Lillian Russell (20th Century-Fox, 1940)

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

Two nights ago Charles and I watched another movie from the Alice Faye boxed set from 20^th Century-Fox: Lillian Russell, a 1940 mega-production (it was in black-and-white but Fox production chief Darryl F. Zanuck otherwise lavished the resources of his studio on it, including Don Ameche and Henry Fonda as Faye’s co-stars, ravishing cinematography by Leon Shamroy and an obviously substantial budget, though he chose hacky Irving Cummings as director, perhaps because Cummings had worked as a minor actor with the real Lillian Russell in a 1906 Broadway show) about the legendary singer and actress who had a remarkable 40-year career as an entertainer before retiring in 1919, three years before her death in 1922. She was actually born Helen Leonard in Clinton, Iowa (though the film’s script by William Anthony McGuire relocated the event to Chicago, where her family had relocated in 1870) on December 4, 1860, though McGuire moved the blessed event up a year so it could take place during the Civil War. The film begins with a great gag sequence in which the pediatrician who has officiated at her mother Cynthia’s previous four births (Lillian was actually the fourth of her parents’ five children, though in the film she’s the last) is a major in a volunteer company that’s about to ship out for the war and he’s worried about whether little baby Helen will make it out of her mom’s womb before the boat they’re supposed to be on sails and everyone in his company, including Our Heroine’s father, is at least technically guilty of desertion. Her dad, Charles K. Leonard (Ernest Truex), desperately hopes for another boy since all four of his previous kids have been girls, but Helen emerges female and, when she grows up, gets enlisted in her mom Cynthia Leonard’s (Dorothy Peterson) campaign for women’s suffrage — and yes, after having participated in re-creations of the suffrage marches it was a real thrill to see one reasonably accurately depicted on screen. With Cynthia busy as a political activist — she even mounts a campaign for mayor of New York, and though she gets only 137 votes (which the film reduces to just 84!) she still made it into history as the first woman ever to seek elective office in the U.S. — and Helen’s dad complaining that his wife is so busy either going to meetings or hosting them at her home she never has any time for him (a complaint with which Charles and I were all too familiar!), the job of raising her falls mostly to her grandmother (Helen Westley, who played the title character in the 1935 film Roberta with Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers), who makes clear her disinterest in all this women’s suffrage crap — Cynthia even gets a self-righteous speech to the effect that once women can vote political graft will end, and so will war (the sort of thing that makes you groan at how wrong she was but also makes you wish she’d been right!) and who encourages young Helen’s stage ambitions even though her mom thinks that’s no life for a daughter of hers. Helen gets discovered by vaudeville impresario Tony Pastor (Leo Carrillo), who likes her singing but not her name; he asks her what her favorite flower is, and she says, “Roses,” but a Black servant in his office says “Lilies,” and this inspires him to rechristen her “Lillian Russell” — which Our Heroine doesn’t mind because using a different name makes it less likely she’ll be “outed” to her mom.

Lillian Russell becomes an enormous star and attracts the attention of young aspiring newspaperman Alexander Moore (Henry Fonda in a role several sizes too small for him — in his autobiography he complained that he had to sign a long-term contract with 20^th Century-Fox to get the part of Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, and once Zanuck “owned” him he got saddled with parts like this), who’s in love with him but put off by the 1-percenters who hang out outside the theatres where she performs seeking her “company” for the usual Production Code-veiled reasons. Russell gets the attention of two of the 1-percenters in particular, Diamond Jim Brady (Edward Arnold, who by this time was pretty well “typed” as the living incarnation of capitalist arrogance, especially in his three films for Frank Capra: You Can’t Take It With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe) and Jesse Lewisohn (an on-the-downgrade but still effective Warren William) — not surprisingly the film depicts only a Production Code-sanitized version of the friendship between Russell and Brady, though it does show the famous diamond-studded bicycle he had made for her and which she rode around Central Park (today, no one would dare!). But she dumps both of them in favor of a penniless composer, Edward Solomon (Don Ameche, who’s billed second even though he only gets about 20 minutes of screen time in the film; he enters about 45 minutes in and dies of a heart attack at a young age two reels later), who writes her an intensely moving song called “Blue Love Bird” (actually the work of composer Bronislau Kaper and lyricist Gus Kahn — Kaper was borrowed from MGM for this production; most of the songs were genuine hits from Russell’s period but 20^th Century-Fox musical director Alfred Newman contributed a choral theme song, “Back in the Days of Old Broadway,” and a song called “Adored One”) and then collapses at the piano, the irony being that at the end of the song one of the lovebirds is left all alone by the death of the other. (At that I couldn’t help but think, when Lillian is shown closing the door on the music room where Solomon was working until he collapsed at the piano, thinking he’s just taking a nap, “Go in there, girl! He’s not just sleeping, he’s dying!”) All this happens in London, where Lillian has gone to star in a new operetta, Princess Ida, by Gilbert and Sullivan — only Gilbert (Nigel Bruce) and Sullivan (Claud Allister, the jilted fiancé from the 1930 Jeanette MacDonald/Ernst Lubitsch musical Monte Carlo) have one of their famous hissy-fits (a major part of their real-life relationship as well) over whether she belongs in their show, and eventually she returns home after playing in her late husband’s musical just so she can be advertised, when she returns, as direct from her London success.

Eventually Alexander Moore, whom we first met as he was trying to get a job as a reporter for the New York Chronicle (thinking of Citizen Kane, I joked that when the Chronicle didn’t hire him he should have applied at the Inquirer), turns up in London representing a paper in his home town, Pittsburgh, offering Lillian $2,500 for an exclusive series of interviews on her life story — though he realizes she’s so broken up by the death of her husband she can’t bear to cooperate and the series is canceled. Later Moore buys the paper he worked for and becomes Lillian’s second husband. The DVD of Lillian Russell comes with an intriguing featurette on the real Lillian Russell, saying she was the forerunner of Mae West, Marilyn Monroe and Madonna in pushing an image of female independence, including sexual independence; it also mentions the two other men Lillian Russell married that aren’t depicted in the film — her first husband, orchestra leader Henry Braham (best known today as composer of the song “Limehouse Blues,” usually played as an instrumental today because its lyrics are so rancidly racist); and her third, tenor John Haley Augustin Chatterton, who performed under the pseudonym “Giovanni Perugini.” The featurette suggests that the real Lillian Russell’s life story could have made a more interesting film than the one we have, and the one recording that exists of the real Russell — “Come Down, Ma Evenin’ Star,” made for Columbia in 1912 and available on https://archive.org/details/LillianRussell-ComeDownMaEveninStar1912 — shows a quite different sort of voice from Faye’s foghorn contralto, a delicate, almost operatic instrument (even though when Russell made the record she was 51 and she’d been through at least one vocal crisis, so the voice isn’t what audiences heard in her prime). Andrea King played Russell in My Wild Irish Rose (1947), the Warner Bros. biopic of Irish tenor/composer Chauncey Olcott (Dennis Morgan), and in that film she sang “Come Down, Ma Evenin’ Star” and came a lot closer to the real Russell’s sound that Alice Faye did. According to imdb.com, Lillian Russell was originally developed at MGM as a follow-up to the huge success of the film The Great Ziegfeld (also scripted by William Anthony McGuire, who had written many shows for the real Ziegfeld) and was planned as a vehicle for Jeanette MacDonald (who would have been superb vocally and an interesting choice for acting the role), but they abandoned it, 20^th Century-Fox developed it instead and made it a vehicle for Faye.

Oddly, though Faye had begun her Fox career as their attempt to create a rival to Jean Harlow (Faye even got the female lead in In Old Chicago, a film that had been planned for Harlow when she died — MGM was going to loan Clark Gable and Jean Harlow to Fox for In Old Chicago in exchange for Shirley Temple as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, but Harlow’s death canceled that deal, Judy Garland got to play Dorothy and Zanuck made In Old Chicago with his own people, Tyrone Power and Faye), in Lillian Russell she bears a striking resemblance to Mae West — which makes one wonder what this film might have been like with the real West in the role (her voice wasn’t any closer to the real Russell’s than Faye’s was but she would have delivered a considerably gutsier performance), though given that the real Russell picked up her mother’s feminist mantle, working for women’s suffrage (and lasting until 1922, thereby living through the first U.S. election in which women had the vote nationwide), at one point (in 1913) threatening to refuse to pay income taxes until women were granted the vote, and also raising money to support the Actors’ Equity strike against the Broadway producers in 1919 and helping Ziegfeld’s chorus girls organize a union, perhaps from that point of view the most appropriate person in 1940 to play Lillian Russell would have been Katharine Hepburn with a suitable voice double (Rosa Ponselle, maybe?). But all these speculations about the film Lillian Russell could have been with more guts on the part of the producers and less interference from the Production Code just take away from how good a movie it is as it stands; vocally mismatched though she is, Faye plays the part with absolute sincerity and power, and it also benefits from a strong supporting cast (including the famous vaudeville team of Joe Weber and Lew Fields, who cast Russell in one of their shows and gave her an early break, playing themselves and doing a wild gambling routine that shows where Abbott and Costello ripped off some of their great dialogue scenes), serviceable direction by Cummings (for once I don’t mind the relatively uncreative staging of the production numbers, since he clearly wanted to keep intact the theatrical setting of Russell’s performances and not go all Busby Berkeley on us — and I suspect the theatre set in which Faye does most of her songs was recycled from On the Avenue), glorious half-lit cinematography by Shamroy (some of the scenes look oddly noir and reflect McGuire’s thesis that great fame is always accompanied by heartbreak and the warning he put into the mouth of Lillian’s grandmother that she might become famous but that wasn’t going to make her happy) and an overall production that casts the period in a nostalgic glow that still holds up today and must have been comforting to 1940 audiences just pulling out of the Great Depression and with their country about to be plunged into World War II.

Four Laurel and Hardy Silent Shorts (Hal Roach/Pathé and MGM, 1927-1929)

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

Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” last night was a program of four Laurel and Hardy silent shorts, with host Ben Mankiewicz pointing out that unlike a lot of other silent-era stars, Laurel and Hardy not only survived into the sound era but became more popular — I suspect not only because their voices were incredibly right for their characters but also because dialogue gave them more opportunities to project the extraordinary warmth and love that set them apart from other slapstick comedians on film. As a team, Laurel and Hardy evolved from the so-called “Comedy All-Stars” at Hal Roach Studios in the 1920’s; Roach, having lost his original star comedian — Harold Lloyd — to Lloyd’s own self-contained production company (the parting was amicable but Lloyd had simply outgrown the Roach lot), was looking around for a replacement and ended up with a number of comedians under contract, none of whom could carry a film on their own but all of whom could work together to generate laughs. Thus came about the “Comedy All-Stars,” a free-floating group of comedians who came together for a series of films until Roach realized that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were becoming more popular than their studio-mates, pulled them out of the All-Stars and gave them films in which they had the starring roles. The first film on TCM’s program was one of the transitional ones in this process, Do Detectives Think? (not that it’s hard work to guess the answer the film gives!) from 1927, billing five people, with Laurel and Hardy at the top of the cast list but not above the title. It was also still distributed by Pathé, which lost the rights to the Laurel and Hardy films later in 1927 to MGM (Pathé’s U.S. branch never recovered from the triple blow of losing Lloyd to Paramount, losing the Roach product to MGM and the 1929 accident during which 11 people were burned to death following a set fire during the shooting of a musical in New York).

Officially directed by Fred Guiol but with Leo McCarey credited as “supervising director” (he had that credit on all four of the Laurel and Hardy silents TCM showed, and I suspect that if anyone was the auteur on these films, it was McCarey, who developed the slow-paced “tit for tat” method of staging slapstick fight scenes that was very much a part of their early style) and photographed by George Stevens (who would later become a director and use Guiol as his frequent screenwriter and assistant), Do Detectives Think? starts out in a courtroom, where “The Tipton Slasher” (Noah Young — though when I first saw him he looked so much like Boris Karloff in The Old Dark House I thought for a while it was Karloff playing the part) has just been convicted of two murders. Judge Foozle (James Finlayson) gives him a long prison term, and the Slasher vows revenge on the judge and says he intends to escape for the sole purpose of killing him. Then the Slasher does escape and waylays the new butler assigned to the Foozle house (Wilson Benge), sending the real butler off in the night in his long johns and “disguising” himself by the simple expedient of appearing clean-shaven, without the heavy beard he was sporting in the opening scene. Meanwhile, Judge Foozle, understandably concerned for his own safety, calls a local detective agency — whose boss, thinking it’s an unimportant case, decides to send the agency’s two worst operatives, “the second-worst detective in the world,” Ferdinand Finkleberry (Stan Laurel), and the worst, Sherlock Pinkham (Oliver Hardy). What follows is a pretty relentless but still screamingly funny succession of slapstick gags, in one of which the judge is taking a bath when the plug on his bathtub is accidentally pulled and the black, murky water in which he was submerged disappears on him; in another the judge falls on the face of a mask of tragedy that’s been knocked off his wall and scares the other characters silly just by showing the mask on the back of his head; and at the end the incompetent detectives actually capture the killer, only Hardy puts the handcuffs on his own arms — and still later Laurel locks the killer in a closet of the judge’s house, only he’s locked Hardy in there with him! Do Detectives Think? is a great little comedy, not particularly subtle and lacking the great characterizations of the later Laurel and Hardy films (in which they junked the conceit of separate character names and played people named “Stan Laurel” and “Oliver Hardy” — Laurel explained later that was because a character name could be copyrighted by a movie studio and reassigned to another actor, but their real names were their own and they could take them anywhere they worked) but still screamingly funny. It’s also interesting to see Laurel with his hair slicked down and center-parted the way Rudolph Valentino (whom Laurel had parodied as “Rhubarb Vaseline” in his 1922 film Mud and Sand, a spoof of Valentino’s vehicle Blood and Sand) wore his instead of combed upwards the way he wore it later. The change happened when Laurel and Hardy had to have their heads shaved for an early Roach two-reeler, The Second Hundred Years, in which they themselves played escaped convicts, and when Laurel’s hair grew back it obstinately refused to stay plastered to his head and instead kept sticking up. Other employees of Hal Roach laughed at it, and Laurel, reasoning that if Roach’s staff found it funny audiences would too, kept wearing it that way.

The next film on the program was You’re Darn Tootin’, a 1928 vehicle for Laurel and Hardy that cast them as bumbling musicians whose spectacular incompetence costs them jobs playing in a park band (Laurel plays clarinet and Hardy French horn) and forces them to work as buskers. Charles and I had seen this one before at the Balboa Park Organ Pavilion’s silent-movie night in 2007, but it was still hilarious, and though it was a silent film (and one has to wonder about the chutzpah of Laurel, Hardy, Roach, McCarey and nominal director Edgar Kennedy — one of his few forays behind the camera — to make a silent film about musicians!) it’s got some interesting bits of verbal wit in the titles, including the opening, which says that the park-band conductor “was making his farewell appearance — which the audience had been demanding for years” (later he’s shown rehearsing for “another farewell,” and with Laurel and Hardy busking outside and interfering with his rehearsal, that precipitates the slapstick shin-kicking climax — so even in the 1920’s people were making jokes about celebrities’ “first farewell tours”!); and later, when Laurel and Hardy are sitting to a meal at the boarding house where they live and the landlady (Agnes Steele) has sent them a note saying that in the thrill of finally getting jobs they still need to remember that they owe her 14 months’ back rent and board. A kid who lives in the boarding house says he went to the band concert at the park, the landlady asks, “How was the music?,” and the obnoxious little brat says, “Fine — after those two got fired!,” leading the landlady to throw them out at once. Though You’re Darn Tootin’ would no doubt have been considerably funnier as a talkie — let’s face it, we want to hear for ourselves how bad Laurel and Hardy are as musicians instead of just having it explained to us in titles (and Robert Israel’s added background score for this 2011 re-release actually made them sound pretty good — too good for the plot to make much sense) — it’s still quite amusing as it stands and shows that even this early, having been cast as a team for only two years, they were already developing the characterizations that would make them first famous and then legendary, including not only wearing derby hats but constantly getting them mixed up so Laurel’s small derby ends up, much to Hardy’s discomfiture, on Hardy’s big head.

The next film on the program was probably the best of the four, Big Business, a 1929 silent I’d seen before only in a shortened version at the end of Robert Youngson’s 1960 compilation film When Comedy Was King but which turned out to be even better when viewed complete. It’s a simple tale of Laurel and Hardy going door-to-door on a hot California day selling Christmas trees (some of the writing about this film says it takes place in July, which would have made the central premise even sillier, but there’s nothing in the movie itself that makes that claim — probably people who have never lived in California and have spent their lives in more northern climes and therefore associate Christmas with snow simply saw all those warm, sunny vistas and assumed this was midsummer). They encounter three customers. The first is a heavy-set woman who says she doesn’t want a tree; when Laurel asks her if her husband might want one, she says, “I have no husband,” and Laurel — refusing to take no for an answer, in what was probably the writers’ deliberate parody of the aggressive go-getter books on salesmanship that abounded in the 1920’s — asks, “Well, if you did have a husband, would he want a tree?” The second customer we never see — we just see a sign on his front porch saying that no peddlers or solicitors are welcome, and an unseen hand holding a hammer and banging Laurel on the head with it. The third customer is James Finlayson (again!), and he refuses a tree but Laurel keeps ringing his doorbell anyway because part of the tree he was trying to sell him got caught in the door when Finlayson closed it on them. This snowballs into a great fight scene in which, according to Leo McCarey’s “tit for tat” principle (once again another name was credited as director — James W. Horne — but clearly McCarey was the auteur), instead of staging wild, frenetic slapstick violence the protagonists politely take turns as they wreak havoc on each other. What’s more, when Laurel starts taking out a knife and slicing off bits of the molding off Finlayson’s house, and he responds by walking over to their car (a Model “T” Ford, an anachronistic transport that became part of the Laurel and Hardy characterizations and undoubtedly got funnier once time past and rendered it totally obsolete — though in the 1938 Block-Heads Hardy is seen driving a brand-new car which Laurel, naturally, quickly buries in sand) and yanking off first its headlights, then its gas tank, then its door, the victims of this comic violence don’t try to stop it while it’s in progress. They just patiently and politely wait it out until it’s completed, then figure out something they can do to get back at the perpetrator. It ends with a police officer (Tiny Sandford) coming on the scene and getting hopelessly confused as to who started the confrontation and unclear whom to bust — though of course it ends with Laurel and Hardy fleeing the wrath of both Finlayson and the law. One of the legends of Big Business, perpetuated by John McCabe’s 1962 biography Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy, was that in order to save money the filmmakers decided to rent a real house rather than build a set on the Roach lot — only Laurel, Hardy and Finlayson improvised so many destruction gags that the house ended up needing so many repairs (which the studio had to pay for) it would have cost less to build a set. Over the years this tale got twisted and turned into a legend that Roach actually bought a house for the filming, then mistakenly sent his crew to the house next door from the one he’d bought and virtually destroyed a house he didn’t own. Not true, said Stan Laurel in one of his late-in-life interviews; “The chap who owned the house was employed at the studio and worked on the film with us.”

After Big Business, the fourth film on the program, Double Whoopee (1929), was something of a letdown, though still quite amusing. This time Stan and Ollie play hotel workers — Hardy a doorman, Laurel a footman (did they still have footmen in 1929? I thought they’d gone out with horse-drawn carriages!) — who are sent by an employment agency with a somewhat less than ringing letter of introduction (“There is some reason to believe they may be competent”) and are instantly mistaken for a mittel-Europan prince (Hans Joby, who’d worked for Erich von Stroheim as a stand-in and stunt double and is made up to look uncannily like Stroheim here) and his prime minister (Charley Rogers). They are invited to sign the hotel register, which Hardy does with a flourish while Laurel spills ink all over it — and some jets over into the compact of a fashionable woman, who decides to powder her face and doesn’t notice that the ink is turning her into a blackface minstrel. Once they present their letter and are “outed” as hotel staff, they assume their duties and Hardy takes over as doorman with the grand uniform and self-important air of Emil Jannings in Friedrich Murnau’s classic The Last Laugh (1924). Laurel also has a run-in with a self-important cab driver (Charlie Hall) and the real prince and prime minister take a few too many pratfalls down the shaft of an automatic elevator (automatic elevators were still a novelty in 1929), with the prince’s previously immaculate white uniform getting stained with gobs of black grease. The big moment everyone remembers from this film comes when Hardy is self-importantly escorting a young platinum-blonde woman into the hotel, not aware that when he closed the door on her cab Laurel got her dress caught in it, with the result that she’s wearing only underwear below the waist (a gag Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant repeated to just as much effect in Bringing Up Baby nine years later). The reason that’s the big moment everyone remembers is the young woman is played by Jean Harlow, just launching her film career — she appeared in two other silent Laurel and Hardy shorts, Liberty (in which she was billed under her original name, Harlean Carpenter) and Bacon Grabbers (in which Laurel and Hardy play repo men trying to grab a radio from Edgar Kennedy, and Harlow is Kennedy’s wife), as well as a number of even smaller bits before Howard Hughes got hold of her and gave her the female lead in Hell’s Angels (1929). Maybe I was just getting tired, but Double Whoopee didn’t seem to hold the punch of the three films TCM had shown before it — though it was still quite amusing and miles funnier than any of the movies being shown today that, as Dwight Macdonald put it, “in form and intent can be called comedies.”

On the Avenue (20th Century-Fox, 1937)

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

I ran Charles the videotape I’d brought over of the 1937 film On the Avenue, with Dick Powell, Madeleine Carroll, Alice Faye, the Ritz Brothers and a score by Irving Berlin, who actually got billed above the title. It contains some of his greatest songs, too — including two that became standards, “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” and “This Year’s Kisses” (the latter hauntingly sung by Alice Faye — yes, she’s competing with Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Carmen McRae, but it’s one song for which Faye’s foghorn voice actually works as a portrait of disillusioned love; if anything, her version is even gloomier than Billie’s, which was recorded early in her career and features a romantic tenor solo by Lester Young) — along with the novelties “Slumming on Park Avenue” (also recorded by Jimmie Lunceford) and “He Ain’t Got Rhythm” (of which I have three cover versions — a Lunceford version with an Eddie Durham electric guitar solo, a Billie Holiday/Teddy Wilson version and a version by Benny Goodman’s band with Jimmy Rushing as guest vocalist!), and “You’re Laughing at Me,” a forgotten ballad which really doesn’t deserve to be forgotten, as well as a cobwebbed novelty from the Berlin catalogue, “The Girl on the Police Gazette,” which actually suits Dick Powell’s voice better than the more contemporary material in the film! On the Avenue also has a much more sophisticated plot than was common in musical films at the time — though the central premise was pretty obviously stolen from MGM’s nonmusical Libeled Lady a year before — an heiress (Carroll) threatens to sue a musical writer/star (Powell) for defamation after his show includes a burlesque of her life. The two go out on a date, fall in love, and Powell agrees to tone down the sketch — instead, Powell’s jealous co-star (Faye) makes it meaner, thus making it actionable (which it hadn’t been before) and giving Carroll the leverage she needs to force the show’s producer to sell it to her and stage an incredible practical joke on Powell, in which she “papers the house” with 400 friends who walk out as soon as Powell opens his mouth to sing.

In addition to these distinctions — a witty plot line (screenplay by Gene Markey — who also produced — and William Conselman), efficient direction by Roy del Ruth and a great Berlin score — On the Avenue also boasted beautiful black-and-white photography by Lucien Andriot (Charles noted that color was not missed — not with the chiaroscuro backgrounds of the musical numbers setting off Seymour Felix’s dances effectively) and an interesting performance by Powell. His character in this one — a bit more ambiguous and less of a cardboard hero than most of the roles he played in his musical years — actually allowed him to show flashes of the laconicism and arrogance he displayed in his later detective films. The film also had some great supporting players (notably Billy Gilbert and Sig Rumann) and it moved quickly over 89 minutes — perhaps a little too quickly, since the outtakes included a title song as well as a routine with the Ritz Brothers and Alice Faye. The latter was actually shown as a newly rediscovered clip at the beginning of the film (somebody at 20th Century-Fox seems to be going through the archives these days — as I mentioned earlier, during the film preservation festival American Movie Classics, without any explanation at all, followed W. C. Fields’ last starring vehicle from Universal, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, with Fields’ scene from the Fox anthology film Tales of Manhattan, also cut from that film prior to its release), and Charles felt the film would have been stronger if that scene had been left in, since it would have made it clearer why the second version of the sketch burlesquing Madeleine Carroll’s lifestyle was libelous, whereas the first version hadn’t been. [Interestingly, this film was remade as the 1960 Marilyn Monroe vehicle Let’s Make Love, a thoroughly dreary and unimaginative movie, with the genders of the leading characters flip-flopped; Monroe played Dick Powell’s part and Yves Montand, a last-minute replacement for Gregory Peck, played Madeleine Carroll’s!] — 10/21/95

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The film was On the Avenue, an item from the Alice Faye boxed set I’d just got at Costco along with a Betty Grable boxed set, partly because they were there (and quite reasonably priced) and partly because in my current dire state of mind watching 20^th Century Fox musicals is a good antidote to the blues. On the Avenue is a movie that’s been oddly neglected even though it’s one of the best films of its type from the 1930’s, probably because it’s more of a screwball comedy than a musical, and though it’s included in a boxed set of Alice Faye, she’s really only the second female lead and she’s billed third, under the title, whereas the stars are Dick Powell and Madeleine Carroll. It’s been an oddly elusive movie and one I’ve only had the chance to see three times: the first time in the 1970’s on the Sunday late-afternoon movies from Channel 40 in the Bay Area (also the setting in which I first saw King Kong and most of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals), the second when a VHS tape came out on a series called “Fox Studio Classics” in the 1990’s and I grabbed it, and the third last night when I finally got to watch a DVD. The film credits a restoration team, which may account for how rarely it’s been shown over the years; even with the restoration there were still some sequences where tell-tale scratches could be seen on the screen. On the Avenue is a wild story owing more than a little to MGM’s film Libeled Lady from the year before, with Madeleine Carroll essentially in the Myrna Loy role as a super-rich woman threatening a libel suit — though this time not against a newspaper but against Broadway producer Jake Dibble (the marvelous character comedian Walter Catlett, a delight as usual) and singer-actor Gary Blake (Dick Powell), the star of Dibble’s new revue On the Avenue. The show features a sketch satirizing the home life of Mimi Caraway (Madeleine Carroll) and her father, Commodore Caraway (George Barbier), as well as her Aunt Fritz (Cora Witherspoon, a delightfully dotty character who seems to have stepped out of the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart play You Can’t Take It With You and performs the same plot function Charlotte Greenwood did in Down Argentine Way and The Gang’s All Here) and her polar-explorer fiancé Frederick Sims (Alan Mowbray). Mimi — played in the sketch by Mona Merrick (Alice Faye), Gary’s leading lady in the show and, she wishes, in his life as well — makes her entrance down a long staircase flanked by a retinue of hunting dogs (the familiar hunting fanfare is heard on the soundtrack) and sits across from her father at a breakfast table so long they need to use a phone to talk to each other. The polar explorer and his two sidekicks are played by the Ritz Brothers, 20^th Century-Fox’s comedy team and their apparent attempt to build up a zany brothers-based attraction comparable to the Marx Brothers at MGM and the Three Stooges at Columbia — and they’re amusing even though they lack the wit, sophistication and anarchic energy of the Marxes or the balletic precision of the Stooges’ slapstick; they weakened a lot of Fox’s big musicals in this period because, even though they were funny, they were nowhere nearly as funny as the directors and writers of these films thought they were!

When they see the sketch based on themselves, the Caraways walk out of the theatre in high dudgeon and the Commodore calls his attorney and asks him to sue for libel — only the attorney said that since the Caraways are public figures and the sketch stops short of actually lying about them (something we learn when the “real” Mimi Caraway makes her entrance at home in the morning flanked by the same dogs we saw in the sketch in which Alice Faye “played” her), they have no grounds to sue. Instead Mimi Caraway decides to crash the theatre during the next performance of On the Avenue and confront Gary directly; they end up on a picturesque date in which they stay out all night and Gary has to give up his top hat and overcoat (with tails!) to pay off Mr. Papadopulos (Billy Gilbert), proprietor of one of those diners made from a converted railroad car (seen here, and in The Goldwyn Follies a year later, as a symbol of 99-percenters’ innocence and proletarian virtue), and the driver of a horse-drawn cab in which they’ve been riding all night. Mimi gets Gary to fall in love with her, and Gary agrees to tone down the sketch about her in the show — only the version performed the next night is actually worse than the original; instead of making her entrance flanked by dogs, “Mimi” makes her entrance among a gaggle of pigs; there’s a scene in which the actress playing Aunt Fritz makes her entrance doing a Russian dance (she’d been studying Russian ballet as her latest obsession, one she quickly ditches in favor of learning to be a trapeze artist from “Herr Hanfstaengl,” played with his usual drollery by Sig Ruman); and originally there was supposed to be a scene with the Ritz Brothers making an entrance playing plumbers and attracting the attentions of Mimi, who in this version is played as a thinly disguised nymphomaniac with a “thing” for proletarian men. This deleted scene survives and was included on the VHS tape as well as a “special feature” on the DVD, and I suspect the reason it was deleted was it ran afoul of the Production Code; certainly (as Charles pointed out the last time we watched On the Avenue) it makes the next plot point clearer, which is that even though the first version of the sketch wasn’t legally actionable, this one is. Mimi goes to see Dibble and demands that he either sell her the production or find himself sued and financially ruined, and once she’s the new owner of On the Avenue she hires 400 people to sit in the theatre and walk out once Gary and Mona (who was the one who worked up the nastier version of the Mimi Caraway sketch out of jealousy) start their big romantic duet. The big Broadway columnists write items about how Mimi humiliated Gary, and as a result he disappears and only Mona can find him — in an Italian restaurant (“played” by a set we’ve seen in innumerable movies!), trying to get over his humiliation by getting drunk.

Eventually it ends with a scene that was clearly “borrowed” from It Happened One Night three years earlier but also anticipates The Graduate three decades later: Mona goes to Mimi and tells her Gary is eating his heart out over her, and Mimi bails on her big wedding to the Arctic explorer and runs off with Gary to be married at City Hall. The End. On the Avenue was considered a big movie then, and for it 20^th Century-Fox hired America’s most popular songwriter, Irving Berlin, who contributed a dazzling score with several songs that have become standards — notably “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” and “This Year’s Kisses” — as well as some others that were big hits at the time, notably the big novelties “Slumming on Park Avenue” (with Alice Faye wearing a hideous outfit whose top is black with huge white polka dots; later Harry Ritz comes out in drag wearing the same thing, with his brothers mincing around him in a surprisingly homoerotic image for a Code-era film, and though they don’t appear together that way there’s a still photo of Faye and Harry Ritz posing together in the clothes, which Leonard Maltin ran in his book Movie Comedy Teams and captioned, “That outfit doesn’t look good on either of them”) and “He Ain’t Got Rhythm” (set in an observatory with Harry Ritz as an Einstein-esque scientist who, as the lyrics explain, “ain’t got rhythm/So no one’s with him/He’s the loneliest man in town”). They were recorded by all sorts of artists; “He Ain’t Got Rhythm” by Jimmie Lunceford’s band (with Joe Thomas singing and Eddie Durham contributing one of his pioneering solos on electric guitar), Benny Goodman (with the great Jimmy Rushing borrowed from Count Basie to do the vocal), and Billie Holiday with Teddy Wilson; Billie also recorded “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” and “This Year’s Kisses” (the latter in an incomparably beautiful version with Goodman and Lester Young) and Lunceford recorded “Slumming on Park Avenue” with vocals by the famous Lunceford Trio (who were actually sidemen in his band — Lunceford followed the older big-band tradition of having his instrumentalists, if they could sing, double as vocalists, instead of hiring people whose only job it was to sing).

The production numbers are staged by Seymour Felix, who went mostly for best-seat-in-the-theatre views and did not do the Busby Berkeley trick of having the numbers take place over far vaster areas of space than could be contained in a theatre, but whoever was in charge of the singing — and I suspect director Roy Del Ruth (an underrated filmmaker who made the first version of The Maltese Falcon at Warners in 1931 and had already toyed with the screwball/musical blend in Broadway Melody of 1936 at MGM) had something to do not only with that but also with the blessedly restrained singing Powell and Faye do in this movie. Though their voices are recognizable, Powell manages to calm down and project real emotion and feeling instead of just powering his way through each song (Michael Brooks likened his vocal performances in the Busby Berkeley movies at Warners to listening to a dentist’s drill), and Faye also brings a genuine sense of phrasing to her usual foghorn contralto. Faye is also fascinatingly photographed; in at least two scenes she wears a hat with a veil attached, and even when she isn’t so equipped cinematographer Lucien Andriot lights her and angles her close-ups the way Josef von Sternberg and his cinematographers (usually Bert Glennon) shot Marlene Dietrich. On the Avenue is a movie that deserves to be better known; not only does it have great songs by Irving Berlin at the height of his powers and people who knew how to sing them, the plot (imdb.com credits Berlin himself with the “original” story from which Gene Markey and William M. Conselman wrote the script) is genuinely charming and effective (and blessedly lacks the nastiness of Berlin’s films Holiday Inn and Blue Skies with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire — even Faye’s character, the most unscrupulous of the bunch, is redeemed by her self-sacrifice at the end), and Del Ruth proves his chops as a director; the all-night date between Powell and Carroll is especially beautifully staged and shot. Ironically, On the Avenue was remade by 20^th Century-Fox in 1960 to far less effect as Let’s Make Love, and in that version they flipped the genders of the leads: Marilyn Monroe played Dick Powell’s role and Yves Montand played Madeleine Carroll’s! — 5/16/15

Down Argentine Way (20th Century-Fox, 1940)

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

I set the alarm clock for 2:45 so I could do another tape change and record Down Argentine Way, the 1940 musical directed by Irving Cummings that made immediate stars of Betty Grable (she’d been in movies for a decade at that point, but this was the first time she’d played a leading role — she was a last-minute substitute for Alice Faye and would soon eclipse her) and Carmen Miranda (it was her first American film — she’d made five in Brazil before that, of which only fragmentary clips survive — and she was so busy with her appearances in the Shuberts’ nightclub and their Broadway revue Streets of Paris that her numbers were filmed in New York and spliced into the rest of the film, which was made in Hollywood). As usual with these types of movies, the plot was meaningless (a depressingly obvious intrigue about Argentinian horse owner Henry Stephenson, his son Don Ameche — whose attempts at a Spanish accent were strictly hit-or-miss — and his long-standing hatred for the American family represented by Grable and her aunt, played by Charlotte Greenwood in a performance that virtually stole the movie). The color was typically luscious and overwrought 20th Century-Fox color, the recreation of Argentina in the Hollywood hills actually fairly convincing (this, of course, to someone who’s never seen the original!), and while it’s hard to see why this movie made Betty Grable a star (we got very few glimpses of the legendary legs, and she was an indifferent singer and not a terribly charismatic personality, though as a dancer she was quite good), Miranda’s charisma comes through even in the crudely filmed numbers (a giveaway to her absence from Hollywood during this film’s production is her non-appearance in the final scene, which unites all the other principals in a big send-off reprise of the title song) and Harry Warren turned out to be a fairly credible composer of “South American” music (though when Miranda returned home to Brazil and began her big homecoming performance at the Casino de Urca in Rio with Jimmy McHugh’s “South American Way,” the song which opens this film, the home-town crowd booed her and the song as a pathetic imitation of their own musical styles). — 1/22/97

•••••

I got to Charles’ place, and since I didn’t want to do anything particularly “heavy” I brought the tape of Down Argentine Way and watched it with him. I’ve already commented on the film recently so I’ll just give Charles’ reactions; he was amused by it, amazed by the sheer athleticism of the Nicholas Brothers’ performance, and enthusiastically pointed out the profusion of blue objects in the film. I had told him earlier that once three-strip Technicolor was introduced, and filmmakers now had the ability to photograph blue, often they seemed to go out of their way to include blue objects just to show off the fact that they now could — both photographing things like the ocean and the sky that are naturally blue, and by making as many objects in the movie blue as they could where they had a choice in the matter. Much of Down Argentine Way takes place in nightclubs, and virtually all the nightclubs are painted blue, while almost all the people in them are wearing blue clothes — the men in dark-blue suits and the women in powder-blue dresses. When Don Ameche (in a dark blue suit) and Betty Grable (in a white blouse and a light-blue dress) venture out to the patio of one of the New York nightclubs, the furniture is blue, the railings are blue, the New York skyscrapers are blue and even the sky — the night sky, mind you — is blue. Later, when they have a similar scene together in a nightclub in Argentina, they step out onto the porch and even comment in the film’s dialogue how much it looks like the one in New York. It does, too — it also has blue furniture and a deep-blue night sky in the background! — 1/25/97

•••••

I broke open the Betty Grable DVD boxed set and ran Down Argentine Way, the 1940 musical in which Grable, after kicking around Hollywood for over a decade (she signed a contract with Fox when she was only 13, lying about her age to do so, and made her film debut in a huge chorus line in a 1929 revue film called Happy Days, then worked her way through Sam Goldwyn, RKO and Paramount, getting a featured number in the Astaire-Rogers classic The Gay Divorcée but otherwise going unnoticed until she went to New York, got cast in the second lead in the Cole Porter musical DuBarry Was a Lady and was signed by Fox again), stepped in at the last minute to replace an indisposed Alice Faye in an odd project that had originally been planned to co-star Faye and Desi Arnaz (of all people), only Desi also pulled out of the project at the last minute and Don Ameche replaced him. Down Argentine Way was one of a cycle of musicals made by various studios — primarily 20^th Century-Fox, RKO and Disney — to depict South America and help build public support for President Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy,” his attempt to improve U.S. relations with Latin America by making them less paternalistic. (FDR also was looking ahead to World War II and wanted the Latin American countries on the same side as the U.S. — had Nazi Germany been able to make trade deals with Latin American countries and obtained valuable resources, they could have kept the war going a lot longer than they did.) Grable got plugged into this movie when Faye had to withdraw at the last minute (an imdb.com “trivia” poster says Faye got appendicitis, though other sources I’ve read say she got pregnant) — and it made her an overnight star. It’s hard to see why; her performance is perfectly fine for a limited, multi-dimensional role, she dances superbly (she must have learned something from being on the same sets as Fred and Ginger!) and she projects an infectious personality, but only in the last number does she actually get to show the fabled “Million Dollar Legs” Fox later had insured for that amount with Lloyd’s of London. As Charles noted the last time we saw a Grable film in color (The Dolly Sisters, made in 1945), the real star of Down Argentine Way is Natalie Kalmus, the technical advisor who ran the Technicolor company (her estranged husband Herbert had invented the process and they continued to work together for two decades after they broke up as a couple) and insisted that the colors be neon-bright. From the moment we see the opening credit, with the film’s name and the cast (no one is billed above the title) in off-white against a throbbing blue background, we know we’re in for a visual feast. Scene after scene dazzles the eyes, though director Irving Cummings and cinematographers Leon Shamroy and Ray Rennahan (Rennahan was the Technicolor technician sent out to assist the studio cinematographer, yet another practice the Technicolor company insisted on if you were going to use their process) managed to dazzle without making the colors so overbearing that they become exhausting.

The very first scene we see is Carmen Miranda, making her U.S. film debut singing a Portuguese-language version of her hit song “South American Way,” which had made her a star in the Broadway revue Streets of Paris (also the show that made stars of Abbott and Costello) — it was in her contract with Fox that in every film she would get to sing at least one song in Portuguese, though she hadn’t moved to Hollywood yet. She was still performing at a New York nightclub owned by the Shuberts, who had brought her to the U.S. from Brazil, and as a result all her scenes were shot in a New York studio, which meant Fox’s set construction crews had to build two exactly identical interior sets of “El Tigre,” the nightclub in Buenos Aires where Miranda’s character performs, so Cummings and editor Barbara McLean could cut smoothly from the Hollywood set to the New York version so it would appear they were the same place. (This also explains why Miranda doesn’t appear in the big finale featuring the rest of the cast.) When the cast members aren’t singing and dancing, Down Argentine Way is a pretty conventional movie about, of all things, horse racing. It actually starts in New York, where Don Diego Quintana (Henry Stephenson doing his best C. Aubrey Smith impression, on top of which he tries to put a transparently phony “Latino” accent) has gone to show his horses, and the Crawford family — aunt Binnie (Charlotte Greenwood, a superb eccentric dancer and comic singer who practically steals this movie from the principals) and her niece, show rider Glenda (Betty Grable) — are also there, attempting to buy one of Don Diego’s horses despite Don Diego’s fierce animosity towards the entire Crawford family, which isn’t explained for several more reels but seems to have had its origins in 1925, when a jockey riding a Crawford horse deliberately fouled Don Diego’s star racer Tempestad, leading to the horse’s death. Of course, Don Diego’s son Ricardo (Don Ameche) not only doesn’t share his family’s animosity towards the Crawfords but falls in love with Glenda at first sight — and she with him, though the course of true love hits a few minor speed bumps thrown in its way by writers Rian James, Ralph Spence, Darrell Ware and Karl Tunberg (the last far more famous for writing another movie involving horses, the 1959 remake of Ben-Hur).

About half an hour into this movie the characters finally relocate to Argentina, where first Glenda and then Binnie fall in with the comic-relief character of a professional tour guide (Leonid Kinskey — yet another last-minute replacement for a cast member, Cesar Romero, who had to drop out at the last minute — who puts this whole cast one degree of separation from the Marx Brothers) and end up at El Tigre, where they get to hear Carmen Miranda sing “Mama Eu Quiero” (which I hadn’t realized until years later was a Brazilian song originally written in Portuguese, since I’d first heard it on a Victor 78 by Xavier Cugat, who sang it in Spanish) and see the Nicholas Brothers do a dazzling dance routine to the title song (excerpted years later in the MGM compilation That’s Dancing) that’s easily the best number in the movie. When Pepe Guizar’s guitar ensemble comes out next to re-establish the romantic “Argentinian” mood, all I could think was they must have been lamenting, “We have to follow the Nicholas Brothers?” The finale is a big horse race for which Ricardo, Glenda and the Quintanas’ stable boy Casiano (J. Carrol Naish) have secretly trained Furioso, Tempestad’s grandson and a potentially great flat-racing horse Don Diego has tried to remold into a show jumper (a reverse of the plot of the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races), for the big Argentinian handicap race at San Isidro, and Don Diego — who gave up horse racing after the death of Tempestad — reluctantly gets dragged into allowing Furioso to race. We’re supposed to believe that the horse is so good he wins the big race even with a crooked jockey (substituted at the last minute due to machinations by a syndicate of which that tour guide is part) trying to hold him back — actually I was hoping for a National Velvet-style finish in which Glenda, who’d been established as a horsewoman in the opening scene, knocks out the crooked jockey and takes Furioso’s reins herself to win the big race — and all ends happily. Down Argentine Way isn’t much as a movie — the songs aren’t all that special and the fake Latin accents of Don Ameche and the other white cast members playing Argentinians are risible (though Charles told me the Anglo actors actually pronounced Spanish pretty well) — but it holds up as entertainment thanks to the vivid colors, Grable’s infectious personality and the incredible specialties of Miranda and the Nicholases. — 5/15/15

Jack Benny Show: “Goldie, Fields and Glide" (CBS-TV,

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

Two nights ago Charles and I watched a March 21, 1954 episode of the Jack Benny Program called “Goldie, Fields and Glide,” a marvelous little gem of entertainment in which Benny’s guest stars were Bing Crosby and his lifetime friend George Burns. Benny and Burns did woefully little together (the only other collaboration I’ve seen of theirs is the Paramount film The Big Broadcast of 1937, a bit of a letdown) but they’re marvelous here. The gimmick is that Benny wants Bing Crosby as a guest on his TV show but worries that Bing will want too much money, so he’s invited both Bing and Burns to play golf with him — only they never get near the golf course. Benny has set up his valet, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson — who, because of Benny’s penchant for letting his sidekicks score off him, was virtually the only African-American comedian of the age who got to play street-wise instead of stupid — with a preposterous Keaton-esque contraption with which Rochester can rack Benny’s hammock, fan him, churn butter and make ice cream (Benny has decided to sell the last two items by sneaking his phone number onto Carnation trucks — at the time Carnation was George Burns’ sponsor and Lucky Strike cigarettes was Benny’s) all at the same time, though he runs out of limbs when Benny bids him answer his phone as well. Rochester is doing all this while reading a mystery novel called Murder in the Attic, and he gets so excited about the book that he starts pushing the treadmill of Benny’s hammock-rocker too fast, with the result that Benny goes flying off the contraption and into a tree. (The next thing that happens is Rochester answers Benny’s phone with, “The residence of Jack Benny, star of stage, screen, radio, TV and trying to be Tarzan.”)

Then there’s a marvelous send-up of vaudeville in which Benny recalls his days as “Glide” in the act “Goldie, Fields and Glide” — Goldie being Bing Crosby and Fields being George Burns. Their act, as Benny remembers it, consists of the three of them doing a soft-shoe dance to a typical song of the vaudeville era and a grim spoof of the song “Put Them All Together, They Spell Mother,” which Crosby sings more or less “straight” and Benny ridicules with a talking bridge that savages the cheap sentimentality of the song. When Crosby comes by he, Burns and Benny reminisce — Benny says to Crosby, “You didn’t become big until Paul Whiteman put you in front of the Coconut Grove,” and Crosby says to Burns, “And you didn’t become big until you put Gracie Allen in front of a justice of the peace.” Burns turns to the audience and says, “I’ve got a great comeback for that, but I’m saving it for my own show.” Later, Crosby insists on resting in the hammock — it’s a wonder he doesn’t ask Rochester for a pitcher of Minute Maid orange juice (Crosby co-owned the company) — and he agrees to do Benny’s show for a fee of $10,000. Benny responds by pushing the treadmill and rocking the hammock faster and faster, until Crosby flies off it into the tree — and Benny tells him, “I’m not letting you down until you lower your price.” Crosby refuses, and then the camera pans over to another tree where, lo and behold, Bob Hope is nestled. “You’d better do as he asks,” Hope tells Crosby. “I’ve been up here for four months now.” What’s amazing about this show is how matter-of-fact it was, how much a product of an era in which entertainment this good was considered routine — “Oh, just another Jack Benny show with Bing Crosby, George Burns and Bob Hope” — whereas today we watch with goop-eyed amazement that there were ever people this funny not only regularly featured on TV but beloved as superstars. It’s also jarring, to say the least, to see cigarettes advertised on TV (our source for the show was a commercial DVD that presented both this and the Liberace episode unedited and with the original commercials in place) — especially when a Mexican gardener with the obligatory Frito Bandido accent comes on and delivers the Lucky Strike pitch, albeit ostensibly talking about bananas; the show is obviously both using the strategy of embedding the commercials into the program and making fun of it!

Independent Lens: “Kumu Hina” (Qwaves/PBS, 2014/2015)

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

I ran Charles an hour-long PBS documentary I’d recorded a week before, an Independent Lens episode called “Kumu Hina” after its central character, a 49-year-old native Hawai’ian Transgender person who two decades earlier completed gender reassignment from male to female (as a male his first name was “Collin”!) but has continued to teach boys’ hula classes. One point this documentary — made by a Gay couple, Hawai’i residents Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson — makes is that where we mainlanders (haoles, the Hawai’ians call us) think of the hula as primarily a dance, it’s a lot more than that: it’s basically a means of spiritual communication and affirming one’s faith in being Hawai’ian and in Hawai’ian culture generally. The film makes the point that traditional Hawai’ian culture is a lot more accepting not only of Queer sexuality but gender ambiguity than mainland Anglo-American culture — indeed, the show overall reminded me of Two Spirits, the marvelous Independent Lens entry from four years ago about the brutal murder of Fred Martinez, a traditional Diné (Navajo) from Cortez, Colorado who was killed in a manner reminiscent of Matthew Shepard (only he didn’t become the poster boy for hate-crimes legislation the way Shepard did because he was a Native Transgender person whose sexuality and gender identity didn’t fit neatly into categories and wasn’t as merchandisable as a white cisgender Gay man like Shepard), and I’d like to think Kumu Hina was the sort of person Fred Martinez would have grown up to be had he been allowed to live to middle age. Interestingly, the term she uses for herself is mahu, a Hawai’ian word that translates to “Transgender” and seems to be the equivalent of the Navajo nahuatl. (Though Kumu otherwise presents completely as female, she’s never been able to raise her voice to a normal woman’s register, and in a degree of understanding and support almost incomprehensible to us mainlanders (especially given the way certain busybodies look for pedophiles under every rock and it’s inconceivable that most mainland schools, even in relatively “enlightened” urban areas, would allow a MTF Transgender person to teach a boys’ class in anything) she’s been allowed to lead the boys’ hula group — and she’s admitted into it and made the lead performer a female-to-male Transgender person named Ho’onani.

The three central characters in this program are Kumu, Ho’onani and Kumu’s (legally married) husband, a 25-year-old from Tonga named Hema who had never been off the island of Fiji when Kumu met him there. Hema rather ruefully acknowledges that before he met Kumu he never had any use for Queer people, and indeed would punch out his Gay brother when the brother tried to talk to him about his sexuality — and here he finds himself not only accepting but genuinely in love with a mahu. Interestingly, the couple are shown at home living the most banal life imaginable, and even when they get into an argument (something Hamer and Wilson said they wanted to show to make the portrait of Kumu’s life more nuanced) it’s a pretty common one among couples: Hema wants time-out from the relationship to hang out with his Tongan buddies male-to-male, and Kumu responds by going on a “road trip” with an old friend of hers, a fellow MTF Transgender person from the island of K’auai. The domestic life (and strife) between Kumu and Hema is counterpointed with the preparations at the Hawai’ian-culture school where Kumu teaches and where she’s rehearsing her grade-school-age hula troupe for their end-of-year public performance, with some of the boy-born-boys in the class both put out and jealous that their teacher has made Ho’onani the star, and where she’s also pleading with the boys to pay attention to their classwork because the preservation of traditional Hawai’ian language and culture is dependent on them learning it and making it an integral part of themselves and their identities.

Needless to say, Kumu Hina is also a story of cultural imperialism; when Christian missionaries came to Hawai’i they were predictably incensed that this culture not only accepted people with in-between sexual and gender identities but actually celebrated them, and they tried to burn it out of them the way the “Indian School” people on the U.S. mainland did, forbidding the indigenous people to speak Hawai’ian and forcing their kids into schools where they were taught the mores, values and prohibitions of white culture. At the same time it’s ironic in a film that aims to celebrate Hawai’ian culture and traditions, we see at least two sequences of people singing explicitly Christian songs and virtually all the Hawai’ian music we hear is accompanied by guitars and/or ukuleles — not parts of Hawai’i’s native traditions but brought to the islands by Mexicans who came to work there in the early 19^th century. It’s also amazing that the kids sing the old Hawai’ian national anthem and salute the Hawai’ian flag — which has the Union Jack in the upper left corner, reminding us that the first whites to “discover” Hawai’i were the British and they would likely have annexed it to the British Empire if we hadn’t grabbed it first. In some ways Kumu Hina is a pretty straightforward (maybe not the greatest word I could have picked there) entry in the growing repertoire of documentaries about Queer-accepting (and particularly Trans-accepting) native traditions that have been steamrollered by whites with their damned sky-god religions and attitude of moral superiority (there’s even a grimly funny bit when Hema comments on life in the U.S. that “all anyone cares about is money”), though Kumu Hina herself is a fascinating character and comes across as an inspiring mixture of personal charm and gritty determination — a postscript says that she ran for a seat on the council that administers the Office of Hawai’ian Affairs, though it doesn’t say (and I haven’t been able to find out online) whether or not she won.

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.