Torch Song (MGM, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, December 8) my husband Charles and I stayed in and watched a run of films on Turner Classic Movies, starting with the 1953 Joan Crawford vehicle Torch Song. Directed by Charles Walters, who also appears in the opening scene as Crawford’s dance partner – she chews him out for tripping over her leg – and written by John Michael Hayes and Jan Lustig from a story by I. A. R. Wylie, Torch Song marked Crawford’s return to MGM after 11 years and a particularly bitter parting. It casts Crawford as temperamental Broadway star “Jenny Stewart,” who systematically alienates everyone around her with her diva antics. She meets her comeuppance when her accompanist, Charles Maylor (Benny Rubin), walks out on her in the middle of rehearsals for her new show because he’s had enough of her imperious attitude. Her producer lines up a replacement in the person of Tye Graham (Michael Wilding, best known then and now mostly as the second Mr. Elizabeth Taylor rather than for his own talents), who shows up and knows all her songs by heart. It turns out he had to learn them that way because, after a brief career as a theatrical critic – in which he reviewed Jenny Stewart’s Broadway debut singing the song “Tenderly” by Jack Lawrence and Walter Gross – he went to serve in World War II and got blinded. Tye shows up with a seeing-eye dog called “Duchess” and Jenny rather bitterly jokes that what he really needs is a seeing-eye girlfriend. Tye actually has one – Martha (Dorothy Patrick), who plays guitar in the informal jam band Tye likes to play with in his off-hours – but proximity works its predictable magic and Tye and Jenny fall more or less in love. Experiencing Tye’s disability first-hand – there’s a marvelous sequence in which Jenny tries to light a cigarette with her eyes closed and burns her fingers, which seemingly explains why Tye only smokes pipes – humbles Jenny and makes her human.

Torch Song was billed as Joan Crawford’s first film in color, which it was and it wasn’t; it was the first movie she made entirely in color, but she’d appeared in color sequences in three previous films: Hollywood Revue of 1929, Ice Follies of 1939, and The Women (also 1939). Equipped with a head of flaming red hair by MGM stylist Sidney Guilaroff (who also had the idea of dyeing Lucille Ball’s hair red), Jenny Stewart has a fierce mien that reinforces François Truffaut’s comment in his review of Johnny Guitar (made a year later) that Crawford was looking more masculine in each new film. She was also equipped with a voice double, India Adams, who had previously sung for Cyd Charisse in the 1953 film The Band Wagon with Fred Astaire. In fact, Crawford’s big dance number, a blackface workout to the Arthur Schwartz-Howard Dietz song “Two-Faced Woman,” was originally intended for Charisse in The Band Wagon, and the makers of Torch Song simply recycled the recording Adams had made for Charisse and had Crawford mime to it instead. (The compilation film That’s Entertainment III contained a split-screen showing of both Charisse’s and Crawford’s performances to this recording.) Crawford was predictably unhappy with MGM’s decision to give her a voice double; in Hollywood Revue of 1929 and the 1933 musical Dancing Lady (in which she was Fred Astaire’s first on-screen dance partner; most people assume it was Ginger Rogers, but it was actually Joan Crawford!) she had sung quite acceptably herself. It’s possible MGM’s “suits,” producers Henry Berman, Sidney Franklin and Charles Schnee, didn’t think Crawford’s voice as of 1953 was up to snuff even though it had been two decades earlier.

There’s one odd sequence in which Crawford reminiscences about her performance of “Tenderly” a decade earlier and plays the record of the song she’d made then, and it’s not clear the two singers are the same because the supposedly old record featured a higher-lying and younger-sounding voice even though the imdb.com page for Torch Song claims it’s India Adams on both. Torch Song builds to an all too predictable ending in which Jenny Stewart and Tye Graham pair up personally, though the impression I had was it was going to be both a professional and a romantic partnership. That wasn’t how Carol Burnett, who guest-hosted the TCM showing, did it in 1977 when she parodied Torch Song on her CBS-TV variety show as Torchy Song. In Burnett’s version the pianist (Harvey Korman) is merely near-sighted instead of totally blind – he’s wearing super-thick glasses and constantly stumbling into things – and the routine ends with the two of them singing about how she’s going to give up her career and just be a housewife … until he starts mentioning having kids, and all of a sudden she bails on the promise of domesticity and changes the song to insist she’s going to continue her career, and when the pianist resists she and her choristers lock him inside her grand piano. Burnett and TCM host Dave Karger co-MC’d this showing and they ran Burnett’s 1977 Torchy Song parody right after the original film – even though Torch Song was a fairly obscure film and hardly at the iconic level of Gone With the Wind, Rebecca, Sunset Boulevard and most of the other films they’d parodied on Burnett’s show.