by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I’ve been waiting several days to have long enough to write
a journal to comment on the TV show I saw Tuesday night. The show was the 1964
stop-motion animated version of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, aired on CBS and ballyhooed as the 50th
anniversary showing of this ubiquitous special. Even more than Johnny Marks’
original song (which according to imdb.com’s “Trivia” section on the show was
actually written in 1939 as a promotional song for Montgomery Ward’s, though it
didn’t become a hit until 1947 when, after both Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra
turned it down, Gene Autry, who by then had been virtually forgotten by just
about everyone who’d aged out of the Saturday Western matinees, agreed to
record it and turned it into a major comeback), the TV Rudolph is a tale celebrating individualism, nonconformity
and triumphing over people who hate you for being “different.” Marks himself
was hired to write eight more Christmas-themed songs and turn Rudolph into an out-and-out musical, including one, “Holly
Jolly Christmas,” that while not a mega-hit on the order of “Rudolph” did do well enough it’s become a holiday standard
(especially in the recording Burl Ives made for this film).
The songs get a bit
cutesy-poo at times and the stop-motion animation is nothing to write home
about — except for the Abominable Snowman-style “Bumble” character, who seems
to have been deliberately designed as a tribute to the title character of the
greatest and most famous stop-motion film ever made, King Kong. But what’s most fascinating about Rudolph is how far the writers (Robert May, story; and Romeo
Muller, script) extended the song’s basic message — that something that’s
looked down on by your peers and becomes an excuse for prejudice can turn out
to be a special talent that can save the day in a crisis — though a series of
lovably eccentric characters and situations. Rudolph himself is the son of
Donner — not the German name for Thor, the Norse god of thunder, but one of the
canonical eight reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh in The Night Before
Christmas — but Donner and his missus don’t
want people to know that their son has a glowing red nose, so they make him
wear a black hood over it that makes him sound like he has a cold all the time.
(Kudos to voice actor Billie Mae Richards for pulling this off and doing both
of Rudolph’s voices — the one with the hooded nose and the one has au
naturel — impeccably.) Once Rudolph is
“outed,” Coach Comet (another of Clement Clarke Moore’s canonical reindeer)
snidely announces, “We’re not going to let him play in any Reindeer Games!,” adding a sting-in-the-tail
resonance to the original line from the song. Rudolph’s one friend among his
species is his girlfriend Clarisse (Janis Orenstein), who’s willing to walk
with him until her dad spots the two of them together and forbids her to see
him again. (Donner, Comet and Clarisse’s father are all voiced by the same
actor, Paul Kligman.)
Joined by Hermey, a renegade elf who doesn’t want to work
in a toy factory and instead wants to be a dentist (a pretty twisted sense of
humor on the part of the writers!), they set off into the wilds of the Arctic
and meet up with Yukon Cornelius (Larry Mann), a comical prospector who keeps
looking for silver and gold and striking out. They also have a run-in with the
Bumble — the monster designed to look like a white King Kong — and to flee from
them Yukon Cornelius cuts a chunk of ice into a boat and they reach land at the
Island of Misfit Toys, including a Charlie-in-the-Box, a train with square
wheels on the caboose, and other equally oddball items. The phrase “Island of
Misfit Toys” has entered the language — I know I’ve used it pretty often as a
metaphor — and the whole story, with Rudolph returning to Christmas Town in
triumph and becoming indispensable to Santa on an especially stormy Christmas
Eve because his nose will serve as a fog-cutting beacon to get Santa to the homes
of all the good little kids to deliver their presents (including the Misfit
Toys, who are given owners who will cherish them as they are), is a deliberate
parable celebrating freedom, individuality and uniqueness over conformity, an
odd thing indeed to have been put on children’s (and family) television in 1964
and perhaps a bit of a time bomb fueling the fancies of the 1960’s that youth
could somehow stake their own territory and be free from the demands of
society. The producers of Rudolph,
Sid Rankin and Jules Bass, went on to make quite a few more Christmas shows,
with similarly tacky stop-motion models (the animation work was done in Japan
because it was already cheaper to do the labor-intensive stop-motion process
there than here) but without the amazing resonances that set this show quite
apart from most sappy “family” stories told at and/or about Christmastime and
make it a special favorite of the Gay atheist socialist who’s writing these
words!
Saturday, December 13, 2014
Monday, December 8, 2014
Bing Crosby Remembered (WNET/PBS, 2014)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The PBS Bing Crosby Rediscovered special was interesting, though with only an hour and a half (stretched to two hours with those offensive and disgusting “pledge breaks” through which PBS has to beg for money continually since it doesn’t have a dedicated revenue stream from TV set license fees the way the BBC does) to tell the story of one of the longest and most remarkable careers in show business, it took a rather whirlwind approach. There was precious little about how Bing started out — it briefly mentioned his early partnership with Al Rinker (brother of Mildred Bailey and, like Bing, a native of Washington state) and then with Harry Barris to form the Rhythm Boys, their association with Paul Whiteman (it did not mention that Bing actually made a record before he joined Whiteman — “I’ve Got the Girl,” with Rinker and Don Clark’s orchestra) and its relatively sudden and ambiguous end. The script (no writer is credited on imdb.com but Robert Trachtenberg is listed as director and he probably wrote the narration as well) says it remains unclear whether Whiteman fired the Rhythm Boys in Los Angeles in 1930 when they were out there to make The King of Jazz or whether they quit; it claims that they got so far into the Hollywood party lifestyle, including quite a lot of drinking (the only mention of Bix Beiderbecke on the program is as a Whiteman colleague whose example encouraged Bing to drink a lot; in fact they were roommates when Whiteman went on tour and there are plenty of Bing’s early recordings, like the whole-tone scale with which he starts his vocal on Whiteman’s “Reaching for Someone,” that show Bix’s influence, but according to this show Bing learned from Louis Armstrong — which he did, often playing hooky from his own gigs at the Ambassador Hotel in 1930-31 to watch Armstrong at Sebastian’s New Cotton Club — but not from Bix, even though Bing loved Bix’s sound so much that in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s he used Andy Secrest, who had replaced Bix with Whiteman, as a studio musician on a lot of his records[1]), and stopped rehearsing or learning new material. (This seems a bit hard to believe because Harry Barris was an ace songwriter who, during this period when the Rhythm Boys were supposedly too busy partying to work, he actually placed quite a few songs not only with his own group but quite a few other L.A.-based performers.)
Trachtenberg seemed anxious to race through Bing’s early years to get to the “good stuff,” the Bing Crosby of the 1930’s and 1940’s, the one who made a lot of movies at Paramount, married Dixie Lee and fathered four sons, watched helplessly as she spiraled into alcoholism while he learned to control his own drinking, and retreated from the intense emotionalism of his early work to the (seemingly) lazy, laid-back persona he projected in his glory years. The biggest paradox of the program is just how long Bing’s career was and how continuously successful he was — who else recorded with both Paul Whiteman and David Bowie? — a level of success he couldn’t have sustained without a lot of hard work even though he made everything he did seem effortless. That extended even to his voice; it was one of the most remarkable instruments ever to come out of a human throat — once he stopped trying to “push up” into the tenor range and instead decided to rely on the natural beauty of the baritone his genes and vocal cords had made him — with a rich, velvety tone, ample reserves of power and a surpassingly smooth legato a lot of opera singers would have drooled over. If there’s one Bing Crosby record I would take to that proverbial desert island, it would be his September 1933 version of “Home on the Range” — sung with a simple, heartfelt eloquence and absolute technical command (I’ll never forget watching Bryn Terfel, an acclaimed operatic baritone, sing this on an Andrea Bocelli special and being astonished that in addition to bringing far more emotion and soul to the piece, Bing outsang him technically as well!). When Bing sings the line “Where the graceful white swan goes gliding along,” he pulls off so perfect a melisma he really conjures up with his voice the vision of a graceful white swan gliding through the air. And if I could take another one with me it would be his first (1935) version of “Silent Night,” also sung eloquently and with depths of emotion even Bing couldn’t touch in his later versions.
If the show had a failing it was in zipping through the story so rapidly it didn’t mention the people who helped Bing artistically — no mention of Eddie Lang, the superb (and tragically short-lived — he died of complications from a tonsillectomy in 1933 and Bing was uncharacteristically guilt-ridden about it, noting in his autobiography that he had been the one who talked Lang into having that operation) guitarist who accompanied him in his early solo career (though one of the last pieces heard is an aircheck from one of Bing’s early broadcasts of his theme, “Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day,” with Lang playing an absolutely astonishing part behind him that sounds less like an accompaniment than a New Orleans jazz-style obbligato to Bing’s vocal lead), or of Victor Young and Lennie Hayton, arrangers on his early records (before he settled in with John Scott Trotter, a competent but not particularly imaginative arranger, conductor and studio bandleader who led most of Bing’s Decca sides in the 1930’s and 1940’s); or of Victor Schertzinger, who directed the first two movies in the “Road” series with Bob Hope (The Road to Singapore and The Road to Zanzibar) and established the famous “frame-breaking” in which both Crosby and Hope would break character, speak directly to the audience and wryly comment on the film itself and the passel of Hollywood conventions from which its script had derived. The show makes the interesting argument that the success of the “Road” films pulled Bing out of the artistic doldrums into which he’d fallen with Paramount using him for one formula musical after another in the late 1930’s, and it offered intriguing evidence that Bing sensed how limited his roles were getting and pushed for bigger things: the part of Father O’Malley in Going My Way (a movie some executives at Paramount were willing to suppress because they didn’t think audiences would believe Bing Crosby as a priest! In the end it won him an Academy Award), the lead in The Country Girl (a searing performance in an otherwise O.K. movie), and an extraordinary test sequence in which an almost unrecognizable Crosby auditioned for a biopic of Will Rogers. (It was never made — at least not with Crosby — though Bing did star in the 1949 remake of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, playing the role Rogers had played in the original 1933 film of Mark Twain’s tale.)
The oddest thing about Bing Crosby Rediscovered is that someone that overwhelmingly famous for that long (one statistic about the longevity of Bing’s career that particularly impresses me was he made at least one commercially released phonograph record every year of his life between 1926, when he made his first one, and 1977, when he died — he didn’t have the long lacunae in his recording career many of his contemporaries, including Frank Sinatra, had) should be in need of “rediscovery.” ““We naturally think of Bing at Christmastime,” said American Masters executive producer Michael Kantor in an interview on the PBS Web site (and indeed we do; when I went grocery shopping at the Mission Hills Vons after the show, there was Bing’s voice on the in-store sound system, crooning “You’re All I Want for Christmas”), “but with more No. 1 recordings than anyone, it is easy to overlook all of his other achievements.” So why has Bing so totally dropped off the radar screen? Partly it was that as he aged (and so did his core audience), he went from what jazz critic and Crosby biographer Gary Giddins called “the first hip white guy” to someone who seemed hopelessly square. It took me a long time to appreciate Crosby — my stepfather had a pile of Crosby 78’s (mostly 1930’s releases on blue-label Decca — the U.S. Decca label was not only figuratively but literally built around Crosby; not only was he its biggest seller but its Hollywood studios were built just two blocks from Paramount so Crosby could come in and make records during his lunch breaks from filming) but when I was growing up he seemed the safe, square alternative to Sinatra — and the rise of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950’s and its maturation into “rock” (without the roll) in the 1960’s took the last bit of edge off Bing’s music. I got into him, oddly enough, from his very earliest records (which are still my favorites; after he quit Brunswick Records in 1934 and signed with Decca, his music became safer; he still sang beautifully but only rarely with the naked, edgy emotion of his early works with Paul Whiteman, Gus Arnheim and on his own for Brunswick, Victor and Columbia from 1927 to 1934), and largely through my interest in Bix. I bought all the Bix LP’s that were available in the early 1970’s and started not only to appreciate Bing’s vocals (so much better than the God-awful pop tenors of the period, people like Frank Bessinger, Irving Kaufman and Jack Fulton, who sounded like they were being strangled!) but hear that he was essentially doing with his voice what Bix was doing with his horn (just as Louis Armstrong did with his voice what he was doing with his horn).
I mentioned the 1933 “Home on the Range” and the 1935 “Silent Night” as Bing’s all-time greatest records, and if I had to pick a third it would be “Galway Bay,” a late-1940’s Decca release which starts out as just a picturesque song about Ireland but takes on a wrenching power when Bing reaches the lines, “For the strangers came and tried to teach us their ways/They scorned us just for being what we are.” It’s a reference to the Church of England sending missionaries to Ireland in the wake of the Potato Famine in 1846 (an important event in my personal history because it led thousands of Irish people, including the Conlan family, to emigrate to the U.S.) and offering to feed the starving people if they would abandon Roman Catholicism and become Protestants. (The people who took them up on this offer were derisively referred to by their Catholic-faithful acquaintances as “soupers” because they had sold their souls into perdition for some soup.) Bing may have been the hippest white guy to his time, and he may have had a feel for the real jazz unparalleled by any other white male singer of his day (though his predecessor Gene Austin made some surprisingly jazzy records for someone whose image was as the crooner whose 1927 mega-hit of “My Blue Heaven” was the best-selling record of all time until Bing released “White Christmas” in 1942), but he was also of Irish ancestry and the sweeping melismas that were such a part of his style owe as much or more to traditional Irish singing as Black gospel music (from which they filtered into jazz, rock and soul). The film also attempted to bridge the gap between Crosby’s affable, self-effacing public persona (it includes an interview clip in which he deprecates his own talents — he says he thinks he’ll be remembered as “someone who could carry a tune passably well” — the sort of thing one would expect from a man who titled his autobiography Call Me Lucky) and his private life — the rather tacky Donald Shepherd-Robert Slatzer biography Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man from the early 1980’s suggested the “Bing” we saw was really the Crosby who emerged when he drank, softening the hard edges of his personality that his children — especially his four sons by his first marriage to Dixie Lee — saw every day at home.
Naturally the show dealt with the infamous book Going All the Way Bing’s oldest son, Gary Crosby, published in 1983; it came out in the wake of other scandalous memoirs by kids of famous stars and was allegedly so close to Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest Gary’s book inevitably got nicknamed Daddy Dearest. This is unfair not only to Bing’s memory but Gary’s as well (Gary died in 1991 but this show includes some interview clips he filmed in 1987), since when I read Gary’s book I was impressed that he did not blame everything that went wrong with his life on his famous parent (as Christina Crawford seemed to), and though he described Bing as a strict disciplinarian he did not experience the sort of craziness from him Christina went through at Joan Crawford’s hands. Indeed, the part of Gary’s book that most bothered me was his account of his dad’s reaction when he started dating a Black woman — for someone with a reputation for being supportive of civil rights (he’d gone to bat for Louis Armstrong and got him billing in the first film they made together, Pennies from Heaven, in 1936) Bing was almost totally disapproving, and Gary flashed back to conversations he’d overheard between Bing and his buddies about how Lennie Hayton, who had written some of Bing’s best arrangements with Whiteman and in his earliest solo years, had done this horrible, terrible thing that had wrecked his career … and it had gradually dawned on Gary that the horrible, terrible thing Lennie Hayton had done that had, in Bing’s eyes and those of his friends, wrecked his career was meeting, falling in love with and marrying Lena Horne. Bing’s widow Kathryn and his kids with her were interviewed for this program — even Bing’s fiercest critics acknowledge that in his second run at parenthood he tempered the strictness and did a much better job than he had in his first — and they said they decided to ignore Gary’s book, thinking the controversy around it would go away on its own, and instead it’s come to overshadow Bing’s extraordinary legacy of success and the love audiences of his time had for him.
You don’t become the kind of success Bing was in any field without being considerably more complicated than the normal run of humanity, and it’s not surprising that he didn’t live up to that Mr. Lovable image off-screen and off-stage (Ken Barnes, who produced Bing’s last records and was interviewed for this show, remembered Bing as thoroughly professional but also prickly to work with). What remains of Bing is a remarkable voice — nature gave him incredible vocal chops but Bing knew exactly what to do with them (if you want to hear what a singer less naturally endowed with sheer vocal beauty but with Bing’s brains and musicianship, listen to his brother Bob, whom Gary Crosby had nice things to say about in his book because he was the only one of Bing’s brothers who carved out his own career instead of ending up on Bing’s payroll) — and an affable on-screen personality with great comic timing and a voice that sounded musical even when he was speaking instead of singing. One of the tics of the “Road” movies is a little inflection Bing does when he’s trying to talk Bob Hope into going along with his latest hare-brained scheme; as Hope explains the dangers of it and pleads with Bing to be let out of his role in it, Bing goes, “Oh, no no no no, No-ooooo,” in a rising inflection that itself sounds musical. Reason enough that Bing Crosby was such a success in movies; his speaking voice was so close to singing that he made it seem quite natural when he stopped speaking and actually started singing — easing the suspension of disbelief that makes so many Hollywood musicals tough going for today’s audiences. Bing Crosby was a remarkable talent, and despite its flaws one would hope this show would aid his “rediscovery” and convince modern audiences that there was more to him than just the affable old gent who brought along the Christmas spirit year after year on his TV specials and, since his death, every time “White Christmas” and his other holiday records are trotted out and replayed for new generations.
The PBS Bing Crosby Rediscovered special was interesting, though with only an hour and a half (stretched to two hours with those offensive and disgusting “pledge breaks” through which PBS has to beg for money continually since it doesn’t have a dedicated revenue stream from TV set license fees the way the BBC does) to tell the story of one of the longest and most remarkable careers in show business, it took a rather whirlwind approach. There was precious little about how Bing started out — it briefly mentioned his early partnership with Al Rinker (brother of Mildred Bailey and, like Bing, a native of Washington state) and then with Harry Barris to form the Rhythm Boys, their association with Paul Whiteman (it did not mention that Bing actually made a record before he joined Whiteman — “I’ve Got the Girl,” with Rinker and Don Clark’s orchestra) and its relatively sudden and ambiguous end. The script (no writer is credited on imdb.com but Robert Trachtenberg is listed as director and he probably wrote the narration as well) says it remains unclear whether Whiteman fired the Rhythm Boys in Los Angeles in 1930 when they were out there to make The King of Jazz or whether they quit; it claims that they got so far into the Hollywood party lifestyle, including quite a lot of drinking (the only mention of Bix Beiderbecke on the program is as a Whiteman colleague whose example encouraged Bing to drink a lot; in fact they were roommates when Whiteman went on tour and there are plenty of Bing’s early recordings, like the whole-tone scale with which he starts his vocal on Whiteman’s “Reaching for Someone,” that show Bix’s influence, but according to this show Bing learned from Louis Armstrong — which he did, often playing hooky from his own gigs at the Ambassador Hotel in 1930-31 to watch Armstrong at Sebastian’s New Cotton Club — but not from Bix, even though Bing loved Bix’s sound so much that in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s he used Andy Secrest, who had replaced Bix with Whiteman, as a studio musician on a lot of his records[1]), and stopped rehearsing or learning new material. (This seems a bit hard to believe because Harry Barris was an ace songwriter who, during this period when the Rhythm Boys were supposedly too busy partying to work, he actually placed quite a few songs not only with his own group but quite a few other L.A.-based performers.)
Trachtenberg seemed anxious to race through Bing’s early years to get to the “good stuff,” the Bing Crosby of the 1930’s and 1940’s, the one who made a lot of movies at Paramount, married Dixie Lee and fathered four sons, watched helplessly as she spiraled into alcoholism while he learned to control his own drinking, and retreated from the intense emotionalism of his early work to the (seemingly) lazy, laid-back persona he projected in his glory years. The biggest paradox of the program is just how long Bing’s career was and how continuously successful he was — who else recorded with both Paul Whiteman and David Bowie? — a level of success he couldn’t have sustained without a lot of hard work even though he made everything he did seem effortless. That extended even to his voice; it was one of the most remarkable instruments ever to come out of a human throat — once he stopped trying to “push up” into the tenor range and instead decided to rely on the natural beauty of the baritone his genes and vocal cords had made him — with a rich, velvety tone, ample reserves of power and a surpassingly smooth legato a lot of opera singers would have drooled over. If there’s one Bing Crosby record I would take to that proverbial desert island, it would be his September 1933 version of “Home on the Range” — sung with a simple, heartfelt eloquence and absolute technical command (I’ll never forget watching Bryn Terfel, an acclaimed operatic baritone, sing this on an Andrea Bocelli special and being astonished that in addition to bringing far more emotion and soul to the piece, Bing outsang him technically as well!). When Bing sings the line “Where the graceful white swan goes gliding along,” he pulls off so perfect a melisma he really conjures up with his voice the vision of a graceful white swan gliding through the air. And if I could take another one with me it would be his first (1935) version of “Silent Night,” also sung eloquently and with depths of emotion even Bing couldn’t touch in his later versions.
If the show had a failing it was in zipping through the story so rapidly it didn’t mention the people who helped Bing artistically — no mention of Eddie Lang, the superb (and tragically short-lived — he died of complications from a tonsillectomy in 1933 and Bing was uncharacteristically guilt-ridden about it, noting in his autobiography that he had been the one who talked Lang into having that operation) guitarist who accompanied him in his early solo career (though one of the last pieces heard is an aircheck from one of Bing’s early broadcasts of his theme, “Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day,” with Lang playing an absolutely astonishing part behind him that sounds less like an accompaniment than a New Orleans jazz-style obbligato to Bing’s vocal lead), or of Victor Young and Lennie Hayton, arrangers on his early records (before he settled in with John Scott Trotter, a competent but not particularly imaginative arranger, conductor and studio bandleader who led most of Bing’s Decca sides in the 1930’s and 1940’s); or of Victor Schertzinger, who directed the first two movies in the “Road” series with Bob Hope (The Road to Singapore and The Road to Zanzibar) and established the famous “frame-breaking” in which both Crosby and Hope would break character, speak directly to the audience and wryly comment on the film itself and the passel of Hollywood conventions from which its script had derived. The show makes the interesting argument that the success of the “Road” films pulled Bing out of the artistic doldrums into which he’d fallen with Paramount using him for one formula musical after another in the late 1930’s, and it offered intriguing evidence that Bing sensed how limited his roles were getting and pushed for bigger things: the part of Father O’Malley in Going My Way (a movie some executives at Paramount were willing to suppress because they didn’t think audiences would believe Bing Crosby as a priest! In the end it won him an Academy Award), the lead in The Country Girl (a searing performance in an otherwise O.K. movie), and an extraordinary test sequence in which an almost unrecognizable Crosby auditioned for a biopic of Will Rogers. (It was never made — at least not with Crosby — though Bing did star in the 1949 remake of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, playing the role Rogers had played in the original 1933 film of Mark Twain’s tale.)
The oddest thing about Bing Crosby Rediscovered is that someone that overwhelmingly famous for that long (one statistic about the longevity of Bing’s career that particularly impresses me was he made at least one commercially released phonograph record every year of his life between 1926, when he made his first one, and 1977, when he died — he didn’t have the long lacunae in his recording career many of his contemporaries, including Frank Sinatra, had) should be in need of “rediscovery.” ““We naturally think of Bing at Christmastime,” said American Masters executive producer Michael Kantor in an interview on the PBS Web site (and indeed we do; when I went grocery shopping at the Mission Hills Vons after the show, there was Bing’s voice on the in-store sound system, crooning “You’re All I Want for Christmas”), “but with more No. 1 recordings than anyone, it is easy to overlook all of his other achievements.” So why has Bing so totally dropped off the radar screen? Partly it was that as he aged (and so did his core audience), he went from what jazz critic and Crosby biographer Gary Giddins called “the first hip white guy” to someone who seemed hopelessly square. It took me a long time to appreciate Crosby — my stepfather had a pile of Crosby 78’s (mostly 1930’s releases on blue-label Decca — the U.S. Decca label was not only figuratively but literally built around Crosby; not only was he its biggest seller but its Hollywood studios were built just two blocks from Paramount so Crosby could come in and make records during his lunch breaks from filming) but when I was growing up he seemed the safe, square alternative to Sinatra — and the rise of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950’s and its maturation into “rock” (without the roll) in the 1960’s took the last bit of edge off Bing’s music. I got into him, oddly enough, from his very earliest records (which are still my favorites; after he quit Brunswick Records in 1934 and signed with Decca, his music became safer; he still sang beautifully but only rarely with the naked, edgy emotion of his early works with Paul Whiteman, Gus Arnheim and on his own for Brunswick, Victor and Columbia from 1927 to 1934), and largely through my interest in Bix. I bought all the Bix LP’s that were available in the early 1970’s and started not only to appreciate Bing’s vocals (so much better than the God-awful pop tenors of the period, people like Frank Bessinger, Irving Kaufman and Jack Fulton, who sounded like they were being strangled!) but hear that he was essentially doing with his voice what Bix was doing with his horn (just as Louis Armstrong did with his voice what he was doing with his horn).
I mentioned the 1933 “Home on the Range” and the 1935 “Silent Night” as Bing’s all-time greatest records, and if I had to pick a third it would be “Galway Bay,” a late-1940’s Decca release which starts out as just a picturesque song about Ireland but takes on a wrenching power when Bing reaches the lines, “For the strangers came and tried to teach us their ways/They scorned us just for being what we are.” It’s a reference to the Church of England sending missionaries to Ireland in the wake of the Potato Famine in 1846 (an important event in my personal history because it led thousands of Irish people, including the Conlan family, to emigrate to the U.S.) and offering to feed the starving people if they would abandon Roman Catholicism and become Protestants. (The people who took them up on this offer were derisively referred to by their Catholic-faithful acquaintances as “soupers” because they had sold their souls into perdition for some soup.) Bing may have been the hippest white guy to his time, and he may have had a feel for the real jazz unparalleled by any other white male singer of his day (though his predecessor Gene Austin made some surprisingly jazzy records for someone whose image was as the crooner whose 1927 mega-hit of “My Blue Heaven” was the best-selling record of all time until Bing released “White Christmas” in 1942), but he was also of Irish ancestry and the sweeping melismas that were such a part of his style owe as much or more to traditional Irish singing as Black gospel music (from which they filtered into jazz, rock and soul). The film also attempted to bridge the gap between Crosby’s affable, self-effacing public persona (it includes an interview clip in which he deprecates his own talents — he says he thinks he’ll be remembered as “someone who could carry a tune passably well” — the sort of thing one would expect from a man who titled his autobiography Call Me Lucky) and his private life — the rather tacky Donald Shepherd-Robert Slatzer biography Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man from the early 1980’s suggested the “Bing” we saw was really the Crosby who emerged when he drank, softening the hard edges of his personality that his children — especially his four sons by his first marriage to Dixie Lee — saw every day at home.
Naturally the show dealt with the infamous book Going All the Way Bing’s oldest son, Gary Crosby, published in 1983; it came out in the wake of other scandalous memoirs by kids of famous stars and was allegedly so close to Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest Gary’s book inevitably got nicknamed Daddy Dearest. This is unfair not only to Bing’s memory but Gary’s as well (Gary died in 1991 but this show includes some interview clips he filmed in 1987), since when I read Gary’s book I was impressed that he did not blame everything that went wrong with his life on his famous parent (as Christina Crawford seemed to), and though he described Bing as a strict disciplinarian he did not experience the sort of craziness from him Christina went through at Joan Crawford’s hands. Indeed, the part of Gary’s book that most bothered me was his account of his dad’s reaction when he started dating a Black woman — for someone with a reputation for being supportive of civil rights (he’d gone to bat for Louis Armstrong and got him billing in the first film they made together, Pennies from Heaven, in 1936) Bing was almost totally disapproving, and Gary flashed back to conversations he’d overheard between Bing and his buddies about how Lennie Hayton, who had written some of Bing’s best arrangements with Whiteman and in his earliest solo years, had done this horrible, terrible thing that had wrecked his career … and it had gradually dawned on Gary that the horrible, terrible thing Lennie Hayton had done that had, in Bing’s eyes and those of his friends, wrecked his career was meeting, falling in love with and marrying Lena Horne. Bing’s widow Kathryn and his kids with her were interviewed for this program — even Bing’s fiercest critics acknowledge that in his second run at parenthood he tempered the strictness and did a much better job than he had in his first — and they said they decided to ignore Gary’s book, thinking the controversy around it would go away on its own, and instead it’s come to overshadow Bing’s extraordinary legacy of success and the love audiences of his time had for him.
You don’t become the kind of success Bing was in any field without being considerably more complicated than the normal run of humanity, and it’s not surprising that he didn’t live up to that Mr. Lovable image off-screen and off-stage (Ken Barnes, who produced Bing’s last records and was interviewed for this show, remembered Bing as thoroughly professional but also prickly to work with). What remains of Bing is a remarkable voice — nature gave him incredible vocal chops but Bing knew exactly what to do with them (if you want to hear what a singer less naturally endowed with sheer vocal beauty but with Bing’s brains and musicianship, listen to his brother Bob, whom Gary Crosby had nice things to say about in his book because he was the only one of Bing’s brothers who carved out his own career instead of ending up on Bing’s payroll) — and an affable on-screen personality with great comic timing and a voice that sounded musical even when he was speaking instead of singing. One of the tics of the “Road” movies is a little inflection Bing does when he’s trying to talk Bob Hope into going along with his latest hare-brained scheme; as Hope explains the dangers of it and pleads with Bing to be let out of his role in it, Bing goes, “Oh, no no no no, No-ooooo,” in a rising inflection that itself sounds musical. Reason enough that Bing Crosby was such a success in movies; his speaking voice was so close to singing that he made it seem quite natural when he stopped speaking and actually started singing — easing the suspension of disbelief that makes so many Hollywood musicals tough going for today’s audiences. Bing Crosby was a remarkable talent, and despite its flaws one would hope this show would aid his “rediscovery” and convince modern audiences that there was more to him than just the affable old gent who brought along the Christmas spirit year after year on his TV specials and, since his death, every time “White Christmas” and his other holiday records are trotted out and replayed for new generations.
[1] — Albert Haim posted a rather pissy note on his Bix
Web site blasting the show not only for mentioning Bix only as a fellow
Whiteman bandmate who encouraged Bing to drink, but lumping in Frank Trumbauer
as a fellow alcoholic — which Trumbauer was not. Indeed, it was Trumbauer who
often had the unenviable task of dragging Bix out of whatever speakeasy he was
holed up in and getting him to work!
The Wizard of Oz (Eshbaugh/Van Beuren, 1933)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When I got home last night I watched part of a quite remarkable program on Turner Classic Movies that was supposed to be a tribute to the Van Beuren animation studios — though I only got to see four of the seven cartoon shorts they showed and the only one I watched that was actually a Van Beuren production was A Little Bird Told Me, an engaging mixture of live action and animation from 1932. The head of the studio was Amedée Van Beuren and he was originally the business partner of Paul Terry, who made the popular “Terrytoons” cartoons into the 1940’s. They actually released the first sound cartoon, Dinner Time (1928), a month before Walt Disney’s pioneering (but not quite as pioneering as the film histories have it!) Steamboat Willie (indeed, Disney emerges as an ongoing nemesis in the Van Beuren story!), and when Terry quit the partnership in 1928 Van Beuren hired John Foster to take over the animation and continued along similar lines. They put out cartoons with a pair of characters named “Tom and Jerry,” though these were human beings (“a tall-and-short pair, usually vagrants who attempted various occupations,” says the Wikipedia page on Van Beuren, which makes them sound like an attempt to do a cartoon Laurel and Hardy) instead of the famous cat-and-mouse pairing of the same names later created at MGM. Van Beuren also produced a series based (at least nominally) on Aesop’s fables, and eventually found success when they licensed popular comic-strip characters like Felix the Cat and the Toonerville Trolley gang. They distributed through RKO Radio Pictures and also released live-action shorts and bought the reissue rights to Charlie Chaplin’s 12 masterpieces for Mutual Studios in 1916-17, dubbing in music, sound effects and occasional “wild” voices (and, according to Chaplin biographer Theodore Huff, ruining the films with their tasteless soundtracks — fortunately the currently circulating prints of the Chaplin Mutuals have gone back to a silent-style presentation with simple piano accompaniments and no synchronized sound effects).
In 1932 Van Beuren embarked on what was supposed to be the first cartoon ever shot in three-strip Technicolor, a one-reel semi-adaptation of The Wizard of Oz — only Walt Disney struck again; behind Van Beuren’s back he cut a deal with Technicolor that for three years he would be the only producer allowed to make cartoons in three-strip for U.S. release. Ted Eshbaugh, the director of The Wizard of Oz, went ahead and finished the film, and Van Beuren released it in Britain and Canada (where Disney’s ukase did not apply) but it couldn’t be legally shown in the U.S. until 1935, by which time Van Beuren had closed his animation studio (thanks once again to Disney, who’d signed a distribution contract with RKO and thereby left Van Beuren without a distributor) and Eshbaugh ended up owning the rights himself. Eshbaugh kept himself in business making commercial shorts, including the other two on TCM’s program last night: The Sunshine Makers (for Borden’s Milk), in which a company figures out a way to bottle sunshine, deliver it in milk bottles and convert a whole country of out-and-proud sourpusses to sunshine and happiness; and Pastry Town Wedding (which imdb.com lists in two versions, one from 1934 and one from 1940 — I suspect the difference is the 1934 version was shot in Cinécolor and in 1940 Eshbaugh reused the same animation art and reshot the film in three-strip Technicolor once Disney’s exclusive deal expired — TCM showed the Cinécolor version), made for Cushman’s baked-goods company and featuring Cushman products prominently placed in the film. (I don’t know whether these films were shown in regular theatres or not, given the allergy of the movie business to any commercial exploitation in the 1930’s, but in today’s age of ear-splitting commercials in movie theatres it occurred to me that I wouldn’t mind them so much if they were produced with the artistry and imagination of Eshbaugh’s shorts.)
The Wizard of Oz is the most astonishing film of the four (though the two commercial shorts are visually stunning and quite clever and entertaining), and though it doesn’t work as an adaptation of the book — there’s no Cowardly Lion, no Wicked Witch, and the Wizard is an honest-to-goodness wizard (or at least a stage magician) instead of a total humbug with an electronic gizmo simulating super-powers — it is an absolutely glowing piece of visual art and it must have been seen by someone at MGM working on the classic 1939 live-action version. Though the credits are in color, when the film itself opens we see Dorothy (oddly designed to look like Betty Boop, though the Scarecrow and the Tin Man have the familiar appearances W. W. Denslow created in his illustrations for L. Frank Baum’s novel) in her farmhouse in Kansas in blue-tinted black-and-white. When the cyclone comes and takes her to Oz (on her own instead of inside her house in this version), her clothes change in mid-air and she gradually takes on color, and when she lands in Oz everything is in color. There’s been a lot of educated (and not-so-educated) guesswork about who thought up the famous gimmick of beginning the 1939 Wizard of Oz in black-and-white (sepia-toned in the original release prints and on the currently available video versions) and having it turn to color when Dorothy arrived in Oz; whoever thought it was an obscure cartoon director working on his own riff on the famous story for a tiny independent studio six years earlier?
When I got home last night I watched part of a quite remarkable program on Turner Classic Movies that was supposed to be a tribute to the Van Beuren animation studios — though I only got to see four of the seven cartoon shorts they showed and the only one I watched that was actually a Van Beuren production was A Little Bird Told Me, an engaging mixture of live action and animation from 1932. The head of the studio was Amedée Van Beuren and he was originally the business partner of Paul Terry, who made the popular “Terrytoons” cartoons into the 1940’s. They actually released the first sound cartoon, Dinner Time (1928), a month before Walt Disney’s pioneering (but not quite as pioneering as the film histories have it!) Steamboat Willie (indeed, Disney emerges as an ongoing nemesis in the Van Beuren story!), and when Terry quit the partnership in 1928 Van Beuren hired John Foster to take over the animation and continued along similar lines. They put out cartoons with a pair of characters named “Tom and Jerry,” though these were human beings (“a tall-and-short pair, usually vagrants who attempted various occupations,” says the Wikipedia page on Van Beuren, which makes them sound like an attempt to do a cartoon Laurel and Hardy) instead of the famous cat-and-mouse pairing of the same names later created at MGM. Van Beuren also produced a series based (at least nominally) on Aesop’s fables, and eventually found success when they licensed popular comic-strip characters like Felix the Cat and the Toonerville Trolley gang. They distributed through RKO Radio Pictures and also released live-action shorts and bought the reissue rights to Charlie Chaplin’s 12 masterpieces for Mutual Studios in 1916-17, dubbing in music, sound effects and occasional “wild” voices (and, according to Chaplin biographer Theodore Huff, ruining the films with their tasteless soundtracks — fortunately the currently circulating prints of the Chaplin Mutuals have gone back to a silent-style presentation with simple piano accompaniments and no synchronized sound effects).
In 1932 Van Beuren embarked on what was supposed to be the first cartoon ever shot in three-strip Technicolor, a one-reel semi-adaptation of The Wizard of Oz — only Walt Disney struck again; behind Van Beuren’s back he cut a deal with Technicolor that for three years he would be the only producer allowed to make cartoons in three-strip for U.S. release. Ted Eshbaugh, the director of The Wizard of Oz, went ahead and finished the film, and Van Beuren released it in Britain and Canada (where Disney’s ukase did not apply) but it couldn’t be legally shown in the U.S. until 1935, by which time Van Beuren had closed his animation studio (thanks once again to Disney, who’d signed a distribution contract with RKO and thereby left Van Beuren without a distributor) and Eshbaugh ended up owning the rights himself. Eshbaugh kept himself in business making commercial shorts, including the other two on TCM’s program last night: The Sunshine Makers (for Borden’s Milk), in which a company figures out a way to bottle sunshine, deliver it in milk bottles and convert a whole country of out-and-proud sourpusses to sunshine and happiness; and Pastry Town Wedding (which imdb.com lists in two versions, one from 1934 and one from 1940 — I suspect the difference is the 1934 version was shot in Cinécolor and in 1940 Eshbaugh reused the same animation art and reshot the film in three-strip Technicolor once Disney’s exclusive deal expired — TCM showed the Cinécolor version), made for Cushman’s baked-goods company and featuring Cushman products prominently placed in the film. (I don’t know whether these films were shown in regular theatres or not, given the allergy of the movie business to any commercial exploitation in the 1930’s, but in today’s age of ear-splitting commercials in movie theatres it occurred to me that I wouldn’t mind them so much if they were produced with the artistry and imagination of Eshbaugh’s shorts.)
The Wizard of Oz is the most astonishing film of the four (though the two commercial shorts are visually stunning and quite clever and entertaining), and though it doesn’t work as an adaptation of the book — there’s no Cowardly Lion, no Wicked Witch, and the Wizard is an honest-to-goodness wizard (or at least a stage magician) instead of a total humbug with an electronic gizmo simulating super-powers — it is an absolutely glowing piece of visual art and it must have been seen by someone at MGM working on the classic 1939 live-action version. Though the credits are in color, when the film itself opens we see Dorothy (oddly designed to look like Betty Boop, though the Scarecrow and the Tin Man have the familiar appearances W. W. Denslow created in his illustrations for L. Frank Baum’s novel) in her farmhouse in Kansas in blue-tinted black-and-white. When the cyclone comes and takes her to Oz (on her own instead of inside her house in this version), her clothes change in mid-air and she gradually takes on color, and when she lands in Oz everything is in color. There’s been a lot of educated (and not-so-educated) guesswork about who thought up the famous gimmick of beginning the 1939 Wizard of Oz in black-and-white (sepia-toned in the original release prints and on the currently available video versions) and having it turn to color when Dorothy arrived in Oz; whoever thought it was an obscure cartoon director working on his own riff on the famous story for a tiny independent studio six years earlier?
Friday, December 5, 2014
Peter Pan Live! (NBC/Universal/Sony, December 4, 2014)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched last night’s much-ballyhooed live telecast of Peter Pan on NBC. A co-production of Universal (NBC’s affiliate under the Comcast octopus) and Sony, this was an acceptable run-through of the classic 1954 musical version, which took a much cuter and sweeter “take” on the material than I suspect its creator, Sir James M. Barrie, had in mind. Peter Pan the character first appeared briefly in a novel called The Little White Bird, written by Barrie for an adult audience (Barrie was primarily a writer of what would now be called “rom-coms,” short for “romantic comedies,” set in the England of his own time, but his stage works run the gamut from rom-coms to out-and-out fantasies to historical dramas like The Boy David — the Biblical one). In 1904 Barrie wrote an entire play called Peter Pan: Or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, and its first production in London was a smash hit. That one starred Nina Boucicault, daughter of playwright Dion Boucicault, in the title role and established the tradition of casting Peter as what would in opera be called a “trouser role” — a male character played by a woman in drag. (British critic Gareth Hughes sniffed in the 1920’s, “Why must it always be a peterless Pan?”) In 1908 Barrie’s publisher extracted the four chapters about Peter Pan from The Little White Bird and printed them separately, and in 1911 Barrie wrote an entire novelization of the play — which he kept revising until he authorized a final published version in 1928. I’ve never read Barrie’s original novel or play, nor have I seen it produced (it almost never is done in its original form), but I have seen the 1924 silent film, made by Paramount, directed by Herbert Brenon (a largely forgotten director of the silent era whose reputation has been handicapped by the loss of many of his films, including the 1926 version of The Great Gatsby) and starring Betty Bronson as Peter, Mary Brian as Wendy, Anna May Wong as Tiger Lily the Indian and the great silent-era villain Ernest Torrence as Captain Hook.
In fact I’ve seen it twice, once on the Kino DVD with the soundtrack provided by the Kino company and again at the Organ Pavilion with Dennis James providing a live musical accompaniment, and I love the 1924 version; I’ve called it “deeper and richer than the more recent adaptations, full of complex emotions and overlaid with a hint (though no more than a hint!) of burgeoning sexual attraction between Peter and Wendy.” Alas, since that version (supervised by Barrie himself, who had star approval and kept Paramount waiting for nine months while he disapproved of every actress they proposed for the lead until they showed him the test of 19-year-old Betty Bronson), virtually all the adaptations since have sentimentalized the material and moved it away from real emotions, emphasizing the cutesy aspects of the material. Walt Disney put out an animated version in 1953 (Peter was voiced by child actor Bobby Driscoll, one of the few times it has been a petered Pan) and the next year a Broadway musical version came out starring Mary Martin, who’d already proven in the “Honey Bun” number of South Pacific five years earlier that she could cross-dress convincingly and was petite enough that she could be flown easily — since part of Barrie’s fantasy requires that Peter and the Darling children (Wendy, the female lead, and her brothers Michael and John), take a header out the Darlings’ second-story window and fly to Never Never Land, where the bulk of the story takes place. The musical was written by Mark “Moose” Charlap with lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, though when that version flopped in previews additional songs were added by composer Jule Styne and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, with Martin as Peter and the marvelous British actor Cyril Ritchard (the murder victim in Hitchcock’s Blackmail in 1929) as Captain Hook. (An earlier Broadway production from 1950 wasn’t a musical, though Leonard Bernstein provided incidental music, and starred Jean Arthur as Peter and Boris Karloff — who would seem the perfect actor for the role — as Hook.) The Martin version was telecast live three times — in 1955, 1956 and 1960 — and the 1960 version was preserved on videotape and reissued several times, once in 1973 and again in the 1990’s when it was discovered on two-inch tape (no player then existed that could run a two-inch tape; a non-working model of a two-inch videotape player was found in a Houston museum of TV history and parts had to be hand-machined to get it in working order so the tape could be played and transferred to modern storage media).
The show has been periodically revived “live” with Sandy Duncan, Cathy Rigby and anyone else they can find who can sing, dance and is petite enough to look credibly boyish and be accommodated by the assembly of ropes, cables and harnesses needed to “fly” on stage, and it was the basis for this version, though Adolph Green’s daughter Amanda was brought in to provide three additional songs (which, quite frankly, added little). This time around Peter was played by Allison Williams — she didn’t really look all that masculine (more like a 1920’s flapper wearing a grass skirt) but she sang and moved well — with Taylor Louderman as Wendy, Alanna Saunders in a Catwoman-esque costume as Tiger Lily (whose band, in an unnecessary bow to political correctness, was changed from “Indians” to “Islanders” and made to look Polynesian instead of Native American; also, a new song called “True Blood Brothers” replaced “Ugg-a-Wugg,” the original bonding song between Peter Pan and Tiger Lily. This misbegotten example of political correctness run riot actually got a thank-you from one Kevin Gover, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. These people want all entertainment to be sanitized and have all the fun bleached out of it) and Christopher Walken as Hook. Walken’s presence was the biggest element ballyhooed — and let’s face it, it’s not every day that an Academy Award-winning actor with a serious reputation sets foot on a TV soundstage to replicate a comic-villain role in a deliberately campy Broadway musical. Walken was actually one of the show’s biggest disappointments; he seems as if he got his whole idea of how to play a pirate (and even what to look like as one) from Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and though the script feints at homoerotic attractions between Hook and his crew (particularly his sidekick Smee, played by Christian Borle, who also doubles as the stuffed-shirt father of Wendy and her two brothers), he’s hardly as daring as Cyril Ritchard, who played Hook as an all-out screaming queen. (That went over my head when I saw the Mary Martin TV show in 1960, when I was seven, and even in 1973, but when the piece was revived in 1990 it seemed almost too obvious.)
Indeed, the weakest part of this Peter Pan was it conveyed almost no sense of terror; even the villainy had an element of “Don’t worry, we’re only kidding” about this, and frankly I’d have liked to see Hook played as an all-out villain to cut the cutesiness of the rest of the tale, the way Ernest Torrence played him in the 1922 film — and Margaret Hamilton played the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz, a story which pre-dates Peter Pan by a few years and is far more interesting, especially since it’s a classic fantasy quest-narrative and its adapters embraced the coming-of-age aspects of the original just about everyone who’s taken on Peter Pan since Barrie has run away from. Ironically, the most genuinely moving parts of the story as presented in the NBC telecast of the 1954 musical of Barrie’s 1904 play are the ones dealing with the Darling parents’ sense of loss over their children (later Barrie wrote a fascinating fantasy called Mary Rose — about a young girl who disappears for weeks or even years; it’s not clear what’s happened to her in the meantime, but when she comes back to our world she hasn’t aged at all no matter how much time has passed in the normal sphere — which when I read it seemed to have been his way of answering the question, “But what about the parents of the Lost Boys? What did they go through?” Mary Rose also fascinated Alfred Hitchcock, who for decades wanted to film it and got as far as a preliminary script written with Jay Presson Allen, who wrote Marnie, but never got to make it) and the final scene, based on an addition to the original play Barrie called “An Afterthought,” in which Wendy is seen as an adult (played here by Minnie Driver), married with a daughter of her own, when Peter Pan finally fulfills his promise to her to return and takes Wendy’s daughter on her own Never Never Land adventure.
It also didn’t help that the spirit of Julie Andrews hung so heavily over this enterprise; all three of the female principals — Allison Williams, Taylor Louderman and Kelli O’Hara as the Darling kids’ mother — seem to have adopted her clear diction and somewhat exaggerated enunciation as their model for how to sound convincingly “British” when they sang. (Peter Pan Live! was a follow-up to NBC’s previous “live” take on The Sound of Music, which got rotten reviews, mainly aimed at the star, Carrie Underwood, though all they could really fault her for was not being Julie Andrews.) And whereas the Sound of Music telecast had been a traditional TV adaptation of a live play, shot with best-seat-in-the-house vistas from three cameras, Peter Pan Live! roamed throughout the studio and moved about through the sets representing the various vistas — the Darlings’ house back in London and the locales of Never Never Land, from the beach on which Peter and the Darling kids land to the “Islander” encampment, the Lost Boys’ secret underground hideout (which seemed to have been inspired by the one for the villainous Cabinet ministers plotting to depose President W. C. Fields in the 1932 Million Dollar Legs) and the pirate ship to which Hook takes the kidnapped Lost Boys and threatens to make them walk the plank … Not all this was to the good; though it was fun to see a Busby Berkeley-like overhead dance formation with men (though that had already been done in the Village People’s 1980 movie Can’t Stop the Music!), it was not fun that the ever-changing camera angles made it impossible for the lighting people to conceal the ropes and cables suspending the cast members as they “flew.” Even on our old, non-digital, low-definition TV the cords tying these people to normal gravity were just too obvious.
Where Peter Pan scored was the excellence of the dancing — it’s nice to know all those kids taking tap will have some chance at a professional showcase for their skills — indeed, Christopher Walken’s halting steps in rhythm looked even worse by comparison to the quality of the fully professional (and amazingly good) chorus dancing behind him — and also the literally colorful settings; this was one modern production that actually offered colors other than dank green and dirty brown! As far as the whole thing was concerned, let’s just say that this Peter Pan was fun, but not as much fun as it could have been if it hadn’t been played so relentlessly for cuteness — the whole moving subplot of both Peter and Wendy feeling sexual awakenings in their attraction to each other, a relationship that can’t be consummated because Peter refuses to grow up and Wendy ultimately wants a home and family much like the one her parents have, was delicately but brilliantly communicated in the 1924 film but is almost totally ignored here. James M. Barrie wrote a charming fairy tale (indeed, when his plays started falling off in popularity Dorothy Parker attributed it to audiences getting tired of works whose virtually only audience appeal was charm) but it had darker resonances — some of which he may not have intended — and in each new adaptation the cutesy-poo stuff has been emphasized more and more and the darker elements relegated to the cutting-room (or the steno-pool) floor.
Charles and I watched last night’s much-ballyhooed live telecast of Peter Pan on NBC. A co-production of Universal (NBC’s affiliate under the Comcast octopus) and Sony, this was an acceptable run-through of the classic 1954 musical version, which took a much cuter and sweeter “take” on the material than I suspect its creator, Sir James M. Barrie, had in mind. Peter Pan the character first appeared briefly in a novel called The Little White Bird, written by Barrie for an adult audience (Barrie was primarily a writer of what would now be called “rom-coms,” short for “romantic comedies,” set in the England of his own time, but his stage works run the gamut from rom-coms to out-and-out fantasies to historical dramas like The Boy David — the Biblical one). In 1904 Barrie wrote an entire play called Peter Pan: Or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, and its first production in London was a smash hit. That one starred Nina Boucicault, daughter of playwright Dion Boucicault, in the title role and established the tradition of casting Peter as what would in opera be called a “trouser role” — a male character played by a woman in drag. (British critic Gareth Hughes sniffed in the 1920’s, “Why must it always be a peterless Pan?”) In 1908 Barrie’s publisher extracted the four chapters about Peter Pan from The Little White Bird and printed them separately, and in 1911 Barrie wrote an entire novelization of the play — which he kept revising until he authorized a final published version in 1928. I’ve never read Barrie’s original novel or play, nor have I seen it produced (it almost never is done in its original form), but I have seen the 1924 silent film, made by Paramount, directed by Herbert Brenon (a largely forgotten director of the silent era whose reputation has been handicapped by the loss of many of his films, including the 1926 version of The Great Gatsby) and starring Betty Bronson as Peter, Mary Brian as Wendy, Anna May Wong as Tiger Lily the Indian and the great silent-era villain Ernest Torrence as Captain Hook.
In fact I’ve seen it twice, once on the Kino DVD with the soundtrack provided by the Kino company and again at the Organ Pavilion with Dennis James providing a live musical accompaniment, and I love the 1924 version; I’ve called it “deeper and richer than the more recent adaptations, full of complex emotions and overlaid with a hint (though no more than a hint!) of burgeoning sexual attraction between Peter and Wendy.” Alas, since that version (supervised by Barrie himself, who had star approval and kept Paramount waiting for nine months while he disapproved of every actress they proposed for the lead until they showed him the test of 19-year-old Betty Bronson), virtually all the adaptations since have sentimentalized the material and moved it away from real emotions, emphasizing the cutesy aspects of the material. Walt Disney put out an animated version in 1953 (Peter was voiced by child actor Bobby Driscoll, one of the few times it has been a petered Pan) and the next year a Broadway musical version came out starring Mary Martin, who’d already proven in the “Honey Bun” number of South Pacific five years earlier that she could cross-dress convincingly and was petite enough that she could be flown easily — since part of Barrie’s fantasy requires that Peter and the Darling children (Wendy, the female lead, and her brothers Michael and John), take a header out the Darlings’ second-story window and fly to Never Never Land, where the bulk of the story takes place. The musical was written by Mark “Moose” Charlap with lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, though when that version flopped in previews additional songs were added by composer Jule Styne and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, with Martin as Peter and the marvelous British actor Cyril Ritchard (the murder victim in Hitchcock’s Blackmail in 1929) as Captain Hook. (An earlier Broadway production from 1950 wasn’t a musical, though Leonard Bernstein provided incidental music, and starred Jean Arthur as Peter and Boris Karloff — who would seem the perfect actor for the role — as Hook.) The Martin version was telecast live three times — in 1955, 1956 and 1960 — and the 1960 version was preserved on videotape and reissued several times, once in 1973 and again in the 1990’s when it was discovered on two-inch tape (no player then existed that could run a two-inch tape; a non-working model of a two-inch videotape player was found in a Houston museum of TV history and parts had to be hand-machined to get it in working order so the tape could be played and transferred to modern storage media).
The show has been periodically revived “live” with Sandy Duncan, Cathy Rigby and anyone else they can find who can sing, dance and is petite enough to look credibly boyish and be accommodated by the assembly of ropes, cables and harnesses needed to “fly” on stage, and it was the basis for this version, though Adolph Green’s daughter Amanda was brought in to provide three additional songs (which, quite frankly, added little). This time around Peter was played by Allison Williams — she didn’t really look all that masculine (more like a 1920’s flapper wearing a grass skirt) but she sang and moved well — with Taylor Louderman as Wendy, Alanna Saunders in a Catwoman-esque costume as Tiger Lily (whose band, in an unnecessary bow to political correctness, was changed from “Indians” to “Islanders” and made to look Polynesian instead of Native American; also, a new song called “True Blood Brothers” replaced “Ugg-a-Wugg,” the original bonding song between Peter Pan and Tiger Lily. This misbegotten example of political correctness run riot actually got a thank-you from one Kevin Gover, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. These people want all entertainment to be sanitized and have all the fun bleached out of it) and Christopher Walken as Hook. Walken’s presence was the biggest element ballyhooed — and let’s face it, it’s not every day that an Academy Award-winning actor with a serious reputation sets foot on a TV soundstage to replicate a comic-villain role in a deliberately campy Broadway musical. Walken was actually one of the show’s biggest disappointments; he seems as if he got his whole idea of how to play a pirate (and even what to look like as one) from Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and though the script feints at homoerotic attractions between Hook and his crew (particularly his sidekick Smee, played by Christian Borle, who also doubles as the stuffed-shirt father of Wendy and her two brothers), he’s hardly as daring as Cyril Ritchard, who played Hook as an all-out screaming queen. (That went over my head when I saw the Mary Martin TV show in 1960, when I was seven, and even in 1973, but when the piece was revived in 1990 it seemed almost too obvious.)
Indeed, the weakest part of this Peter Pan was it conveyed almost no sense of terror; even the villainy had an element of “Don’t worry, we’re only kidding” about this, and frankly I’d have liked to see Hook played as an all-out villain to cut the cutesiness of the rest of the tale, the way Ernest Torrence played him in the 1922 film — and Margaret Hamilton played the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz, a story which pre-dates Peter Pan by a few years and is far more interesting, especially since it’s a classic fantasy quest-narrative and its adapters embraced the coming-of-age aspects of the original just about everyone who’s taken on Peter Pan since Barrie has run away from. Ironically, the most genuinely moving parts of the story as presented in the NBC telecast of the 1954 musical of Barrie’s 1904 play are the ones dealing with the Darling parents’ sense of loss over their children (later Barrie wrote a fascinating fantasy called Mary Rose — about a young girl who disappears for weeks or even years; it’s not clear what’s happened to her in the meantime, but when she comes back to our world she hasn’t aged at all no matter how much time has passed in the normal sphere — which when I read it seemed to have been his way of answering the question, “But what about the parents of the Lost Boys? What did they go through?” Mary Rose also fascinated Alfred Hitchcock, who for decades wanted to film it and got as far as a preliminary script written with Jay Presson Allen, who wrote Marnie, but never got to make it) and the final scene, based on an addition to the original play Barrie called “An Afterthought,” in which Wendy is seen as an adult (played here by Minnie Driver), married with a daughter of her own, when Peter Pan finally fulfills his promise to her to return and takes Wendy’s daughter on her own Never Never Land adventure.
It also didn’t help that the spirit of Julie Andrews hung so heavily over this enterprise; all three of the female principals — Allison Williams, Taylor Louderman and Kelli O’Hara as the Darling kids’ mother — seem to have adopted her clear diction and somewhat exaggerated enunciation as their model for how to sound convincingly “British” when they sang. (Peter Pan Live! was a follow-up to NBC’s previous “live” take on The Sound of Music, which got rotten reviews, mainly aimed at the star, Carrie Underwood, though all they could really fault her for was not being Julie Andrews.) And whereas the Sound of Music telecast had been a traditional TV adaptation of a live play, shot with best-seat-in-the-house vistas from three cameras, Peter Pan Live! roamed throughout the studio and moved about through the sets representing the various vistas — the Darlings’ house back in London and the locales of Never Never Land, from the beach on which Peter and the Darling kids land to the “Islander” encampment, the Lost Boys’ secret underground hideout (which seemed to have been inspired by the one for the villainous Cabinet ministers plotting to depose President W. C. Fields in the 1932 Million Dollar Legs) and the pirate ship to which Hook takes the kidnapped Lost Boys and threatens to make them walk the plank … Not all this was to the good; though it was fun to see a Busby Berkeley-like overhead dance formation with men (though that had already been done in the Village People’s 1980 movie Can’t Stop the Music!), it was not fun that the ever-changing camera angles made it impossible for the lighting people to conceal the ropes and cables suspending the cast members as they “flew.” Even on our old, non-digital, low-definition TV the cords tying these people to normal gravity were just too obvious.
Where Peter Pan scored was the excellence of the dancing — it’s nice to know all those kids taking tap will have some chance at a professional showcase for their skills — indeed, Christopher Walken’s halting steps in rhythm looked even worse by comparison to the quality of the fully professional (and amazingly good) chorus dancing behind him — and also the literally colorful settings; this was one modern production that actually offered colors other than dank green and dirty brown! As far as the whole thing was concerned, let’s just say that this Peter Pan was fun, but not as much fun as it could have been if it hadn’t been played so relentlessly for cuteness — the whole moving subplot of both Peter and Wendy feeling sexual awakenings in their attraction to each other, a relationship that can’t be consummated because Peter refuses to grow up and Wendy ultimately wants a home and family much like the one her parents have, was delicately but brilliantly communicated in the 1924 film but is almost totally ignored here. James M. Barrie wrote a charming fairy tale (indeed, when his plays started falling off in popularity Dorothy Parker attributed it to audiences getting tired of works whose virtually only audience appeal was charm) but it had darker resonances — some of which he may not have intended — and in each new adaptation the cutesy-poo stuff has been emphasized more and more and the darker elements relegated to the cutting-room (or the steno-pool) floor.
Thursday, December 4, 2014
42 (Warner Bros./Legendary, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was 42, a quite remarkable production from Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures last year, written and directed by Brian Helgeland and telling the story of Jackie Robinson and how he integrated Major League Baseball as a player for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Charles wondered why the film was given so enigmatic a title as 42 — the number of Jackie Robinson’s uniform (and for the 50th anniversary of his major-league debut in 1947 Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig announced that the number 42 would be permanently retired by all the major-league teams, though players currently using 42 would be grandfathered in and be allowed to keep that number until they retire) — instead of something including Jackie Robinson’s name in the title. He assumed that far more viewers interested in Robinson’s tale but not overall baseball fans would have been attracted to a film called Jackie Robinson than one called 42, but there had already been a film about him from 1950 called The Jackie Robinson Story with Robinson playing himself on screen and the fine Black actress Ruby Dee as his wife Rachel. (Ruby Dee was the person I would have liked to see star in the film adaptation of Billie Holiday’s autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, with Billie’s own records used to represent her inimitable singing; instead, of course, the film got turned into a putrid vehicle for Diana Ross, who actually did a decent job given how horrendously miscast she was but got saddled with a script that scrapped the truth of Billie’s life story — including scenes she described in the book that would have made great movie sequences — and substituted the most God-awful Hollywood clichés.) I have a VHS tape of this film and was able to find a download of The Jackie Robinson Story on archive.org, though about my only serious memory of it is that for some reason the screenwriter decided to change the name of the team Robinson played for in the Negro Leagues from the Kansas City Monarchs to the “Black Panthers”! Anyway, 42 turned out to be an excellent movie, mainly because though it’s a recent film it’s told in a deliberately old-fashioned style, with long takes, well framed compositions and, at least in the exteriors (including the scenes actually representing baseball games), a realistic sense of color instead of the dirty-aquarium look all too common these days. The film lasts 128 minutes but manages not to seem padded (as too many modern films that push past the two-hour mark do), and what makes it work is the fine cast as well as Helgeland’s understated writing. While there’s a sense at some points that he’s cherry-picking Robinson’s real life for material he can structure along the familiar Hollywood clichés of the success movie as well as the sports movie, he’s also a highly talented screenwriter working over material that plays to his strengths as a director. It’s interesting that his previous writing credits include films for actor-directors like Clint Eastwood (Mystic River) and Kevin Costner (The Postman), because Helgeland’s work here shows the same kind of understated acting generally found in films made by actor-directors.
His cast is near-perfect; as Robinson he found a young performer named Chadwick Boseman (who alas is being run through the superhero meatgrinder; after this film he did another Black biopic, Get On Up, about James Brown — thereby playing both sides of what used to be called the “Willie Mays-Louis Armstrong syndrome,” in which Black people were assumed to have only two avenues of success available to them: sports and entertainment — and he’s currently playing a superhero called the “Black Panther” in the Marvel universe, just as Tobey Maguire got plucked away from promising roles like his wide-eyed aspiring young Gay writer in Wonder Boys to play Spider-Man) who’s absolutely right, wiry, formidably athletic and also able to portray the torture Robinson went through, not only from the racist abuse he got from teammates, opponents and audience members alike, but from the ongoing injunction he was under not to show any temper and especially not to fight back. He’s matched by Nicole Beharie as his wife Rachel (or “Rae,” as he called her and she’s usually addressed in the film), a deceptively meek-looking slip of a young Black woman who turns out, if anything, to be more racially militant in asserting her civil rights than her husband, especially in a scene in which she uses a whites-only restroom at an airport and gets both herself and Jackie thrown off the plane they were waiting for. But the real star of the movie is Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who turns in a wonderfully authoritative old-salt performance as a marvelously ambiguous character, who claims his only motivations for bringing in a Black player and breaking down the color line of Major League Baseball are to tap a previously unexploited talent pool and draw African-American audiences into Ebbets Field, but who — like Robinson himself — is obviously aware of the racial minefield he’s stepping into and the way hiring a Black player is going to make him a civil-rights pioneer whether he wants to be one or not. Helgeland’s well-structured script includes the character of Black reporter Wendell Smith (André Holland), who introduces himself to Robinson as “your Boswell” (Robinson responds with a stare of blank incomprehension — though given that he’d gone to UCLA I had a hard time believing he’d graduated without having at least heard of John Boswell) and follows him around as chauffeur, bodyguard, early-warning system and civil-rights conscience.
What’s most remarkable about 42 is it depicts the racism Robinson had to contend with honestly and believably without hitting us over the head with it; Helgeland realized that the reality was so ugly, from the constant uses of the word “nigger” (notably from the Philadelphia Phillies’ manager, Ben Chapman, who goads Robinson so vilely and insistently when the Dodgers and Phillies play each other he, like some of the other white players, seems more interested in goading Robinson into an embarrassing fight than in beating him and the Dodgers on the field) to the ugly central-casting “cracker” stereotype who comes out to see Wendell Smith one night and says if Robinson is still there in the morning … well, the exact threat is left chillingly unspecified but it sounds like the Ku Klux Klan is going to lynch him (and the counterbalancing old white guy who looks just as “redneck” but turns out to be supportive, saying that in America it shouldn’t matter what color a man is if he can deliver the goods); and the supercilious hotel manager who cancels the reservations of the entire Dodger team when the team bus arrives and Robinson is on it. (Robinson, true to what we know about his real-life character as well as the way he’s drawn in this movie, offers to spend the night somewhere else if the hotel will honor the reservations of the white men on the team, but to no avail.) There’s also the chilling scene in which the white Dodgers circulate a petition to Rickey telling him they will refuse to play if a Black man is on their team — including one who makes such a big to-do about it that Rickey offers to trade him to another team if he still feels that way by the trading deadline (only by the time of the deadline, he’s changed his mind, come to value Robinson as a teammate, and withdraws his request for a trade). I remember talking about Jackie Robinson to a friend and explaining that, given that sports is one human endeavor in which the outcomes are a matter of statistical record — points scored, games won, end-of-season standings and the myriad other statistics baseball fans (more than those of any other sport) obsess over — Robinson’s success was measurable in objective terms. Before he joined the Dodgers in 1947, the team had made the World Series only once (in 1941); during the ten years he played for them they made the World Series six times and won it once (in 1955), a record which led not only the Dodgers but other teams in the majors to recruit Black players to get some of that comparative advantage for themselves.
The theme of the movie is eloquently expressed in a scene between Robinson and Rickey in which Rickey tells him that under no circumstances must he respond to the racial taunts in public no matter how bad they get — then, Rickey says, audiences won’t remember that the Black man was provoked; all they’ll remember is that the Black man started a fight — and Robinson says, “You mean you want someone who doesn’t have the guts to fight back?” “No,” says Rickey, “I want someone who has the guts not to fight back.” Throughout the film Helgeland delicately balances the story of Jackie Robinson’s inner turmoil (including the spectacular scene in which he holds it together in public but loses it as soon as he gets in the hallway between the field and the dressing rooms, then beats the shit out of the walls with his bat — “Who does he think he is, me?” I found myself asking myself) with the story of the Dodgers’ 1947 pennant race and the ways Robinson’s presence both hurt them and helped them; it was a major distraction from the business of winning ballgames but it was also a major distraction for everyone else they played, and in particular the opponents who were goaded by Robinson’s presence on the field to obsess over him and make stupid mistakes (in one scene, an opposing pitcher gets so discomfited by Robinson he drops the ball on the mound and the batter gets a base on balls and walks Robinson home). One typical trope of baseball movies is showing Robinson as a major home-run hitter, which he wasn’t; his skills were fielding and base-running (and the film does show him stealing bases, including one famous game in which he stole home, something that almost never happens).
Overall, 42 is a great movie, ranking alongside The Pride of the Yankees, Eight Men Out and Moneyball in my personal pantheon of baseball films, though my hero Christopher Meloni is somewhat wasted in the role of Dodgers manager Leo Durocher (that’s Hollywood anti-typecasting at its worst, casting tall, muscular Meloni as short, wiry Durocher — almost as bad as casting short, wiry Tom Cruise as Lee Child’s character Jack Reacher, a role that should have been Meloni’s almost by divine right!); though we get a scene of him naked from the waist up in bed with a woman (“So that’s why you wanted to watch this movie!” Charles joked), shortly thereafter he’s banned from baseball for a year by Commissioner Happy Chandler (a former Southern governor who, ironically, lost his chance to be George Wallace’s running mate for vice-president in 1968 because he had presided over baseball when it became integrated) for an affair with said woman, a Hollywood star carefully unnamed in Helgeland’s script (it was Laraine Day) and Rickey has to dredge up Bert Shotton (Max Gail — so a veteran of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is replaced by a veteran of my other all-time favorite cop show on TV, Barney Miller!) out of retirement to manage his team through the minefields of a close pennant race and a civil-rights battle. Ironically, baseball is now the least racially integrated of America’s major team sports, mainly because it’s lost its “cool” factor and young Black athletes are more inclined to pursue football or basketball — and the major-domos of Major League Baseball are once again wondering how to get people of color to buy tickets to their games when there aren’t that many people who look like them on the teams.
The film was 42, a quite remarkable production from Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures last year, written and directed by Brian Helgeland and telling the story of Jackie Robinson and how he integrated Major League Baseball as a player for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Charles wondered why the film was given so enigmatic a title as 42 — the number of Jackie Robinson’s uniform (and for the 50th anniversary of his major-league debut in 1947 Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig announced that the number 42 would be permanently retired by all the major-league teams, though players currently using 42 would be grandfathered in and be allowed to keep that number until they retire) — instead of something including Jackie Robinson’s name in the title. He assumed that far more viewers interested in Robinson’s tale but not overall baseball fans would have been attracted to a film called Jackie Robinson than one called 42, but there had already been a film about him from 1950 called The Jackie Robinson Story with Robinson playing himself on screen and the fine Black actress Ruby Dee as his wife Rachel. (Ruby Dee was the person I would have liked to see star in the film adaptation of Billie Holiday’s autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, with Billie’s own records used to represent her inimitable singing; instead, of course, the film got turned into a putrid vehicle for Diana Ross, who actually did a decent job given how horrendously miscast she was but got saddled with a script that scrapped the truth of Billie’s life story — including scenes she described in the book that would have made great movie sequences — and substituted the most God-awful Hollywood clichés.) I have a VHS tape of this film and was able to find a download of The Jackie Robinson Story on archive.org, though about my only serious memory of it is that for some reason the screenwriter decided to change the name of the team Robinson played for in the Negro Leagues from the Kansas City Monarchs to the “Black Panthers”! Anyway, 42 turned out to be an excellent movie, mainly because though it’s a recent film it’s told in a deliberately old-fashioned style, with long takes, well framed compositions and, at least in the exteriors (including the scenes actually representing baseball games), a realistic sense of color instead of the dirty-aquarium look all too common these days. The film lasts 128 minutes but manages not to seem padded (as too many modern films that push past the two-hour mark do), and what makes it work is the fine cast as well as Helgeland’s understated writing. While there’s a sense at some points that he’s cherry-picking Robinson’s real life for material he can structure along the familiar Hollywood clichés of the success movie as well as the sports movie, he’s also a highly talented screenwriter working over material that plays to his strengths as a director. It’s interesting that his previous writing credits include films for actor-directors like Clint Eastwood (Mystic River) and Kevin Costner (The Postman), because Helgeland’s work here shows the same kind of understated acting generally found in films made by actor-directors.
His cast is near-perfect; as Robinson he found a young performer named Chadwick Boseman (who alas is being run through the superhero meatgrinder; after this film he did another Black biopic, Get On Up, about James Brown — thereby playing both sides of what used to be called the “Willie Mays-Louis Armstrong syndrome,” in which Black people were assumed to have only two avenues of success available to them: sports and entertainment — and he’s currently playing a superhero called the “Black Panther” in the Marvel universe, just as Tobey Maguire got plucked away from promising roles like his wide-eyed aspiring young Gay writer in Wonder Boys to play Spider-Man) who’s absolutely right, wiry, formidably athletic and also able to portray the torture Robinson went through, not only from the racist abuse he got from teammates, opponents and audience members alike, but from the ongoing injunction he was under not to show any temper and especially not to fight back. He’s matched by Nicole Beharie as his wife Rachel (or “Rae,” as he called her and she’s usually addressed in the film), a deceptively meek-looking slip of a young Black woman who turns out, if anything, to be more racially militant in asserting her civil rights than her husband, especially in a scene in which she uses a whites-only restroom at an airport and gets both herself and Jackie thrown off the plane they were waiting for. But the real star of the movie is Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who turns in a wonderfully authoritative old-salt performance as a marvelously ambiguous character, who claims his only motivations for bringing in a Black player and breaking down the color line of Major League Baseball are to tap a previously unexploited talent pool and draw African-American audiences into Ebbets Field, but who — like Robinson himself — is obviously aware of the racial minefield he’s stepping into and the way hiring a Black player is going to make him a civil-rights pioneer whether he wants to be one or not. Helgeland’s well-structured script includes the character of Black reporter Wendell Smith (André Holland), who introduces himself to Robinson as “your Boswell” (Robinson responds with a stare of blank incomprehension — though given that he’d gone to UCLA I had a hard time believing he’d graduated without having at least heard of John Boswell) and follows him around as chauffeur, bodyguard, early-warning system and civil-rights conscience.
What’s most remarkable about 42 is it depicts the racism Robinson had to contend with honestly and believably without hitting us over the head with it; Helgeland realized that the reality was so ugly, from the constant uses of the word “nigger” (notably from the Philadelphia Phillies’ manager, Ben Chapman, who goads Robinson so vilely and insistently when the Dodgers and Phillies play each other he, like some of the other white players, seems more interested in goading Robinson into an embarrassing fight than in beating him and the Dodgers on the field) to the ugly central-casting “cracker” stereotype who comes out to see Wendell Smith one night and says if Robinson is still there in the morning … well, the exact threat is left chillingly unspecified but it sounds like the Ku Klux Klan is going to lynch him (and the counterbalancing old white guy who looks just as “redneck” but turns out to be supportive, saying that in America it shouldn’t matter what color a man is if he can deliver the goods); and the supercilious hotel manager who cancels the reservations of the entire Dodger team when the team bus arrives and Robinson is on it. (Robinson, true to what we know about his real-life character as well as the way he’s drawn in this movie, offers to spend the night somewhere else if the hotel will honor the reservations of the white men on the team, but to no avail.) There’s also the chilling scene in which the white Dodgers circulate a petition to Rickey telling him they will refuse to play if a Black man is on their team — including one who makes such a big to-do about it that Rickey offers to trade him to another team if he still feels that way by the trading deadline (only by the time of the deadline, he’s changed his mind, come to value Robinson as a teammate, and withdraws his request for a trade). I remember talking about Jackie Robinson to a friend and explaining that, given that sports is one human endeavor in which the outcomes are a matter of statistical record — points scored, games won, end-of-season standings and the myriad other statistics baseball fans (more than those of any other sport) obsess over — Robinson’s success was measurable in objective terms. Before he joined the Dodgers in 1947, the team had made the World Series only once (in 1941); during the ten years he played for them they made the World Series six times and won it once (in 1955), a record which led not only the Dodgers but other teams in the majors to recruit Black players to get some of that comparative advantage for themselves.
The theme of the movie is eloquently expressed in a scene between Robinson and Rickey in which Rickey tells him that under no circumstances must he respond to the racial taunts in public no matter how bad they get — then, Rickey says, audiences won’t remember that the Black man was provoked; all they’ll remember is that the Black man started a fight — and Robinson says, “You mean you want someone who doesn’t have the guts to fight back?” “No,” says Rickey, “I want someone who has the guts not to fight back.” Throughout the film Helgeland delicately balances the story of Jackie Robinson’s inner turmoil (including the spectacular scene in which he holds it together in public but loses it as soon as he gets in the hallway between the field and the dressing rooms, then beats the shit out of the walls with his bat — “Who does he think he is, me?” I found myself asking myself) with the story of the Dodgers’ 1947 pennant race and the ways Robinson’s presence both hurt them and helped them; it was a major distraction from the business of winning ballgames but it was also a major distraction for everyone else they played, and in particular the opponents who were goaded by Robinson’s presence on the field to obsess over him and make stupid mistakes (in one scene, an opposing pitcher gets so discomfited by Robinson he drops the ball on the mound and the batter gets a base on balls and walks Robinson home). One typical trope of baseball movies is showing Robinson as a major home-run hitter, which he wasn’t; his skills were fielding and base-running (and the film does show him stealing bases, including one famous game in which he stole home, something that almost never happens).
Overall, 42 is a great movie, ranking alongside The Pride of the Yankees, Eight Men Out and Moneyball in my personal pantheon of baseball films, though my hero Christopher Meloni is somewhat wasted in the role of Dodgers manager Leo Durocher (that’s Hollywood anti-typecasting at its worst, casting tall, muscular Meloni as short, wiry Durocher — almost as bad as casting short, wiry Tom Cruise as Lee Child’s character Jack Reacher, a role that should have been Meloni’s almost by divine right!); though we get a scene of him naked from the waist up in bed with a woman (“So that’s why you wanted to watch this movie!” Charles joked), shortly thereafter he’s banned from baseball for a year by Commissioner Happy Chandler (a former Southern governor who, ironically, lost his chance to be George Wallace’s running mate for vice-president in 1968 because he had presided over baseball when it became integrated) for an affair with said woman, a Hollywood star carefully unnamed in Helgeland’s script (it was Laraine Day) and Rickey has to dredge up Bert Shotton (Max Gail — so a veteran of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is replaced by a veteran of my other all-time favorite cop show on TV, Barney Miller!) out of retirement to manage his team through the minefields of a close pennant race and a civil-rights battle. Ironically, baseball is now the least racially integrated of America’s major team sports, mainly because it’s lost its “cool” factor and young Black athletes are more inclined to pursue football or basketball — and the major-domos of Major League Baseball are once again wondering how to get people of color to buy tickets to their games when there aren’t that many people who look like them on the teams.
Monday, December 1, 2014
Mare Nostrum (Ingram-Metro-Goldwyn, 1925)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent yesterday evening watching a quite interesting film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase”: Mare Nostrum, a 1925 production by director Rex Ingram. Born Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock in Dublin in 1892 (so two of the all-time greatest film directors had the original name “Hitchcock” — and though they did their work in different eras of film history Rex Ingram was only eight years older than Alfred Hitchcock), Ingram got his start as a director in 1914 with a short film called A Symphony of Souls and hit the big time in 1921 with his mega-hit The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and introducing Rudolph Valentino, who’d been kicking around Hollywood for five years or so playing oily Latin villains but who got his big break as the hero of Ingram’s film. Ingram followed this up with another Valentino vehicle, The Conquering Power, and then when he got tired of working with Valentino he launched the career of another silent-screen idol, Ramon Novarro, in the 1922 version of Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche. All these films were made for Metro Pictures Corporation, the production arm of the Loew’s theatre chain, whose president, Marcus Loew, regarded Ingram as his company’s savior because the profits from his blockbuster hits were keeping the company alive. In 1924 Loew bought the Goldwyn Studios, which had been floundering since a boardroom coup drove Sam Goldwyn out of the company in 1922, and absorbed Louis B. Mayer’s independent production outfit (which had been releasing most of its films through Metro) to create the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer combine. The whole point of the merger that created MGM was to regularize production and ensure the Loew’s theatres an ongoing supply of quality films, and for that purpose Loew put Mayer in overall control of the company. Mayer brought along with him Irving Thalberg, whom he’d hired away from Universal, as his vice-president in charge of production. Ingram was appalled at the factory-like system Mayer and Thalberg were introducing, and he told Loew he wouldn’t work for them. Fine, said Loew; you don’t have to. Instead Loew told Ingram he could set up his own production company, and Loew would back him as long as his films were released through Metro-Goldwyn — as the company was styled on the credits of Ingram’s films since he hated Mayer so much he didn’t want Mayer’s name on them. Ingram set up shop in Nice, building his own studio (and attracting celebrity visitors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who set one scene of Tender Is the Night at Ingram’s Vittorine Studio in Nice) and looking for stories that would involve close-by European locations so he could shoot as much as possible on actual locations instead of working in the studio. For his first independent film he picked Mare Nostrum because it was a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez — whose Four Horsemen had been Ingram’s biggest hit — and also because its locales included Spain and Italy, both easily accessible from his redoubt in the south of France.
Like The Four Horsemen, Mare Nostrum is a multi-generational story set just before and during World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II) and dealing with divided loyalties. Ulysses Ferragut (played as a boy by Kada-Abd el-Kader, whom Ingram and his wife Alice Terry adopted, and as an adult by Antonio Moreno) is caught between his uncle, “The Triton” (Uni Apollon), who wants him to go to sea and be a sailor like most of the preceding male Ferraguts, and his father, attorney Esteban Ferragut (Alex Nova), who wants him to go into his business and become a lawyer. As a boy, Ulysses (one wonders why, if his dad did not want him to be a sailor, he gave him such a nautical first name!) is fascinated by a painting The Triton has on his wall of Amphitrate, the Greco-Roman goddess of lost sailors on the Mediterranean — also known, as the opening titles helpfully inform us, as Mare Nostrum (“our sea”). Needless to say, the sea wins out over the law as his chosen career, and when next we see him he’s saved enough money to buy his own ship, a fast freighter he names the Mare Nostrum, with a typically eccentric movie crew of whom we meet the first mate, Toni (Fredrick Mariotti), and the cook, Caragol (Hughie Mack), the closest this film has to a comic-relief character. Everything goes well until, on a routine trip to Naples, he meets Freya Talberg (Alice Terry), and immediately falls in love — or at least in lust — with her, mainly because she’s the spitting image of that painting of Amphitrate his uncle had when he was a boy. Freya is traveling with an older, stouter and severely dykey-looking woman, Dr. Fedelmann (Madame Paquerette — quite a few of Ingram’s actors, especially in his European films, were billed with only one name), an anthropologist who’s doing a tour of ancient ruins. Ulysses follows them to the ancient Greek city of Paestum — and it’s beautiful to see the actual ruins of Paestum playing themselves instead of being represented by crude studio mock-ups! — and then returns to Naples and hangs out with Freya for weeks, delaying the sailing of the Mare Nostrum and thereby putting himself and his crew in severe financial jeopardy. It gets worse: Freya and Dr. Fedelmann are actually spies — Freya is Austrian and Fedelmann is German — and they’re anxious either to get Italy in the war on their side or at least keep her neutral. (A lot of people don’t realize that Italy, an ally of Germany in World War II, was actually on the other side from Germany in World War I, fighting as part of the Entente with France, Britain, Russia and eventually the U.S.)
Toni ultimately gives up on his captain and takes the Mare Nostrum back to its home port, Barcelona, without him. Freya successfully lures Ulysses into taking a sailing ship out into the Mediterranean for some undisclosed purpose to help the German/Austrian war effort — though at the last minute, having fallen genuinely in love with him, she has a change of heart and tries to talk him out of the job he’s been given by Fedelmann and German Count Kaledine (played by French actor Fernand Mailly in obvious imitation of Ingram’s good friend, Erich von Stroheim), which it turns out is to refuel U-boats in the middle of the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, Ulysses’ son Esteban (Michael Brantford) — product of a loveless marriage, arranged by Ulysses’ parents, with Doña Cinta (Mademoiselle Kithnou) — leaves Barcelona on his own and goes to Naples to find his dad, only after haunting the place where his dad is supposed to be staying — only he’s never there because he’s at Freya’s virtually 24/7 — for a week, he gives up and goes home just one day before Ulysses finally returns to his place. Ulysses gets a royal chewing-out from his housekeeper, who tells him his son “deserves a better father than you,” and with the Mare Nostrum already out to sea under Toni’s command Ulysses signs onto a tramp steamer bound for Marseilles and intends to work his way from there back home to Spain. But while he’s on his way the German U-boat he helped refuel sinks a British passenger liner, the Californian, and while the ship Ulysses is on rescues many of the passengers aboard, he learns his son was on that ocean liner and was killed by the German torpedo attack. The rest of the movie is about how Ulysses avenges himself against the members of the espionage ring; he spots Count Kaledine on the streets of Marseilles, calls him out as a “Boche spy” and organizes what amounts to a lynch mob against him — though he’s ultimately captured by the authorities instead of killed on the spot. Then he receives a note telling him to go to a certain address which “could mean much for your happiness,” and when he goes he finds Freya — who’s genuinely in love with him and is sorry for her role in the affair, and he’s ready to take her back when he sees a ghostly vision of his dead son shaking his head, whereupon he throws her to the floor and leaves.
Freya wanted his help because the Germans learned of Freya’s change of heart when Dr. Fedelmann intercepted a letter Freya had written Ulysses confessing all and pleading for his forgiveness. Crossing a line through her name on a list of active agents, Fedelmann orders that Freya be sent instructions for her next espionage assignment using a code the Germans know the French had already broken (a story detail Blasco Ibáñez and/or the film’s screenwriter, Willis Goldbeck, copied from the real-life end of Mata Hari) — and when Ulysses turns down Freya’s plea for help escaping to neutral Spain, she’s duly arrested and executed by a firing squad. In a line Josef von Sternberg and his writer, Jules Furthman, ripped off six years later for Dishonored (with Marlene Dietrich basically playing Alice Terry’s role as a woman spy trained to get secrets out of enemy men by seducing them), Freya goes to her execution wearing a fancy dress, jewels and a fur coat, announcing that these were the uniform in which she served her country. Ulysses decides to complete his revenge against the Germans by refitting the Mare Nostrum (ya remember the Mare Nostrum?) as a gunship, replacing all his crew except Caragol the comic-relief cook (ya remember Caragol the comic-relief cook?) with trained French military sailors and setting out on the Mediterranean to destroy German ships — only that pesky German U-boat ambushes the Mare Nostrum and sinks her in the middle of a storm. Luckily, Ulysses is able to get off a shot with one of the ship’s guns and sink the sub, so both ships go down with all hands and the film ends with a final vision of Ulysses and Freya, dressed as Ulysses’ boyhood vision of Amphitrate, embracing under the water as the titles explain that, like the hero and heroine of a 19th century Romantic tragedy, they have finally been united in death. (Not surprisingly, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg cabled Ingram in his Riviera redoubt and asked him if he could please, pretty please, come up with a “happy” ending. Ingram, secure in Marcus Loew’s support and already treading on thin ice by giving his villainess the last name “Talberg,” told them politely but firmly to go fuck themselves, especially since The Four Horsemen had had a similarly unhappy ending and had been an enormous hit.)
In his introduction to the TCM showing Ben Mankiewicz (whom I’ve rather contemptuously dismissed as “a nodule from one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees”) claimed Mare Nostrum is Ingram’s masterpiece. I’m not so sure — I’d rate The Four Horsemen, The Conquering Power and Ingram’s next independent movie, The Magician, ahead of it — but it is a brilliant film from a pioneering and long-forgotten director who deserves a place in the pantheon. As Charles (who arrived about midway through the movie, just after Ulysses’ and Freya’s first breakup) noted, it’s the sort of film that seems to exist in a dream reality of its own, equally divorced from real life and Hollywood conventions, then and now. Ingram wasn’t a particularly innovative director technically — though some of the special effects are stunning, others (particularly the staged shots of ships in the Mediterranean) are done with models of toy-ship-in-the-bathtub levels of believability — and all too often his actors resort to the sort of arm-flailing and exaggerated facial expressions a lot of people who’ve never watched a silent film start-to-finish think they were all acted like. Also, though Ingram had quite a good eye for male talent, he stuck himself with his wife Alice Terry as the female lead in film after film — and like a lot of other actresses personally involved with their directors, he had a far wider idea of her range than her talents deserved. What makes Ingram a great director, and virtually everything he made worth watching, was his combination of a pictorial sense — there are scenes here, including one of Doña Cinta dealing with the trauma of her husband’s betrayal by becoming intensely religious and going to church a lot, that have the piquant composition and delicate play of light of an Old Master painting — and a dreamlike sense of story reality that draws you in to Ingram’s world and makes you forget how realistically improbable the events of the film are. (In that regard — if in no other, though one can certainly trace a chain of influence from Mare Nostrum through Dishonored to Notorious — Ingram does remind one of the “other” Hitchcock.)
Mare Nostrum wasn’t released in the U.S. until January 1926 and, though it wasn’t a blockbuster hit like Ingram’s previous films, it did turn a profit, and Ingram was able to go on to make the even greater and more haunting The Magician (with Alice Terry and German actor Paul Wegener in a story of a mad scientist attempting to create an artificial human via an ancient alchemical recipe — it was obviously influenced by The Golem, which also starred Wegener, and was equally an influence on Frankenstein), which also was a success though not a hit. Alas, Ingram’s third film on his own, an adaptation of Robert Hichens’ novel The Garden of Allah, was a major box-office flop, and just as it was bombing his protector at the company, Marcus Loew, suddenly died. Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg gave Ingram an ultimatum — either close down his independent studio and come to work in Hollywood under the same strict rules as all MGM’s other directors, or quit. Ingram chose to quit, spending most of the rest of his life in the Middle East and becoming a writer, though he made at least two other films, a final silent called The Three Passions produced by a British company for United Artists release in 1928 and a Gaumont-British production from 1932; imdb.com lists two Ingram films after 1928, Baroud and Love in Morocco, but I suspect these are just alternative titles for the same movie. He went so “native” in the Middle East he even converted to Islam, though he eventually returned to Hollywood, gave a number of interviews about his career (in one of which he sniped at the continuing cult around Rudolph Valentino and said any decent-looking young man could have played the lead in The Four Horsemen) and died of a cerebral hemorrhage on July 21, 1950, at age 58. Mare Nostrum was remade in Spain in 1948 (no U.S. studio has gone near the story again, though one can’t help wishing Sternberg would have done a talkie remake with Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant, just as one can’t help wishing Ingram would have made his version with Valentino and Garbo instead of the rather bland actors he used, Antonio Moreno and Alice Terry) and imdb.com lists a 2014 project called Mare Nostrum as “in development,” though they haven’t received a report on what the story will be and therefore it’s unknown whether it will indeed be a remake of this tragic, haunting film.
I spent yesterday evening watching a quite interesting film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase”: Mare Nostrum, a 1925 production by director Rex Ingram. Born Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock in Dublin in 1892 (so two of the all-time greatest film directors had the original name “Hitchcock” — and though they did their work in different eras of film history Rex Ingram was only eight years older than Alfred Hitchcock), Ingram got his start as a director in 1914 with a short film called A Symphony of Souls and hit the big time in 1921 with his mega-hit The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and introducing Rudolph Valentino, who’d been kicking around Hollywood for five years or so playing oily Latin villains but who got his big break as the hero of Ingram’s film. Ingram followed this up with another Valentino vehicle, The Conquering Power, and then when he got tired of working with Valentino he launched the career of another silent-screen idol, Ramon Novarro, in the 1922 version of Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche. All these films were made for Metro Pictures Corporation, the production arm of the Loew’s theatre chain, whose president, Marcus Loew, regarded Ingram as his company’s savior because the profits from his blockbuster hits were keeping the company alive. In 1924 Loew bought the Goldwyn Studios, which had been floundering since a boardroom coup drove Sam Goldwyn out of the company in 1922, and absorbed Louis B. Mayer’s independent production outfit (which had been releasing most of its films through Metro) to create the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer combine. The whole point of the merger that created MGM was to regularize production and ensure the Loew’s theatres an ongoing supply of quality films, and for that purpose Loew put Mayer in overall control of the company. Mayer brought along with him Irving Thalberg, whom he’d hired away from Universal, as his vice-president in charge of production. Ingram was appalled at the factory-like system Mayer and Thalberg were introducing, and he told Loew he wouldn’t work for them. Fine, said Loew; you don’t have to. Instead Loew told Ingram he could set up his own production company, and Loew would back him as long as his films were released through Metro-Goldwyn — as the company was styled on the credits of Ingram’s films since he hated Mayer so much he didn’t want Mayer’s name on them. Ingram set up shop in Nice, building his own studio (and attracting celebrity visitors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who set one scene of Tender Is the Night at Ingram’s Vittorine Studio in Nice) and looking for stories that would involve close-by European locations so he could shoot as much as possible on actual locations instead of working in the studio. For his first independent film he picked Mare Nostrum because it was a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez — whose Four Horsemen had been Ingram’s biggest hit — and also because its locales included Spain and Italy, both easily accessible from his redoubt in the south of France.
Like The Four Horsemen, Mare Nostrum is a multi-generational story set just before and during World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II) and dealing with divided loyalties. Ulysses Ferragut (played as a boy by Kada-Abd el-Kader, whom Ingram and his wife Alice Terry adopted, and as an adult by Antonio Moreno) is caught between his uncle, “The Triton” (Uni Apollon), who wants him to go to sea and be a sailor like most of the preceding male Ferraguts, and his father, attorney Esteban Ferragut (Alex Nova), who wants him to go into his business and become a lawyer. As a boy, Ulysses (one wonders why, if his dad did not want him to be a sailor, he gave him such a nautical first name!) is fascinated by a painting The Triton has on his wall of Amphitrate, the Greco-Roman goddess of lost sailors on the Mediterranean — also known, as the opening titles helpfully inform us, as Mare Nostrum (“our sea”). Needless to say, the sea wins out over the law as his chosen career, and when next we see him he’s saved enough money to buy his own ship, a fast freighter he names the Mare Nostrum, with a typically eccentric movie crew of whom we meet the first mate, Toni (Fredrick Mariotti), and the cook, Caragol (Hughie Mack), the closest this film has to a comic-relief character. Everything goes well until, on a routine trip to Naples, he meets Freya Talberg (Alice Terry), and immediately falls in love — or at least in lust — with her, mainly because she’s the spitting image of that painting of Amphitrate his uncle had when he was a boy. Freya is traveling with an older, stouter and severely dykey-looking woman, Dr. Fedelmann (Madame Paquerette — quite a few of Ingram’s actors, especially in his European films, were billed with only one name), an anthropologist who’s doing a tour of ancient ruins. Ulysses follows them to the ancient Greek city of Paestum — and it’s beautiful to see the actual ruins of Paestum playing themselves instead of being represented by crude studio mock-ups! — and then returns to Naples and hangs out with Freya for weeks, delaying the sailing of the Mare Nostrum and thereby putting himself and his crew in severe financial jeopardy. It gets worse: Freya and Dr. Fedelmann are actually spies — Freya is Austrian and Fedelmann is German — and they’re anxious either to get Italy in the war on their side or at least keep her neutral. (A lot of people don’t realize that Italy, an ally of Germany in World War II, was actually on the other side from Germany in World War I, fighting as part of the Entente with France, Britain, Russia and eventually the U.S.)
Toni ultimately gives up on his captain and takes the Mare Nostrum back to its home port, Barcelona, without him. Freya successfully lures Ulysses into taking a sailing ship out into the Mediterranean for some undisclosed purpose to help the German/Austrian war effort — though at the last minute, having fallen genuinely in love with him, she has a change of heart and tries to talk him out of the job he’s been given by Fedelmann and German Count Kaledine (played by French actor Fernand Mailly in obvious imitation of Ingram’s good friend, Erich von Stroheim), which it turns out is to refuel U-boats in the middle of the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, Ulysses’ son Esteban (Michael Brantford) — product of a loveless marriage, arranged by Ulysses’ parents, with Doña Cinta (Mademoiselle Kithnou) — leaves Barcelona on his own and goes to Naples to find his dad, only after haunting the place where his dad is supposed to be staying — only he’s never there because he’s at Freya’s virtually 24/7 — for a week, he gives up and goes home just one day before Ulysses finally returns to his place. Ulysses gets a royal chewing-out from his housekeeper, who tells him his son “deserves a better father than you,” and with the Mare Nostrum already out to sea under Toni’s command Ulysses signs onto a tramp steamer bound for Marseilles and intends to work his way from there back home to Spain. But while he’s on his way the German U-boat he helped refuel sinks a British passenger liner, the Californian, and while the ship Ulysses is on rescues many of the passengers aboard, he learns his son was on that ocean liner and was killed by the German torpedo attack. The rest of the movie is about how Ulysses avenges himself against the members of the espionage ring; he spots Count Kaledine on the streets of Marseilles, calls him out as a “Boche spy” and organizes what amounts to a lynch mob against him — though he’s ultimately captured by the authorities instead of killed on the spot. Then he receives a note telling him to go to a certain address which “could mean much for your happiness,” and when he goes he finds Freya — who’s genuinely in love with him and is sorry for her role in the affair, and he’s ready to take her back when he sees a ghostly vision of his dead son shaking his head, whereupon he throws her to the floor and leaves.
Freya wanted his help because the Germans learned of Freya’s change of heart when Dr. Fedelmann intercepted a letter Freya had written Ulysses confessing all and pleading for his forgiveness. Crossing a line through her name on a list of active agents, Fedelmann orders that Freya be sent instructions for her next espionage assignment using a code the Germans know the French had already broken (a story detail Blasco Ibáñez and/or the film’s screenwriter, Willis Goldbeck, copied from the real-life end of Mata Hari) — and when Ulysses turns down Freya’s plea for help escaping to neutral Spain, she’s duly arrested and executed by a firing squad. In a line Josef von Sternberg and his writer, Jules Furthman, ripped off six years later for Dishonored (with Marlene Dietrich basically playing Alice Terry’s role as a woman spy trained to get secrets out of enemy men by seducing them), Freya goes to her execution wearing a fancy dress, jewels and a fur coat, announcing that these were the uniform in which she served her country. Ulysses decides to complete his revenge against the Germans by refitting the Mare Nostrum (ya remember the Mare Nostrum?) as a gunship, replacing all his crew except Caragol the comic-relief cook (ya remember Caragol the comic-relief cook?) with trained French military sailors and setting out on the Mediterranean to destroy German ships — only that pesky German U-boat ambushes the Mare Nostrum and sinks her in the middle of a storm. Luckily, Ulysses is able to get off a shot with one of the ship’s guns and sink the sub, so both ships go down with all hands and the film ends with a final vision of Ulysses and Freya, dressed as Ulysses’ boyhood vision of Amphitrate, embracing under the water as the titles explain that, like the hero and heroine of a 19th century Romantic tragedy, they have finally been united in death. (Not surprisingly, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg cabled Ingram in his Riviera redoubt and asked him if he could please, pretty please, come up with a “happy” ending. Ingram, secure in Marcus Loew’s support and already treading on thin ice by giving his villainess the last name “Talberg,” told them politely but firmly to go fuck themselves, especially since The Four Horsemen had had a similarly unhappy ending and had been an enormous hit.)
In his introduction to the TCM showing Ben Mankiewicz (whom I’ve rather contemptuously dismissed as “a nodule from one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees”) claimed Mare Nostrum is Ingram’s masterpiece. I’m not so sure — I’d rate The Four Horsemen, The Conquering Power and Ingram’s next independent movie, The Magician, ahead of it — but it is a brilliant film from a pioneering and long-forgotten director who deserves a place in the pantheon. As Charles (who arrived about midway through the movie, just after Ulysses’ and Freya’s first breakup) noted, it’s the sort of film that seems to exist in a dream reality of its own, equally divorced from real life and Hollywood conventions, then and now. Ingram wasn’t a particularly innovative director technically — though some of the special effects are stunning, others (particularly the staged shots of ships in the Mediterranean) are done with models of toy-ship-in-the-bathtub levels of believability — and all too often his actors resort to the sort of arm-flailing and exaggerated facial expressions a lot of people who’ve never watched a silent film start-to-finish think they were all acted like. Also, though Ingram had quite a good eye for male talent, he stuck himself with his wife Alice Terry as the female lead in film after film — and like a lot of other actresses personally involved with their directors, he had a far wider idea of her range than her talents deserved. What makes Ingram a great director, and virtually everything he made worth watching, was his combination of a pictorial sense — there are scenes here, including one of Doña Cinta dealing with the trauma of her husband’s betrayal by becoming intensely religious and going to church a lot, that have the piquant composition and delicate play of light of an Old Master painting — and a dreamlike sense of story reality that draws you in to Ingram’s world and makes you forget how realistically improbable the events of the film are. (In that regard — if in no other, though one can certainly trace a chain of influence from Mare Nostrum through Dishonored to Notorious — Ingram does remind one of the “other” Hitchcock.)
Mare Nostrum wasn’t released in the U.S. until January 1926 and, though it wasn’t a blockbuster hit like Ingram’s previous films, it did turn a profit, and Ingram was able to go on to make the even greater and more haunting The Magician (with Alice Terry and German actor Paul Wegener in a story of a mad scientist attempting to create an artificial human via an ancient alchemical recipe — it was obviously influenced by The Golem, which also starred Wegener, and was equally an influence on Frankenstein), which also was a success though not a hit. Alas, Ingram’s third film on his own, an adaptation of Robert Hichens’ novel The Garden of Allah, was a major box-office flop, and just as it was bombing his protector at the company, Marcus Loew, suddenly died. Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg gave Ingram an ultimatum — either close down his independent studio and come to work in Hollywood under the same strict rules as all MGM’s other directors, or quit. Ingram chose to quit, spending most of the rest of his life in the Middle East and becoming a writer, though he made at least two other films, a final silent called The Three Passions produced by a British company for United Artists release in 1928 and a Gaumont-British production from 1932; imdb.com lists two Ingram films after 1928, Baroud and Love in Morocco, but I suspect these are just alternative titles for the same movie. He went so “native” in the Middle East he even converted to Islam, though he eventually returned to Hollywood, gave a number of interviews about his career (in one of which he sniped at the continuing cult around Rudolph Valentino and said any decent-looking young man could have played the lead in The Four Horsemen) and died of a cerebral hemorrhage on July 21, 1950, at age 58. Mare Nostrum was remade in Spain in 1948 (no U.S. studio has gone near the story again, though one can’t help wishing Sternberg would have done a talkie remake with Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant, just as one can’t help wishing Ingram would have made his version with Valentino and Garbo instead of the rather bland actors he used, Antonio Moreno and Alice Terry) and imdb.com lists a 2014 project called Mare Nostrum as “in development,” though they haven’t received a report on what the story will be and therefore it’s unknown whether it will indeed be a remake of this tragic, haunting film.
Friday, November 28, 2014
Her Man (Pathé, 1930)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a quite interesting movie last night: Her Man, a little-known 1930 cult film made by Pathé Studios in its death throes, directed by Tay Garnett (who also co-wrote it with Howard Higgin and Tom Buckingham) and starring Helen Twelvetrees as a “B”-girl in an unnamed Caribbean island — well, at least it’s somewhere in Latin America because it’s clearly a semi-tropical environment and the locals speak Spanish (the crew did four days of location shooting in Havana — Pathé and MGM did this as a joint venture because MGM needed background footage of Cuba for their film Cuban Love Song — and though the country’s name is never specified in the film, Cuban officials protested at the depiction of a locale that was at least physically their nation as an anything-goes land of bars, drinkers, “B”-girls and sailors being rolled) — torn between the requirements both of her job and her employer Johnny (Ricardo Cortez, showing some of the Valentino-esque mannerisms with which he had launched his career but also warming up for his magnificent portrayal of Sam Spade in the first version of The Maltese Falcon a year later) and her innocent attraction to sailor Dan Keefe (Phillips Holmes, displaying real charisma and masculine attractiveness despite his typecasting as a pathetic nerd in other films). And he’s not the only actor here who's cast against “type” — Franklin Pangborn appears, not as the nellie stereotype he usually played but a surprisingly butch hanger-on at Johnny’s bar who holds his own with fistfights with the other patrons. This is one movie that actually makes believable Pangborn’s insistence in an early-1930’s interview quoted by Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet that though he might play the “pansy” on screen he could more than hold his own with his fists against anybody who dared call him one for real!
Her Man actually takes its own sweet time getting us to its Latin location; it begins in New York City, where a boat is docking but one of its passengers, sleazy-looking good-time-girl Annie (Marjorie Rambeau), is denied entry into the U.S. and put right back on the boat because a customs inspector (Richard Cramer) who makes the house detective in Peacock Alley look like an Esalen staffer by comparison identifies her as “undesirable.” She spends most of the return voyage pacing on the deck until she finally arrives from whence she came and reports back to work at the Thalia, Johnny’s establishment. Only then do we meet this film’s lead, Frankie (Helen Twelvetrees), who greets Annie as a long-lost sister before they get to work. There’s also a third woman, a sort of “B”-girl in training named Nellie (played by Thelma Todd, taking a break from her usual jobs as comic villainess for Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers). The Thalia is such a sleazy establishment that they don’t content themselves with sending “B”-girls to the sailors that make up most of its clientele and divesting the sailors of most of their money by getting them to buy overpriced shots of gin. No, the “B”-girls in this bar are obliged to get the sailors so drunk (while they themselves are drinking only water) they can pick their pockets and turn over the proceeds to Johnny. Then Dan Keefe — a genuine hero with a medal (which Frankie steals from him) to prove it — shows up with two other sailors, comic-relief parts Steve (James Gleason) and “The Swede” (Slim Summerville).
Dan catches Frankie trying to pick his pocket but eventually forgives her, and the two start a relationship under difficult circumstances — particularly the watchful eye of Johnny, who’s in love with her himself and also needs her on his good side to cover up his crimes, including murder (he killed one bar patron who threatened to go to the police by throwing a knife into his back). Frankie loses a shoe when she gets it caught in a bicycle wheel — she extricates it but it gets knocked into the air and then washed down a storm drain; Dan is sitting there and could have caught it but didn’t, thereby having the excuse to buy her a new pair (between the business with Frankie’s shoes and the long scenes earlier showing Annie pacing up and down the deck of the boat, Charles wondered if director Tay Garnett was a foot fetishist) — and the scene kicks off a series of courtship sequences whose innocence contrasts vividly with Frankie’s work life. The two hang out at the beach and write their names in the sand (indeed, the opening and closing credits of this film both consist of names written in the sand), and later spend an afternoon inside an otherwise deserted church in what appears to be intended as a D.I.Y. marriage ceremony à la Lucia di Lammermoor and the 1933 William Wellman film Safe in Hell (a much better movie than Her Man but one clearly influenced by it). The two lovebirds arrange to meet at the Thalia before she joins him on the next boat he’s working on, but Annie learns that it’s a trap: Johnny intends to kill Dan as soon as he shows up. Annie means to warn Frankie but she doesn’t get the chance because Nellie lures her away with the promise of a free drink. Up until its final scene Her Man has been a quite unusual and compelling drama, limning Frankie’s central conflict — love and marriage with a decent guy or continuing in a sleazy lifestyle with a no-good crook — far better than the writers and director of Peacock Alley did with their female lead, but the end shades over into risibility: Dan’s arrival at the Thalia and Johnny’s attempt to kill him triggers an all-out bar fight (which Garnett makes the mistake of staging in fast motion; it may have been an accepted custom of action movies and serials in 1930 but today fast motion automatically conjures up comedy) from which Frankie, Dan and the other two sailors barely escape with their lives, and Garnett and his co-writers supply a predictable happy ending instead of the deeply moving tragic one of Safe in Hell.
Still, Her Man is quite a remarkable movie, one of a fascinating run of films Tay Garnett made (including Prestige and One-Way Passage) in the early 1930’s about doomed couples in exotic locales before his career degenerated into hackdom with only an occasional shot at a dramatically powerful and erotic story like The Postman Always Rings Twice to liven up his filmography. He’s particularly remarkable in how he handles Helen Twelvetrees compared to the performance Ralph Murphy got out of her in the similarly themed Panama Flo; while Twelvetrees’ acting in Panama Flo vacillated between the simpering coyness expected of a silent-era heroine and deeper, richer, more world-weary playing anticipating film noir, here she’s a world-weary noir heroine from the get-go and her performance (as well as the atmosphere Garnett creates around her) is strikingly reminiscent of what Josef von Sternberg did for (or to) Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel and especially Morocco. (A decade after making Her Man Garnett got to direct the real Dietrich in Universal’s Seven Sinners, but it was a campy spoof of the flea-bitten-cabaret-in-an-exotic-locale genre instead of a serious film exploiting it.) I’d assumed that Twelvetrees, with that rather silly name (she was born Helen Marie Jurgens and the “Twelvetrees” actually came from her first husband, Clark Twelvetrees, whom she married in 1927 and divorced in 1931), had been a silent-era star, or at least a silent-era starlet, but no-o-o-o: according to imdb.com[1] she was actually a New York stage actress who came to Hollywood in 1929 to make talkies, and she worked quite often through most of the 1930’s until her film career came to a skidding halt in 1938 before she retired, moved to Pennsylvania with her last husband and died of an overdose of sedatives at age 49 in 1958. Her imdb.com biography page contains a couple of quotes that show her on-screen attitude of world-weary fatalism carried over to her private life as well; “Between pictures I go away,” she said. “I think that is the best way to achieve happiness in Hollywood, the only way to keep one’s perspective. If you stay too close to the motion picture colony you lose your sense of values.”
Charles and I watched a quite interesting movie last night: Her Man, a little-known 1930 cult film made by Pathé Studios in its death throes, directed by Tay Garnett (who also co-wrote it with Howard Higgin and Tom Buckingham) and starring Helen Twelvetrees as a “B”-girl in an unnamed Caribbean island — well, at least it’s somewhere in Latin America because it’s clearly a semi-tropical environment and the locals speak Spanish (the crew did four days of location shooting in Havana — Pathé and MGM did this as a joint venture because MGM needed background footage of Cuba for their film Cuban Love Song — and though the country’s name is never specified in the film, Cuban officials protested at the depiction of a locale that was at least physically their nation as an anything-goes land of bars, drinkers, “B”-girls and sailors being rolled) — torn between the requirements both of her job and her employer Johnny (Ricardo Cortez, showing some of the Valentino-esque mannerisms with which he had launched his career but also warming up for his magnificent portrayal of Sam Spade in the first version of The Maltese Falcon a year later) and her innocent attraction to sailor Dan Keefe (Phillips Holmes, displaying real charisma and masculine attractiveness despite his typecasting as a pathetic nerd in other films). And he’s not the only actor here who's cast against “type” — Franklin Pangborn appears, not as the nellie stereotype he usually played but a surprisingly butch hanger-on at Johnny’s bar who holds his own with fistfights with the other patrons. This is one movie that actually makes believable Pangborn’s insistence in an early-1930’s interview quoted by Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet that though he might play the “pansy” on screen he could more than hold his own with his fists against anybody who dared call him one for real!
Her Man actually takes its own sweet time getting us to its Latin location; it begins in New York City, where a boat is docking but one of its passengers, sleazy-looking good-time-girl Annie (Marjorie Rambeau), is denied entry into the U.S. and put right back on the boat because a customs inspector (Richard Cramer) who makes the house detective in Peacock Alley look like an Esalen staffer by comparison identifies her as “undesirable.” She spends most of the return voyage pacing on the deck until she finally arrives from whence she came and reports back to work at the Thalia, Johnny’s establishment. Only then do we meet this film’s lead, Frankie (Helen Twelvetrees), who greets Annie as a long-lost sister before they get to work. There’s also a third woman, a sort of “B”-girl in training named Nellie (played by Thelma Todd, taking a break from her usual jobs as comic villainess for Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers). The Thalia is such a sleazy establishment that they don’t content themselves with sending “B”-girls to the sailors that make up most of its clientele and divesting the sailors of most of their money by getting them to buy overpriced shots of gin. No, the “B”-girls in this bar are obliged to get the sailors so drunk (while they themselves are drinking only water) they can pick their pockets and turn over the proceeds to Johnny. Then Dan Keefe — a genuine hero with a medal (which Frankie steals from him) to prove it — shows up with two other sailors, comic-relief parts Steve (James Gleason) and “The Swede” (Slim Summerville).
Dan catches Frankie trying to pick his pocket but eventually forgives her, and the two start a relationship under difficult circumstances — particularly the watchful eye of Johnny, who’s in love with her himself and also needs her on his good side to cover up his crimes, including murder (he killed one bar patron who threatened to go to the police by throwing a knife into his back). Frankie loses a shoe when she gets it caught in a bicycle wheel — she extricates it but it gets knocked into the air and then washed down a storm drain; Dan is sitting there and could have caught it but didn’t, thereby having the excuse to buy her a new pair (between the business with Frankie’s shoes and the long scenes earlier showing Annie pacing up and down the deck of the boat, Charles wondered if director Tay Garnett was a foot fetishist) — and the scene kicks off a series of courtship sequences whose innocence contrasts vividly with Frankie’s work life. The two hang out at the beach and write their names in the sand (indeed, the opening and closing credits of this film both consist of names written in the sand), and later spend an afternoon inside an otherwise deserted church in what appears to be intended as a D.I.Y. marriage ceremony à la Lucia di Lammermoor and the 1933 William Wellman film Safe in Hell (a much better movie than Her Man but one clearly influenced by it). The two lovebirds arrange to meet at the Thalia before she joins him on the next boat he’s working on, but Annie learns that it’s a trap: Johnny intends to kill Dan as soon as he shows up. Annie means to warn Frankie but she doesn’t get the chance because Nellie lures her away with the promise of a free drink. Up until its final scene Her Man has been a quite unusual and compelling drama, limning Frankie’s central conflict — love and marriage with a decent guy or continuing in a sleazy lifestyle with a no-good crook — far better than the writers and director of Peacock Alley did with their female lead, but the end shades over into risibility: Dan’s arrival at the Thalia and Johnny’s attempt to kill him triggers an all-out bar fight (which Garnett makes the mistake of staging in fast motion; it may have been an accepted custom of action movies and serials in 1930 but today fast motion automatically conjures up comedy) from which Frankie, Dan and the other two sailors barely escape with their lives, and Garnett and his co-writers supply a predictable happy ending instead of the deeply moving tragic one of Safe in Hell.
Still, Her Man is quite a remarkable movie, one of a fascinating run of films Tay Garnett made (including Prestige and One-Way Passage) in the early 1930’s about doomed couples in exotic locales before his career degenerated into hackdom with only an occasional shot at a dramatically powerful and erotic story like The Postman Always Rings Twice to liven up his filmography. He’s particularly remarkable in how he handles Helen Twelvetrees compared to the performance Ralph Murphy got out of her in the similarly themed Panama Flo; while Twelvetrees’ acting in Panama Flo vacillated between the simpering coyness expected of a silent-era heroine and deeper, richer, more world-weary playing anticipating film noir, here she’s a world-weary noir heroine from the get-go and her performance (as well as the atmosphere Garnett creates around her) is strikingly reminiscent of what Josef von Sternberg did for (or to) Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel and especially Morocco. (A decade after making Her Man Garnett got to direct the real Dietrich in Universal’s Seven Sinners, but it was a campy spoof of the flea-bitten-cabaret-in-an-exotic-locale genre instead of a serious film exploiting it.) I’d assumed that Twelvetrees, with that rather silly name (she was born Helen Marie Jurgens and the “Twelvetrees” actually came from her first husband, Clark Twelvetrees, whom she married in 1927 and divorced in 1931), had been a silent-era star, or at least a silent-era starlet, but no-o-o-o: according to imdb.com[1] she was actually a New York stage actress who came to Hollywood in 1929 to make talkies, and she worked quite often through most of the 1930’s until her film career came to a skidding halt in 1938 before she retired, moved to Pennsylvania with her last husband and died of an overdose of sedatives at age 49 in 1958. Her imdb.com biography page contains a couple of quotes that show her on-screen attitude of world-weary fatalism carried over to her private life as well; “Between pictures I go away,” she said. “I think that is the best way to achieve happiness in Hollywood, the only way to keep one’s perspective. If you stay too close to the motion picture colony you lose your sense of values.”
[1] — Incidentally, imdb.com’s page on Her Man has a couple of really bizarre errors: it describes
the film as taking place in Paris (wherever that mythical country is, it’s
certainly in the Western Hemisphere!) and it gives the name of Helen
Twelvetrees’ character as “Frankie Keefe,” implying that she and the Phillips
Holmes character are married in the film — which they’re not, at least not
officially!
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