by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran one of the movies I’ve recorded recently, an intriguing Columbia “B” thriller from 1939 called Blind Alley, featuring a situation that was fresh and new when this film was made even though it quickly (especially after World War II) become clichéd through overuse: psychiatry professor Dr. Shelby (Ralph Bellamy), his wife Doris (Rose Stradner), their 11-year-old son Davy (Scotty Beckett) and an assortment of their friends are held hostage at their lakefront home by escaped killer Hal Wilson (Chester Morris), his girlfriend Mary (Ann Dvorak, who ends up out-acting the rest of the cast!) and their gang.
Left alone with Wilson because the other gang members are all in other parts of the house holding the other members of Shelby’s circle at gunpoint, Dr. Shelby begins psychoanalyzing him and in particular interpreting a recurring dream the outlaw has had (narrated by Mary and shown, simply but effectively, in negative film that projects us into the dream world more powerfully than all Salvador Dali’s elaborate designs did in the similar sequence in Spellbound) in which he hides under an umbrella but a hole in the umbrella allows the rain to leak through, and when he tries to escape bars block his way. Shelby eventually figures out that the bars are actually table legs, the umbrella is a table top, and the rain is the blood of Wilson’s father, whom he killed as a boy and then hid under the table as the cops arrived to investigate. (This is shown in a powerfully staged flashback with stylized sets that led Charles to joke that it was taking place in the nightclub of Dr. Caligari.) The film was directed by Charles Vidor in between Sensation Hunters and Gilda — and though both those movies are better than this one, it did show Vidor’s powerful grasp of psychologically kinky drama and his ability to stage even a low-budget film with vivid atmospherics that powerfully visualized the characters’ obsessions.
The property started out as a play called Smoke Screen, premiered in New York in September 1935 and originally purchased for films by MGM, who couldn’t get it past the Production Code Administration because the story featured a gangster hero — and the note on the film in the American Film Institute Catalog says that MGM submitted a treatment in 1938 that the Code people ruled acceptable, but is silent on how the project ended up at Columbia (though with MGM contract player Rose Stradner still attached to it and doing the film as a loanout). Though the script Philip MacDonald, Michael Blankfort and Albert Duffy adapted from James Warwick’s play has its clunky moments and reliances on cliché – the moment we meet Dick Holbrook (John Eldredge, misspelled “Eldridge” on the credits), the ridiculously nerdy graduate student Dr. Shelby is about to lose to a professional assignment, we know he’ll become a victim of Wilson’s murderous rampage, and that indeed happens — for the most part it’s a quite strong melodrama, well directed by Vidor, that doesn’t have the impact it should have only because this basic situation was recycled so often that it soon became cliché itself.
Blind Alley not only influenced later films like Spellbound but was officially remade as The Dark Past in 1948, had two TV productions in the 1950’s and probably influenced the writers of Teen-Age Crime Wave as well, since there’s at least one scene in that film (one of the hostages attempts to subdue one of the crooks by hitting him with a blunt object, but another, more fearful hostage warns the crook in time) that seems to have come out of this one. Also worth noting is an early scene in Dr. Shelby’s lecture class at the university where he teaches psychology, where he compares being in love with being insane and points to a student in class, played by an unbilled but instantly recognizable Grady Sutton, as an example; Sutton does comic embarrassment as only he could, and the sequence also puts everybody else in this film one degree of separation from the Ramones!
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Houdini (Paramount, 1953)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie Charles and I watched last night was Houdini, the 1953 biopic made at Paramount but starring two leads they had to borrow from other studios, Tony Curtis as Houdini (Universal) and Janet Leigh, his then-wife, as Mrs. Bess Houdini (MGM). It was a movie Charles and I both had seen when young, but only on black-and-white TV’s; neither of us had ever seen it in color, and Charles hadn’t even known it was in color until it started last night. It’s the sort of movie that could have been a lot more interesting with a script that stuck closer to reality and particularly one that faced up to the issue this one (by Philip Yordan based on a Houdini biography by Harold Kellock) hinted at but ultimately ducked: namely, did Houdini ever come to believe he really had supernatural powers, or did he remain to the end what he had always been: a magician and escape artist whose feats, though astonishing, were rationally explainable?
It began in the milieu you’d expect, the carnival, with the heartwarming sight of Sig Ruman as Schultz, carnival showman and barker who’s hired Houdini to play the “wild man” in his act — Houdini had won the concession that he could also perform magic in the show if he did the “wild man” — and as a result he attracts Bess, an upper-class girl who went to the carnival to “slum” and who attracted Houdini’s eye immediately and ultimately agreed to go out with him and, eventually, marry him. The film has Houdini drop out of entertainment for a while after he’s pelted with fruit by a West Virginia audience and the goldfish bowls he uses in his act are upended by a well-aimed slingshot pellet to Bess’s ass — as the scene fades they’re frantically trying to recover all their goldfish from the stage before the fish die — and he takes a job in a lock factory, fascinated by the big safe this company makes and determined to try to escape from it. (Later he explains, “Safes are designed to keep people out — not in!”)
When they blow up the safe to get him out — much to his annoyance because he was about to escape from it anyway — he’s fired, only to win back his real career one night when he attends a magicians’ ball at the Astor Hotel and gets out of an “escape-proof” straitjacket — a feat the MC of this event tells him had been done only by one other magician, a German named von Schwager, who came to believe he actually had the power to dematerialize and was so frightened by this that he quit magic and became a recluse. Houdini’s prize for winning the straitjacket-escape contest is a ticket to Europe, where he becomes a sensation and tries to get in to visit von Schwager, who supposedly perfected the “Pagoda Torture Tank” (a glass case holding two tons of water in which the magician is suspended upside down and chained in) but was too scared of his own powers to use it. When he shows up at von Schwager’s house, the great man has been dead for two days but Houdini inherits his assistant Otto (Torin Thatcher), and the three (including Bess, who changed Houdini’s round-trip ticket into two one-way ones so she could come along) return to the stage in the U.S. and are a sensation, especially after Houdini stages a spectacular escape from a safe dropped through a hole in the ice-covered Detroit River (hours behind schedule; he got out of the safe just fine but the river currents carried him too far from the escape hole and he had to survive by finding little air pockets between the water and the ice and using them to breathe).
The film takes a detour when Houdini’s mother (Angela Clarke) dies and sets Houdini off on his famous quest to find a true spirit medium and expose all the frauds in the field — which he was able to do because they pulled their tricks with the same set of skills he used as a stage magician. It ends with his spectacular return to the stage doing the “Pagoda Torture Tank” escape — much to his wife’s disgust — only before he goes on, he falls on a prop sword, rupturing his appendix, and he dies, though he lasts long enough after the sides of the tank are bashed in by stagehands attempting to rescue him to give a faintly moving curtain speech to his wife before expiring.
Houdini is a fun movie as it stands but more could have been done with its subject. Tony Curtis looks the part (except for his anachronistic 1953 greasy-kid-stuff hairdo), though it’s a pity John Garfield had died two years earlier because he would have been the perfect actor for it; Curtis pretty much fails to dramatize Houdini’s inner demons (though, admittedly, Yordan’s script gives him precious little to work with) and the choice of a director, George Marshall, doesn’t help much either — though with Marshall, Bob Hope’s favorite director, at the helm, at least we get a surprising number of laughs for what’s ostensibly a “serious” biopic. What makes it entertaining is the sparkling color, the insouciance of Janet Leigh’s performance (especially by comparison to the High Seriousness of Torin Thatcher’s!) and the boyish appeal of Curtis, who was a teen idol and who gets a lot of screen time in nothing but a period swimsuit that shows off a body type (tall, stocky, hairless) that does little for me but others might find (indeed, did find) sexy.
The movie Charles and I watched last night was Houdini, the 1953 biopic made at Paramount but starring two leads they had to borrow from other studios, Tony Curtis as Houdini (Universal) and Janet Leigh, his then-wife, as Mrs. Bess Houdini (MGM). It was a movie Charles and I both had seen when young, but only on black-and-white TV’s; neither of us had ever seen it in color, and Charles hadn’t even known it was in color until it started last night. It’s the sort of movie that could have been a lot more interesting with a script that stuck closer to reality and particularly one that faced up to the issue this one (by Philip Yordan based on a Houdini biography by Harold Kellock) hinted at but ultimately ducked: namely, did Houdini ever come to believe he really had supernatural powers, or did he remain to the end what he had always been: a magician and escape artist whose feats, though astonishing, were rationally explainable?
It began in the milieu you’d expect, the carnival, with the heartwarming sight of Sig Ruman as Schultz, carnival showman and barker who’s hired Houdini to play the “wild man” in his act — Houdini had won the concession that he could also perform magic in the show if he did the “wild man” — and as a result he attracts Bess, an upper-class girl who went to the carnival to “slum” and who attracted Houdini’s eye immediately and ultimately agreed to go out with him and, eventually, marry him. The film has Houdini drop out of entertainment for a while after he’s pelted with fruit by a West Virginia audience and the goldfish bowls he uses in his act are upended by a well-aimed slingshot pellet to Bess’s ass — as the scene fades they’re frantically trying to recover all their goldfish from the stage before the fish die — and he takes a job in a lock factory, fascinated by the big safe this company makes and determined to try to escape from it. (Later he explains, “Safes are designed to keep people out — not in!”)
When they blow up the safe to get him out — much to his annoyance because he was about to escape from it anyway — he’s fired, only to win back his real career one night when he attends a magicians’ ball at the Astor Hotel and gets out of an “escape-proof” straitjacket — a feat the MC of this event tells him had been done only by one other magician, a German named von Schwager, who came to believe he actually had the power to dematerialize and was so frightened by this that he quit magic and became a recluse. Houdini’s prize for winning the straitjacket-escape contest is a ticket to Europe, where he becomes a sensation and tries to get in to visit von Schwager, who supposedly perfected the “Pagoda Torture Tank” (a glass case holding two tons of water in which the magician is suspended upside down and chained in) but was too scared of his own powers to use it. When he shows up at von Schwager’s house, the great man has been dead for two days but Houdini inherits his assistant Otto (Torin Thatcher), and the three (including Bess, who changed Houdini’s round-trip ticket into two one-way ones so she could come along) return to the stage in the U.S. and are a sensation, especially after Houdini stages a spectacular escape from a safe dropped through a hole in the ice-covered Detroit River (hours behind schedule; he got out of the safe just fine but the river currents carried him too far from the escape hole and he had to survive by finding little air pockets between the water and the ice and using them to breathe).
The film takes a detour when Houdini’s mother (Angela Clarke) dies and sets Houdini off on his famous quest to find a true spirit medium and expose all the frauds in the field — which he was able to do because they pulled their tricks with the same set of skills he used as a stage magician. It ends with his spectacular return to the stage doing the “Pagoda Torture Tank” escape — much to his wife’s disgust — only before he goes on, he falls on a prop sword, rupturing his appendix, and he dies, though he lasts long enough after the sides of the tank are bashed in by stagehands attempting to rescue him to give a faintly moving curtain speech to his wife before expiring.
Houdini is a fun movie as it stands but more could have been done with its subject. Tony Curtis looks the part (except for his anachronistic 1953 greasy-kid-stuff hairdo), though it’s a pity John Garfield had died two years earlier because he would have been the perfect actor for it; Curtis pretty much fails to dramatize Houdini’s inner demons (though, admittedly, Yordan’s script gives him precious little to work with) and the choice of a director, George Marshall, doesn’t help much either — though with Marshall, Bob Hope’s favorite director, at the helm, at least we get a surprising number of laughs for what’s ostensibly a “serious” biopic. What makes it entertaining is the sparkling color, the insouciance of Janet Leigh’s performance (especially by comparison to the High Seriousness of Torin Thatcher’s!) and the boyish appeal of Curtis, who was a teen idol and who gets a lot of screen time in nothing but a period swimsuit that shows off a body type (tall, stocky, hairless) that does little for me but others might find (indeed, did find) sexy.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
The Magic Box (Festival Productions U.K., 1951)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked this time was The Magic Box, a 1951 film made for the Festival of Britain — which celebrated the centenary of Queen Victoria’s Great Exhibition in 1851 that showed off Britain’s industrial power and growing empire. By 1951 the British Empire was essentially history and Britain itself a former world power which had been so hard hit by World War II (despite technically being on the “winning” side) that the wartime rationing program had just ended in 1950, one year before the Festival and five years after the war ended. Various feature-film projects were planned for release during the Festival but this was the only one that was completed (though a few documentary films were also made and shown under Festival auspices), and it was released only two weeks before the Festival ended and was ultimately a box-office flop.
The Magic Box tells the story of William Friese-Greene (Robert Donat), a British photographer in the 1890’s who gave up a thriving portraiture business and spent all his money attempting to invent motion pictures. The film was based on a 1948 biography by Ray Allister called Friese-Greene: Close-Up of an Inventor (a book whose claim that Friese-Greene was the real inventor of the movies has since been debunked) and was directed by John Boulting from a script by Eric Ambler, usually a novelist of continental crime and espionage and hardly the first name one thinks of for this sort of story.
Ambler created a confusing double-flashback structure in which we first see Friese-Greene in the year in which we’re already told he will die — 1921 — on his way to a movie industry conference at which he attempts to demonstrate his latest invention, color movies. We also meet his second wife, Edith Harrison (Margaret Johnston), who by 1921 had left him because he was constantly running through all the money they had in order to finance his experiments — a running theme that becomes the main dramatic issue of the film — and was running a boarding house. We see the later part of Friese-Greene’s career via a flashback from Edith’s point of view, then she confesses that his career was already over when they met, and then at the meeting — a contentious affair in which the overlords of the British film business are discussing how to remain solvent in the face of the overwhelming competition from abroad (essentially a discussion of American cultural imperialism that sounds awfully contemporary today!) — someone makes the statement, “We must bury the past … ,” and this sends Friese-Greene (played in this scene by Donat with a marvelously hang-dog air that illustrates how the character is all too conscious of his own irrelevance) off into an orgy of reminiscence about his own past and we finally get to see the events by which he is claimed by Allister, Ambler and Boulting to be the true inventor of the movies.
He starts out as William Green, apprentice to photographer Maurice Guttenberg (Frederick Valk), a typically imperious British-movie German who resents Friese-Greene for his “people skills” in getting people to hold still for the 22 seconds then needed to expose the heavy glass-plate negatives needed to photograph anything. Friese-Greene hears of a new photographic plate that takes only one second to expose — and Guttenberg won’t hear of it — and in the end Friese-Greene walks out of the man’s studio and sets up his own with the financial backing of Arthur Collings (Eric Portman), soon becoming the king of portrait photographers in Britain. He also misses an appearance of his choral society — with the great Sir Arthur Sullivan (as in “Gilbert and … ”) conducting personally — because he’s so busy discussing motion pictures with Fox Talbot (Basil Sydney), presented here as the inventor of still photography with just the same historically misguided certainty as Friese-Greene is presented as the inventor of cinema — and so his first wife Helena (Maria Schell), a Swiss woman whose maiden name “Friese” Green(e) took as a professional name (sort of like me!), adding the “e” at the end of his own surname “to balance things out,” has to take his solo stint much to the surprise of Sullivan, who wrote the brief solo for a male. (Sullivan is played on screen by the film’s real-life conductor, Muir Matheson.)
What’s fascinating about The Magic Box is that, for all the ostensibly celebratory nature of the story — both in context as a film especially made for the Festival of Britain and in and of itself hailing the U.K. as the country that pioneered filmmaking — the movie is surprisingly downbeat. The obsessive concern with William Friese-Greene’s finances (or lack of same) may be offered as a reason why the historical record ultimately hailed Edison and not him as the father of filmmaking (a particularly poignant history-is-written-by-the-winners scene occurs when one of Friese-Greene’s sons comes home from school badly beaten up — by, it turns out, a kid who challenged his claim that his dad invented the movies and insisted, based on the school encyclopedia, that Edison did) — the hint is that Friese-Greene would have been able to bring his invention to fruition and make tons of money off it had he only had decent, reliable financial backing instead of having to finance it himself catch-as-catch-can — but it also gives the film a curiously defeatist air.
Unwittingly Eric Ambler was sabotaging the film’s very purpose as well as the whole whistling-past-the-grave idea of a “Festival of Britain” in 1951 — this isn’t the work of a proud country celebrating its technological advances but a humbled country apologizing for having let one of the greatest technological prizes of the late 19th century get away from them. The films The Magic Box reminded Charles and I of were The Great Moment and Tucker, respectively — but Preston Sturges and Francis Ford Coppola brought enough urgency to their tales of failed inventors whose technical savvy far exceeded their business sense that those movies have an exuberance The Magic Box only hits intermittently — particularly in the scene in which Friese-Greene literally burns the midnight oil to perfect his invention, developing the film he’s shot that afternoon of his cousin (and financial backer) Alfred (Bernard Miles) until his lit window attracts the attention of a patrolling police officer (Laurence Olivier in one of the film’s many star cameos, anticipating Around the World in 80 Days) who becomes the world’s first movie audience as — thinking Friese-Greene is about to confess to a murder — he follows him up the stairs to his flat and watches as Friese-Greene runs his first movie.
The Web site www.screenonline.uk has an article on the real William Friese-Greene (http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/508948/) that argues that the real reason he wasn’t acknowledged as the inventor of filmmaking (and of film — lacking Edison’s access to George Eastman’s laboratories, he had to make his own celluloid — and the film argues that he invented that, too) was that he patented his invention too early, before he’d really perfected it: his camera ran at just eight frames per second, not long enough for the persistence of vision to blend his images into a smoothly running, non-flickering illusion of motion. The article also noted that after Friese-Greene’s death, his son Claude continued his researches into color film — like his father and their principal rivals, George Albert Smith and Charles Urban of Kinemacolor (Friese-Greene’s color system was called Biocolour), he used an “additive” color process that involved projecting alternating red and green images of black-and-white film so the eye would blend them into an illusion of color (as opposed to the “subtractive” Technicolor process that involved actually combining color images on the film to be projected) — and actually released a series of color documentaries in the 1920’s, though when one was recently revived it had to be digitally “tweaked” to get rid of the flickering that was a deficiency inherent in these additive processes.
The film I picked this time was The Magic Box, a 1951 film made for the Festival of Britain — which celebrated the centenary of Queen Victoria’s Great Exhibition in 1851 that showed off Britain’s industrial power and growing empire. By 1951 the British Empire was essentially history and Britain itself a former world power which had been so hard hit by World War II (despite technically being on the “winning” side) that the wartime rationing program had just ended in 1950, one year before the Festival and five years after the war ended. Various feature-film projects were planned for release during the Festival but this was the only one that was completed (though a few documentary films were also made and shown under Festival auspices), and it was released only two weeks before the Festival ended and was ultimately a box-office flop.
The Magic Box tells the story of William Friese-Greene (Robert Donat), a British photographer in the 1890’s who gave up a thriving portraiture business and spent all his money attempting to invent motion pictures. The film was based on a 1948 biography by Ray Allister called Friese-Greene: Close-Up of an Inventor (a book whose claim that Friese-Greene was the real inventor of the movies has since been debunked) and was directed by John Boulting from a script by Eric Ambler, usually a novelist of continental crime and espionage and hardly the first name one thinks of for this sort of story.
Ambler created a confusing double-flashback structure in which we first see Friese-Greene in the year in which we’re already told he will die — 1921 — on his way to a movie industry conference at which he attempts to demonstrate his latest invention, color movies. We also meet his second wife, Edith Harrison (Margaret Johnston), who by 1921 had left him because he was constantly running through all the money they had in order to finance his experiments — a running theme that becomes the main dramatic issue of the film — and was running a boarding house. We see the later part of Friese-Greene’s career via a flashback from Edith’s point of view, then she confesses that his career was already over when they met, and then at the meeting — a contentious affair in which the overlords of the British film business are discussing how to remain solvent in the face of the overwhelming competition from abroad (essentially a discussion of American cultural imperialism that sounds awfully contemporary today!) — someone makes the statement, “We must bury the past … ,” and this sends Friese-Greene (played in this scene by Donat with a marvelously hang-dog air that illustrates how the character is all too conscious of his own irrelevance) off into an orgy of reminiscence about his own past and we finally get to see the events by which he is claimed by Allister, Ambler and Boulting to be the true inventor of the movies.
He starts out as William Green, apprentice to photographer Maurice Guttenberg (Frederick Valk), a typically imperious British-movie German who resents Friese-Greene for his “people skills” in getting people to hold still for the 22 seconds then needed to expose the heavy glass-plate negatives needed to photograph anything. Friese-Greene hears of a new photographic plate that takes only one second to expose — and Guttenberg won’t hear of it — and in the end Friese-Greene walks out of the man’s studio and sets up his own with the financial backing of Arthur Collings (Eric Portman), soon becoming the king of portrait photographers in Britain. He also misses an appearance of his choral society — with the great Sir Arthur Sullivan (as in “Gilbert and … ”) conducting personally — because he’s so busy discussing motion pictures with Fox Talbot (Basil Sydney), presented here as the inventor of still photography with just the same historically misguided certainty as Friese-Greene is presented as the inventor of cinema — and so his first wife Helena (Maria Schell), a Swiss woman whose maiden name “Friese” Green(e) took as a professional name (sort of like me!), adding the “e” at the end of his own surname “to balance things out,” has to take his solo stint much to the surprise of Sullivan, who wrote the brief solo for a male. (Sullivan is played on screen by the film’s real-life conductor, Muir Matheson.)
What’s fascinating about The Magic Box is that, for all the ostensibly celebratory nature of the story — both in context as a film especially made for the Festival of Britain and in and of itself hailing the U.K. as the country that pioneered filmmaking — the movie is surprisingly downbeat. The obsessive concern with William Friese-Greene’s finances (or lack of same) may be offered as a reason why the historical record ultimately hailed Edison and not him as the father of filmmaking (a particularly poignant history-is-written-by-the-winners scene occurs when one of Friese-Greene’s sons comes home from school badly beaten up — by, it turns out, a kid who challenged his claim that his dad invented the movies and insisted, based on the school encyclopedia, that Edison did) — the hint is that Friese-Greene would have been able to bring his invention to fruition and make tons of money off it had he only had decent, reliable financial backing instead of having to finance it himself catch-as-catch-can — but it also gives the film a curiously defeatist air.
Unwittingly Eric Ambler was sabotaging the film’s very purpose as well as the whole whistling-past-the-grave idea of a “Festival of Britain” in 1951 — this isn’t the work of a proud country celebrating its technological advances but a humbled country apologizing for having let one of the greatest technological prizes of the late 19th century get away from them. The films The Magic Box reminded Charles and I of were The Great Moment and Tucker, respectively — but Preston Sturges and Francis Ford Coppola brought enough urgency to their tales of failed inventors whose technical savvy far exceeded their business sense that those movies have an exuberance The Magic Box only hits intermittently — particularly in the scene in which Friese-Greene literally burns the midnight oil to perfect his invention, developing the film he’s shot that afternoon of his cousin (and financial backer) Alfred (Bernard Miles) until his lit window attracts the attention of a patrolling police officer (Laurence Olivier in one of the film’s many star cameos, anticipating Around the World in 80 Days) who becomes the world’s first movie audience as — thinking Friese-Greene is about to confess to a murder — he follows him up the stairs to his flat and watches as Friese-Greene runs his first movie.
The Web site www.screenonline.uk has an article on the real William Friese-Greene (http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/508948/) that argues that the real reason he wasn’t acknowledged as the inventor of filmmaking (and of film — lacking Edison’s access to George Eastman’s laboratories, he had to make his own celluloid — and the film argues that he invented that, too) was that he patented his invention too early, before he’d really perfected it: his camera ran at just eight frames per second, not long enough for the persistence of vision to blend his images into a smoothly running, non-flickering illusion of motion. The article also noted that after Friese-Greene’s death, his son Claude continued his researches into color film — like his father and their principal rivals, George Albert Smith and Charles Urban of Kinemacolor (Friese-Greene’s color system was called Biocolour), he used an “additive” color process that involved projecting alternating red and green images of black-and-white film so the eye would blend them into an illusion of color (as opposed to the “subtractive” Technicolor process that involved actually combining color images on the film to be projected) — and actually released a series of color documentaries in the 1920’s, though when one was recently revived it had to be digitally “tweaked” to get rid of the flickering that was a deficiency inherent in these additive processes.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer (AOD Productions, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday Charles and I met to go to the Ken Cinema to see the film Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer, a superbly done movie by writers/directors Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden that mostly, if not totally, avoids the usual pitfalls of the music documentary. While Anita O’Day’s live performances aren’t presented note-complete, at least there’s enough of each song so you can get a sense of the shape of her performances and a clue as to how good she was and why, and the songs are (for the most part) blessedly presented without the talking-heads talking over them.
Anita O’Day’s story, captured in print in her autobiography High Times, Hard Times, is a typical jazz-world tale of rags-to-(almost)-riches-to-rags-again as the little girl with the soaring voice shot to the top with the bands of Gene Krupa (whom she liked) and Stan Kenton (whom she didn’t) and seemed, when she embarked on a solo career, headed for a sky’s-the-limit career — only she got busted for marijuana at a time when she wasn’t actually smoking it and figured “If I have the name, I might as well play the game” (which she narrates in the on-camera interviews in a tone of voice that says, “Yeah, I was stupid, that’s all over, so what?”) and drifted first into pot and then, at the urging of her long-time drummer John Poole, into heroin, which she took for 16 years until a nearly fatal O.D. in 1966 led her to quit. (She adopted an interesting strategy to get off the drug: she went to Hawai’i so she would be in a warm environment that would somewhat counteract the chills typical of withdrawal, and where she could sunbathe and swim to give herself physical sensations that would help stifle the craving to resume use.)
Between the drugs and her reluctance to compromise and record commercial pop material the way Peggy Lee was doing (as were Black jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan), O’Day got ghettoized on the jazz-club circuit and never got the major cabaret, concert, TV and film work that should have been her due. O’Day developed a unique style (the filmmakers don’t pursue the subject of influences in their interviews with her — they were as anxious as she was to present her as sui generis — but it’s clear she learned a lot from Mildred Bailey, as did just about every white woman from her generation who sang jazz and quite a few of the Black ones as well) that stemmed from the fact that as a child, she’d had a tonsillectomy and the surgeon had screwed up and cut off her uvula as well. Without a uvula — the small, fleshy part of the soft palate that hangs down from the back of the tongue — she couldn’t sing with vibrato and had a hard time sustaining long notes, so she turned her deficiency into a trademark by singing in double-time, hitting a lot of short, quick eighth-notes in succession (her version of “Tea for Two,” which turns Vincent Youmans’ long melody into a jazz version of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song, is a good example) and using her soft, pure tone to fit in with the horns of a big band and later, when she worked with a rhythm trio, to sing like a horn herself.
If O’Day had a weakness, it was the same as Ella Fitzgerald’s: they both sang utterly gorgeously but didn’t hit the emotional depths that Billie Holiday (with vibrato to spare but lacking the range and inclination to scat) sounded in song after song, including some pretty mediocre pieces of material which Billie made soar by the sheer force of her personality. Both Fitzgerald and O’Day were far more dependent on the quality of their material: give them a great song and they could do it full justice, but they couldn’t always take some of the stupid novelties they got handed during the swing era and transform them the way Billie did.
O’Day ran afoul of some other bandleaders before Gene Krupa hired her — Benny Goodman turned her down after she improvised on her audition song rather than sing the melody “straight” and Raymond Scott fired her after two nights when she forgot the words of a forgettable novelty and scatted her way through it — and Krupa was impressed by her at least in part because she’d studied drums herself under Don Carter, who had also trained Krupa. This isn’t mentioned in the film, but what is mentioned is that Krupa heard her in 1939 and promised her a job as soon as he lost Irene Daye, his current female vocalist and the one on his hit records “Drummin’ Man” and “Drumboogie.” (I’ve long been amused at the procession of similarly named singers that passed through Krupa’s band: Irene Daye, Anita O’Day and Carolyn Gray. If he’d been able to hire Doris Day away from Les Brown, his cycle would have been complete!)
When Daye turned in her notice — she and Krupa bandmate Corky Cornelius got engaged and turned in their notices together, intending to join Glen Gray’s Casa Loma Orchestra — O’Day got the call, and immediately stunned Krupa by refusing to wear the fancy, flowing stage gowns that were standard attire for girl singers. (In the film she admits that the real reason she didn’t want to wear them was the difficulty of getting them cleaned on the road.) Instead, when a tailor showed up to make new uniforms for the (male) Krupa band members, O’Day insisted that the tailor make her a jacket that would be identical to what the men wore (though undoubtedly it had to be made differently to accommodate a woman, including the “darts” to make room for her breasts) and a skirt to match, sending the visual message that she wasn’t an attraction apart from the band but was a full-fledged musician, “one of the boys.”
The film is somewhat confusing on the course of her career after that — it mentions her leaving Krupa and joining Stan Kenton but does not say that the only reason she quit Krupa is that the drummer had to give up his band after his 1943 trial in San Francisco (he was not charged with drug possession but with contributing to the delinquency of a minor — the “minor” being teenager John Pateakos, whom he hired as a gofer and used to fetch him marijuana; Krupa was acquitted, but the scandal wiped out his career and forced him to return to sideman work with Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey until his reputation recovered) and, after a brief attempt to make it on her own, she was talked into joining Kenton by her (and Kenton’s) manager, Carlos Gastel.
The film also doesn’t mention that the first time she recorded what would be her breakthrough hit with Kenton, “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine,” she told Kenton not to release it because she thought the drumming was weak. For the next session, she brought along a Black drummer, Jesse Price (who’d preceded Jo Jones with Count Basie’s band in Kansas City), and insisted that he play on the record — and the combination of O’Day’s soaring vocal, the appeal of the song itself (it’s a novelty but a damned cynical one that was appropriately “covered” by Lauren Bacall in the film The Big Sleep) and Price’s driving, swinging drumming made the song a hit. (The Proper four-CD boxed set Young Anita includes both the studio version and an aircheck of “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine” made after Price finished his unhappy three-week stint with Kenton — and the rhythmic stiffness of the aircheck with drummer Jim Falzone only underscores how much of a difference Price had made on the hit.) When I read that story for the first time — in a biography of Stan Getz (he was in the Kenton band at the time) — it seemed logical that, since Gene Krupa had been her previous employer, Anita O’Day would be picky about drummers.
In any event, after another brief solo stint (during which the C. P. MacGregor transcription company recorded her with the Nat “King” Cole Trio for five songs — but, amazingly, used Cole only as a pianist, depriving us of the sheer joy of a vocal duet between them!), she rejoined Krupa as soon as he put a new band of his own back together (the one for which Krupa sat in front and took all the flashy drum solos while hiring another drummer, Joe Dale, to sit in back and do the grunt work of keeping time) and had another hit with him in “Boogie Blues” before finally striking out on her own for good. The film takes up her story here with a large placard announcing her new label affiliation with Bib Thiele’s independent Signature label (“Hey, ops! I’m on Signature now!” it said — “ops” meant jukebox operators) and her growing standing once Norman Granz signed her to his labels, originally Clef and Norgran and, after 1955, Verve (the film claims that O’Day, not Ella Fitzgerald, was the first female singer to release an LP on Verve), coupled with her increasing drug problems.
When her drummer John Poole first gave her heroin (he was a lifetime addict who stayed on the stuff but continued to work with her even after she cleaned up, only to get fired after 32 years because he hit her once) she said, “This is better than a martini! This is better than sex!” — yet another attempt by a user (or ex-user) to answer the eternal question those of us who don’t do drugs ask of those who do — and she made a lot of money on the club circuit in the 1950’s and spent it all, mostly (as one former manager ruefully reflects in the movie) in her arms. When the popularity of jazz declined in the U.S. in the 1960’s she made her living elsewhere, recording extensively for a Japanese label and playing mostly there and in Europe (two of the most interesting performance clips here are from a concert she gave in Sweden, singing into an odd tapered mike that looks like an expensive vibrator). The film includes the famous clip of her singing “Sweet Georgia Brown” from Bert Stern’s film Jazz on a Summer’s Day — of which, when I saw that movie, I wrote, “Anita O’Day sings divinely but sports one of the silliest outfits of all time, a black cinch dress with white feather-boa trimmings and a matching floppy sun hat that makes it a bit difficult to see her face under the damned thing!” — and O’Day tells the story of how she got that outfit. When she showed up at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, where that movie was shot, she asked the Festival’s promoter, George Wein, what night she would be singing. “Sunday afternoon,” Wein told her. The day of her performance O’Day went to a Newport dress shop to see what they had that might be suitable, and they sold her a typical Newport society woman’s going-out-on-a-sunny-summer-day outfit — and she wore it, complete with glass slippers that made her stumble as she walked up the stairs to the stage (immortalized in Bert Stern’s film).
This film was completed just a few weeks before O’Day’s death in November 2006 and features quite a lot of interview footage, not only with O’Day herself (some of it archival footage, notably her appearances on The Dick Cavett Show and 60 Minutes, but most of it shot especially for this film) but also with fellow singers Annie Ross and Margaret Whiting (who actually seems jealous of O’Day even though she had a much bigger career and a happier life) and some of the usual — and a few unusual — talking heads, notably pianist/jazz educator Billy Taylor, bandleader/arranger Gerald Wilson and trumpeter Joe Newman as well as critics Will Friedwald (also recently deceased) and Leonard Feather. O’Day looks back on her career ruefully but with a determination not to dwell on the past — “It’s past! What are you going to do about it now?” — and makes the fascinating statement that in order to be a great jazz performer you need to live the “jazz life.” It’s not altogether clear what she means by that — if she means you have to be an alcoholic or a drug addict she’s discernibly wrong (many of jazz’s greatest talents, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie, ducked those bullets and prospered artistically and financially); rather, it seems to mean that you have to go through life loosely and with a sense of freedom similar to that in the music itself.
The one part of this movie that really rubbed me the wrong way was the archival clip from Leonard Feather, who said that O’Day was the only white singer he regarded as the artistic equal of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan — all the more annoying because the filmmakers presented that in a context that suggested they agreed with him — which is of course sheer nonsense: in the generation before O’Day’s there were Mildred Bailey (who influenced just about every subsequent woman jazz singer, white or Black!) and the Boswell Sisters, and in O’Day’s generation there were June Christy (whom O’Day recruited to replace her in the Kenton band), Chris Connor and the awesome Peggy Lee, whom Feather probably wasn’t thinking of as a jazz singer because she recorded commercial pops and had hits with them — indeed, as I noted above, Lee had the career O’Day should have had!
There’s a rather sad coda to Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer, in which Cavolina and McCrudden depict her late-in-life comeback and the gigs she played in the 1990’s and 2000’s as proof of her glorious indomitability — she’s shown entertaining the 1990’s “swing kids” who seem all too aware that she was one of the last living links between them and the real swing era — and O’Day seemed to go along with that when she called her final album Indestructible (she’s shown signing copies of it in the documentary and it makes us realize that O’Day is one of the few artists whose recording career began with 78’s and ended with CD’s) — when there’s something tragic about the bits of her final singing we hear: her musician’s instincts and skill at phrasing were still in evidence, but the voice itself was almost totally gone. Instrumentalists lose their capabilities as they age, too, but it’s harder when your “instrument” is also an integral part of your body; Artur Rubenstein and Vladimir Horowitz could still perform stunningly at the end of very long lives (as, in the jazz field, did centenarian Eubie Blake and relative “spring chicken” Earl “Fatha” Hines in his 70’s at a concert I saw at UC Berkeley in January 1976), but O’Day, like Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, just stuck it out too long and made late-in-life records that were poor echoes of what she had been at her best. Still, Anita O’Day’s roller-coaster life story is an inspiring tale of sheer survival against all odds, and her recorded legacy establishes her as one of the jazz greats — and Cavolina and McCrudden honor her with deep respect and love in their film.
Yesterday Charles and I met to go to the Ken Cinema to see the film Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer, a superbly done movie by writers/directors Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden that mostly, if not totally, avoids the usual pitfalls of the music documentary. While Anita O’Day’s live performances aren’t presented note-complete, at least there’s enough of each song so you can get a sense of the shape of her performances and a clue as to how good she was and why, and the songs are (for the most part) blessedly presented without the talking-heads talking over them.
Anita O’Day’s story, captured in print in her autobiography High Times, Hard Times, is a typical jazz-world tale of rags-to-(almost)-riches-to-rags-again as the little girl with the soaring voice shot to the top with the bands of Gene Krupa (whom she liked) and Stan Kenton (whom she didn’t) and seemed, when she embarked on a solo career, headed for a sky’s-the-limit career — only she got busted for marijuana at a time when she wasn’t actually smoking it and figured “If I have the name, I might as well play the game” (which she narrates in the on-camera interviews in a tone of voice that says, “Yeah, I was stupid, that’s all over, so what?”) and drifted first into pot and then, at the urging of her long-time drummer John Poole, into heroin, which she took for 16 years until a nearly fatal O.D. in 1966 led her to quit. (She adopted an interesting strategy to get off the drug: she went to Hawai’i so she would be in a warm environment that would somewhat counteract the chills typical of withdrawal, and where she could sunbathe and swim to give herself physical sensations that would help stifle the craving to resume use.)
Between the drugs and her reluctance to compromise and record commercial pop material the way Peggy Lee was doing (as were Black jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan), O’Day got ghettoized on the jazz-club circuit and never got the major cabaret, concert, TV and film work that should have been her due. O’Day developed a unique style (the filmmakers don’t pursue the subject of influences in their interviews with her — they were as anxious as she was to present her as sui generis — but it’s clear she learned a lot from Mildred Bailey, as did just about every white woman from her generation who sang jazz and quite a few of the Black ones as well) that stemmed from the fact that as a child, she’d had a tonsillectomy and the surgeon had screwed up and cut off her uvula as well. Without a uvula — the small, fleshy part of the soft palate that hangs down from the back of the tongue — she couldn’t sing with vibrato and had a hard time sustaining long notes, so she turned her deficiency into a trademark by singing in double-time, hitting a lot of short, quick eighth-notes in succession (her version of “Tea for Two,” which turns Vincent Youmans’ long melody into a jazz version of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song, is a good example) and using her soft, pure tone to fit in with the horns of a big band and later, when she worked with a rhythm trio, to sing like a horn herself.
If O’Day had a weakness, it was the same as Ella Fitzgerald’s: they both sang utterly gorgeously but didn’t hit the emotional depths that Billie Holiday (with vibrato to spare but lacking the range and inclination to scat) sounded in song after song, including some pretty mediocre pieces of material which Billie made soar by the sheer force of her personality. Both Fitzgerald and O’Day were far more dependent on the quality of their material: give them a great song and they could do it full justice, but they couldn’t always take some of the stupid novelties they got handed during the swing era and transform them the way Billie did.
O’Day ran afoul of some other bandleaders before Gene Krupa hired her — Benny Goodman turned her down after she improvised on her audition song rather than sing the melody “straight” and Raymond Scott fired her after two nights when she forgot the words of a forgettable novelty and scatted her way through it — and Krupa was impressed by her at least in part because she’d studied drums herself under Don Carter, who had also trained Krupa. This isn’t mentioned in the film, but what is mentioned is that Krupa heard her in 1939 and promised her a job as soon as he lost Irene Daye, his current female vocalist and the one on his hit records “Drummin’ Man” and “Drumboogie.” (I’ve long been amused at the procession of similarly named singers that passed through Krupa’s band: Irene Daye, Anita O’Day and Carolyn Gray. If he’d been able to hire Doris Day away from Les Brown, his cycle would have been complete!)
When Daye turned in her notice — she and Krupa bandmate Corky Cornelius got engaged and turned in their notices together, intending to join Glen Gray’s Casa Loma Orchestra — O’Day got the call, and immediately stunned Krupa by refusing to wear the fancy, flowing stage gowns that were standard attire for girl singers. (In the film she admits that the real reason she didn’t want to wear them was the difficulty of getting them cleaned on the road.) Instead, when a tailor showed up to make new uniforms for the (male) Krupa band members, O’Day insisted that the tailor make her a jacket that would be identical to what the men wore (though undoubtedly it had to be made differently to accommodate a woman, including the “darts” to make room for her breasts) and a skirt to match, sending the visual message that she wasn’t an attraction apart from the band but was a full-fledged musician, “one of the boys.”
The film is somewhat confusing on the course of her career after that — it mentions her leaving Krupa and joining Stan Kenton but does not say that the only reason she quit Krupa is that the drummer had to give up his band after his 1943 trial in San Francisco (he was not charged with drug possession but with contributing to the delinquency of a minor — the “minor” being teenager John Pateakos, whom he hired as a gofer and used to fetch him marijuana; Krupa was acquitted, but the scandal wiped out his career and forced him to return to sideman work with Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey until his reputation recovered) and, after a brief attempt to make it on her own, she was talked into joining Kenton by her (and Kenton’s) manager, Carlos Gastel.
The film also doesn’t mention that the first time she recorded what would be her breakthrough hit with Kenton, “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine,” she told Kenton not to release it because she thought the drumming was weak. For the next session, she brought along a Black drummer, Jesse Price (who’d preceded Jo Jones with Count Basie’s band in Kansas City), and insisted that he play on the record — and the combination of O’Day’s soaring vocal, the appeal of the song itself (it’s a novelty but a damned cynical one that was appropriately “covered” by Lauren Bacall in the film The Big Sleep) and Price’s driving, swinging drumming made the song a hit. (The Proper four-CD boxed set Young Anita includes both the studio version and an aircheck of “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine” made after Price finished his unhappy three-week stint with Kenton — and the rhythmic stiffness of the aircheck with drummer Jim Falzone only underscores how much of a difference Price had made on the hit.) When I read that story for the first time — in a biography of Stan Getz (he was in the Kenton band at the time) — it seemed logical that, since Gene Krupa had been her previous employer, Anita O’Day would be picky about drummers.
In any event, after another brief solo stint (during which the C. P. MacGregor transcription company recorded her with the Nat “King” Cole Trio for five songs — but, amazingly, used Cole only as a pianist, depriving us of the sheer joy of a vocal duet between them!), she rejoined Krupa as soon as he put a new band of his own back together (the one for which Krupa sat in front and took all the flashy drum solos while hiring another drummer, Joe Dale, to sit in back and do the grunt work of keeping time) and had another hit with him in “Boogie Blues” before finally striking out on her own for good. The film takes up her story here with a large placard announcing her new label affiliation with Bib Thiele’s independent Signature label (“Hey, ops! I’m on Signature now!” it said — “ops” meant jukebox operators) and her growing standing once Norman Granz signed her to his labels, originally Clef and Norgran and, after 1955, Verve (the film claims that O’Day, not Ella Fitzgerald, was the first female singer to release an LP on Verve), coupled with her increasing drug problems.
When her drummer John Poole first gave her heroin (he was a lifetime addict who stayed on the stuff but continued to work with her even after she cleaned up, only to get fired after 32 years because he hit her once) she said, “This is better than a martini! This is better than sex!” — yet another attempt by a user (or ex-user) to answer the eternal question those of us who don’t do drugs ask of those who do — and she made a lot of money on the club circuit in the 1950’s and spent it all, mostly (as one former manager ruefully reflects in the movie) in her arms. When the popularity of jazz declined in the U.S. in the 1960’s she made her living elsewhere, recording extensively for a Japanese label and playing mostly there and in Europe (two of the most interesting performance clips here are from a concert she gave in Sweden, singing into an odd tapered mike that looks like an expensive vibrator). The film includes the famous clip of her singing “Sweet Georgia Brown” from Bert Stern’s film Jazz on a Summer’s Day — of which, when I saw that movie, I wrote, “Anita O’Day sings divinely but sports one of the silliest outfits of all time, a black cinch dress with white feather-boa trimmings and a matching floppy sun hat that makes it a bit difficult to see her face under the damned thing!” — and O’Day tells the story of how she got that outfit. When she showed up at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, where that movie was shot, she asked the Festival’s promoter, George Wein, what night she would be singing. “Sunday afternoon,” Wein told her. The day of her performance O’Day went to a Newport dress shop to see what they had that might be suitable, and they sold her a typical Newport society woman’s going-out-on-a-sunny-summer-day outfit — and she wore it, complete with glass slippers that made her stumble as she walked up the stairs to the stage (immortalized in Bert Stern’s film).
This film was completed just a few weeks before O’Day’s death in November 2006 and features quite a lot of interview footage, not only with O’Day herself (some of it archival footage, notably her appearances on The Dick Cavett Show and 60 Minutes, but most of it shot especially for this film) but also with fellow singers Annie Ross and Margaret Whiting (who actually seems jealous of O’Day even though she had a much bigger career and a happier life) and some of the usual — and a few unusual — talking heads, notably pianist/jazz educator Billy Taylor, bandleader/arranger Gerald Wilson and trumpeter Joe Newman as well as critics Will Friedwald (also recently deceased) and Leonard Feather. O’Day looks back on her career ruefully but with a determination not to dwell on the past — “It’s past! What are you going to do about it now?” — and makes the fascinating statement that in order to be a great jazz performer you need to live the “jazz life.” It’s not altogether clear what she means by that — if she means you have to be an alcoholic or a drug addict she’s discernibly wrong (many of jazz’s greatest talents, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie, ducked those bullets and prospered artistically and financially); rather, it seems to mean that you have to go through life loosely and with a sense of freedom similar to that in the music itself.
The one part of this movie that really rubbed me the wrong way was the archival clip from Leonard Feather, who said that O’Day was the only white singer he regarded as the artistic equal of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan — all the more annoying because the filmmakers presented that in a context that suggested they agreed with him — which is of course sheer nonsense: in the generation before O’Day’s there were Mildred Bailey (who influenced just about every subsequent woman jazz singer, white or Black!) and the Boswell Sisters, and in O’Day’s generation there were June Christy (whom O’Day recruited to replace her in the Kenton band), Chris Connor and the awesome Peggy Lee, whom Feather probably wasn’t thinking of as a jazz singer because she recorded commercial pops and had hits with them — indeed, as I noted above, Lee had the career O’Day should have had!
There’s a rather sad coda to Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer, in which Cavolina and McCrudden depict her late-in-life comeback and the gigs she played in the 1990’s and 2000’s as proof of her glorious indomitability — she’s shown entertaining the 1990’s “swing kids” who seem all too aware that she was one of the last living links between them and the real swing era — and O’Day seemed to go along with that when she called her final album Indestructible (she’s shown signing copies of it in the documentary and it makes us realize that O’Day is one of the few artists whose recording career began with 78’s and ended with CD’s) — when there’s something tragic about the bits of her final singing we hear: her musician’s instincts and skill at phrasing were still in evidence, but the voice itself was almost totally gone. Instrumentalists lose their capabilities as they age, too, but it’s harder when your “instrument” is also an integral part of your body; Artur Rubenstein and Vladimir Horowitz could still perform stunningly at the end of very long lives (as, in the jazz field, did centenarian Eubie Blake and relative “spring chicken” Earl “Fatha” Hines in his 70’s at a concert I saw at UC Berkeley in January 1976), but O’Day, like Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, just stuck it out too long and made late-in-life records that were poor echoes of what she had been at her best. Still, Anita O’Day’s roller-coaster life story is an inspiring tale of sheer survival against all odds, and her recorded legacy establishes her as one of the jazz greats — and Cavolina and McCrudden honor her with deep respect and love in their film.
Captain Pirate (Columbia, 1952)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Captain Pirate is an engaging 1952 production from Columbia that was actually based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini called Captain Blood Returns. Columbia planned this as a sequel to their 1950 film Fortunes of Captain Blood, based (more or less) on the same Sabatini novel that was filmed twice before, by Vitagraph in 1924 with J. Warren Kerrigan as the lead (this was not the same person as character actor J. M. Kerrigan, who frequently appeared in John Ford’s movies; he made one more movie after Captain Blood, Hello, ’Frisco, and then retired from acting in 1924 even though he lived 23 more years) and then — famously — by Warners in 1935 with Errol Flynn.
My only acquaintance with the story is the Flynn version (a good movie but really a beta version for the later, even better Warners/Flynn swashbucklers like The Prince and the Pauper, The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk) and there were some jarring differences between the setup for this sequel (with an interesting black-and-white flashback, probably consisting of footage from Fortunes of Captain Blood, giving us the backstory) and the end of the Flynn version: this time Peter Blood is once again working as a doctor in the British colony of Port Royal, Jamaica, but his aristocratic fiancée is not Arabella Bishop (daughter of the former Governor-General of Jamaica) but Isabella (Patricia Medina, Mrs. Joseph Cotten and a frequent female lead in Columbia period pictures of this time), daughter of a Spanish noblewoman, at a time (1690) when Britain and Spain were actually allies, both fighting to preserve their own empires against the imperial designs of France.
Blood gets back into trouble — and into piracy — when someone stages a raid on Cartagena and steals a priceless Spanish jewelry set while he and his crew were dressed in the famous blue-and-white uniforms Blood and his men wore during his own pirate days. He’s captured by Hilary Evans (John Sutton) — that’s right, a boy named Hilary — who’s high up in the colonial government and also has an ulterior motive: he’s also in love with Isabella and thinks she’ll accept him if he can get Blood out of the way. Blood and his loyal crew members hijack the ship that was supposed to take him to England for trial, with the aid of Isabella and her boy slave Manuelito (Robert McNeeley), and target slave traders in their piracy (the script by Robert Libott, Frank Burt and John Meredyth Lucas establishes that Blood’s own time in slavery turned him against the institution in general and made him an abolitionist, forcibly liberating slaves 160 years before John Brown!).
They also trace the jewels first to a British pirate, Easterling (Ted de Corsia), and then to a French pirate, Coulevain (Maurice Marsac), whom they defeat in a confusing action sequence involving not only the usual swordplay but a gun battle at sea in which, for reasons that remained pretty murky, Blood sank his own ship in the harbor with the shore batteries and ultimately brought down Coulevain’s three ships as well. (I think it had something to do with blocking the exit to the port and thereby trapping the Frenchman’s ships inside, but the sequence as a whole was so sloppily edited the ending of Armageddon looked like a model of clarity by comparison.)
Directed (on some of his good days) by Ralph Murphy and photographed in stunning Technicolor by Charles Lawton, Jr. and Francis Cugat, Captain Pirate is an effective swashbuckler, and Louis Hayward — though he lacks both Flynn’s charisma and the gender ambiguity he showed in the 1935 Captain Blood — is certainly dashing enough for the lead, but the film lacks any truly menacing villains (no one even remotely in the league of Lionel Atwill and Basil Rathbone!) and suffers from a camp score (mostly by George Duning) that relies too heavily on hackneyed sea chanteys. Charles joked every time the characters called out, “Weigh the anchor!” He asked, “Why do they have to weigh it every time? Why don’t they just weigh it once and remember how much it weighs? Why don’t they write down how much it weighs?”
Captain Pirate is an engaging 1952 production from Columbia that was actually based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini called Captain Blood Returns. Columbia planned this as a sequel to their 1950 film Fortunes of Captain Blood, based (more or less) on the same Sabatini novel that was filmed twice before, by Vitagraph in 1924 with J. Warren Kerrigan as the lead (this was not the same person as character actor J. M. Kerrigan, who frequently appeared in John Ford’s movies; he made one more movie after Captain Blood, Hello, ’Frisco, and then retired from acting in 1924 even though he lived 23 more years) and then — famously — by Warners in 1935 with Errol Flynn.
My only acquaintance with the story is the Flynn version (a good movie but really a beta version for the later, even better Warners/Flynn swashbucklers like The Prince and the Pauper, The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk) and there were some jarring differences between the setup for this sequel (with an interesting black-and-white flashback, probably consisting of footage from Fortunes of Captain Blood, giving us the backstory) and the end of the Flynn version: this time Peter Blood is once again working as a doctor in the British colony of Port Royal, Jamaica, but his aristocratic fiancée is not Arabella Bishop (daughter of the former Governor-General of Jamaica) but Isabella (Patricia Medina, Mrs. Joseph Cotten and a frequent female lead in Columbia period pictures of this time), daughter of a Spanish noblewoman, at a time (1690) when Britain and Spain were actually allies, both fighting to preserve their own empires against the imperial designs of France.
Blood gets back into trouble — and into piracy — when someone stages a raid on Cartagena and steals a priceless Spanish jewelry set while he and his crew were dressed in the famous blue-and-white uniforms Blood and his men wore during his own pirate days. He’s captured by Hilary Evans (John Sutton) — that’s right, a boy named Hilary — who’s high up in the colonial government and also has an ulterior motive: he’s also in love with Isabella and thinks she’ll accept him if he can get Blood out of the way. Blood and his loyal crew members hijack the ship that was supposed to take him to England for trial, with the aid of Isabella and her boy slave Manuelito (Robert McNeeley), and target slave traders in their piracy (the script by Robert Libott, Frank Burt and John Meredyth Lucas establishes that Blood’s own time in slavery turned him against the institution in general and made him an abolitionist, forcibly liberating slaves 160 years before John Brown!).
They also trace the jewels first to a British pirate, Easterling (Ted de Corsia), and then to a French pirate, Coulevain (Maurice Marsac), whom they defeat in a confusing action sequence involving not only the usual swordplay but a gun battle at sea in which, for reasons that remained pretty murky, Blood sank his own ship in the harbor with the shore batteries and ultimately brought down Coulevain’s three ships as well. (I think it had something to do with blocking the exit to the port and thereby trapping the Frenchman’s ships inside, but the sequence as a whole was so sloppily edited the ending of Armageddon looked like a model of clarity by comparison.)
Directed (on some of his good days) by Ralph Murphy and photographed in stunning Technicolor by Charles Lawton, Jr. and Francis Cugat, Captain Pirate is an effective swashbuckler, and Louis Hayward — though he lacks both Flynn’s charisma and the gender ambiguity he showed in the 1935 Captain Blood — is certainly dashing enough for the lead, but the film lacks any truly menacing villains (no one even remotely in the league of Lionel Atwill and Basil Rathbone!) and suffers from a camp score (mostly by George Duning) that relies too heavily on hackneyed sea chanteys. Charles joked every time the characters called out, “Weigh the anchor!” He asked, “Why do they have to weigh it every time? Why don’t they just weigh it once and remember how much it weighs? Why don’t they write down how much it weighs?”
Friday, January 2, 2009
Beyond Our Differences (Entropy Films, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The December 26, 2008 episode of the PBS public-affairs TV series Bill Moyers’ Journal was given over to a film (or an excerpt therefrom; from its imdb.com listing I conclude the original is a good deal longer than the 56-minute excerpt we got to see) called Beyond Our Differences, which is basically your standard Religion Is Good After All documentary focusing on religious leaders who are actually working to bring peace on earth and people together rather than driving them apart and therefore are providing an alternative to the fundamentalists. To say I have mixed feelings about this subject is putting it mildly; I firmly believe that on balance, religion has been a negative force in world history — all the Gandhis and Kings who have done good things in the name of their faiths are vastly outweighed by the Torquemadas, the Cotton Mathers, the Meir Kahanes and Osama bin Ladens who have killed in the name of theirs.
Predictably I felt my skin crawl when I saw Father Kieran Creagh being held up as a positive role model for setting up a hospice for “AIDS” patients in South Africa, not only because I’m sure most of the “AIDS” patients whom he’s helping to ease their deaths would probably have been salvageable if the real, preventable or treatable, diseases they had were acknowledged as the causes of what was wrong with them instead of having it all blamed on “HIV” but also because Creagh is saying that he’s been inspired by “AIDS” to do education on the South African Blacks to get them to stop having sex and remain abstinent until marriage (it’s oh so convenient when you manage to watch what’s happening in the world and decide it confirms what you already believe), and whereas the film presents Father Creagh’s willingness to take an experimental AIDS vaccine in 2003 as an example of physical and moral courage, it’s hard to see even by the mainstream’s lights what on earth this is supposed to prove, since as a Roman Catholic priest he’s not supposed to be having sex anyway and therefore his likelihood of “exposure” to HIV in the primary way the mainstream says it’s transmitted is minimal to none.
I liked a lot of Beyond Our Differences and was particularly moved by the quotations from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic holy books even though director Peter Bisanz is cherry-picking the scriptures as thoroughly as Fred Phelps is — particularly ignoring all the passages in the Old Testament and the Koran that specifically have God green-lighting his chosen people to commit genocide.
The December 26, 2008 episode of the PBS public-affairs TV series Bill Moyers’ Journal was given over to a film (or an excerpt therefrom; from its imdb.com listing I conclude the original is a good deal longer than the 56-minute excerpt we got to see) called Beyond Our Differences, which is basically your standard Religion Is Good After All documentary focusing on religious leaders who are actually working to bring peace on earth and people together rather than driving them apart and therefore are providing an alternative to the fundamentalists. To say I have mixed feelings about this subject is putting it mildly; I firmly believe that on balance, religion has been a negative force in world history — all the Gandhis and Kings who have done good things in the name of their faiths are vastly outweighed by the Torquemadas, the Cotton Mathers, the Meir Kahanes and Osama bin Ladens who have killed in the name of theirs.
Predictably I felt my skin crawl when I saw Father Kieran Creagh being held up as a positive role model for setting up a hospice for “AIDS” patients in South Africa, not only because I’m sure most of the “AIDS” patients whom he’s helping to ease their deaths would probably have been salvageable if the real, preventable or treatable, diseases they had were acknowledged as the causes of what was wrong with them instead of having it all blamed on “HIV” but also because Creagh is saying that he’s been inspired by “AIDS” to do education on the South African Blacks to get them to stop having sex and remain abstinent until marriage (it’s oh so convenient when you manage to watch what’s happening in the world and decide it confirms what you already believe), and whereas the film presents Father Creagh’s willingness to take an experimental AIDS vaccine in 2003 as an example of physical and moral courage, it’s hard to see even by the mainstream’s lights what on earth this is supposed to prove, since as a Roman Catholic priest he’s not supposed to be having sex anyway and therefore his likelihood of “exposure” to HIV in the primary way the mainstream says it’s transmitted is minimal to none.
I liked a lot of Beyond Our Differences and was particularly moved by the quotations from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic holy books even though director Peter Bisanz is cherry-picking the scriptures as thoroughly as Fred Phelps is — particularly ignoring all the passages in the Old Testament and the Koran that specifically have God green-lighting his chosen people to commit genocide.
Operation Double 007 (Produzione D.S., 1967)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
As our movie, Charles and I picked out a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a 1967 spy spoof called Operation Double 007, a.k.a. O.K. Connery. Lots of people in the 1960’s turned out stupid spoofs of the James Bond movies (by far the best spoof of them was the Get Smart! TV show) but only the makers of this one, producer Dario Sabatello and director Alberto De Martino, had the chutzpah to hire Sean Connery’s brother Neil as their star. In fact, some of the alternate titles even proclaimed that fact about the movie: Operation Kid Brother and O.K. Connery. Neil Connery strongly resembles his brother physically (though, oddly, he insists on wearing a thin moustache and beard throughout the film that makes the resemblance less obvious than it otherwise would have been) but not at all in acting ability — and if the sheer brazenness of casting Sean Connery’s brother in a James Bond spoof weren’t enough, the producers also engaged actors like Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell who had been in the real Bond films.
The story was credited to Paolo Levi but the actual screenplay to Levi, Frank Walker, Stanley Wright and Stefano Canzio (“Bad luck! Four on a screenplay!” the MST3K crew joked; certainly this is a movie that confirms my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers) and the four men on this screenplay managed between them to come up with something that doesn’t make even a lick of sense. We begin the movie not with James Bond — oops, James Bond’s stupider brother — but with the villain, Mr. Thai a.k.a. Beta (Adolfo Celi), on his yacht that comes equipped with TV monitors and wall-to-wall women, including one whose back is serving as the screen for his projection TV. (“When he changes the channel, does he need to get a different woman?” one of the MST3K crew joked.) He’s moored off the coast of Monaco, and at the Monaco general-aviation airport a black plane comes in for a landing and Mr. Thai sends a radio-controlled Citroën car (we see the car with no driver and then there’s a cut to Mr. Thai on board his yacht driving it with a remote-control device) to ram it and cause it to explode, killing the pilot.
The pilot was going to sell the good guys information on the bad guys’ latest plot — the good guys are unnamed but the bad guys are an international organization called Thanatos, and Mr. Thai is called “Beta” because he’s the second-in-command and he wants to displace Alpha (Anthony Dawson) and take over. In order to do that he plans to steal an “atomic nucleus” (what, only one? Didn’t the members of the writing committee realize how small one is?) and construct his own nuclear weapons. His adversary is the internationally famous plastic surgeon Dr. Neil Connery (quite a few of the actors in this movie are using their own names!), who came to Monaco to demonstrate his use of an ancient Tibetan hypnotism technique as an anaesthetic; his experimental subject was Miss Yachuko (Yachuco Yama), and as a side effect the hypnotic technique also brought up some crucial information locked in her brain that both the good guys and the bad guys need. So the bad guys kidnap and torture her and Dr. Connery has to find her.
There’s also a hit-person nun who kills people with a knife with a spring-loaded blade she can shoot at them, a lot of gags involving archery (including a rather charming sequence in which the baddies who’ve kidnapped Yachuko bundle her up and use an air-gun that looks like a bazooka to shoot a line out her window so they can lower her to a waiting vehicle — disguised as an ambulance — and get her out of the building without risking being discovered) and a climactic action sequence that is pretty unmemorable — in fact, I was having trouble staying awake through this one and was zoning out during much of it. The most memorable parts of its MST3K presentation were two interstital segments, in one of which Joel Hodgson does his Mr. Thai impression and works the robots into it as the women in Mr. Thai’s life; and another in which the crew compares the careers of Sean and Neil Connery and then says, as a punchline, “Well, there’s one thing we have to say for Neil Connery. At least he didn’t do Zardoz.”
As our movie, Charles and I picked out a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a 1967 spy spoof called Operation Double 007, a.k.a. O.K. Connery. Lots of people in the 1960’s turned out stupid spoofs of the James Bond movies (by far the best spoof of them was the Get Smart! TV show) but only the makers of this one, producer Dario Sabatello and director Alberto De Martino, had the chutzpah to hire Sean Connery’s brother Neil as their star. In fact, some of the alternate titles even proclaimed that fact about the movie: Operation Kid Brother and O.K. Connery. Neil Connery strongly resembles his brother physically (though, oddly, he insists on wearing a thin moustache and beard throughout the film that makes the resemblance less obvious than it otherwise would have been) but not at all in acting ability — and if the sheer brazenness of casting Sean Connery’s brother in a James Bond spoof weren’t enough, the producers also engaged actors like Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell who had been in the real Bond films.
The story was credited to Paolo Levi but the actual screenplay to Levi, Frank Walker, Stanley Wright and Stefano Canzio (“Bad luck! Four on a screenplay!” the MST3K crew joked; certainly this is a movie that confirms my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers) and the four men on this screenplay managed between them to come up with something that doesn’t make even a lick of sense. We begin the movie not with James Bond — oops, James Bond’s stupider brother — but with the villain, Mr. Thai a.k.a. Beta (Adolfo Celi), on his yacht that comes equipped with TV monitors and wall-to-wall women, including one whose back is serving as the screen for his projection TV. (“When he changes the channel, does he need to get a different woman?” one of the MST3K crew joked.) He’s moored off the coast of Monaco, and at the Monaco general-aviation airport a black plane comes in for a landing and Mr. Thai sends a radio-controlled Citroën car (we see the car with no driver and then there’s a cut to Mr. Thai on board his yacht driving it with a remote-control device) to ram it and cause it to explode, killing the pilot.
The pilot was going to sell the good guys information on the bad guys’ latest plot — the good guys are unnamed but the bad guys are an international organization called Thanatos, and Mr. Thai is called “Beta” because he’s the second-in-command and he wants to displace Alpha (Anthony Dawson) and take over. In order to do that he plans to steal an “atomic nucleus” (what, only one? Didn’t the members of the writing committee realize how small one is?) and construct his own nuclear weapons. His adversary is the internationally famous plastic surgeon Dr. Neil Connery (quite a few of the actors in this movie are using their own names!), who came to Monaco to demonstrate his use of an ancient Tibetan hypnotism technique as an anaesthetic; his experimental subject was Miss Yachuko (Yachuco Yama), and as a side effect the hypnotic technique also brought up some crucial information locked in her brain that both the good guys and the bad guys need. So the bad guys kidnap and torture her and Dr. Connery has to find her.
There’s also a hit-person nun who kills people with a knife with a spring-loaded blade she can shoot at them, a lot of gags involving archery (including a rather charming sequence in which the baddies who’ve kidnapped Yachuko bundle her up and use an air-gun that looks like a bazooka to shoot a line out her window so they can lower her to a waiting vehicle — disguised as an ambulance — and get her out of the building without risking being discovered) and a climactic action sequence that is pretty unmemorable — in fact, I was having trouble staying awake through this one and was zoning out during much of it. The most memorable parts of its MST3K presentation were two interstital segments, in one of which Joel Hodgson does his Mr. Thai impression and works the robots into it as the women in Mr. Thai’s life; and another in which the crew compares the careers of Sean and Neil Connery and then says, as a punchline, “Well, there’s one thing we have to say for Neil Connery. At least he didn’t do Zardoz.”
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