Dancing Lady (MGM, 1933)

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

Charles and I got off early enough so we could go out for dinner and then repair to his place for a very interesting 1933 musical: Dancing Lady, produced by David O. Selznick at MGM, directed by Robert Z. Leonard and starring Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, with supporting appearances by Franchot Tone, May Robson, Fred Astaire (in his film debut), Nelson Eddy (in his second film), Robert Benchley, Ted Healy and the Three Stooges. (Fred Astaire, the epitome of movie class; and the Three Stooges, the epitome of movie classlessness; in the same film — the mind reels.) A fairly obvious knockoff of 42nd Street, Dancing Lady is based on a novel by James Warner Bellah — usually known as a Western writer (the most famous movie based on anything he wrote is She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, second in the so-called “Cavalry Trilogy” — even though the stories were completely independent — directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne) and in some respects is even better than its Warners model. It helps that Joan Crawford is a much better actress than Ruby Keeler, and the screenwriters (Allen Rivkin and P. J. Wolfson) actually gave her a character with some dramatic definition and emotional complexity (even though she was just a singing-and-dancing version of the character she was playing in most of her dramatic films in the early 1930’s: the shopgirl determined to raise her economic position without letting herself become a rich man’s mistress, and ultimately succeeding in getting a nice man to fall genuinely and respectably in love with her). In this film, Crawford is the Ruby Keeler equivalent (though she gets the lead in the musical show not because the star breaks her leg, but because she gets fired) and Gable is the Warner Baxter equivalent — the tough, no-nonsense director who’s determined to whittle Crawford down to size. The clash of their attitudes is the most entertaining thing about this movie — certainly more entertaining than the big production numbers, which are obviously attempts to imitate Busby Berkeley but make the same error just about everyone else who tried to duplicate Berkeley fell into: lack of continuity. What Arlene Croce wrote about Dave Gould’s staging of the big production numbers in the first two Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films, Flying Down to Rio and The Gay Divorcée, also applies to the numbers created for Sammy Lee’s and Edward Prinz’ work here:

Gould’s staging of the dances has a theme-and-variations plot but no continuity within the dance structure. He merely cuts, dissolves or flash-pans from one formation to the next, and [Hermes] Pan’s ensembles in “The Piccolino” [from Top Hat] follow the same procedure. There was no excitement in the permutations to compare with the unfolding logic — or the surrealistic illogic — of Busby Berkeley’s numbers at Warners (cf. the inexorable “Lullaby of Broadway” in Gold Diggers of 1935).

Croce also notes about Astaire’s film debut in Dancing Lady:

His role in Dancing Lady is a bit — a prestigious bit, but a bit. We wait an eternity for him to appear, and when he does — as himself (Gable, a director holding a rehearsal, calls out, “Oh, Fred, will you come here, please?”[1]) — he has two lines and then partners Joan Crawford in a run-through of her big number. After a few seconds, Joan gets a muscle cramp and Fred disappears until the end of the picture. The number is then seen. Actually it is four numbers run together and Astaire appears in two of them: “Heigh-Ho, the Gang’s All Here,” an old Burton Lane-Harold Adamson song here given the white-tie-and-tails treatment, and “Let’s Go Bavarian,” which Lane and Adamson almost certainly dashed off with Astaire in mind, since it’s an obvious pastiche of “I Love Louisa” from his show The Band Wagon. He doesn’t get to do a solo and all too evidently was written into the picture at the last minute.

What saves Dancing Lady are, surprisingly, the plot and dramatic performances rather than the numbers. Crawford actually turns in quite a remarkable performance, capturing the character’s desperation, commitment to her craft, unwillingness to depend on anyone else and basic morality, even though at the beginning of the movie she’s making her living as a stripper in a burlesque house that’s raided. And, though James Robert Parish (in the Gable-Crawford chapter in Hollywood’s Great Love Teams) said he thought Gable was miscast and “seemed very awkward and ill at ease,” I actually found his performance quite credible — one of his better ones from the period (and by then he had grown the famous moustache that did so much to give his face some character), ably capturing both the director’s perfectionism and his attitude. With Franchot Tone as his rich rival for Crawford’s affections, Gable wins out because he can match Crawford attitude to attitude — and though they end up in a clinch at the fadeout it’s clear that for her, his attraction is primarily professional and only secondarily romantic or sexual. The film also benefits from nice supporting performances from Benchley (as a gossip columnist), Robson (as Tone’s grandmother) and Eve Arden (unbilled, as the star Crawford replaces), and the Three Stooges appear doing the same act they would do for the next three decades — though Larry Fine also has a non-Stooge role in the film as Gable’s rehearsal pianist. As for Astaire, as Croce noted above he’s barely in the film; in “Heigh-Ho, the Gang’s All Here” he does an embryonic version of an Astaire-Rogers routine (and Crawford gets to do her best dancing in the film, ably keeping up with him), following which they step onto a circular rug in the middle of the set and keep up their dance routine as the rug takes off and flies, transporting them to Germany for the Bavarian number (and when they alight both of them have mysteriously changed costumes — Astaire had on lederhosen and Crawford has not only exchanged her evening gown for a dirndl, she’s grown a long, blonde, pig-tailed wig!). The other numbers — a snatch of the title song as a tag for the whole film and an elaborate production called “That’s the Rhythm of the Day” (sung by Nelson Eddy, who was not exactly the right person to bring jazz to the 18th century, as the number shows him doing — “If anything, it should have been the other way around!” Charles commented — if they had to have Eddy in this film, they should have given him the beautiful Lane-Adamson ballad, “Everything I Have Is Yours” — marvelously revived by Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan a decade and a half later — which instead went to a nerdy Irish tenor named Art Jarrett, with sotto voce scat-vocal asides from Crawford) — are equally over the top; the highlight of “Rhythm” is an enormous merry-go-round set with mirrors on the hub which turn the whole set into a gigantic kaleidoscope. (One can readily imagine Prinz and Lee conferring about this number: “Well, Busby Berkeley arranges his chorus girls to look like they’re part of a kaleidoscope — we’ll turn our whole set into a real kaleidoscope!”) In all of this, however, Joan Crawford acquits herself quite well; she sings acceptably (about as well as Ruby Keeler ever did, and considerably better than she had in Hollywood Revue of 1929), she dances quite well and it remains a real mystery why Crawford didn’t make another musical until Torch Song 20 years later! (Crawford was set for the 1936 MGM film Reckless, but at the last minute, for reasons that remain mysterious and inexplicable, she was replaced by Jean Harlow — who couldn’t sing, couldn’t dance and required both voice and body doubles for a role Crawford could have played quite capably on her own.) — 5//26/98

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Charles and I watched the 1933 film Dancing Lady, a big-budget (they spent almost $1 million on it, a lot of money in 1933) MGM attempt at a knock-off of Warner Bros.’ 42^nd Street and, at least to me, a better movie than the one they were ripping off. It’s basically the same story — a tough-minded Broadway choreographer plucks an unknown out of the chorus and makes her an overnight star in a big show he has to finance himself after his backer abruptly pulls out — but it’s got some interesting wrinkles that make it considerably tougher and less sentimental than its model (not the way you usually expect a comparison between a Warner Bros. and an MGM film to work). Dancing Lady was more or less produced by David O. Selznick — one of only two musicals he ever made (the other, two years later, was Reckless, also at MGM) — during the unhappy two years he spent as an MGM unit producer between his abrupt resignation as studio head of RKO (where he greenlighted King Kong and signed Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) and his formation, with backer John Hay Whitney, of the independent Selznick International studio. The reason those years were unhappy was that he had married Louis B. Mayer’s daughter Irene, and the joke around town was that was the only reason he’d got the job: his situation was described in a pun on the title of Ernest Hemingway’s famous novel, “The Son-in-Law Also Rises.” John W. Considine, who’d come from First National to United Artists to MGM and was described by people who knew him (including writer Anita Loos) as one of the most tasteless producers in Hollywood, was credited as “associate producer” probably because he knew more about making musicals than Selznick did. As a source for the story, MGM bought the rights to a novel by, of all people, James Warner Bellah, whose best-known movie credit is supplying the story for the John Wayne-John Ford cavalry epic She Wore a Yellow Ribbon 16 years later — hardly the sort of writer one expects to see on a major musical. They assigned Allen Rivkin and P. J. Wolfson to write it and came up with a plot that, if they’d been interested in continuing a series the way Warners was doing with the Gold Diggers movies, they could well have called Broadway Melody of 1933 since it has much the same mix of characters, situations and veiled but still unmistakable sexual politics.

The film opens with millionaire playboy Tod Newton (Franchot Tone) taking his current date “slumming” to a burlesque house, where a chorus line is performing a raucous number called “Hey! Young Fella” (also heard on the last session guitarist Eddie Lang ever recorded, a marvelous February 28, 1933 jazz date with Joe Venuti and Jimmy Dorsey that also produced “Raggin’ the Scale,” “Jigsaw Puzzle Blues” and “Pink Elephants”), following which Winnie Lightner, a surprising name to see on the cast because she was usually associated with Warners, coming on and doing a rather decorous striptease to the song “Hold Your Man” (actually written as the title song of a previous MGM movie from 1932 starring Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, their most underrated collaboration). Then the police come and raid the theatre, busting all the chorus girls and not even giving them the opportunity to change into street clothes. Our Heroine, Janie Barlow (Joan Crawford), whom we first saw standing next to Rosette LaRue (Lightner) as she did her big number, is sentenced to a $30 fine or 30 days in jail. She has no money, but Tod is sufficiently “taken” with her (as Franchot Tone was in real life; they married shortly after this film was completed) that he not only pays her fine but starts dating her. Janie Barlow is a much more complicated character than Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler), her equivalent in 42^nd Street (at least the one in the film; according to Richard Barrios, in Bradford Ropes’ book on which 42^nd Street was based Peggy Sawyer was a forerunner of Eve Harrington, all smiles and seeming innocence before she makes it big and all scheming and diva-dom afterwards); while Rosie, her roommate, urges her to get out of the dancing racket and snag Tod while he’s still available and interested in her, all Janie wants is to dance, and she’ll do that wherever she can — even in burlesque. Her interest in dance leads her to stalk super-choreographer Patch Gallagher (Clark Gable) until he agrees to audition her — though, unbeknownst to either of them, Janie finally lands her audition through the good graces of Tod, who buys an interest in the show from backer Jasper Bradley (Grant Mitchell), who got into show business via the interest of his incompetent doofus son Jasper Bradley, Jr. (Maynard Holmes in the kind of part that would later become Grady Sutton’s specialty), who majored in drama in college and apparently learned nothing from the experience. Tod tells Bradley, Sr. he’s got a girl he’s interested in, and Gallagher, assuming he’s going to be auditioning some rich guy’s no-talent girlfriend, instructs his assistant Ted (Ted Healy) to have his rehearsal pianist (Larry Fine) and his stagehands Moe and Joe Howard to sabotage the audition and give her the brush-off. In case those names sound familiar, they’re the Three Stooges — they were originally billed as “Ted Healy and His Stooges” and made a number of films for MGM, some shorts (including a few experimental ones in color) and also brief appearances in features like this one. Then Healy decided he didn’t need them anymore, fired them and stayed at MGM as a character actor until his death in 1937 — and the Stooges were picked up by Columbia and enlisted for the 23-year series of shorts that were later sold to TV in the 1950’s and are the basis of their enduring fame. Healy and the Stooges do their best to screw up Janie’s audition, but Healy notices that she has real talent and insists on giving her another chance, this time with Gallagher watching.

Gallagher signs her up for the chorus and says that if she works out well he’ll give her a featured spot in the show, and on that basis she endures the insanely exhausting rehearsal schedule he puts her and the other chorines through. At the same time Gallagher is especially rough on choristers who stay out all night, drink and come in for rehearsal the next day the worse for wear. He’s also rough on the star of his show, Vivian Warner (Gloria Foy), who midway through rehearsals he decides is inadequate for the lead; and on the writer, Pinky (Sterling Holloway), whom he accuses of writing a show stuck in the 19^th century. He wants to revamp the production so it’s the story of a woman who comes to New York with nothing but a determination to make good as a dancer — and you don’t need two guesses whom he wants to cast in the lead of that version. Rehearsals continue and Crawford gets to do a big run-through of one of the big numbers with Fred Astaire (in his first film, wearing a thin moustache, almost unrecognizable and displaying almost none of the personality he would rise to stardom with in the upcoming series with Ginger Rogers at RKO) before she gets a sprain and has to stop. Gallagher massages her and she enjoys his physical attentions, but in the meantime she’s still been seeing Tod and she’s spent a weekend at his parents’ home, hanging out with his nearly deaf maternal grandmother Dolly Todhunter (the always delightful character actress May Robson) and swimming in a pool so full of aquatic statuary, including great columns of fake coral, it looks like the sort of thing MGM’s set designers were constructing for Esther Williams’ big numbers 15 years later. Janie makes the mistake of telling Tod that if her show is a flop she’ll marry him, while if it’s a hit she’ll continue her career — and Tod gets the Bradleys to pull their money out of the show and close it down, then takes Janie to Cuba on a pre-marital vacation (where their nightclub jaunts look like stock footage left over from MGM’s Cuban Love Song with Lawrence Tibbett two years earlier and the song we get on the soundtrack is Ernesto Lecuona’s “Siboney”). Patch is furious with Janie and Tod for pulling the plug on his show and costing 100 people real or potential jobs (he’s especially angry that, at Tod’s insistence, Janie was being paid for rehearsals while none of the other cast members were), so he decides to finance the show himself and re-recruits Vivian Warner for the lead — only when she walks on the eve of the opening Janie nobly volunteers to step in in her stead, pointing out that she rehearsed enough of the show she knows all the routines. Accordingly Janie does the show, it’s a success and, even though Tod is now willing to let her continue working even if she marries him, but instead she decides to stay not only with show business but with the man who can partner her both personally and professionally, and the final scene is the expected clinch between Joan Crawford and Clark Gable.

Dancing Lady is probably more remembered today for the big guest stars it helped introduce, Fred Astaire (in his first film) and Nelson Eddy (in his second, after Broadway to Hollywood). It has one major flaw in common with 42^nd Street: all the big production numbers are back-loaded onto the end of the film instead of being interspersed throughout, and of the four songs we see performed at the end of the film Astaire is in the first two, “Heigh-Ho, the Gang’s All Here” and “Let’s Go Bavarian.” Both songs are about beer — I’m not making this up, you know — and though Astaire shows up in his trademark top hat, white tie and tails (it would not be until The Sky’s the Limit, made in 1943, that he’d make a film in which he didn’t dress that way in at least one scene) and he and Crawford partner each other acceptably, they’re both tapping and they don’t get the chance to do a romantic dance together. (Ask virtually any film buff who was Astaire’s first female dancing partner on screen and they’ll probably guess Ginger Rogers; it was actually Joan Crawford!) Midway through the “Heigh-Ho” number the round carpet Astaire and Crawford are standing (and occasionally dancing) on suddenly takes off and flies (though magic carpets had been a staple on screen at least until the Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. vehicle The Thief of Baghdad from 1923), making a bee-line to Germany for the “Let’s Go Bavarian” number, also about beer — obviously songwriters Burton Lane and Harold Adamson were trying to duplicate the success of the “beer song” “I Love Louisa” from the last Fred and Adele Astaire stage musical, The Band Wagon (1930). Then the scene shifts to a 19^th century garden park and the stentorian voice of Nelson Eddy informing us that that sort of thing is hopelessly out of date and the choristers need to get with it and adopt the “Rhythm of the Day” — which they do by going through a magic archway that converts them from the 19^th century to 1933, change their horse-drawn carriages to cars and, in one audacious gag that marks Dancing Lady as a product of the so-called “pre-Code” era, a man in a full suit of armor goes through the archway and emerges as a prissy handkerchief-waving queen. The scene shifts to a giant merry-go-round in which the central hub is ringed with giant mirrors, as if director Robert Z. Leonard (usually a hack, but here he gets some quite interesting and occasionally almost proto-noir compositions) and choreographers Sammy Lee and an uncredited Eddie Prinz had decided to go Busby Berkeley one better: instead of arranging chorines into a kaleidoscope pattern and filming them from above, they’d build a real kaleidoscope on their set. Eventually the number ends with a brief paean to Joan Crawford’s dancing skills set to a title song we’ve previously heard very little of, though this being MGM instead of fading out on the end of the number it ends with a wrap-up of the romantic intrigues and the big Crawford-Gable clinch.

Dancing Lady was made while Crawford was already one of MGM’s biggest stars and Gable was still on his way up — that’s why the first title card says “Joan Crawford and Clark Gable,” the second has the name of the film and the third offers the miscellaneous cast members: Franchot Tone, May Robson, Winnie Lightner, Fred Astaire (playing a character called “Fred Astaire” — in his next film, Flying Down to Rio, he would be “Fred Ayres”) and Robert Benchley (considerably thinner and less avuncular than he would be in his later MGM shorts, playing a gossip columnist who’s pissing Gallagher off by dropping hints of the real relationship between Tod and Janie and how it allegedly got Janie the big part in the new show). Charles seemed surprised that Crawford was considered a bigger star than Gable in 1933 — but she was; it would be with the smash success of Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night in 1934 (a “punishment” loanout Louis B. Mayer arranged with Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures) that Gable would make the final leap from star to superstar. Astaire comes across surprisingly weakly in a role that didn’t give him much of a chance to shine — after watching Dancing Lady one can more readily understand the reaction of the Paramount talent scout who wrote off Astaire with the immortal words, “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little” (just as listening to the Beatles’ January 1, 1962 audition tape for Decca Records makes the Decca executives who didn’t sign them seem less dumb — when I got the bootleg album containing them my then-girlfriend and I both had the same reaction: we looked at each other and said, “If this is what we’d had to go on, we wouldn’t have signed them either!”) — and as I noted the last time we watched Dancing Lady, Nelson Eddy would have been a lot more suitable for a song that flashed back from 1933 to the 19^th century and emphasized the commonality of music and dance through the years rather than one that was supposed to epitomize the progress that had been made in those fields since then. If Eddy had to be in this film, they should have given him the lovely Lane-Adamson ballad “Everything I Have Is Yours,” sung about midway through the film by pathetic Irish-tenor wanna-be Art Jarrett in one of those weird period vocals that makes it sound like he’s trying to sing while being strangled. “Everything I Have Is Yours” is the only song from Dancing Lady that became a standard, though it would have to wait over a decade — after the rediscovery of the 1931 song “As Time Goes By” following its use as the theme song in Casablanca, quite a few 1940’s singers started raiding the stage and film musicals of a decade earlier for suitable material; usually the rediscoveries were done by Frank Sinatra, but “Everything I Have Is Yours” got brought back to the public consciousness in the mid-1940’s by two great African-American singers, Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan. — 5/10/15

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[1] — It startled Charles that they didn’t even bother to come up with a character name for him — he merely played a dancer in Gable’s show named “Fred Astaire”! And in his next film, Flying Down to Rio, he was called “Fred Ayres,” a name kept deliberately close to his own.

Jane Eyre (Monogram, 1934)

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

The film was the 1934 Jane Eyre, produced by Ben Verschleiser at Monogram Pictures and a movie Charles and I had remembered as surprisingly good the last time we saw it. Wanting to see it again with the memory of the far more famous film of Charlotte Brontë’s novel from 1943 fresh in our minds, I downloaded it from archive.org and burned a DVD. My memories had been that the Jane Eyre in this version, Virginia Bruce, was considerably better than Joan Fontaine, who had played her in 1943 — Fontaine had pretty much moped through the role as a put-upon victim while Bruce played her as considerably feistier and more independent — but I’d been disappointed in her Rochester, Colin Clive. Maybe it’s because Clive is best known for his two relentlessly enervated performances as Henry Frankenstein, creator of the Monster, in the two Frankenstein movies directed by James Whale (Frankenstein, 1931; and the awesome masterpiece The Bride of Frankenstein, 1935) that I had expected him to have some of the same force-of-nature quality Orson Welles brought to Rochester in the 1943 version, but under director Christy Cabanne (the fourth and least illustrious of the former D. W. Griffith assistants who became directors themselves — the others were Erich von Stroheim, Tod Browning and Raoul Walsh!) Clive plays Rochester as an ordinary and quite befuddled British gentleman who just happens to have a crazy wife locked up in his attic (or a back room, or wherever). Probably because, even though it was based on a literary classic and was therefore a “prestige” production by Monogram standards, studio head Trem Carr still insisted on keeping it within six or seven reels (for a running time of 63 minutes), screenwriter Adele Commandini (though her name is spelled with only one “m” here), who two years later became famous for writing the first Deanna Durbin vehicle, Three Smart Girls, had to telescope the novel relentlessly. The moving scenes of Jane’s experiences at Lowood School are gone completely — in one jump-cut Jane ages from the child newly brought to Lowood to Jane as a teacher giving a geography lesson and getting herself fired for objecting to the discipline Mr. Brocklehurst (David Torrence, who like Clive gives a considerably more matter-of-fact and less force-of-nature performance than his counterpart in the 1943 film, Henry Daniell) wants to mete out against a pupil who instead of attending to Jane’s lecture drew a caricature of him, and Jane quickly ages from Edith Fellowes (who plays her as a child considerably less sentimentally than Peggy Ann Garner did in 1943) to Virginia Bruce.

I still really like Virginia Bruce’s performance; she was one of those ill-used talents who pretty much fell through the Hollywood cracks — had this film been made at a major studio instead of Monogram this probably would have been her star-making performance — and her Jane Eyre comes closer to the descriptions of Katharine Hepburn in the short-lived 1937 stage production (which was supposed to play on Broadway but closed out of town, largely because of the inadequacy of her Rochester, Dennis Hoey, best known as Inspector Lestrade in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies) as grabbing the role forcefully and bringing Jane’s independent spirit to life in ways Fontaine (who played Jane too much the way she’d played the weaker and mousier heroine of Rebecca, a story Daphne du Maurier had obviously created with Jane Eyre as an inspiration). Though a Jane Eyre film with the young Hepburn remains one of the most tantalizing of cinematic might-have-beens (along with a Falstaff with W. C. Fields and a Great Gatsby with Cary Grant), Virginia Bruce (who would play a Katharine Hepburn role again in 1940, when she appeared as Jo March in a film of Little Men, Louisa May Alcott’s sequel to Little Women) is excellent in the role and one could readily wish she’d been able to play it in the 1943 version with a major-studio infrastructure and cast. That said, one thing I still like about the 1934 Jane Eyre is its matter-of-fact understatement; lacking all the fustian Gothic effects Robert Stevenson and Orson Welles brought to the 1943 film, the story seems more realistic, more like something we could imagine actually taking place and less like a fantastic dream (or nightmare). Not only is the 1934 Jane Eyre relatively plainly photographed (though Cabanne and cinematographer Robert Planck get some interesting overhead angles in some scenes and even do a couple of crane shots, an unusual effect for a Monogram movie given how much it cost to rent camera cranes) but it has virtually no music — a far cry from the wall-to-wall score Bernard Herrmann supplied for the 1943 film (and Herrmann must have been attracted to the world of the Brontës because he also wrote an opera based on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights) — and even the crazy wife, when she appears, is played by actress Claire Du Brey as a normal-seeming person who just appears a bit goop-eyed in her one on-screen appearance (though her off-screen screams are properly terrifying).

One oddity is that, though the 1934 Jane Eyre is a product of the so-called “pre-Code” era (it was released August 15, 1934, just as the pressure from the Catholic Legion of Decency was getting Hollywood to enforce the Production Code seriously) it’s considerably more decorous than the 1943 version: when Brocklehurst asks the young Jane where bad people go when they die, the word “hell” does not appear on the soundtrack (though it may have been drowned out by an added sound effect after the Legion launched its campaign against the studios), and in this version Jane finds out that Rochester is already married and therefore can’t marry her when the first wife simply turns up in a scene in which Rochester and Jane are planning their wedding and meeting with the minister. Commandini dodged the marvelous scene in the book, done come scritto in the 1943 film, in which Rochester and Jane are literally standing at the altar when Rochester’s brother-in-law confronts them and stops the wedding with the news that Rochester’s wife is still living and, because she’s mad, he can’t divorce her. Also, the 1934 Jane Eyre does suffer from the cheapness of Monogram’s production; the exterior of Thornfield Hall is only a model, and when it burns at the end (a plot device repeated in James Whale’s film The Old Dark House — though in that one it’s the patriarch’s crazy brother, not his wife, who breaks out of the room where he’s being held captive and sets the place on fire — and in Rebecca) Monogram’s effects people simply set fire to their model. It’s interesting that both the 1934 and 1943 Jane Eyres have ties to the great horror-film icons, the 1934 to Frankenstein via Clive’s presence (albeit bringing a much more understated acting style to this role than he did in his greatest films: the two Whale Frankensteins, Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong and Frank Borzage’s History Is Made at Night) and the 1943 to Dracula via Welles (who had played Count Dracula on radio in 1938 in a version far more imaginatively adapted than any of the Dracula movies — and with a finer actress as Mina Harker, Agnes Moorehead, than has ever played her on screen) and, as Charles argued, the entire 1943 Jane Eyre can be read with Rochester as a lead vampire who’s already enslaved his crazy wife and their daughter (for some reason Adele Commandini in the 1934 version turned the girl from Rochester’s daughter to his niece!) and wants to bring Jane into his vampire harem.

Jack Benny Program with Liberace (CBS-TV, 1/17/54)

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

I screened Charles a 1954 episode of The Jack Benny Program featuring Liberace as guest star. Originally aired January 17, 1954, and written by Sam Perrin, George Balzer, Milt Josefsberg and John Tackaberry, the episode has a typically simple plot — Liberace’s violin-playing and bandleading brother George (Our Hero’s original name was Wladziu Valentino Liberace and he Anglicized the first name to “Walter” — the name on his first film, a “Soundie” of “Tiger Rag” — before he dropped his given name altogether) can’t make it to a benefit concert Liberace is playing, so he’s inviting Jack Benny to stand in for him. Benny learns of this when his valet Rochester (Eddie Anderson, given such heavy lighting that when we first see him he doesn’t look all that Black) takes Liberace’s phone message, and there’s a great scene when Benny’s attempt to return Liberace’s call gets sidetracked by two gloriously funny character actresses, Bea Benaderet and Shirley Mitchell, who play switchboard operators making catty remarks as Benny tries to get through. Unable to reach Liberace by phone, Benny drops in at him at home — and Liberace’s home is a palatial living room lit entirely by candelabra. Benny meets Liberace’s manservants, including butler Geoffrey (Rex Evans), chef Pierre (Rolfe Sedan) — who has prepared an entrée of “frog’s legs à la José Ferrer,” meaning that the legs are permanently bent at the knees (a reference to Ferrer’s starring role as the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the film Moulin Rouge, in which to simulate the artist’s diminutive stature he had a special frame made so he could go about on his knees throughout the film and look like a real little person — indeed, as I recall the most spectacular scene was a confrontation between Toulouse-Lautrec and his father, also played by Ferrer but standing up normally) — and at least two of the four people Liberace has detailed to change the candles when they’re about to burn out. It’s an illustration of how Liberace managed to be a Gay celebrity at a time when homosexuality was almost unheard of and the big concern of the Gay community, such as it was, was to keep from getting arrested instead of winning the right to marry each other: instead of staying closeted and playing the big, buff straight guy the way Rock Hudson did, Liberace ramped up the camp to such a level that people thought, “He acts way too much like one to actually be one!” (Amazingly, in 1959 Liberace filed a libel suit against a British columnist who had hinted he was Gay — and won.)

At the scene representing the concert, Liberace plays a medley of Chopin pieces — and plays them surprisingly well; for all his affectations, Liberace as a musician was genuinely at home with the classics, and when he could resist his temptation to add orchestral parts to pieces whose composers had written them for solo piano (which he doesn’t do here until the very end of the medley), he could play standard piano repertoire quite well. Not surprisingly, his tastes ran to the dreamier parts of the classical piano canon, particularly Chopin and Debussy (I have a late Liberace recording of “Clair de Lune,” blessedly free of orchestral interjections, and he’s quite good —not at the level of Gieseking or Arrau, but still quite good.) Then Jack Benny emerges with a miniature three-candle candelabrum glued to the body of his violin. “I think you’re taking this a bit too far,” says Liberace, the Master of Excess! Benny agrees to fetch his other, unadorned violin, and the two play Kurt Weill’s “September Song,” with Benny excruciatingly out of tune as usual (when Liberace sounds A on the piano and suggests, “Why don’t we tune up?,” Benny says, “That’s a great idea.” Liberace says, “No, why don’t you tune up?”). In one of the great Benny-as-terrible-violinist sequences, he plays “September Song” with full visual panache, as if he thinks he’s making the greatest music of all time even though what we hear is the usual Benny screeching. (According to Joe Venuti, Benny could really play well — the two jammed together and Venuti said Benny would have made a great jazz violinist — but he couldn’t risk playing competently for audiences because it would have blown his carefully crafted image of being terrible.) It’s a wonderful little program and a souvenir of a bygone age in entertainment when you could have a mass following as a comedian without being rude, offensive or scatological.

Cleveland Abduction (Sony Pictures Television, Woolridge Productions, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All Rights Reserved

The latest “world premiere” movie on Lifetime last night was Cleveland Abduction, based on the famous case of three women who were kidnapped in Cleveland, Ohio and held in captivity for over a decade by an astonishingly ordinary person, Ariel Castro (Raymond Cruz), who worked weekdays as a school bus driver and occasionally played gigs in a salsa band which rehearsed in his living room, having no idea that three women were in the same house being held against their will. The story broke when the women were rescued in May 2013 after Castro made a slip and, amazingly, left his front door unlocked, thus allowing one of the women to get the attention of the neighbors, who ultimately called the police, who rescued the women and staked out the house (an unprepossessing Cleveland row house whose very ugliness and lack of charm make it virtually its own character in the film). The film was at least nominally based on the memoir Finding Myself by Michelle Knight (played in the film by Taryn Manning), the first of Castro’s victims and the one who probably suffered the most — for some reason, every time he got her pregnant he would beat her up and kick her in the abdomen until she aborted, whereas he let one of the other woman bear his child, and he also taunted Michelle because she didn’t have a functioning family that was looking for her, putting up missing-person posters for her, lobbying the media to keep covering her story and the like the way the other two women he’d kidnapped, Amanda Berry (Samantha Droke) and Nancy DeJesus (Jean Zarzour), did. What makes the story so compelling is not only how horrifying Ariel Castro’s crimes were but how ordinary he seemed — this is the sort of tale that invites invocation of Hannah Arendt’s famous description of Adolf Eichmann, “the banality of evil” — he wasn’t an especially interesting person and he wasn’t particularly well-to-do, either.

One expects the people engaged in this sort of nasty sexual enslavement to be part of the 1 percent, like the originator and the man after whom this conduct is named, the Marquis de Sade, or the legendary Bluebeard, or the fictional Alexander Grey (the male protagonist in the insanely successful Fifty Shades books) — yet here is an ordinary proletarian, who drove a school bus (until he was laid off, whereupon his treatment of his captives got even rougher, partly because he couldn’t afford to feed them even what little he had before that and partly because he all too predictably used them as an outlet on whom to take out his frustrations at being unemployed) and led a small-time salsa band which played a few gigs at night. The movie is unusually good by Lifetime standards, though I suspect that’s more due to the inherently compelling nature of the story than any particular talent of the filmmakers, including director Alex Kalymnios (who seems to have instructed cinematographer Richard Wong not to hold the camera steady, but to allow it to move in short, jerky ways that add to the nervousness of the situations being depicted) and screenwriter Stephen Tolkin, who (inevitably) left out a lot of Michelle Knight’s memoir but actually did a pretty good job of boiling it down. The story of Ariel Castro remains enigmatic, partly because one month after he pled guilty to over 900 criminal counts against him (inexplicably, he had allowed his victims to keep journals and from those records the police and prosecutors were able to piece together an indictment with a staggering 979 counts against him, from which he pled guilty to all but 40 and got the rather preposterous sentence of life plus 1,000 years) he hanged himself in his cell, thereby taking all the secrets of What Made Ariel Run with him. From the few bits of Ariel Castro’s account of his actions that are preserved — in videotapes of police interrogations and courtroom proceedings — it seemed he wanted to present what he did as no big deal, saying that the women were free to leave and all the sex between him and them was consensual (yeah, right), and his overall affect, shown in the film in some pretty smarmy dialogue that shows the level of doublethink Castro engaged in, on one level needing to buy chains (presumably at the local Home Depot or Ace Hardware), locks, handcuffs and other paraphernalia to keep his victims chained, bound and captive, and also to make sure no relatives or friends or neighbors learned his secrets; while he also simultaneously thought of them as a “family” and had a twisted sort of love and affection towards them that comes through in one pathetic (in both senses) scene in which he confesses some of his failings to Michelle not long before she was rescued.

We know a good deal more about Michelle Knight than we do about Ariel Castro, since she published a book about her experiences (and apparently the other two women have clubbed together to write their book, and a British author interviewed on the Behind the Headlines show about the case after the movie has written a third one from a more objective perspective) and showed herself to be predisposed to be a victim of a sexual enslaver even before she and Castro met. She was a “bad girl” who was molested by her mom’s boyfriend, ended up partnered (professionally and personally) with a drug dealer until she was busted, had a son somewhere along the way and ended up with him being a victim of physical abuse from one of the men in her life, which got the kid taken away from her. Indeed, she was on her way to a meeting at the Cleveland Department of Social Services to talk to them about getting her boy, Joey (Kyle McCann), out of the clutches of the social workers and the welfare department when on foot to the appointment in an unfamiliar part of town, she was accosted by Ariel Castro and offered a ride. The level of her naïveté is shown not only by the fact that the lure he used to get her into his car was the promise of a puppy — one expects to see cute young dogs more as the lure used by a pedophile to gain access to a pre-pubescent child rather than a kidnapper and sexual enslaver to entrap an adult woman. Later he gives her a puppy, only to kill it brutally in front of her face when she’s disobeyed him in what’s probably the most chilling scene in the film (though one that gives it a run for the money is one early on in her captivity, when he’s strung her up and is hanging her from the ceiling like a piñata, and she loses control of her bladder and starts involuntarily peeing through her pants onto the floor below). Cleveland Abduction is a chilling tale, made all the more frightening (I keep coming back to this, but it’s true) by Ariel Castro’s ordinariness — instead of the kind of eye-rolling villain one wants a character like this to be (mainly because at then we could at least tell ourselves we’d know enough to avoid him, and at best be able to figure out what he was doing and turn him in) he’s just a normal guy who just happens to have a really twisted and disgusting hobby he managed to keep secret from his family, friends neighbors and everybody else for over a decade.

The best thing I can say for Raymond Cruz’s performance as Castro is he projects the ordinariness by which he was able to stay under the radar of the authorities for so long. He’s also got the knack of making us understand that Castro saw nothing wrong with what he was doing — at least according to his own statements (based on Michelle’s recollections of them during her long period as his captive) he had conceived the idea of holding women captive after his wife (the father of his daughter Emily, who was about the same age as Amanda and Nancy and who unwittingly helped his dad entrap them — “But I’m not a stranger offering you a ride! I’m the father of a friend of yours!”) left him, though he says little about her except to call her a “bitch.” He’s blatantly foul-mouthed but in a way that’s pretty typical of a working-class male — at one point he gives his captives a TV set but threatens to take it away if they ever watch any programs featuring African-Americans, whom he hates — and as the years go by (they don’t seem to go by as slowly as they no doubt did in real life or they seemed to in Michelle Knight’s book, mainly because Kalymnios and Tolkin had only a two-hour running time, less commercials, to tell the tale) his actions and the responses of his captives fall into a dull routine, so much so that when they finally do get the chance to get out we’re as surprised as they are. While I still think Emma Donoghue’s Room is the best story ever written about this type of abduction (it opens six years after the woman has been taken captive and been held in a shed, separate from her abductor’s house and built by him especially for this purpose, and it’s told from the point of view of the woman’s five-year-old son, who has literally been born inside the room and known no other life) and I wish someone with the right sort of demented imagination would film it, Cleveland Abduction is quite moving in a desperate sort of way, and Kalymnios and Tolkin deserve a lot of credit (especially given the network they were working for) for not milking the tear-jerking aspects of the story, not turning it into a massive soap opera, and trusting the horror of what Ariel Castro did to those women to come through without a lot of manipulative direction and writing to guy the audiences’ emotions.

Jane Eyre (20th Century-Fox, 1943)

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

At Charles’ place I ran the movie Jane Eyre, the 1943 version with Joan Fontaine in the title role and Orson Welles as the mysterious Edward Rochester, ostensibly directed by Robert Stevenson but actually largely shaped by Welles. Fontaine, in her autobiography, gives herself credit (along with production designer William Pereira) for resisting Welles’ attempts to take over the direction and allowing Stevenson to regain control of the film — but there are plenty of vertiginous camera angles, depth-of-field compositions, wild and stormy exteriors, extensively Gothic chiaroscuro interiors and point-of-view shots to mark this as a virtual Welles film. In fact, the opening scene — in which Jane’s aunt (played by Agnes Moorehead) gives custody of her over to a sinister stranger (Henry Daniell) — is amazingly reminiscent of that early scene in Citizen Kane, in which Moorehead as Kane’s mother gives custody of him over to a sinister stranger (George Coulouris), down to the shot of Moorehead looking out at her from the window of her house and the low-angle shot of the sinister guardian, a child’s point-of-view shot that makes him loom monstrously overhead. The early scenes — perhaps because Fontaine wasn’t in them (the title character is still a child, and is being played by Peggy Ann Garner — with a haunting, though oddly uncredited, bit part for the young Elizabeth Taylor as a schoolgirl who befriends Jane and dies of tuberculosis) — are the most convincingly Wellesian, full of low angles, high angles, shadows and ceiling shots, though many of the shots at Rochester’s home, Thornfield, are also dark and sinister in Welles’ best manner.

Oddly, Robert Stevenson’s greatest directorial contribution to this film may have been in controlling Welles as actor, since (as Joseph McBride noted in his Welles book), “the material tends to bring out some of the more purely self-indulgent aspects of [Welles’] personality and would have required painstaking refinement and stylization to be a complete success.” As the film stands, Welles’ performance, though powerful, isn’t the piece of baroque, over-the-top overacting Welles probably would have delivered if he’d been formally directing the film; indeed, he seems oddly restrained at times, and his performance is so richly oratorical it would probably have worked as well on radio as it did on film. (Welles had done a radio broadcast of Jane Eyre four years before, and had repeated the role of Rochester twice in broadcasts.) I’d be interested in reading the novel (Charles has, and was amused by the differences — most of them in altering and telescoping what happened between the time Jane leaves Thornfield and the time she returns — as well as the fact that the credits used a “storybook” format, shown on the pages of an open copy of the novel, yet the original novel didn’t have all these names in front — “That’s because Charlotte Brontë could write the novel all by herself,” I pointed out, “while a film takes hundreds of people to make”) and also in seeing the alternate versions — the one Monogram made in 1934 with Virginia Bruce and Colin Clive (Clive wouldn’t have been the dramatic physical presence Welles was, but the movies I have seen him in — Whale’s two Frankenstein films, Karl Freund’s Mad Love, Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong and Frank Borzage’s History Is Made at Night — all indicate a gift for portraying tortured souls that probably would have made him a great Rochester), the BBC-TV version with Timothy Dalton and the new Zeffirelli version with William Hurt as Rochester and Anna Paquin as the young Jane, growing up to be an “Anglo-French actress” (as The New Yorker described her) named Charlotte Gainsbourg. — 4/19/96

•••••

As part of this month’s Friday night salute to Orson Welles, last night Turner Classic Movies showed a program of Welles-associated films, including his first two (and best) films as a director, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons; the 1943 20^th Century-Fox version of Jane Eyre, in which he accepted a job as actor; and the recently rediscovered work print of Welles’ 1938 film Too Much Johnson (more on that later). The 1943 Jane Eyre was originally developed by David O. Selznick as a vehicle for his contract star, Joan Fontaine, who after years of unsuitable roles as an RKO contractee had rocketed to the “A”-list in a production of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, a novel heavily influenced by Jane Eyre — a young, innocent woman marries a troubled man some years her senior, only to be confronted by what’s troubling him — but like a lot of the other projects he had been developing during the four years between Rebecca (1940) and Since You Went Away (1944), he sold the package to 20^th Century-Fox. As the story’s male lead, the troubled landowner Edward Rochester, master of Thornfield — the crumbling Gothic estate to which Jane Eyre is summoned to be governess to Rochester’s daughter Adele (Margaret O’Brien) — either Selznick or Fox (it’s not clear which) hired Orson Welles after Selznick’s preferred choices, Ronald Colman, Laurence Olivier and Walter Pidgeon (!), didn’t pan out for one reason or another. Selznick warned Fox that his public-opinion polling on the casting (Selznick was the first producer in history to commission opinion polls to tell him how audiences would want him to cast his films) warned that Welles was less popular than the other actors on the short list and “particularly weak with females.”

But with 20^th Century-Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck off the lot running the U.S. Signal Corps’ division making government training films for World War II, the man in charge was Selznick’s brother-in-law (they had both married daughters of Louis B. Mayer) Bill Goetz, and Goetz brought in Welles and not only used him as actor but allowed him a voice in the production and direction of the film. Just how much of a voice remains a matter of contention among scholars of Hollywood history; in her autobiography, Joan Fontaine said that Orson Welles was the least responsible co-star she’d ever had (her favorites were Fred Astaire and Charles Boyer, whom she liked because whenever they made suggestions to the producer or director they were ideas that would improve the film overall and not just fatten their own parts) and she boasted that she had re-established the authority of the film’s designated director, Robert Stevenson (a British filmmaker who in the 1930’s had been regarded as Great Britain’s second most important director, after Alfred Hitchcock), by insisting that she would take notes on her own performance only from Stevenson, not Welles. Be that as it may, the 1943 Jane Eyre certainly looks like a Welles film, especially during the scenes of Jane’s childhood (before either Fontaine or Welles, who got top billing even though he doesn’t appear on screen until the film is nearly half over, show up). The opening scene, in which Jane’s creepy relatives send her off with the even creepier Rev. Brocklehurst (Henry Daniell in full Professor Moriarty mode) to attend the horrible Lowood School, where she’s made to stand on a stool while Brocklehurst excoriates her and tells the other students not to befriend her, can’t help but seem reminiscent of the scene in Citizen Kane in which Kane’s mother (played by Agnes Moorehead, who’s also cast as Jane’s aunt, Mrs. Reed, here) sends him off with financier Walter Parks Thatcher — so much so that I couldn’t help but joke, “Where’s her sled called ‘Roseb-’ — oops, wrong movie.”

The whole approach to the story is so Gothic that this time around Charles said it might almost be a remake of Dracula (which, you’ll remember, Welles had adapted and played on radio in a version I find far more creative and moving than any of the films of the story), and after a prologue in which Joan Fontaine’s voice narrates a passage that’s supposed to be the opening of Charlotte Brontë’s source novel (it isn’t, but the social comment it contains — “I was born in 1820, a harsh time of change in England. Money and position seemed all that mattered. Charity was a cold and disagreeable word. Religion too often wore a mask of bigotry and cruelty. There was no proper place for the poor or the unfortunate” — certainly sounds like the work of the Left-leaning Welles, aside from being an all too accurate description of the U.S. today!) the first image we see is of a lighted candle, the person holding it kept in shadow, moving across the screen. The cinematographer is George Barnes, whose protégé Gregg Toland had shot Citizen Kane, and while one reason he got the job is probably because he had photographed Fontaine in Rebecca and was the first D.P. who figured out how to light her so she didn’t look like she had a flashlight bulb stuck on the end of her nose, he also had no trouble adapting to Welles’ visual style — oblique angles, extreme close-ups, high depth of field, off-kilter framing and wild exteriors in which the sky took up two-thirds of the screen. Jane Eyre as a movie is vivid and fantastic — in both senses of the word — and though it doesn’t quite live up to Thomas Schatz’s billing in his book The Genius of the System as a movie that showcased the power of a romantic myth that had inspired several other templates (not only Rebecca but the other Fontaine-Hitchcock collaboration, Suspicion, and even Val Lewton’s artful “B,” I Walked with a Zombie, in which, stuck with a lurid title insisted on by RKO’s marketing department and forced to come up with a film to go with it, Lewton and his writers decided simply to knock off Jane Eyre) before there was a sound-era adaptation of Jane Eyre itself. (Schatz was wrong; there was a quite good 1934 version from Monogram, of all places, with Virginia Bruce — at least to my mind — out-acting Fontaine in the title role, and Colin Clive an excellent Rochester even if he didn’t have Welles’ fustian, almost superhuman panache and charisma in the part.)

Welles’ fingerprints are all over the movie; though Selznick had hired Aldous Huxley and John Houseman to write the script (Houseman was a former Welles collaborator who had worked with him and Herman J. Mankiewicz on the script of Citizen Kane but subsequently had a falling-out with him) Welles apparently rewrote it, and though Fontaine may have taken her notes only from Robert Stevenson it’s clear that Welles was giving a performance without guidance from any nominal director other than himself. Indeed, he did enough work on the script that 20^th Century-Fox offered him a producer credit, which he turned down on the basis that he only wanted producer credit on films he was also directing. During one particularly intense red-filtered scene of Rochester parading around the grounds of Thornfield, either on his feet or on his horse, with black-silhouetted trees against a dark, ominous, cloud-ridden sky I said to Charles, “This movie looks a lot more like the work of the man who did Citizen Kane than the man who did Mary Poppins.” The film’s acting is generally quite good — though one could imagine a feistier reading of Jane Eyre than Fontaine’s (as Katharine Hepburn reportedly gave in her 1937 stage version — with, alas, an inadequate Rochester: Dennis Hoey, the character actor best known as Inspector Lestrade in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes series) and a more human, less spectral version of Rochester than Welles’ — and especially noteworthy is a performance in the Lowood scenes by the child actress playing Helen, the one girl there who befriends Jane, only to be punished by being forced to walk about in the rain for hours, from which she catches tuberculosis and dies. You’ll recognize her immediately as Elizabeth Taylor, and one could only wish she had been given the role of Rochester’s daughter instead of the ridiculously mannered Margaret O’Brien, who in her first years in Hollywood was put into so many heavy-duty romances and war dramas that Vincente Minnelli recalled that on Meet Me in St. Louis his biggest problem with O’Brien was scraping off the pseudo-Shakespearean affectations she’d acquired and forcing her to act her age! — 5/2/15

Too Much Johnson (Mercury Theatre, 1938)

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

Too Much Johnson is a Welles project with an even weirder genesis than Jane Eyre: made in 1938, two years before Welles signed with RKO and made Citizen Kane, the film was originally part of a multi-media spectacle Welles wanted to stage based on a play actor-writer William Gillette wrote in 1894. The play features a woman who’s dating three guys named (or at least using the name of) Johnson, and takes place both in New York City and Cuba, where the main Johnson (played in Welles’ production by the almost unrecognizably young Joseph Cotten) flees and is confronted by his girlfriend’s husband and several other characters. Welles decided to shoot filmed prologues for each of the play’s three acts, deciding that the movie medium would work better to set the stage for Gillette’s complicated plot than long, dialogue-drenched expository scenes. Alas, though Welles had legally licensed the stage rights to Gillette’s copyrighted play, he hadn’t taken into account that movie rights were an entirely separate matter; what eventually became Paramount studios had purchased the film rights to Too Much Johnson in 1912 and made a silent film of the play in 1919, and when they got word that Welles was planning to show his own film adaptations of scenes from Too Much Johnson as part of a production of the play, they went to court and slapped an injunction on him forbidding him from doing so.

In 1969 Welles sat for an interview with Charles Higham for a book called The Films of Orson Welles — though when the book was published two years later Welles angrily severed ties with Higham, saying the book had misrepresented him and in particular objecting to Higham’s allegation that Welles didn’t properly finish his films because he had a psychological block against doing so — and showed Higham a fully edited version of Too Much Johnson. (This was probably the same print Welles had shown the RKO bigwigs back in 1940 before he signed with them to prove to them that he did know how to direct a film. This is important because much of the promotion around the Too Much Johnson rediscovery argued that Welles never properly edited the footage.) Higham had frame enlargements made from the movie and published them in his book, but in 1970 that print of the film was destroyed when Welles’ villa in Madrid burned. Too Much Johnson was assumed to be a lost movie until 2005, when a work print from which Welles had worked on his editing in an archive in the small Italian town of Pordenone. The Pordenone archive worked with the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York on preserving and restoring the film, and publicly premiered a 67-minute version which is fascinating for film scholars and Welles fans but almost unwatchable by a general audience. The reason is that instead of attempting to duplicate Welles’ editing (such as we know about it) or do anything else to make the footage coherent, they simply ran all 67 minutes as it stood, with the result that for no apparent reason we see multiple takes of many scenes and it’s almost impossible to discern what is happening or why.

It occurred to me that the only way to present Welles’ Too Much Johnson in an audience-friendly way would be to try to reconstruct Welles’ combined film-stage production, hiring modern actors to perform the play live, making them up to look as much like the people in the movie as possible, and showing Welles’ footage in the context for which he intended it. What survives is a surprise mainly because it’s a comedy — as much as I love Welles’ films, one thing they are noticeably deficient in is humor, but here he’s shooting al fresco on the streets of New York (and letting in a few anachronisms in a film that’s supposed to be set in the past — Gillette wrote the play in 1894 but in the scene in which the characters drive to the dock to take a steamer to Cuba, which Gillette called the Tropic Queen but Welles changed to the Munificent, we see a car that looks to be from about 1912) and clearly evoking the greats of silent comedy in general and Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin in particular. There are some shots that strikingly anticipate scenes in later Welles films, including a chase scene shot overhead in a storage room full of crates and barrels (the resemblance to the scene in Kane’s junkroom towards the end of Citizen Kane is instantly discernible to any Welles fan), a sequence in which people are shown in extreme close-up wearing forbidding hats that a malicious character goes about knocking off their heads that anticipates the sequences of neighbors gossiping in The Magnificent Ambersons, and some final vertiginous shots of the cliffs around Cuba that (even though the locale was undoubtedly somewhere in upstate New York) Welles repeated in The Lady from Shanghai. But most of it is a rambunctious farce comedy that, properly edited, scored (the archive that re-released the film included a dreary “modern” score by Italian pop musicians instead of the 1920’s silent-comedy score the film clearly called for) and shown in context with scenes from the play would probably make an excellent viewing experience — but as it is, just a bunch of rough cuts strung together with virtually no clue for the non-cognoscenti about exactly what’s supposed to be going on, Too Much Johnson is at least as oppressive as it is entertaining.

Broadway Melody of 1940 (MGM, 1940)

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

The film was Broadway Melody of 1940, fourth and last in the Broadway Melody series at MGM and a better film than its immediate predecessors, Broadway Melody of 1936 and Broadway Melody of 1938, mainly because of two mega-talents MGM added to the mix this time around: Fred Astaire and Cole Porter. Astaire was available because he’d completed his seven-year RKO contract in 1939 with The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, the last in his original series of nine films with Ginger Rogers, and he was now free-lancing. Porter was available because he already had an ongoing relationship with MGM that had produced the scores for Born to Dance (1936) and Rosalie (1937), both with Eleanor Powell, who had starred in the two immediately preceding Broadway Melodies and was in this one along with her dancing partner from the other two, George Murphy. The script — “original” (quotes definitely merited) story by Jack MacGowan (a writer on the previous films in the series) and Dore Schary (an odd name indeed for a film so utterly without social comment) and screenplay by Leon Gordon and George Oppenheimer — was nothing special and blatantly copied the mistaken-identity gimmick from the Astaire-Rogers classic Top Hat five years before. Johnny Brett (Astaire) and King Shaw (Murphy) are taxi dancers at the “Dimeland” dime-a-dance hall; their duties include escorting the female members of the couples that get married there — the place offers a live, for-real wedding ceremony every night — and essentially giving them away at what passes for an altar at the Dimeland dance floor. They also get to do a specialty number every night, though they don’t get paid extra for it; the number we see is a Porter song called “Please Don’t Monkey with Broadway” which —though I hadn’t thought of it this way before — is really an anti-gentrification song pleading with the New York City authorities to let Broadway remain what it is and traditionally has been instead of being remodeled into something newer, more antiseptic but less appealing. (Maybe I was wrong about this movie being utterly without social comment.) Johnny learns that a bill collector is coming to Dimeland to serve a subpoena on King Shaw — so he assumes Shaw’s name and puts off Bob Casey (Frank Morgan), who he thinks is a process server but is in reality a Broadway producer wanting to sign up that spectacular dancer as the lead in a new musical, Swing Song, starring established Broadway attraction Clare Bennett (Powell).

The real King Shaw gets summoned to the producers’ offices, where Casey’s partner Bert C. Matthews (Ian Hunter, who’d previously played people around the fringes of Broadway in weepies starring Bette Davis or Kay Francis at Warner Bros.) sees him, tells him to study Bennett’s show and learn her number “Between You and Me,” and learn it so he can dance it with her as his audition piece. King gets the job with Clare’s show and also starts romancing Clare, while Johnny moons over her from afar — though not that afar since he’s on hand during the rehearsals, constantly rehearsing King privately and showing him new dance steps for the numbers. Alas, King lets success go to his head even before he’s been successful, drinking heavily (especially when it seems like his on-again, off-again relationship with Clare — we know she’s not really interested in him as a lover, but he doesn’t — is off again), spending evenings out in nightclubs and working himself into such a state that on opening night for the show he’s too potted to perform the opening number (a harlequin-themed production with stentorian baritone Douglas MacPhail butchering Cole Porter’s lovely song “I Concentrate on You” and Albertina Rasch’s ballet dancers supporting Eleanor Powell, who here as in other Broadway Melody episodes shows herself a good all-around dancer and not just the tap specialist she’s remembered as being) and Johnny goes on in his stead. (One imdb.com contributor noted the “goof” that the harlequin costume fits Johnny perfectly even though Fred Astaire was noticeably shorter and skinnier than George Murphy.) King recovers to perform the rest of the show, but the next night he’s really too incapacitated to go on at all, Johnny takes his place, the show is a hit and Johnny and Clare get together. The End. What I like about Broadway Melody of 1940 is not only the obvious points of appeal — the great Cole Porter songs (most of which he wrote specifically for the film but one a five-year-old oldie, “Begin the Beguine” — first done in a “Carioca”-like style by Carmen D’Antonio, though one Jeri Hudnutt actually dubbed her vocal, and the Rasch dancing girls; then reprised in swing style featuring a clarinet and vibraharp, nodding both to the Benny Goodman Quartet ensemble sound and the hit record of “Begin the Beguine” Artie Shaw had made in 1938, two years before this film had made, as a dazzling dance duet between Astaire and Powell) and the incredible dancing done to them — but some of the novelty acts and, above all, Astaire’s characterization.

Instead of the dirty, disgusting and vile tricks Astaire and Bing Crosby played on each other in Holiday Inn and Blue Skies to win the heart (or get into the pants) of the leading lady (Marjorie Reynolds and Joan Caulfield, respectively), Astaire in this one plays a character so humble, so willing to sacrifice his own ambitions to boost the career of his friend, that if he were in the Divergent universe he would definitely be Abnegation. At one point Eleanor Powell’s character even calls him on it — “You just handed your friend a career on a silver platter,” she tells him after the harlequin number, “and I’d like to know why.” Frankly I’d rather watch this noble, self-sacrificing Astaire than the nasty, cutthroat one of Holiday Inn and Blue Skies — and it’s especially moving in the song “I’ve Got My Eyes on You,” which Astaire (watched, unbeknownst to him, by Powell), does a sort of virtual dance with her, playing the song on piano (it is Astaire on piano — he was an excellent musician on both piano and drums, and whenever a script called on him to play either of those instruments, he insisted on doing the playing himself) and doing tap breaks from a seated position at the end of each eight-bar strain. Then, to the accompaniment of the MGM “magic orchestra” — the unseen musicians who steal in on the soundtrack to play behind the star, a musical convention brilliantly lampooned by Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour in The Road to Zanzibar — Astaire does a virtual duet with Powell, holding in his hands the song’s sheet music with her picture on it (recalling the dance he did with a chorus line of women wearing Ginger Rogers masks at the end of Shall We Dance) and, for someone often compared to Buster Keaton, assuming a surprisingly Chaplinesque air of pathos as he sits down and longingly gazes on Powell’s photo at the end. Add to that a novelty act by a brilliant juggler, Trixie Firschke — considerably more appealing than the snoring and sneezing done by Robert Wildhack in the two immediately previous Broadway Melodies — and acceptable direction by Norman Taurog (the two previous films had been made by Roy Del Ruth, who was more energetic, but Taurog is good here even in a film not involving children, his specialty), and Broadway Melody of 1940 emerges as a quite lovely musical and a fitting end to the series. (There was supposed to be one more — Broadway Melody of 1943, filmed in Technicolor and starring Eleanor Powell and Gene Kelly — but it was abandoned, though the numbers filmed for it were plugged into Thousands Cheer and Broadway Rhythm.)