by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Met’s recent “Live in HD” telecast of Verdi’s Rigoletto showcased a new production by director Michael Mayer
that moved the action of the opera from 16th century Mantua to Las Vegas c.
1960 — and after the horrible atrocities of the Met’s modern-dress Traviata and Parsifal this one was actually a relief: a modern-dress opera production that
was internally consistent, made sense and actually found modern (or
recent-past) equivalents to the character and class relationships of the
original. In Mayer’s reading, the Duke of Mantua became Frank Sinatra — a
highly charismatic character, a sex addict and sufficiently Mob-connected that
even though he wasn’t a head of state he could still order, or even personally
commit, a murder (he shoots Monterone right on stage with a small handgun!) without
having to worry about legal consequences. Rigoletto became Don Rickles, a
comedian whose stage act was vicious meanness (his tag line was “Hello,
dummy!”) but was nice, kind and generous as could be off-stage. The various
courtiers became the Rat Pack, with Borsa (Alexander Lewis) played as a
combination of Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis, Jr.; Marullo (Jeff Mattsey) as
Dean Martin; Countess Ceprano (Emalie Savoy), the only woman the Duke goes
after in the story who eludes his grasp, as Marilyn Monroe; and her husband
Count Ceprano (David Crawford) as Mafioso Sam Giancana, who reportedly shared
his mistress Judith Campbell with both Sinatra and President John F. Kennedy.
The between-acts interviews with the singers in these roles said they’d
actually found it helpful when Mayer gave them real-life people on whom to
model their characterizations, and as forced as some of the parallels got they
did add depth and made the courtiers seem more like individual people and less
like a generic opera chorus. Rigoletto (Zelijko Lucic) is still referred to as
a hunchback but his only concession to “hunchicity” was to lean slightly
forward as he walked, and the only reference in his costume to the usual image
of a court jester was a vest that looked somewhat like a red-suit playing card.
The opera purists would probably be outraged, but the spare costuming at least
helped Lucic retain his dignity on stage; all too many baritones who play
Rigoletto come scritto slouch around like Marty Feldman in Young
Frankenstein. In addition to the visual
updating of the opera, the subtitles on the broadcast were deliberately written
in c. 1960 American English slang (and some of it actually seemed more recent
than that; one of the lines in the Duke’s “Questa o quella” came out “Monogamy
is monotony,” which predictably elicited a groan from Charles!), and in the
last act Sparafucile dumps the bag containing Gilda’s body into the trunk of a
blue Cadillac whose license plate reads “SPARFUC” — obviously a personalized
license plate (an anachronism given that such things didn’t exist in the U.S.
in 1960) for Sparafucile but also making the wicked pun, “Spare fuck,” a
reference to the role played by Sparafucile’s sister Maddalena in the story.
For those who aren’t familiar with the basic plot of Rigoletto as Verdi and his librettist, Francisco Maria Piave,
adapted it from Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’Amuse (“The King Amuses Himself”), here goes: 16th century
Mantua is ruled by a licentious Duke (Piotr Beczala, a Polish tenor whose name
I had always presumed was pronounced as it was spelled until Renée Fleming,
introducing him, said something that sounded like “Bech-WAH-nuh”) whose
principal avocation is getting himself into the pants (or whatever they wore
back then) of any woman who’ll hold still long enough for him to get his rocks
off. He introduces this side of himself in his opening aria, “Questa o quella”
— meaning “This one or that one,” expressing the sentiment that women are
completely interchangeable and he doesn’t care who he has sex with as long as
it’s alive, human and female. He’s recruited equally morally despicable people
as courtiers to help him recruit his victims, and he’s also hired a court
jester named Rigoletto whose basic function seems to be to ridicule the
husbands, boyfriends, parents, relatives or significant others of the Duke’s
seducees. Rigoletto is a single father who is neurotically overprotective of
his daughter Gilda (Diana Damrau), who since her mother died (giving birth to
her? The libretto isn’t clear on that point but it’s entirely possible; in the
19th century women’s deaths in childbirth were all too common) has become
Rigoletto’s only interest outside his job. He keeps her shut up in his little
house, letting her out only to go to church and only in the company of her
governess/nurse/chaperone Giovanna (Maria Zifchak), with the idea that by
locking her in he can keep her from attracting the attention of the Duke or
someone equally corrupt in his court. Alas, she’s already fallen for the Duke —
she met him at church and has no idea who he is — and he’s taken enough with
her to find out where she lives. (In this production there’s a neat little
scene of the Duke slipping Giovanna some cash as a bribe to betray Gilda; I
don’t remember Piave’s libretto being that obvious about it but it’s a neat
gesture and ties in with the greed and lust that motivate the Duke and his
entourage.)
Once the Duke finds out where Gilda lives he pays court to her,
pretending to be a poor student named “Gualtier Maldé,” and after they sing their
duet he leaves and she moons over him in her big aria, “Caro nome” (“Dearest
Name”), now that she finally has a name (albeit a false one) to go with the
face and bod she’s been fantasizing about. Meanwhile Rigoletto has been
approached by Sparafucile (Stefan Kocán), a hit man who runs an inn on the
outskirts of town and uses his sexually open sister Maddalena (Oksana Volkova)
to lure his victims to the inn, where he kills them. Rigoletto tells
Sparafucile he has no need for his services … yet, and after Sparafucile leaves Rigoletto sings a
marvelously broken aria, “Pari siamo” (which basically means “We are the same”
— Rigoletto reflects that Sparafucile kills people with a knife and Rigoletto
himself destroys them with his wit). Monterone (Robert Pomakov) — who in this
production is made an Arab sheik, a visiting high-roller pissed off at the Duke
for seducing his daughter — pronounces a curse on the Duke and all the people
in his court, but they laugh it off — all but Rigoletto, who’s sensitive and
decent enough to be upset that he was cursed out by the grieving father of one
of the Duke’s victims. (Indeed, Verdi was so taken with this plot element that
his working title for Rigoletto
was La Maledizione — “The
Curse.”) The first act ends with the courtiers telling Rigoletto they’re going
to kidnap Countess Ceprano (Emalie Savoy) and take her to the court so the Duke
can amuse himself with her, only they’re really going to Rigoletto’s own house
and want to trick Rigoletto himself into helping them kidnap Gilda, whom they
think is Rigoletto’s mistress instead of his daughter. They blindfold Rigoletto
and put plugs in his ears so he can neither see the woman he’s helping them
abduct nor hear her voice (though a lot of modern productions, including this
one, omit the earplugs and therefore leave us wondering how Rigoletto can be
fooled when he would recognize Gilda’s voice the moment she cried for help).
At
the start of act two, the Duke returns to Rigoletto’s house, expecting to meet
Gilda for a hot afternoon, only he finds she’s gone and in the one decent thing
he does in the whole opera, he sings “Parmi veder le lagrime,” noticing that
she cried when they met and wondering if he could forsake all other women for
her. Not that that lasts very long; he finds Gilda in his own court, where the
kidnappers have brought her (concealed in a giant Egyptian sarcophagus, one of
those transparently fake props Las Vegas hotels of the period constructed to
establish some attempt at an atmosphere from antiquity), only Rigoletto finds
her too, sends the courtiers away and in one of the high points of the score
they sing the duet “Tutte le feste” in which Gilda explains how she met the
Duke (and how he tricked her) and Rigoletto alternately comforts her and vows
revenge. His idea of revenge is to hire Sparafucile to kill the Duke, and
accordingly Sparafucile lures the Duke to the inn with Maddalena as his bait —
while Rigoletto brings Gilda to the inn to eavesdrop on the Duke with Maddalena
so he can convince her the Duke is a faithless, wanton seducer unworthy of her
affections — and the scene culminates in the famous quartet, “Bella figlia
dell’ amore,” in which the Duke woos Maddalena with his usual seduction lines
while Rigoletto tries to tell Gilda what sort of man he really is and Gilda
basically pouts in stunned disbelief. Only Maddalena decides the Duke is so hot
she doesn’t want her brother to kill him; she suggests he kill Rigoletto
instead but it’s not in Sparafucile’s moral code to kill a customer.
Accordingly Sparafucile agrees to murder the first person who comes out of the
inn, whether it’s the Duke or someone else — and Gilda, who’s in male drag as
part of Rigoletto’s plan for them to flee after the murder goes down, overhears
this and decides to sacrifice her own life to save the Duke’s. Rigoletto
accepts delivery of the bag containing Gilda’s body, and he’s convinced his
plan has succeeded — until he hears the chilling reprise of “La donna è
mobile,” the score’s most famous aria, a marvelous bit of projection in which
the Duke projects his own moral failings on the other gender (the opening line
is usually translated as “Women are fickle, false altogether”). Hearing the
Duke’s song makes him realize that the Duke has somehow survived the plot, and
naturally curious as to just who’s in the body bag, Rigoletto opens it, sees
his own daughter, and is horrified and overcome. She sings a marvelous final
scene, “Lassù in cielo,” in which she looks forward to meeting her mother in
heaven and praying for her father’s soul so that when he croaks he’ll be
allowed to meet them there, and after Gilda finally expires Rigoletto looks
skyward, recalls Monterone’s curse, and screams, “Ah, la maledizione!” Curtain.
Rigoletto is generally considered the beginning of Verdi’s middle or mature
period, and it’s a far-reaching opera nothing like anything an Italian composer
had ever written before. The Duke’s big arias are the score’s pop tunes, but
the music for the other principals — especially Rigoletto himself — is nothing
like the simple slow-fast cavatina-cabaletta formula previous Italian composers
(including Verdi himself in his earlier works) had used. “Pari siamo” is a bit
of jagged pieces of music, fitted together not to a musical formula but to
express the torment gripping Rigoletto’s soul, his sense that by being the
house comic at the Duke’s morally corrupt court he’s no better than a hired
assassin. When Rigoletto discovers his daughter has been kidnapped, Verdi sets
his rage not to a bouncy uptempo tune but to “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata,” a
menacing, raging piece of music that expresses Rigoletto’s revulsion at the
people he’s served and what he’s done for them, and also his anger that despite
his incredible efforts to protect his daughter, she’s been swept up in his
employer’s corrupt world anyway. (One thing this production blessedly didn’t do is give Rigoletto an incestuous itch for Gilda;
it’s probably only a matter of time, though, before a modern director decides
that the only thing that could possibly explain Rigoletto’s neurotic
overprotectiveness of Gilda is if he had the hots for her himself.) What’s
amazing about Michael Mayer’s production is that it works; the amoral
atmosphere of Las Vegas c. 1960 is a close enough parallel to the setting Verdi
and Piave had in mind (especially once they had to downgrade the tenor villain
from a king to a duke at the insistence of the Italian censors, who behaved
towards Verdi and the other composers of his time pretty much the way the staff
of the Hays Office in Hollywood did in enforcing the Motion Picture Production
Code in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s) and the glittering neon of Act I is a
powerful visual symbol for the real “city that never slept,” a place in which
celebrities like Sinatra and his fellow Rat Packers could party to their
heart’s content, indulge themselves in booze, women and drugs (though Sinatra
was always anti-drug, to the point of staging an intervention with Sammy Davis,
Jr. after Davis had got hooked on cocaine — a point blissfully ignored by
Mayer, who has the Sinatra-esque Duke sniff coke in one scene; later he has the
Duke swig from a bottle of amber fluid, a reference to Sinatra’s real drug of
choice, Jack Daniels’ whiskey — the real Sinatra left instructions that he be
buried with a bottle of it!) and be protected from any collateral damage they
did, safe in the assurance from their Mafia buddies that whatever happened in
Vegas, up to and including murder, really would stay in Vegas.
By chance I’d heard this performance of Rigoletto before I watched it, and in its audio-only
incarnation, without Mayer’s exciting visuals, it was basically just another
recording of Rigoletto — and I had not been particularly impressed by the
principals except for Diana Damrau as Gilda (not surprisingly, the only cast
member I’d heard of before). With the visuals, Damrau slipped a bit in my
estimation — she still sang divinely but she’s well past her teenage years
(Gilda is supposed to be a love-struck teenager) and she tried to bridge the
gap between the character’s age and her own by acting like an annoying
flibbertigibbet instead of, as John Ardoin described Maria Callas’s Gilda, “an
innocent of whom circumstance makes a woman.” On the other hand, the rest of
the principals seemed to gain when we could see as well as hear them; Zelijko
Lucic portrayed a desperate dignity in the scenes with his daughter and a
fearsome rage in the later stages, and though Piotr Beczala hardly had the
charisma of the real Frank Sinatra (but then, who would?), he looks convincing
as a lounge-lizard entertainer (there’s a neat touch in which a mike is thrust
in his hand just before he starts “Questa o quella,” essentially portraying it
as the sort of number the Duke sings in his Vegas act) and he’s got a strong
voice well suited to the Duke’s music. He’s also hot-looking, though not so hot
that we can readily believe he owes his life at the end to the actions of two
women (ironic for such a misogynist character!) who both find him so
irresistible that they won’t let him be killed, and one of them even gives her
own life to save his — and I must say I found the Sparafucile, Stefan Kocán, to
be the hottest guy in the cast (though maybe that was just how he was costumed:
a purple suit and green tie in act one, a green leather jacket in act three).
Damrau doesn’t quite achieve the remarkable feat Callas pulled off in “Lassù in
cielo,” convincing us that she was half in this world and half in the next one,
but she nonetheless phrases her part in the final duet quite sensitively and
ravishingly (probably not a good word in this context!). She goes out with a
quiet dignity and strength that ably caps a performance that triumphs vocally
and overcomes her rather silly gestures and deportment on stage. And the
production, it seemed to me, quite nicely reflected the growing darkness of the
story, from the neon-lit party scenes in Act I to the aftermath of Act II (with
the courtiers passed out in drunken stupors on a series of couches) and Act
III, set in a strip club (Maddalena begins it by doing a pole dance) in which
the tube lights are mostly blue except for flashes of white that animate across
the stage to represent the storm that’s going on and mirrors the boiling human
emotions of the story.
Michael Mayer’s “Vegas Rigoletto” seems to me to be an almost complete success, a
shining example of how a standard-repertory opera can be updated without losing
its essence — and one weird aspect of the opera scene today is how many
productions there are that change the setting and major aspects of the story in
pathetic attempts to make the piece more “relevant,” and how few of them pull
it off. When Peter Sellars did his three stagings of the Mozart-da Ponte operas
in the 1980’s, I loved The Marriage of Figaro because Sellars, like Mayer, found modern-day
equivalents for the original characters and their class relationships, but
hated the Don Giovanni and Cosi
fan Tutte because there Sellars didn’t seem
to be bothering — he was doing them in modern drag just to be different. I also
quite enjoyed the 1983 Frank Corsaro production of Bizet’s Carmen, which not only moved the opera’s setting to the
1930’s — the time of the Spanish Civil War — but incorporated the war into the
plot: Carmen and her smuggler friends were running guns to the Loyalists, while
José was in Franco’s army. (The more recent Met Carmen also updated the story to the era of the Civil War
but did absolutely nothing
creative with the revised setting — and the reviewers who praised it seemed
oblivious to the existence of Corsaro’s production almost three decades
earlier.) But most modern-dress productions have just seemed boring or silly,
and the self-consciously “avant-garde” productions at the Met like the Willy
Decker Traviata or the François
Girard Parsifal have been
downright offensive in their sheer perversity and disinclination to serve the
original intent of the composer and librettist. I’m reserving judgment on the
current Robert Lepage Ring at the
Met until I see more of it — so far I’ve only seen the Walküre, which I thought worked even though some parts
seemed risible (notably the appearance of the Valkyries on see-saws during the
famous Ride at the start of Act III); at least Lepage was attempting with his
up-and-down steel planks to reproduce the seismic activity that roils Iceland,
part of the world that generated the Norse sagas Wagner adapted into his
scenario for the Ring.
I’ve read
enough on both sides of the debate over so-called Regietheater — productions in which, depending on your point of
view, the stage director/designer either alters or updates the setting and
story of an opera or a classic play to allow its message to come through more
strongly to a modern audience, or arrogantly substitutes his (or, much more
rarely, her) own vision for that of the creators of the original work — and generally
I’d much rather watch either a tastefully done traditional production or a
coherently stylized one like Wieland Wagner’s famous 1950’s restagings of his
grandfather’s works at Bayreuth; but if all modern-dress opera productions were
at the level of this Michael Mayer Rigoletto — coherent, sensible, aimed at translating the
characters and their class and social relationships into modern equivalent
instead of just moving them willy-nilly through the centuries to be “different”
or to be outrageous — I’d like them a lot better!
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Monday, March 18, 2013
Bellini: Norma — Act I (concert performance: Madrid, 1971)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles a VAI (stands for Video Artists International) disc I’d got as a closeout from Daedalus Books: Montserrat Caballé in two performances from the Teatro Real in Madrid, one in 1971 and one in 1979. The 1971 show was a concert performance of Act I of Bellini’s Norma (though Norma is in just two acts and therefore Act I consists of more than half the opera!) and the 1979 one a recital of Caballé and pianist Miguel Zanetti in songs and opera excerpts by Handel, Vivaldi (who usually isn’t thought of today as a vocal composer, though he wrote quite a few operas and some of them have been revived lately — it was during the era that composers churned out opera after opera by recycling their own music, either from earlier operas or instrumental pieces, which was why, when one Vivaldi opera had its Los Angeles premiere, the L. A. Times critic warned audiences that two of the arias would be joltingly familiar because they were based on themes Vivaldi also used in The Four Seasons) and Granados. Charles noted that in 1971 dictator Francisco Franco was still the absolute ruler of Spain, and therefore suggested that Norma was a “safer” project for the Teatro Real in Madrid to perform than, say, Tosca. Also, Spanish TV was still in black-and-white in 1971, and between the rather murky lighting of the Teatro Real, the black dress Caballé was wearing as Norma and the black suits of the three male participants — bland tenor Robierto Merolla as Pollione, up-and-coming bass James Morris as Oroveso and an unidentified singer as Pollione’s servant and sidekick, Flavio — the singers tended to get lost among the orchestra members and the overall murk. The one who didn’t was the Adalgisa, Margreta Elkins (that odd spelling of her first name is correct), who was wearing a white gown and stood about a head taller than both Caballé and Merolla in their big trio at the end of the act. Norma is an extraordinary opera by the composer I consider by far the best of the three most commonly associated with the bel canto style; compared to Rossini and Donizetti, Bellini seems to have been the most dramatically and musically sophisticated — even Wagner admitted that he learned from Bellini (most notably ideas on how to use the brass instruments) and he carefully left Bellini out of his attacks on Italian composers, just as he carefully left Jacques Fromental Hálevy, who wrote La Juive (an attack on anti-Semitism and an opera Wagner loved despite his own anti-Semitic prejudices), out of his attacks on Jewish composers.
Its plot, relatively simple, derives from a French poetic drama by the now otherwise forgotten Alexandre Soumet, which in turn derives from the Medea myth: Norma is the high priestess of the moon in a Druidic religious cult during the times that the Romans were trying to conquer the British isles. However, despite her position of power with the Romans’ adversaries and her vow of chastity, she’s not only fallen in love with the Roman proconsul Pollione, she’s born him two children — even though the job includes having to make at least one big public appearance every month when the moon is in its crescent phase, and one would think people would notice if a pregnant woman were doing this. (Then again, maybe one of the justifications for casting zaftig sopranos like Caballé or Joan Sutherland in this role was to make it believable that Norma was a woman so large you wouldn’t notice if she were pregnant.) But Pollione has not only decided to dump Norma, he’s set his sights on her assistant priestess, Adalgisa, and wants her to break her vows and run away with him to Rome. The act we saw in this production starts with Norma’s father Oroveso assembling the Druids and demanding that they rebel against the Romans. Then we get Pollione’s aria about a dream he had in which he and Adalgisa were standing together on the steps of the Temple of Venus back in Rome, and his concern that Norma will somehow figure out what’s going on and queer the deal. At that point Norma enters and leads the Druids in the ritual prayer to the moon, “Casta diva” — one of Bellini’s (or anyone else’s) most ravishingly beautiful arias — which is also her plea to the Druids to keep the peace and not rebel. When the service is done (though Norma is still standing there in front of everybody) she sings a flashy cabaletta, “Ah! Bello a me ritorna,” in which she says she hopes Pollione will soon return to her. (Remember that this is intended to be an aside because the relationship between Norma and Pollione is supposed to be a big secret.) Then Adalgisa comes in to see Norma privately, and the two sing a lovely duet in which Norma says that she won’t hold Adalgisa to her vows but will set her free to join her beloved. Of course, Norma doesn’t yet know that her boyfriend and Adalgisa’s are one and the same — and when Adalgisa lets her in on the secret of just who the guy she has the hots for is, Norma is furious. Pollione enters and the three of them sing an angry, seething trio that ends Act I.
In Act II (not included here) Norma decides to avenge herself against Pollione by murdering the two children they had together, and in Soumet’s play she actually does so — but Bellini’s librettist, Felice Romani, had a better idea; Norma prepares to kill her kids but can’t go through with the deed. Instead she appears at the next Druid version of a general assembly, announces that she’s dropping her opposition to the Druids who want to rebel against the Romans, condemns both Pollione and Adalgisa, then has a turn of heart, announces that she is the traitor who betrayed her people for the love of the Roman general, and commits suicide by hurling herself off a convenient cliff, leaving the kids in the hands of her father Oroveso (as Anna Russell might have said, “Ya remember Oroveso?”) to raise. The Act I presented here is actually pretty dull; Caballé is in good form vocally and Elkins (a second-tier mezzo from La Scala’s 1950’s glory days who had previously sung with Maria Callas) is also good (their duet is radiant), but the guys aren’t all that interesting and conductor Enrique Garcia Asensio rather plods through the score, missing almost all the obvious opportunities for drama and intensity. Maybe it was because he was conducting it in concert — and the singers weren’t helping maintain the mood much by milking the audience applause after every aria and ensemble for all it was worth — but this Act I of Norma was surprisingly dull, and for that I tend to blame Garcia Asensio more than the singers or Bellini. (It was also amusing that the performance was filmed in Madrid but all the post-production work was done at studios in Barcelona.)
The recital presented on the rest of the disc was marked as a bonus item, but it was consistently more interesting than Norma, partly because Caballé seemed to have matured as an artist in the intervening eight years (it also helped that in between 1971 and 1979, Franco had fallen and, probably purely coincidentally, Spanish TV had adopted color) and partly because her accompanist, pianist Miguel Zanetti, seemed like a much more interesting musician than Garcia Asensio, coloring and shaping the music in ways the conductor had been unwilling or unable to do with his orchestra (“RTVE,” the initials of the network that had broadcast the show) in Norma. The repertoire wasn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill vocal recital program, either; it began with three selections by Handel — two from his Italian operas (the little-known “An, no son io che parlo” from Ezio and the well-known “Care Selve” from Atalanta — misspelled “Atlanta” on the on-screen credit!) and one, “O, had I Jubal’s lyre,” from the oratorio Joshua — which I found amusing because Caballé’s English diction, though no great shakes (and in an aria featuring lots of vocal ornamentation that tends to make the text indecipherable in any language), was at least better than Joan Sutherland’s even though Sutherland, unlike Caballé, came from an English-speaking country. Then she did five selections by Vivaldi, one a separate song (“Vieni, vieni, o mio diletto”) and the others excerpts from his operas, and though the historically-informed performance fascists would probably pick her to pieces, Caballé’s singing here was spirited and lively.
After a bit of Cherubini’s opera Demofonte (ironically Cherubini’s only opera even tangentially in the standard repertory, Medée, was written by an Italian composer living in France and was therefore in French, though virtually all modern performances are in an Italian-language adaptation by Franz Lachner, a German, who replaced the original’s spoken dialogue with sung recitatives) Caballé did three songs by Granados, “Cançi d’amor,” “L’oeil profeta” and “Elegia eterna.” I joked that we were finally hearing Caballé sing in her native language, Spanish — and Charles pointed out to me that the “ç” with a tail isn’t used in standard Spanish and therefore that song was either in Portuguese or a regional dialect of Spanish like Catalán or Galician. (I remember encountering a video in Catalán about a community doing their own water project — and the title spelled the word “agua” with an “i,” “aigua.”) Caballé seemed more at home in the music of Granados than she had in the Baroque arias of Handel and Vivaldi or the classical-era Cherubini selection, and she did her most spirited singing of the night in her two encores: “Carceleras” from Roberto ChapÃ’s Las Hijas del Zebedeo and “Me llaman la primorosa” from a version of The Barber of Seville by Gerónimo Giménez and Manuel Nieto. It’s interesting that there’s a zarzuela version of this story to set alongside the full-length operas by Paisiello and Rossini, and even more interesting that in these lighter zarzuela arias both Caballé and Zanetti seemed to be letting their hair down and really having fun with the music. Despite VAI’s decision to give us English subtitles only for Norma and not for the songs, this was an interesting disc and the song recital was especially commendable.
I ran Charles a VAI (stands for Video Artists International) disc I’d got as a closeout from Daedalus Books: Montserrat Caballé in two performances from the Teatro Real in Madrid, one in 1971 and one in 1979. The 1971 show was a concert performance of Act I of Bellini’s Norma (though Norma is in just two acts and therefore Act I consists of more than half the opera!) and the 1979 one a recital of Caballé and pianist Miguel Zanetti in songs and opera excerpts by Handel, Vivaldi (who usually isn’t thought of today as a vocal composer, though he wrote quite a few operas and some of them have been revived lately — it was during the era that composers churned out opera after opera by recycling their own music, either from earlier operas or instrumental pieces, which was why, when one Vivaldi opera had its Los Angeles premiere, the L. A. Times critic warned audiences that two of the arias would be joltingly familiar because they were based on themes Vivaldi also used in The Four Seasons) and Granados. Charles noted that in 1971 dictator Francisco Franco was still the absolute ruler of Spain, and therefore suggested that Norma was a “safer” project for the Teatro Real in Madrid to perform than, say, Tosca. Also, Spanish TV was still in black-and-white in 1971, and between the rather murky lighting of the Teatro Real, the black dress Caballé was wearing as Norma and the black suits of the three male participants — bland tenor Robierto Merolla as Pollione, up-and-coming bass James Morris as Oroveso and an unidentified singer as Pollione’s servant and sidekick, Flavio — the singers tended to get lost among the orchestra members and the overall murk. The one who didn’t was the Adalgisa, Margreta Elkins (that odd spelling of her first name is correct), who was wearing a white gown and stood about a head taller than both Caballé and Merolla in their big trio at the end of the act. Norma is an extraordinary opera by the composer I consider by far the best of the three most commonly associated with the bel canto style; compared to Rossini and Donizetti, Bellini seems to have been the most dramatically and musically sophisticated — even Wagner admitted that he learned from Bellini (most notably ideas on how to use the brass instruments) and he carefully left Bellini out of his attacks on Italian composers, just as he carefully left Jacques Fromental Hálevy, who wrote La Juive (an attack on anti-Semitism and an opera Wagner loved despite his own anti-Semitic prejudices), out of his attacks on Jewish composers.
Its plot, relatively simple, derives from a French poetic drama by the now otherwise forgotten Alexandre Soumet, which in turn derives from the Medea myth: Norma is the high priestess of the moon in a Druidic religious cult during the times that the Romans were trying to conquer the British isles. However, despite her position of power with the Romans’ adversaries and her vow of chastity, she’s not only fallen in love with the Roman proconsul Pollione, she’s born him two children — even though the job includes having to make at least one big public appearance every month when the moon is in its crescent phase, and one would think people would notice if a pregnant woman were doing this. (Then again, maybe one of the justifications for casting zaftig sopranos like Caballé or Joan Sutherland in this role was to make it believable that Norma was a woman so large you wouldn’t notice if she were pregnant.) But Pollione has not only decided to dump Norma, he’s set his sights on her assistant priestess, Adalgisa, and wants her to break her vows and run away with him to Rome. The act we saw in this production starts with Norma’s father Oroveso assembling the Druids and demanding that they rebel against the Romans. Then we get Pollione’s aria about a dream he had in which he and Adalgisa were standing together on the steps of the Temple of Venus back in Rome, and his concern that Norma will somehow figure out what’s going on and queer the deal. At that point Norma enters and leads the Druids in the ritual prayer to the moon, “Casta diva” — one of Bellini’s (or anyone else’s) most ravishingly beautiful arias — which is also her plea to the Druids to keep the peace and not rebel. When the service is done (though Norma is still standing there in front of everybody) she sings a flashy cabaletta, “Ah! Bello a me ritorna,” in which she says she hopes Pollione will soon return to her. (Remember that this is intended to be an aside because the relationship between Norma and Pollione is supposed to be a big secret.) Then Adalgisa comes in to see Norma privately, and the two sing a lovely duet in which Norma says that she won’t hold Adalgisa to her vows but will set her free to join her beloved. Of course, Norma doesn’t yet know that her boyfriend and Adalgisa’s are one and the same — and when Adalgisa lets her in on the secret of just who the guy she has the hots for is, Norma is furious. Pollione enters and the three of them sing an angry, seething trio that ends Act I.
In Act II (not included here) Norma decides to avenge herself against Pollione by murdering the two children they had together, and in Soumet’s play she actually does so — but Bellini’s librettist, Felice Romani, had a better idea; Norma prepares to kill her kids but can’t go through with the deed. Instead she appears at the next Druid version of a general assembly, announces that she’s dropping her opposition to the Druids who want to rebel against the Romans, condemns both Pollione and Adalgisa, then has a turn of heart, announces that she is the traitor who betrayed her people for the love of the Roman general, and commits suicide by hurling herself off a convenient cliff, leaving the kids in the hands of her father Oroveso (as Anna Russell might have said, “Ya remember Oroveso?”) to raise. The Act I presented here is actually pretty dull; Caballé is in good form vocally and Elkins (a second-tier mezzo from La Scala’s 1950’s glory days who had previously sung with Maria Callas) is also good (their duet is radiant), but the guys aren’t all that interesting and conductor Enrique Garcia Asensio rather plods through the score, missing almost all the obvious opportunities for drama and intensity. Maybe it was because he was conducting it in concert — and the singers weren’t helping maintain the mood much by milking the audience applause after every aria and ensemble for all it was worth — but this Act I of Norma was surprisingly dull, and for that I tend to blame Garcia Asensio more than the singers or Bellini. (It was also amusing that the performance was filmed in Madrid but all the post-production work was done at studios in Barcelona.)
The recital presented on the rest of the disc was marked as a bonus item, but it was consistently more interesting than Norma, partly because Caballé seemed to have matured as an artist in the intervening eight years (it also helped that in between 1971 and 1979, Franco had fallen and, probably purely coincidentally, Spanish TV had adopted color) and partly because her accompanist, pianist Miguel Zanetti, seemed like a much more interesting musician than Garcia Asensio, coloring and shaping the music in ways the conductor had been unwilling or unable to do with his orchestra (“RTVE,” the initials of the network that had broadcast the show) in Norma. The repertoire wasn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill vocal recital program, either; it began with three selections by Handel — two from his Italian operas (the little-known “An, no son io che parlo” from Ezio and the well-known “Care Selve” from Atalanta — misspelled “Atlanta” on the on-screen credit!) and one, “O, had I Jubal’s lyre,” from the oratorio Joshua — which I found amusing because Caballé’s English diction, though no great shakes (and in an aria featuring lots of vocal ornamentation that tends to make the text indecipherable in any language), was at least better than Joan Sutherland’s even though Sutherland, unlike Caballé, came from an English-speaking country. Then she did five selections by Vivaldi, one a separate song (“Vieni, vieni, o mio diletto”) and the others excerpts from his operas, and though the historically-informed performance fascists would probably pick her to pieces, Caballé’s singing here was spirited and lively.
After a bit of Cherubini’s opera Demofonte (ironically Cherubini’s only opera even tangentially in the standard repertory, Medée, was written by an Italian composer living in France and was therefore in French, though virtually all modern performances are in an Italian-language adaptation by Franz Lachner, a German, who replaced the original’s spoken dialogue with sung recitatives) Caballé did three songs by Granados, “Cançi d’amor,” “L’oeil profeta” and “Elegia eterna.” I joked that we were finally hearing Caballé sing in her native language, Spanish — and Charles pointed out to me that the “ç” with a tail isn’t used in standard Spanish and therefore that song was either in Portuguese or a regional dialect of Spanish like Catalán or Galician. (I remember encountering a video in Catalán about a community doing their own water project — and the title spelled the word “agua” with an “i,” “aigua.”) Caballé seemed more at home in the music of Granados than she had in the Baroque arias of Handel and Vivaldi or the classical-era Cherubini selection, and she did her most spirited singing of the night in her two encores: “Carceleras” from Roberto ChapÃ’s Las Hijas del Zebedeo and “Me llaman la primorosa” from a version of The Barber of Seville by Gerónimo Giménez and Manuel Nieto. It’s interesting that there’s a zarzuela version of this story to set alongside the full-length operas by Paisiello and Rossini, and even more interesting that in these lighter zarzuela arias both Caballé and Zanetti seemed to be letting their hair down and really having fun with the music. Despite VAI’s decision to give us English subtitles only for Norma and not for the songs, this was an interesting disc and the song recital was especially commendable.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Frankie Laine: An American Dreamer (JFM International Productions, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a quirky documentary called Frankie Laine: An American Dreamer on the Cox Cable’s own channel, Channel 4. This is a cut-down (to about 45 minutes, less commercials) version of a 90-minute documentary produced and directed by Jimmy Marino (who also did the interviews) and Don Wilson, written by Leslie Wilson, luckily produced while Frankie Laine was still alive and available to be interviewed (though many of the clips show him on various TV shows — still, this came out in 2006, a year before Laine’s death in San Diego at age 93), and the editing showed occasionally; for example, Laine talks about doing intermission work at Billy Berg’s nightclub in Los Angeles in 1946 and then “after Slim left” he was promoted to headliner — leaving the non-cognoscenti totally ignorant about who “Slim” was. He was Slim Gaillard, the African-American jive performer who did novelty songs like “Flat Foot Floogie,” “Cement Mixer (Put-ti, Put-ti)” and “Popity Pop (Go the Motorcycle),” titles which give a good account of his act (though he always hired good musicians; one 1945 date includes Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Jack McVea and Zutty Singleton!). According to the listing for the 90-minute version on imdb.com, Gaillard was actually shown in the film (I remember seeing him as a guest on the Flip Wilson variety TV show in the early 1970’s — Wilson was always interested in showcasing fellow African-Americans who hadn’t had much TV exposure, including one marvelous night when he had the Modern Jazz Quartet on), as were Louis Armstrong (whom Laine relied on quite a lot for material — his first album, Frankie Laine Sings!, recorded for Mercury in 1947, contained six songs, all of which Armstrong had recorded in the early 1930’s), guitarist Mundell Lowe and other important figures in Laine’s life, either as influences or collaborators.
Some things I didn’t know about Laine until I watched this show was that, like his contemporary and (first-)namesake Frank Sinatra, he was of Sicilian ancestry (I did know his real last name was “Lo Vecchio,” a weird moniker because it literally means “The Old One” in Italian); he was a champion marathon dancer before a sprained ankle led him to switch to a more contemporary and less strenuous sort of career (in fact, the show claims he still holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for the longest continuous marathon dance performance — during one dance from hell in which the promoter decided to award the prize in a sadistic fashion that makes the dance described in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? look like a New Age touchy-feely exercise by comparison: the people were told that they had to continue dancing nonstop, without the usual breaks, and wouldn’t be allowed food, drink, or bathroom breaks, and Laine won when the other male contestant wet his pants, thereby disqualifying himself and bringing the ordeal, which should have been forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, to an end); and he got his stage name from WINS radio in New York when he auditioned there and won a job as a radio singer. The station manager said “Lo Vecchio” wouldn’t do for a name and wanted to call him “Frankie Lang.” Laine thought he would be confused with the great jazz guitarist and Bing Crosby accompanist Eddie Lang (who’d actually died two years before this happened; Lang died in 1933 of a botched tonsillectomy and Laine got his radio job in 1935), and offered “Lane” as a last name instead. Then Laine got worried that he might be confused with Frances Lane, another singer on the station, and each might get the other’s fan mail (“Fan mail? I hadn’t even started yet and I was already worried about fan mail!,” the older Laine joked about his younger self), so he added the “i” to his new name.
The show also goes over much the same ground as the interview he did with George Simon for Metronome in the early 1950’s — which describes his early years as a singer in singularly miserable terms: he kept showing up at benefits and club dates asking if he could be put on to sing a number or two, and he kept being told no — in one benefit he was put off until the very end, when he was promised a song just before the concert was over, only Roy Eldridge went into his spectacular extended version of “Body and Soul” and no one was going to ask him to cut it short to put on an unknown singer to a jazz audience. Laine finally broke through when he hired a new manager, Sam Lutz, who got him a job singing at Billy Berg’s nightclub even though Berg’s initial response was, “Why should I pay him? He already sings here all the time for free!” While there he got presented with the song “That’s My Desire” and decided to announce it as “a new song” even though it had been written in 1931 (by Irving Berlin’s musical secretary, Helmy Kresa — that’s right, the world’s most popular and successful songwriter couldn’t actually write music and needed someone to take down his songs in notation, and Berlin hired Kresa after he decided the first person he auditioned for the job, George Gershwin, was overqualified and should be writing songs of his own instead of taking down Berlin’s) and had just been recorded in Laine’s then-home town, Los Angeles, for the Modern Records label by Black singer-pianist Hadda Brooks. (Laine never acknowledged Brooks for reviving “That’s My Desire” and thereby putting the old song back on the musical map, but it’s hard to believe someone with as much of an ear for Black music as Laine’s — he always named Bessie Smith as the biggest influence on his style and one can hear much more of Smith in him than one can in Billie Holiday! — hadn’t heard Brooks’ recording, especially since he was living in the same city as she.) Laine signed with the young, hungry Mercury label and “That’s My Desire” was his first record and his career-establishing hit, and he followed it up with a cover of Claude Thornhill’s “A Sunday Kind of Love” (Laine’s vocal is hardly as mellow as Fran Warren’s on the Thornhill version, but his record is still beautiful), and his records not only sold well to white audiences but dominated what were euphemistically called the “Harlem Hit Parades” until his manager unwittingly let slip to a jukebox operator whose clients were in the Black communities that Laine was white — whereupon all his records disappeared from the “Harlem Hit Parades” overnight.
The rest of the show’s account of Laine’s career was familiar — though it also covered his brief career as a songwriter (he placed “It Only Happens Once” with Nat “King” Cole — who’d had one of the biggest hits of his career with another song written by a singer, Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song,” and though the magic didn’t strike twice “It Only Happens Once” is a hauntingly beautiful song in both Laine’s and Cole’s versions — and “We’ll Be Together Again” is a great song that was buried as the flip side of Laine’s record of “Shine,” one of his audition pieces for WINS, and didn’t really become a standard until Frank Sinatra revived it on the Songs for Swinging Lovers album in 1956; this show has a marvelous montage of various high-powered singers, including Holiday, Sinatra, Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, doing “We’ll Be Together Again”) — including his meeting with Mitch Miller at Mercury, their spectacularly successful collaborations on “That Lucky Old Sun,” “Mule Train” and “Cry of the Wild Goose” (Miller was actually interviewed for this show but, alas, was not asked about the long-standing rumor that he himself supplied the famous bullwhip sound effects on “Mule Train”) and Miller’s decamping to Columbia Records in 1950 — Miller had told Laine that he would sign him to Columbia if he chose not to renew his Mercury contract when it expired, and Laine stashed away a song he’d been presented called “Jezebel” and didn’t tell anyone at Mercury it existed, so it could be his first Columbia release.
“Jezebel” is one of Laine’s finest records, featuring some spectacular register shifts that clearly influenced Elvis Presley (and Elvis wasn’t the only white rocker from the 1950’s Laine influenced: Buddy Holly actually covered “That’s My Desire”!), and though Miller’s influence on his career moved him away from his jazz roots and towards a more dramatic, emphatic style that might be considered overwrought and corny, it also moved a lot of records then and holds up surprisingly well. Laine was one of the key figures in the prehistory of rock ’n’ roll: he emerged as a star the year after the release of The Jolson Story, which led young record buyers tired of the “crooning” style of Crosby, Como and Sinatra to a ballsier, more intense “belting” style of singing with direct roots in African-American music, and between them Jolson and Laine pretty much killed the “crooning” style for young, upcoming white pop singers (though Tony Bennett managed to launch his career around this time with a style midway between the crooners and the belters) and blazed the trail for the early white rock ’n’ rollers. (They also briefly killed Frank Sinatra’s career until Sinatra decided that if he couldn’t beat them, he’d join them; aided by Nelson Riddle’s powerhouse arrangements, Sinatra showed on his Capitol records that he could belt with the best of them, and his tumultuous relationship with Ava Gardner and the aftermath of its end made Sinatra’s ballads less prayerful and more emotionally wrenching than they’d ever been before.)
The show demonstrated Laine’s success doing theme songs for Western movies and TV shows — Clint Eastwood was one of the interviewees because of the Laine-Eastwood connection via the TV show Rawhide (Laine recorded the theme song and Eastwood was one of the stars — though he was actually billed second to the now nearly-forgotten Eric Fleming; when Sergio Leone wanted an American star for his “spaghetti Western” A Fistful of Dollars he initially offered it to Fleming, then gave the part to Eastwood when Fleming turned it down … and the rest, as they say, is history) — and though Tex Ritter actually sang the theme song for the film High Noon on the actual soundtrack (and, to my mind, did it better than Laine: Ritter’s quiet, matter-of-fact understatement sounds far more ominous and appropriate than Laine’s strained, almost operatic belting) Laine got the nod for quite a few other Western film soundtracks, including Man Without a Star and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, as well as the one that reinvigorated his career after it went into the doldrums in the 1960’s: Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks’ outrageous Western spoof for which, as part of the joke, Brooks wanted a big, stentorian theme song just like a big-budget 1950’s Western and wanted Laine to sing it. The show was rather breathless in covering the last few decades of Laine’s career — there’s an interesting clip of Patti Page saying that both she and Laine kept their audiences in Britain and elsewhere in Europe even once they were largely forgotten in the U.S. because fans there are much more loyal and don’t stop liking their favorites and replace them with newer performers the way American audiences tend to — but overall Frankie Laine: An American Dreamer was a nice, if rather tackily edited (I’d love to see the long version sometime!), documentary about a very interesting and unique singer who may not have achieved the lasting superstardom of Crosby or Sinatra but nonetheless made his mark on American popular music.
I watched a quirky documentary called Frankie Laine: An American Dreamer on the Cox Cable’s own channel, Channel 4. This is a cut-down (to about 45 minutes, less commercials) version of a 90-minute documentary produced and directed by Jimmy Marino (who also did the interviews) and Don Wilson, written by Leslie Wilson, luckily produced while Frankie Laine was still alive and available to be interviewed (though many of the clips show him on various TV shows — still, this came out in 2006, a year before Laine’s death in San Diego at age 93), and the editing showed occasionally; for example, Laine talks about doing intermission work at Billy Berg’s nightclub in Los Angeles in 1946 and then “after Slim left” he was promoted to headliner — leaving the non-cognoscenti totally ignorant about who “Slim” was. He was Slim Gaillard, the African-American jive performer who did novelty songs like “Flat Foot Floogie,” “Cement Mixer (Put-ti, Put-ti)” and “Popity Pop (Go the Motorcycle),” titles which give a good account of his act (though he always hired good musicians; one 1945 date includes Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Jack McVea and Zutty Singleton!). According to the listing for the 90-minute version on imdb.com, Gaillard was actually shown in the film (I remember seeing him as a guest on the Flip Wilson variety TV show in the early 1970’s — Wilson was always interested in showcasing fellow African-Americans who hadn’t had much TV exposure, including one marvelous night when he had the Modern Jazz Quartet on), as were Louis Armstrong (whom Laine relied on quite a lot for material — his first album, Frankie Laine Sings!, recorded for Mercury in 1947, contained six songs, all of which Armstrong had recorded in the early 1930’s), guitarist Mundell Lowe and other important figures in Laine’s life, either as influences or collaborators.
Some things I didn’t know about Laine until I watched this show was that, like his contemporary and (first-)namesake Frank Sinatra, he was of Sicilian ancestry (I did know his real last name was “Lo Vecchio,” a weird moniker because it literally means “The Old One” in Italian); he was a champion marathon dancer before a sprained ankle led him to switch to a more contemporary and less strenuous sort of career (in fact, the show claims he still holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for the longest continuous marathon dance performance — during one dance from hell in which the promoter decided to award the prize in a sadistic fashion that makes the dance described in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? look like a New Age touchy-feely exercise by comparison: the people were told that they had to continue dancing nonstop, without the usual breaks, and wouldn’t be allowed food, drink, or bathroom breaks, and Laine won when the other male contestant wet his pants, thereby disqualifying himself and bringing the ordeal, which should have been forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, to an end); and he got his stage name from WINS radio in New York when he auditioned there and won a job as a radio singer. The station manager said “Lo Vecchio” wouldn’t do for a name and wanted to call him “Frankie Lang.” Laine thought he would be confused with the great jazz guitarist and Bing Crosby accompanist Eddie Lang (who’d actually died two years before this happened; Lang died in 1933 of a botched tonsillectomy and Laine got his radio job in 1935), and offered “Lane” as a last name instead. Then Laine got worried that he might be confused with Frances Lane, another singer on the station, and each might get the other’s fan mail (“Fan mail? I hadn’t even started yet and I was already worried about fan mail!,” the older Laine joked about his younger self), so he added the “i” to his new name.
The show also goes over much the same ground as the interview he did with George Simon for Metronome in the early 1950’s — which describes his early years as a singer in singularly miserable terms: he kept showing up at benefits and club dates asking if he could be put on to sing a number or two, and he kept being told no — in one benefit he was put off until the very end, when he was promised a song just before the concert was over, only Roy Eldridge went into his spectacular extended version of “Body and Soul” and no one was going to ask him to cut it short to put on an unknown singer to a jazz audience. Laine finally broke through when he hired a new manager, Sam Lutz, who got him a job singing at Billy Berg’s nightclub even though Berg’s initial response was, “Why should I pay him? He already sings here all the time for free!” While there he got presented with the song “That’s My Desire” and decided to announce it as “a new song” even though it had been written in 1931 (by Irving Berlin’s musical secretary, Helmy Kresa — that’s right, the world’s most popular and successful songwriter couldn’t actually write music and needed someone to take down his songs in notation, and Berlin hired Kresa after he decided the first person he auditioned for the job, George Gershwin, was overqualified and should be writing songs of his own instead of taking down Berlin’s) and had just been recorded in Laine’s then-home town, Los Angeles, for the Modern Records label by Black singer-pianist Hadda Brooks. (Laine never acknowledged Brooks for reviving “That’s My Desire” and thereby putting the old song back on the musical map, but it’s hard to believe someone with as much of an ear for Black music as Laine’s — he always named Bessie Smith as the biggest influence on his style and one can hear much more of Smith in him than one can in Billie Holiday! — hadn’t heard Brooks’ recording, especially since he was living in the same city as she.) Laine signed with the young, hungry Mercury label and “That’s My Desire” was his first record and his career-establishing hit, and he followed it up with a cover of Claude Thornhill’s “A Sunday Kind of Love” (Laine’s vocal is hardly as mellow as Fran Warren’s on the Thornhill version, but his record is still beautiful), and his records not only sold well to white audiences but dominated what were euphemistically called the “Harlem Hit Parades” until his manager unwittingly let slip to a jukebox operator whose clients were in the Black communities that Laine was white — whereupon all his records disappeared from the “Harlem Hit Parades” overnight.
The rest of the show’s account of Laine’s career was familiar — though it also covered his brief career as a songwriter (he placed “It Only Happens Once” with Nat “King” Cole — who’d had one of the biggest hits of his career with another song written by a singer, Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song,” and though the magic didn’t strike twice “It Only Happens Once” is a hauntingly beautiful song in both Laine’s and Cole’s versions — and “We’ll Be Together Again” is a great song that was buried as the flip side of Laine’s record of “Shine,” one of his audition pieces for WINS, and didn’t really become a standard until Frank Sinatra revived it on the Songs for Swinging Lovers album in 1956; this show has a marvelous montage of various high-powered singers, including Holiday, Sinatra, Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, doing “We’ll Be Together Again”) — including his meeting with Mitch Miller at Mercury, their spectacularly successful collaborations on “That Lucky Old Sun,” “Mule Train” and “Cry of the Wild Goose” (Miller was actually interviewed for this show but, alas, was not asked about the long-standing rumor that he himself supplied the famous bullwhip sound effects on “Mule Train”) and Miller’s decamping to Columbia Records in 1950 — Miller had told Laine that he would sign him to Columbia if he chose not to renew his Mercury contract when it expired, and Laine stashed away a song he’d been presented called “Jezebel” and didn’t tell anyone at Mercury it existed, so it could be his first Columbia release.
“Jezebel” is one of Laine’s finest records, featuring some spectacular register shifts that clearly influenced Elvis Presley (and Elvis wasn’t the only white rocker from the 1950’s Laine influenced: Buddy Holly actually covered “That’s My Desire”!), and though Miller’s influence on his career moved him away from his jazz roots and towards a more dramatic, emphatic style that might be considered overwrought and corny, it also moved a lot of records then and holds up surprisingly well. Laine was one of the key figures in the prehistory of rock ’n’ roll: he emerged as a star the year after the release of The Jolson Story, which led young record buyers tired of the “crooning” style of Crosby, Como and Sinatra to a ballsier, more intense “belting” style of singing with direct roots in African-American music, and between them Jolson and Laine pretty much killed the “crooning” style for young, upcoming white pop singers (though Tony Bennett managed to launch his career around this time with a style midway between the crooners and the belters) and blazed the trail for the early white rock ’n’ rollers. (They also briefly killed Frank Sinatra’s career until Sinatra decided that if he couldn’t beat them, he’d join them; aided by Nelson Riddle’s powerhouse arrangements, Sinatra showed on his Capitol records that he could belt with the best of them, and his tumultuous relationship with Ava Gardner and the aftermath of its end made Sinatra’s ballads less prayerful and more emotionally wrenching than they’d ever been before.)
The show demonstrated Laine’s success doing theme songs for Western movies and TV shows — Clint Eastwood was one of the interviewees because of the Laine-Eastwood connection via the TV show Rawhide (Laine recorded the theme song and Eastwood was one of the stars — though he was actually billed second to the now nearly-forgotten Eric Fleming; when Sergio Leone wanted an American star for his “spaghetti Western” A Fistful of Dollars he initially offered it to Fleming, then gave the part to Eastwood when Fleming turned it down … and the rest, as they say, is history) — and though Tex Ritter actually sang the theme song for the film High Noon on the actual soundtrack (and, to my mind, did it better than Laine: Ritter’s quiet, matter-of-fact understatement sounds far more ominous and appropriate than Laine’s strained, almost operatic belting) Laine got the nod for quite a few other Western film soundtracks, including Man Without a Star and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, as well as the one that reinvigorated his career after it went into the doldrums in the 1960’s: Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks’ outrageous Western spoof for which, as part of the joke, Brooks wanted a big, stentorian theme song just like a big-budget 1950’s Western and wanted Laine to sing it. The show was rather breathless in covering the last few decades of Laine’s career — there’s an interesting clip of Patti Page saying that both she and Laine kept their audiences in Britain and elsewhere in Europe even once they were largely forgotten in the U.S. because fans there are much more loyal and don’t stop liking their favorites and replace them with newer performers the way American audiences tend to — but overall Frankie Laine: An American Dreamer was a nice, if rather tackily edited (I’d love to see the long version sometime!), documentary about a very interesting and unique singer who may not have achieved the lasting superstardom of Crosby or Sinatra but nonetheless made his mark on American popular music.
Hubble: 15 Years of Discovery (ESA/Hubble, 2005)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles, our friend Garry and I watched a DVD he’d brought over of a 2005 German documentary called Hubble: 15 Years of Discovery, an interesting if somewhat disappointing and rather lumbering documentary about all the cool stuff the Hubble space telescope has shown us about the universe. It was directed by Lars Lindberg Christensen and written by him with Stuart Clark and Stefania Varano, and it was a bit disappointing in that though it promised actual images from the Hubble telescope, most of what was really shown was computer animations and simulations of what merging galaxies and the like would theoretically look like (though since their interactions would take place over a period of billions of years this is really time-lapsed time-lapse photography!). I joked that since the show described galaxies as encountering each other in space and their gravitational fields pulling them together and merging them into super-galaxies, some Ayn Rand Libertarian at a science-fiction convention would probably cite that as yet more “evidence” that lassiez-faire capitalism is the one good, true and moral economic system: “You see, even in outer space galaxies do mergers and acquisitions!” I had expected this to be about 45 minutes (the usual length of an hour-long TV program less commercials) but it was nearly an hour and a half and it did tend to drag.
Charles, our friend Garry and I watched a DVD he’d brought over of a 2005 German documentary called Hubble: 15 Years of Discovery, an interesting if somewhat disappointing and rather lumbering documentary about all the cool stuff the Hubble space telescope has shown us about the universe. It was directed by Lars Lindberg Christensen and written by him with Stuart Clark and Stefania Varano, and it was a bit disappointing in that though it promised actual images from the Hubble telescope, most of what was really shown was computer animations and simulations of what merging galaxies and the like would theoretically look like (though since their interactions would take place over a period of billions of years this is really time-lapsed time-lapse photography!). I joked that since the show described galaxies as encountering each other in space and their gravitational fields pulling them together and merging them into super-galaxies, some Ayn Rand Libertarian at a science-fiction convention would probably cite that as yet more “evidence” that lassiez-faire capitalism is the one good, true and moral economic system: “You see, even in outer space galaxies do mergers and acquisitions!” I had expected this to be about 45 minutes (the usual length of an hour-long TV program less commercials) but it was nearly an hour and a half and it did tend to drag.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Shine On, Harvest Moon (Warner Bros., 1944)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Shine On, Harvest Moon (actually the title doesn’t have a comma, but the name of the song the film was named after does), a Warner Bros. musical from 1944 that purported to be a biopic of Jack Norworth and Nora Bayes. In case you haven’t heard of them, they’re the husband-and-wife vaudeville team who introduced the song “Shine On, Harvest Moon” and quite a few other standards from the first decade of the 20th century. From other sources I’ve learned that Norworth and Bayes were the Sonny and Cher of their day; when they met he was an established star and she was a nobody, he coached her and built their act into a major attraction, then they broke up and she ended up a bigger star than he was. It got worse when Norworth thought, “If I did it once, I can do it again,” and picked up (though he did not get romantically involved with) another young female singer-dancer of potentially great talent, worked with her, shaped her, helped her project her gifts, then saw her leave him and become an even bigger star on her own. Her name was Ginger Rogers! Instead Shine On, Harvest Moon, directed by David Butler from a committee-written script (story by Richard Weil, screenplay by him with Sam Hellman, Francis Swan and James V. Kern), was an engagingly dark-ish musical in which Norworth (Dennis Morgan) is a vaudevillian who’s playing support to singer Blanche Mallory (Irene Manning). Also on the bill is magician The Great Georgetti (Jack Carson — this is early in the attempt of Warner Bros. to convert Morgan and Carson into a singing/comedy team on the order of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope at Paramount), a friend of Norworth’s and another client of manager “Poppa Carl” (S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall at his most avuncular). Mallory asks Norworth to team up with her but he declines, saying that he works solo and doesn’t want to be part of a partnership. Mallory has lost her job at Milwaukee’s Crystal Theatre because the big new trend is sister acts.
Georgetti tells Norworth that there’s a particularly good singer at the local sleazy nightclub doing an especially good version of one of Norworth’s songs (both Norworth and Bayes wrote quite a lot of their own material, jointly and severally), and they go to scout her. Of course she’s Nora Bayes (Ann Sheridan, though imdb.com lists Lynn Martin as her voice double), and when Norworth and Georgetti arrive the club’s owner, Dan Costello (Robert Shayne), is literally pimping her out to his principal backer, Tim Donovan (William B. Davidson), in a scene written surprisingly brazenly for a film from the era of strict Production Code enforcement. When Norworth asks her to come with him instead, Costello grabs her arm, Norworth tries to wrest her from his grip, and the scene ends up in a free-for-all fight that ends up with Norworth, Bayes and Georgetti all arrested (though Georgetti, an experienced magician, works free from his handcuffs). The three are freed in a wild production number that takes place in night court, with the police officers and even the judge joining in — throwing us a curveball in what we thought was originally going to be a “normal” backstage musical, with the characters singing and dancing only when they were doing so professionally in performance or rehearsal. Norworth tries Mallory and Bayes as a faux-“sister” act after Bayes’ audition as a solo fails (courtesy of a claque Costello has hired to disrupt it) but Mallory bails on it after Bayes’ solo number, “How Can They Tell That I’m Irish?,” goes over with an audience composed mostly of members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. In desperation Norworth goes on stage with Bayes and the two are instant stars, and while they’re on a carriage ride on the night of a full moon the two work out That Song and he proposes marriage to her, at least partly because if they’re going to be traveling together it’ll be easier to need only one room and bed instead of two. As husband and wife they go to New York, expecting to make it into the vaudeville big-time — only Dan Costello has blacklisted them and purchased all the vaudeville chains to make sure their career can’t go anywhere. Their privations as they can’t find work and he can’t even place “Shine On, Harvest Moon” with a publisher unless he can get Blanche Mallory to sing it — which she won’t unless he divorces Nora and marries her — reach depths unplumbed in a major musical since the early days and films like Applause, Burlesque and Lord Byron of Broadway. Even when Georgetti finds a vaudeville theatre so small Costello hasn’t bought it yet, Costello strikes again by telling anyone who plays on a bill with them that he’ll never hire them in any of his theatres.
They finally get their break when a burlesque house books Norworth as a single and he’s bombing — until Nora shows up in the audience — and then suddenly he regains his voice and sings his heart out, a scout for Ziegfeld is in the audience, and in a final color sequence (the rest of the film is in black-and-white) they’re shown in a Ziegfeld extravaganza not only of “Shine On, Harvest Moon” but of Jack Norworth’s entire song catalogue (or at least as much of it as Warner Bros. could get in one reel). The transition is done more neatly than it usually was in black-and-white films containing one color sequence — a close-up of a stage light before it’s turned on cuts to a close-up of another stage light, this one with colored gel filters in front of it. Shine On, Harvest Moon is a surprisingly dark musical — when I saw cinematographer Arthur Edeson’s name on the credits I though it was an odd choice given that his best-known films were All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1931 Frankenstein, the 1941 Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, but in fact his rich, chiaroscuro style was just right for a film that keeps its central characters in penury for so long (and runs them through a dilemma that would become all too real for many Hollywood people after the House Committee on Un-American Activities struck in 1947) — and it’s engaging, sometimes annoying (all the repetitive jokes about the dumbness of Marie Wilson, playing Georgetti’s girlfriend, really get old after a while, especially when Jack Carson sings a whole song about how dumb she is!), sometimes surprisingly moving and not at all the mindless “fun” musical one might expect from the title, the subject (as predictably bowdlerized by the writing committee) and the stars!
The film was Shine On, Harvest Moon (actually the title doesn’t have a comma, but the name of the song the film was named after does), a Warner Bros. musical from 1944 that purported to be a biopic of Jack Norworth and Nora Bayes. In case you haven’t heard of them, they’re the husband-and-wife vaudeville team who introduced the song “Shine On, Harvest Moon” and quite a few other standards from the first decade of the 20th century. From other sources I’ve learned that Norworth and Bayes were the Sonny and Cher of their day; when they met he was an established star and she was a nobody, he coached her and built their act into a major attraction, then they broke up and she ended up a bigger star than he was. It got worse when Norworth thought, “If I did it once, I can do it again,” and picked up (though he did not get romantically involved with) another young female singer-dancer of potentially great talent, worked with her, shaped her, helped her project her gifts, then saw her leave him and become an even bigger star on her own. Her name was Ginger Rogers! Instead Shine On, Harvest Moon, directed by David Butler from a committee-written script (story by Richard Weil, screenplay by him with Sam Hellman, Francis Swan and James V. Kern), was an engagingly dark-ish musical in which Norworth (Dennis Morgan) is a vaudevillian who’s playing support to singer Blanche Mallory (Irene Manning). Also on the bill is magician The Great Georgetti (Jack Carson — this is early in the attempt of Warner Bros. to convert Morgan and Carson into a singing/comedy team on the order of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope at Paramount), a friend of Norworth’s and another client of manager “Poppa Carl” (S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall at his most avuncular). Mallory asks Norworth to team up with her but he declines, saying that he works solo and doesn’t want to be part of a partnership. Mallory has lost her job at Milwaukee’s Crystal Theatre because the big new trend is sister acts.
Georgetti tells Norworth that there’s a particularly good singer at the local sleazy nightclub doing an especially good version of one of Norworth’s songs (both Norworth and Bayes wrote quite a lot of their own material, jointly and severally), and they go to scout her. Of course she’s Nora Bayes (Ann Sheridan, though imdb.com lists Lynn Martin as her voice double), and when Norworth and Georgetti arrive the club’s owner, Dan Costello (Robert Shayne), is literally pimping her out to his principal backer, Tim Donovan (William B. Davidson), in a scene written surprisingly brazenly for a film from the era of strict Production Code enforcement. When Norworth asks her to come with him instead, Costello grabs her arm, Norworth tries to wrest her from his grip, and the scene ends up in a free-for-all fight that ends up with Norworth, Bayes and Georgetti all arrested (though Georgetti, an experienced magician, works free from his handcuffs). The three are freed in a wild production number that takes place in night court, with the police officers and even the judge joining in — throwing us a curveball in what we thought was originally going to be a “normal” backstage musical, with the characters singing and dancing only when they were doing so professionally in performance or rehearsal. Norworth tries Mallory and Bayes as a faux-“sister” act after Bayes’ audition as a solo fails (courtesy of a claque Costello has hired to disrupt it) but Mallory bails on it after Bayes’ solo number, “How Can They Tell That I’m Irish?,” goes over with an audience composed mostly of members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. In desperation Norworth goes on stage with Bayes and the two are instant stars, and while they’re on a carriage ride on the night of a full moon the two work out That Song and he proposes marriage to her, at least partly because if they’re going to be traveling together it’ll be easier to need only one room and bed instead of two. As husband and wife they go to New York, expecting to make it into the vaudeville big-time — only Dan Costello has blacklisted them and purchased all the vaudeville chains to make sure their career can’t go anywhere. Their privations as they can’t find work and he can’t even place “Shine On, Harvest Moon” with a publisher unless he can get Blanche Mallory to sing it — which she won’t unless he divorces Nora and marries her — reach depths unplumbed in a major musical since the early days and films like Applause, Burlesque and Lord Byron of Broadway. Even when Georgetti finds a vaudeville theatre so small Costello hasn’t bought it yet, Costello strikes again by telling anyone who plays on a bill with them that he’ll never hire them in any of his theatres.
They finally get their break when a burlesque house books Norworth as a single and he’s bombing — until Nora shows up in the audience — and then suddenly he regains his voice and sings his heart out, a scout for Ziegfeld is in the audience, and in a final color sequence (the rest of the film is in black-and-white) they’re shown in a Ziegfeld extravaganza not only of “Shine On, Harvest Moon” but of Jack Norworth’s entire song catalogue (or at least as much of it as Warner Bros. could get in one reel). The transition is done more neatly than it usually was in black-and-white films containing one color sequence — a close-up of a stage light before it’s turned on cuts to a close-up of another stage light, this one with colored gel filters in front of it. Shine On, Harvest Moon is a surprisingly dark musical — when I saw cinematographer Arthur Edeson’s name on the credits I though it was an odd choice given that his best-known films were All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1931 Frankenstein, the 1941 Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, but in fact his rich, chiaroscuro style was just right for a film that keeps its central characters in penury for so long (and runs them through a dilemma that would become all too real for many Hollywood people after the House Committee on Un-American Activities struck in 1947) — and it’s engaging, sometimes annoying (all the repetitive jokes about the dumbness of Marie Wilson, playing Georgetti’s girlfriend, really get old after a while, especially when Jack Carson sings a whole song about how dumb she is!), sometimes surprisingly moving and not at all the mindless “fun” musical one might expect from the title, the subject (as predictably bowdlerized by the writing committee) and the stars!
Friday, March 8, 2013
Passion Flower (MGM, 1930)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I ended up watching a movie I’d recorded earlier in the day from a Charles Bickford tribute on TCM: Passion Flower, a 1930 film from MGM based on a similarly titled novel by Kathleen Norris (imdb.com lists three other films called Passion Flower, a 1921 silent (not based on Norris’s novel but a Norma Talmadge tear-jerker in which, according to the imdb.com review, she has to deal with sexual harassment … from her grandfather!), a TV movie from 1986 and a theatrical film, also called Passion’s Flower (with the possessive), from 1991. This Passion Flower reunites Bickford and Kay Johnson from the cast of Cecil B. DeMille’s first talkie, Dynamite, in similar roles (and the director here is William DeMille, Cecil’s older brother): he’s a chauffeur and she’s a rich girl who falls in love with him and insists on marrying him — despite the threat from her father (Winter Hall) that if she does so, he’ll disinherit her and leave her to her own devices. The central relationship in the movie, though — at least in its first few reels — isn’t between Katherine, a.k.a. “Cassy” (Kay Johnson) and her chauffeur boyfriend Dan Wallace (Charles Bickford) but between Katherine and her cousin Dulce (pronounced “Dulcie”) Morado (Kay Francis, top-billed; Charles noted that both leading women had the same first name and called it a “Battle of the Kays!”). At first glance at the cast list I wondered if Francis was going to be playing a Latina vamp, but it turned out she only married that name, rejecting love in favor of security and hooking up with an older man, Antonio Morado (Lewis Stone, who doesn’t look very convincing as a Latino!), because he had money. (Francis’s infamous lisp and the limitations of 1930 sound recording make “Cassy” sound like the more common contraction “Cathy.”) Cassy insists on marrying Dan even though that means she’s going to be turned out of her home and lose all her dad’s money. Cousin Dulce decides to help out by giving Dan and Cassy the farm next door to her dad’s estate so they can make a decent, hard-working living running it, but Dan’s too proud to accept any charity from his wife’s family. Instead he and Cassy move to the big city, to an attic room in a boardinghouse owned by Mrs. Harney (ZaSu Pitts at her most world-weary; after the artistic triumph and financial disaster of Greed, in which she gave one of the finest performances ever put on film, she got relegated to ditzy comedies in which she cast an oddly sad mien at times, as if she were all too aware these sorry roles were a total waste of her talents), and Dan gets a job as a stevedore.
Then there’s a jump cut and we’re suddenly five years later: Dan and Cassy are still in that attic, and they have two children, Tommy (Dickie Moore) and a younger girl whose name I don’t recall hearing on the soundtrack and who isn’t billed either in the credits or on imdb.com. Then the Depression hits and Dan, who had worked up to assistant foreman, is laid off suddenly on his fifth anniversary (writers like Kathleen Norris and the people who adapted her, Martin Flavin, L. E. Johnson and Edith Fitzgerald, really knew how to lard it on) and he comes home shame-facedly to find Dulce in his apartment. He throws her out but later, unable to find another job, he decides to accept her offer of that farm after all, and they move there. The second act — this is one early talkie that really is structured like a play even though it wasn’t based on one — consists of the growing, and totally inexplicable, attraction between Dan and Dulce, who’s determined to seduce him away from his long-suffering wife even though not only is his wife her cousin but she already has a husband (albeit one who, it’s hinted, has tolerated and winked at her affairs before). She actually does get him to leave and travel with her to Europe, where their life together is a series of meaningless parties — during one of which, taking place in London, a guest played by an uncredited but easily recognizable Ray Milland gives him a letter from Cassy that’s been chasing him around Europe. He gets the letter at long last — it includes a photo of their two kids and dog and pleads with him to come back for the children’s sake, if not for hers — but he’s still determined to divorce Cassy and marry Dulce (why?). Cassy says she’ll give him his divorce but only if he meets her and asks for it in person — and of course once he’s back on the farm, in the family atmosphere and with the kids guilt-tripping the hell out of him, he comes back and leaves the now-widowed Dulce to reconcile with his wife and family.
It’s not much of a story, and frankly though Charles Bickford has a rough-hewn handsomeness it’s hard to believe in him as the man no woman (or at least no woman in that family) can resist. MGM’s later star, Clark Gable, could have pulled that off, but in essence Bickford was the beta version of Gable and MGM was still working out the kinks in the typology. It’s one of those MGM movies where they seem to be poaching on Warners’ territory — only at Warners James Cagney would have been the proletarian lead and there’d have been a proletarian girl for him to end up with at the end (probably played by Joan Blondell) — less so from the subject matter than the atmosphere. The director, William DeMille, and his cinematographer, Hal Rosson, shoot almost the entire movie in what would then have been called “German style” and would later be known as film noir — all vertiginous angles, stylized sets in forced perspective, and chiaroscuro contrasts of light and darkness. It’s a visual style we expect to adorn a much darker, more sordid sort of story than this, and it’s especially odd for Rosson given that his best-known credit is The Wizard of Oz and he wasn’t usually into this sort of high-contrast black-and-white (he was one of the few filmmakers of his generation who welcomed it when color became standard in the 1960’s; “Life is color,” he told Leonard Maltin). Aside from the visual distinction and the fact that there’s almost no music in the film (just under the opening and closing credits and a few pieces of source music during the party scenes at which Dan and Dulce are wasting their lives towards the end) — this was still early enough in the history of talkies that background music was considered a holdover from the silent era and it was thought audiences wouldn’t like hearing non-source music and people talking at the same time —Passion Flower is the sort of movie that seems like you’ve seen it before even if you haven’t, but it was still fun in a certain quirky way.
Charles and I ended up watching a movie I’d recorded earlier in the day from a Charles Bickford tribute on TCM: Passion Flower, a 1930 film from MGM based on a similarly titled novel by Kathleen Norris (imdb.com lists three other films called Passion Flower, a 1921 silent (not based on Norris’s novel but a Norma Talmadge tear-jerker in which, according to the imdb.com review, she has to deal with sexual harassment … from her grandfather!), a TV movie from 1986 and a theatrical film, also called Passion’s Flower (with the possessive), from 1991. This Passion Flower reunites Bickford and Kay Johnson from the cast of Cecil B. DeMille’s first talkie, Dynamite, in similar roles (and the director here is William DeMille, Cecil’s older brother): he’s a chauffeur and she’s a rich girl who falls in love with him and insists on marrying him — despite the threat from her father (Winter Hall) that if she does so, he’ll disinherit her and leave her to her own devices. The central relationship in the movie, though — at least in its first few reels — isn’t between Katherine, a.k.a. “Cassy” (Kay Johnson) and her chauffeur boyfriend Dan Wallace (Charles Bickford) but between Katherine and her cousin Dulce (pronounced “Dulcie”) Morado (Kay Francis, top-billed; Charles noted that both leading women had the same first name and called it a “Battle of the Kays!”). At first glance at the cast list I wondered if Francis was going to be playing a Latina vamp, but it turned out she only married that name, rejecting love in favor of security and hooking up with an older man, Antonio Morado (Lewis Stone, who doesn’t look very convincing as a Latino!), because he had money. (Francis’s infamous lisp and the limitations of 1930 sound recording make “Cassy” sound like the more common contraction “Cathy.”) Cassy insists on marrying Dan even though that means she’s going to be turned out of her home and lose all her dad’s money. Cousin Dulce decides to help out by giving Dan and Cassy the farm next door to her dad’s estate so they can make a decent, hard-working living running it, but Dan’s too proud to accept any charity from his wife’s family. Instead he and Cassy move to the big city, to an attic room in a boardinghouse owned by Mrs. Harney (ZaSu Pitts at her most world-weary; after the artistic triumph and financial disaster of Greed, in which she gave one of the finest performances ever put on film, she got relegated to ditzy comedies in which she cast an oddly sad mien at times, as if she were all too aware these sorry roles were a total waste of her talents), and Dan gets a job as a stevedore.
Then there’s a jump cut and we’re suddenly five years later: Dan and Cassy are still in that attic, and they have two children, Tommy (Dickie Moore) and a younger girl whose name I don’t recall hearing on the soundtrack and who isn’t billed either in the credits or on imdb.com. Then the Depression hits and Dan, who had worked up to assistant foreman, is laid off suddenly on his fifth anniversary (writers like Kathleen Norris and the people who adapted her, Martin Flavin, L. E. Johnson and Edith Fitzgerald, really knew how to lard it on) and he comes home shame-facedly to find Dulce in his apartment. He throws her out but later, unable to find another job, he decides to accept her offer of that farm after all, and they move there. The second act — this is one early talkie that really is structured like a play even though it wasn’t based on one — consists of the growing, and totally inexplicable, attraction between Dan and Dulce, who’s determined to seduce him away from his long-suffering wife even though not only is his wife her cousin but she already has a husband (albeit one who, it’s hinted, has tolerated and winked at her affairs before). She actually does get him to leave and travel with her to Europe, where their life together is a series of meaningless parties — during one of which, taking place in London, a guest played by an uncredited but easily recognizable Ray Milland gives him a letter from Cassy that’s been chasing him around Europe. He gets the letter at long last — it includes a photo of their two kids and dog and pleads with him to come back for the children’s sake, if not for hers — but he’s still determined to divorce Cassy and marry Dulce (why?). Cassy says she’ll give him his divorce but only if he meets her and asks for it in person — and of course once he’s back on the farm, in the family atmosphere and with the kids guilt-tripping the hell out of him, he comes back and leaves the now-widowed Dulce to reconcile with his wife and family.
It’s not much of a story, and frankly though Charles Bickford has a rough-hewn handsomeness it’s hard to believe in him as the man no woman (or at least no woman in that family) can resist. MGM’s later star, Clark Gable, could have pulled that off, but in essence Bickford was the beta version of Gable and MGM was still working out the kinks in the typology. It’s one of those MGM movies where they seem to be poaching on Warners’ territory — only at Warners James Cagney would have been the proletarian lead and there’d have been a proletarian girl for him to end up with at the end (probably played by Joan Blondell) — less so from the subject matter than the atmosphere. The director, William DeMille, and his cinematographer, Hal Rosson, shoot almost the entire movie in what would then have been called “German style” and would later be known as film noir — all vertiginous angles, stylized sets in forced perspective, and chiaroscuro contrasts of light and darkness. It’s a visual style we expect to adorn a much darker, more sordid sort of story than this, and it’s especially odd for Rosson given that his best-known credit is The Wizard of Oz and he wasn’t usually into this sort of high-contrast black-and-white (he was one of the few filmmakers of his generation who welcomed it when color became standard in the 1960’s; “Life is color,” he told Leonard Maltin). Aside from the visual distinction and the fact that there’s almost no music in the film (just under the opening and closing credits and a few pieces of source music during the party scenes at which Dan and Dulce are wasting their lives towards the end) — this was still early enough in the history of talkies that background music was considered a holdover from the silent era and it was thought audiences wouldn’t like hearing non-source music and people talking at the same time —Passion Flower is the sort of movie that seems like you’ve seen it before even if you haven’t, but it was still fun in a certain quirky way.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
The Surrogate (Johnson Entertainment Group/Shadowland, 2013)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I decided to take advantage of my last lonely morning and watch The Surrogate, the first of two new made-for-TV movies on the subject of crazy surrogate mothers Lifetime premiered last weekend. I watched the second one, The Surrogacy Trap, “live” when it aired last Sunday night and recorded The Surrogate when it was first shown the day before — and it turns out The Surrogate is so obscure there isn’t an imdb.com page on it at all (there’s a listing for an in-production film called The Surrogate but the writers’ names are different) and so I had to resort to re-screening the recording and pulling the credits off it just like in the bad old pre-Internet days. As for the film itself, The Surrogate is a monumental example of Lifetime at its absolute worst: unbelievable and so intensely melodramatic The Surrogacy Trap looks like an understated drawing-room comedy by comparison. The Surrogate opens in a huge mansion with a domestic-violence scene between a middle-aged man and a young woman. They’re chasing each other through the house as they have an argument, and eventually they confront each other in the entrance hall (this house is big enough it has an entrance hall), he slaps her, she kicks him in the balls and that incapacitates him long enough that she’s able to grab the keys to her Porsche and drive away. Then there’s a stock shot of a beach and a title reading “four years later,” and it turns out that four years later novelist Jacob Kelly (Cameron Mathison, a soap-opera actor from All My Children who had also starred in a domestic drama for Lifetime called The Wife I Met Online, which they showed right after The Surrogate), who had turned out a novel called Blackberry Winter (which, judging from the dust jacket we see — a black-and-white cover with a photo of a branch from a snow-covered tree — is probably considerably more highbrow than the movie we’re watching it in) but then got blocked and ended up teaching writing at Whittemore College. The young woman from the opening scene is there too as a college staff person, sitting in on his class when he calls her in, kisses her, she slaps him but then she leaps into his arms and he ends up having her on his desk in full view of his students — and then a cut-back to her standing in the doorway of his class with a moony look on his face indicates that that scene is merely a fantasy of hers.
I decided to take advantage of my last lonely morning and watch The Surrogate, the first of two new made-for-TV movies on the subject of crazy surrogate mothers Lifetime premiered last weekend. I watched the second one, The Surrogacy Trap, “live” when it aired last Sunday night and recorded The Surrogate when it was first shown the day before — and it turns out The Surrogate is so obscure there isn’t an imdb.com page on it at all (there’s a listing for an in-production film called The Surrogate but the writers’ names are different) and so I had to resort to re-screening the recording and pulling the credits off it just like in the bad old pre-Internet days. As for the film itself, The Surrogate is a monumental example of Lifetime at its absolute worst: unbelievable and so intensely melodramatic The Surrogacy Trap looks like an understated drawing-room comedy by comparison. The Surrogate opens in a huge mansion with a domestic-violence scene between a middle-aged man and a young woman. They’re chasing each other through the house as they have an argument, and eventually they confront each other in the entrance hall (this house is big enough it has an entrance hall), he slaps her, she kicks him in the balls and that incapacitates him long enough that she’s able to grab the keys to her Porsche and drive away. Then there’s a stock shot of a beach and a title reading “four years later,” and it turns out that four years later novelist Jacob Kelly (Cameron Mathison, a soap-opera actor from All My Children who had also starred in a domestic drama for Lifetime called The Wife I Met Online, which they showed right after The Surrogate), who had turned out a novel called Blackberry Winter (which, judging from the dust jacket we see — a black-and-white cover with a photo of a branch from a snow-covered tree — is probably considerably more highbrow than the movie we’re watching it in) but then got blocked and ended up teaching writing at Whittemore College. The young woman from the opening scene is there too as a college staff person, sitting in on his class when he calls her in, kisses her, she slaps him but then she leaps into his arms and he ends up having her on his desk in full view of his students — and then a cut-back to her standing in the doorway of his class with a moony look on his face indicates that that scene is merely a fantasy of hers.
Her name is Kate Randall
(Amy Scott) and she’s decided to break up Our Hero’s marriage to Allison (Annie
Wersching), a real-estate agent who had a miscarriage and then got diagnosed
with ovarian cancer, but before they removed her ovaries they harvested her
eggs, fertilized them in vitro
with Jacob’s sperm, then froze them — only 11 of the 12 are dead and only one
can give the Kellys the child they always wanted. Like the surrogate-from-hell
in The Surrogacy Trap, Kate has a
demented crush on Jacob and is desperate to get him — but she’s considerably
crazier, more determined and also more homicidal. She overhears Jacob tell
another person on the college staff — the typical avuncular African-American
who’s the voice of reason in productions like this these days (only she’s a
woman and she’s younger than this character usually is — indeed Jacob actually
asks her to be his wife’s surrogate herself, but having already experienced
pregnancy once she backs off) — that he and his wife are seeking a surrogate,
and they’ve gone to an agency called “Carriers” (which sounds pretty sick in
itself — usually when I hear the word “carriers” in connection with humans
bearing something inside their bodies, I think “disease”!) to hire one. They’ve
already picked one out, Remy — only Kate, using a black wig (she’s naturally
blonde) to disguise herself as an old friend of Remy’s named Nancy (who’s
actually in San Francisco, whereas this story is set in Los Angeles), ambushes
Remy at a club, drugs her drink and pushes her off the building’s roof. Then
she kills Remy’s boyfriend Max when he gets too close to the truth about her —
though she raises Jacob’s suspicions because he was on the phone to Max at the
time Kate killed him. Kate also frames Jacob by hacking his faculty e-mail
account and forging e-mails that make it look like he’s cyber-stalking her,
stealing his credit card info to buy herself roses and sexy underwear to make
it look like Jacob is buying these things for her as part of an affair (which, since
Jacob already cheated on Allison with an old friend from college five years
before, Allison is all too ready to believe) and even rents “them” a hotel room
which, as Allison said in what’s probably the best bad line in a script full of
them, “costs more than you spent on our whole honeymoon!” Kate even lures Jacob
to the place she’s staying in and provokes an argument with him which two
neighbors here, then slams a door into her own face to give herself a black eye
and a cut requiring 13 stitches so she can claim Jacob beat her up and get him
fired from his job.
The film’s second half turns into The Great Lie meets Misery, as it develops that the whole point of Kate’s machinations was so
Jacob would be free of both work and family obligations and she could support
him with the multi-million dollar inheritance she got from her late father
while he just sat and wrote. Only she knows exactly the plot of the book she wants him to write: a
17-year-old girl gets passed from her rich father to a fellow businessman with
whom he’s trying to arrange a merger, the other guy insists on sex with the
daughter as part of the deal, when she resists he rapes her, and of course this
being a movie she gets infallibly pregnant at a single contact. She wants to
abort the rapist’s baby but dad insists she keep it or he’ll cut her out of his
will — do I really need to tell
you that this is Kate’s own story and the set-up for the domestic-violence
scene we saw during the opening credits? — and unable either to keep the baby
from being born or to put it up for adoption once it is born, she kills the inconvenient child and blames it
on “crib death.” The authorities buy that but her dad doesn’t; he confronts her
and she escapes, and though he writes her out of his will she discovers the one
properly executed copy of his new will, shreds it and gets the money and the
huge, remote house where the film began. Jacob is living there because he and
Allison have agreed that the only way to keep Kate from making good on her
threat to kill the baby inside her is for Jacob to pretend to be willing to
leave Allison for Kate and to move into the mansion — where she’s carefully cut
him off from any connection with the outside world, grinding his cell phone
into silicon dust with her heel and cutting off the land line and the Internet
(when he protests that he needs an Internet connection to research the book she
wants him to write, she says her daddy left her a huge library and he can use that to research — how un-21st century!),
though somehow Allison (ya remember Allison?) has managed to rent a place nearby (well, she is a realtor — or is that a Realtor? — so she may have
connections for locating properties the rest of us wouldn’t) and she and Jacob
pass notes to each other through the crack in an ornamental brick wall near the
trash cans when Jacob takes out the trash, which seems to be the only time Kate
ever lets him go out.
Alas, two
weeks before the baby’s due date Kate catches on to the Kellys’ message drop (I
joked that Jacob would try to lie his way out of this and say, “Would you
believe I’m a Russian spy?”) and, realizing that Allison is the problem, tries
to take her out with a high-powered rifle — alas for her it’s a carbine and not
a semi-automatic and so she can’t get the shots out fast enough once she misses
the first time, and Allison gets away and summons the local sheriff — only
while all this is happening, how much do you want to bet that Allison’s water
breaks (we see an un-lovely shot of the stuff dripping out from under her dress) and she starts going
into labor right then and there? Her strength holds out long enough to put
Jacob in bondage in the basement, chaining him to a support beam, though he
manages to use a broom to reach for a saw and use the saw to cut open the beam
and escape, and eventually both he and Allison confront Kate and threaten to
kill her then and there if she doesn’t start pushing so their baby can be born
— which puts Allison in the weird position of doing a D.I.Y. midwife delivery
of her own son. Kate tries to flee but the sheriff’s deputy catches her — only
in a weird ending that seems to be setting up a Devil in the Flesh II-type sequel, the film ends with Kate and the
sheriff’s deputy in a lip-lock that makes it look like she’s going to seduce
him into letting her go. The Surrogate was produced, directed and written by a quite tight-knit group of
people — the producers are Ken Sanders, who also wrote the original story, and
Robert Ballo, who was also the cinematographer; the writers who turned Sanders’
farrago of melodramatic craziness into a shooting script are Barbara Kymlicka
and Doug Campbell, and Campbell also directed — and while I’ll give Campbell
and the actors credit for getting this nonsense on screen while keeping
straight faces about it, The Surrogate is so crazily melodramatic and so ludicrous it sometimes seems the
filmmakers were as demented as their central character. There’s an ironic
little scene early on in which Jacob Kelly is telling one of his students,
who’s submitted a story about a bad girl entrapping a good girl, to make the
villain more interesting and let her live at the end; but I would hope that if
Jacob Kelly had had Ken Sanders as a student and he’d submitted the plot of The
Surrogate, Kelly would have given Sanders
an F.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)