Forced Landing (Pine-Thomas/Paramount, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Forced Landing, a truly weird 1941 movie from Paramount’s “B” production team of William Pine and William Thomas (though the version we were watching was a TV reissue from something called “Screencraft Pictures,” which cut their own logo in during the opening credits and thus messed up a potentially powerful sequence in which the credits were supposed to be superimposed over the image of a burning plane). The film begins ahead of the credits — an unusual effect for 1941 — and shows a plane catching fire in mid-air and its pilot making a (you guessed it) forced landing; he manages to get his plane down and escape from the burning wreckage, only to be shot by a mystery man we see only from behind. Then we get the credits, and then a title establishing the setting as somewhere called “Mosaque,” supposedly an island nation in the South Pacific but actually made up from Paramount’s standing sets of Latin American scenes and populated with a weird assortment of character actors doing a mad mélange of “ethnic” voices, from Latin American to Russian to Asian to just about everything else. The star is Richard Arlen, playing Dan Kendall, an American pilot who’s been hired by the military government that rules Mosaque to fly in what little they have of an air force — only when he arrives he’s told that he’s being transferred to Mosaque’s civilian air transport. This discomfits him because the last two pilots who’ve taken up Mosaque’s civilian transport planes have both disappeared — one of them was Petchnikoff (Harold Goodwin), the man who recruited Dan and whom we saw doing his forced landing and getting shot in the pre-credits sequence.

One of Mosaque’s more colorful inhabitants is Andros Banchek (J. Carrol Naish, attempting to do all the accents suggested by the character’s name), who’s supposedly an outlaw and a bandit but is really a revolutionary leader trying to overthrow Mosaque’s military government. Dan also has a comic-relief mechanic, Christmas (Mikhail Rasumny, obviously channeling Akim Tamiroff), and he’s ready to bail on the whole Mosaque job until he meets and instantly falls in love with Johanna Van Deuren (a young and genuinely pretty Eva Gabor in her film debut, playing an odd cross between Ingrid Bergman and Sonja Henie) even though she’s the fiancée of Col. Jan Golas (Nils Asther), the right-hand man to Mosaque’s military leader. Needless to say, Col. Golas is the real baddie; though ostensibly part of the government he’s actually attempting to stage a coup of his own and freeze both his fellow junta members and the rebels out of power. To do this he’s determined to sabotage the construction of a fort —which he accomplishes by blowing up the planes that are supposed to be carrying the gold to pay the workers who are building it. Only the supposed “gold” boxes really contain bombs that blow up the planes in mid-air — something Dan fortuitously realizes when Johanna stows away in the cargo hold of his plane and notices the box emitting smoke — and the film ends with Golas dead, his co-conspirators executed, the government offering an amnesty to the rebels and Dan returning to the U.S. with Johanna as his new bride.

Forced Landing isn’t much of a film — and one could tell that screenwriters Maxwell Shane and Edward Churchill (no relation, I presume) were trying to thread the needle on this one, drawing on World War II for plot material as much as they could get away with without pissing off (and pissing away) the audience in a still largely isolationist country — but it’s well written and imaginatively directed by Gordon Wiles, who along with cinematographer John Alton throws the whole armamentarium of film noir — shadowy chiaroscuro lighting, oblique angles and the like — at a story that doesn’t have the moral ambiguity of real noir but benefits from the atmospherics anyway. It’s also nice to see that Eva Gabor wasn’t always a caricature, though Evelyn Brent (identified in the official credits as “Housekeeper” and by imdb.com as “Brunet Who Turns In Andros”) was so minimally present in the film that I missed her almost completely, a sorry fate for the actress who had preceded Marlene Dietrich as Josef von Sternberg’s favorite and had turned in similarly subtle, understated performances in his films.

“X” Marks the Spot (Tiffany, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was “X” Marks the Spot, a title Hollywood has used several times (including a 1942 Republic actioner with Dan “Captain America” Purcell that might be worth seeing), but this one was a 1931 indie from Tiffany Studios that was quite well done. Like later enterprises like World Wide and Grand National, they were at least trying for the “finish” and polish of a major-studio production, and this one was unusually good for an early-1930’s indie (alas, Tiffany was another under-capitalized casualty of the Depression). The story starts in 1923, when Ted Lloyd (Wallace Ford) is a reporter on a paper called the Blade in an unnamed medium-sized city. He’s hoping to land a job in New York, and his hopes tick up when his editor, George Howard (Lew Cody), gets hired by a New York paper and promises someday to send for Ted and hire him. Alas, Ted’s kid sister Gloria (Helen Parrish) is run over by a car and the only way she can keep the ability to walk is if Ted can raise the $5,000 to send her to Germany to see the one doctor in the world who knows how to do the operation required. After asking Howard and several other friends for help, Ted appeals to the one person in town who seems to have that kind of money available, Riggs (Fred Kohler), the head of the town’s gangs. At first Riggs turns him down because the two men can’t stand each other — the Blade has been attacking gangsters in general and Riggs in particular — but eventually, as a sort of noblesse oblige, Riggs casually hands Ted a bundle with the money and says he won’t expect Ted to pay him back but Ted will owe him a favor someday.

The film flashes forward eight years and moves to New York City, where Howard is editor of a tabloid called the Gazette and Ted is the paper’s star columnist — when Howard tells his production people to take out a story about a Presidential proclamation to make room for more coverage of a sensational divorce case, both Charles and I thought, “Plus ça change, plus ça même chose” — and Ted has just broken a story about chorus girl Vivian Parker (Mary Nolan, with a spectacular head of platinum-blonde hair that should have had Jean Harlow worried about the competition) and her sugar daddy. Only said sugar daddy threatens the paper with a libel suit, and in order to forestall this Ted makes a date with Vivian at her apartment — thereby understandably pissing off his secretary and girlfriend, Sue (Sally Blane, Loretta Young’s real-life sister) — to try to get her to sign a release ending the lawsuit. Vivian crumples the release form in contempt but doesn’t tear it up — that becomes an important plot point later — and later, after Ted leaves her apartment, someone else comes in, steals a few of her jewels and knocks her off. Ted is suspect number one — after all, he clearly had a motive, revealed to the police when they uncrumple the release form and decide Ted murdered Vivian in a fit of rage when she refused to sign it — only he soon learns that the real criminal is Riggs. Riggs summons Ted and tells him not to reveal to the cops that Riggs was involved; he also demands $5,000 from Ted so he can escape — and Ted obliges, but the whole conversation is overheard by, of all people, Ted’s sister Gloria (now an adult — though still a pretty naïve and stupid one — and played by Joyce Coad). She reports it to Ted’s bosses at the Gazette and they in turn report it to the police, who stake out Ted’s bank and follow him once he withdraws the money to find out whom he’s taking it to. The cops arrest Riggs and he, of course, is convinced Ted double-crossed him. Riggs goes on trial for the murder, with Ted as a reluctant witness for the prosecution, and the night before the verdict comes in he sneaks something into the courtroom which turns out to be a gun. After the guilty verdict comes in, Riggs grabs the gun he’s previously hidden there, shoots a court clerk and takes an old man hostage, and it ends with a gun battle between Riggs and Ted that ends the way you expect it to, though curiously it takes place in a room full of smoke (the cops have shot tear gas into the room hoping to incapacitate Riggs and take him alive) and it’s hard to see what’s going on.

“X” Marks the Spot is a quite good movie, cleverly written by Warren Duff and Gordon Kahn, full of nice wisecracks — notably the scene in court in which Vivian’s servant (Clarence Muse) is testifying, the lawyer says, “You’ve established that there was a fire escape outside the building,” and Muse says, “Yeah, I said there was, but I didn’t establish it — it was already there before I was” — and vividly directed by Erle C. Kenton, who includes Venetian-blind shots (the easy “atmosphere” gimmick used by directors in low-budget films then), oblique camera angles, lots of close-ups (usually low-budget films skimped on close-ups because they took time to light properly and these productions were on ultra-tight schedules) and a sense of pace rare in an indie director of the time. It’s no wonder within two years Kenton was working at the majors, doing movies like the 1933 Island of Lost Souls (the first, and by far the best, film of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau), and later in the 1940’s he’d be under contract to Universal and do three of their later Frankenstein cycle films (Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula), the movies on which rests however much of a reputation he has today. Though we were watching “X” Marks the Spot in a typically tacky archive.org download — the images were ghosted and un-crisp, and a couple of times the print they were transferring jumped the sprocket holes and took a few seconds to settle back in — the film itself was surprisingly good, though still well within the Hollywood cliché bank, and for once I could watch an indie crime film without wishing it had been made at Warner Bros. with James Cagney as star!

Toscanini: The Maestro (Peter Rosen Productions/Bravo, 1985)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Toscanini — The Maestro, a bonus DVD included in the 71-CD boxed set of all Arturo Toscanini’s major recordings as conductor (mostly with the NBC Symphony but also containing the handful of records he made with other orchestras: the La Scala Orchestra of Milan in 1920, the New York Philharmonic in 1926-1936, the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1937-39 and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1941-42; the criteria for inclusion seemed to be either studio recordings or broadcasts released on record during Toscanini’s lifetime and with his approval), which turned out to be a film made by Peter Rosen in 1985 for the Bravo cable-TV network, at a time when Bravo was still trying to be a “special” channel for culture mavens and before it got homogenized into the same gluey mix of standard TV formulae just about every other cable channel has become. (I once read an article about the consultant who wreaked havoc on every non-premium cable channel — I forget her name but I recall she was a woman and I’m pretty sure her first name was Debbie — who successively got hired by Arts & Entertainment, Lifetime and any channel with any distinctive flavoring and rewired them to the same putrid formula, and the fact that the article actually presented her with approval made the story even more disgusting.) The 1985 production date is also important because it meant that Rosen was shooting his film at a time when musicians who had played under Toscanini in the NBC Symphony were still alive and available for interviews — though their comments were pretty predictable: they said that Toscanini could be mean and volatile during rehearsals but he could also be gentle and caring.

Much of what we think we know about Toscanini comes from the incredible hype NBC and its parent company, RCA, put out about him during the 17-year run of the NBC Symphony broadcasts, and some bits of the legend still cling in Rosen’s presentation, including the argument that Toscanini was the only 20^th century conductor who became a real celebrity (what about Leopold Stokowski? Herbert von Karajan? Leonard Bernstein?) — and much of the writing about Toscanini since his death (including Joseph Horowitz’s book Understanding Toscanini, to which one imdb.com contributor suggests this documentary was an answer to) has been an attempt to unpack the myth and argue that there are actually ways to play the standard symphonic repertoire other than the generally fast, taut, high-tension way Toscanini liked to play it. Some pro-Toscanini critics have argued that we think of Toscanini as that sort of conductor — emphasizing speed and precision over poetry and eloquence — because that’s what’s on most of his records, especially those with the NBC Symphony (which is the bulk of his legacy because until he started conducting the NBC Symphony in 1937 he recorded only sporadically, though the few records of him pre-NBC that exist reveal a more expansive and less obsessed conductor). One quirk about Toscanini is that, while most long-lived conductors (he worked until he was 87 and died just a few days short of his 90^th birthday) get slower as they age, he got faster (as did his bitter enemy, Willem Mengelberg; for a time in the late 1920’s they shared the job of principal conductor with the New York Philharmonic despite their diametrically opposed conceptions of how to conduct — Mengelberg heavily edited his scores and went for rapid gear changes in the middle of a piece; Toscanini meticulously rehearsed and expected his musicians to play it pretty much the same way every time — which must have made the Philharmonic players feel whipsawed between two quite different approaches from the podium), and at least one recent article in Fanfare suggested that as he became older he became less patient with “expression,” with any sense of deviation from the composers’ score markings.

The show made most of the major points about Toscanini’s upbringing (born a poor kid in Parma, albeit to a musical family, who went to the Parma Conservatory at age 9 and lived in dormitory conditions), his early efforts at composition (which he abandoned, according to Rosen, because once he heard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde he felt he’d never be able to write anything nearly as good and so he decided not to try), and his dramatic conducting debut when, at age 19, he was deputized to fill in for an indisposed conductor during a South American tour of an opera company performing Aïda (at a time when it was still relatively new music, just 15 years after its premiere). Rosen makes a big deal about how much Toscanini reformed the world of opera — ironically as opera was receding from mainstream popularity (which Rosen variously dates from the death of Verdi in 1901 and the death of Puccini in 1924) and becoming an elitist medium — and refused to countenance the slapdash productions he’d grown up with in Italy. He also notes that Toscanini’s repertoire ranged all over the European map — at a time when conductors usually specialized in the music of their home country, Toscanini not only conducted Verdi in Italy but Wagner in Germany (when he became the first non-German conductor at the Bayreuth Festival in 1930 the orchestra musicians derisively referred to him as “Der Italiener”) and — though this isn’t mentioned in the film — led the Italian premiere of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at La Scala in 1908 (just six years after the world premiere under André Messager in Paris), an opera that still has only a toehold in the standard repertory even though Debussy’s orchestral works are mainstays of the modern symphonic repertoire.

There are attempts to “humanize” Toscanini, showing home movies of him at his island villa in Italy (where he continued to live until 1938 even after the Italian Fascists had driven him off the symphony and opera stages of his home country — more on that later) with his family and friends, but even there he seems to have been gripped by the driven intensity with which he did everything; the narration by Alexander Scourby (32 years after his marvelous performance as the all-powerful corrupt gangster/city boss in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat and 21 years after he narrated a 45 rpm tribute/memorial record to John F. Kennedy) explains that while on his island Toscanini did hikes and did them faster than people one-half, one-third or one-quarter his age. Just about every shot of Toscanini in this film, whether taken from the famous black-and-white stills of him by Robert Hupka (credited as a consultant) with his leonine white-haired head looming out over a stark field of black, or TV footage of his concerts (in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s some of the NBC Symphony concerts — including his spectacular concert performance of Verdi’s Aïda with Herva Nelli in the title role, Richard Tucker as Radamès and Eva Gustafson magisterial as Amneris — were televised, and later they were prepared for video with the original crappy TV soundtracks erased and replaced by the professional RCA Victor recordings of the broadcasts) or even the home movies, shows Toscanini intensely serious, glowering, as if whatever he was doing at the moment was the most monumentally important task any member of the human race had ever been given to perform, and therefore neither he nor anybody he was responsible for could dare screw it up.

Toscanini’s principled fight against Fascism and Nazism is one of the most ennobling parts of his biography. This film acknowledges that in 1919 he supported Benito Mussolini (and even ran for the Italian Parliament on Mussolini’s ticket), but that when Mussolini still proclaimed himself a socialist. (The documentary “explains” Toscanini’s Leftism by saying he got it from his father, a soldier in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s revolutionary army in the 19^th century which attempted to unify Italy as a republic — not, as eventually happened, as a monarchy.) After Mussolini led a Right-wing march on Rome in 1922 and took over the Italian government, Toscanini consistently opposed him (unlike people like Puccini, who eagerly embraced the new regime; though the world lost a lot from Puccini’s early death in 1924, including a coherent ending to Turandot, Puccini’s reputation probably gained from not having lived long enough to write the patriotic potboilers Mussolini wanted from Italy’s composers and got from Puccini’s longer-lived contemporary, Pietro Mascagni) and eventually suffered from it. He and Mussolini had a long-standing feud over Toscanini’s refusal, when La Scala in Milan was under his artistic directorship in the 1920’s, to display photos of Mussolini and the Italian king (who had essentially turned himself into a figurehead for the Fascist regime — to the point where in 1946, asked whether the monarchy should continue in a post-Fascist Italy, the Italian people voted overwhelmingly against it) or to allow the fascist hymn “Giovinezza” (with its line “Giuro fede al Mussolini!”) to be played on stage, as the fascist regime required every April 21 (the official birthday of the city of Rome and a Fascist-proclaimed holiday). Sometimes Toscanini ensured that the theatre would be closed on April 21 when “Giovinezza” was supposed to be played; sometimes he would compromise and allow a band to come on stage and play the offensive song without his involvement.

By 1929 working in Italy had become so intolerable that he gave up the directorship of La Scala and came back to Italy only for special concerts; in 1931 he was invited to give a benefit for his friend, composer Giuseppe Martucci, but on his way into the theatre to rehearse a gang of Fascist thugs beat him up and injured his arm so badly that for the Bayreuth Festival in 1931 (his second and last year conducting there) he had to lead Wagner’s Parsifal — all five hours and five minutes of it — with his arm in a sling. Toscanini was invited to Bayreuth in the first place by Wagner’s son Siegfried in 1930, the last year of his (and his mother Cosima’s) life, and he played there for two years; at the time the tradition at Bayreuth was that the festival would take place two years in a row, then take off a year, and by the time the festival was to resume it was 1933, Hitler had taken power in Germany, Siegfried’s widow Winifred (a huge supporter of Hitler and the Nazis, whose sponsorship had done much to make them respectable) pleaded with him to stay, but Toscanini said no way, he wasn’t going to show up and ignore the evils of Hitler’s party just to conduct Wagner. When Walter Legge, music critic and later record producer for British HMV and Columbia (eventually merged into EMI), reviewed the 1933 Bayreuth festival he noted that Winifred Wagner and the Nazi regime were trying to make a virtue out of the withdrawals of Toscanini and many of the Jewish artists who had previously sung at Bayreuth (notably soprano Lotte Lehmann and basses Alexander Kipnis and Emmanuel List) by proclaiming the festival to be one of “German Artists for German Art.” Legge noted the “hundreds of cancellations” from all over the world that followed Toscanini’s withdrawal, sneered that the “German Artists for German Art” policy was “a fear-induced protection of inferior home products against superior foreign competition, and wrote that “the performances of Die Meistersinger and Parsifal were considerably inferior to those that most of us expected when, five or six months ago, we bought our tickets. The fault is not on Toscanini’s side — no one can blame him for his withdrawal.”

In 1934 he accepted an offer from the producers of the Salzburg festival to build their enterprise into a sort of anti-Bayreuth, performing works by Mozart, Verdi and other composers as well as Wagner and inviting all the singers who by nationality or ethnicity or religion were no longer welcome on Germany’s stages — and that lasted for four years, producing some galvanic performances that can still (more or less) be heard on lousy-sounding short-wave monitor discs and dubs from Selenophon recordings (the Selenophon was a recording machine that cut a phonograph-like groove on a strip of film). Then Hitler annexed Austria (his native country) in 1938 and Toscanini ended up at a smaller festival in the Swiss city of Lucerne when he wasn’t in the U.S. conducting the NBC Symphony — from which he walked out during the 1940-41 season (Stokowski replaced him) after he realized “his” musicians were being pulled out of his rehearsals to play on other NBC broadcasts, though he returned on February 22, 1941 to conduct a benefit concert for the American Red Cross. He made this an all-Wagner concert — yet another gesture of defiance to the fascists; it was obviously Toscanini’s way of saying to Hitler, “You don’t own Wagner. Wagner belongs to all the world, including the people who are fighting you for the ideals of peace, justice and humanity” — and invited Lauritz Melchior and Helen Traubel as guest stars to sing incandescent excerpts from Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung that are our only documentary evidence of Toscanini conducting music from the Ring with singers. In 1943 Toscanini made a documentary for the U.S. Office of War Information film in which he led the NBC Symphony in Hymn of the Nations, a Verdi-Boïto potboiler based on different countries’ national anthems, to which Toscanini changed the line “Italia, mia patria” — “Italy, my fatherland” — to “Italia, mia tradita” — “Italy, my betrayed.” He also added the “Internationale,” representing the Soviet Union, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” to the end of the piece so it would include the anthems of all the major countries fighting World War II on the Allied side, and as his final fuck-you to the Fascists he hired Jewish tenor Jan Peerce as the soloist. (The currently circulating DVD versions of this film omit the section containing the “Internationale” — ah, the ever-changing horizons of political correctness! — but the audio CD’s of the performance include it.) James Agee reviewed this film for The Nation and said, “[T]he face is as good a record of human existence somewhere near its utmost as we are likely to see.”

Toscanini — the Maestro is as good a defense of Toscanini as we are likely to see on film, “printing the legend” and less answering than just ignoring the criticisms that have been made of him since his death and since the NBC hype machine surrounding him that proclaimed him the greatest conductor of all time shut down. The criticisms are that he conducted everything too fast, with too strict a sense of rhythm, and he didn’t let the music “breathe” the way looser, more improvisatory conductors like Wilhelm Furtwängler did. (In 1936, when Toscanini stepped down as conductor of the New York Philharmonic, he asked the orchestra’s board to hire Furtwängler as his replacement, perhaps not only admiring Furtwängler as a musician but hoping to get him away from his impossible situation as a basically decent man forced to suck up to the Nazis in public time and time again — but the Jewish members of the board had a hissy-fit and said under no circumstances would they allow a Nazi, which Furtwängler technically wasn’t since he never joined the Nazi Party, to conduct the New York Philharmonic.) In the 1970’s a lot of young conductors glommed on to Furtwängler as a sort of anti-Toscanini — leading to a lot of long, slow performances of core 19^th century repertoire by people like Daniel Barenboim (listen to his performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and compare it to Furtwängler’s 1951 Bayreuth recording and you will hear the difference between a genius and a mediocrity who’s trying to copy him) — and then in the late 1980’s the pendulum started swinging again, this time under the lash of the “historically informed performance” movement, as Roger Norrington recorded an influential cycle of the Beethoven symphonies that used small, chamber-sized orchestras, period instruments and zippy tempi (Norrington’s Beethoven Ninth took a little over an hour versus the 1951 Furtwängler’s 78 minutes). After not having heard them for years, I got a download of Toscanini’s 1950’s Beethoven recordings a few years ago and was amazed at how contemporary they sounded; how they captured the drama and inner life of the scores even if they came short on passages requiring profundity (like the first movement of the Ninth, which Furtwängler in Bayreuth made a deeply moving, spiritual experience and Toscanini seemed to be rushing through to get to the “good stuff” at the end, in which he faced and mastered the technical challenge of pulling together orchestra, chorus and vocal soloists, at which Furtwängler’s Bayreuth Ninth had fallen short).

There are other aspects to Toscanini — The Maestro, including its rather odd treatment of Toscanini’s womanizing; the film mentions one notorious affair he had with Metropolitan Opera soprano (and major movie star, even though it was still the silent era!) Geraldine Farrar, which allegedly led to his abrupt departure for Italy in 1915 (elsewhere I’ve read it had to do with the Met’s wanting to allow encores in the middle of opera performances, a practice Toscanini detested, along with a factor that did get mentioned here: Italy’s involvement in World War I — ironically, on the same side as the British, French and ultimately the Americans — and Toscanini’s desire to be part of the war effort, which he achieved by leading a military band at the front and actually winning a decoration for having played under fire and inspired a regiment of the Italian army to take a crucially important hill). It doesn’t mention that, despite being in a long-term marriage (to Carla DeMartinis, daughter of an Italian merchant and the woman who bore Toscanini his four acknowledged children), Toscanini, like such other musical geniuses as Richard Wagner and Duke Ellington, did not believe that marriage = monogamy. Indeed, his first departure from La Scala in 1903 got embroiled in sexual as well as musical politics; the following year, when Puccini’s Madama Butterfly literally got booed off the stage at its premiere at La Scala in 1904 (with Cleofonte Campanini having the unenviable task of replacing Toscanini as conductor), the audience was well aware that the soprano in the title role, Rosina Storchio, had been having an affair with Toscanini. When her costume blew over her head in the second act, a prankster in the audience yelled out, “Butterfly is pregnant! Ah, the little Toscanini!” Storchio actually was pregnant with Toscanini’s child at the time, though she had a miscarriage later. Rosen’s script for Toscanini — The Maestro makes his dalliance with Farrar seem like an exception when in fact it was a long-term pattern — and like so much of Toscanini’s biography, facts about his womanizing haven’t really come out until after his death and after the NBC hype machine stopped running interference for him.

My own feelings about Toscanini are genuinely positive; I’m old enough that I learned much of the standard symphonic repertoire from his records, and there are some of his performances (like the 1950 NBC recording of Debussy’s La Mer) that I think are unsurpassed to this day. I can hear what his critics are talking about — that he was too glib, that his tastes were too conservative (the man who was arguably the greatest conductor of the 20^th century left only one movement of the ballet score Petrouchka and otherwise recorded nothing by the man who was arguably the greatest composer of the 20^th century, Stravinsky — though Toscanini not only gave the world premieres of three Puccini operas and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci but also in his NBC years gave the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which became a classical standard in the 1980’s when it was used in the film Platoon), that he zipped through scores with too little feeling — but overall his recordings are at an incredibly high standard. Once you acknowledge that Toscanini’s way is not the only way these pieces should be played, his records still have enduring value — and his story, even in this rather whitewashed version, is worth telling as well.

Latin Lovers (MGM, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Latin Lovers, a 1953 production by MGM, a bit late in the day for something this bizarre and slight, a sort of semi-musical in which Lana Turner plays Nora Taylor, daughter of a Texas mailman who dug for oil in his spare time, struck it big and amassed a fortune which Nora’s own business acumen has expanded to $37 million. The one thing that frustrates her, this being an MGM movie, is she doesn’t have a serious boyfriend; she’s been dating Paul Chevron (John Lund), who’s decent-looking and has an even bigger fortune, $48 million, but she’s not interested in him because he’s at once too stuck up and too deferential (on the advice of his analyst — both Nora and Paul are seeing psychoanalysts; hers is a man and his is a woman, and the gags involving their therapy sessions are funny even though writer Isobel Lennart obviously borrowed this from the Kurt Weill musical Lady in the Dark). Paul is planning a trip to Brazil to play polo (at which he’s spectacularly terrible, always falling off his polo ponies, breaking or spraining various limbs, and blaming it on the allegedly poor training of the animals), and Nora follows him — and falls head over heels in love with rancher Roberto Santos (Ricardo Montalban). The rest you could practically write yourself; it’s a romantic triangle that we’re not in much suspense over how it’s going to turn out — not when John Lund is as repulsive a screen presence as ever — and quite frankly both the chief glory of the film and its most annoying aspect is the incredibly rich, overripe, garish three-strip Technicolor by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg and Technicolor consultant Henri Jaffa. The film goes out of its way to make so many objects blue, including the cars and Ricardo Montalban’s suits, Charles thought it seemed like a throwback to the mid-1930’s, the early days of three-strip, when filmmakers not only threw in as many things one would expect to be blue (like sea and sky) but made as many objects as possible blue — clothes, walls, furniture, props — just to glory in the fact that now color film could photograph blue. The colors have a richness and vibrancy that’s astonishing and spectacular at first but soon becomes wearing — it’s a nice change from the dank browns and greens that dominate color films today (and lead me to ask the rhetorical question why, if they’re going to use so little of the visible spectrum anyway, they don’t just film in black-and-white), but in the end all those shrieking colors start to feel like they’re assaulting the eyes instead of pleasing them.

There are some interesting supporting characters, including Nora’s long-suffering secretary Anne Kellwood (Jean Hagen in a nicely controlled performance that will be a shock to anyone who knows her only as the ditz she played in Adam’s Rib and Singin’ in the Rain), who ends up paired with Paul at the end after Nora has paired with Roberto; and a quite engaging comic-relief character called Howard G. Hubbell (Archer McDonald), a staffer at the U.S. embassy in Rio de Janeiro whom Nora engages to teach her Portuguese so she can communicate with Roberto, not knowing that he speaks English (and if this film was ever shown in Brazil with its original soundtrack — which, as Charles pointed out, is highly unlikely because most South American prints were dubbed — audiences probably got a hoot from hearing Montalban speak Portuguese with his Mexican Spanish accent), and who goes through the whole film wearing thick glasses that make him look as if his eyeballs are popping out, cartoon character-style, as Lana Turner’s sheer beauty overwhelms him. Eventually Isobel Lennart, who was one of those women writers who made millions telling other women they should stay at home and be submissive little housewives, concocts the most sexist ending imaginable as she has Nora realize that the only way she can be happy with a man is if she gives all her money away (how? In the real world rich people don’t just start handing out money; if they want to be charitable they set up foundations) and just lives on his money. Since Roberto is obviously quite well fixed himself — this is an MGM movie, after all, and therefore it’s a paean to the 1 percent rather than one of those kinky films we got in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s in which the fabulously wealthy heiress fell in love with a proletarian and could have him only if she descended to his lifestyle — this doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice, but the idea that a woman could have both a business career and a husband was strictly verboten in 1950’s films.

Latin Lovers is a film of surpassing mediocrity, a romantic melodrama that isn’t particularly romantic or melodramatic, and a quasi-musical in which neither of the two leads sing (and Lana Turner doesn’t even try, though Ricardo Montalban gets two numbers in which he’s dubbed by a stentorian “Latin” singer whose voice doesn’t even begin to match Montalban’s speaking voice); it’s not actively unpleasant but it’s not all that much fun, either. Frankly, I had a hard time watching it and not comparing it to Flying Down to Rio as a U.S.-made musical set (mostly) in Brazil — and the 1933 film has it all over this 1953 ones in terms of creativity, ingenuity, credibility (it had stars, including Gene Raymond and Raul Roulien as the two males in the romantic triangle as well as, of course, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers making their joint debut in supporting roles, who could actually sing and dance) and sheer exuberance, along with impressively atmospheric black-and-white cinematography instead of shrieking, garish Technicolor. (Remember that Latin Lovers was made when Technicolor was trying to hold its own commercially against the less spectacular but considerably cheaper and more convenient Eastmancolor process.) The most interesting thing about Latin Lovers is that it was originally planned as a follow-up to the 1952 movie The Merry Widow, a vehicle for Turner and her real-life lover Fernando Lamas — only Turner and Lamas broke up just before Latin Lovers was about to start shooting, she insisted that MGM replace him, and Montalban was the only other Latino they had under contract who would be suitable for a romantic lead (which is how an actor went within a decade and a half from appearing opposite Lana Turner to playing a key role in the Star Trek cycle on both TV and film).

Cinerama Adventure (C. A. Productions/American Society of Cinematographers, 2002)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Cinerama Adventure, a 2002 movie about the pioneering wide-screen process invented by Fred Waller, a fascinating figure not only in movie history but in other fields as well (among other things, he invented water skis — apparently in the 1930’s you could buy a waterboard that you could stand on and be towed by a boat, and Waller figured that you’d be more stable if he cut the waterboard in half and put one on each leg), who worked at the Astoria studio run by Paramount in New York City and did special-effects work for movies including Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female and D. W. Griffith’s That Royle Girl. He also directed band shorts — the music videos of the 1930’s — including what are probably the two best band shorts ever made, A Bundle of Blues (1933) and Symphony in Black (1935), both featuring Duke Ellington and coming far closer than most of them to the trick photography and dazzling editing we became familiar with when music videos reached the peak of their popularity in the 1980’s. (At the same time I’ve always thought that Ellington himself, which his training and lifelong interest in the visual arts — he began as a painter and still thought of color when he focused on music instead, as witness how many of his songs are named after colors —must have had some input into the visual creativity of these films, not only the two Waller directed for him but the 1929 Black and Tan, directed by Dudley Murphy, as well.) In 1938 Waller left his job with Paramount and focused on a system of using multiple cameras and strips of film to create movies that would reproduce the entire field of human vision, not only what we see directly in front of us but his peripheral vision as well. He even walked around his house with a special pair of glasses fitted with two toothpicks, which he moved so he could measure exactly what the range of his peripheral vision was. His first attempt was a process called Vitarama, which involved 11 16 mm cameras and was first publicly exhibited in a dome-shaped theatre at the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair. When the U.S. entered World War II in 1941 Waller’s invention was put on hold as a commercial property but was enlisted in the war effort; Waller used five cameras and a directional light beam to create a film used as the basis for a machine to train aerial gunners; his five strips of film showed planes flying across a sky that ranged across the full panoramic range of human vision, and the trainees sat at mock guns that emitted beams of light, while behind the translucent screen a machine measured where their light beams landed and therefore whether their shot would have hit the plane on screen had it been real. (Essentially Fred Waller invented the video game.) He built 74 of these training modules in the U.S. and Britain, and they were credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives by allowing gunners to hone their skills before they got into actual combat.

In 1948 Waller formed a company to market his invention and exploit it commercially, and he ended up attracting an odd assortment of partners: Lowell Thomas, who’d been narrating the Fox Movietone newsreels for years and had cut his teeth using film cameras to cover T. E. Lawrence’s campaigns in Arabia in World War I (this film showed a still photo of the real Lawrence — and he looked amazingly like Peter O’Toole, underscoring just how well cast O’Toole was in Lawrence of Arabia); Merian C. Cooper, who’d been involved in both movies and aviation for decades, who had begun his career with his business and exploration partner Ernest B. Schoedsack making nature documentaries like Grass and Chang before entering fiction film with his productions of The Most Dangerous Game and King Kong (and who, by an odd coincidence, also had wanted to make a dramatic film about T. E. Lawrence; in 1933 he and Schoedsack sent a unit to Arabia to shoot second-unit footage and intended to cast John Barrymore as Lawrence, but the film was shelved and the Arabian footage wasn’t used until 1943 for an RKO “B,” Action in Arabia); and Mike Todd, whose legendary skills as a showman and a negotiator won the fledgling Cinerama company the right to shoot an actual opera performance (Verdi’s Aïda) in La Scala as part of the first Cinerama release, This Is Cinerama. Other key people in making Cinerama work were Paul Mantz, the seemingly fearless stunt pilot who flew in Hollywood for over 30 years and piloted the camera plane for many of the Cinerama travelogue sequences; and Harry Squire, the equally fearless cameraman who was director of photography on most of the famous Cinerama films and who managed to tame the unwieldy beast of a camera needed for the process, an object which looked like a miniature tank and contained three cameras with three lenses (ironically for a process equated with bigness, the lenses themselves were quite small — about the size of a contact lens — obviously they were going for maximum depth of field, meaning small lenses and wide angles) and three strips of film, itself off-putting since a malfunction on one of the camera mechanisms or a break or jam in one strip of film would result in the entire sequence being unusable.

Cinerama debuted in September 1952 at the old Warner Theatre on Broadway in New York (though the documentary didn’t make the point, this was also where The Jazz Singer had premiered 25 years earlier, launching the movie industry’s transition from silent to sound!) after all the major studios had turned it down; making a deal with Stanley Warner Theatres, the company that had acquired the Warners theatre chain after Warner Bros. had been forced to divest by the 1948 Paramount consent decree (by which the movie studios agreed they would no longer own theatres after the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled this violated the antitrust laws — incidentally this was widely credited with breaking up the studio system, and among the people who believed that was Ronald Reagan, which was one reason antitrust enforcement virtually ceased once Reagan became President), and exhibited This Is Cinerama themselves in a specially remodeled theatre to accommodate not only the three projectors (actually there were four film strips — three containing the visual parts of the movie and one recording the seven-channel stereo soundtrack — which occasionally led to some of the same synchronization problems the sound pioneers had had keeping the Vitaphone records in synch with the film) but also the unique screen, which consisted of hundreds of translucent silver-coated vertical strips. The strips were so narrow you could walk through the screen the way you could with vertical Venetian blinds, and their purpose was to refract the light so you could see the film equally well wherever you were in the theatre — and also to smooth out the join lines between the three separate film images that combined to give you the Cinerama effect. (The clips from Cinerama films included here show that the join lines were all too obvious anyway.) The documentary emphasized that Cinerama was a special experience, in some ways more like attending a live play than a movie — the tickets were “hard” (they admitted you to one and only one seat, which was numbered like a live theatre seat) and no refreshments were served (when you went to a Cinerama movie they weren’t going to let you distract yourself with popcorn, candy or soda), and people instinctively understood the “specialness” of the experience and dressed up for Cinerama showings the way they would for a play or a symphony concert.

What’s fascinating about Cinerama Adventure is not only the difficulties Cinerama faced in both making and showing the films, and the business problems involved in keeping the company afloat (even though it was sensationally popular, the cumbersome nature of the process meant that there were never more than a handful of theatres equipped to show it, though a French entrepreneur tried to solve that problem by creating a mobile, inflatable Cinerama theatre, which devastatingly collapsed one day in a windstorm — fortunately not during a public screening, so the theater was destroyed but no one was killed), but the sheer verve and optimism inherent in the process. Cinerama debuted in the 1950’s, at the peak of America’s confidence in itself and its future — and at a time when (at least if you were white) this was more of a “middle-class” country that it had been before or ever would be again, a time when one-third of America’s workforce belonged to labor unions (now it’s less than 7 percent) and America was also the world’s industrial powerhouse. The documentary indicates that Cinerama was such a broad-based phenomenon that the suffix “-rama” itself became a major advertising ploy, attached to all sorts of things in an effort to communicate their sensational bigness and modernity. (One stripper even billed herself as “Sinerama.”) There’s a fascinating clip from a 1955 General Motors promotional film called Motorama, and it’s heartbreaking to watch this given what’s happened both to GM and its then-home city, Detroit, since. The clips from the big Cinerama documentaries — including the “Flight Across America” sequence from the first one, This Is Cinerama, in which the breathtaking vistas of the great canyons of Utah are guyed by an enormously loud performance of “America, the Beautiful” (the whole song, not just the familiar first chorus) by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir— show not only the impressiveness of the process but also the patriotism behind it (Merian C. Cooper was one of Hollywood’s most notorious Right-wingers and, as the film points out, the very name “Cinerama” was an anagram of “American” and the Cinerama logo was colored red, white and blue) and the bizarre mix of spectacle and kitsch that makes Cinerama representative of America’s chest-out sense of world supremacy during the 1950’s. The film also goes into Cinerama’s role as a weapon in the Cold War, getting sent to trade shows around the world and overwhelming whatever the Soviet Union put up to compete with it — until the Soviets developed a knock-off version, which ironically created footage the Cinerama company later licensed for a film of its own called Cinerama’s Russian Adventure. (The film didn’t mention a Western Cinerama knock-off, Cinemiracle, whose inventors attempted to avoid infringing on Cinerama’s patents by having their images bounced off mirrors onto the screen; Cinerama won a patent infringement suit against Cinemiracle and took over Cinemiracle’s one completed film, Windjammer, and re-released it as a Cinerama production.)

One of the ironies of Cinerama is that though it inspired the wide-screen craze of the rest of the 1950’s, as studios looked for “almost as good” processes that would approach the width and size of the Cinerama screen (the theory being that one way to lure audiences out of their homes and away from their TV sets was to offer them the one thing TV couldn’t: sheer size — also color and stereo sound, which early-1950’s TV didn’t have) and came up with things like CinemaScope (an anamorphic lens which “squeezed” the image during filming so you could photograph a wide-screen image on an ordinary strip of 35 mm film, plus a decoder lens on the projector that reversed the effect) and VistaVision (shooting on 35 mm film sideways to create a wider frame), Cinerama itself wasn’t used in a non-documentary feature film until MGM and Cinerama co-produced How the West Was Won in 1962. Only two fiction films were ever made in the full three-strip Cinerama process, How the West Was Won and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (later films like Grand Prix and 2001: A Space Odyssey were advertised as being in “Super Cinerama” but were really shot in ordinary 70 mm formats, much like the “Grandeur Screen” Fox had briefly experimented with in 1930, shooting John Wayne’s first major film, The Big Trail, in it — it was a flop and theatre owners, reeling from the cost of sound conversion and the Depression on top of that, refused to spend the extra money to put in the new projectors and wider screens required), and interviews with surviving cast members for How the West Was Won (including Carroll Baker, Russ Tamblyn, Eli Wallach and Debbie Reynolds) expressed just how difficult it was to act in a Cinerama movie. Instead of looking at the other actor you were supposed to be talking to, you had to look in a different direction altogether so your face would register properly in the Cinerama image, and the challenge of composing shots for the giant format also daunted the directors (How the West Was Won had three: John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall). Ford had to abandon his usual habit of sitting next to the camera as the film was shot because his body kept cutting into the frame of one of the cameras; eventually they built a platform for him so he could sit behind the three-camera rig and watch the action from the point of view of the camera(s) as he always had. Cinerama Adventure is a fascinating tale, a reminiscence of a time when both the movies and the country were very different from what they are today — though the idea of an all-enveloping movie experience lives on in the Imax and Omnimax formats as well as the expansive wide-screen 3-D of films like Avatar — and it seems like a cultural tragedy that as of 2002, when this documentary was made, there were only three theatres in the world (one in Europe, one in Seattle and one in L.A.) still equipped to show the original Cinerama format. (San Diego had a Cinerama dome as late as the 1980’s, but it was non-functional and it was ultimately destroyed when the owners of the shopping mall it was in had it torn down so they could put in more shops.)

A Salute to Vienna (Attila Glatz Concert Productions/KPBS, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The “feature” was A Salute to Vienna, which judging from the promos for it I had expected would be a generalized tribute to the various high arts in Vienna. Instead it was exclusively an operetta concert, filmed at the Vienna Volksoper (their operetta theatre, equivalent to Lyric Opera San Diego and the venue where many of the most famous operettas, including Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, were premiered) last April 25 with a pretty no-name cast of singers, the Vienna Boys’ Choir, British pop tenor Russell Watson (who sang the “Serenade” from Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince with perfect technical finesse and almost no emotion whatsoever; when Mario Lanza made the version I consider definitive, he played a man whose soul was wrenched by the conflict between love and duty, and with Lanza’s record extant there’s no excuse for a modern-day tenor, even a pop tenor, to sing it as if it were just another piece of pretty music) and hosts Frederica von Stade and Maximilian Schell. Maximilian Schell actually got a vocal feature, the “Song of the Emperor” from Robert Stolz’s The White Horse Inn, and he did surprisingly well, mainly because he got to talk-sing it much the way Rex Harrison and Richard Burton did in My Fair Lady and Camelot, respectively (both musicals composed by Frederick Loewe, who was born in Berlin but whose parents were Viennese). In a concert filled with people with nondescript voices (though the guy who sang the Gondolier’s Song from Johann Strauss, Jr.’s A Night in Venice was really cute and had one of the better voices of the night), von Stade’s two numbers, “Vilia” and the famous waltz from The Merry Widow, stood out. Though her voice is clearly worn from the years (I remember buying — and enjoying — her first recital album in 1978), she nonetheless sang with a command and a breadth of wisdom and experience that eluded the pretty young things on the stage with her.

Granted that this was the Volksoper and not the Vienna Philharmonic (the Wiener Philharmoniker was the very last major symphony orchestra in Europe to gender-integrate), still it was gratifying to see a lot of women in the ranks of the musicians — including a rather hatchet-faced first violinist with a striking resemblance to Ayn Rand. It’s true that the numbers from The Merry Widow were hardly presented with the style with which Erich von Stroheim and Ernst Lubitsch directed the first two film versions (I’ve got the third one, directed by Curtis Bernhardt — another expat from the German-speaking world! — in the backlog but I haven’t seen it) — as beautifully as von Stade created the mood for “Vilia” I’d have liked to seen her do it in dappled black-and-white cinematography in a garden set made to look moonlit the way Jeanette MacDonald got to do it in the Lubitsch film, and somehow the “Girls! Girls! Girls!” chorus sounded even more sexist in the original German than it had with the English lyrics Lorenz Hart wrote for the Lubitsch movie — but there’s still a reason why this score has stood out among almost all other operettas (only Johann Strauss, Jr.’s Die Fledermaus rivals it, and quite frankly I find the music of The Merry Widow more memorable than that of Die Fledermaus). A Salute to Vienna was hardly the show it could have been with a greater breadth of focus — though it occurs to me that very few of the composers identified with Vienna were actually born there. The most famous composers from Austria, Mozart and Bruckner, were both from “the sticks” — Salzburg and Linz, respectively (Linz was also the home town of Adolf Hitler, which didn’t exactly help its postwar reputation) — and Mahler was born in a village called Kalischt, Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), though Arnold Schönberg was authentically Viennese, as were his “Second Vienna School” colleagues Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Alexander von Zemlinsky.[1] (Then again, a tribute to the “Second Vienna School” of composers famous for their invention of atonality and serialism was probably not going to keep the phones ringing on KPBS’s pledge nights.)

Given how hard it was to keep track of what was being played or sung in a darkened room, watching a home-recorded DVD of a show on a low-def TV, with the brief titles explaining what the selections were and who was singing them being very small and flashing on the screen quite briefly, it was almost impossible for me to keep track of who was singing what, and aside from von Stade’s most of the voices were pretty nondescript anyway (as was most of the music, except for the Merry Widow excerpts and Lehár’s “Mein lippen sie küssen so heiss” from Giuditta, sung by a woman who aside from von Stade was the most formidable singer of the bunch, though between her bright red dress and the flower in her hand she looked like she’d wandered in by mistake from a production of Carmen, and frankly I’d much rather have seen and heard her in that!). A Salute to Vienna — really it would have been more accurately called A Salute to Viennese Operetta, since to the extent they ventured off the operetta reservation it was for Viennese standards like the “Blue Danube” waltz (effectively danced by a few couples but drowned in treacle by the Vienna Choir Boys — incidentally at least one of the current crop of Vienna Choir Boys is Black, as was one of the adult choral singers elsewhere in the program) and Johann Strauss, Sr.’s “Radetzky March” — was the sort of concert where each individual number is appealing and even charming, but heard one after the other with almost nothing to break the monotony of songs about girls, boys and alcoholic beverages set to lilting but rather sappy strains, the show began to seem like something that could induce diabetes. Incidentally this was a direct production of KPBS in conjunction with Attila Glatz Concert Productions, Inc. (who probably supplied most of the performing talent), though the Vienna Tourism Board (or whatever they call it) was also a sponsor and have coined the singularly unattractive slogan, “Vienna: Now or Never,” as if Vienna will either be blown up to make room for a new state-of-the-art casino or inundated by global warming in the next two years and therefore if you don’t go there now you’ll never have the chance at all.

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[1] — Zemlinsky’s Wikipedia page claims he never actually wrote atonal or serial music, even though that was what the “Second Vienna School” was famous for, and it describes him moving from Brahms as his early influence and key supporter to a Wagner influence in his later works — exactly the opposite direction from Schönberg’s evolution from copying Wagner in early pieces like Transfigured Night and Gurrelieder to, at the end of his life, orchestrating one of Brahms’ chamber works and writing a 1947 essay called “Brahms the Progressive.”

Vacation in Reno (RKO, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I ran a quirky movie last night called Vacation in Reno, a 1946 “B” from RKO (back when they were getting out of the “B” business) which TCM showed as part of a run of films set in Reno during its days as a divorce mecca: The Merry Wives of Reno (a 1934 Warner Bros. programmer I had quite fond memories of and which had some similarities to this one — particularly the speed with which a formerly happily married couple ends up on the outs with each other), Reno (a rather dour melodrama in which Richard Dix stars as a crooked divorce lawyer who ends up being disbarred for his shenanigans) and Peach-o-Reno, a brilliantly funny Wheeler and Woolsey comedy (methinks their best film together — at least the best of the ones I’ve seen) satirizing the whole divorce business in Nevada in the 1930’s. Vacation in Reno was a vehicle for Jack Haley; it opens with him and Anne Jeffreys playing Jack and Eleanor Carroll, who decide as an example to their less happily married friends (played by Wally Brown of Brown and Carney, RKO’s attempt to create their own bionic version of Abbott and Costello, and an appealingly vulgar woman whose name I couldn’t find in the credits and who never appears again) to stage an argument over a dinner party for the two couples. Only the faux argument turns real and bitter when Jack denounces Eleanor’s mother (Constance Purdy) as a “fat old porpoise,” and Eleanor gets pissed at him for real and leaves him a note that she’s moving back in with the porpoise. Jack has a job but has ambitions to start a rabbit farm, and to get his seed capital he’s bought a metal detector and is going to go out to the outskirts of Reno (“played” by ultra-familiar Western locations — so familiar that, recalling their use in the Republic serial Undersea Kingdom, I joked that he seemed to have taken a wrong turn on his way to Nevada and ended up in Atlantis) to locate the treasure of Black Bart. Jack has also bought an amphibious vehicle at an Army surplus store and drives to Reno in this preposterous craft. Only while he’s on his way out of town he witnesses two bank robbers getting into his bank just as he’s leaving with the cash for his trip, and the robbers (Morgan Conway and Alan Carney) and their associate/moll, Bunny Wells (Iris Adrian in a marvelous performance that steals the film), flee to Nevada themselves and bury their loot under Indian Rock, the location where Jack’s sources have told him to look for Black Bart’s treasure. Eleanor also comes to Nevada intending to divorce Jack, and of course, this being a movie, they all end up at the “Bar Nothing” dude ranch, where they’re chased by a sheriff’s deputy (Matt Willis, the werewolf from Return of the Vampire with Bela Lugosi) who wants to arrest the robbers and also to take Jack into custody as a material witness. The rest of the movie is basically old-fashioned bedroom farce, as the various characters go in and out of each other’s hotel rooms, either voluntarily or otherwise, and Jack also runs afoul of a woman named Mrs. Dumont (Myrna Dell), who seems to have come to Reno to divorce her sailor husband (Matt McHugh), only they reconcile … while Jack is stuck under their bed all night, hiding from Mr. Dumont’s jealous rages (he’d gone to Mrs. Dumont’s room because she’d inadvertently taken the suitcase he thought contained Black Bart’s treasure but actually contained the bank loot, and stuck him with her own suitcase full of lingerie).

There are some marvelously funny scenes in this film, notably the one in which Jack, armed with his metal detector and his map, goes out to dig for Black Bart’s treasure and finds … an old spittoon, then tears up the ground and after fruitlessly digging hole after hole after hole (a rehash of a gag in the RKO comedy masterpiece Bringing Up Baby but still hilarious) finally comes up with the suitcase of loot; and a later scene, whose homoerotic implications probably sailed over the heads of 1946 audiences (or at least 1946 Production Code censors!), in which the sheriff’s deputy handcuffs Jack to a bed and insists on spending the night with him so he can bring him in as a material witness the next morning. There’s also a predictable but still funny pratfall in which Jack ends up falling from a trellis into the salad at a garden party ­— it was at this time that, referencing Jack Haley’s most famous role, I joked that by now he was probably thinking the wizard of Oz was right when he told him he’d be better off without a heart — and a good final scene in which Eleanor rescues Jack from a runaway stagecoach which the crooks had commandeered and the cops were chasing, and Jack Haley’s stunt double does a nice leap from a low-hanging tree trunk (itself, as Charles pointed out, a familiar sight on these “Western” locations!) into the amphibious vehicle Eleanor is driving. An imdb.com reviewer noted that this film, produced and directed by Leslie Goodwins from a script by Charles E. Roberts and Arthur A. Ross based on an “original” (quotes definitely appropriate!) story by Charles Kerr, was an example of Anton Chekhov’s dictum that whenever you put a pistol on the mantel in act one, it has to get fired in act three; just about every major plot point of this movie is meticulously “planted” by the writers, which makes the film well constructed but also rather predictable. It’s odd that RKO put Wally Brown and Alan Carney into the film but did not have them work together — remember that they were two comic actors who had never even met when RKO signed them and decided to pair them as their own Abbott and Costello, and it’s likely that the nose-dive in the real Abbott and Costello’s popularity in the mid-1940’s led RKO to lose interest in Brown and Carney as a team and throw them into this movie as two separate actors in two different parts of the film. There is a nice in-joke reference to the Dick Tracy radio program (the joke being that Morgan Conway, cast here as a crook, made two movies playing Dick Tracy at RKO), and overall Vacation in Reno is a nice little comedy, rarely laugh-out-loud funny but at least amusing — though Charles made the point that as a silent film with a master like Harry Langdon or even a solid but not brilliant comedian like Snub Pollard, this would have been screamingly funny instead of just moderately amusing.