Hot Rhythm (Monogram,1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Hot Rhythm was a movie I really hadn’t had much hope for, mainly because it was presented by Turner Classic Movies as part of a tribute to director William Beaudine — so notorious for making bad movies that Harry and Michael Medved nominated him as one of the “Worst Directors of All Time” in their book The Golden Turkey Awards. Beaudine had actually begun his career in the 1910’s as a director of comedy shorts (including a spoof of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea called — almost inevitably — 20,000 Legs Under the Sea) and had actually worked his way up by the mid-1920’s to direct features with “A”-list stars like Mary Pickford (her last two films in child roles, Little Annie Rooney and Sparrows, in 1925 and 1926 respectively) before the Depression wiped him out financially and forced him to accept a long succession of jobs in “B”-movies (and then, in the 1950’s, in the graveyard of “B” directors, series TV). He’d still made some good movies in the early sound era, like Three Wise Girls (1932) with Jean Harlow (though its quality came more from its writer, future Academy Award winner Robert Riskin) and The Old-Fashioned Way (1934) with W. C. Fields (but then anybody could make a great movie with Fields — all you had to do was make sure the camera had him in range and in focus, and the soundtrack was recording his dialogue audibly), but by the early 1940’s he was forced to work in the swamp pit of Monogram, making things like The Ape Man (1943) — Bela Lugosi’s all-time worst movie, at least until Ed Wood got hold of him! The stars of Hot Rhythm were Dona Drake, a reasonably attractive young woman singer with a reasonably attractive voice (she wasn’t going to keep Anita O’Day or Peggy Lee up nights worried about the competition, but she was a more than competent band-style singer in the manner of Helen Ward and Martha Tilton with Benny Goodman, Edythe Wright with Tommy Dorsey or Irene Daye with Gene Krupa), and Robert Lowery, tall, gangly and oddly clumsy-looking for an actor who within four years would become the screen’s second Batman (in the 1948 Columbia serial Batman and Robin). I also knew that even though the title was Hot Rhythm, there was likely to be very little actual hot rhythm in the movie; “B” studios like Monogram and PRC often made musicals whose titles promised far swingier songs than the films themselves delivered, and this was no inception: the hottest rhythm we hear in the film is in the very opening shot, in which the camera tracks down the various studios of the “Beacon Record Company” (almost certainly the fictional invention of the film’s writers, Tim Ryan and Charles R. Marion, though there was an actual Beacon recording company owned by entrepreneur Joe Davis, one of whose other imprints was modestly called “Joe Davis Records”!) and the first performer we see is a hot Black boogie-woogie pianist. Alas, the camera keeps tracking and we end up in the studios featuring less exciting, though still capable, white performers.

Surprise! Hot Rhythm, though unoriginal, is at least fun and stylishly done all the way through. The plot is no great shakes; it has to do with Beacon owner Mr. O’Hara (Tim Ryan) and his battle with crooked attorney (is that redundant?) Herman Strohbach (Robert Kent), manager of Tommy Taylor (Jerry Cooper) and His Orchestra, Beacon’s most successful act. Taylor is resisting pressure from his manager and the owner of the nightclub where he works to add a girl singer to his band — Taylor insists he’s doing fine taking the vocals himself (and the first song we see him perform is — surprise! — the old Harry Barris-Gus Arnheim-George Clifford “It Must Be True” from 1930, recorded then by Arnheim’s band with Bing Crosby doing a superb vocal Jerry Cooper in this version is trying his level best to copy). Jimmy O’Brien (Robert Lowery) and Sammy Rubin (the engaging Sidney Miller) are two aspiring songwriters working for Beacon in its lucrative sideline of recording jingles for radio commercials, though instead of coming up with original melodies for these O’Brien simply recycles public-domain tunes like “Clementine” and “Little Brown Jug.” One of the quartet of girl singers at Beacon who record the jingles is Mary Adams (Dona Drake), and O’Brien runs into her — literally — in a hallway and instantly falls in love with her and is determined to build her career. O’Brien decides to make a test record of Mary by tuning a radio to a broadcast of Tommy Taylor’s band and having her overlay a live vocal on his broadcast performance of the song “Where Were You?” (written by Lou and Ruth Herscher and, while hardly as good as the similar but better-known song “Where Are You?” is actually a quite nice ballad, worthy of revival, that showcases Dona Drake’s voice better than the rather forced “swing” numbers she sings later in the movie). Rubin questions whether that would be legal, but O’Brien assures him there’s nothing wrong with it as long as the record is used only as an audition test and is not publicly released. Well, the inevitable happens and the record gets picked up by mistake along with the six instrumentals Taylor recorded that completed his contract with Beacon; it is publicly released, and despite O’Hara’s and his ditzy secretary Polly Kane’s (Irene Ryan, Tim’s real-life wife and later Granny on the TV series The Beverly Hillbillies) attempts to go around and break all the records of it that have been put on sale (which gets them arrested and O’Brien and Rubin have to bail them out), the record gets released, it’s a hit and Herman Strohbach threatens a lawsuit that could put Beacon out of business. O’Hara decides to pull a fast one on Strohbach by claiming that Polly is the mystery singer on the illegal record — she actually filled in on one of the jingles and thought that was the record her boss was talking about — and O’Brien cuts a record with Polly that turns out to be a novelty hit. It all ends happily, of course, with Strohbach publicly humiliated, O’Hara with two huge hits on his hands and O’Brien and Mary together.

Though owing a lot to Manhattan Merry-Go-Round and virtually every other Hollywood movie of the period depicting the recording industry as a bunch of bozos who, if they ever stumble on something the public will buy, do so purely by mistake, Hot Rhythm is fun start to finish and is especially entertaining when Irene Ryan is front and center. It’s obvious she’s channeling Gracie Allen — and the whole crazy business between her and her boss, played by her real-life husband, is all too reminiscent of all those movies in which Gracie played a bizarrely incompetent secretary for her real-life husband, George Burns — but like Burns, Tim Ryan wrote excellent material for his wife and she manages to duplicate Allen’s feat of being surrealistically dumb instead of just ditzily dumb à la yet another great comedienne who worked with her actual husband, Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy. Her best moments are when she gets so confused about various people’s names she starts introducing people to themselves and then quits in frustration and says things like, “Names! They’re so confusing! Why do people have to have them?” One imdb.com reviewer, who signed himself (herself?) only as “ptb-8” from Australia, made the interesting case that in the mid-1940’s the quality of Monogram’s output was actually improving, mentioning a couple of other musicals, Lady, Let’s Dance and The Sultan’s Daughter, as well as the “B” noirs When Strangers Marry (an early credit for Robert Mitchum) and Dillinger, before the studio got into bigger-budgeted films like the quite good 1946 Suspense (an intriguing mixture of ice-skating musical and Double Indemnity-ish crime drama with Belita as the skater and Barry Sullivan as her corrupt manager and husband, directed by Frank Tuttle and with Belita showing real acting chops that eluded her ice-skating consoeurs Sonja Henie and Vera Hruba Ralston). Dillinger is the only one of these movies I’ve seen and it’s no great shakes as a film (though it has its moments), but it’s certainly arguable that one shouldn’t judge Monogram just by those dreary East Side Kids/Bowery Boys movies, Sam Katzman’s cheapies with Lugosi and the endless Charlie Chan movies with the dying Sidney Toler and his replacement, Roland Winters; though even the best movies of Monogram 2.0 (the incarnation formed by original founder W. Ray Johnston in 1937 after he exited the 1935 merger that had created Republic) don’t equal the films of genuine quality made by Monogram 1.0 (The Phantom Broadcast, Sensation Hunters and the 1934 Jane Eyre with Virginia Bruce and Colin Clive), it’s nice to know the little studio wasn’t entirely a wasteland — and Swing Parade of 1946, with Gale Storm, Louis Jordan and the Three Stooges (!), also counts as well worth watching.

Behind the Headlines: Whitney Houston (Lifetime, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan

I watched a Lifetime Behind the Headlines special on Whitney Houston, yet another episode in their weird “tribute” to her that included the TV-movie about her, Whitney (so focused on her ill-advised — to say the least — marriage to Bobby Brown one commenter on an imdb.com message board said it should have been called Bobby), an hour-long tabloid interview with Bobby Brown giving his side of their relationship and the one I would most have wanted to see but didn’t, a one-hour “performance special” I caught a bit of (and which contained a clip of a very young Whitney Houston singing a nondescript song but singing it powerfully in a Broadway-ballad style that didn’t sound at all Black but was still considerably moving). I was hoping last night’s show would be a rerun of that but instead it was a bit of sleazy tabloid story-mongering starting with the factoid that Houston died in the Beverly Hills Hotel on the eve of the big Grammy Awards pre-event party being thrown by Clive Davis, the head of her record company (Arista), and Davis went ahead with the party, ostensibly turning it into a tribute to her, while her body was still in the hotel several floors above. The show gave a thumbnail sketch of her career, and included the interesting revelation that the earliest and last performances of Whitney Houston that exist on video are both of her singing religious songs: a clip of her from the New Hope church in her home town of Newark, New Jersey (where her mom, Cissy Houston, was music director when she wasn’t on tour as a backup singer for Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley) and a drop-in she did at a nightclub where she joined a much younger male R&B singer in a hymn. (They showed a bit of this and her voice was considerably more ragged than it had been in its prime, though a different sort of artist could have used this to her advantage and presented herself as a hard-bitten woman who had been through a lot and survived it — sort of like the way Billie Holiday and Judy Garland presented themselves during their last years.) There wasn’t much of an attempt to get an insight into What Made Whitney Run — and the rather pat summing-up at the end, talking about how sometimes addiction is more powerful than love or fame, didn’t really answer the question, “Why Whitney Houston?” You might as well ask, “Why Billie Holiday?” “Why Judy Garland?” “Why Dinah Washington?” “Why Amy Winehouse?” (Though in Winehouse’s case she already had a big — and well-known — drug problem before she became a star, and her most famous song was a forthright statement about why she wasn’t going to go to rehab.)

Whitney Houston’s case was complicated by the fact that her carefully built-up image (mostly by Clive Davis, who was pushing her — as Berry Gordy had pushed Diana Ross earlier — for the “Black Barbra Streisand” market niche) didn’t allow for the complexities of real life to intrude: while Billie’s, Dinah’s and Judy’s pain became part and parcel of their work, Whitney was marketed as a performer whose beautiful, pure voice could soar over all that was mean and sordid in life — and the embarrassments of the later years (including her weird appearances on the TV “reality” series Being Bobby Brown, in which we got to see Mr. and Mrs. Brown playfully but edgily confronting each other in their kitchen over breakfast, which probably did as much to de-mythologize Whitney Houston as all the tabloid headlines about her drug use ever did) blew her career in ways that for other kinds of performers (including Bobby Brown himself, with his carefully cultivated “bad boy” image) wouldn’t have hurt and to some extend would actually have helped their myth-making. Whitney Houston’s story is a sad waste of talent, and despite all the churning of her private life in shows like this and tabloid articles both during her lifetime and since her death, we’re really not any closer to an idea of why a singer who seemed to have it all fell so far, so fast, and didn’t have the kind of either personal or career longevity her obvious models, Streisand and Ross, did.

Whitney (Sanitsky Company, Silver Screen Pictures, Lifetime, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Whitney, a much-hyped biopic of Whitney Houston … well, not the whole life of Whitney Houston, which would have been considerably more interesting. A story that told her transition from good little church-singing daughter of soul courtier Cissy Houston, a classic “40 Feet from Stardom” singer whose group, the Sweet Inspirations, sang backup for Aretha Franklin and later, after he offered them way more money, for Elvis Presley, to pop-soul diva to spoiled star to her mysterious death on February 11, 2012 on the eve of the Grammy Awards (where she was supposed to be featured in a big tribute as part of her comeback attempt) would have been considerably more interesting than the film we got from writer Shem Bitterman and director Angela Bassett — yes, the same person who made a splash playing another troubled soul diva, Tina Turner, in What’s Love Got to Do with It (a much better movie than this one!). They decided to focus their film entirely on the relationship between Houston (Yaya DaCosta) and her husband, soul/R&B singer Bobby Brown (Arlen Escarpeta), picking up Houston’s story as she’s sweeping the Soul Train awards and she meets Brown because the two of them are both performing at the event. The film was apparently produced with Brown’s full cooperation and definitely was opposed by Houston’s family — mom Cissy bitched to Entertainment Tonight that no one involved in the making of the film had actually known Whitney Houston and the daughter she had with Brown, Bobbi Kristina Brown, was upset that she was not picked to play her mom in it. Angela Bassett said that was because “she’s not an actress. I know she’s acted here and there. I know she’s been on their family’s reality show, but she’s not an actress and acting is a craft.” (That seems an odd criticism considering how wretchedly Whitney Houston herself acted in the film The Bodyguard; her stunning cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” made both the film itself and its soundtrack album mega-hits, but her performance was so bad Charles rather nastily cracked that she wasn’t even able to play herself — though in her defense, screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan created such a wildly inconsistent character that even someone with far more acting experience — like Barbra Streisand, for whom Kasdan originally wrote it — would have been thrown.) What makes me suspect that Bobby Brown was Bitterman’s and Bassett’s principal source of information is not only that Lifetime immediately followed up the film with an hour-long interview with him reminiscing about their relationship and dredging up its more sordid, tabloid-friendly aspects (the drinking, the drugs, the infidelities) but the script seemed designed deliberately to counter the standard “legend” of Houston’s career.

The “legend” is that she was a talented and professionally responsible, straight-edge singer until she met Brown, who got her hooked on drugs and a party-hearty lifestyle and basically dragged her down with him, and though she ultimately divorced him in 2007 (five years before she died) it was too late. The version presented in this film not only shows her using cocaine before he ever did but him trying to talk her out of it, and her status as a drug-user becoming public when he went into rehab and someone in his group violated the anonymity principle big-time and sold his revelations to a tabloid. There are some parts of this movie that ring true — like when Cissy Houston (Suzzanne Douglas) lectures Whitney when she’s about to marry Brown and makes it clear she’s against it because the Houstons were from the Black middle class and the Browns were from the ghetto, and “you can take the man out of the projects but you can’t take the projects out of the man” — but for the most part it’s a pretty standard-issue movie biography, leaning heavily for inspiration on The Jolson Story, Funny Girl and quite a few other movies I can’t think of at the moment simply because their clichés have become so much a part of the culture that it’s hard to trace them back to their origins. Indeed, the ending is a stone ripoff of Funny Girl (appropriate enough given that Houston’s big breakthrough film was originally planned as a Streisand vehicle): Whitney Houston has finally broken up with the man with whom she’s had a troubled and acutely dysfunctional relationship when she has to go out and deliver a performance of “I Will Always Love You,” and the song becomes a summing-up of her heartbreak the way “The Music That Makes Me Dance” did in the stage version of Funny Girl and “My Man” did in the film. I remember Whitney Houston as someone whose first flush of popularity coincided with my coming-out as a Gay man, and every time one of her records was played in a Gay bar I felt a sense of relief that the loud, obnoxious pounding “dance music” that dominated such places (and mostly still does!) would part for at least a few minutes and I’d get to hear a glorious pop-soul voice caressing songs with actual melodies. Whitney Houston was one of the most perfect voices ever to record (on a par with Karen Carpenter’s — another tragic, ill-fated figure — for sheer beauty and purity), and whatever I thought of her music (she was the sort of singer who was great when they gave her the right song; alas, especially after the first two albums, that didn’t happen all that often), I always loved the sheer sonority of the voice itself.

Oddly, the vocals on this movie sound only superficially like the real one; I’m not sure who did the singing since the imdb.com page on this film does not yet have a “Soundtracks” section, and I had assumed it was Yaya DaCosta herself but one imdb.com message board contributor said she had a voice double named Deborah Cox, but whoever was singing didn’t have the sheer purity of Houston’s own voice but made up for it by singing far more soulfully, indulging in a lot more melismas, “worrying” and the other devices of soul music (and the Black gospel from which it derived), to the point where the vocals on this movie turned out to be interesting in themselves as reworkings of Houston’s style with less sheer beauty but more emotion and passion. Unfortunately, when the Houston character wasn’t singing this film was so overwrought as to be virtually unwatchable — DaCosta and Escarpeta did such convincing beaver imitations on the scenery it’s hard to imagine anything was left of it when the film wrapped, and Bassett seemed intent on going out of her way to disprove my theory that actor-directors (from Stroheim and Welles — even though as actors they were unmitigated hams — to Allen, Redford, Costner and Eastwood) generally get marvelously quiet, understated performances from their casts. Even the soft-core porn scenes — of which there were several, featuring sex-machine Brown not only with Houston but the two other women with whom he had kids (one of whom he dated and knocked up a second time while he and Houston had already begun their relationship), as well as the party-girl he gets introduced to by one of his “projects” friends and takes up to Houston’s palatial home, only to have Houston unexpectedly come home early and catch them in flagrante delicto (not that old cliché again — that one’s so hoary there’s probably a painting of it at Lascaux!) — aren’t especially exciting or interesting. Whitney Houston’s story, though one with all too many of the makings of cliché (enormously talented star wastes it and ends up ruined and dead way too early), could have made an excellent (or at least a very good) film; instead this one is just a mess, and between this and the savage reviews Lifetime got for their biopic of Aaliyah (which I haven’t seen, though I undoubtedly have it in the backlog somewhere), maybe they just ought to lay off and not do any more movies based on classic and prematurely deceased Black divas, even if they think this is the best sort of programming they can offer for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend!

Debussy: The Fall of the House of Usher (Dutch TV, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The “feature” we watched last night was a complete — more or less — performance of Debussy’s second opera, La Chute de la Maison Usher, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” and left incomplete after his death. (At least two other composers, Peter Hammill and Gordon Getty — yes, a relative of those Gettys — have written operas based on “The Fall of the House of Usher.”) What survived was a complete libretto (Debussy’s own adaptation of the Poe story) and the first 25 minutes of what was projected to be an hour-long short opera (he planned to pair it with another Poe adaptation, “The Devil in the Belfry,” which he never even started), plus nine disconnected fragments from later in the piece. Debussy never orchestrated any of it, but his orchestral style is well known enough that various attempts to reconstruct it have been made, including one by Carolyn Abbate and Robert Kyr in the 1970’s, by Chilean composer Juan Allende-Blin also in the 1970’s and by Robert Orledge in the 2000’s. The Allende-Blin version — recorded on EMI in the 1980’s and issued first on LP and then on CD, coupled with two more works by French composers based on stories or poems by Poe (André Caplet’s The Masque of the Red Death and Florent Schmitt’s The Haunted Palace — ironically, based on a poem that occurs within “The Fall of the House of Usher”) — merely orchestrated Debussy’s surviving fragments. Orledge attempted to fill in the gaps and present the work “complete,” though towards the end he seems to have given up on attempting to duplicate Debussy’s style of vocal writing and the characters merely speak their lines accompanied by Debussyan instrumental music (the original meaning of the term “melodrama,” by the way: a spoken text declaimed against a musical accompaniment). What we were watching last night was a 2008 performance on Dutch TV, with a Dutch cast — baritone Geert Smits as Roderick Usher, baritone Henk Neven as his friend (the character who narrates the story in Poe’s original), tenor Yves Saelens as the doctor (though Debussy originally marked this role for a baritone, too — in his one completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, he had also written the male lead on the cusp between tenor and baritone) and soprano Cécile de Boever as Roderick’s sister Madeline, who has basically driven her brother crazy by suffering from a long, wasting disease (remember this was a personal issue for Poe; both his parents died of tuberculosis as, much later, did his wife) and coming back to life after she has been pronounced dead and interred in the Usher family crypt (Poe also wrote a story called “The Premature Burial” and the idea of being buried by mistake while one was still alive clearly haunted him). Not that we could make out much of the story from what we were watching, which was a semi-staged concert performance in the original French with Dutch subtitles — and about the only attempt at staging was to have de Boever come out and walk down a staircase in front of some red curtains at the beginning and again at the end, when all she has to do is scream to let Roderick Usher, his long-suffering friend and the audience know she’s still alive.

It’s clear both from this and from Pelléas (Debussy’s one completed opera and the only one performed during his lifetime — among his unrealized projects were not only another Poe adaptation but Romeo and Juliet and a spit-in-Wagner’s-eye attempt to do his own Tristan et Isolde, using the French version of the legend by Joseph Bedier rather than the German one by Gottfried von Strassburg Wagner had used) that Debussy’s tastes in operatic material ran towards shadowy stories that were frankly unrealistic and concerned more with mood than realistic human emotions or actions, and his style of setting text basically used the voices to carry the principal texture and relegated the orchestra to the background — the opposite of Wagner’s style and, I suspect, a deliberate rejection of Wagner by a composer who had such a bizarre love-late relationship with Wagner he referred to him as “Old Klingsor’s Ghost” and tore up the first draft of Pelléas because he thought too much Wagnerism had sneaked into it. What that means is that Debussy’s operas can work but only if you know what the singers are singing about — which requires you either to be a native speaker of French or to have learned it so well you can absorb it instantly. This is why Mark Elder’s 1980’s recording of Pelléas was such a revelation to me: it was in English, and while English translations of German and Italian opera are usually disasters, the English version of Pelléas brought home the score’s dramatic beauty and intensity in ways no French-language recordings ever had. All of this is a rather roundabout way of saying that I don’t think I can really judge Debussy’s The Fall of the House of Usher until I can see a staged performance sung in English; what emerges here is a lot of convincing atmosphere that seems to capture the aura of terror and dread that suffuses Poe’s tale and is effectively communicated by his matter-of-fact (at least by 19^th-century standards) writing style, and an effective frisson at the end when the supposedly dead Madeline reappears and screams. But it’s little more than an operatic curio by a composer whose instrumental works have become cornerstones of the standard repertory for both orchestra and piano, but whose one finished opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, still has no more than a toehold on the operatic repertoire — as I noted to Charles, Debussy may have only written one finished opera, but so did Beethoven, and Fidelio is a repertory work while Pelléas nestles on the fringe!

Holiday (Pathé, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I thought I’d do something that Charles and I used to do fairly often in our movie-watching but now do only rarely: run two versions of the same story consecutively on the same night. This time our story was Philip Barry’s play Holiday, which premiered on Broadway in 1928 and in some ways is a 1960’s story in 1920’s garb: on a vacation in Lake Placid 10 days before the main action begins, socialite and heiress Julia Seton meets and instantly falls in love with Johnny Case. Case is a young man who came from humble origins, worked his way through Harvard and just masterminded a merger between two utility companies that will make him a bundle and pave the way for a potentially major career in finance. He doesn’t realize that Julia comes from a family with major money until he shows up at the address she’s given him where she lives — and realizes it’s a palatial mansion. Julia’s father, Edward Seton, is the son of a self-made man but he’s picked up such an insufferable set of conventions about not only being a hereditary millionaire himself but insisting that his children — he’s got three, all grown, daughters Julia and Linda and son Ned — marry only people who already have money and social connections. Meanwhile, Johnny is rethinking the path he’s been on all his life and is thinking seriously of using his earnings from the utility merger to take off for a few years and have a “holiday,” a break from earning a living and building a career to give himself a chance to figure out what he really wants to do with his life.

Julia is aghast at her husband-to-be coming up with such a plan, and her dad is even more viciously negative about it, but her sister Linda thinks it’s a wonderful idea: Linda has been searching for an opportunity to rebel against what she calls “the reverence for riches,” and though she doesn’t explicitly set out to take Johnny away from her sister, that’s duly what happens at the end, with Linda accompanying Johnny on a steamship to Paris for his “holiday” and Julia left back home at the Seton manse with her dad, presumably to wait for a more stable, more grounded and less free-spirited man with an appropriate bank balance and social pedigree. There are also interesting supporting characters, including the third Seton offspring, son Ned, who’s being groomed to take over the family business (whatever it is) but lives his days in an alcoholic haze and cares about little but getting genteelly drunk (sometimes not-so-genteelly drunk) and avoiding as many responsibilities as he can. There’s also a pair of distant cousins, Seton Cram and his wife (Charles wondered why “Seton” would be the last name of some of the characters and the first name of another, but it was common among well-to-do families at the time to give their kids as a first name the maiden name of a woman who’d married into the family — which is how Cole Porter got his first name; his maternal grandfather was someone named J. D. Cole), who are additional enforcers of the social and monetary rules by which the Setons in general, and dad and Julia in particular, live. Holiday began life as a Broadway play that premiered November 26, 1928 and ran for 229 performances — not a blockbuster but a solid hit — and in the normal order of things it was bought by a movie studio (Pathé, in the last throes of its existence as an independent company — the founding branch in France would survive but the U.S. division would soon get absorbed by RKO), though in the nearly two years between the debut of the play and the release of the film on July 9, 1930 the Great Depression started, and all of a sudden the conflicts driving this story — particularly the whole idea of a man on his way to a fortune being willing to walk away from both it and the love of a glamorous and rich woman — must have seemed excessively out of date.

Pathé originally bought this as a vehicle for the musical star Ina Claire, but her nine-month contract with them expired before it could be filmed and Ann Harding, of all unlikely people, stepped into the role — not of Julia, at which she would probably have been quite good, but of Linda, the free spirit who doesn’t know she’s a free spirit and yearns to rebel against her dad’s idea of a proper lifestyle. Pathé cast Mary Astor as Julia and put solid actors in the men’s roles: Robert Ames (fresh from his triumph in Gloria Swanson’s first talkie, The Trespasser) as Johnny; Monroe Owsley as Ned (the only actor from the Broadway production to repeat his role in the movie); Edward Everett Horton and Hedda Hopper as Johnny’s socialite friends Nick and Susan Potter; Hallam Cooley as Seton Cram and William Holden — no, not that William Holden but a middle-aged character actor who also appeared in Dance, Fools, Dance with Joan Crawford and Clark Gable (the later, and far more famous, William Holden was originally named “Beedle”!) — as the self-important father, Edward Seton. The play was adapted by screenwriter Horace Jackson and directed by Edward H. Griffith, who had nowhere nearly as illustrious career as his famous namesake D. W. but was a solid craftsman who made a number of very interesting films, of which this is definitely one. The 1930 Holiday really seems like the beta version of a screwball comedy, though Griffith’s pacing is just a bit too slow and ponderous for it to take off and fly in the way similarly class-conscious stories did later in the 1930’s. But the basic plot is sturdy enough to work, the acting is certainly competent (and Mary Astor better than that!) even though Edward Everett Horton practically steals the movie with his down-to-earth characterization, and there are haunting plot devices like the playroom Linda Seton has kept as it was when her mom died and regards as an oasis of sanity and fun in her otherwise museum-like manse — where Linda and Johnny dance to a Regina music-box recording of Sol P. Levy’s “That Naughty Waltz.” (The Regina, which we’ve already seen in operation in Ken Maynard’s contemporary Western Smoking Guns from 1934, was a giant music box whose songs were programmed on discs, so you could have it play different songs the way you could with a record player. Indeed, as record players developed and threatened to put the Regina company out of business, Regina responded with a machine that could at least theoretically play both.)

The second-act climax (even if you didn’t know in advance that this movie was based on a stage play you could tell just by looking at it where the original curtains fell!) takes place on New Year’s Eve (thus adding Holiday to the oddly short list of movies — Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Horn Blows at Midnight, and Woody Allen’s recent and utterly marvelous Whatever Works — in which key sequences take place on New Year’s Eve), where Linda has wanted to celebrate her sister’s engagement with a handful of people in the playroom, and her dad has taken over the event and invited virtually the entire Social Register for a thoroughly dull event enlivened only by a society-style dance band and Ned’s alcoholic commentary on the whole drab affair. Holiday is also a transitional film in the history of talkies; the actors deliver their lines relatively naturalistically and without those … horrendous … pauses … that … make a lot of films from 1928 and 1929 almost totally unwatchable today, but the actors are still facing front and center, treating the camera as if they were on a stage and it were the audience, and director Griffith does surprisingly little of the shot-reverse shot angling and cutting that became standard for long dialogue sequences in the mid-1930’s. It also didn’t much help that the print we were watching was a download from archive.org that was in poor shape technically; the soundtrack was relatively clear but the picture often cut off the tops of people’s heads in long shots and in one scene, set inside a car, the image washed out so that we were essentially seeing little bits of people’s features in a sea of off-white. Ironically, when we screened the 1938 version — a recent recording from Turner Classic Movies (which showed this film twice in the last two weeks, as part of their December “Star of the Month” tribute to Cary Grant and more recently as part of a birthday celebration for Lew Ayres) — we noticed it carried a UCLA film preservation credit; we can only hope somebody steps in with a grant to restore the 1930 version as well!

Holiday (Columbia, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The 1938 Holiday would on paper seem to be a much better movie — Barry’s play was adapted this time around by Sidney Buchman and Donald Ogden Stewart, two Leftist writers whose politics showed in the much nastier “spin” they put on the character of the father, Edward Seton (veteran character actor Henry Kolker); the director was George Cukor and the stars were Katharine Hepburn as Linda Seton, Cary Grant as Johnny Case and Lew Ayres as Ned Seton — all far better actors than the ones who played their parts for Edward Griffith in 1930. I’d seen this one before in the 1980’s and regarded it as the weakest of the four collaborations between Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, partly because I didn’t think very much of the plot and partly because Cukor seemed to be directing under water; the film became less interesting in its own right than as the beta version of the 1940 masterpiece The Philadelphia Story, which reunited Hepburn, Grant, Cukor, Barry and Stewart (along with a more famous Stewart than writer Donald Ogden: James Stewart, who played the second male lead and won the Academy Award for Best Actor even though Grant had the leading male role — MGM, which produced The Philadelphia Story, promoted Stewart instead of Grant because Stewart was under contract to them while Grant was a free-lancer) and was both a great movie and a blockbuster hit. Katharine Hepburn had been interested in Holiday for a decade before she filmed it; in 1928 she had understudied Hope Williams as Linda in the original Broadway production, and in 1932, auditioning at RKO for the female lead in a film based on the play A Bill of Divorcement, while all the other actresses up for the role were shooting screen tests of scenes from A Bill of Divorcement, Hepburn thought she’d stand out if she shot a test of a scene from Holiday instead. During pre-production for the 1938 version George Cukor scored a copy of Hepburn’s screen test and showed it to her — and she responded, “I’m terrible! I look so awful I wonder why you hired me!” Where the 1938 version suffers by comparison is not only the hiring of a weak and uninteresting actress, Doris Lloyd (who’s billed fourth, after Hepburn, Grant and Ayres — Mary Astor had been billed second in the same role in 1930!), as Julia.

The 1930 version is actually more evenly cast, and there’s real suspense whether Robert Ames will accept his future father-in-law’s offer to help him get started in business and assume all the responsibilities attendant thereto or run off to Paris either on his own, with his scapegrace friends the Potters (who, though Edward Everett Horton repeated his role from 1930 and Jean Dixon played his wife, were socially demoted in the 1938 version from one-percenters to college professors on the ground that Stewart and Buchman thought audiences would find it easier to relate to Johnny’s friends if they did not have money themselves) and/or with Linda. In the 1938 Holiday it’s all too obvious from the get-go that Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant are going to end up together; precisely because the two of them are so much more charismatic than the rest of the cast that there’s no sense the outcome is uncertain and that Johnny might indeed end up sacrificing his free-spirit ideals the way Jason Robards does at the end of A Thousand Clowns (1964), though in that film it’s to preserve not his engagement but his right to parent his son. What’s most interesting about Holiday is how forbidding Hepburn’s performance is; she made this film after Harry Brandt of the Associated Exhibitors had put her on his infamous list of stars he considered “Box-Office Poison” (Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and Fred Astaire also made his list) and she and her original studio, RKO, had parted company following the box-office failure of Howard Hawks’ comedy Bringing Up Baby (today it’s hailed as a masterpiece, but in 1938 it did well in New York City but flopped dismally in the rural areas that still dominated much of the U.S. film market) and Hepburn’s furious refusal to take on a cracker-barrel soap opera called Mother Carey’s Chickens as her next film. At the time she was dating the super-rich Howard Hughes, and he put up the money for her to buy her way out of her RKO contract. Harry Cohn, president of Columbia and a man who delighted in making stars of people who’d burned out at other studios — in 1934 he’d had a huge success with opera diva (in both senses) Grace Moore in the film One Night of Love after MGM had fired her for being overweight — grabbed the chance to sign Hepburn for one film and gave her everything she wanted: her favorite director, Cukor; her favorite co-star, Grant; and a play she’d longed to perform in for a decade.

What seems especially odd about this is that at a time in Hepburn’s career with so much hostility against her from both theatre owners and audience members (David O. Selznick seriously considered casting her as Scarlett O’Hara but ultimately rejected her partly because 1939 audiences hated her and partly because he didn’t think Hepburn was sexy enough to be believable as Scarlett), instead of seeking out a part in which she could express lovability and soften her image, she opened her performance in the same serious, defiant mode she’d begun her film career with in A Bill of Divorcement. Selznick’s comment on that film — that instead of inviting the audience to like her she came out with a chip on her shoulder and dared them to — applies to Holiday as well. Holiday ended up as another flop on Hepburn’s résumé — 1970’s film historian Marjorie Rosen thought Depression audiences felt that anyone who’d turn down the sort of job Johnny Case was being offered was too irresponsible to bother with — and it didn’t help that Harry Cohn decided to use the “Box-Office Poison” label in his ad campaign, essentially challenging audiences to see the film in defiance of Harry Brandt’s label. Not surprisingly, this backfired big-time; when roller-derby star Wes Anderson was worried that too many people were forsaking roller-derby matches to attend movies, he took a billboard right across from Harry Cohn’s “Do you think Katharine Hepburn is box-office poison? See her in Holiday!” with his own billboard, “Wes Anderson thinks it’s true.” Nonetheless, Hepburn retained enough confidence not only in her own judgment but in Philip Barry as a suitable writer for her that (with another infusion of Howard Hughes’ money) she commissioned a new play from him for a Broadway production, ensured that she would own the movie rights (so no studio could buy the play and make it with someone else in the lead) and came up with The Philadelphia Story, a blockbuster hit on both stage and screen and the renaissance of Katharine Hepburn’s status as a movie star.

Screen Directors’ Playhouse: “One Against Many” (Hal Roach TV, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I just watched an interesting little half-hour show on Turner Classic Movies: “One Against Many,” an episode of the woefully short-lived (only 35 episodes during the 1955=1956 season) TV series Screen Directors’ Playhouse. This was a Hal Roach production during the time in which Roach had suffered business reversals — notably from the failure of his idea of producing 45-minute “streamliner” films to bridge the gap between the old two-reelers his studio had specialized in during its glory days and full-length features. He was trying to reinvent himself as a TV producer,  notably with The Gale Storm Show, and this was an effort to launch a prestige project: the gimmick was that each episode would be shot on film by a major movie director, and the scripts would also be by “name” feature writers. This one was aired March 7, 1956 and seems almost bizarre in its typecasting: Lew Ayres, famous both for playing Dr. Kildare in MGM’s “B” series in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s and for serving as a medic in World War II after asking for (and, controversially, receiving) conscientious objector status regarding actual combat, gets cast as real-life veterinarian Dr. John Mohler, who in California in 1924-25 demanded extermination and destruction of whole herds of cattle, sheep and other cloven-hoofed animals to stop an epidemic of hoof and mouth disease (called “foot and mouth disease” in the script by Malvin Wald, John Jacobs and Donald F. Sanford).

The Wikipedia page on foot-and-mouth disease reports, “Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) has severe implications for animal farming, since it is highly infectious and can be spread by infected animals through aerosols, through contact with contaminated farming equipment, vehicles, clothing, or feed, and by domestic and wild predators. Its containment demands considerable efforts in vaccination, strict monitoring, trade restrictions, and quarantines, and occasionally the killing of animals.” The Wikipedia page states that the disease is caused by a virus — as does the script of this program, something I wanted to check on given how many things these days are blamed on viruses (I’m still reeling from the reference I read recently to syphilis being a “sexually transmitted virus” — it’s sexually transmitted, all right, but it’s a bacterium) — and the plot of this show deals with an epidemic that threatened the entire livestock industry in California. The famous director who was assigned to this was William Dieterle — the actor who played Dr. Kildare working for the director of the biopic of Louis Pasteur (who gets mentioned at least three times in the dialogue), though oddly the announcer who introduces and narrates the show didn’t mention The Story of Louis Pasteur in his intro and instead hailed Dieterle as “the director of great films like The Life of Émile Zola and Elephant Walk.” (Well, great films like The Life of Émile Zola, anyway.)

The show depicts Dr. Mohler first treating a dog named “Taffy,” the pet of a young girl he’s befriended (these days we’d be asking, “What’s that dirty old man doing with that young girl and her dog?,” but the 1950’s were more innocent times), just so we know he’s generally compassionate towards animals and therefore he wouldn’t make the recommendation he does make that whole herds of cattle, sheep and pigs consisting of over 100,000 animals must be destroyed to contain and ultimately eliminate the foot-and-mouth epidemic if it weren’t absolutely necessary for health reasons. Dr. Mohler — who’s being played by an actor whose conscientious-objector status during “The Good War” had truly made him “one against many” in real life! — appears before a Congressional committee and convinces them that his genocidal war against California’s farm animals is necessary. Then he has to go convince the farmers themselves to consent to the destruction of their herds, and though the federal government is compensating them that’s still small beans compared to the years — sometimes decades — the farmers have put into breeding their herds, work which will die with the animals themselves. Mohler’s first target is his old friend, farmer Ed Rawlings (Wallace Ford) — who, unlike his fellows in central California, always prided himself on using scientific methods — only this time he goes ballistic and, in words similar to those used by Cliven Bundy and other defiant ranchers who have become Right-wing culture heroes for threatening to shoot federal agents who dare suggest they pay grazing fees to feed their cattle on public land, he threatens to shoot Dr. Mohler if the doc dares set foot on his ranch. Only Rawlings’ cute, tow-headed son (Rudy Lee) — there had to be a cute, tow-headed kid in it somewhere! — agrees to hand over his own pet calf for destruction and that softens dad’s heart.

The Rawlingses (he’s also got a long-suffering wife, played by Emlen Davies with the sort of hang-dog expression that’s standard for all Hollywood depictions of farmers’ wives) are ultimately mollified that they’ll only be out of business for three months; after that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (which gets a special-thanks credit at the end) will introduce test animals, and if they survive the Rawlingses and their fellow ranchers will be able to use the government compensation money to restock. Only the test animals end up catching the disease, and Dr. Mohler traces it to mountain deer, who are carrying the disease and, fleeing the winter snows, are coming down to the farms and infecting the farm animals. This requires another confrontation with a whole bunch of men with guns, following which Mohler sends out teams of hunters to wipe out the deer population so they can’t keep reinfecting the farms. (“Oh, great,” I thought. “As if wiping out the cattle isn’t bad enough, he’s going to have to kill Bambi.”) In a marvelous scene he has the deer hunters served a dinner in enclosed plates which, when the covers are lifted, contain oranges — he persuades them to go along by pointing out that Nevada and other neighboring states are refusing to allow any California agricultural products in even though foot-and-mouth disease doesn’t affect plants. “One Against Many” is a pretty standard tale, and the writers were good enough Hollywood pros they hit virtually all the accepted cliché points for their type of story, but it’s still an oddly moving piece even though the “herds” are obviously stock clips and the burial of the infected cattle and the shooting of the deer are kept off-screen, which actually makes the scenes more powerful and heart-rending since they’re indicated Val Lewton-style by sound alone.