Armistead and I: Tales of Two Cities

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On New Year’s Day 2018, KPBS, the local San Diego outlet for public broadcasting, showed a couple of programs from 9 p.m. to midnight. One — the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s concert, featuring the music of the Strauss family and other light fare —was the sort of thing you expect to see around the New Year’s holiday. The other wasn’t: it was a film by Jennifer Kroot (she’s credited on imdb.com only as director but the actual credits list her as writer as well) called The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin, a documentary about the life of the San Francisco-based Gay writer who created the long-running serial Tales of the City, first published in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper and then in a book, which begat another book, which ultimately became six books in all ending in 1989, plus a couple of follow-ups Maupin wrote years later.

I don’t know why I wanted to watch this. I’d never been a fan of Armistead Maupin. I’d never even read him, though I’d seen the 1993 mini-series of Tales of the City on PBS — parts of it, anyway. Indeed, my husband Charles told me several times in the early minutes of The Untold Tales that if I wanted to watch something else, he wouldn’t mind me either switching the channel or putting on a movie on DVD. “This is an important slice of Gay culture and history,” I told him, and the show stayed on and we watched it until the end. It was a weird experience, mainly because it flashed me back to my own adolescence and early adulthood in San Francisco and my coming to grips with my own sexuality, including the time I was attending San Francisco State University and simultaneously dating two of my fellow students — a woman and a man — and ultimately living with the woman for nearly five years before I finally decided it was time to come out as Gay.

What I didn’t realize about Armistead Maupin was that not only was he a Southern boy. He was born in Washington, D.C. but raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. His family was Southern in their orientation and even had a genuine Confederate war hero in their lineage: Lawrence O’Bryan Branch, a Confederate general killed in the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862. (This was an especially noteworthy battle because it was the North’s first major victory, and it gave President Lincoln the political and military credibility he felt he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.) What’s more, Maupin got his first job in media at a TV station in Raleigh managed by none other than future U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, a deeply and viciously homo-hating man who once told Maupin that a homosexual was “the worst thing you could possibly be.”

Maupin grew up a hardline Right-winger and so intensely committed to the U.S. military that he volunteered for the Navy, served three tours (one of them in combat in Viet Nam) and only reluctantly left. In Kroot’s documentary, he ruefully admits that all the cute guys he could ogle there were one of the reasons he wanted to serve, though in the pre-“don’t ask, don’t tell” era when Queers were automatically banned from the U.S. military and there were periodic witch hunts to ferret them out, discharge them and give them “bad paper” that would make it virtually impossible for them to get civilian jobs later, he knew the rule was “look but don’t touch.”

He didn’t find his way out of either his political or his sexual closet until 1971, when he got a job with the Associated Press in their bureau in San Francisco. Though Kroot didn’t tell when or how Maupin came to grips with being Gay, his Wikipedia page says he knew he was Gay from childhood but didn’t have sex with a man until age 26 and didn’t definitively come out until age 30. In 1974 he began writing a serial about urban live in San Francisco for a weekly newspaper called the Pacific Sun, based in Marin County, just north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge. The Pacific Sun hired Maupin when they were attempting to expand into San Francisco itself, and when that folded he managed to place the serial with the biggest and most prestigious newspaper in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Chronicle.

Tales of the City — a title invented by his editor at the Chronicle since the Pacific Sun owned its previous name, The Serial — raised eyebrows at the Chronicle because newspapers generally didn’t publish fiction. They had once, and in Untold Tales Maupin at least twice compares himself to Charles Dickens because Dickens’ books, too, were first published chapter by chapter in newspapers as serials. The installments created a sensation, mainly because they dealt frankly with the fact that there were a lot of Queer people in San Francisco, and the Chronicle’s Gay and Lesbian readers embraced the series because it gave them a chance to read about people like themselves. The stories’ central character is Mary Ann Singleton, a naïve young woman who moves from Cleveland to San Francisco, takes an apartment in a building run by an eccentric landlady named Anna Madrigal, and falls in decidedly unrequited love with a young Gay man named Michael “Mouse” Tolliver.

The stories got attention from Chronicle readers, who fought what would now be called “flame wars” in the paper’s letters-to-the-editor column. Some denounced Maupin’s story as utterly unsuited for a family newspapers, while others defended the series. In 1978 a New York publisher sounded Maupin out about publishing the serial episodes as a novel, and Maupin agreed. Tales of the City became a best-seller and Maupin wrote five more books in the cycle. It ended in 1989 with Sure of You, a decision Maupin says in the film he reached because he had made Michael Tolliver HIV positive and he didn’t want the cycle to end with a morbid death scene like virtually all previous fiction about Queer people. As people with HIV diagnoses began living longer and AIDS receded from being an automatic death sentence to what the medical business calls “a chronic, manageable disease,” Maupin resumed writing about Michael Tolliver in 2007 with a book called Michael Tolliver Lives, with him narrating the story this time instead of it being told in third-person.

One of the things that kept Maupin’s series popular and relevant was his inclusion of real-life characters, events and issues facing the Queer community. Oddly, Jennifer Kroot includes a segment in her film about the effect of AIDS on Queers in general and the San Francisco community in particular before her depiction of Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” anti-Queer campaign in 1977 — four years before the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) first identified AIDS as a diagnosable medical condition. Maupin was one of the first fiction writers to address AIDS — in the fourth installment in the Tales cycle, Babycakes, published in 1983, at a time when a lot of people in the Queer community were hoping the epidemic would burn itself out and go away.

He was also one of the first to depict a Transgender character. He had had it in mind that Anna Madrigal, the landlady and on-site manager of the building where most of the characters live, would be a Transwoman and be revealed as such at the end of the first Tales of the City book. Realizing that he knew very little about actual Trans people, he sought out a Transwoman and interviewed her. When he asked her why she had gone through gender reassignment, he was stunned by her answer: “Because I wanted to be able to talk to women.” At a time when there was a good deal of anti-Trans prejudice in the Queer community — much of it from self-proclaimed feminists who thought Transwomen were embracing the attributes of “femininity” many Lesbians were consciously rejecting in the 1970’s — Maupin was once again a trailblazer in depicting a Trans character realistically and sympathetically.

Maupin mostly used the real names of actual people he incorporated into his story, but made an exception for a major movie star he called “_____ _____,” but who was obviously Rock Hudson — whom Maupin had tricked with a few times in the 1970’s, including one three-way with Hudson’s partner. When Hudson fell seriously ill in 1985 and his publicists put out various cover stories to try to keep people from figuring out he had AIDS, Maupin publicly stated that he knew Hudson and had personal knowledge that he was Gay, thereby “outing” him after decades of rumors and getting dumped on by a lot of Queer people who thought no one should ever be brought out of the closet against their will.

One of the most heartbreaking stories about the impact of AIDS in Kroot’s film comes from Maupin’s long-time friend, Chinese-American author Amy Tan. She first met Maupin when he came to do a book signing at a bookstore Tan’s family owned. It had a lot of Queer employees, attracted Queer customers and stocked books about Queers and their lives. As the AIDS epidemic progressed, Tan recalled, her employees started dying. Her customers started dying, too, and eventually so many of her “regulars” passed away that the bookstore lost business and was forced to close.

Kroot pretty much races through Maupin’s post-Tales of the City years. She does discuss two long-term relationships he was in, including one with a man named Terry from whom he had what Maupin calls a “cocktail divorce.” After the 1996 International AIDS Conference in Vancouver — held during a long period when it was impossible to hold the conference in the U.S. because Maupin’s former mentor, Jesse Helms, had pushed a bill through Congress banning entry visas for people who tested HIV positive — new therapies involving multiple drugs were introduced and people with AIDS or HIV diagnoses started living longer. This had the odd result that people like Maupin in so-called “sero-discordant” relationships — he’s remained negative but he says in the film that all his serious partners have been positive — found their partners wanted to leave now that they no longer felt they needed someone to support them through an imminent decline and death.

Maupin’s current partner — his husband, actually, though Kroot doesn’t mention that they are legally married — is Christopher Turner, a much younger former model and photographer who created the DaddyHunt.com Web site for younger Gay men interested in meeting and dating older ones. Maupin remembered looking at the site but not dating anyone from it; later he met Turner on the street and told him, “Didn’t I see you on DaddyHunt.com?” Turner then acknowledged that he’d created DaddyHunt.com because he’d wanted to meet older men. The two began dating and married in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on February 18, 2007.

One good thing about Kroot’s film is that, though she made it with the intent of getting it on PBS, it doesn’t shy away from the sad history of Maupin’s work on the network. Tales of the City was made into a miniseries on PBS in 1993, with the young, then little-known Laura Linney as Mary Ann Singleton and Olympia Dukakis as Anna Madrigal — both of them are interviewed extensively in Untold Tales — and it was sensationally successful. It brought many PBS stations the best prime-time ratings they’d ever had, and in San Francisco Tales pulled in more viewers than the commercial networks.

Then disaster struck: the Republican Party gained control of both houses of the U.S. Congress and Maupin’s mentor turned nemesis, U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, made Tales Exhibit A in his case for why the government should cancel all funding for PBS. The network caved and backed out of their deal to make another miniseries out of the second book in the cycle — and Linney, in Kroot’s films, vividly recalls her disappointment that she would not get to play the character again.

Maupin’s San Francisco — and Mine

I was born in San Francisco in 1953, making me nine years younger than Armistead Maupin. (By ironic coincidence, my husband Charles is nine years younger than I.) In 1960 my mother and stepfather (my dad and my mom had broken up when I was 1 ½ and I have no living memories of them as a couple) moved to Marin County and bought a home. I grew up in Marin County and suffered through some of my mother’s social experiments — including moving us to the so-called “gilded ghetto” of Marin City, where most of the county’s African-Americans lived — after she and my stepfather broke up in 1965.

Then in 1974 I moved to the East Bay to attend UC Berkeley, where I dropped out after two quarters. I stayed there until 1978, when I moved into a dorm at San Francisco State (where I’d started attending in 1977 less out of any burning career goal and more just to check “college graduation” off my list of life tasks) and then found a small studio apartment on Larkin Street, where my girlfriend and I lived until we moved to San Diego in January 1980.

There were a number of reasons we did that. She was from Southern California and felt more comfortable there than in San Francisco. I was already noticing my “roving eye” roving towards the men in our neighborhood, and I naïvely believed it would be easier for me to resist temptation and keep my straight relationship going if I got away from the large, politically influential and socially inescapable Queer community in San Francisco. Also the November 1978 murders of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk had to some extent soured me on the city of my birth. The fact that I had commonalities with both Milk and his killer, Supervisor Dan White — I’m Irish-American like White and Queer like Milk — made the post-assassination political state of San Francisco even weirder and less welcoming to me.

Needless to say, the hope that I could keep my straight relationship together in San Diego and not be tempted to stray back to my Gay side didn’t work — though I didn’t finally come out to my girlfriend until December 1982. (We remain close friends to this day.) I was certainly a late bloomer sexually — I didn’t have my first sexual experience with a woman until early 1973 (she was on the rebound from her breakup with a mutual friend who also turned out to be Gay; today we’re back in touch and are friends on Facebook) and didn’t have my first with a man until late 1977.

I was coming out of the student bookstore at San Francisco State when I was approached by a man who sidled up to me and said, in a voice I’m sure he thought was sexy, “I’d like to blow you away.” Never having consciously thought of myself as Gay — though I can look back at my life and realize there were certain boys in my life on whom I clearly had what I can now recognize were crushes — I was freaked out by this, though I let him give me his phone number. That night, I tossed and turned virtually all night, worried about the whole thing, until I finally told myself, “You’re going to call that guy and you’re going to make a date with him.” The next morning I did, leaving him a message which he returned at an almost cosmically right moment — I was in my room listening to an LP of Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1938 recordings of the Act I Prelude and Act III Good Friday Spell from Parsifal, and he called right in the pause between the Prelude and the Good Friday Spell.

I had my first Gay experience in the back of his car, on a weekend morning in the San Francisco State parking lot. We dated for a while until I met my girlfriend, also at school, and that, I thought, was the end of that. But as a Bay Area resident in the late 1970’s, when Tales of the City appeared as a miniseries on PBS, I recognized many of the settings — and many of the kinds of people depicted, too. In fact, I found much of the series hard to watch because, as I explained to my then-roommate, “I didn’t like these people that much in real life — why would I want to watch a movie about them?” I wonder what I’d think about Tales of the City if I revisited it now as an historical document.

I know that the books about life as a Gay man I did read in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, like John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw and Larry Kramer’s Faggots, probably kept me in the closet longer than I otherwise might have lasted because they made life as a Gay man seem like a relentless hunt for sex on the most superficial level. I’ve written before apropos of the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus books that if its author, John Gray, wanted to test his theory that men and women approach sex differently, with women demanding that it have a romantic and emotional context and men more interested in the sheer physical sensation, he should have done what scientists call “isolate the variable” and looked at how people behave sexually when they don’t have to worry about the needs, desires and feelings of the other gender: totally Gay men and totally Lesbian women.

Certainly my own experiences as a Gay man — including being “out” for the past 35 years and having been through both “open” and “closed” relationships — lend credence to the idea that men can readily detach the physical pleasure of sex from any emotional or relational context. It also helps, of course, that Gay men can’t either get pregnant themselves or make their partners pregnant. When I was with my girlfriend I would frequently lose my hard-on during the laborious process of her putting in her diaphragm, which she had to use because she was allergic to pills and scared of IUD’s. When I came out I joked to her that I was finally practicing a form of birth control that was guaranteed 100 percent effective.

I can’t read a book or watch a movie about San Francisco in the late 1970’s without having twinges of nostalgia. I remember an establishing shot in Peter Berlin’s remarkable 1970’s Gay porn film That Boy that took us past the Wherehouse Records outlet in San Francisco, where I could remember buying the boxed set of Bruno Walter’s recordings of the complete Beethoven symphonies as well as quite a few avant-garde jazz items by people like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

When I watched — or tried to watch — the PBS miniseries adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City in 1993 I had a lot of those nostalgic twinges and said a sad requiem for the city I had once lived in, and the sort of community it had started groping towards before the Moscone/Milk murders, the rise of AIDS, and later the takeover of San Francisco by the dot-commers (briefly alluded to in Untold Tales when Maupin tells Kroot that he still loves San Francisco and refuses to protest things like the “Google bus” that spirits tech employees from their homes in San Francisco to their jobs in Silicon Valley) ended that set of possibilities.

San Diego is my home now and probably will be until the day I die — unless the relentless gentrifiers price me out of it and force Charles and I to relocate to a more isolated, more conservative but cheaper area for our final years. It’s not a place that exalts me the way the Bay Area used to, but it doesn’t disappoint me the way the Bay Area did either. But as the song says, I did leave my heart in San Francisco — or at least a piece of it — and cultural artifacts like Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City bring it back to me in weird and not altogether pleasant ways.

2018 Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Eve Concert (Vienna Philharmonic, ORTF, PBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Monday, January 1 KPBS, the Public Broadcasting Service’s San Diego outlet, rang in the New Year with a predictable feature and a decidedly unpredictable one. The unpredictable one — which I’ll be writing about later because though I was never a fan of its subject, the time (late 1970’s) and place (San Francisco) where he made his mark is personal to me because I was living there then and just coming to grips with my sexuality — was a documentary on the Independent Lens series called The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin. The predictable one was the American telecast of the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s concert, which apparently actually starts at midnight so it can take place entirely within the new year (according to Wikipedia, they actually play the same program three days in a row — December 30 and 31, and January 1 — but it’s the last of the three that is internationally televised). 

The tradition was started in 1939 by conductor Clemens Krauss, and it was apparently greenlighted by Baldur von Schirach, one of the creeps on Adolf Hitler’s staff whom he made Gauleiter (“regional leader”) of Austria after he took it over in 1938. Like a lot of what goes on artistically in Vienna, the concert has become quite bound by tradition — indeed I remember that when PBS first started broadcasting them in the 1980’s Walter Cronkite was the MC and he kept going on and on and on about “traditional” this and “traditional” that it seemed to be awfully hidebound for what was supposedly a group of serious classical musicians letting their hair down and having fun. Of course, the concert’s greatest tradition is that it primarily features music by the Strauss family — father Johann Strauss, Sr.; his sons Johann, Jr. (by far the most famous member and the one we think of when we say “Strauss waltz”), Josef and Eduard; and his grandson Johann Strauss III, who to confuse the issue was not Johann, Jr.’s son but Eduard’s! I’m not sure whether we got to see the whole concert — I suspect not — because in previous years we’ve been able to download the entire concert from private sources, including extensive silent footage of Viennese landmarks the telecast’s producers, the Austrian broadcasting company ORTF, shoot so the editors in various countries can use it as B-roll. Now ORTF, the Vienna Philharmonic and their record label, Sony Classical, have put the concert on such tight copyright control — it is a major international cash cow for the orchestra and Sony, after all — that recordings of it are available for advance-order sale on arkivmusic.com even before the concert has taken place. 

What we got this year was 11 numbers, nine on the printed program plus the inevitable two encores — the “Blue Danube” waltz (here accompanied by aerial photographs of the actual Danube River — I remember being disappointed to read in the 1970’s that the Danube, far from being beautiful or blue, was then the most polluted river in Europe; fortunately it’s been cleaned up since then) and Johann Strauss, Sr.’s “Radetzky March,” to which the audience claps along in strict time and the conductor sometimes turns away from the orchestra and conducts the audience instead. (One year Charles turned to me as the audience was clapping in near-perfect unison and said, “How come we got all the white people who can’t clap?”) The “Blue Danube” is always presented the same way; the orchestra plays a few bars, the conductor stops them and says, in German, “The Vienna Philharmonic wants to wish you a … ” — and then the orchestra says, in unison, “Prosit Neujahr,” which is German for “Happy New Year.” Over the years the concert programs expanded to include light music by people other than the Strausses, including last night’s opener, the overture to Franz von Suppé’s operetta Boccaccio (it’s fun but there are other Suppé overtures, including Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry, which are better) and the “Stephanie” gavotte by Alphonse Czibulka (don’t hold me to that spelling). This year’s conductor was Riccardo Muti, who’s aged a great deal since he established his reputation as a young firebrand at La Scala in Milan in the 1970’s; he conducted the concert for the first time in 1993 and did so again in 1997, 2000 and 2004. 

PBS’s choice for an on-screen host was rather dubious; in years past it was Walter Cronkite and then Julie Andrews (whose most famous film, The Sound of Music, took place in Austria — but in Salzburg, not Vienna!), but this year it was the offensively booming Hugh Bonneville, an actor who joked about how the magnificent palace settings might make you think you were watching a PBS pledge-break marathon of Downton Abbey, a popular British series that is probably Bonneville’s best-known vehicle (though if you look him up on imdb.com the first credit that comes up is for another show, Notting Hill). I’ve never watched Downton Abbey — I have about zero interest in shows glorifying the British aristocracy and either patronizing or ignoring the British 99 percenters who keep them in business — and if Hugh Bonneville’s announcements on the New Year’s concert are any indication, I haven’t missed much. He reminds me of the stories I’ve heard about how in the early days of sound filmmaking actors who had been trained on the stage boomed out their lines at fortissimo volume, as if they were still straining to make sure they were heard in the back rows, and they had to learn that acting before a camera and a microphone demanded a different, more naturalistic style of line delivery than acting before a live audience, especially a large one. Bonneville’s booming style made this show considerably less fun than it could have been, but the music was still excellent, and if the show seemed all too lovingly to use all that B-roll of the preposterously decorated palaces in which the Austro-Hungarian monarchs lived before the Great War (as World War I was called before there was a World War II) ended the empire and dispersed the royal family. 

At least the musical selections involved some of the lesser-known works of the “Waltz King” as well as such standards like “Tales from the Vienna Woods” (containing the beautiful solos for zither that are usually omitted in modern arrangements — and I had always thought the zither was strictly a plucked instrument but this show got its cameras close enough that you could tell it has a miniature keyboard as well), “Roses from the South” and the inevitable “Blue Danube,” including the “Myrtle Blossoms” waltz, the “Magic Bullets” quick polka (composed by Johann Strauss Söhn to commemorate one of the Austro-Hungarian ruling family’s many hunting trips — one family member kept a meticulous record of just how many animals he killed and one of those palaces has a solid wall of trophy heads), a “Festive March” that was simply attributed to “Johann Strauss” but which I suspect might be the work of the father rather than the son, and what was probably the most interesting piece on the program, a quadrille based on themes from Verdi’s opera Un Ballo in Maschera (which Muti recorded as a complete opera in London in 1975 with Plácido Domingo and Martina Arroyo — there are also live versions from 1972 and 1974 in Florence and 2001 at La Scala in Milan). There was also a charming piece by Josef Strauss (a composer a lot of critics think was more innovative and advanced than his far more famous brother), a polka called “Letters to the Editor” that was written in honor of Crown Prince Rudolf, the heir of the long-time Emperor Franz Josef, who was a reformer who would frequently write letters to the editors of Austrian papers urging that the empire lighten up and change to a style of government more suited to the 20^th century. 

The Strauss oeuvre can be conducted as great music (especially in the records by Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy and Herbert von Karajan — Karajan led the New Year’s concert just once, in 1987, but he recorded what’s probably the most famous version of anything by Johann Strauss, Jr., the concert version of the “Blue Danube” heard in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey); in Muti’s hands it wasn’t as grand or sweeping as it can be but it was great fun, with Muti’s quick, snappy, Toscaninian approach suiting the music well enough even if it got the Vienna Philharmonic just a bit out of its comfort zone (which is probably why Muti wasn’t invited to conduct this concert until he’d already been a star for over 20 years!). Incidentally the listing for the advance-order CD on arkivmusic.com offers six pieces that were played before what we got to hear on the telecast — “Einzugsmarsch” and “Brautschau” from Johann Strauss, Jr.’s operetta The Gypsy Baron, “Wiener Fresken” by Josef Strauss, “Leichtes Blut” and “Marien-Walzer” by Johann Strauss, Jr. and a gallop by Johann, Jr. based on themes from Rossini’s William Tell — which ought to be interesting listening! (The CD does not include the final “Blue Danube” and “Radetzky March” traditional encores.)

Mystery of the Wax Museum (Warner Bros., 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013, 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I went to my friend Bob R.’s and ran him Mystery of the Wax Museum — a movie he found at once too confusing and too predictable. The limitations of two-strip Technicolor were less annoying in this one than in The King of Jazz, partly because the print that survived was in much better shape from the standpoint of color registration, and partly because the movie was so carefully designed to work around the limitations of the process — notably by containing no daytime exteriors, thereby obviating the need to show sky. The visual quotes from the 1925 Phantom of the Opera and the 1931 Frankenstein were pretty obvious, and Anton Grot’s expressionistic sets would actually have looked better in a dark, shadowy, chiaroscuro black-and-white than they did in color, but the spectacular scenes — the fire in the original London wax museum at the beginning and the “monster” climax in which Lionel Atwill tries to murder Fay Wray by spraying her with wax — did benefit from the use of the two-strip process. (When I taped this movie, I left in the host’s introduction, in which he explained that the movie was not colorized, but was actually shot in an early color process — at the time this was aired, colorization was so poor that colorized films tended to have many of the same limitations as the early two-strip films, notably a palette biased heavily towards browns and a “smeary” effect caused by problems in matching registrations between the various “strips,” whether physical or electronic, containing the various spectral ranges. I also hadn’t remembered the host being such a queen!) — 5/4/93

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I made dinner for myself and then walked over to Charles’ home and ran him Mystery of the Wax Museum and The Brasher Doubloon, two movies I’d copied from Beta to VHS recently. Charles liked them both, and was amazed at how well the two-strip Technicolor of Mystery of the Wax Museum had held up (though at least part of that may have had to do with the fact that we were watching a copy of the recording I’d originally made; the copying process, for some strange reason, tends — if it affects the color at all — to make it brighter). He’s seen the remake, House of Wax, of course, but he liked this version as well. I like it better, actually, since it’s shorter, it’s set contemporaneously, Lionel Atwill is a more subtle and less stylized actor than Vincent Price and Glenda Farrell — significantly more important than her counterpart in the remake — is a treat as the fast-talking, hard-bitten girl reporter who unravels the case; as Tino Balio put it in his introduction to the published script, “A typical Warner Brothers production dons a fright wig and tries to pass itself off as a Universal picture.” — 9/16/96

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Since I got the double-sided Warner Home Video DVD of Mystery of the Wax Museum and House of Wax I’d been anxious to run these films, especially Mystery since — aside from the fact that I think it’s the better of the two versions — I’ve been curious about how a relatively well-preserved two-strip Technicolor movie (according to the American Film Institute Catalog, the last film made in the two-strip process) would hold up in a DVD transfer. It looked about the same as it had on my previous tape (a Beta tape I copied over to VHS) and about like most two-strip films: dominated by salmon-red and turquoise-green as the main colors but also harmonious and painterly in its overall color scheme. (I often find good-condition two-strip actually pleasanter to look at than some early films in the three-strip process that succeeded it, which were frequently garish and overbright, especially in the primaries.) The film was remade 20 years later in 3-D as House of Wax (unfortunately this DVD does not contain either the 3-D version or the glasses needed to view it that way!) and according to the AFI catalog was also the basis for a 1966 TV-series pilot that wasn’t picked up but was released theatrically under the title Chamber of Horrors (and the AFI also mentions Roger Corman’s 1959 film A Bucket of Blood, a variation on the basic concept in which the protagonist is a beatnik with artistic ambitions but no talent, who kills people, plasters clay all over their bodies and exhibits these as sculptures). The transfer is adequate and Warner Home Video deserves kudos for duplicating the color “as is” and not trying to “improve” it through color-correction or colorization, though as Charles noted as we watched the film doesn’t really gain that much from being in color: aside from the marvelous opening sequence in which the original wax sculptures of Igor (Lionel Atwill) are burned in a fire by his crooked partner, Joe Worth (Edwin Maxwell) — including a beautiful series of close-ups in which some of the wax women actually seem to be crying as the fire starts to melt their faces away — most of this film would have been as effective, possibly even more so, in black-and-white. I’ve also long treasured Tino Balio’s description of Mystery of the Wax Museum — “A typical Warner Brothers production dons a fright wig and tries to pass itself off as a Universal picture” — especially since Glenda Farrell, as the wisecracking reporter who solves the mystery, romances rich playboy George Winton (Gavin Gordon) but ends up marrying her editor (Frank McHugh, less oppressive than in most of his appearances at the time — the director, Michael Curtiz, must have restrained him), suggesting this as a prequel to His Girl Friday, is by far the most significant character in the story and the one with the most screen time even though she’s billed third behind Atwill and Fay Wray (as the ingenue whom Atwill marks for waxification because she’s the spitting image of his lost sculpture of Marie Antoinette), and her high-energy portrayal gives this film most of its entertainment value. (Inexplicably the writer of House of Wax, Crane Wilbur, eliminated this character completely from his story, thus significantly draining the remake of the original’s power.)

All in all, Mystery of the Wax Museum is a quite good film that holds up well. Like Boris Karloff, Lionel Atwill had the sophistication as an actor to portray one of these obsessed characters with sufficient depth to make his obsession credible and genuinely pathetic instead of just evil. Fay Wray had little to do but look decorative and scream (you’re likely to remember her waxen appearance as Marie Antoinette much more than her ambulatory scenes as Charlotte Duncan, who meets Igor because her fiancé, apprentice sculptor Ralph Burton [Edwin Maxwell], works for him) but there’s a quite good supporting cast, including actors like McHugh and Gordon whom Curtiz got far better performances from than was their norm. The AFI Catalog has some rather odd mistakes in their description of the film — they don’t mention that Worth, the character who torches the wax museum in 1921 London in the film’s prologue, reappears in the main part (set in 1933 New York) as a bootlegger who’s exposed by Farrell’s character and ultimately murdered by Igor in his giant wax bath just before he tries to give Fay Wray the same treatment; and they refer to Arthur Edmund Carewe’s character as “Sparrow” when he’s actually called “Professor Darcy” in the film (Carewe, who played the secret agent in the Lon Chaney, Sr. version of The Phantom of the Opera, here is cast as a sculptor who’s become a heroin addict and, arrested for his role in Worth’s bootlegging racket, “cracks” in the police station and implicates Igor in the murders — this being a pre-Code film he’s openly referred to as a “junkie” in the dialogue; in House of Wax he was played by Charles Bronson under his real last name, Bushinsky,[1] and due to the Code his addiction had to be downgraded from heroin to alcohol); they also credit Ralph as Charlotte’s sole rescuer in the final scene when in fact a squad of police officers raid the wax museum, though it is Ralph who pushes the gurney on which Charlotte is about to be sprayed with wax away from the wax spout just in the nick of time. Mystery of the Wax Museum was thought lost until 1970, when the sole extant print turned up in Jack Warner’s home (and I first saw it that year when the San Francisco Film Festival ran that original print along with an even more delicious rediscovery, James Whale’s The Old Dark House), and since then it’s trickled out on occasional showings on various Turner channels — though one person I’m almost sure saw it early in its revival career was Mel Brooks, because he cribbed two elements from it in Young Frankenstein (the pronunciation of Atwill’s character name as “EYE-gor” instead of the more usual “EE-gor” and the scene in which a live character appears as part of a lineup of otherwise lifeless heads) — prior to this quite welcome and beautifully transferred DVD release. — 10/17/03

•••••

I ran the 1933 movie Mystery of the Wax Museum, which I have on the Warner Home Video two-sided DVD also containing its more famous 1953 remake, House of Wax. By coincidence I happened to see both films for the first time theatrically within less than a year of each other — Mystery of the Wax Museum at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1970 when the sole extant print (found in Jack L. Warner’s personal collection after he had forgotten about it for decades) had just been rediscovered and reissued; and House of Wax in 1971 in a spectacular transfer of the original 3-D version (and I pity anyone who hasn’t seen it in the 3-D format; it’s really spectacular and adds a lot to the film). Mystery of the Wax Museum was the last feature film made in the two-strip Technicolor process; all the major studios experimented with it — sometimes merely for color sequences in otherwise all-black-and-white movies — but Warners, having just hit the jackpot by being the first big studio to shoot a movie with synchronized dialogue and music and thereby sparking the talkie revolution, thought color would be, shall we say, the next sound. So they signed a big contract with Technicolor to make 60 features in the two-strip process, which involved using a camera that shot two separate negatives, red and green; the two strips of negative film were then “married” to produce positive prints through so-called “dye transfer imbibition,” a process similar to lithography. There were a lot of things that could go wrong with this in practice, and with Technicolor having stepped up (and speeded up) production to fulfill Warners’ contract, critics claimed that the quality of Technicolor’s films declined due to the sheer rush. 

Two-strip had a major limitation inherent in the process: it could not photograph blue, because blue has the shortest wavelength of any color in the spectrum and therefore was the hardest to photograph, period. Anyone who did newspaper or magazine production in the era before desktop publishing will remember “non-photo blue” pencils and marking pens with which you could proofread copy without leaving an image that the camera that photographed the galleys to make offset plates would pick up (such people will also remember that red photographed black), and James Wong Howe first “made his bones” as a cinematographer by figuring out how to photograph the blue-eyed Mary Miles Minter: he hid himself and his camera behind a velvet curtain, bounced the light off the curtain and back into Minter’s eyes, and thereby created a shadow that allowed Minter’s irises to look like normal ones on screen. Indeed, when the three-strip Technicolor process replaced two-strip (three-strip was introduced in 1932 by Walt Disney in the cartoon Flowers and Trees; the first live-action three-strip films, the final reel of the Jeanette MacDonald musical The Cat and the Fiddle and the short La Cucaracha, came out in 1934, and the first feature shot entirely in three-strip, Becky Sharp, came out in 1935), directors, cinematographers and art designers seemed to go out of their way to include blue objects just because they could. What makes it odd is that the Warner Home Video edition of Mystery of the Wax Museum does feature some objects — mostly walls in nighttime exteriors — that look deep blue, and I was trying to determine whether that was an artefact of the old TV we were watching it on (not likely because other people on the imdb.com message board on the film were also saying they’d seen blue), some “tweaking” of the color in the DVD transfer process (also not likely because if they’d played around with the color balance they’d have gone farther and not left many scenes in the overall brown-and-green scheme of two-strip, and in one scene a frog appears, and though you would expect it to be green it is blue), or — my guess — differential fading of the dyes used to make the color image so what looked dark green to the original 1933 audience looks blue now because the yellow components of the lithography have faded more than the blue ones.

As far as Mystery of the Wax Museum goes as a film, it’s an excellent little chiller, far superior to its slower-paced, more lumbering remake, offering not only the cheekiness of the so-called “pre-Code” era (the Production Code was actually put into place in 1930, but pressure from the Roman Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency in 1934 forced the studios to be a lot more serious about enforcing it, vetting films both when they were in script form and after they were shot) — including a character who’s quite openly drawn as a heroin addict and a lot of sexual innuendi from Glenda Farrell, playing a reporter (what else?) who cracks the case — but also superior acting, direction and writing. The story in both versions is the same (a recently made House of Wax junked the original tale by writer Charles Belden and substituted a typical modern-day slasher story with blood and gore replacing the Gothic terror of both this version and House of Wax): a talented sculptor leaves the fine-art world and starts making figures for a wax museum in London he co-owns with a crooked entrepreneur. Alas, just as respected art critics are drifting in and offering him the acclaim he wants, the crooked entrepreneur burns the place down for the insurance money, destroying the sculptor’s cherished figures and leaving him badly scarred and with stumps for fingers. Twelve years later, his museum reopens in New York City with figures duplicating the originals, only the sculptor can no longer make the figures himself and has to depend on assistants to do the actual work. The artist is particularly obsessed with restoring his lost wax sculpture of Marie Antoinette, and he goes off the deep end when he meets the girlfriend of one of his assistants and finds she looks exactly like his Marie Antoinette.

Eventually it turns out that all, or nearly all, of the “wax” figures in the museum are actually dead humans, murdered because they resembled the original statues — in a humorous topical bit obviously evoking the real-life disappearance of Judge Crater, a missing judge named Ramsey turns out to have been killed because he looked like the museum’s statue of Voltaire, while another person, a socialite named Joan Gale who supposedly committed suicide, was actually killed and embalmed with wax because she resembled the mad sculptor’s Joan of Arc. The plots track similarly, but Mystery of the Wax Museum is a better movie because it’s shorter (by about half an hour, avoiding the longueurs of House of Wax), it’s better constructed, it has the advantage of two-strip Technicolor (superbly used by director Michael Curtiz and cinematographer Ray Rennahan — who was actually employed by Technicolor, not Warners — to evoke a flawless Gothic atmosphere; unable to show blue sky in two-strip, the filmmakers turned the limitation into an asset by not including any scenes that take place outdoors during daytime) and it also has a far superior cast. In Mystery of the Wax Museum the mad sculptor is called “Ivan Igor” — the last name is pronounced “EYE-gor” instead of the more common “EE-gor,” and Mel Brooks’ movie Young Frankenstein not only copied the “EYE-gor” pronunciation but also included a visual quote from Mystery of the Wax Museum (a row of wax heads in which a live human hides, concealing the rest of his body behind the table the wax heads are sitting on — in Young Frankenstein it was a row of severed human heads but the gag was the same) — and he’s played, superbly, by Lionel Atwill. In the remake, House of Wax, he was called “Henry Jarrod” (apparently the filmmakers didn’t want to insult Russians!) and played by Vincent Price, who camped his way through the role in a performance that eventually “typed” him as a horror actor after a 15-year film career in which he’d played mostly lounge-lizard second leads. (Eventually Price’s camping through horror part after horror part would itself become the major appeal of his films — though given a good “straight” role in a genuinely sinister movie like Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, a.k.a. The Conqueror Worm, he proved as late as the 1970’s that his acting chops were still A-O.K.)

By contrast, Atwill brings to the role the same twisted pathos Boris Karloff did in the 1932 version of The Mummy (another horror classic that as a work of art towers far, far above its remake!); like Karloff, he’s able to convince us that he’s so bonkers that he genuinely believes that killing the heroine and reincarnating her (as a living mummy in Karloff’s film, as a dead wax sculpture in Mystery) he’s really doing her a favor! Mystery also benefits from the rambunctious reporter character played by Glenda Farrell — unwisely eliminated by Charles Belden when he wrote the screenplay for House of Wax: the filmmakers, including screenwriters Don Mullaly and Carl Erickson, give her a showcase for her torrential energy and rapid-fire delivery of dialogue (Warners at one point even advertised her as having the fastest mouth in films!) — and by the radiance of Fay Wray in her part as the hapless heroine who finds herself at the center of the villain’s schemes due to her unfortunate resemblance to (his vision of) Marie Antoinette. It’s a wonderful movie, well directed by Michael Curtiz and with stark, stylized, almost Caligari-esque sets by Anton Grot, and it even has Frank McHugh (as Glenda Farrell’s editor) getting her at the end, as she dumps the rich guy she’s been chasing all movie (an innocent suspect in one of the murders because Joan Gale was his previous girlfriend) and ends up in his arms for the final clinch, while we just assume Fay Wray and her “stick” boyfriend (Allan Vincent) get together as well. Mystery of the Wax Museum is a gem, and while Tino Balio’s assessment of it — “a typical Warner Bros. production dons a fright wig and tries to pass itself off as a Universal picture” — is somewhat accurate, in fact the film is a clever mix of Warners’ clichés and an overall Gothic atmosphere just helped by the use of two-strip Technicolor. — 2/15/13

•••••

I ran a double bill I’d shown before over a decade ago because there are surprisingly few movies that actually take place on New Year’s day and these are a couple of my personal favorites: the 1933 Warner Bros. two-strip Technicolor horror film Mystery of the Wax Museum and the 1945 farce, also from Warners, The Horn Blows at Midnight. I’ve written quite a lot about Mystery of the Wax Museum over the years — including its clear superiority to the 1953 remake, House of Wax (my copy of Mystery was as a bonus item to House of Wax — alas, not in its 3-D version — just as I bought the DVD of the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments mainly to get the bonus item of the 1923 silent version, also directed by Cecil B. DeMille and still my favorite version of the story), and once I summed up why in a post on the late and very lamented message-board feature on imdb.com:

1) Concision. The 1933 version is half an hour shorter and moves the story along much quicker.

2) Color. The two-strip Technicolor used in 1933, as limited as the process was, frequently had a painterly elegance far more appealing than the often shrieking hues of the three-strip process that replaced it. In “Mystery of the Wax Museum” two-strip is used effectively by director Michael Curtiz and cinematographer Ray Rennahan to create a much more convincing Gothic mood than was possible with the cheap “WarnerColor” (actually Eastmancolor) used to film “House of Wax.”

3) Glenda Farrell. I can’t understand why some of the other contributors to this board find her “annoying.” As far as I’m concerned she MAKES this movie! Her salty, energetic performance is the glue that holds this film together. “House of Wax” screenwriter Crane Wilbur’s decision to eliminate this character is one of the dumbest moves ever made by a writer doing a remake.

4) Lionel Atwill. His sincerity and the depth of his performance must be seen to be believed. In the remake Vincent Price camped his way through the role, as he usually did in horror parts; and while Price’s deliciously overwrought overacting in horror film after horror film had its appeal (he never let us forget that HE didn’t take the genre seriously), there’s no comparison between Price’s camping and Atwill’s genuine sincerity. Like Boris Karloff in the 1932 “The Mummy,” Atwill actually makes us believe he’s so crazy that by killing the heroine he really thinks he’s doing her a favor!

5) Setting. “Mystery of the Wax Museum” takes place the year it was made, 1933 (indeed the New Year’s celebration is depicted in the film and the relative simplicity of the Times Square New Year’s party compared to the bizarre extravaganza it is now is one reason to watch this film!), and the contemporary setting gives it a crackling immediacy. The 1890’s setting of “House of Wax” distances us from the story and makes it less effective.

What does “House of Wax” have going for it? Effectively and tastefully used 3-D (I had the good fortune to see it theatrically during the 1971 reissue of the 3-D version) and a gloriously over-the-top performance by Vincent Price (it was the movie that forever after “typed” him in horror roles). But “Mystery of the Wax Museum” is far and away the better film.

Last night, run through an “upscaling” Blu-Ray player on a big flat-screen digital TV, I got to see Mystery of the Wax Museum in better quality than ever since I first saw it in a late-night screening at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1970, just months after the one surviving print had been rediscovered in Jack Warner’s personal collection. I admired the film for what I’ve liked about it in the past: Lionel Atwill, Glenda Farrell and the beauty and harmony of the two-strip Technicolor (it was the last movie ever filmed in two-strip — Technicolor had already introduced the three-strip process and released at least one film in it, Walt Disney’s animated short Flowers and Trees, in 1932 even though there wouldn’t be a live-action three-strip sequence until the final reel of MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle in 1934 and there wouldn’t be a whole feature in three-strip until Becky Sharp, Rouben Mamoulian’s adaptation of Vanity Fair, in 1935) even though one can see the truth behind the joke that two-strip made the whole world look turquoise and salmon. — 1/3/18

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[1] Actually, in House of Wax “Igor,” now pronounced “EE-gor” instead of the first version’s “EYE-gor,” is no longer the name of the mad sculptor but his mute assistant — and that, not the addict sidekick, is the role Charles Bronson played under his birth last name, Buchinsky.

The Horn Blows at Midnight (Warner Bros., 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movies we finally ran were The Horn Blows at Midnight and the Abbott and Costello film from 1944, Lost in a Harem. The Horn Blows at Midnight was the butt of jokes by its star, Jack Benny, for years; it was the last feature film he ever made (in 1945, 30 years before his death!) and was a total flop at the box office. There’s a famous clip from his TV show where he drives up to a studio gate and asks to be let in by the doorman. “You might remember me,” Benny says. “I once made a little picture here called The Horn Blows at Midnight.” “Remember it?” says the doorman. “I directed it!” Surprisingly, The Horn Blows at Midnight is actually a great comedy — next to the original To Be or Not to Be it’s the best movie Benny ever made; and, like To Be or Not to Be, it’s the kind of nervy, edgy project Benny deserves credit for being willing to take on instead of being like most radio stars who did films and just duplicated their radio characterizations in their movies. Benny plays a trumpeter in a radio studio band (judging from what we hear, he plays the trumpet about as well as he played the violin) who falls asleep during a broadcast and dreams he is the angel Athanaël and is sent to earth with a golden trumpet to herald the end of the world. It’s a marvelous film, full of visual as well as aural wit (when the action shifts to Heaven — heralded by an intertitle reading, “Heaven, 1945-46” — there’s a long tracking shot across this totally immense orchestra of white-robed musicians, playing a singularly pompous and pretentious composition music director Franz Waxman must have had a lot of fun writing as a parody of Hollywood grandiosity; later, when Jack Benny is an angel on earth and sees people jitterbugging in a dance hall, asks what they’re doing, is told they’re dancing and deadpans, “St. Vitus must hear of this!”), thanks to tight direction by Raoul Walsh (who didn’t end up as a studio doorman!), a neat (if somewhat on the droll side) script by Sam Hellman and James Kern (from an “idea” by Aubrey Wisberg), excellent music by Waxman (particularly important in a story that revolves so much around music and its performance), great special-effects work (even the climax, which oddly places Benny on the side of a building doing Harold Lloyd-style gags, is impeccably staged with convincing process backgrounds) and a fine supporting cast including Alexis Smith (as Benny’s angelic girlfriend), Reginald Gardiner (as an upper-class crook), Guy Kibbee, Franklin Pangborn (as a hotel house detective — at least he was something other than a desk clerk this time!) and Margaret Dumont (as an insufferable soprano in the framing sequence that opens the film). While some of the gags probably sailed over the heads of the mass audience (it’s the sort of film, like James Whale’s The Great Garrick, which is such a connoisseur’s movie that even people who like it can see why it failed at the box office), The Horn Blows at Midnight is overall a sophisticated comedy that deserves a better reputation than it has. — 1/2/99

•••••

The Horn Blows at Midnight is a movie that was such a commercial flop when it was released that it took down Jack Benny’s film career — he never made another feature as star, though he was set to do The Sunshine Boys when he died in 1975 and his lifelong friend George Burns replaced him — and he made it the butt of jokes for years afterwards. (My favorite: on one of Benny’s TV shows he drives up to a studio gate to make a film, and tells the gateman, “Remember me? I did a picture here once called The Horn Blows at Midnight.” “Remember it? I directed it!” the gateman replies.) With a star who spent the rest of his life making jokes about it that made it sound worse than Plan Nine from Outer Space, I wasn’t prepared to like The Horn Blows at Midnight when I first saw it in the San Francisco Bay Area on the local UHF station Channel 44’s week-long tribute to Benny right after his death, but it turned out to be a screamingly funny comedy, nicely balanced between sophistication and slapstick (including quite a lot of Harold Lloyd-ish “thrill” slapstick, though no doubt Benny had a stunt double for the kinds of scenes Lloyd in his prime could have done himself with no problem) with an audacious premise. It opens in a radio studio, with a bored studio trumpeter (Jack Benny) playing in a band behind the ridiculously pompous opera singer “Madame Traviata” (Margaret Dumont) sponsored by a preposterous product called “Paradise Coffee.” 

The gimmick behind Paradise Coffee is that it’s so decaffeinated it’s actually being sold as a sleep aid, and as the unctuous announcer proclaims this aspect of the product the bored Benny, who’s been getting out his frustrations over the assignment by blowing horse-laughs through his trumpet at Dumont (so violin wasn’t the only instrument Benny played badly on screen!), falls asleep and dreams he’s the angel Athanael, sent by “The Chief” (Guy Kibbee) to Earth to blow the signal for its destruction. He’s given a magic trumpet and told that in order to fulfill his mission to wipe out Earth he’s supposed to blow it precisely at midnight on New Year’s 1946 — 11:59 or 12:01 won’t do — and of course he gets sidetracked by various characters, all of whom have real-life counterparts on his show: his girlfriend/fellow angel Elizabeth (Alexis Smith), who wangles him a second chance the following day after he blows the deadline; gentleman thief Archie Dexter (Reginald Gardiner), a character writers Aubrey Wisberg, Sam Hellman and Jerome Kern clearly based on John Barrymore’s role in Grand Hotel; his girlfriend Fran Blackstone (Dolores Moran, the “other” new star besides Lauren Bacall Warners introduced in the trailer for To Have and Have Not — Bacall, of course, went on to marry that film’s star, Humphrey Bogart, and have a major career of her own; Moran was pretty much forgotten — undeservedly so, if her work here is any indication); two fallen angels, Doremus (John Alexander) and Osidro (Allyn Joslyn), who blew a previous mission to Earth and as a result are condemned to undergo a painful twitch every hour on the half-hour (and, of course, are fated to go “down there” when they reach the end of a normal Earth life span); a diner proprietor to whom Athanael loses the trumpet when he runs up a $3 charge he can’t pay (he seems totally unfamiliar with the whole concept of money) and his son, played by the young Robert Blake, who at the time was a child starring in the Our Gang short comedies at MGM. 

It all comes to a great climax in which Athanael is trapped inside a giant-sized version of the Paradise Coffee logo, constantly being drenched with coffee, cream and sugar, and nearly knocked off the building by the giant prop spoon that delivers the sugar to the cup when … he awakens and finds, in a marvelous closing gag, that the announcer’s hypnotic spiel extolling the sleep-inducing qualities of Paradise Coffee has put everybody in the studio to sleep: the musicians, the soloist, the producer, the engineer and the entire staff — until he calls out in clarion tones, “Then you wake up!,” and everyone does so. The Horn Blows at Midnight is a screamingly funny film and a great example of one of the things I admire about Jack Benny — that he didn’t just recycle his radio characterization the way most radio stars (especially radio comedians) did when they made movies. Instead he took on nervy projects like Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (a farce comedy about Nazi occupation, which sounds like the sort of stupid idea some desperate screenwriter would come up with but in fact has been the subject not only of a Lubitsch masterpiece but also Mel Brooks’ surprisingly good — and surprisingly close — remake in 1983) and The Horn Blows at Midnight, and this time he came up with a surprisingly good film (its real director was the veteran Raoul Walsh, who did not get bounced down to being a studio gateman but actually had another decade or so ahead of him as a director) that didn’t deserve either its box-office failure then or the opprobrium heaped on it, mostly by its star, over the years. — 1/3/18

American Masters: Bob Hope (PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night KPBS presented a show I’d seen advertised on the Orange County PBS station in the Los Angeles Times and had been curious about but so far had managed to miss: an American Masters documentary on Bob Hope. It was basically well done and crowded as much as possible of Hope’s decades-long career in two hours, but it suffered from what was probably an unavoidable flaw: there was virtually no sense of who the “real” Bob Hope was under the persona he created as an entertainer. Though director John Scheinfeld (who I’m presuming also wrote the show, since no outside writer is credited) didn’t duck the allegations of marital infidelity — the show mentions the affair Hope had in the 1940’s with starlet Marilyn Maxwell but does not make the claim I’ve seen elsewhere that Paramount set up an entirely separate dressing room for Hope, aside from his usual one, in which he could have quickies with various actresses and other woman on the Paramount lot — that’s about the only behind-the-scenes glimpse of what Hope was “really” like aside from the three characters he created, the nebbishy coward he played in films, the wisecracking radio comedian and the thoroughgoing patriot who did all the USO shows for America’s servicemembers in every war the U.S. fought from our entry into World War II in 1941 to the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.

The show did not mention one of the things I most admire about Hope — that despite his reputation for political conservatism in other respects he was anti-racist way before anti-racism was cool. Billie Holiday had very nice things to say about Hope in her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues (though, oddly, she never covered Hope’s signature song “Thanks for the Memory” — a pity, since she could have done wonders with it!), and Hope hailed African-American comedian Willie Best as the greatest natural talent he ever worked with and insisted that Best be billed under his actual name and not the demeaning “Sleep ’n Eat” moniker he’d been billed with in his pre-Hope movies. Like the American Masters documentary on Bing Crosby, this one on Hope also annoyed me by hailing the Road movies as major innovations in screen comedy, particularly the way in which they “broke the frame” and allowed both Hope and Crosby to address the audience directly and remind them they were just watching a movie — without mentioning the person who actually had that idea. His name was Victor Schertzinger, and he directed the first two Road movies at the end of his career (he died in 1942), but he had “broken the frame” in his previous films (notably Something to Sing About, the little-known and quite good musical he made with James Cagney at Grand National in 1937, a film Cagney admired so much he devoted a whole chapter of his autobiography to it) — and Schertzinger’s frame-breaking continued as an integral part of the Road films even after he died and other directors (mostly Norman Z. McLeod and Hal Walker) took the series over — and McLeod had also previously directed the Marx Brothers, who also “broke the frame” in early-1930’s films like the McLeod-directed Horse Feathers. This isn’t the only example of “first-itis” in this show — “first-itis” is my term for the tendencies of biographers in all media to assume and state that whoever they’re biographing was the first person to do something when in fact quite a few people were doing it before them (my most egregious example was that all the obituaries for Ray Charles said his 1954 hit “I Got a Woman” was the first time anyone had turned gospel music into a pop hit — Sister Rosetta Tharpe had done it in 1941 with “Shout, Sister, Shout”), including making the argument that Hope was the first person to do what we think of today as stand-up comedy and also the first one to tell topical jokes and include political commentary in his act. 

John Scheinfeld does acknowledge that Will Rogers was doing political jokes before Hope but claims he doesn’t really count because he was delivering them in his folksy “country” persona — though the records I’ve heard of Rogers indicate that he was in his own way a far more slashing political comedian than Hope; whereas Hope tried to stay even-handed (at least until the 1960’s, when he was appalled by the counter-culture and seemed to regard opposition to the Viet Nam war as a personal insult), Rogers was an out-and-out progressive, and his comments, particularly on the environment and on America’s treatment of its Native population (Rogers was part-Cherokee and he let everyone know it), ring true today whereas most of Hope’s political jokes have become dated. Hope’s political jokes got nastier in the 1960’s, when he not only took sides with the mainstream pro-war, anti-hippie, anti-dissent culture against the counterculture but became quite vehement about it: there’s a clip here of him talking about the Woodstock festival right after it happened in which he says, “It was held in an old cow pasture. Just the right place for it, don’t you think?” There’s also an even more bizarre excerpt from one of the tapes made at the White House during the Nixon administration in those bizarre years from 1971 to 1973 when Nixon essentially had himself bugged 24/7 and recorded virtually every White House meeting and phone call (thereby generating the evidence that ultimately led to his forced resignation to avoid impeachment), in which Hope is visiting the White House and he and Nixon are egging each other on about hatred of the anti-war protesters and a determination to continue and escalate the bombing of North Viet Nam until the war is “won.” Hope would probably have had a hard time staying at the top even without the generation gap — seeing his later close-ups in the 1980’s it’s all too obvious that he’d aged, and though they are mercifully unmentioned here by the 1960’s Hope’s film career had degenerated into dreary, unfunny would-be farces like Call Me Bwana, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! (which Harry and Michael Medved and Randy Dreyfuss listed in their 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time) and Cancel My Reservation that made the age both of their star and their script formulae all too apparent. 

There were quite a few interviewees, including Woody Allen (shown both in his younger days doing a guest shot as host of The Tonight Show in 1971 and inviting Hope on as one of his guests — and telling Hope a lot of Bananas was ripped off Hope’s films — and as what he looks like now), Conan O’Brien (who said he never paid attention to Hope until he heard Woody Allen in an interview saying Hope had been his great inspiration and influence, and he liked Allen so much that made him look more seriously at Hope and eventually learn from him), and even Kermit the Frog (voiced by whom, one wonders, now that his creator Jim Henson is long since dead), along with Hope’s daughter Linda (adopted, as were Hope’s three other children, because his wife Dolores Reade Hope couldn’t bear any of her own) and some of  his old writers. The story ends up frustrating because there doesn’t seem to have been a ‘real” Hope; whatever he was like beyond the parts of his personality he drew on to create the “Bob Hope character,” he rigidly concealed them even from his closest associates and friends — anyone coming to this film hoping to find Hope’s “Rosebud” will be disappointed. In an age in which celebrities not only share their personal angst with their audience but often rely on it to create, Hope’s rigid line between his onscreen and offscreen personalities (and his success in doing so, to the point that even his death, which usually loosens acquaintances’ tongues and makes them feel like they have permission at last to tell the world what so-and-so was “really” like) marks him as the product of another era, a world of image-makers in which celebrities were protected by the big companies they worked for and only what they and their bosses thought would be “good” for their careers for people to know about them ever saw the light of day.

New York Philharmonic: New Year’s Eve Concert, 2017: A Tribute to Leonard Bernstein on Broadway (WNET/PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the American Masters special on Bob Hope KPBS showed the Great Performances New Year’s Eve concert by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by a Britisher named Bramwell Tovey (aside from “Elizabeth Windsor,” it’s hard to think of a more quintessentially British name than that!) and dedicated specifically to Leonard Bernstein’s work for the musical theatre. Of course, for most people think “Leonard Bernstein” and “musical theatre” and the show that immediately comes to mind is West Side Story, by far his most successful Broadway musical (and the source for a multi-Academy-Award-winning film). If you think harder maybe you’ll come up with On the Town, and if you’re even more familiar with Broadway trivia you might remember Peter Pan (the 1950 version starring Jean Arthur and Boris Karloff, who weren’t exactly two of the greatest singers of all time, so Bernstein’s contribution was cut to five songs in the stage production and then, on the original-cast album, even further to just a few burbles of “incidental music” under what was otherwise a spoken-word album of a cut-down version of Sir James M. Barrie’s source play), Wonderful Town (the 1953 Tony Award-winning adaptation of My Sister Eileen, with Rosalind Russell repeating her role of Ruth McKinney from the 1942 Columbia film) and his last work for the Broadway stage, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a badly-reviewed 1976 show about the history of the White House that contains one great ballad, “Take Good Care of This House,” that the producers of this concert would have done well to include.

I couldn’t help but mentally compare this show to the one aired in Paris nine days earlier, Noël à Broadway, which wasn’t exclusively a Bernstein tribute but contained quite a lot of his music, at least partly because they began with the same selection. It was the overture to the 1956 musical Candide, which has had a star-crossed history in toto and whose overture has had far more enduring success than the play. (Charles pointed out that that’s true of Rossini’s William Tell as well.) From the opening bars of the Candide overture, I figured we were in for a great evening — Tovey played the piece with far more power, drive and rhythmic snap than Mikko Franck had managed in Paris nine days before — but as the concert wound on I felt Tovey and whoever else might have been involved in programming it was emphasizing the brash, loud, percussive style of Bernstein’s fast musical songs over the rich lyricism of his ballads. The four vocal soloists — “straight” soprano Laura Osnes, comic singer Annaleigh Ashford, tenor Aaron Tveit and baritone Christopher Jackson — all had the right sort of voices for this music but weren’t always well served by the song selections. Indeed, some of the songs, including “Come Up to My Place” from On the Town for Tveit and Ashford and “Ohio” from Wonderful Town for Ashford and Osnes — were such relentlessly ugly, staccato patter songs they were more a tribute to their lyricists, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, than their composer.

From On the Town Tovey played “Come Up to My Place” (which wasted the sheer beauty of Tveit’s voice — but then that was also true when Frank Sinatra did it with Betty Garrett in the 1949 film of On the Town, and it’s a pity both Sinatra in the film and Tveit in last night’s concert were deprived of the ability to do the show’s beautiful ballad, “Lonely Town”) and “Lucky to Be Me” (sung by Christopher Jackson in the role of Gabey, played by John Battles in the original stage production and Gene Kelly in the film), which was a male song in the original musical but whose first recording was made by Mary Martin for Decca (and she’s unsurpassed in it), followed by a suite of “Three Dance Episodes” that Bernstein later assembled as a concert instrumental and recorded himself in the 1940’s for RCA Victor. Wonderful Town was represented by “Ohio,” “It’s Love” and “The Wrong-Note Rag,” the last piece seemingly being an attempt by Bernstein literally to write a wrong-note rag, throwing in modern classical dissonances into something that otherwise sounded like traditional ragtime. After the intermission — during which Tovey told a story of being called in at the last minute to conduct a concert of Bernstein’s music in London in 1986 when the original conductor, Lukas Foss, called in sick; he was told that Bernstein himself was to attend the dress rehearsal, and he came in with an entourage of about five people plus a gang of paparazzi photographing virtually his every move, a story that would have been a more engaging anecdote if Tovey hadn’t told it twice — Tovey played a set of three dances from Fancy Free, the 1944 Jerome Robbins ballet that would eventually become the basis for the plot of On the Town. Then Ashford sung a lovely ballad called “Dream with Me” from Bernstein’s 1950 Peter Pan score (and it wasn’t her fault that her opposite number from the Noël à Broadway concert, Deborah Myers, had sung an even more beautiful ballad from that show, “Build My House”) and we finally got an impression of Bernstein the lyrical composer. Alas, the next number up was the inevitably percussive “Mambo” from West Side Story, which was also represented by Christopher Jackson singing “Cool,” Aaron Tveit singing “Maria” (and singing it well, far better than just about anyone since Larry Kert on the original 1957 Broadway cast album) and he and Ashford duetting on “Tonight.” 

Then there came an odd piece, an instrumental orchestration by Sid Ramin and Michael Tilson Thomas of the vocal trio from Bernstein’s 1952 one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti — which has nothing to do with Tahiti but tells about the bored lives of suburban couple Sam and Dinah (Bernstein wrote his own libretto and used the names of his actual parents), and which used three singers in the style of the Andrews Sisters as a sort of Greek chorus commenting on and explaining the action. In 1982 Bernstein wrote another opera called A Quiet Place, which incorporated Trouble in Tahiti and also contained a sequel in which the main characters were Sam and Dinah’s Gay son, their straight daughter and Junior, the Bisexual man who has affairs with both of them. Bernstein worked with various writers and did one version in which Trouble in Tahiti was the first act and the new material followed, and another in which Tahiti was a flashback in the middle of the piece. When he rehearsed the premiere it was so unpopular with the cast and musicians that when one of the people involved overheard Bernstein saying, “I don’t want to be remembered just as the man who wrote West Side Story,’ he said, “Better that than being remembered as the man who wrote A Quiet Place.” The program concluded with a novelty number from On the Town, “I Can Cook, Too” (also recorded by Mary Martin in the 1940’s), done to a turn by Osnes, and then Ashford and Tveit closing the program with the beautiful final duet “Make Our Garden Grow” from Candide (and hearing it in this context made it even clearer than before that Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins ripped off the ending of the final Hunger Games book, Mockingjay, from Voltaire’s Candide: the two protagonists reunited, definitively out of public life, living together on a farm, baking bread and literally making their garden grow). The encore was the only non-Bernstein music of the night, an audience sing-along on “Auld Lang Syne.” Overall, the Bernstein tribute was a quite good concert, but I’d have preferred more of Bernstein at his most lyrical and less of him at his bombastic, raucous attempts to bring together Broadway, classical and jazz, which are fun but a little bit of them goes a long way!

Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, 2017-2018 (Dick Clark Productions, Ryan Secrest Productions, ABC-TV, 2017-2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The PBS Great Performances tribute to Leonard Bernstein ended at about 10:45 — they ran out of program to fill their time slot (a refreshing change from previous years, when they’ve actually run the closing credits under the final number and cut it short when the time slot ended!) — which gave me the chance to shift to Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve on ABC, which started out in the 1970’s as a kinda-sorta counter-cultural alternative to Guy Lombardo’s telecast (I remember my mom joking to me, “They invented New Year’s just so Guy Lombardo could keep working”) but now has become the big Establishment New Year’s TV celebration, complete with well-bundled reporters shivering in Times Square (this year the temperature was minus 7° Fahrenheit, the coldest on record) as they do interviews with the people on the street who’ve come out to see the mega-ball drop. In the 15 minutes between the end of the Bernstein concert and 11 p.m. — a sort of witching hour on American TV because whatever else is being shown has to come to a screeching halt so the local stations can put on their news programs — I got to see one act, Portugal … The Man (presumably called that to distinguish him from Portugal … The Country), with one of those high androgynous voices (I think the woman singing with him on the choruses — her part was too prominent to be considered a backing vocal but she wasn’t really a second lead, either — was in the same key he was) doing a quite lovely modern-day dance ballad called “I Feel It Still.” 

The remainder of the 15 minutes was taken over by dumb person-on-the-street interviews (ask someone who’s standing out in -7° weather, “How do you feel?,” and the answer you’re liable to get is, “Cold”) and even dumber commercials. For the 11 to 11:30 period in which ABC and the other American networks switched to their news shows, I switched to the Telemundo New Year’s Eve telecast, also based in Times Square but with a whole different set of acts lined up, all (not surprisingly) singing in Spanish; Zoom & Lennox doing something I think was called “Enduagame”, Victor Manuelle (that’s how the chyron spelled his last name!) announced as performing “La Sonora del Juventud” (though I suspect that was his group name) and doing a medley of old-fashioned salsa that didn’t sound very much like music of the juventud to me but was still appealing; and Jencarlos, a single-named male performer, doing a song called “Doré, Doré” which showed that even pretty mainstream modern dance-pop can still be enlivened by Latin percussion. After that interesting cross-border interlude I switched back to ABC at 11:30 and got two songs by Mariah Carey, going back to the origins of her career for “Vision of Love” and “Hero” (alas, not “Butterfly,” which is my favorite Mariah Carey song by quite a stretch), before the ball dropped at Times Square and the hosts rang in 2018 and Charles and I imbibed Martinelli’s sparkling apple cider to toast a year in which, as he put it, “the reality-based capitalist party regains control of Congress — we hope.” Through a freak of ABC’s scheduling, the first song I got to hear in all of 2018 was Britney Spears doing “Toxic,” which is supposed to be about her getting trapped in a beautiful garden but one in which all the plants are poisonous. It’s also supposed to be a metaphor for a “toxic” relationship — something Ms. Spears ought to be an expert on by now! — and it struck me as the sort of song that could have been really powerful if it were performed by someone with an actual voice instead of a computer re-creation of one. Then Kelly Clarkson came out looking surprisingly zaftig (and reminding me in that department, at least, of Adele, who became one of my favorite modern-day artists the moment I saw her on TV looking pleasingly plump and not having starved herself to look like she just got liberated from a Nazi death camp) and singing her song, “Stronger,” which I like even though I think it’s a shame no one connected with it credited Friedrich Nietzsche with the inspiration for the lyric (“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”).

After that came BTS, whom I’ve encountered before — with a name like that I keep expecting them to be rappers and instead they’re a Korean boy band (though some of them have bleached their hair blonde and done everything they could short of plastic surgery to look as un-“Asian” as possible) who sang a hit, apparently called “Mike Drop,” in a mishmash of English, Korean and gibberish. I found them considerably sexier than I usually find boy-band members and loved the way they moved on stage even though their song was pretty much disposable pop. Then came Khalid, another person I would have assumed from his stage name was a rapper. Wrong on both counts: like Prince, Khalid uses his real first name professionally (his last name is Robinson), and he’s a heavy-set African-American 19-year-old with an appealing neo-soul voice good for novelties like the one he sang last night, “Young, Dumb and Broke” — though I had to look up the song on Khalid’s official YouTube page to find out what it was called. For the last item Charles and I watched before we turned off the TV and crashed, we got to see two songs beamed in from New Orleans by a group called Imagine Dragons (I can never forget what Charles said the first time we watched them on TV together; when they were introduced Charles wisecracked, “Well, you have to imagine dragons — they don’t really exist”) doing a song of theirs called “Thunder” which I’d heard before and another one, “Believer,” I haven’t. They’re billed as a rock band but are actually a fusion of 1960’s rock and modern-day dance-pop — essentially “Thunder” is a dance-pop record with a 1960’s-style rock guitar solo spliced in (much the way I remember, when I first heard the term “house music,” I tried to figure out what it meant from listening to a few examples and finally concluded, “They just splice a Bud Powell-style jazz piano solo into the middle of a disco record!”) — and, like a lot of other acts who turn up on shows like this, I like them but not well enough to buy their CD’s — whereas more impassioned current singers like Maren Morris and Alessia Cara did knock me out enough to get me to get their CD’s despite my ongoing joke about myself, “Mark, when was the last time you bought a CD by someone who’s still alive?”