Too Many Husbands (Columbia, 1940)

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

The film was Too Many Husbands, which I’d recorded as part of a TCM “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to Fred MacMurray — I hadn’t expected much from this but it was a reasonable length (81 minutes) and the synopsis (“When her long lost husband returns after her re-marriage, a woman decides to try life with two mates”) promised at least a nice bit of studio-generated entertainment. What we got was a film much better than I’d thought it would be, a marvelous Code-bending romp through a situation that gave rise to several other films around the same time — the same year that Columbia released this movie, 1940, RKO came up with My Favorite Wife (reuniting director Leo McCarey and stars Irene Dunne and Cary Grant from Columbia’s big comedy hit of 1937, The Awful Truth) with much the same premise: a woman is left alone after her husband sails out to sea and (presumably) drowns, and she falls in love with his best friend and — at least in Too Many Husbands — actually marries him. Then husband number one turns out not to have drowned after all; he’s rescued, he returns home expecting to resume his relationship where he left it off, and complications ensue. Too Many Husbands began life in 1919 as a play by W. Somerset Maugham, who had basically taken over Oscar Wilde’s mantle as dramatic chronicler of the romantic misadventures of the British classes — and who, like such other Gay or Bisexual writers as Wilde and Noël Coward, brought his Gay sensibility to bear on the domestic (mis)adventures of heterosexuals and had a refreshingly cynical view of the whole idea of “fidelity” and the palpably absurd notion that human beings can regularly pair off with one and only one partner, till death to them part. (It does happen but it’s not the usual thing, despite society’s exaltation of it as an ideal and ferocious pressure on anyone who doesn’t conform to it.) It opens in the offices of the Lowndes and Cardew publishing company, two years after partner Bill Cardew’s (Fred MacMurray) mysterious (supposed) drowning at sea in his yacht, and Henry Lowndes (Melvyn Douglas) has got to the point where he’s decided to take Cardew’s name off the door to the firm’s office, which he does with the implacable self-assurance of Sam Spade’s similar removal of the (genuinely) dead Miles Archer’s name from his office door in The Maltese Falcon a year later.

Then we meet Vicky Lowndes (Jean Arthur), who was Cardew’s wife until she had him declared legally dead and married Lowndes essentially on the rebound. She expects to have dinner with her husband but he’s too busy — the linotypers at the printing company have just gone on strike and he has to settle the labor dispute personally — and naturally she’s not a happy camper. The Lowndeses (incidentally the name “Lowndes” is a real tongue-twister for the actors here and it keeps coming out sounding more like “Lawrence”) live with her father George (Harry Davenport) — usually in stories like this it’s the mother-in-law from hell but this time it’s the father-in-law from hell, a neat “spin” on the old cliché from Maugham and screenwriter Claude Binyon — and it’s dad who gets the phone call from Bill Cardew, alive, reasonably well and with such a scraggly growth of hair and beard he resembles Bela Lugosi’s makeup in The Island of Lost Souls and only the familiar MacMurray voice emerging from all that hair “outs” him. It turns out Cardew was stranded on a South Seas island for a year and then, when he finally was rescued, it was by a ship that lacked a radio. But he’s determined to get shaved, groomed, cleaned up and reunited with Vicky, whom he’s been thinking of for two years. Bill moves into the house together — I was waiting for some plot strand in which he wanted to take over full partnership of the business as well, but once Bill returns the whole business thread (including the long-suffering secretary who was in unrequited love with both Bill and Henry, and who I thought was being set up as a consolation prize for whichever man lost Vicky) disappears from the plot and the action stays pretty much in the Lowndes home afterwards. From then on Too Many Husbands is a marvelous romp with Vicky, delightfully maddening in that special way Jean Arthur had, keeping both men on tenterhooks, refusing to make up her mind between them, and forcing both of them to sleep in adjoining twin beds in the guest room — there’s a marvelous gag in which Henry discovers that Bill snores like a cement mixer — and setting up one scene whose homoerotic implications probably sailed over 1940 audiences but seem all too obvious now, in which Henry sneaks into what he thinks is Vicki’s room, declares his undying love for her, and of course he turns out to be talking to Vicki’s dad.

The ending is something of a cop-out — Columbia apparently filmed two versions and even sought out the advice of college girls at UCLA and USC to help them decide which to use; ultimately the version they released ends with a judge ruling that since Bill was not legally declared dead in a proper way, he, not Henry, is Vicki’s legal husband, though there’s a final tag scene in which Henry refuses to give up; he crashes Bill’s and Vicki’s first post-court date at Frank’s, the favorite restaurant of all the parties involved, and they end up in a preposterous three-way huddle on the dance floor — but until then Too Many Husbands is a delightful movie that makes one wonder how they got it by the Production Code Administration and makes one happy there was a Production Code Administration so they had to depict the situation subtly and not go for the gamy, sexually blatant “humor” with which a similar plotline would be done today. The Code people did come down hard on Columbia when they first proposed the story — the Code office slammed them with a letter criticizing the story’s “apparent lack of any respect for the sanctity of marriage; its farcical treatment of the subject of bigamy; and its very frank and detailed discussion of the unsavory subject of divorce by collusion.” Just what Binyon and director Wes Ruggles — who was billed over the title, a surprise since that was an honor usually only directors of the box-office recognizability of Cecil B. DeMille and Frank Capra got in 1940, but Columbia had signed Ruggles to a producer-director deal similar to the one William Dieterle had got at RKO after finishing at Warner Bros. and being billed above the title was probably one of the perks he got in his contract — did to get Too Many Husbands past the Code office is unclear (you’d probably have to read Maugham’s original play and compare it to the film to figure it out) — but it paid off; the film is a minor comic gem (and Ruggles deserves points for the anti-type casting of making MacMurray the free-spirited around-the-world gallivanter and Douglas the solid/stolid stay-at-home type, when just about anyone else at the time would have cast them the other way around) and far more sophisticated and genuinely witty than a movie on the same theme would be today.

Death on the Diamond (MGM, 1934)

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

Charles and I watched an intriguing 1934 MGM movie called Death on the Diamond, an odd little baseball-themed thriller in which Robert Young plays star pitcher Larry Kelly, who’s recruited by St. Louis Cardinals owner-manager Pop Clark (David Landau) to perk up an otherwise ailing franchise (coincidentally — or maybe not — the legendary pitcher “Dizzy” Dean led the Cardinals to a World Series berth that year). Kelly meets Clark’s daughter Frances (Madge Evans), who also serves as the team’s secretary, and has one of those hate-at-first-sight meetings with her that we know, as hardened moviegoers, will soon blossom into love. Alas, the Cardinals are beset by gamblers led by Joseph Karnes (C. Henry Gordon — who else?) who at one point, unbidden, leave $10,000 to get Kelly to throw a game (he responds not only by pitching to win but racking up a no-hitter!); by an unscrupulous businessman named Henry Ainsley (John Hyams), who has a mortgage on the franchise that will enable him to take it over if Clark’s team doesn’t win the pennant and thereby make enough money to pay him off; and by a string of mysterious assaults on the team members that ends with one of them being murdered in the middle of important games. The sequences showing the shootings look surprisingly modern — just the muzzle of a gun mysteriously appearing from behind a column in the stadium and then a cut to the ballfield, where the intended victim falls and is assumed to have simply collapsed until the tell-tale bullet hole indicates foul play. The first shooting is aimed at Kelly and the Cardinals’ star hitter, Dunk Spencer (Joe Sauers) — who can’t stand Kelly and also has the hots for Frances — the shooter aims not at them but the tire of their car, causing it to overturn and laying them both up so they miss several important games.

Then “Truck” Hogan (Nat Pendleton), who until now we’ve thought of only as a comic-relief character, is fed a poisoned hot dog (we’ve previously seen that non-toxic hot dogs are his favorite food) because he witnessed the strangling of pitcher Frank Higgins (Robert Livingston) before the second game of a double-header, which Higgins was going to pitch in Kelly’s place at the insistence of Frances, who’s in love with Kelly and doesn’t want to see him killed. Clark doesn’t want to put Kelly in the game either but is persuaded by Larry himself that the only way to flush out the killer is to let Larry pitch — and the bad guy actually throws an exploding baseball into the game, only Larry realizes what it is and hurls it out of the field just in time so it explodes harmlessly in mid-air. Then the assassin tries to shoot Larry but is caught and is revealed to be Patterson (DeWitt Jennings), a former Cardinals player whom Clark demoted to groundskeeper even though he thought he should have been hired as manager when he was too old to play. The film ends with Patterson arrested and safely in custody, and the Cardinals needing one more run in the bottom of the ninth to win the final game of the season — and the pennant; it’s Larry Kelly’s turn at bat, though, and Clark wants to send in a pinch-hitter but Kelly persuades him he deserves the chance to bat himself, drives in a home run and everyone — except Ainsley and the gamblers who bet so heavily on the Cardinals to lose — is happy. Based on a similarly titled novel by Cortland Fitzsimmons (a writer I’ve vaguely heard of), Death on the Diamond could have been considerably more exciting than it is; as it is, it’s an amiable thriller written by the usual committee — Harvey Thew, Joe Sherman and silent-era veteran Ralph Spence — and directed in O.K. but not spectacular fashion by Edward Sedgwick, who made great movies with Buster Keaton as his star (though those were probably good because Keaton still had the interest and the clout essentially to direct himself) but seemed out of place outside the realm of comedy. The film does feature a lot of comedy, including the ongoing arguments between a Cardinals player and an umpire who’s always threatening to fine him and/or throw him out of games, and it was shown by TCM — oddly — as part of a “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to, of all people, Mickey Rooney, who’s in it, all right, as a bat boy in one scene.

Requiem for a Heavyweight (Columbia, 1962)

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

The film was Requiem for a Heavyweight, which began life as a Playhouse 90 TV episode and originally starred Jack Palance as the central character, Louis “Mountain” Rivera, a burned-out heavyweight fighter who comes out of his last bout — in which he’s brutally beaten over seven rounds before he’s finally knocked out — with only the dimmest idea of who or where he is. A doctor examines him and declares that he’s a punch or two away from being blind, so he will no longer be certified as fit to fight in the ring. So what is he to do with the rest of his life? He’s only 37 but he dropped out of school in sixth grade and has been a prizefighter for 17 years, fighting 111 bouts and never taking a dive once. For the film, made in 1962, Serling and the original director, Ralph Nelson, returned to the project, but they replaced Palance as star with Anthony Quinn, who slotted the film in during a two-month hiatus (October and November 1961) on his work on Lawrence of Arabia. Requiem is a relentlessly dark story that begins with Rivera being creamed in his last fight at the hands of a real-life boxer, Cassius Marcellus Clay, later known as Muhammad Ali — though we see very little of him in action because most of it is shown from Rivera’s point of view, which becomes progressively more blurry and disoriented as he loses his ability not only to defend himself against Ali’s onslaught but even to see. (In a bizarre irony, the venue where this fight takes place advertises itself as “New York’s Sporting Mecca” — little did anyone associated with this film that within two years Clay would convert to Islam for real and take a new name!) When he comes to in his dressing room he thinks he’s still training for the fight he’s actually just lost, and when he hears an unrelated bell ring he snaps to and starts punching the air — evidently he’s supposed to be suffering from what’s now called post-traumatic stress disorder.

There are four main characters in the film: Rivera; Maish Rennick (played by a marvelously slimy Jackie Gleason, who grew a moustache for the role and enacted the villain superbly), his manager; Army (Mickey Rooney in a good serious performance, though not particularly a surprise to anyone who’d seen his powerful lead role in The Big Operator three years earlier), his trainer; and Grace Miller (Julie Harris), a social worker at the New York Employment Department who takes a sympathetic interest in Rivera and tries to place him with a job coaching children in athletics at a summer camp. Only Maish is determined to sign Rivera for fixed TV wrestling matches with slimeball promoter Perelli (Stanley Adams) because his life is being threatened by a group of gangsters led by Ma Greeny (played by someone billed only as “Madame Spivy” — and for a 1962 movie character she’s so surprisingly gender-ambiguous that it was only after I watched the film and looked up the imdb.com page on it that I realized this character was a woman and not just a weirdly effeminate man!) who, on Maish’s recommendation, made a bet on the Clay-Rivera bout that Rivera wouldn’t last four rounds — and, though he lost, he made it to seven. Maish deliberately takes Rivera to Jack Dempsey’s bar in New York City (the real Dempsey, who unlike the titular heavyweight seems to have made it out of boxing with his body and his reason relatively intact, appears in the film as himself) and gets him drunk so he’ll blow his interview for the camp job. Rivera realizes this in time to make it to the hotel where the interview was supposed to take place, but is so drunk and obnoxious he blows the job and in the end he’s convinced by Maish that he owes Maish to go into wrestling, in the guise of an Indian chief — and the last shot of the film is of Rivera, all his pride and self-respect gone, woo-wooing in stereotyped “Indian” noises as he enters the wring to face his opponent in his first wrestling bout. As the title suggests, Requiem is a good film but also a relentlessly dark one, literally an example of a “kitchen-sink drama” (a particularly grungy-looking one figures prominently in the set of the hotel room where Rivera lives), a hard film to watch that Quinn made harder because instead of speaking his lines in his normal voice, he decided to adopt the almost incomprehensible slur he’d heard from old, punch-drunk fighters when he’d interviewed them to prep for the role. According to Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne, Quinn’s odd vocal inflections pissed off Jackie Gleason, giving the two actors a real-life animosity that helped make the dagger’s-edge relationship between their characters that much more believable.

Oddly, though the original theatrical release was 95 minutes long, TCM’s print was only 85 minutes, and one imdb.com reviewer noted at least two specific scenes missing: “I distinctly remember Maish (Jackie Gleason) telling Ma Greeny what he would do to her if she weren’t a lady. In response, she laughs and says, ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.’ This is part of the early scene where Maish is attacked in an abandoned boxing ring by Ma’s thugs. There is another whole scene I can recall in which Mountain (Anthony Quinn) is practicing holds with a wrestler. He asks that the wrestler stay away from his injured eye, and when he purposely goes for the eye, Mountain punches his lights out. The cuts I recall seeing on TV years ago always included these scenes, and I’ve never seen this shortened cut of the film before. It’s still a great film, but I really miss these two scenes.” I’d like to see the full-length version sometime, and I’d also like to see the TV version with Palance (assuming it still exists) since it reportedly has a different and less relentlessly dark ending, but Requiem is still a good movie, especially in the heart-wrenching emotional identification director Nelson, writer Serling and the actors give us with the characters, Rivera in particular. (Even with Maish, we’re kept in an uncertain, edgy state, one minute wanting his schemes to succeed, the next wishing the gangsters would kill him already.) Its debt to Joseph Moncure Marsh’s 1920’s prose poem The Set-Up and the 1949 movie made from it (with real-life boxer-turned-actor Robert Ryan in the lead) is pretty obvious, especially with the plot gimmick that the manager has not only bet against his own fighter, he hasn’t told the fighter to throw the bout because he’s convinced he’ll lose — and lose on schedule — on his own. Also the character of the social worker played by Julie Harris is really too good to be true — she anticipates Mariska Hargitay on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in her schoolmarm-ish attitude and it’s utterly incomprehensible that she could be at all physically attracted to Rivera (though when he makes a crude move on her and she repulses him, the scene works because we read it as the only approach to women Rivera knows: we get the distinct impression that he’s never actually dated and all his sexual outlets have been prostitutes). But Requiem works as a tour de force for director, writer and the key cast members — even though Charles couldn’t help but comment that Rooney’s presence in the cast (TCM was showing this as part of a day-long “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to him) puts Muhammad Ali one degree of separation from Judy Garland!

Sherlock: The Hounds of Baskerville (BBC-TV, 2011)

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

Last Sunday I watched the Sherlock episode on PBS, a rerun from the second season of Mark Gatiss’s rather quirky show (he created it as well as playing Mycroft Holmes on-screen) called The Hounds of Baskerville, which like the other shows in the Sherlock series grabs a story from the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle canon but twists and turns it into unrecognizable shapes and forms. In this version, “Baskerville” is the name, not of a family and its ancestral mansion in Dartmoor, but a British military research laboratory working on genetically engineering animals to serve as military weapons. The script by Gatiss and Steven Moffatt centers around Henry Knight (Russell Tovey), a 20-something man who’s never recovered from the shock of seeing his father suffer a sudden heart attack, collapse and die on the moor, and incorporates the classic exchange from the Conan Doyle original in which the young man says he saw footprints near the body and, when asked if they were a man’s or a woman’s, says, “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” Holmes is struck, less by the tale itself than by the young man’s use of the word “hound” rather than “dog” to describe a canine creature — he regards the word “hound” as an archaic term no one in early 21^st century England would use (of course this is a modern-dress version of the Holmes saga). Holmes and Watson travel to Dartmoor together to investigate (in the original book they went there separately) and the script incorporates quite a few elements from the original, including the lights on the moor — in this version they seem to be signaling in Morse code, but the code when deciphered is simply a set of initials — and there are some odd bits reflecting the 21^st century’s mores (as opposed to the late-Victorian era when Conan Doyle wrote the original stories) in which Watson’s attempts to cruise girls in Dartmoor keep getting undone by the widely held belief that he and Holmes are a Gay couple.

The story incorporates some of the character names from the original, though both Stapleton and Mortimer are sex-changed — Mortimer (Sasha Behar) is Henry Knight’s therapist and Stapleton (Amelia Bullmore) is a researcher at the Baskerville lab — and Dr. Frankland (Clive Mantle), a minor character in the book, is the director of the lab (and also a rather queeny Gay man who openly cruises Watson). Even more so than the other Sherlock episodes I’ve seen, this one is long on atmosphere but short on plot coherence, and in an O.K. final twist it turns out that the “hound” is simply an illusion and what the lab has actually developed (or, more accurately, refined from a product previously produced by the U.S. military in Liberty, Indiana) is a drug that when surreptitiously slipped to its victim makes the person think they’re being chased by a gigantic hound from hell. (Holmes deduces that the drug exists, and it’s being administered via sugar, when he realizes that the only people who’ve seen the hound are those who’ve taken sugar-sweetened coffee in the local diner; Watson, who drinks his coffee without sugar, was therefore not exposed.) I’m not sure why this show has the reputation it does — to me the CBS-TV series Elementary seems a much better translation of the Holmes mythos to the modern day, at least in part because it’s not trying to insert all these cutesy-poo twists on the canon — the episodes I’ve seen are clever but all have suffered from their writers thinking themselves far more clever than they really are, and the show also suffers from Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes, since he emphasizes the neurotic, driven aspects of the character and not the supremely logical ones.

The Conspirators (Warner Bros., 1944)

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

Last night Charles and I watched The Conspirators, a 1944 film from Warner Bros. that was obviously trying to be another Casablanca — just about every studio in Hollywood tried to make their own Casablanca and Warners, having made the real one, did more of them than anybody else (including a little-known one called To the Victor that attempted to keep the cycle going after World War II was over). TCM showed this as part of their July “Star of the Month” tribute to Paul Henried — though, in an intriguing coincidence I didn’t notice but Charles did, they also showed this film, in which Henried plays a fictional Dutchman named Vincent Van der Luyn, right after Lust for Life, in which Kirk Douglas played a real Dutchman named Vincent Van Gogh. The Conspirators began life as a novel by Frederic Prokosch and got turned into a screenplay by Vladimir Pozner and Leo Rosten, with additional dialogue by Jack Moffitt — of these writers Rosten is the only one I’d otherwise heard of — and was directed by a hot new up-and-coming director on the Warners lot, Jean Negulesco. The film reunited three members of the Casablanca cast — Henried as freedom fighter Vincent Van der Luyn (and this time, unlike in Casablanca, we actually get to see him blowing up things and otherwise engaging in resistance-type action — in Casablanca we rather had to take it on faith that this somewhat prissy, stuck-up actor was supposed to be an action hero), Sydney Greenstreet as retired romance novelist turned underground leader Ricardo Quintanilla, and Peter Lorre as underground go-fer Jan Bernazsky.

The plot is very convoluted and takes place in Lisbon (where, you’ll remember, all the characters in Casablanca were trying to get to), where Vincent has come on some sort of secret mission to contact a resistance agent named Jennings (Monte Blue) — only on his way to his rendezvous he’s sidetracked at the Café Imperio by another sort of rendezvous with drop-dead gorgeous woman of mystery Irene Von Mohr (Hedy Lamarr, top-billed — Warners had tried to get her for Casablanca but her home studio, MGM, didn’t loan her out; I guess MGM wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice!), who joins him at his table and then just as mysteriously disappears on him. Vincent car-jacks her and drives her around the Lisbon coastline (“played,” as usual in a Hollywood film then, by Malibu), and eventually learns that she spent six months in Dachau and was rescued by a German official, Hugo von Mohr (Victor Francen), who got her released and married her. (So this time it’s Paul Henried who’s playing the “other man.”) Unfortunately the Germans are one step ahead of the rest and murder not only Jennings’ contact but Jennings himself — and they set it up so Vincent looks guilty. Eventually the plot does the one-of-the-resistance-fighters-is-really-a-traitor number, and Quintanilla is convinced it’s Vincent until Vincent mentions something about an eagle — which turns out to be a rare Dutch coin that Jennings was supposed to present to his handlers once they smuggled him into the Netherlands. To no one’s surprise it turns out that Victor Van Horn, who’s a Nazi posing as a resistance fighter posing as a Nazi, is the traitor, and there’s a grim final shootout staged in relentless chiaroscuro darkness in which Vincent finally dispatches Victor — only to say a tearful goodbye to Irene because he’s going to have to go to the Netherlands to take Jennings’ place in the underground. The Conspirators has the air of a factory product about it — the writers were all too consciously rechanneling the elements that had made Casablanca a great film as well as an enormous box-office success — but overall, despite its ridiculously complicated and confusing plot line, it’s a triumph of style over substance, with Casablanca cinematographer Arthur Edeson showing his marvelous mastery of dark atmosphere and Henried turning in an acceptable performance even if he can’t bring Bogart’s complexity to the role (but then, who could?).

Vienna Philharmonic Summer Night Concert (PBS, 2013)

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

I screened an intriguing PBS concert special, the annual summer night concert of the Vienna Philharmonic (the actual German name, emblazoned in white letters on black in front of the orchestra, is Wiener Philharmoniker), which was a sort-of tribute to Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, arguably the two greatest opera composers of all time, since 2013 is the bicentennial of both their birthdates. The concert was held in the outdoor garden of Schönbrunn, the big palace of the Austro-Hungarian Emperors way back when, though it was held in a fierce drizzle and a lot of the audience members brought (and needed) umbrellas. The concert was conducted by Lorin Maazel, a 70-something American who began his conducting career as a five-year-old child prodigy and, it’s estimated, had conducted 7,000 performances of symphonies and operas in his career. Like Erich Leinsdorf, Maazel is a competent but not particularly inspired conductor; he gets the musicians to play well and stay together but one misses the power and emotion this music can have in greater hands. It also didn’t help that the concert featured only one vocal soloist, tenor Michael Schade, or that he sang on only two of the nine pieces performed (at least on the PBS telecast; the actual concert could have been longer). The program began with the Triumphal March from Verdi’s Aïda — not a piece that works that well out of context — and then the Act I prelude from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger (as one critic remarked, Wagner filled Meistersinger with good old German counterpoint just to prove he could — he was commonly written off in his day as an autodidact composer who had never mastered the fundamentals and therefore shouldn’t be taken seriously as a composer like his great contemporary rivals, first Schumann and then Brahms). Then Michael Schade came on for the aria “La mia letizia infondere” from Verdi’s I Lombardi, which he sang decently enough but rather raggedly until the final, beautifully floated high note. The orchestra then played the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde — alas, without a soprano to do the vocal part in the Liebestod. Instrumental arrangements of the piece bother me — especially towards the end, when the arrangements generally leave out Isolde’s part and therefore avoid the stunning dissonances between the vocal and orchestral lines that give the piece much of its power. (The best instrumental version of the Liebestod I’ve heard was Franz Waxman’s arrangement for the film Humoresque, in which Isaac Stern as John Garfield’s violin double played the soprano line and turned the piece into a quite effective concerto movement for violin, piano and orchestra.)

Then Schade came on for the high point of the evening, “In fernem Land” from Lohengrin (the standard short version, alas), which he sang magisterially; perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that as a German singer he’d be more comfortable in German than Italian opera, but he sang the aria beautifully, keeping mostly in head tones until the big climax and managing to portray the complex emotions of the character and the scene: the mystical connection to the Grail order, the longing for human companionship and contact, the hurt at Elsa’s betrayal of his trust. (He did the piece well enough I’d like to hear him in a complete Lohengrin sometime.) The remaining selections were the overture from Verdi’s La Forza del Destino (and the comparison between Verdi’s overtures and Wagner’s proved how much more bombastic Verdi was; Verdi fans often argue that his operas were warmer and more humanistic since they dealt with real people and not spiritual or quasi-spiritual beings, but as an orchestral composer Wagner ran rings around Verdi, possibly at least in part because the Germans had so much more of a symphonic tradition than the Italians) and what were announced as encores: the “Ride of the Valkyries” and two pieces by Johann Strauss, Jr. — the well-known Wiener Blut waltz (given a rather bowdlerized translation as “Vienna Spirit” when the title is really “Vienna Blood”) and a lesser-known light piece called Long Live the Magic: A Quick Polka. I could have done without the Strauss pieces — just before the first one, the unctuous announcer said, “What’s a concert in Vienna without a Strauss waltz?” (though I’m sure there are many times the Vienna Philharmonic plays in concert in which it does not play anything by the waltz-writing Strausses!) — and gone for more Wagner and Verdi instead, like the prelude to Lohengrin for the former and the Act I and III preludes to La Traviata for the latter — and I also wished they’d got another vocal soloist (like a soprano for the Liebestod who could also have joined Schade in a Verdi soprano-tenor duet) and a stronger conductor than Maazel — who exemplifies the usual rule that long-lived conductors tend to get slower as they age (though some, like Mengelberg and Toscanini, got faster); Wiener Blut was taken so slowly it lost all its passion and drive, and only one couple tried waltzing to it on camera! Still, this was an enjoyable concert, and as Charles pointed out, here, as in the Vienna Philharmonic’s fabled New Year’s concerts (which are quite popularly devoted to light music in general and the Johann Strauss family in particular), both the musicians and the audience seem to be having fun. There isn’t the deadly-dull way classical music usually gets presented in the U.S., as what Charles called a sort of musical castor oil: “Here, listen to this, it’s good for you!”

Pearl Jam 20 (Tremolo Productions, Vinyl Films, 2011)

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

Afterwards Charles and I watched a quite different music show from the Vienna Philharmonic concert we’d recorded a week before: Pearl Jam 20, an odd 2011 documentary on the Seattle-based rock band Pearl Jam whose title is a pun on the fact that they’d been together 20 years as a band when the film was made and their first album was called Pearl Jam 10. (Their second album was called Vs. and sometimes the title was expressed as “Two Fives” — i.e., 10 — though in the film the band members refer to the album as “Versus.”) The film was directed by Cameron Crowe, former rock critic turned film director, and he recalled that he had moved to Seattle in the early 1980’s and found the music scene dramatically different than what he’d been used to in L.A., where the bands were fiercely competitive and tried to elbow each other out of potential “discovery” by the music business. In Seattle, unlike in L.A. or New York, Crowe said, the members of various bands were often good friends and helped each other. Crowe seemed to think that was unique in rock scenes, though the history of music is full of city-based “scenes” in which there was a lot of mentoring and mutual support going on: in New Orleans in the first two decades of the 20^th century (despite the fabled “cutting contests” in which bands competed on the street, there was also quite a lot of support, as witness the way Louis Armstrong was mentored by King Oliver and Kid Ory), in Liverpool in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s (before the Beatles broke and the rest of the British music biz descended on Liverpool like locusts) and definitely in San Francisco in the mid-1960’s (before he had a record deal himself, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead came to L.A. to participate in the Jefferson Airplane’s sessions for their second — and commercial breakthrough — album, Surrealistic Pillow, and even suggested the title).

Pearl Jam grew out of an earlier band called Mother Love Bone, featuring a charismatic blond singer named Andrew Wood who had a major drug problem — he was coming out of rehab when he joined the band, which the other members should have taken as a warning. Mother Love Bone lasted long enough to make one album (for Mercury, in 1989) before Wood died of a heroin overdose — what I hadn’t known was that he lingered on two days on life support, kept alive just long enough so his family and friends could see him one last time before they pulled the plug, which made a macabre impression on the other two key members of Mother Love Bone, guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament. Rather than attempt to continue Mother Love Bone with a replacement singer, Gossard and Ament briefly went their separate ways and Gossard started organizing another band, which Ament joined. They also participated in a side project called Temple of the Dog organized by Chris Cornell, leader of Soundgarden (actually the first of the late-1980’s/early-1990’s bands from Seattle to sign with a major label, though since “alternative” or “grunge” weren’t established as musical categories yet Soundgarden was marketed by their label, A&M, as heavy metal) and Andrew Wood’s former roommate, which Gossard and Ament in their interviews in the film seem to regard as a sort of transition project between Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam. (I bought the Mother Love Bone album on CD in the early 1990’s and was startled and rather disappointed, mainly because Wood’s voice was a typical heavy-metal screech and seemed far less flexible and dramatic than Eddie Vedder’s.) Eddie Vedder, who would become Pearl Jam’s singer, was living in San Diego when the band sent him, along with several other candidates, an instrumental demo tape to which they wanted prospective singers to add a vocal; they seem to have been impressed with him largely because he was the only person they were considering who sang in his own style and did not try to imitate Andrew Wood. They were expecting a long, slow career buildup, years of playing in clubs and touring as bigger artists’ opening acts until they developed an independent following and slowly built up their reputation and their record sales; instead their first album, 10, exploded onto the charts thanks largely to their explosive performances on the 1992 Lollapalooza tour. The story is familiar: an early career peak, a gradual drop-off in record sales — though their concerts consistently drew well (largely, one suspects, to the hair-raising stage act they did; Vedder in particular became known for scaling the stage machinery and then leaping from it into the audience, and throughout those tours the other band members were worried he’d injure, incapacitate or kill himself) until they picked a (losing) battle with the Ticketmaster combine, which had grown from a ticket broker to a giant promoter with exclusive contracts with so many venues it became almost impossible for a rock band, even one at Pearl Jam’s level of commercial success, to do a tour without them.

Some of the most grimly amusing parts of the movie show the mutual incomprehension between Pearl Jam and the people in the U.S. government when they came to Washington, D.C. to testify that Ticketmaster was an antitrust-violating monopoly; in one sequence, one of the people interrogating them asks, “Don’t you have an exclusive recording contract?,” and one of the band members says that’s an irrelevant question — alas, missing the chance to make the obvious point: when Pearl Jam wanted to record, they had several companies offering them contracts and they were able to choose between them, but when they wanted to do live tours in major venues, it was Ticketmaster or nothing (or, as the film depicts, shows in out-of-the-way locations, including an outdoor venue where the show got rained out; perhaps they should have followed Bessie Smith’s example and rented a tent). The show also hit other high and low points of Pearl Jam’s career — including probably the grimmest day in the band’s history, the 2000 rock festival in Roskilde, Denmark, in which nine people were trampled to death and three others severely injured when fans crowded too close to the stage and started stepping on and over each other. (The band members saw what was happening and tried to get the fans to move back, but too late.) Crowe directs this film in a nervy, energetic style that seems to be an attempt to reproduce the energy of Pearl Jam’s music on film, even though he indulges in one of the most annoying habits of music documentary directors: until the very end he never lets us see Pearl Jam perform one single song, start to finish. He does avoid another one of the traps of films like this: he doesn’t include the usual plethora of talking heads going on and on and on about his subject’s importance; besides the members of Pearl Jam themselves, the only person extensively interviewed on camera is Chris Cornell, their longtime associate and friend. Instead there are some quite amusing clips from people commenting on Pearl Jam in the early 1990’s, in the flush times of their success — including a couple of excerpts from the late Andy Rooney’s 60 Minutes commentary on the grunge scene, in which he said he was tired of hearing 20-something girls say they liked bands like Pearl Jam because they agreed with them that life was hopeless, and he’d gladly trade ages with them.

Clashes between the younger generation that likes contemporary music and older people that look askance on it and can’t understand why anyone would want to listen to it have become axiomatic (I’ll never forget reading Bruno Walter’s autobiography Theme and Variations and learning that for a music-loving German teenager in the late 1890’s the generation gap was over Wagner — Walter and his generation loved him, his parents and their generation hated him, though the older Germans generally conceded that Tannhäuser and Lohengrin were great operas and reserved their scorn for everything Wagner wrote after that). One recalls the oddball video issued as part of the complete Buddy Holly boxed set on the European label Purple Chick, a weird appearance by Holly and his band, the Crickets, on a New York local show MC’d by Arlene Francis in a patronizing fashion, telling her viewers that even if they don’t think they like rock ’n’ roll they should listen to it anyway or else they won’t “understand” young people. Pearl Jam 20 scores in ways a more conventional music-doc wouldn’t have — Cameron Crowe’s affection for his subjects and their music is quite obvious — though there are parts of the movie you’d have to be pretty well up on Pearl Jam trivia to understand (the film didn’t make it clear that while Pearl Jam recorded an album backing Neil Young, Mirror Ball, they were not allowed to take credit for it as “Neil Young and Pearl Jam”; instead all the Pearl Jam members were credited merely as individuals, because they and Young were under contract to different record companies) and a more conventional presentation might have made part of the history clearer. Still, as an example of a rock band that has lasted over 20 years with four of the five original members still on board (the only one they’ve rotated was the drummer; like Bruce Springsteen and, for that matter, the Beatles, they had to go through several drummers before they found the right one long-term) and survived a skyrocketing career upswing and the seemingly inevitable fall, Pearl Jam are worth treasuring — especially as a reminder that 20 years ago it was still possible to become sensationally popular in the music business while still writing emotionally sophisticated, impassioned songs about the darker aspects of human existence. Today all that sells are boy bands, dance divas and ultra-materialistic rappers!