Centennial Summer (20th Century-Fox, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film my husband Charles and I watched last night was a recent arrival from one of my grey-label DVD sources: Centennial Summer, a 20th Century-Fox production from 1945 that was an example of the Hollywood Xerox Machine in full operation. In 1943 Richard Rodgers had abandoned his collaboration with the terminally ill Lorenz Hart and sought Oscar Hammerstein II as lyricist for his latest project, a musical about pioneer life in the Oklahoma Territory. It was based on a novel called Green Grow the Lilacs, but Rodgers and Hammerstein decided it needed a snappier title for the stage version, so they called it simply Oklahoma! It was a huge hit, and while Oklahoma! itself would not be filmed for another 12 years, movie studios tried to develop their own projects to capitalize on the previously unrealized demand for rural-themed musicals. In 1944 MGM bought the movie rights to “5135 Kensington,” a series of short stories by writer Sally Benson loosely based on her own childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, and developed them into a film called Meet Me in St. Louis. Using a mix of songs from the 1903 period and new ones by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, recruiting old hands Irving Brecher and Fred Finklehoffe to write the script, and assigning the young up-and-coming director Vincente Minnelli to helm the project and an all-star cast featuring Judy Garland (though it’s really more of an ensemble cast than a Garland vehicle – when the film ran too long at previews and Minnelli was under studio pressure to cut the marvelous sequence of Margaret O’Brien trick-or-treating on Hallowe’en, he instead took out one of Judy’s numbers so he could keep the Hallowe’en scene). 20th Century-Fox had already sought to duplicate the success of Oklahoma! by hiring Rodgers and Hammerstein to do an original movie musical based on Phil Stong’s novel about country life in Iowa, State Fair, which they’d previously filmed as a Will Rogers vehicle in 1933. Now, with MGM having had an enormous hit based on a story of adolescents in a large family facing adulthood in a city about to host a world’s fair, 20th Century-Fox studio heads Darryl F. Zanuck and Bill Goetz decided to green-light their own project about adolescent girls in a large family looking for – and maybe finding – romance in an American city that was about to host a world’s fair.

They bought a 1943 novel by Albert E. Idell, also called Centennial Summer, that centered around the 1876 American Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in the city where the original had been passed and signed. There are a number of interesting aspects to the American Centennial Exposition that go unmentioned in the film – like the centennial march Richard Wagner composed for it (he got a fee of $2,500, a large sum in 1876 dollars, which went into his funding for the first Bayreuth Festival at which the Ring of the NIbelung cycle got its premiere – and, oddly, instead of doing what another less nationalistic composer might have done and actually going to a music library to look up American songs whose themes he could appropriate, Wagner just ground out the same sort of piece he’d have supplied if a German prince had asked him for a ceremonial march); the appearance of Brazil’s Emperor, Dom Pedro II (the Portuguese who ruled Brazil until the 19th century had planted members of their royal family in Brazil as a sort of government in exile while Napoleon’s forces occupied Portugal, and when the Napoleonic Wars ended Brazil became an independent country but the Portuguese royal family still ruled it until Dom Pedro II died in 1888 and the government quietly decided to dispense with the monarchy and made Brazil a republic – and incidentally also abolished slavery, the last Western Hemisphere country to do so) and the exhibit of the first working model telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, who got priceless publicity for his new invention when Dom Pedro II came to visit the fair. He stopped by Bell’s booth and accepted Bell’s invitation to go into another room and talk to him via the telephone, then proclaimed it a marvelous boon to the world and paid Bell for the rights to launch telephone service in Brazil. (It was Bell’s first real income from the phone.) Dom Pedro is mentioned very briefly in the movie but neither Wagner’s nor Bell’s contributions are in the script at all.

Instead Centennial Summer centers around the Rogers family: father Jesse (Walter Brennan in a “with” performance – Brennan was fond of asking directors who’d never worked with him before, “Do you want it with or without?,” and when they inevitably asked, “With or without what?”, Brennan would say, “Teeth”; in Centennial Summer his dentures are actually visible in his closeups, and they also help you understand his dialogue), mother Gussie (Dorothy Gish), daughters Edith (Linda Darnell), Julia (Jeanne Crain) and Susanna (Barbara Whiting), and son Dudley (Buddy Swan). Alas, writer Michael Kanin pretty much forgets about the Rogers’ two younger kids and focuses on the ones who are just entering womanhood: Edith is engaged to the town’s young and thoroughly boring doctor, Ben Phelps (William Eythe), who’s decided to specialize in obstetrics. But she also fancies herself a budding woman of the world, and under the influence of her aunt Zenia Lascalles (Constance Bennett), who’s lived the life of a rambunctious single woman and acquired a whole retinue of lovers, all of whose photos she keeps on top of her dresser drawers when she arrives in Philadelphia as a house guest of the Rogerses, she decides she’s too young to tie herself down to just one man. Meanwhile, her sister Julia mopes around the house all day reading racy cheap novels with titles like Love Lies Bleeding (coincidentally also the title of an Elton John song from the 1973 album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road) and also envisioning a far more romantic future for herself than the one Philadelphia has to offer.

The family is thrown into further turmoil by the arrival of Philippe Lascalles (presumably Zenia’s stepson, though that’s not made clear in the film itself), who’s come from Paris to supervise the construction and decoration of the French pavilion at the exposition. Philippe hires Julia to work with him on setting up the exposition – in one of the film’s funniest scenes he corrects her on the placement of the various buildings in the scale model of Paris that’s part of the French exhibit – and he even pays her, which totally scandalizes her dad. Needless to say, Edith decides that Philippe is too good a catch for her sister and decides to go after him herself, using a series of stratagems, but they avail her not as Philippe decides her down-to-earth sister Julia is the woman he really loves. There’s also a subplot in which Jesse, who works as a yard man for the Pennsylvania Railroad (which had a reputation as being one of the few railroads in the 19th century which was run by people who actually knew about how railroads worked instead of speculators only interested in sucking easy money from the public trough – sound familiar?), has spent years of his time and just about all the extra money the Rogers family has been able to accumulate on building an invention, a series of clocks mounted together in one cabinet that would be set to different time zones so people running a railroad would know what time it was in the various cities in which their roads, or the ones that fed to and from it, operated. (One thing I’ve read in the literature about early railroading is that it was because of railroads that people had to care about exactly what time it was so they would know when the trains would arrive. Until then people only needed to know the time in general terms – when was sunrise, noon and sunset.)

Mrs. Rogers becomes convinced her sister is making a play for her husband – there’s a nice scene in which the photos of all Zenia’s previous lovers dissolve into Jesse’s image – and the film’s climax occurs when Jesse gets talked into going to a saloon, where he gets drunk just when his 11 p.m. night shift is supposed to begin. He shows up for work drunk and his boss, J. P. Snodgrass (Charles Dingle), fires him – but help arrives in the person of Zenia, who’s lobbied the railroad president, Trowbridge (Gavin Gordon), to have a look at Jesse’s multi-clock cabinet. Trowbridge buys Jesse’s invention and hires him to supervise its installation at all the Pennsylvania Railroad’s stations, Edith and Dr. Phelps reconcile and Julia goes to Paris with Philippe at the conclusion of the fair to marry him and live with him there. Centennial Summer is one of those frustrating movies that’s good as it stands but had the potential to be really great. Certainly it had major talent both in front of and behind the camera: the director was Otto Preminger – though this isn’t really his kind of movie, and not just because he wasn’t American – the script is by Michael Kanin, and the songs are by Jerome Kern. This was actually the last completed project of Kern’s life – the only song he wrote after Centennial Summer was “Nobody Else but Me,” his latest failed attempt to write a convincing ending to his masterpiece, Show Boat. (He’d actually written a great song for the 1927 premiere, “It’s Getting Hotter in the North,” but the original star, Norma Terriss, didn’t like it and refused to sing it, and no one know how good Kern’s first thoughts for the ending had been – much better than anything he tried later – until John McGlinn recorded it as part of his three-CD Show Boat edition in 1988.)

20th Century-Fox was so convinced of Kern’s bankability that his is the only name listed above the title in the credits, and for most of the songs his lyricist was Leo Robin, who’d written marvelous songs with Ralph Rainger for Paramount films in the 1930’s. The only song for this film that’s even come close to standard status was “In Love in Vain,” staged here as a duet for Julie and Dr. Phelps (which dropped a red herring that suggested she might end up with the good doctor at the end while her nasty sister got dumped by both men and had to pair with the Irish tenor, played by Richard Lewis, who got dragged into one scene to represent the magic lantern slide show at the Exposition), and as with “It Might as Well Be Spring” from the 1945 State Fair it didn’t really come into its own until a great Black jazz singer covered it. “It Might as Well Be Spring” achieved greatness when Sarah Vaughan recorded it twice (in 1946 for Crown with John Kirby and in 1950 for Columbia with Miles Davis), while “In Love in Vain” had to wait for its redemption from this movie until 1964, when Carmen McRae, despite being saddled with a huge easy-listening orchestra behind her, made a great version for Mainstream that you can hear on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBmg6XKZ_RI.

Part of the problem is that none of the principals of Centennial Summer could sing: Jeanne Crain was dubbed by Louanne Hogan (as she had been in State Fair), Cornel Wilde by Ben Gage, William Eythe by Ben Street, and Linda Darnell by someone imdb.com doesn’t list. When Charles and I watched State Fair I found myself wishing they had cast Judy Garland and Doris Day as the female leads in that story instead of Jeanne Crain and Vivian Blaine (though at least Blaine could sing!), and this time around I kept thinking that the part of Julia cried out for Deanna Durbin and got Jeanne Crain. (In 1944 Universal had cast Durbin in her own big-budget Technicolor vehicle, Can’t Help Singing, also built around a big 19th century event – the California Gold Rush – and also with songs by Jerome Kern, and Universal used a lot more Kern songs in it than Fox did in Centennial Summer.) The only person in the movie who actually does their own singing is Black vaudevillian Avon Long, a marvelously sly performer who was the original Sportin’ Life in the 1935 premiere of Porgy and Bess (though George Gershwin had intended the part for Cab Calloway, who didn’t play it because he was making much more money with his band than he could acting on Broadway; Calloway later played the part in the early 1950’s, after the bottom had dropped out of the band business) and who gets to do a number called “Cinderella Sue” with E. Y. Harburg’s lyrics and a Black chorus line that appears out of nowhere in that white saloon. (It’s the best song in the movie and it certainly establishes that Long would have been credible as the Porgy and Bess villain.)

Part of the problem is the inevitable comparison with Meet Me in St. Louis – which was so much more appealing as a movie that the first time we got to see the Rogers family together for a meal (also how Meet Me in St. Louis opens) I found myself asking, “Where’s the charm?” It also doesn’t help that the director of Meet Me in St. Louis, Vincente Minnelli, was noted for his visual flair, a quality Preminger utterly lacked (his two best films, Anatomy of a Murder and Advise and Consent, are dialogue-driven stories that aren’t hurt by Preminger’s lack of visual flair), though if Preminger hadn’t fired Rouben Mamoulian from Laura in 1944 and taken over the direction himself, 20th Century-Fox would have had a director on hand who would have been perfect for this story. Mamoulian was a stunningly visual director, he’d made the 1932 film Love Me Tonight with Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald and songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (and the film I still consider the best movie musical ever made, bar none), and in addition to directing the premiere of Porgy and Bess as well as the premiere of DuBose Heyward’s source play Porgy, he’d directed the stage premiere of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Oklahoma!, the prototype for all these rural musicals. (He’d go on to direct the stage premiere of the next Rodgers and Hammerstein show, Carousel.)

As it is, Centennial Summer kind of lopes along, hitting all the expected points, with Cornel Wilde speaking in one of the most outrageously phony accents in movie history (Charles and I were debating whom he modeled it on – I said Maurice Chevalier and he said Charles Boyer) and William Eythe looking like a guy you could trust to examine your wife’s sex organs because he wouldn’t be interested in them in any but a professional way. Eythe was actually Gay; he had a long-time partner, fellow actor Lon McAllister, and in the early 1950’s he reportedly was busted cruising a New York subway restroom: see https://www.datalounge.com/thread/9043721-william-eythe-and-lon-mccallister – though, like Rock Hudson and Raymond Burr, Eythe was forced into a brief marriage to a woman in a vain attempt to establish hetero cred. Preminger’s one directorial triumph in Centennial Summer was getting a nicely understated performance from Walter Brennan (much the way fellow German expat Fritz Lang had done in Hangmen Also Die); for the rest of the movie we miss the light touch Minnelli brought to similar material in Meet Me in St. Louis. We probably would have liked this movie better if we hadn’t been watching it from a grey-label source based on a VHS tape from American Movie Classics; had we seen a studio transfer Natalie Kalmus’s bright, vivid colors would have made this film considerably more fun – but that wouldn’t have redeemed its dramatic, visual and musical shortcomings.