Only Robby, still containing remnants of its original programming not to harm people or put them at risk, refuses to kill Timmie, and though dad asks Timmie to stay on the spacecraft until it automatically returns to Earth a year later, Timmie is impatient to be reunited with his parents and uses an escape glider to get out of the ship and come back to Earth far sooner than that. Ultimately the Marinoes are reunited and Tom sets about to build a new supercomputer that won’t get out of hand the way the first one did. In that regard The Invisible Boy is the progenitor for later science-fiction tales about computers that conquer the human race, including the films Colossus: The Forbin Project and Demon Seed (in which the supercomputer literally rapes the wife of its creator) as well as the Matrix series. As a whole The Invisible Boy doesn’t come off; the domestic comedy of the first half and the horror of the out-of-control computer calmly ordering the total destruction of humanity in the second really don’t mesh that well. The action climax seems perfunctory and the final return-to-domesticity scene comes off as fake and unconvincing. Also, as Charles noted, the boy’s invisibility isn’t that important a plot point and really doesn’t relate to anything else in the film. What appealed to moviegoers in 1957 was a second chance to see Robby the Robot in action, and that’s still why anyone would sit through The Invisible Boy today.

Invisible Invaders (Premium Pictures, United Artists, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The last film in our program of invisibility movies from TCM was Invisible Invaders, made in 1959 by a company called Premium Pictures releasing through United Artists. The producer was Robert E. Kent (famous for being able to sit at a typewriter and churn out the usual Hollywood clichés while narrating the events of the baseball game he’d been to the previous evening), the director was Edward L. Cahn (former MGM shorts stalwart in the 1930’s reduced to making cheap-jack features like this in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s) and the writer was Samuel Newman. The cast featured two people I’d actually heard of before, John Agar and John Carradine, along with a lot of people I hadn’t, and the plot is essentially what Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s Plan Nine from Outer Space would have been if Wood had had a mini-budget instead of the micro-budget he actually did. The plot begins with scientist Dr. Karol Noymann (John Carradine) accidentally blowing himself up and killing himself while working in his lab developing a mega-weapon, the “Super H-Bomb.” (The original hydrogen bomb was actually nicknamed “The Super” by its inventor, Dr. Edward Teller, when he was researching it in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.) The moment I recognized him and realized what was about to happen to him I joked, “John Carradine is in this movie – and he gets blown up in the first minute?” Actually, he does and he doesn’t; after he’s dead he gets revivified and shows up at the home his old friend, Dr. Adam Penner (Philip Tonge), shares with Penner’s daughter Phyllis (Jean Byron) and fellow scientist Dr. John Lamont (Robert Hutton). Dr. Adam Penner has just resigned from the Atomic Energy Commission because he rebelled against the program to build the Super H-Bomb, and the revived Dr. Noymann (whose first name becomes “Carl” in the closing credits) explained that he’s actually an invisible man from outer space. He comes from a race of beings from another planet who 20,000 years before colonized the moon and obliterated all its native life forms. Newman’s script not only refers to the moon as a “planet” (it’s actually a satellite) but cheerily ignores the fact that without any atmosphere the moon couldn’t have supported native life at all (though maybe we were supposed to assume that the moon had once had air until its sinister colonizers abolished it because they didn’t need it – but then how did they breathe themselves?).

The invisible invaders from the moon have been using it as a home base to conquer the rest of the universe ever since, and now they’ve decided that it’s Earth’s turn to come under their total domination. They use their powers to turn the Earth into a ruined planet via a lot of stock footage, some of it from World War II newsreels and some of it from documentaries, newsreels or feature films (including a bizarre clip of the final scene from the Robert Mitchum/Arthur Ripley film Thunder Road, made by Mitchum’s company, DRM Productions, for United Artists release in 1958). I had the same thought during this movie that I’d had decades ago when Charles and I watched an hour-long edit of Abel Gance’s Fin du Monde (The End of the World) (1929): that the producers had written every film company in the world that did a newsreel and said, “Please send us everything you have on disasters.” The U.S. government, which somehow has managed to maintain a communications infrastructure even while the rest of the world is being destroyed, summons Dr. Penner, Phyllis and Dr. Lamont to live and work in an underground bunker so they can figure out how to kill the monsters while in a relative degree of safety themselves. (The bunker came equipped with a gas station and I was amused that the station pumps were emblazoned with the then-required warning, “Contains Lead [Tetraethyl],” before the modern smog converters made it necessary that cars use unleaded gas.) To drive them there, the government assigns Marine Major Bruce Jay (John Agar, once again adopting the halting vocal intonations and stance of his close friend John Wayne to try to make us see him as butch), and though we’ve previously assumed that Phyllis was married to Dr. Lamont, it turns out they were only roommates and not romantically interested in each other, so we should have known she’d end up with butch, clean-shaven Major Jay instead of Dr. Lamont with his “roo” moustache.

On their way to the bunker there’s an attempt to waylay them by a farmer (Hal Torey), whom I first thought was a zombie controlled by the invisible invaders. He turns out to be a farmer who was run off his land by the bad guys and, like a character in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, he’s got his gun out and is ready to flee to safety no matter how many people he has to take down to do it. Ultimately Major Jay kills the farmer in self-defense, and then the farmer’s body is indeed taken over by one of the invisible invaders (shown by piles of animated dirt the invaders are presumably kicking over in their paths). The invaders are demanding the total surrender of Earth’s population in 24 hours, but they don’t get it and are getting more and more impatient with the delays. In one of the film’s cleverer scenes, one invader takes over the broadcast booth at a hockey game, kills the color commentator, and forces the main broadcaster to send the message that the invaders demand the total surrender of earth (though since they intend to annihilate the human race whether we “surrender” or not, there’s no particular reason for us to capitulate). While trapped in the bunker, the Fantastic Four deduce that because the moon’s gravity is only one-sixth that of earth, the invaders can’t use their own metal weapons because they won’t hold together in earth’s environment. They are destroying the world only by using our own earth weapons against us. They also realize that while the creatures are impervious to bullets, they have a fatal weakness: sound. Certain sonic frequencies aimed at them not only incapacitate them but ultimately kill them and turn them into foam (after a few tests of this, the bunker starts to look like a particularly foam-driven craft brewery). Dr. Penner invents a ray gun that shoots sound waves and sends Major Jay to use it – though Jay is dressed in an ordinary haz-mat suit and Phyllis and Dr. Lamont have to go out in their truck with no protection at all. Eventually the world is saved for boring old humanity, there’s a stock shot of the United Nations headquarters in New York City as the stentorian (and unnamed on imdb.com) narrator who’s been annoying us throughout the whole movie explains that the need for the nations of the world to come together to defeat the space aliens has convinced them to make permanent peace, and Major Jay and Phyllis end up in a clinch. Invisible Invaders basically has the same plot as Plan Nine from Outer Space – aliens from another planet revive the corpses of dead Earthlings and use them as an army to take over – and though its production values are far higher than those of Ed Wood’s messterpiece, somehow it simply isn’t as much fun. For all Wood’s fabled incompetence as a director, at least his films have a crude energy that makes them entertaining; in the more “normal” but less energetic hands of Edward L. Cahn, Invisible Invaders just seems dull.

Platinum Blonde (Columbia, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, December 26), with all the late-night TV shows doing reruns for the last week of the year, my husband Charles and I watched a quite engaging film on Turner Classic Movies: Platinum Blonde, a 1931 romantic comedy directed by Frank Capra (or “Frank R. Capra,” as he was still billing himself then) and starring Loretta Young, Robert Williams and Jean Harlow (in that order!) in a wild tale about a super-rich family, the Schuylers (a real family who loom large in the history of New York’s 1 percent). Michael Schuyler (Donald Dillaway), son of matriarch Mrs. Schuyler (Louise Closser Hale), has got himself in trouble with a chorus girl whom he wrote letters to of a stupefying banality. We never see her, but she’s already extracted $10,000 as a settlement from the Schuyler family to avoid a nasty public scandal and a breach-of-promise suit. Reporter Stew Smith (Robert Williams) shows up at the Schuyler home, along with Bingy Baker (the marvelous character comedian Walter Catlett), a reporter for a competing newspaper. Bingy accepts a $50 bribe from the Schuylers’ attorney, Grayson (Reginald Owen), to forget about the story, but Stew tricks the Schuylers into confirming the story and naming the amount they paid the chorus girl to settle it. Only Stew has attracted the attentions of Michael’s sister Anne (Jean Harlow); they start dating and eventually they elope. Bingy finds out about it and “breaks” the story in his own paper – thereby getting Stew’s editor, Conroy (Edmund Breese), pissed at him because he didn’t give the story to him instead. Stew wants Anne to forsake her 1-percenter lifestyle and live with him in his flat, but Anne insists that he move in with her in the Schuyler mansion, where his new mother-in-law has promised them a wing in the big house. The media covering the marriage of Anne Schuyler to Stew Smith dub him the “Cinderella Man” – an appellation he finds humiliating (later Capra would reuse the “Cinderella Man” phrase in a far more famous film, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) – and though he continues rather desultorily to work as a reporter, he also starts writing a play but he can’t get any farther than the opening line detailing where it takes place.

In case you’re wondering where Loretta Young fits into this, she’s Gallagher, a young woman who’s part of the staff of Stew’s paper (though exactly what she does there remains something of a mystery), and though she and Stew are nothing more than co-workers and friends it’s obvious that writers Jo Swerling and Robert Riskin (in his first direct collaboration with Capra; Capra’s immediately previous film, The Miracle Woman, had been based on a play by Riskin called Bless You, Sister! but he didn’t work on the movie, and the writing credits for Platinum Blonde list Harry E. Chandlee and Douglas W. Churchill for the original story, Swerling for “adaptation” and Riskin for “dialogue”) are setting Gallagher up to be the true love of Stew Smith once his foray into “marrying up” ends dismally. The crisis comes when Stew invites his friends from the paper for a drunken party at the Schuyler home. Gallagher shows up and they start working on the play together once she convinces him that he knows nothing about Siberia, Araby or Norway (the locales he’s attempted before) and he should write something about his own experience. They start working and in nothing flat they have an outline and a complete Act I. Act II comes about when Anne Schuyler Smith catches Stew and Gallagher together (the one scene in the film in which Jean Harlow and Loretta Young both appear) and of course assumes the worst. We’ve already seen Anne getting cruised by a daredevil pilot (Bill Elliott) who’s previously flown around the world at a party to which Gallagher gained admittance by replacing the paper’s indisposed society editor, so the writers have lined up a replacement beau for her if and when she and Stew break up. (In a later and much better-known Capra-Riskin film, It Happened One Night, the heiress’s beau is also an aviator, though he’s a pretentious twit and in the end she dumps him for roughneck reporter Clark Gable.) Ultimately, in an engaging life-imitates-art-imitates-life finish, Gallagher tells Stew their play should end with the reporter pairing up with “O’Brien,” a character Gallagher has inserted based on herself, and as the two finish the play with that ending Stew and Gallagher pair up for real. There’s a neat worm-turning ending in which Anne offers to write Stew a settlement check and Stew virtuously turns it down.

Platinum Blonde is a movie I’ve seen before and been lukewarm about, but this time it clicked for me and I was with it totally. It’s got a lot of bad press over the years, partly due to the odd casting of the female leads. Audiences familiar with the later career trajectories of Jean Harlow and Loretta Young often wonder why Capra cast Harlow as the upper-class socialite and Young as the down-to-earth newspaper girl – based on their subsequent films one would have assumed it would be the other way around – but Harlow was actually from at least an upper-middle-class background. Like Humphrey Bogart’s father, Harlow’s father was a doctor and she grew up in relative affluence even though as an actress she played mostly lower-class characters. Platinum Blonde is also a sad film in that two of its stars died tragically young (of medical conditions that could probably have been successfully treated today); you knew about Jean Harlow but Robert Williams caught peritonitis and died while rehearsing his next film, a Constance Bennett vehicle at RKO called Lady With a Past, so he was gone permanently just four days after the release of the film that should have made him a star. According to a Robert Williams biography on imdb.com, when Platinum Blonde was first released on home video in the 1980’s audiences attracted to it by the legendary names – Harlow, Young, Capra – wondered who Robert Williams was and why they’d never heard of him. His character is the typical wisecracking reporter usually played in films of this period by Lee Tracy, but Williams is a good deal less annoying and more debonair. He comes off as a combination of William Powell and Cary Grant, both of whom later played similar roles (Powell in Libeled Lady – also with Harlow! – and Grant in His Girl Friday), and his dry wit and underlying sensitivity marked him as an actor of real promise, tragically unfulfilled.

Platinum Blonde also marks a road-not-taken for Frank Capra, who, aided by cinematographer Joseph Walker (who later shot most of Capra’s famous films), creates some hauntingly beautiful romantic images. These include a scene of Robert Williams and Jean Harlow necking, shot through a fountain on the Schuyler estate the way Josef von Sternberg was already famous for doing and Joseph H. Lewis would do in the 1940’s. Also Capra and Walker quite effectively use the massive staircase that separates the two floors of the Schuyler mansion for crane shots that anticipate what Orson Welles and Stanley Cortez did in The Magnificent Ambersons a decade later. And the floor of the Schuyler living room, with its inlaid black-and-white trapezoidal tiles, becomes a character in and of itself, especially when Stew irreverently plays hopscotch on them. Film critic Don Miller once argued that “the screen lost a director of great romantic power when Frank Capra became the cinematic propagandist for the New Deal” – and while that’s a strange thing to say about Capra, a lifelong Republican who voted against Franklin Roosevelt all four times (people who met Capra after seeing his films were often startled by how Right-wing his actual politics were), the “great romantic power” is quite obvious and apparent in this and other early Capras until he pretty much abandoned sensuality after the marvelous outdoor twilight love scene between Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in It Happened One Night. Platinum Blonde is best remembered as an important film in the ascent to superstardom of Jean Harlow – who was, after all, playing the title role – but it emerges today as an excellent romantic comedy which presents class conflicts considerably more adroitly and engagingly than Capra did in his later films, even the ones in which he still had Robert Riskin as his writer.

Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (The Cat in the Hat Productions, MGM Television, MGM Animation/Visual Arts, 1966)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After last night’s episode of Jeopardy!, my husband Charles and I got a nice surprise: an NBC network showing of the 1966 half-hour TV Christmas fable How the Grinch Stole Christmas! Charles and I had already encountered the Grinch story on Christmas Eve, when we’d walked past the Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park and posed for selfies in front of the big Grinch Christmas tree they put up every year for the holidays to promote their on-stage production of the classic “Dr. Seuss” (actually his real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, and before he started writing children’s books he’d been an editorial cartoonist for the Left-wing daily PM in New York in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, as “Ted Geisel”) tale. Earlier on Christmas day Charles had asked me to play the CD of the soundtrack to How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but then had me take it off after a few minutes when it turned out to be the soundtrack to the 2000 feature-length remake with Jim Carrey plastered with rubber appliances to play a live-action Grinch. Charles had hoped it would be the soundtrack of the original 1966 cartoon version with Boris Karloff as both the narrator and the Grinch, which was released as a record at the same time as the film and won Karloff a Grammy award. (When he received it – a statuette of an old-style wind-up phonograph – Karloff said, “It looks like a door-stop!”) So we got the unexpected and surprisingly welcome treat of getting to see and hear the Karloff original, co-directed by Chuck Jones, who’d worked at Warner Bros. in their cartoon department in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s and, among other things, had essentially created Bugs Bunny.

I’ve got an odd relationship with the works of Dr. Seuss; my mom couldn’t stand him and actually pulled me out of public school when in second grade we were being taught The Cat in the Hat. She loathed the book as being way too simple-minded – she taught both me and my brother to read when we were four, so when the Los Angeles Times did their big “Reading by Nine” campaign a few years ago, my reaction was, “Reading by nine? Way too late!” I didn’t develop any appreciation for Dr. Seuss at all until I started dating my girlfriend Cat in my early 20’s and she was a huge Seuss fan, turning me on to the progressive political messages in many of his works, notably the pro-environmentalist The Lorax. I think I first watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas! with her on a TV screening in the late 1970’s, and as an enormous Boris Karloff fan I was particularly attracted to his double casting as both narrator and Grinch. Actually, according to imdb.com, his “Grinch” voice was at least partly electronically created; directors Jones and Ben Washam had the sound crew tweak Karloff’s voice electronically so it would sound “grinchier” (to use the sort of crunchy expression Dave Hurwitz uses quite often on his “Classics Today!” raps on YouTube) as the Grinch than he did as the narrator. (It reminded me of the story Karloff biographer Donald F. Glut told that when he was offered the part of opera singer Gravelle in the 1936 film Charlie Chan at the Opera, he insisted on doing his own singing – but, though they may have told him they were using his voice, they hired a voice double for him anyway. That was something I hadn’t known until I posted an imdb.com “Trivia” post that said Karloff had done his own singing for the film – and another contributor corrected me and supplied the name of Karloff’s voice double, Tudor Williams.)

How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is mostly quite charming, and among the voice talents used on the soundtrack is June Foray as the two-year-old Cindy-Lou Who. Foray is best known as the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel in Jay Ward’s superb Rocky and Bullwinkle show, though she’d crossed paths with Karloff before in the 1953 film Sabaka, produced by a British company but actually shot in India. She played the bloodthirsty leader of a Hindu cult and Karloff was the Indian general trying to catch her and stop her from extorting the local peasants. How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is basically your usual bad-guy-who-hates-Christmas-sees-the-light-and-turns-good-at-the-end story, though there’s an implied progressive political message in that the Grinch and his faithful dog sidekick Max (the Grinch disguises himself as Santa Claus and Max dresses as a reindeer, though in one of the film’s better sight gags the reindeer antlers are too heavy for his head to support them and the Grinch has to cut them down) try to stop Christmas from coming to Whoville by stealing all the presents, toys and decorations, but Christmas comes all the same thanks to little two-year-old Cindy-Lou Who’s finding an ornament the Grinch left behind and all the Whoville residents getting together to sing “Welcome Christmas,” a song written especially for the film by Dr. Seuss, Albert Hague and Eugene Poddany, who conducted. I’d always assumed the opening words to this ditty were “Damu Dores,” and I never really understood what they meant (though, as British comedienne Anna Russell said of the Rhinemaidens’ song that opens Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, “I won’t bother to translate it because it doesn’t mean anything”). This time around I looked them up on imdb.com and found they’re actually “Fah who foraze! Dah who doraze!” Though one thing I still get irked about in Dr. Seuss’s tales is his use of made-up words (like virtually all the toys the residents of Whoville play with) as well as fictional items like the “roast beast” that’s the centerpiece of their Christmas dinner, for the most part How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is a wonderfully charming and entertaining little film and one of Boris Karloff’s few credits from the last decade of his life (1960-1969) that he could have been genuinely proud of instead of clearly just doing it for the money!

Holiday Affair (RKO, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I got back from our journey to Balboa Park at 6:30 p.m. last night (Sunday, December 24) and I settled in for the night. We had tamales and steamed carrots and corn for our Christmas Eve dinner and I began the evening with a quirky movie from RKO in 1949, Holiday Affair, produced and directed by Don Hartman from a script by Isobel Lennart (of the original Funny Girl and the quite amusing farce Fitzwilly from 1967) based on a story called “The Christmas Gift” by John D. Weaver. I was especially interested in this one because in March 2019 Charles and I had watched a 1955 Lux Video Theatre presentation of the same story, with Scott Brady, Phyllis Thaxter and Elliott Reid in the roles played here by Robert Mitchum, Janet Leigh and Wendell Corey, respectively. When I did a moviemagg blog post on the 1955 TV version (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2019/03/lux-video-theatre-holiday-affair-j.html) I’d speculated that the TV cast might actually have been better than the movie cast, and that turned out to be partially right. The story begins on Christmas Eve at the Crowley department store, where “comparison shopper” Connie Ennis (Janet Leigh) shows up and buys two items. One is for herself – a new suit of clothes for her son Timmy (Gordon Gebert) – and one is for her “comparison shopper” gig, in which she buys items to compare them to the ones her employer, a rival department store, is offering. Then she returns them the next day. Unfortunately, Timmy takes a peek at the comparison item – an elaborate model train set – and thinks that’s his present.

The store clerk she bought the train from, Steve Mason (Robert Mitchum), suspected her of being a comparison shopper right off when she came in and asked for the specific item without having to be “sold” on it, then produced the exact amount of money required. When she returns it the next day, he explains to her that he’s supposed to take a photo of her and send it to the other store departments as a warning that she’s a comparison shopper and is not to be allowed to buy anything there ever again – and he’s also supposed to call the police on her if she refuses to allow herself to be photographed. (As I wrote in my blog post on the 1955 TV remake, why? Since she paid for the item, it doesn’t seem to me like she did anything illegal.) She pleads with him to accept the return and not get her into trouble because that will mean she’ll be fired on Christmas – only a floorwalker spots him letting her go. As a result, he gets fired on Christmas. He helps her walk out of the store with presents she bought with no ulterior motives, and shows up at the apartment where she, a war widow who’s raising Timmy as a single parent, is having Christmas dinner with her fiancé, stuffed-shirt attorney Carl Davis (Wendell Corey). With his last money, Steve bought Timmy the train set but delivered it anonymously. Connie has such an idealized vision of her late husband she wants to remodel her six-year-old son into the spitting image of him and continue living with just the two of them. Carl wants her to marry him and he promises to be a real father to Timmy if she says yes. Only Connie protests that she doesn’t really love Carl “that way” because she’s still in love with Timmy’s dead father. Ultimately, after a few back-and-forth scenes, in which the train set passes back and forth between the principals several times and ultimately Mr. Crowley himself (Henry O’Neill) gives Timmy a refund on it, which he wants so Steve can get a train from Palm Beach, Florida (where the main part of the story takes place) to Balboa, California, where he’s been promised a job helping a war friend of his build boats.

Eventually Steve and Connie light out for California with Timmy in tow because Connie’s decided that he’s really the right man for her. There’s also a great scene in which Steve has been arrested for robbery and he, Connie and Carl are in a combination police station and night court where the cop in charge, played magnificently by Harry Morgan, practically steals the movie as he tries to sort out the various stories he’s told. I had assumed Holiday Affair the movie would be inferior to Holiday Affair the TV show, but I was only partly right. Robert Mitchum was considered miscast at the time because the part seemed to require a debonair romantic lead – as I wrote about the 1955 version, Cary Grant would have been ideal – but he was a good enough actor that he was able to turn the seeming miscasting into an effectively dry performance. Wendell Corey is also quite credible as Carl – there’s real uncertainty as to whether Carl or Steve would be the best mate for Connie, which there wouldn’t have been with Cary Grant as Steve (though the plot has intriguing similarities to Philip Barry’s Holiday, filmed in 1938 with Grant and Katharine Hepburn in their third of four films together, notably in a bit of dialogue cut from the 1955 TV show in which Steve talks about how he got a job in a financial-services firm but walked out on it because it didn’t fulfill his dreams). The principals who really let the side down were Janet Leigh as Connie and especially Gordon Gebert as Timmy. In an early scene Leigh was so overbearing I joked, “Where’s the drag queen with a knife in the shower when we need him?”, and in my comments on the 1955 remake I actually praised the boy who played Timmy, Christopher Olsen, for avoiding the gooey sweetness child actors of both genders displayed for decades after Shirley Temple’s huge success in 1934. Unfortunately, Gordon Gebert here goes all out for “male Shirley Temple” status here, and is so offensively sweet one wishes he’d die or get sick already just to be rid of him, even though such a plot twist would have made this an unabashed tearjerker instead of a bittersweet romance whose ending Charles said disappointed him because he didn’t think any of these people would truly be happy with the denouement.

The Selfish Giant (Potterton Productions, Reader’s Digest, Arrow Entertainment, Pyramid Films, 1971)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Holiday Affair I was prepared to watch the next item on Turner Classic Movies’ Christmas-eve schedule – the 1938 version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with Reginald Owen as Scrooge, directed by Edwin L. Marin (who’d directed Owen as Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet five years earlier). Owen was a last-minute substitute for Lionel Barrymore, who was identified with Scrooge on radio and whom MGM wanted for the film – only just before shooting his chronic arthritis reached the point of no return and he had to drop out of the part at the last minute. So MGM had Lionel Barrymore host the trailer and symbolically hand over the part to Owen for the actual movie. Instead my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube video post of a 1971 French animated film of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale The Selfish Giant, a nice but rather didactic tale of a selfish giant who gets tired of the local forest kids playing in the garden of his castle. So he builds a giant wall around it and posts “No Trespassing” signs to keep them out. Only without the children around to bring joy to the trees and other plant life in the garden, the walled-off garden is subject to perpetual winter and only the North Wind, Frost and Hail want to hang out there. Eventually the selfish giant’s heart is thawed by a particularly scrawny kid who wants to be lifted onto one of the trees – and as soon as the giant does this, the tree blossoms and spring returns to the garden. The giant ultimately knocks down the wall and the children return to his garden, but he misses the child who opened his heart. He doesn’t return for many years – though since this is a fairy tale he doesn’t seem to be any older when he finally shows up – and in an explicitly Christian ending that was a real surprise coming from a writer like Wilde, he turns out to have the stigmata. When he returns for the giant, who’s old and about to die, he tells the giant, “I’m going to take you to my garden – Paradise.” The 1971 version was half an hour long and directed by Peter Sander, who also wrote the screenplay based on Wilde’s story. It was narrated in English by Paul Hecht and in French by the great cabaret singer Charles Aznavour, and the English version we watched featured three ultra-sappy soft-rock songs by, of all people, the King Sisters. The Selfish Giant was acceptable entertainment, though it seemed to be an odd thing to watch in an era in which Donald Trump is poised to regain the Presidency in the 2024 election with a promise to “close the border” and “drill, drill, drill.” Alas, Trump is such a total psychopath it’s impossible to imagine the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, Cindy-Lou Who or a fairy-tale child who turns out to be the resurrected Jesus opening him up and turning him into a normal, compassionate human being!

The Molly Maguires (Tamm Productions, Paramount, copyright 1969, released 1970)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Ultimately Charles and I watched a movie I’d wanted to show him since he read a mention of it in one of my recent blog posts: The Molly Maguires, made in 1969 and released in 1970. Charles had read a book on the Molly Maguires – a group of Irish-American coal miners in the 1870’s who engaged in sabotage to protest the horrifically awful working conditions the mine owners imposed on them. But he hadn’t been aware anyone had made a movie about them until he read about it in a blog post in which I mentioned it. The Molly Maguires was very much a Zeitgeist movie, made during a period of major civil unrest in the U.S. focused largely on student activists who had come together to agitate for civil rights for African-Americans and against the war in Viet Nam. As the war dragged on for decade after decade and the final victory over American racism remained as elusive as ever, movie studios tried making films about the campus demonstrations like The Strawberry Statement, R.P.M., Zabriskie Point and Getting Straight – all of which bombed. They also looked for historical parallels so they could tell stories of radical protest without appearing to take sides on then-contemporary controversies, just as their forebears in the 1930’s had discovered Charles Dickens and filmed his stories incessantly so they could do rich vs. poor and aristocracy vs. commoners tales without actually dramatizing what was happening in the 20th century.

The Molly Maguires was also an attempt by its star, Sean Connery, to make the world forget that he’d ever played James Bond. He wanted the world’s producers and casting directors to know that he was actually an accomplished actor capable of playing a wide range of characters, including the psychiatrist in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (combining two characters from Winston Graham’s source novel) who becomes obsessed with the title character, a kleptomaniac. But at least Marnie had kept him relatively affluent and kempt; for The Molly Maguires he and the other actors playing coal miners wore faces thick with dark makeup simulating coal dust and looked as grungy and dirty as real miners. The central conflict in The Molly Maguires is between Molly Maguires leader Jack Kehoe (Sean Connery) and his friend John McKenna (Richard Harris), who – as we learn almost immediately even though Kehoe and the other Molly Maguires don’t until the very end of the film – is actually James McParland, a Pinkerton agent (though the agency is unnamed in the film) sent in to bust the Mollies and get their ringleaders hanged for murder. “McKenna” shows up with clean, unscarred hands – so the miners are immediately aware he’s never before worked in a coal mine in his life – but he picks a fight in the local miners’ bar called the “Emerald Green” and thus establishes his proletarian “street cred.” “McKenna” works his way first into the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the legal organization that’s the front group for the Mollies (and which still exists, though its main function these days is putting on St. Patrick’s Day parades), and then he’s given the full-fledged initiation into the Molly Maguires.

The film was written by Walter Bernstein and directed by Martin Ritt – the same team that were responsible for the anti-blacklist film The Front in 1976 – and Bernstein’s script makes clear that the miners had attempted to unionize and strike several years earlier, but the bosses had successfully broken their strike, slashed their already meager wages and imposed a series of “deductions” on them that reduced to pitifully small amounts even for 1875. In one particularly humiliating scene “McKenna” is told he earned $19 for the amount of coal he’s mined, but the deductions, including $2.50 per cask of the explosives used to loosen the coal so it can be mined, add up to so much he ends up with 24 cents. One of the most powerful aspects of The Molly Maguires is it vividly dramatizes just how awful coal mining is as a way to make a living – and it does so without resorting to the almost obligatory mine cave-ins just about every other movie about coal mining has contained. The filmmakers hired the legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe, who’d made his bones in the industry 50 years earlier because he figured out how to make silent star Mary Miles Minter’s blue eyes show up dark (he bounced light off a black screen and thus darkened her eyes on screen to compensate for the insensitive film stocks then in use). For The Molly Maguires he invented a special bank of lights so he could shoot inside a coal mine (or a studio simulation thereof, though most of this film was actually shot at a still-extant Pennsylvania coal mine from the period) and reproduce the “look” of one. There’s also a very au courant debate for the 1969-1970 time the film was made over whether violence is necessary for social change, including a clergyman, Father O’Connor (Philip Bourneuf), who preaches from the pulpit against any sort of violence because it will just be counterproductive.

But it’s hard to imagine what the Molly Maguires are up to because they’re blowing up their own workplaces and therefore putting themselves out of work. It seems to be motivated as much by revenge against the mine owners as anything else, and towards the end Bernstein gives Kehoe a speech indicating that he’s well aware that there will always be a few rich people exploiting the hell out of a lot of not-rich people, and all the not-rich people can do with their activism is strike back just a little. There’s also a love interest between “McKenna” and Mary Raines (Samantha Eggar), daughter of the owner of the rooming house where McKenna is staying, including one scene in which “McKenna” deliberately injures himself on the job (he crushes his fingers with a railroad switch) so he can get a few days off to take Mary to Philadelphia. (Director Ritt, writer Bernstein and cinematographer Wong Howe make Philadelphia positively glow with both natural and urban beauty; this was made before director Francis Ford Coppola and his cinematographer, Gordon Willis, hardened the past-is-brown convention of today with their work on the first two Godfather films.) Ultimately McParland “outs” himself as a detective when he shows up in court to testify against the Mollies as the state’s primary witness – and Mary is predictably disgusted with him as he invites her to move with him to his next posting, Denver. She says she once thought she’d do anything to get out of the Pennsylvania mine country, but hooking up with a Judas (a parallel cleverly made by Ritt’s staging of the actual hanging, in which Kehoe and the other two Molly Maguires leaders are hanged as a group, with Kehoe in the middle like Jesus on Golgotha) was a step too much for her. The Molly Maguires is a surprisingly slow and action-less movie – just a few acts of sabotage and bar fights, in one of which McParland’s police captain contact clubs him upside the head and draws blood just to make it look convincing – and Charles called it half historical spectacle and half film noir. But it holds up surprisingly well even though most of the descendants of the Molly Maguires today are soldiers in the Right-wing culture wars and blind supporters of Donald Trump.

Susan Slept Here (RKO, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Late last night (from 11 p.m. to 12:45 a.m. Saturday and Sunday, December 23 and 24) Turner Classic Movies showed a film I’d had fond memories of the previous time I’d seen it there. The film was Susan Slept Here, a 1954 Christmas-themed screwball comedy co-starring Dick Powell as burned-out 35-year-old Hollywood writer Mark Christopher (so his name combines both mine and my late brother’s!) and Debbie Reynolds as 17-year-old Susan Landis. Susan shows up on Mark’s doorstep as a literal Christmas present from two local vice cops, Monty Maizel (Horace McMahon) and Sam Hanlon (Herb Vigran). They’d worked with Mark as technical advisers on a police drama Mark had written, and they recalled him mentioning that someday he’d like to write a film about juvenile delinquency and he’d want to meet a real juvenile delinquent to interview for research. So they deliver Susan to him because she’s just been arrested for vagrancy and assaulting a cop with a beer bottle, and it’s either take her to jail or find someone willing to take her in. Mark has a sort-of girlfriend, actress Isabella Alexander (Anne Francis), who’s a lot more interested in him than he is in her; she’s the spoiled rich brat of a Senator father and she threatens to use her political connections to ruin his life if he jilts her, especially for a piece of jailbait like Susan. Susan Slept Here was directed by Frank Tashlin; it began life as a stage play by Steve Fisher and former Universal and Warner Bros. producer Alex Gottlieb, and Fisher did the screenplay as well.

While nowhere nearly as anarchic as Tashlin’s vehicles for Jayne Mansfield or Jerry Lewis, Susan Slept Here is a marvelously Production Code-bending comedy in which we’re constantly reminded that Susan is underage (though Fisher and Gottlieb got out of that one via a letter Susan’s mother supposedly left her when she tore off with another man; since Susan’s mom liked Susan’s then-current boyfriend she wrote her a letter giving her written permission to get married). Mark’s attorney, Harvey Butterworth (Les Tremayne, in a departure from his usual role in science-fiction movies as the idiot scientist who wants to reason with the monster instead of joining with the other cast members to kill it; this time he’s playing essentially a Jerome Cowan role and bringing the same kind of dry wit to it), gets more and more exasperated at the possible consequences as Mark’s and Susan’s relationship seemingly gets more serious. Actually, Mark’s original intent in marrying Susan is just so she can stay out of jail over the holidays; after that he plans to have the marriage annulled – only she refuses to sign the annulment papers when Harvey presents them and insists that Mark do it himself. When he does present them himself, she again refuses and insists on either a for-real marriage or a normal divorce. There’s also the rather amorphous character of Virgil (Alvy Moore), Mark’s former commanding officer in the U. S. Navy in World War II (when he introduces himself as such I expected one of the other characters to reply that it’s a good thing that we won the war in spite of his incompetence) turned Mark’s go-fer. The plot reaches its climax when Mark catches Susan breakfasting on a repulsive combination of strawberries and pickles. Though she later explains that she just happens to like that sweet-and-sour mix, he assumes that means she’s pregnant and, since Mark knows he hasn’t had sex with her, he assumes Virgil is the baby-to-be’s father. Mark punches Virgil out for no apparent reason – no apparent reason to Virgil, anyway – but the shock of this makes Mark realize that he loves Susan for real and the two become an actual couple at the end.

There are nice bits of wit in Susan Slept Here, including a scene in which Mark and Susan watch an old movie Mark worked on on TV; Susan complains that she’s never heard of any of the people in it, and Mark says, “That’s because you weren’t born yet.” And there’s a pretty bad song called “Hold My Hand,” sung by Don Cornell (who’s credited in the movie even though we never see him), an appropriately stentorian crooner, that becomes a plot point as well as a musical Leitmotif through the film (it was written by Richard Myers with lyrics by Jack Lawrence; Lawrence also wrote both words and music for the film’s title song, sung by a chorus over both the opening and closing credits). At the end we see it being played on a Coral record (Coral was a subsidiary of American Decca and released the Ames Brothers’ cover of “Ragg Mopp” and Buddy Holly’s solo records) as Mark and Susan commit to making their relationship work. There’s also intriguing references to other movies; Mark Christopher is essentially a comedy version of William Holden’s burned-out writer character from Sunset Boulevard, and there’s an evocation of Dick Powell’s own past in his lament that he’s so good a comedy writer no one will take his ambitions to write a drama seriously, “Oh, like the boy crooner who wanted to play a private detective?” I joked.

And there’s an amusing aspect in that the film’s opening narration is delivered by Mark Christopher’s Academy Award, for which the filmmakers had to get permission from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to depict on screen. The award laments that it was given to a mere writer rather than the supporting actress winner, and also marks the win as the turning point downwards in Mark’s career, an interesting use in a film plot of the so-called “Oscar Curse.” One wonders if the stage version also used an Academy Award as a narrator! There’s also a nice part for Glenda Farrell, Dick Powell’s former studio-mate at Warner Bros., as Mark’s long-suffering secretary Maude Snodgrass, and a big production number representing Susan’s dream (literally) of herself, Mark and Isabella (shown as a six-limbed combination of an evil Hindu goddess and a spider woman). The only touch Tashlin missed was not having Dick Powell make the record of “Hold My Hand” himself – perhaps with Mark Christopher making a few catty remarks about how bad he thinks the singer is.

Room for One More (Warner Bros., copyright 1951, released 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, December 22) I watched an unusual film on Turner Classic Movies, part of their days-long marathon programming of Christmas movies and also part of their “Star of the Month” tribute to actor Cary Grant. The film was called Room for One More and was directed by Norman Taurog, who’d “made his bones” in 1931 with Skippy, the film that made child actor Jackie Cooper a major star. So he’d become a go-to guy for films involving kids. Room for One More is more or less based on a true story; the film’s basis is a book by Anna Perrott Rose, which is also the name of the female lead, played by Betsy Blair, Cary Grant’s real-life wife at the time. (Three of Grant’s five wives were actresses – Virginia Cherrill, Betsy Blair and Dyan Cannon – but Blair appears to be the only one he worked with professionally as well.) The script is by two of Bob Hope’s favorite writers, Melville Shavelson and Jack Rose (presumably no relation), which made me wonder if Hope was considered for the male lead before Grant was finally cast. Anna in the movie is the wife of George Rose (Cary Grant), civic engineer for the city of Fairfield, New Jersey (though we only learn the name of the locale from a banner flown during a Boy Scouts ceremony at the very end). He and Anna have had three children of their own, daughter Trot (Gay Gordon) and sons Teenie (George Winslow) and Tim (Malcolm Cassell), but Anna has a penchant for taking in strays of all species. Among the Roses’ brood are a dog who eats anything that falls to their floor and a cat that, unbeknownst to Anna, is not only female but is pregnant and gives birth to five kittens.

Anna visits an orphanage run by Miss Kenyon (Lurene Tuttle), who’s showing off newborn babies (many of them the children of unwed mothers) and getting oohs and aahs from the potential adoptive parents. Miss Kenyon boasts that “our product sells itself,” and then she takes the group to the back of the orphanage, where the older kids are. Miss Kenyon challenges the potential parents there to adopt an older child, but with one exception they couldn’t be less interested in adopting hard-luck kids with physical, mental or emotional disabilities. Anna, of course, is the exception; she picks out Jane Miller (Iris Mann) and brings her home with the intention of fostering her for a year and then finalizing the adoption. Jane is immediately hostile and convinced that this will be just one more home with a couple who will dump her again within a week or two. Despite George Rose’s protests that they’re barely able to support the kids they have financially and one more mouth to feed will push them over the edge money-wise, he yields to his wife. Later on they foster another child, a boy named Jimmy John Wilson (Clifford Tatum, Jr.) who wears braces on both legs – 1952 audiences would have immediately recognized him as a polio victim, and I was wondering, “Where’s Sister Kenny when they need her?,” though later in the movie we see Anna Rose massaging his legs and using Kenny’s treatments to nurse him back to health and full mobility. Jimmy John is also virtually illiterate and says almost nothing until the Roses gradually break him down with their love.

The most vivid parts of the movie to me were the powerful performances of Iris Mann and Clifford Tatum, Jr. as the damaged children the Roses take in and nurse back to both physical and mental health; Iris Mann in particular is vivid in her rendering of Jane’s pain and trauma is indelible and makes me wonder why she didn’t have more of an acting career. Instead, she quit show business and became a journalist. Just what happened to Jane to traumatize her so completely couldn’t be spelled out with the Production Code hamstringing Shavelson and Rose, but it’s not hard for a modern-day audience to figure out she must have been physically abused and probably sexually molested as well. The family goes to a beach resort for the holiday season – remember this was being shown as part of TCM’s Christmas marathon and so there had to be a holiday connection – and Jane attracts the attention of a young man who invites her to the New Year’s prom, only it’s a formal-dress affair and she has nothing to wear. Anna offers to cut down an old dress of hers, but it looks awful on Jane. The Roses ultimately buy Jane a prom dress, but the boy who asked her to the dance withdraws the invitation on orders of his parents and George Rose goes to their home and chews them out for being such snobs. Meanwhile, Jimmy John goes out alone at 5:30 a.m., while it’s still dark and cold (though we have to take that on faith because director Taurog shot the sequence on a studio “exterior” without the telltale breath steaming that people do when they’re really in cold weather, and the scene could have used Frank Capra’s famous icehouse), to complete a 10-mile hike he needs to do to win his coveted Boy Scout merit badge.

My husband Charles came home as the film was wrapping up, when Jane is at the prom and insists on dancing one dance with her dad, and New Year’s happens. The band at the prom marks the New Year by cutting off their surprisingly good swing version of Kay Swift's “Can’t We Be Friends?” to play “Auld Lang Syne,” and Charles couldn’t resist joking that they must have got Guy Lombardo to play their prom. The film ends with the surprisingly elaborate ceremony at which Jimmy John is awarded the coveted Eagle Scout badge, and the ritual provides that his mom has to pin it on him and he gets to pin a separate item on her dress. I wasn’t sure I’d like Room for One More because I was worried it would be too sentimental, but largely due to Cary Grant’s skill as a performer, particularly his dry wit, it avoids descending too far into treacle. Turner Classic Movies recruited Cary Grant’s daughter Jennifer to co-host his movies, and inevitably they asked her whether her own experience being raised by him had any similarities to his acting the role of a father of five in this film. Of course, her domestic situation was quite different because her parents divorced when she was still a child, and she was shuttled back and forth between her mom and her dad, but she still said she recognized some of his gestures as a parent in his performance in the movie, and could also tell the real affection between Cary Grant and Betsy Blair even though their marriage ended in divorce in 1962 and Blair was one Cary Grant wife before Jennifer’s mother (she was number three and Dyan Cannon was number four).

The Man Who Came to Dinner (Warner Bros., 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I put on Turner Classic Movies starting at 7 p.m. yesterday (Thursday, December 21) for two more items in their marathon of Christmas-themed films, The Man Who Came to Dinner and Fitzwilly. The Man Who Came to Dinner was based on a 1939 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart which spoofed legendary lecturer, broadcaster and Algonquin Round Table host Alexander Woollcott – who was so taken with the play and its joking depiction of him that he later acted the lead role of “Sheridan Whiteside” himself in stock company productions. The play deals with Sheridan Whiteside injuring himself in Mesalia, Ohio when he slips and falls down the stairs of the front stoop of the home of the Stanleys. Immobilized and needing a wheelchair for the duration of his stay, he proceeds to take over the Stanleys’ home and lives. Whiteside’s long-suffering secretary, Maggie Cutler, was played by Bette Davis in the film – a real surprise for long-time moviegoers who were used to seeing her in serious roles instead of a rambunctious comedy – and in his introduction TCM host Ben Mankiewicz went on and on about how Davis pressured Warner Bros. production chiefs Jack Warner and Hal Wallis to give her the role, which she wanted desperately. Alas, Mankiewicz (whom I’ve described elsewhere as “a nodule off one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees”) didn’t mention why Davis so desperately wanted the part. When Warner Bros. bought the movie rights, they’d announced that John Barrymore would play Sheridan Whiteside, and Davis had always wanted to work with the great Barrymore. Then Warner and Wallis decided that Barrymore was neither physically nor mentally able to sustain such a big role – Sheridan Whiteside is in almost every scene and bellows his way through reams of dialogue that would have been hard for Barrymore to recite, even with the aid of his notorious cue cards. So at the last minute they replaced him with Monty Woolley, who’d played the part in the original Broadway stage production as well. Not surprisingly, Davis was furious that she’d agreed to play a low-importance role for the opportunity to work with a superstar whom she’d long admired, only to have that snatched from her grasp – though one can see the logic behind Warner’s and Wallis’s decision to yank Barrymore from the film given that he was really on his last legs and would die the following year.

What emerged was a quite sprightly and entertaining film which piles gag on top of gag; Whiteside’s reluctant (to say the least!) hosts are ball-bearing tycoon Ernest Stanley (Grant Mitchell in the comic-exasperation vein that was his stock in trade as a character actor), his wife Daisy (Billie Burke, four years before The Cheaters and playing essentially the same role), and their kids June (Elisabeth Fraser), Richard (Russell Arms) and Harriet (Ruth Vivian). Also in town is a small-time newspaper editor, Bert Jefferson (Richard Travis), who takes a liking to Maggie Cutler and starts courting her and introducing her to the pleasures of small-town life. Bert Jefferson has also written a play, which he shows to Maggie in hopes she can get Sheridan Whiteside to use his influence to get the script to Katharine Cornell (a legendary real-life stage actress who avoided movies like the proverbial plague, though she made one guest appearance in the 1942 film Forever and a Day, playing herself in a war-themed omnibus) and have it produced on Broadway. There’s also a local doctor, Dr. Bradley (George Barbier), who’s written an 800-page autobiography and wants Whiteside to edit it for him and get it published. The habitués from the celebriati who descend on the Stanley home to pay homage to the great Whiteside include unlikely movie star Banjo (Jimmy Durante, overbearing as usual) and even unlikelier actress Lorraine Sheldon (Anne Sheridan, cast way against type and billed second; Davis is first and Woolley third, even though his is the star part). Lorraine is a gold-digging bitch who’s uncertain whether she wants to keep acting or marry the British lord who’s courting her and will keep her in comfort for the rest of his life. Anxious to get rid of Bert Jefferson before he can marry Maggie and deprive him of the secretary who’s been suffering him for 10 years, Whiteside determines to sneak a copy of the play to Lorraine, who will want to shack up with the author for at least three months’ worth of “rewrites” (had my husband Charles been watching this with me, he doubtless would have joked, “Is that what they’re calling it now?”). He also engineers the elopement of Theresa Stanley with the young union organizer from out of town who came to Mesalia to organize the workers in Stanley’s factory – and naturally Ernest Stanley denounces him as a Communist and wants nothing to do with him as a son-in-law.

Also various well-wishers send Whiteside gifts, including an octopus and four penguins, and the penguins successfully escape their cage and run rampant throughout the Whiteside home. And Whiteside not only runs the Stanleys out of their own living room, he forbids them to use their phone because he needs the line for his own calls – and he runs up a huge long-distance bill to people like Eleanor Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Ultimately Whiteside thinks better of turning Lorraine loose on innocent Bert Jefferson (whose last name I suspect Kaufman and Hard deliberately bestowed on him to make him seem more archetypally “American”), and instead of letting her have her way with him they lock her in an Egyptian mummy case Whiteside has received as a present from the Khedive of Egypt. (I’d always assumed the word “Khedive” was pronounced “Keh-DIVE,” but in this film it’s “Kuh-DEEV.”) It looks like the Stanleys are going to get their house back and no longer have to put up with Whiteside again, only as he’s leaving he stumbles and falls on the same bad stoop of stairs, and … The Man Who Came to Dinner was adapted for the screen by brothers Julius and Philip Epstein (two of the four screenwriters on Casablanca, along with Howard Koch and an uncredited Casey Robinson), and it’s a zany farce staged expertly and at the usual relentless Warners pace by William Keighley (pronounced “Keeley,” by the way; I know that because he took over hosting the Lux Radio Theatre from Cecil B. DeMille and that’s how the announcer of that show introduced him). I’m with Bette Davis in thinking it’s heartbreaking that John Barrymore didn’t get to do this part – Monty Woolley is perfectly fine in the role but Barrymore might have been able to throw in some pathos the way he did in a similar characterization in the 1935 film Twentieth Century – but The Man Who Came to Dinner as it stands is quite charming and intense entertainment even though Keighley either wouldn’t or couldn’t stop Woolley from playing his part as if he were still in a theatre having to boom out all his lines fortissimo to make sure audience members in the farthest seats from the stage could still hear them.

Fitzwilly (The Mirisch Corporation, United Artists, 1967)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Man Who Came to Dinner TCM showed another Christmas-themed farce, Fitzwilly, which according to imdb.com was released in 1967 but I remember seeing it in a theatre as late as 1969. It starred two great character comedians who at the time were best known for their TV work: Dick Van Dyke, who’d just wrapped up the TV sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show after five successful seasons (he could have kept it going but he wanted to do other things with his career); and Barbara Feldon, Agent 99 on the Mel Brooks-Buck Henry spoof of James Bond, Get Smart! Van Dyke played Claude Fitzwilliam, nicknamed “Fitzwilly,” butler to Miss Victoria Woodworth (the legendary British actress Dame Edith Evans, who’s a sheer delight in the role). Ten years previously, Victoria’s father died suddenly with less than $200 to his name after a life in which he’d made and squandered millions. To conceal the fact that she’s broke, Fitzwilly created an elaborate set of criminal enterprises to earn her the money she thought she still had, channeling the proceeds through a fake charity called St. Dismas Thrift Shoppe in Pennsylvania (the main action takes place in New York City, and the real St. Dismas was supposedly the “Good Thief” crucified alongside Jesus and the patron saint of reformed crooks in general). They also pull some scams that are Biblically related but not necessarily illegal, including sending embossed copies of the Bible to people who’ve recently lost loved ones (whose names they get from perusing the obituary columns) and starting bets in bars over the story of Samson and Delilah. The gimmick is that they ask people to place bets on whether Delilah cut off Samson’s strength-giving hair himself or she got a Philistine soldier to do it. The latter is correct, something I vividly remember because one afternoon my husband Charles came home while our then-roommate and home-care client John Primavera was watching the 1949 film Samson and Delilah. Charles saw Hedy Lamarr as Delilah personally cutting the hair of Victor Mature as Samson and said, “That’s not how it was in the book!”

The action kicks off when Fitzwilly has to deal with Juliet Nowell (Barbara Feldon), who’s been sent over by a college employment office for a job as secretary to Miss Victoria Woodworth on her mega-project to write a dictionary for the functionally illiterate. Victoria’s idea is to write a dictionary listing the most common wrong spellings of words and then give the correct one. There’s a charming bit in which Victoria denounces the sheer number of English words that begin with a silent “p.” Fitzwilly has shopped her idea to potential publishers, who turned it down on the grounds that people who are illiterate don’t buy dictionaries, but she’s studded it with enough of her autobiography that when Juliet discusses it with her father (Harry Townes), a medieval English literature professor at Columbia University, he agrees to show it to an editor he knows that’s also a whiz at Scrabble. Fitzwilly doesn’t want Juliet on the job at the Woodworth home because she might stumble onto their criminal activities; he’s already lined up a “safe” candidate for the secretarial gig, but Juliet essentially dares him to hire her – and he does. Eventually Juliet catches on to the scheme after Fitzwilly takes her on a date – he’s hoping she’ll resent her employer coming on to her and quit, but instead she falls genuinely in love with him, and vice versa – and Fitzwilly decides on the proverbial Last Big Score, a Christmas-eve robbery at Gimbel’s. (It’s a measure of how differently the world worked in 1967 than it does today that the crooks in this film can assume there’ll be a huge amount of cash on the Gimbel’s premises ripe for stealing on Christmas eve. Today virtually everybody pays with credit or debit cards.)

The robbery scheme goes off except that one of Fitzwilly’s key henchmen, a former minister named Albert (John McGiver), gets caught and demands to confess all his crimes. Ultimately Victoria offers to pay off the $190,000 Gimbel’s lost in the robbery, and when Fitzwilly questions whether she can afford it without dipping into her (nonexistent) capital, Victoria announces that she’s received $500,000 in advances and a movie-rights payment for her dictionary. This will cover not only the money Gimbel’s lost but also the losses scared interior designer Byron Casey (Stephen Strimbell) suffered from being scammed by the gang in connection with a home he was supposed to be redecorating for a couple in Florida who came home unexpectedly. Ably directed by Delbert Mann from a script by Funny Girl author Isobel Lennart based on a novel called A Garden of Cucumbers by John Poyntz Tyler (whose day job was as an Episcopal minister and bishop in North Dakota, which may explain how much of the plot is rooted in religion), Fitzwilly is a splendid farce that holds up surprisingly well. It’s also one of those films that features quite a few people who became famous names in later years. One of the members of Fitzwilly’s gang, Claude, is played by the young but still recognizable Sam Waterston (later he’d play on the right side of the law as assistant district attorney Jack McCoy on Law and Order, which also featured Jerry Orbach, another actor who’d got his start in 1950’s movies on the wrong side of the law as a juvenile delinquent in films based on Ed McBain’s crime novels before ending up as the lead detective on Law and Order). Also in the cast are Norman Fell as a Gimbel’s security person (he's actually billed ahead of Waterston even though he has less screen time) and John Fielder as an executive with the Steinway piano company who recognizes Fitzwilly at Gimbel’s as the man who scammed him out of a grand piano for the Florida decorating job. An even more illustrious name wrote the musical score for this film; he’s billed here as “Johnny Williams” but he’s really John Williams, the most honored film composer in movie history (he’s won the Academy Award for Best Original Score five times). Williams not only wrote a suitably bouncy score but also contributed a song, “Make Me Rainbows,” with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, which is heard sung by a chorus as Fitzwilly and Juliet have their first date.