Moon Over Miami (20th Century-Fox, 1941)

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

Three nights ago Charles and I watched Moon Over Miami, a not very “special” but nonetheless entertaining 1941 20^th Century-Fox musical reuniting the co-stars of Down Argentine Way, Betty Grable and Don Ameche (she had had an explosive success with Down Argentine Way but was still being billed below him!) in a considerably less splashy but still tuneful and spectacular-looking Technicolor extravaganza. The ostensible basis of the plot of Moon Over Miami was a British play by Stephen Powys that opened in London in 1938 (the film credits future director George Seaton — who would make Grable’s best film, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, five years later — and Lynn Starling with “adaptation” and Vincent Lawrence and old Warners hand Brown Holmes with “screenplay”), but the plot has more than a family resemblance to another play, The Greeks Had a Word for It, written and premiered by Zoë Akins (the quite interesting writer who was responsible for the scripts of Katharine Hepburn’s second and third movies, Christopher Strong and Morning Glory) in 1930 and first filmed by Sam Goldwyn in 1932 — though the Production Code Administration (even in those so-called “pre-Code” days!) forced him to change the title to The Greeks Had a Word for Them, and in the definitively post-Code era of the later 1930’s Goldwyn had to do another title change — to Three Broadway Girls — to be allowed to reissue the film.

The imdb.com page on Moon Over Miami lists no fewer than four versions of this same basic story besides Goldwyn’s Greeks and this one: Three Blind Mice (1938), Three Little Girls in Blue (1946), an Asian film called Kuang Lian (1960) and the most famous of the remakes, How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) — also a Fox production and also starring Betty Grable! (Grable quite frequently appeared in remakes of her old movies; she recalled years later that some of the dialogue in her 1950 film Wabash Avenue sounded familiar and wondered if she’d seen a film containing it. Later she found she had been in a film containing it; the writers of Wabash Avenue had not only recycled the plot of her 1940 movie Coney Island but had ripped off some of the lines as well!) And just what about this plot made it so appealing to generations of moviemakers? Well, Moon Over Miami starts with an unlikely trio — sisters Kay and Barbara Latimer (Betty Grable and Carole Landis) and their aunt Susan (Charlotte Greenwood, whose dry wit is a large part of this film’s appeal) — working as waitresses at “Texas Tommy’s,” a drive-in supposedly famous for its hamburgers and blue-plate specials (though no one seems to come in for anything more than coffee, tomato juice and bicarb — obviously the place’s real reputation is as somewhere to go after you’ve been drinking all night and want to recover from your hangover). The women are expecting an inheritance of $55,000, but when they receive the check they find that attorney’s fees and high taxes have reduced the award to $4,000 plus change — whereupon they hit on the idea (possibly from having seen one of the previous versions of this story) of using the residual amount they did get to rent a room at a fancy resort in Miami (the establishment is called the Flamingo, which made me wonder if inveterate movie-buff Bugsy Siegel had got the idea from it to call his pioneering resort on the Las Vegas Strip the Flamingo) and see if they can snag rich husbands by posing as rich themselves for as long as their bankroll holds out.

They run into bellboy and housekeeper Jack O’Hara (Jack Haley), who hates gold-diggers with a passion and appoints himself to make sure Kay in particular isn’t entrapped by one — which of course creates a lot of comic suspense that leaves the girls worried that he’s going to “out” them as gold-diggers themselves — and at least two of the young rich men who they went there to target: Jeffrey Boulton (Robert Cummings), whose big party is now in its third day (though his guests seem so exhausted by the ordeal all they do is slump in chairs and wonder what they’re going to get to eat); and his principal guest, Phil McLean (Don Ameche), who when we meet him has a napkin or towel or something over his head, reflecting the drunken stupor he’s in. Kay and Barbara go after these unlikely pigeons and there’s a comic rivalry, sort of like the one in Holiday Inn but considerably less nasty, in which Jeffrey and Phil have a speedboat race (a lot of exciting stunt driving by their doubles) and at one point Jeffrey takes Kay for a ride in a submarine and Phil turns up staring at them under water (how did he hold his breath that long?). The studio actually sent a second unit to real resorts in Winter Haven and Ocala, Florida, and it boosts the entertainment value of the film considerably, though we do get the stars performing some not particularly interesting songs by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger (low point of the score is a big dance number in which the principals and chorus are supposedly playing Seminole Indians — watching this right after reading Steve Inskeep’s Jacksonland, which is mostly about the Cherokee removal in the 1830’s but touches on the Seminoles and their resistance as well, was weird, and Charles found this more racially offensive than the minstrel numbers that afflicted too many of the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland films) and listening to an undistinguished assemblage of 20^th Century-Fox studio musicians trying to imitate a swing band (the next year Grable would make Springtime in the Rockies, not a particularly great movie either, but at least that one had a real swing superstar, Harry James, and Grable was so taken with him she married him for real) wearing blue suits as they play for a crowd dressed mostly in blue who are dancing on a blue dance floor. (Remember that the biggest improvement in three-strip Technicolor over the older two-strip version was it could photograph blue, so filmmakers took advantage of that and showed as much blue as they could; even the night skies in this film are a deep, rich blue.)

Eventually Kay gets as far with Boulton as a formal proposal and a chance to meet his family, but in the end she realizes that it’s Phil she really loves even though he’s broke — his family did own the McLean steelworks but their business has dwindled down to nearly nothing (if this had been a Warner Bros. movie she’d have been shown pushing him to take over the mills and build them back up to their former repute, but at Fox they couldn’t have cared less about that sort of thing) — and it’s Barbara who gets Jeffrey, who at the behest of his parents has agreed to give up his playboy ways and take charge of their company’s operations in Brazil. As for Aunt Susan, she ends up with Jack O’Hara — after having spent most of the movie locking him in various bathrooms and closets (in one of the bathroom there’s a solid wall of little square mirrors, and the door to the medicine cabinet is concealed in the middle of the array) — given Jack Haley’s most famous credit, I couldn’t help but joke, “The Wizard of Oz gave me a heart, and all I could do with it was get Charlotte Greenwood?” Moon Over Miami is a fun movie, all things considered, not as entertaining as it could have been but still entertaining (put Grable in a movie with a better director than Walter Lang — like George Seaton in The Shocking Miss Pilgrim or Preston Sturges in the underrated Western spoof The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend — and she could rise to the occasion, but for the most part Fox gave her complaisant hacks who knew how to put her through her paces but not to do much interesting with her), though it hovers in the shadow of How to Marry a Millionaire, which took place in New York City but otherwise had the same plot, with Grable repeating her role, Marilyn Monroe taking the Carole Landis part (and, not surprisingly, bringing a lot more to it) and Lauren Bacall the Greenwood role — and it also doesn’t help that, while it has some of the same elements as Down Argentine Way, it doesn’t have Carmen Miranda (though given how much Latino/a culture there is in Florida she certainly could have been fit into it) and, instead of the Nicholas Brothers, we get the Condos Brothers, a couple of white Nicholas Brothers wanna-bes who are formidable tappers but lack the Nicholases’ incredible acrobatics and athleticism.

Men Against the Sky (RKO, 1940)

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

The film was Men Against the Sky, which I’d recorded from Turner Classic Movies during a recent evening tribute to its star, Richard Dix, who by the time it was made — 1940 — was on the downgrade. RKO was mostly using him in “B” rehashes of his great successes from earlier in the 1930’s, in films like The Arizonian and Reno that were basically reworkings of Cimarron and The Conquerors (a title that just says “banking,” which is the subject of the movie) and in stuff like this, an aviation movie that blatantly rehashes much better films Dix had made before it, The Lost Squadron and Ace of Aces, which TCM showed immediately after Men Against the Sky. Basically, Men Against the Sky is a pretty standard aviation movie which begins in a carnival, with Dix as barnstorming stunt pilot Phil Mercedes (his last name, incidentally, is pronounced “MER-suh-dees” instead of “Mur-SAY-dees,” like the car), who takes people up for $10 a pop (a pretty dated plot point in 1940 when commercial aviation was sufficiently well developed that anyone who really wanted to fly could do so in the comfort and relative safety of an airliner) until one of them gets out of the plane, complains that the pilot is drunk, and tells the waiting crowd that if they want to continue living the last thing they will do is get in that plane. Phil is fired on the spot, and responds by stealing the plane, doing some spectacular stunt flying (the great Paul Mantz is credited as technical adviser but I suspect he did most of the spectacular piloting seen in the film) and crashing the thing into a nearby barn. As a result, the Civil Aeronautics Board (remember the Civil Aeronautics Board? No particular reason why you should, except that it was dissolved during the Carter administration, a reminder that the deregulatory mania of the 1980’s and 1990’s was bipartisan) “grounds” Phil — i.e., takes away his pilot’s license — for one year, and Phil’s sister Kay (Wendy Barrie), with whom he lives, gets a job as draftsperson for the McLean aviation company.

The owner, Dan McLean (Edmund Lowe), is attempting to build a prototype for a new fighter plane so he can win a contract being offered by unspecified foreign powers for a plane with which they can shoot down bombers — an odd plot device reflecting that this film was made after World War II had started but before the U.S. was in it. He’s also being distracted by a mistress, Miss LcClair (Jane Woodworth), but oddly little is made of that — in most aviation movies the mistress would turn out to be an industrial spy for a company competing for the contract with McLean, but writers John Twist (story) and Nathanael West (screenplay) — yes, that Nathanael West, author of Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust — tap into a lot of aviation-movie clichés but don’t do the vamp stealing industrial secrets and/or taking McLean’s attention away from the contract and thereby allowing a competitor to win. (We are told that the initial seed capital for McLean’s company came from the rich woman he married, which makes it look even sleazier that he’s having an affair on her.) Instead Kay — using the last name “Green” so she won’t be linked with the once-honored, now-disgraced pilot who’s her brother — gets a job in the office of Martin Ames (Kent Taylor), McLean’s chief designer, and she sneaks some suggestions for the new plane’s design to Martin, not telling him that they’re actually the work of her brother. When a model of the plane is tested in a wind tunnel (a piece of hardware that’s basic to actual airplane manufacture but hardly ever appears in a film about aviation) and its wings shear off, Phil figures out how to fix the problem: by putting little flaps on the wing that will be up when it takes off and lands but will close for a smoother wing surface during actual flight. Alas, when the full-scale prototype is ready for testing, the test pilot, Dick Allerton (Donald Briggs), has a jealous hissy-fit when he makes a pass at Kay and Martin, who predictably has progressed from hate-at-first-sight to love of her, punches him out.

Allerton gets his revenge by refusing to do the nine-G dive that was part of the contract specs (depicted in the film by the plane heading straight down at a chilling 90° angle to the earth’s surface) and reporting that the plane is unsafe. Phil, who’s on the ground watching the test, immediately goes up to prove that the plane is safe, violating his one-year CAB suspension. Alas, the plane really isn’t safe — it crashes, Phil bails out and the plane emerges a flaming wreck, and by flying in violation of his suspension Phil gets grounded for life. (At this point one wonders why he doesn’t go to South America and fly mail planes under a false name à la Only Angels Have Wings.) Phil figures out what’s wrong with the plane — one of the flaps was cut across one of the wooden spars used as a frame for the wing, thereby weakening the spar and causing it to shred in mid-air — and, with the financial support of an unscrupulous backer (Granville Bates) who gives McLean venture capital on such tough terms he seems like the prototype for Mitt Romney, they build another plane and a U.S. Navy pilot, Captain Wallen (Lee Bonnell, who was the co-winner of that talent contest with Gale Storm which won them both RKO contracts, but who’s barely in the film except inside a dummy cockpit), comes out to test it. The plane passes all its tests but its landing gear gets stuck, half-down and half-up, and though McLean and Martin Ames plead with the U.S. Navy that’s supervising the test that the landing gear are a standard component and all the new stuff in the plane has worked, Navy Captain Sanders (Selmer Jackson) insists that the plane cannot be allowed into production unless it lands safely and in one piece. Accordingly, Phil Mercedes rides to the rescue again, intending to go up in another plane (with someone else actually flying it so he doesn’t break his CAB “grounding” again), push the landing gear open manually, and parachute to safety — he fixes the landing gear but the parachute shreds on the little wheel at the end of the plane, so Phil falls to his death, though as if he were an operatic lead he holds on long enough to bless the union of his sister Kay to Martin Ames before he expires. (I can think of at least two operas about aviation: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Night Flight and one Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht came up with, originally called Lindbergh’s Flight in honor of what they thought was a major triumph of the 20^th century, only later in a typical political snit Brecht changed the title to Ocean Flight after Lindbergh became an apologist for Nazi Germany.)

The final scene is a knockoff of the ending of The Lost Squadron, in which Richard Dix is seen as a ghost, flying the new plane off into the skies, represented by negative film to indicate that he’s dead (in The Lost Squadron both Dix and Robert Armstrong, representing burned-out World War I pilots reduced to working for mad moviemaker Erich von Stroheim, fly across the sky in negative film to indicate that the “lost” squadron is still together even if two of its members are dead). Plotwise, Men Against the Sky is pretty much a rehash of the Aviation Movie 101 clichés, though with just enough variations to make it interesting, and the most fascinating factoid about it is what plane “played” the McLean prototype: the H-1 Racer, designed, financed, built and flown by Howard Hughes in 1935. The H-1 was the first plane ever built with retractable landing gear (which may explain why they look so crude on screen), and Hughes also invented a system to make the rivets holding its metal skin onto the frame flush so there wouldn’t be rivet heads sticking up, offering wind resistance and slowing his super-plane down. Indeed, the film apparently contains stock footage of Hughes’ actual flight in the H-1 in 1935, during which he flew cross-country across the U.S. faster than anyone had before (thereby breaking a record Hughes had set himself flying in the other direction in someone else’s plane). The fact that Howard Hughes appeared — albeit by proxy — in an RKO movie eight years before he bought the studio himself adds to the ironic appeal of Men Against the Sky.

Selma (Paramount, Pathé, Cloud 8 Films, Celador Films, Plan B Entertainment, Harpo Films, 2014)

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

I had been waiting for a long time to see Selma and finally got the chance Monday night when the San Diego Public Library played it along with a live gospel concert by the Martin Luther King, Jr. Choir that took up about half an hour before the film began. Selma is a story of a true-life historical incident that I had vivid memories of when it was happening — the campaign against Black disenfranchisement staged in Selma, Alabama in 1965 and led in an uncertain coalition by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the more radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The film had six production companies — Paramount, Pathé, Cloud 8, Plan B, Celador and Harpo — the last being Oprah Winfrey’s outfit (the name isn’t a reference to the silent Marx Brother but is simply “Oprah” spelled backwards) — though Winfrey (who, unless one of those pre-“discovery” African empires had a female monarch, seems to have been the richest African-descended woman who’s ever lived) appears to have been the prime mover behind the project. She also appears in it, in a brief but indelible cameo as Annie Lee Cooper, a Black woman who attempts to register to vote in Selma and is put through a series of humiliating tests — she’s asked to recite the preamble to the U.S. Constitution by an officious white clerk who first asks her if she knows what a “preamble” is, then asked how many counties there are in Alabama and then asked to name them all — before her application to vote is denied.

Selma was made by a Black woman director, Ava Du Vernoy (that’s how it’s spelled on her credit, though imdb.com and most other sources mash the two parts of her last name together and spell it “DuVernoy”), and the writing credit goes to Paul Webb, though some imdb.com “Trivia” posters said Du Vernoy rewrote most of the script herself and particularly came up with all the pastiches of Martin Luther King’s speeches delivered by David Oyelowo, since the King estate maintains tight copyright control over King’s actual words and had apparently already licensed them exclusively to Warner Bros. for a King biopic that has yet to be made. It does seem odd that both Oyelowo and Carmen Ejogo, who plays King’s wife Coretta, are half-British and half-Nigerian; they both do perfectly fine jobs, but weren’t there any African-American actors qualified for these roles? (To add to the irony, Ejogo had previously played Coretta Scott King in a film called Boycott — and had got married for real to Jeffrey Wright, who played Martin Luther King in Boycott.) Selma wasn’t quite the uplifting celebration of political protest, direct action and nonviolent resistance I was expecting, mainly because director Ava Du Vernoy and screenwriter Paul Webb kept the mood of the piece surprisingly somber for much of it. I give them a great deal of credit for not turning the movie into a hagiography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — there’s a marvelously ironic scene about his womanizing in which his wife Coretta is shown playing a tape the FBI has sent secretly, denouncing him as a “degenerate,” telling him to commit suicide and then offering a sample purporting to offer a genuine sexual encounter between King and another woman. “That’s not me,” King tells his long-suffering wife. “I know it isn’t,” she replies. “I know what you sound like.” Then she asks him point-blank if he loves her, and after a long pause he says he does. Then she asks him, “Do you love any of those others?,” and after an even longer pause he says, “No” — making it clear that Coretta King, like Hillary Clinton, saw a higher purpose in staying in her marriage despite her husband’s “straying.” The film also shows the sometimes bitter antagonism between King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the younger, more radical members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the SNCC people’s understandable upset that they’d been organizing in Selma for months and now here was King, coming in to take over the movement and present its public face to the media.

Selma is a quite interesting historical document and I could see it being useful in school classes about the civil rights movement, though a teacher would have to use the film and put the history it shows in context: that within a year SNCC would publicly break not only with King but with the whole strategy of nonviolence and elect leaders like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown who would proclaim “Black Power,” a doctrine that took the principle that the liberation of oppressed people must come from struggle by the oppressed people themselves and ran it into the ground. What the “Black Power” people did was break off all cooperation with whites — either elected officials or grassroots activists — and thereby bring a sudden end to what has been called the “beloved community” of Blacks and whites working together to achieve liberation and an end to the institutionalized racism of the U.S. in general and the South in particular. Those of us who were alive when the struggles in Selma happened (I was 11 but I was precociously aware of what was going on in the streets of Selma, and my mom was an active participant in SNCC’s white auxiliary, Friends of SNCC, until the “Black Power” activists that took over SNCC in 1966 disbanded it) were inspired and thought they would be a model for future actions that would advance the cause of civil rights — instead they became, as Debussy said of Wagner, “a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn” (in earlier writings on the period I’ve reversed that quote and said of the 1964 Barry Goldwater Presidential campaign — which, like Al Smith’s campaign in 1928, lost but set the stage for America’s next political realignment — that it was an ugly sunrise that was mistaken for a dusk). There’s even a hint of King’s assassination when J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker) tells President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) that if King becomes too troublesome, he can simply be eliminated — the line in the film is, “Mister President, you know we can shut men with power down, permanently and unequivocally” — which couldn’t help but remind me that in his autobiography Malcolm X (depicted obliquely in the film and played by actor Nigél Thatch) had predicted both his own murder and King’s and had said the white power structure would not let either of them live. Selma became a controversial film for its treatment of President Johnson — whose former aides came to his defense and said he was a lot more supportive of the civil rights struggle in general and of King in particular than he’s shown in the film. In a way Selma was the answer movie to all the critics of the film Lincoln, which had shown Abraham Lincoln as a conniving politician ready to achieve the noblest of ends (passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in the U.S.) with the foulest of means, including open bribery of wavering Congressmembers with jobs, and which at least some progressive critics had denounced as saying that you can’t achieve progressive ends without corrupt means. Well, guess what — you can’t (as will become quite apparent if the Broadway play showing how Johnson got the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress makes it to the screen).

If Lincoln is a movie for activists who believe in working through the system and making the compromises it demands, Selma is a movie for those who believe that political change can be achieved through direct action and street demonstrations. In fact, it takes both — a reality the American Left knew in the 1890’s, 1930’s and 1960’s but has long since forgotten, while the Right is well aware of it and skilful in combining pressure from outside groups like the “Tea Party” with cunning manipulation of the levers of power from elective office to get what they want. Johnson is also a problematical figure in this movie because Tom Wilkinson, who plays him, gives the weakest performance of any of the principal cast members; at times he seems undecided whether he’s playing Johnson, Richard Nixon or Ed Sullivan. It’s true that a lot of the actors in Selma had the peculiar challenge of playing people who were extensively photographed and recorded when they were alive, and of whom extensive film footage still exists — an actor cast as Presidents Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon has a considerably greater challenge than one playing Lincoln to create a persona distinct enough from the real one but at the same time believable to people who’ve seen the films of the real one — and David Oyelowo as King handles this challenge a good deal better than Wilkinson. Oyelowo doesn’t quite master the rolling cadences of King’s public speaking style, and his rhetorical style is less powerful than the real King’s, but his is a quite good performance that manages to convince us he is the man he’s playing in a way Wilkinson never does. Selma also suffers from an especially extreme case of the past-is-brown syndrome (the cinematographer is Bradford Young), which is even more annoying in a film in which the main characters are Black: all too often key scenes are virtually impossible to “read” on screen because the actors’ deep brown faces are doing way too good a job of blending into the dank brown backgrounds. (In fairness to the film, the deficiencies of the new San Diego Public Library’s separate theatre building as a venue for film didn’t help; the broad glass front looks spectacular but lets in way too much light, there are no curtains you can draw over it, and the film did get easier to watch once the sun finally set.) The past-is-brown look and Du Vernay’s oddly slow pacing through much of the film — as well as her and Webb’s decision to incorporate the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama and the deaths of four Black girls (14-year-old Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson and 11-year-old Denise McNair) in the blast into the film even though it really took place September 15, 1963, a year and a half before the campaign in Selma — give the film an oddly elegiac tone; instead of a paean to activism it’s more a poem about how sheer desperation can drive an oppressed people to do incredible things.

It’s a measure of how fast things can change in American politics that the movie shows President Johnson addressing Congress on March 15, 1965 calling on them to pass the Voting Rights Act and beginning with his famous opening words, “I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy” — two years later Johnson had turned from the progressive community’s favorite President into its most reviled, thanks to his escalation of the Viet Nam War, and it’s a measure of how thoroughly the counterculture turned against him that in 1967 Mike Bloomfield’s blues-rock band the Electric Flag (itself a name with all sorts of political associations!) sampled that line from the speech in an ironic context — “Yeah, right” — at the start of a cover of Howlin’ Wolf’s song “Killing Floor.” And a lot of the original reviewers of Selma noted that it was released around the same time that the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act and thereby allowed Republican state governments in the South to start passing laws deliberately aimed at reducing the participation of Blacks and other people of color (as well as young people and working people in general) in the electoral process — with the Republicans and Democrats having switched their historic positions on civil rights (the party of the Civil War, “states’ rights” and the Ku Klux Klan became the party of civil rights, while the “Party of Lincoln” saw its future — and ensured its political dominance in the modern era — in becoming the party of Strom Thurmond and white racist reaction) and the Republicans seeing that their path towards full-spectrum dominance of the American political system (they already control the entire federal government except for the presidency, and they fully expect to gain that in 2016) lies at least partly in making sure people who would be likely to vote against them — people of color, women (especially unmarried white-collar professional women) and young people — aren’t allowed to vote at all. At the same time, what’s left of a Left in America has hamstrung itself by, among other things, either disinterest or outright opposition to the whole idea of electoral politics; if I read another article by a proclaimed Leftist saying that the whole idea of representative democracy is inherently illegitimate and therefore having anything to do with protecting, enhancing or even exercising the franchise is anti-Leftist, I think I shall go crazy over what Vladimir Lenin (hardly one of my favorite people, though he’s looking better and better in an era in which Leftists go out of their way to avoid building the kinds of effective, tightly-run hierarchical organizations you need to go up against entrenched power) called “an infantile disorder.”

69th Annual Tony Awards (American Theatre Wing/Broadway League/CBS, June 7, 2015)

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

Last night I settled in and watched the 69^th annual Tony Awards on CBS, a tightly knit three-hour extravaganza whose main appeal is getting to see songs from Broadway musicals and scenes from Broadway plays I wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to experience — and the long-term documentary value of the Tonys is that it preserves at least shards of theatrical performances that would otherwise have been lost. (Katharine Hepburn appeared on the Tonys during the run of her musical Coco and the one number from it she performed on the show is the only audio-visual evidence we have of her as a musical star — and though she really didn’t have a singing voice she was a good enough performer to act as if she had.) What was most interesting about this year’s Tonys was they provided yet more evidence of how much Broadway is sucking off its past glories —the nominees for Best Revival of a Musical included such cultural icons as The King and I (which won) — though I disagreed with the comment of one of the people involved that The King and I is the most iconic of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals (it’s really The Sound of Music, though that’s more due to the enduring popularity of the movie than any memories or later productions of the stage version) and Gigi, as well as On the Twentieth Century — the musicalized version of the 1930’s play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur called simply Twentieth Century, but the words “On the … ” were added so modern-day audiences would know the title referred to a train — which was produced recently enough I was surprised that it was being “revived.” Meanwhile, one of the leading nominees for Best Revival of a Play was another 1930’s work, You Can’t Take It With You by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and one of the “original” musical nominees was An American in Paris, which apparently qualified because it hasn’t been done on stage before even though it was based on the legendary 1951 film, which was itself based on the song hits by George and Ira Gershwin from the 1920’s and 1930’s and the George Gershwin tone poem that gave the film its title.

The people performing these shows now suffer from the unfair but inevitable comparisons with the people who either created or preserved these roles on film — when I saw Kristen Chenoweth, who also co-hosted the show and whose relentless perkiness really puts me off (if Shirley Temple had continued her career as an adult but insisted on playing the same kinds of parts she did as a kid, she’d have been Kristen Chenoweth), in On the Twentieth Century I found myself channeling my late roommate John (“There are no stars anymore”) and saying, “Kristen Chenoweth as Carole Lombard? I don’t think so.” At least Robert Fairchild, cast in the leading role of An American in Paris and doing a tiny bit of the fabled ballet that ended the movie as well as a couple of the pop songs that came earlier, looked enough like Gene Kelly to make the concept work, and while hardly as spectacular or acrobatic he is a good enough dancer to pull it off. But as nice as it is to see the role of King Mongkut in The King and I played by a real Asian, Ken Watanabe, Yul Brynner he’s not, and though she won the award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Musical Kelli O’Hara hardly seemed a match either for Gertrude Lawrence on the original cast album or the bionic combination of Deborah Kerr and Marni Nixon in the movie. The highlight of the telecast was an unexpected performance of “Ring of Keys” by Sydney Lucas in a show called Fun Home, the one musical showcased all night that was neither a revival nor a recycling of a movie or a nonmusical play. (One of the nominees was Something Rotten, a weird fantasy in which Nostradamus predicts to William Shakespeare that someday there’s going to be a genre of theatre called a “musical,” in which the characters will occasionally stop talking and start singing and dancing. He even predicts that there will someday be a form of dramas in which people won’t talk at all, just sing, which is ironic because the Florentine Camarata, the group that invented opera as a genre, was formed in 1600, when Shakespeare was alive, working and indeed at the height of his career.) Fun Home is based on Lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s graphic-novel memoir of her growing up and her suspicions — later confirmed — that her dad was Gay and committed suicide over it. That’s not the stuff of which Broadway musicals are commonly made, and the song — in which a girl just about to enter puberty confesses a crush on a butch female delivery person who’s just dropped a package at their home — isn’t exactly typical Broadway either, especially since it means confronting the fact that people well below the “age of consent” already have sexual stirrings and desires, and quite often they’re made aware of them when they’re attracted to adults.

So it was nice to see Fun Home win the Tony Award for Best Musical, while the award for Best Play went to something called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Any Sherlock Holmes mavens like Charles and I will immediately recognize the title — it’s from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “Silver Blaze” and refers to the fact that the dog in Silver Blaze’s stable did nothing in the night-time — it didn’t bark or growl or bite anyone — and Holmes adding, “That was the curious incident” (it indicates to him that the intruder in the stable was someone well known to the dog and therefore a member of the household, not an outsider) —though the play has nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes and instead deals with an autistic boy (played by Alex Sharp, who won Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Play) of 15 who has to prove his father not guilty of a murder of which the old man is accused. Another weird aspect of the Tonys is that, for a show that was the trail-blazer among awards programs in acknowledging the existence of same-sex relationships (I’ll never forget the electrifying moment in 1983 when one of the male producers of Torch Song Trilogy thanked a number of people including “my lover, Lawrence Lane” — indicating that it wasn’t just a play about Gay men but one largely created and brought to the stage by them), virtually all the winners this year had opposite-sex partners they thanked. Awards shows tend to be lumbering vehicles, and this one was no exception — the co-hosts were Chenoweth and Alan Cumming, who came out in an outfit of pink shorts and a matching shirt, and the jokes were pretty lame and only slowed down the proceedings — but it certainly piqued my curiosity about Fun Home even though it seems unlikely this show is going to make it to San Diego any time soon!

Double Daddy (Shadowland/Lifetime, 2015)

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

Yesterday I was anxious to see the new Lifetime “world premiere” movie, Double Daddy, a silly title (their titles are getting sillier, anyway — next week they’re going to do the first showing anywhere of something called I Killed My B.F.F.!) The moment I saw Barbara Kymlicka’s name on the writing credits I knew we were in for trouble — in previous posts on her movies I’ve wondered why someone with such a penchant for writing sleazy stories about sex (though this time around she only adapted a story by someone else, Alan Donahue, into a screenplay) wouldn’t change her name instead of going through life with (and slapping on her credits) a moniker all too easily read as “cum licker”! Kymlicka did sneak this one into the same fictional universe as her previous Lifetime productions The Surrogate, Dirty Teacher and Sugar Daddies — the high-school kid at the center of the action, Connor (Cameron Palatas), debates, once he gets his girlfriend pregnant, whether to continue with his parents’ plan to send him to Whittendale University or stay in town and attend community college so he can continue to see his girlfriend after she gives birth and be as much of a father as possible to his baby girl. The reason this one is called Double Daddy is that Connor, whose sperm seems unerringly potent even for a movie character (as I’ve noted in these pages before, so many films revolve around what the late David O. Selznick called “infallible pregnancies at single contacts” that a being from another planet, trying to figure out how human reproduction works from watching our movies about it, would probably conclude that the human female invariably gets pregnant from her first act of intercourse with a human male), has knocked up not only his girlfriend Amanda (Mollee Gray — yet another young person who’s latched on to an incredibly pretentious spelling of an otherwise normal first name) but Heather Henderson (Brittany Connor — see above), who came on to him at a party he was hosting when his parents were out of town, insisted on him letting her into the Mercedes parked in his garage (it’s actually his dad’s car, and at that only a company car he’s allowed to drive for his work as an auto dealer), where she manages to overcome his drunken attempts to resist — he’s drunk because in the immediately preceding scene, he’s been challenged as president of the “fraternity” (a word which briefly threw me and made me think the young characters were already in college instead of only in high school) to drink a large tube of some devastatingly intoxicating libation — and get him not only to penetrate her but impregnate her as well. Then she uses social media to spread the word through the entire high school, including Amanda, that not only did she and Connor do the down ’n’ dirty in his daddy’s car but she became pregnant from it. Amanda predictably reacts with a hissy-fit of jealousy and, goaded by Heather, she picks a fight with her in the high-school hallway and knocks her down. Meanwhile she’s learned that she, too, is pregnant by Connor, and being a modern-day heroine in a story about high-school students in a generation for whom abortion is definitely not part of the Zeitgeist (the adults in the movie make a few minor noises about “options” but both Amanda and Heather insist that they’re keeping their babies — reflecting opinion polls that, contrary to the trend on same-sex marriage, younger people are less likely to be pro-choice on abortion than their forebears), she’s determined not only to have the child but to raise it.

If Donahue, Kymlicka and their director, Lee Friedlander (any relation to Louis Friedlander, a.k.a. Lew Landers, director of a million “B” movies in the 1930’s and 1940’s?) had been willing to stop there, they could have had an engaging drama about two young girls, both of whom are carrying the same boy’s children, making the best of an utterly wretched situation and putting all the respective parents on the spot as well — it’s established that Connor’s parents have money and that unsurprisingly doesn’t go unnoticed by both women in their son’s life, Amanda who he’s really in love with and Heather, whom he says was just a “mistake.” Instead the writers and directors boil the melodramatic plot still further, making Heather an all-out Lifetime villainess along the lines of the protagonists of The Surrogate and Dirty Teacher, and they also give her a mystery boyfriend, Trent (Tyson Sullivan, who frankly did more for me than Cameron Palatas did — Palatas is a nice-looking enough twink with an oddly anachronistic D.A. haircut but I couldn’t help but wish the part could have been played by the taller, darker and considerably handsomer Cameron Deane Stewart from Dirty Teacher), who only appears in a couple of scenes but says that he’s helped her pull this scam before — entrapping a high-school student into casual sex and then telling him she’s carrying his baby — has suffered through her miscarriages and isn’t going to let himself suffer financially because she can’t go through with the scam, whatever it is. It seems to be to get herself knocked up by the snot-nosed son of some rich guy and then hold the parents up for whatever she can get out of them financially to support “their” baby — though in order for the scheme to work she’d have to count on every kid she seduced in this fashion to have sperm as hyper-potent as Connor’s (either that or she and Trent have just seen too many movies and they believe a woman gets pregnant every time she has sex). Trent appears in one scene in the second act and then disappears until the movie is half over, by which time Connor’s mom has approached Heather’s scapegrace biker dad Keith (Darin Heames) and given him a check that’s meant to support Heather and her baby for the first eight years of the kid’s life — only Keith literally takes the money and runs, leaving both his daughter and her baby-to-be with no means of support. Accordingly Connor’s parents let Heather move in with them — until she steals Connor’s dad’s company Mercedes because (though they don’t know this) she needs it to drive Trent’s body out in the country so she can bury him after she’s tired of his demands and killed him in Connor’s family’s garage by clubbing him with a convenient wrench.

The climax takes place at a school field trip at a wildlife sanctuary; Connor and Amanda can go but, with no parent around to sign the necessary permission slip, Heather has to sneak in — whereupon she confronts Amanda, the two fall off a small cliff, and with Amanda unconscious Heather picks up a convenient rock and is about to do in her rival when — surprise! Not really — Heather goes into labor and Amanda has to do a bit of D.I.Y. midwifery to get her rival’s baby out of the womb safely. Meanwhile, Donahue and Kymlicka have also inserted a subplot about Amanda’s older sister and her husband, who have tried everything in the modern armamentarium to have a baby themselves — including fertility drugs and in vitro fertilization — only Amanda’s sister has stubbornly refused to conceive, so Amanda hits on the idea of giving her sister and her sister’s husband her child by Connor to raise as their own; as far as the kid (a girl, we’ve been told from the sonograms) will know, Amanda will simply be her aunt. For the last few acts it looks like this is actually what’s going to happen, but of course when Amanda actually gives birth (she’s shown with her baby one month after Heather gives birth to hers) her maternal instincts kick in big-time (just as Glenda Farrell’s did at the end of the 1932 film Life Begins) and she and Connor decide to keep the child themselves and raise her as their own. Meanwhile Heather is arrested for Trent’s murder and is offered a plea bargain that would make her eligible for parole in 20 years — otherwise she’s likely to be convicted and have to serve life — though for some reason Donahue and Kymlicka totally drop the fate of her baby. Where I thought this was going to go — or maybe it’s just where I’d like it to have gone — is that Amanda’s sister and her husband would adopt Heather’s baby, sparing the poor kid (we’re never told its gender!) the travails of foster care while leaving Amanda and Connor to raise their child. Instead the writers simply move on, leaving a live baby (we know it was born alive because we heard it cry as Amanda wrapped it in her jacket after helping Heather get it out of her womb) somewhere absent and unaccounted-for in the dramatis personae. Double Daddy isn’t a bad movie as Lifetime movies go, and the hot encounter between Connor and Heather at the beginning is a welcome return to the soft-core porn that made a lot of Lifetime productions memorable even if they weren’t particularly good as filmmaking, but the title already suggests a film treading on the thin edge of risibility and it does sometimes go over.

The Australian Pink Floyd Show: Eclipsed by the Moon (PBS, filmed 2013, aired 2015)

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

My “feature” last night was a KPBS pledge-break special with the rather awkward title The Australian Pink Floyd Concert: Eclipsed by the Moon. The Australian Pink Floyd are a Pink Floyd tribute band founded in Australia in 1988 (which seems pretty early in the day for a Pink Floyd tribute, given that the real Pink Floyd — though without their principal songwriter, Roger Waters, who’d had a hissy-fit with the others in the mid-1980’s and had angrily left — were still a going concern at the time), and I suppose I should give them credit for a relatively simple name instead of “The World-Famous Pink Floyd” (Charles and I still can’t get over the absurdity of a PBS New Year’s special that featured a Glenn Miller tribute band called “The World-Famous Glenn Miller Orchestra,” which suggested to us that there might be rivals called “The Intergalactically Renowned Glenn Miller Orchestra” or “The Universally Acclaimed Glenn Miller Orchestra” — names that actually sound science-fictional enough they might be better applied to bands doing tribute to Pink Floyd, or Sun Ra for that matter). Their three core members were vocalist and guitarist Steve Mac, bassist and vocalist Colin Wilson, and keyboard player Jason Sawford, who’ve been with the project since its founding even though drummers and others have come and gone. In 1996 they got some sort of ultimate accolade for a tribute band by being hired to play a private gig at the 50^th birthday party of David Gilmour, lead guitarist for the real Pink Floyd (“Well, it was his birthday — he wanted the evening off!,” Charles joked). Gilmour had seen them perform in Croydon in 1994 and been sufficiently impressed to invite them to the party celebrating the end of the tour for The Division Bell, the last “official” Pink Floyd album. I had seen the promos for this show on KPBS — they’re also heavily pushing a gig The Australian Pink Floyd are doing at the San Diego State University Open-Air Theatre on September 5 and giving away tickets to that show for people who respond and make donations (at that show their opening act will be another tribute band, Led Zeppelin 2 — a billing that boggles the mind because one can’t imagine the real Led Zeppelin being invited to perform on a bill with the real Pink Floyd, not only because both were mega-draws on their own but their musical styles were too different to make them a logical pairing) — and it sounded vaguely interesting even though I’m somewhat back of scratch watching a Pink Floyd tribute since I’ve never been that big a fan of the real Pink Floyd. I never actively disliked them but they weren’t a band I went out of my way to keep track of (or buy their LP’s) either, and I don’t think I’ve ever in my life heard The Dark Side of the Moon straight through, start to finish. (Then again, I’d never heard Michael Jackson’s Thriller start to finish until I got the boxed set on Sony right after Jackson died — though the Thriller songs were so ubiquitous, with seven of the nine album tracks becoming single hits, I really didn’t need to.)

For me the most interesting Pink Floyd was the early stuff with their original vocalist, lead guitarist and principal songwriter, Syd Barrett, who until his acid-fueled meltdown just a year into the Floyd’s career (David Gilmour was brought into the band for the same reason Paul Whiteman hired Andy Secrest in 1929 — just as Secrest was brought in to fill in for Bix Beiderbecke whenever Bix either missed a show or was too “under the influence” to perform, Gilmour was brought in to backstop Barrett and ended up replacing him) contributed most of the band’s material and brought an edgy sensibility that when he left got replaced by an exquisite dullness only occasionally broken by moments of fire, as if occasionally the Floyds got bored by their heavily self-referential music and wanted to remind the world that they could still rock. Though some of the Australian Pink Floyd shows perform a single Pink Floyd album start to finish (they did a DVD of their performance of The Dark Side of the Moon and have also done complete concerts of the next two Floyd albums, Wish You Were Here — the band’s quirky tribute to Barrett — and Animals), this one was a sort-of greatest-hits medley containing “Money” from Dark Side, the title track of Wish You Were Here (though, alas, not the album’s signature song, “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond”), “Another Brick in the Wall — Part 2” and “Comfortably Numb” from The Wall (Roger Waters’ mega-concept which he performed as part of an elaborately staged event during which the titular wall was built between the band and the audience as the show progressed, only the band members smashed through it at the end) and a few other songs I didn’t recognize. The show came from two concerts filmed in Trier and Oberhausen, Germany on April 12 and 13, 2013 (ironically Trier was also the birthplace of Karl Marx) and on TV it looked like a competently staged modern rock concert, with a circular video screen as part of the stage set that showed film clips, including one of the wall being constructed during “Another Brick in the Wall,” and a few laser beams at the back of the stage but nothing especially spectacular-looking in the staging (though it’s possible the experience is more exciting “live”). I was hoping — but really not expecting — that they’d do the real Floyd’s first breakthrough hit, “See Emily Play,” as a tribute to the Barrett years. They didn’t, and by leading off with “Another Brick in the Wall” and “Money” (the two strongest Floyd songs they played all night) they risked a precipitous drop in the energy level from which the rest of the show suffered.

To me it was ironic that one of the hosts for the KPBS pledge breaks said what she liked about Pink Floyd’s music was how emotionally intense it was — Pink Floyd was about the last band I’d go to looking for emotional intensity (after all, the second single from The Wall — and a song that was on The Australian Pink Floyd’s set list last night — was called “Comfortably Numb”!), and though I can’t really assess how well The Australian Pink Floyd compares to the original I did get the impression that if anything they were erring by trying to add emotion to songs that didn’t originally contain it (whichever one of their singers did “Comfortably Numb” seemed to be trying to put some soul into a song that Roger Waters deliberately wrote as a paean to disinterested detachment, and sang that way). Indeed, the best singing all night came at the beginning of an odd piece called “The Great Gig in the Sky” (though I’d have had no idea what the title was if one of the pledge-break hosts hadn’t thoughtfully provided it) which doesn’t have any lyrics, and didn’t feature any singing by the band members, but did feature wordless vocalizing by three or four women backup singers, and the one who sang at the beginning was tall, white, with long blond hair, and had one of the greatest white soul voices I’ve ever heard — enough for me to want to hear her do more conventional repertory for her kind of voice. The other songs were “Into the Sun,” an instrumental that was probably from Animals because the band brought in an inflated balloon of an animal (a kangaroo, says PBS’s official program note, though it looked more like a rabbit to me) and lowered it from the flies to the stage during the song in a position that made it look like it was a second keyboard player, and the finale, a song called “You Better Run” that was the band’s most convincing rock ’n’ roll of the night. The Australian Pink Floyd Show: Eclipsed by the Moon was a reasonably entertaining program but, like the music of the band they were copying, aspired to and all too often achieved a level of exquisite aesthetic dullness that made me feel like I wanted to sleep — instead I followed it by listening to some old Carl Perkins records and reminding myself what rock ’n’ roll is really all about!

Ziegfeld Girl (MGM, 1941)

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

I went over to see Charles and arrived shortly after 7 with a videotape of a James Stewart movie, Ziegfeld Girl. Actually, Stewart’s role — even though he’s top-billed (it was right after he won the Academy Award for The Philadelphia Story, in what was actually a second lead — an award Stewart himself conceded was a “consolation prize” for his having not won the year before for his genuinely Oscar-caliber performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) — is really secondary to those of the three women in the cast who aspire to be, and ultimately become, Ziegfeld girls. Ziegfeld Girl is the second in a cycle of three movies MGM made using the magic name. The first one was The Great Ziegfeld, the Ziegfeld biopic from 1936 (in which the short, fat, dumpy, Jewish-looking Ziegfeld was played by the tall, rail-thin, debonair and very Anglo William Powell — ah, Hollywood!), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and a thoroughly undeserved Best Actress award for the execrable Luise Rainer (whose famous “telephone scene,” when she learns Ziggy has deserted her for another woman, has got to be one of the most campy bits of overacting in Hollywood history). Ziegfeld Girl was made in 1941 and the third in the cycle, Ziegfeld Follies, was filmed in 1944 but not released until 1946, mainly because MGM didn’t know what to do with it (it was a plotless musical revue, like its namesake stage shows, and by the mid-1940’s audiences expected some sort of plot, no matter how flimsy, with their musicals).

Like The Great Ziegfeld, Ziegfeld Girl was directed by Robert Z. Leonard and written by William Anthony McGuire (the author, at least, had actually worked for the real Ziegfeld), but instead of Seymour Felix, who’d done the surprisingly dull musical numbers for The Great Ziegfeld, Busby Berkeley was brought in as the choreographer this time — and supplied his demented imagination to the extent star-obsessed MGM would let him, notably in an ersatz Carmen Miranda number called “Minnie from Trinidad” (two years before he worked so dazzlingly with the real Miranda in The Gang’s All Here), in which he has a batch of chorus boys (the fact that he got a male chorus into this number was a major break from the Ziegfeld tradition in itself!) use a set of bamboo poles to lift a basket containing Judy Garland over their heads and into the flies while the camera shot this from overhead (anticipating the number Garland would do at the end of Presenting Lily Mars two years later, in which Tommy Dorsey’s entire orchestra is suspended above her on a set which seems to have no visible moorings at all, leaving the audience less entertained by her act and more concerned that the band and its set will fall down and crush her!). Ziegfeld Girl also reflects Louis B. Mayer’s continuing disinterest in color production; like The Great Ziegfeld (from which it borrows a few film clips for the spectacular closing sequence) it’s in black-and-white, and though that’s fine for the plot portions of the film, some of the numbers (including Berkeley’s Caribbean extravaganza) do lose a lot by not being in color.

Ziegfeld Girl is actually a pretty good slice of Hollywood kitsch, benefiting not only from Berkeley’s (and Judy Garland’s) involvement but also from being 50 minutes shorter than The Great Ziegfeld (132 instead of 172 minutes) and having a much better music-to-talk ratio. Though top-billed, Stewart’s role is pretty peripheral — he plays a truckdriver who’s in love with an elevator operator (Lana Turner) who is picked for the Follies and abandons him in favor of the wealthy “stage-door Johnnies” who hang around the New Amsterdam Theatre while the Follies are in progress in hopes of dates (and more) from the Ziegfeld girls. In order to get the money he feels he needs to compete with them, Stewart becomes a driver for a bootlegging gang, and tries to convince us he’s a bad guy by snarling all his lines through his teeth. (When I first watched this movie it seemed that Stewart’s role would have been perfect for James Cagney or Spencer Tracy — but Cagney was still under contract to Warners and Tracy was being moved away from tough-guy roles.) Garland plays the daughter of an old vaudevillian (Charles Winninger, who played Mickey Rooney’s father in the Rooney/Garland vehicle Babes in Arms — playing father and son, he and Rooney made overacting seem like a genetically acquired trait!) who gets into the Ziegfeld chorus and eventually into a featured singing role in the show, and finally gets to star (McGuire no doubt knew, but chose to ignore, the fact that Ziegfeld never gave any performer star billing in the Follies) — and her audition sequence is interesting because it reflects (quite possibly on purpose) her real-life audition at MGM.

In the film, she nearly loses her big chance because Winninger (who also plays piano behind her) tells her to sing “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” in a corny vaudeville style that makes Judy sound like Al Jolson in drag — until the show’s director has her try it again, this time with the theatre orchestra accompanying her and taking the song in proper ballad tempo that allows Judy to showcase her voice effectively. In reality, six years earlier, she had been accompanied to her MGM audition by her actual father, Frank Gumm — whom Roger Edens, who was there, described as “the worst piano player I’ve ever heard” — and she only got the contract when Edens accompanied her himself; later he became her vocal coach for life and steered her away from “hot” jazz material and helped her develop into the superb ballad and show singer she was. As for the other “Ziegfeld girls” of the title, Hedy Lamarr also gets into the show by accident — her husband, a classically-trained violinist, is auditioning for a job with Ziegfeld’s orchestra; he’s considered overqualified and doesn’t get the job, but she does. Lamarr goes on to romance the show’s featured singer (Tony Martin, reunited with Garland after Pigskin Parade and the only other cast member who could actually sing!), who’s also married (to Rose Hobart as a former Ziegfeld girl), and for a while they plan to leave their respective spouses and marry each other — until Lamarr’s husband finally gets a New York recital debut, they reconcile and she leaves the show. (Incidentally, Hobart’s presence in the cast makes Ziegfeld Girl another one of my “double” movies; she was Dr. Henry Jekyll’s strait-laced fiancée in the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fredric March; while Lana Turner played the same role in Victor Fleming’s 1941 remake with Spencer Tracy.)

That leaves Lana Turner, and though she’s only fourth-billed (after Stewart, Garland and Lamarr, in that order), it’s really her movie. Turner may have had an emotional range as an actress of about a micrometer, but the role she gets in Ziegfeld Girl is absolutely right on the money in terms of what she can do. Not only is her character — a poverty-stricken Brooklyn girl who gets her big chance in the Follies, gets a chance at all the nice things she’s always wanted, is pampered by a rich boyfriend but ultimately done in by alcoholism and a seedy little worm of self-hate — by far the deepest one in this script, but Turner actually manages to be completely credible in it, playing the part with an appealing combination of bitchiness and vulnerability that actually makes the character human and understandable. Turner got the most spectacular scene in the film — a particularly famous piece of Hollywood kitsch in which she almost literally gets up from her deathbed to attend a new edition of the Follies, hears “You Stepped Out of a Dream” (the big hit from the Follies the year her character was in it) as she’s walking down the steps leading out of the theatre, and suddenly raises her shoulders, puts a “winning smile” on her face, and walks down the steps imperiously as if she’s still part of the show — until she collapses and falls on the final stairs. (“A star exit if there ever was one,” wrote Gary Carey in his book on MGM.) What’s more remarkable about her part is that, as Charles pointed out afterwards, it offers a surprisingly unsentimental and unfunny look at alcoholism and its destructive power for a movie of its time — Ziegfeld Girl preceded The Lost Weekend by four years and, at least in Turner’s scenes, offered almost as intense a portrait of a person destroying him/herself with the bottle. It also showcases her in a way that her later, more prestigious movies (like The Postman Always Rings Twice, in which she’s horrendously undercast) really didn’t: an interesting curiosity about what is otherwise a glossy, sentimental musical entertainment. — 7/4/97

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Last night Turner Classic Movies began a cycle in which, instead of making their “Star of the Month” a single person, they decided to use Tuesday nights to show “Pin-Up Girls” and the films featuring them, including the most famous pin-up girl of the World War II years, Betty Grable, whose famous photo (though retouched at the insistence of the Production Code Administration to eliminate her ass cheeks) emblazoned hundreds of airplane fuselages and decorated thousands of U.S. servicemembers’ locker rooms during the war. They began the tribute with — inevitably — her 1944 film Pin-Up Girl and then showed Rita Hayworth’s Gilda and the movie I actually watched, Ziegfeld Girl, a 1941 musical extravaganza from MGM and the second in their cycle of three films sucking off the legacy of Florenz Ziegfeld. The cycle began with The Great Ziegfeld, a 1936 mega-production written by Ziegfeld veteran William Anthony McGuire, directed by Robert Z. Leonard (an amiable MGM hack and former husband of silent-screen star Mae Murray who has one great film on his résumé, the 1937 Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy masterpiece Maytime, as well as some other sporadically interesting movies) and starring tall, Anglo William Powell as the short, dumpy-looking and Jewish Ziegfeld. In Ziegfeld Girl McGuire returned to write the original story — though the usual committee (Marguerite Roberts, Sonya Levien and an uncredited Annalee Whitmore) ganged up on it afterwards on its journey from story to screenplay — and, alas, Leonard was brought back to direct, though at least they got Busby Berkeley to do the musical numbers (stunningly, particularly in the scene in which he hoists Judy Garland into the air on a fruit basket at the end of “Minnie from Trinidad”).

What they didn’t get was William Powell — or anyone else — to play Ziegfeld; instead the administration of the Follies is represented by an assistant, Slayton (Paul Kelly), and a character identified only as “Noble Sage” (Edward Everett Horton, getting to play a lot less doofus-y than usual and actually seeming rather competent), giving Ziegfeld himself a sort of God-like detachment from the action. (Powell would return in the third film in the series, Ziegfeld Follies from 1946 — though actually mostly filmed two years earlier — which brought in color and a much more creative director, Vincente Minnelli, though the opening sequence in which Powell plays a dead Ziegfeld in heaven reminiscing about his old shows and wishing he could produce another Follies with MGM’s contract list is simply risible.) Ziegfeld Girl is a prime example of what I call the “portmanteau movie,” one concocted by a studio to have some element that would appeal to every possible audience: it’s alternately a gangster movie, a soap opera (two soap operas, actually) and a musical. It’s also hamstrung by the outrageous miscasting of James Stewart as Gil (the imdb.com page lists the character as “Gilbert Young” but I don’t recall him having a surname in the actual film), a truck driver who becomes a bootlegger when his girlfriend Sheila Regan (Lana Turner, billed fourth) joins the Follies, attracts the attention of rich sugar daddies and leads Gil to think he has to make a lot of money quickly to be able to compete. It’s amazing that even after Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Philadelphia Story MGM would be so unaware of Stewart’s appeal — and his limitations as an actor — that they’d stick him into a thankless tough-guy role that, had the contract system and inter-studio politics allowed it, would have been perfect for James Cagney. (At that, MGM had on their own contract list an actor who could have played it better than Stewart, Spencer Tracy, but it’s possible that they considered him too big for this sort of part by 1941.)

The film announces its intentions in advance when Slayton, greeting the latest crop of Ziegfeld girls, announces that some of them are going to go on to major careers in showbiz, some are going to marry and have families, and others are going to experience unspecified but less pleasant fates. Needless to say, the three female leads — in original billing order, Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner — will each be destined for one of those fates. Judy is Susan Gallagher, daughter of an old-time vaudevillian (Charles Winninger in basically the same role he played in Babes in Arms — though this time he’s Judy’s father instead of Mickey Rooney’s) who has literally been groomed all her life for a career in showbiz. Hedy is Sandra Kolter, who’s already married to unknown classical violinist Franz Kolter (Philip Dorn) and turned up at Ziegfeld’s audition just to accompany him as he tried out for a job in Ziegfeld’s orchestra, only she got noticed by Slayton and Sage and offered a spot in Ziegfeld’s chorus line, to which hubby has a predictable hissy-fit that as a good Continental he can’t stand the idea of being supported by his wife and can stand even less the idea of her being cruised by the usual stage-door sugar daddies. Lana is Sheila Regan, from a thoroughly proletarian family in Brooklyn including a father (Ed McNamara), a mother (Fay Holden) and a brother, Jerry (Jackie Cooper), who when Sheila returns home with the news that she’s now a Ziegfeld girl responds with such a display of mincing his mom says, “I hope I didn’t raise my son to be a Ziegfeld girl, too” — a pretty radical Gay reference for a post-Code film! Sheila drifts apart from Gil into a relationship of sorts with Geoffrey Collis (Ian Hunter, playing the same sort of avuncular, basically decent sugar-daddy he’d been with Bette Davis and Kay Francis in their aspiring-actress films at Warner Bros.), an apartment on Park Avenue, an extensive wardrobe (including seven diamond bracelets and six fur coats as well as a shoe collection to make Imelda Marcos drool) and an increasing addiction to the bottle. The time signals on this movie are a bit odd since it’s obviously taking place during Prohibition but alcohol seems to be as ubiquitously available as it was in the teens or is today; the characters stroll into restaurants and bars and have no problem getting service without ID’s, passwords or any of the requisite precautions other movies have told us were needed during America’s officially “dry” years.

What’s most fascinating about Lana Turner’s character arc is that, along with Johnny Eager (a movie she was in, but not as the drunk — that was Van Heflin), alcoholism is presented seriously and not as an excuse for laughs; there’d been some early-1930’s movies, including A Free Soul and What Price Hollywood? (both, interestingly, based on stories by Hearst writer Adela Rogers St. John), that had depicted alcoholic characters seriously, but in most 1930’s films drunkenness was an excuse for low comedy and the Heflin character in Johnny Eager and Turner’s character here are the start of a more serious look at alcoholism and its discontents that would bear fruit in The Lost Weekend in 1945 and win Academy Awards for the film itself, Billy Wilder as director and Ray Milland as star. What’s also surprising is that, for the most part, Lana Turner rises to the occasion and, despite Leonard’s indifferent direction, makes Sheila a sympathetically self-destructive figure whom the audience pities instead of hates. There are a couple of scenes in which she overacts, but for the most part it’s a challenging portrayal and hardly the sort of thing one expects to see in the context of a showing paying tribute to Lana Turner, pin-up girl. (Aside from The Postman Always Rings Twice — a movie I haven’t seen for years but in which I don’t remember Turner being very good; as with so many films of the classic era I found myself wishing Barbara Stanwyck would have played her role, especially since Stanwyck had been electrifying in Double Indemnity, the only previous major film based on a James M. Cain novel — Turner wasn’t challenged to do this much acting until the late 1950’s in movies like Peyton Place and Imitation of Life.) Hedy Lamarr is barely in the film; she falls into a rather diffident relationship with Ziegfeld singer Frank Merton (Tony Martin), who is also already married (his wife is played by Rose Hobart, whose presence makes this a “doubles” movie — Hobart played the good-girl fiancée of Dr. Henry Jekyll in the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Fredric March, and Turner played the part in the 1941 version with Spencer Tracy), but in the end each reconciles with their original spouse and Hedy’s husband, helped by Ziegfeld violinist and musical director Mischa (Felix Bressart), gets the classical career he deserves while she quits the Follies to “stand by her man.”

As for Judy Garland, she spent virtually the whole shoot incensed that MGM publicists and the reporters they lured to the set spent all their time with Lana Turner and Hedy Lamarr and ignored her, when she was the only one of the three leading ladies with genuine musical talent in what was supposed to be (among other things) a major musical. She gets an audition sequence with Slayton and Sage that is so much like the real Judy Garland’s audition for MGM in 1935 I suspect the writers consciously patterned the scene after it: like the real Judy, Susan Gallagher comes in with her father as accompanist and vocal coach. She sings the song “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” (the song was from 1921 but after the success of “Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz MGM set about finding or commissioning more songs for Judy with the word “rainbow” in them) in a self-consciously “belting” style, full of Jolson-esque mannerisms that fit oddly in Judy’s woman’s voice and thin frame (thanks to all the diet pills MGM’s doctors had her on and the studio minions who, on orders from On High, would follow her into the cafeteria and literally pull food out of her hands before it could reach her mouth). Slayton tells her that that sort of no-holds-barred assault on a song went out decades ago, then tells the rehearsal orchestra to accompany her; she asks them to take the song more slowly, and the result is one of the great, heart-rending Judy Garland ballad performances on film. (In Judy’s real MGM audition she was accompanied by her actual father, Frank Gumm, and midway through the audition Roger Edens came in the room, told Louis B. Mayer, “That guy is the word piano player I’ve ever heard,” took over the accompanist’s bench himself and asked Judy if she knew the classic Jewish song of lament, “Eili, Eili,” Mayer’s all-time favorite song. Luckily, Judy did know it — she and the other Gumm Sisters had learned it for a gig at a Jewish wedding — and she sang it with Edens backing her, Mayer was moved to tears and MGM signed her.)

In Ziegfeld Girl Judy also gets featured in a novelty song called “Minnie from Trinidad,” a fable (anticipating Johnny Cash’s “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” by nearly two decades) about a girl from Trinidad who gets a Hollywood offer, becomes a big movie star, misses her boyfriend back home and quits at the height of her fame, only the boyfriend is dead but she’s still happier back home than she was in big bad Hollywood. Judy’s number comes at the end of a huge Berkeley spectacular that begins with a mood-setting ballad vocal by Tony Martin on a song called “Caribbean Love Song” by Roger Edens and Ralph Freed, and though the rest of the movie is just fine in black-and-white MGM should have plumped for the extra budget to shoot this scene in color, especially since Judy is essentially doing an impression of Carmen Miranda. Mercifully, she was allowed (likely at Edens’ insistence) to sing in her normal voice rather than do an impression of Miranda’s famously fractured English and thick Brazilian accent (Miranda actually learned to speak English perfectly soon after she moved to the U.S. but had to continue acting in her broken dialect because that had become one of her trademarks), but she’s wearing an elaborate headdress and nut-brown makeup to make her look Latina (or at least Caribbean), and the song is a pretty elaborate imitation of the ones Harry Warren and his lyricists were turning out for Miranda back at 20^th Century-Fox. At the end of the number Berkeley has Judy singing in a giant fruit basket and takes his camera overhead (of course!) as the chorus boys stick bamboo stalks into the basket and lift it towards the ceiling — knowing how sensitive and easily frightened Judy was, shooting this number must have scared her shitless! Judy also dominates the final sequence, a montage of previous Ziegfeld shows (including two clips from The Great Ziegfeld, the movable-beds number and the huge wedding-cake like set against which Dennis Morgan had sung “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” while Virginia Bruce decorated the top of the cake — for this film they simply rebuilt the top of the set so they could substitute Judy Garland for Virginia Bruce), and she was supposed to sing part of a big production number called “We Must Have Music” that was cut out of this film, though a clip of Judy singing it was used in an MGM “Romance of Celluloid” short TCM mercifully aired right after Ziegfeld Girl was over.

During this sequence — which is supposed to represent the opening night of a new Ziegfeld Follies two years after the one depicted in the opening — Lana Turner’s character, having been bounced out of the previous year’s Follies for falling in an alcoholic stupor at the end of the “Trinidad” number and been reduced to pawning her jewelry and furs (in a scene Charles remembered from the last time we watched the film, she’s given a pin by one of her remaining male admirers, tries to pawn it immediately and is told that the jewel in the pin is a fake) and moving back in with her family — and the still-faithful Gil, having served a prison term for bootlegging, says he wants the two of them to buy a duck farm and run it together — gets up from her sickbed, where she’s dying of a broken heart, to the opening of the new Follies and walks down the long flight of stairs between the levels in the theatre lobby as the Ziegfeld crew perform “You Stepped Out of a Dream,” the big hit from the Follies the year she was in it. Holding her head high and walking in the languorous, glamorous steps Ziegfeld’s staff had taught her, she makes it down to the end of the stairs and collapses. According to TCM host Robert Osborne, the original cut of the film made it clear that she died, but preview audiences were so hostile at seeing Lana Turner croak that the film was trimmed to make the scene seem more ambiguous and allow audience members to read it either way — though I must say I’ve always read it with the assumption that she died. Ziegfeld Girl is a problematic movie, too long (132 minutes) for its own good and falling back on some of Hollywood’s hoariest — and silliest — clichés, but also containing genuinely moving performances by Judy Garland and Lana Turner (which helps make up for James Stewart’s wretched miscasting and the virtual non-acting by Hedy Lamarr, who seemed to have been instructed by director Leonard to mimic Garbo’s fabled impassivity) as well as a welcome recreation of the Gallagher and Shean vaudeville act, with Charles Winninger as Gallagher and Al Shean (true name Schönberg, and also the uncle of the Marx Brothers and the first writer for their act) as himself. Ziegfeld Girl is a big, blowsy mess of a movie, but in its good parts (mostly the musical numbers and Lana Turner’s descent into alcohol-fueled self-destruction) it’s well worth watching. — 6/4/15