Fritz Lang Noir Smackdown! THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW vs. SCARLET STREET

March 24, 2012, 3:59 pm

≫ Next: TOPKAPI: Go Schmo!

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Before we get started, let’s have a big round of applause for Kristina Dijan of Speakeasy for suggesting this particular TotED post! Between chatting online at the Speakeasy site, The Dark Pages;Shadows and Satin, and Twitter, Kristina and I have discussed and good-naturedly joked about various film noirs. In a recent communiqué, we happened to discuss the similarities between two classic 1940s thrillers by Fritz Lang (1890—1976), namely 1944’s The Woman in the Window (TWitW)and 1945’s Scarlet Street (SS). Clever gal that she is, Kristina thought it would be great fun if I discussed both of these films, and before you could say, “Cheese it—the cops,” The Woman in the Window vs. Scarlet Street Smackdown was ready to rumble! Many thanks for the great suggestion, Kristina!

When I was a teenage movie buff (hey, maybe some fresh new classic blogger should give the titleI Was a Teenage Movie Buff a good home in some nice warm blog, if someone hasn’t already done so!But I digress….), I mostly knew who Fritz Lang was because of Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). It wasn’t until years later that I learned more about director/writer/producer Lang’s body of work. But once I finally had the opportunity to see these suspense dramas, both of them produced by Walter Wanger (Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 thriller Foreign Correspondent) and his beautiful and talented wife Joan Bennett, both films grabbed me and held me riveted to the TV, intrigued by those films’ similarities and differences! Also, both movies had Milton Krasner as Director of Photography (All About Eve, The Set-Up, the Oscar-winning Three Coins in the Fountain) but H.J. Salter composed the SS score, while TWitW was scored by Arthur Lang and an uncredited Hugo Friedhoffer, Charles Maxwell, and Bruno Mason.

With all due respect for Lang, I must admit that Edward G. Robinson was the main attraction in our little smackdown as far as I was concerned. Born Emmanuel Goldenberg in 1893 in Bucharest, Romania, Robinson emigrated to New York City with his family when he was 10. “Eddie,” as friends called him, rose to stardom playing gangsters and other tough guys in films like Little Caesar, Five Star Final, Tiger Shark, and the Damon Runyon/Howard Lindsay mobster comedy A Slight Case of Murder. However, during his long career, he also proved to be both a fine leading man and a character actor of great talent and range in such films as The Stranger (1946),The Prize(1963), and Robinson’s final role, in Soylent Green (1973), which particularly touched my heart. This time around, we’ll be seeing Robinson’s sensitive side as Our Man Eddie finds himself becoming putty in the hands of dangerous dames and conniving crooks! Where’s his sensible, fearless Double Indemnity character Barton Keyes when you need him?


Both TWitW and SS are set in my hometown, New York City, and both films have the same three stars: Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea. Taken at face value, it looks as if the leads in TWitW and SS are more or less playing the same character archetypes:

1. Our man Edward G. Robinson as a kind, dignified older gent whose quiet life is turned upside-down when he finds himself infatuated with a pretty young woman who may or may not make a chump out of him. Talk about “middle-age crazy!”
   
   
2. Joan Bennett as a beautiful young woman of negotiable affections, as Vinnie would say. She was a member of the renowned Bennett acting family, which included dad Richard Bennett, sister Constance Bennett of Topper fame, and younger sister Barbara Bennett of The Valley of Decision. Joan’s long, successful career included silent films; the 1933 version of Little Women; our director Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941); Father of the Bride (1950), with Joan as the mother of bride-to-be Elizabeth Taylor and the wife of comically beleaguered Spencer Tracy, followed by the sequel Father’s Little Dividend (1951); Dark Shadows on TV and in the feature film House of Dark Shadows; and Dario Argento’s giallo horror classic Suspiria (1977).She started her acting career as a blonde, but I think our Joan always looked best as a brunette, whether she played good girls or shady ladies.
   
   
3. Dan Duryea as a sleazy opportunist who’s not above blackmail and violence to get what he wants. For most of his long career, Duryea excelled at playing Guys We Love to Hate in such classics as Ball of Fire and Criss Cross (no relation to Robinson’s character in SS, but do read and enjoy our friend and fellow blogger John Greco’s stellar review at his blog Twenty-Four Frames!) A native of White Plains, New York (just a short drive from the Bronx neighborhood where I lived for much of my youth!), Duryea’s character actor career was born when he became a Broadway star in the original stage versions of Dead End and The Little Foxes, the latter starring the great Tallulah Bankhead. The Little Foxes also became Duryea’s Hollywood debut; this time he played opposite another powerhouse star, the great Bette Davis! Despite his usual roles as rotters and bounders, Duryea was by all accounts a nice guy in real life (indeed, he’d been a scoutmaster and a PTA parent!),

Let’s get this noir party started!

Dashing young Fritz Lang

The Woman in the Window (1944)

Versatile writer/producer/director Nunnally Johnson brought audiences such classic films as The Grapes of Wrath, The Three Faces of Eve, The Gunfighter, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and How to Marry a Millionaire. He proved to be quite adept at film noir with The Woman in the Window(TWitW), based on J.H. Wallis’ novel Once Off Guard. Wanger and Bennett had been feeling stifled at Universal, so along with Lang, they joined forces to create their production company Diana, named after their daughter, providing Lang with the artistic freedom he craved. It was the first time that Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea had worked together. TWitW was set mostly in Manhattan, with side trips to the Henry Hudson Parkway, leading from Manhattan to the Bronx to Westchester County, near where our family lived at the time. The scene in question involves our desperate heroes trying to ditch a corpse—but I’m getting ahead of myself! (I assure you it wasn’t nearly as scary when we actually lived there!) Our protagonist is Assistant Professor Richard Wanley (Robinson), who we first see lecturing about “Some Psychological Aspects of Homicide” at the fittingly named Gotham College. Somehow I get the feeling our hero’s knowledge on this particular topic has more to do with book smarts than street smarts! Although it’s clear that Richard truly loves his wife and kids, he and his friends are nevertheless “summer bachelors” in the city while their wives and kids head for the country for fresh air and sunshine. But when the fam’s away, will the husbands stray? Is it beer o’clock and the boys are buying? Richard, for one, is perfectly happy to take it easy at his men’s club with a good book.

Richard was gonna read  King Solomon's Mines, but this is more fun!

Richard first sees the titular portrait of a beautiful, ethereal brunette in the window of a midtown Manhattan art gallery. His colleagues, District Attorney Frank Lalor (Raymond Massey of Mackenna’s Gold;Abe Lincoln in Illinois;The Fountainhead; and Arsenic and Old Lace, in which Massey replaced original Broadway cast member Boris Karloff) and Dr. Michael Barkstane (Edmund Breon of Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Gaslight; The Thing from Another World) have been admiring the portrait, too, playfully anointing her “our dream girl.” DA Frank gives his friends a word of friendly caution: “In the District Attorney’s office, we see what happens to middle-aged men who try acting like colts.” Hey, Massey played Abe Lincoln; he wouldn’t kid us about a thing like that!

What a picture: Still Life with Horndog

When Richard leaves after dark, he’s startled by a reflection in the art gallery’s glass window. It’s the woman in the window herself, lovely young Alice Reed (Bennett). She has a sweet smile and a frisson of loneliness about her, so Richard gallantly escorts her home for a nightcap. She shows him her etchings, ruefully mentioning that a man is paying for her swanky apartment. Richard and Alice chat and chastely enjoy each other’s company and champagne. Richard isn’t the two-timing type, though he does admit that “I should say no, I know, but I haven’t the slightest intention of saying it.” How about saying, “Help! Police!” Suddenly an older man wearing one of those straw boater hats bursts into Alice’s apartment and flies into a murderous rage—knocking over furniture, breaking glass, the works! It’s kill or be killed for poor Richard, and since they didn’t have anger management classes back in 1944, Richard fights back. To the horror of all concerned, Richard ends up killing Boater Hat Man in self-defense. They’re both panicky since Alice’s late sugar daddy was meeting her at the apartment on the sly. They pull themselves together and improvise a desperate plan to save their skins: if Richard leaves one of his belongings behind for Alice, and she leaves something for him, that’ll be a clue in case, God forbid, Richard doesn’t come back. In addition to the vest Richard opts to leave behind, Alice has another clue she only discovers after Richard bundles up Boater Hat’s corpse and leaves: his monogrammed pen!

I honestly didn't know where this joke came from -- the hubby had to show me!

Look who's playing Eddie G's son: fellow Little Rascal Bobby Blake!

What a crazy party! Mama told me not to come!

The suspense is nerve-wracking; every time Richard seems to have put the killing behind him, some new wrinkle emerges to taunt him. Will Richard’s loose brakes be our hero’s bad break? Will the critters who live along the Henry Hudson Parkway find the dead hothead has become a maggot condo? And what about Heidt (Duryea), the oily opportunist who smells an opportunity for blackmail? Things get worse when the dead man is finally found by the Bronx River Parkway Extension. He’s no Sterno bum that nobody will miss: he’s financier Claude Mazard (Arthur Loft from The Glass Key—and our other Fritz Lang Smackdown movie, Scarlet Street!), who was apparently always quick to anger. That’s what you get for underestimating quiet, unassuming college professors!

George “Spanky” McFarland of The Little Rascals/Our Gang has an uncredited role in TWitW, but it’s my favorite bit in the movie! He plays the Boy Scout in the newsreel who makes the gruesome discovery…

“I was practicing woodcraft in the woods just off the Bronx River Parkway Extension when I found Mr. Mazard’s remains. No, I was not scared. A Boy Scout is never scared. If I get the reward, I will send my younger brother to some good college, and I will go to Harvard.”

"Honest, dude, this isn't the WWE tryouts!"

Frank is on the case, and he brings Richard along, saying it’ll be an interesting adventure. But is he really trying to trap Richard, or is it plain old paranoia? It doesn’t help that our hero keeps slipping up and innocently commenting on incriminating evidence. I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone who hasn’t seen TWitW, but I will say the denouement either leaves audiences relieved, laughing, or furious.SPOILER-ISH: Personally, I like it, if only because I’m a sucker for a funny, upbeat ending!


 

Venerable film icon Fritz Lang

Scarlet Street (1945)
Named in honor of Greenwich Village’s famous Carmine Street, one of the world’s most celebrated art meccas, it’s almost a miracle that SS was able to be shown in neighborhood theaters at all back in 1945! It was initially banned in New York, Milwaukee, and Atlanta for fear that its “obscene, immoral, inhuman, sacrilegious” subject matter might turn decent moviegoers everywhere into hordes of hooligans. In any case, SS eventually got away with minor cuts, and Joe and Josie Average could watch it in their hometown bijou and make up their own minds about the flick.

I like the stylized artwork here; perfect for phony Kitty!

Kitty and Johnny were lovers—and layabouts, too busy with their “mad love” schtick to check Chris’ bank account and see if he’s rich enough to sponge off of.

Set in New York City, Robinson stars as our protagonist Christopher “Chris” Cross (no puns intended about Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train). As the film begins, Chris is being feted by his company for his 25 years of faithful service (or is that servitude?) as cashier for clothing retailer J.J. Hogarth & Company. Chris is happy as can be with his lovely inscribed pocket watch, and everything’s jake until Chris’ colleagues insist that their clean-cut compadre live a little. So he shares a smoke with them, and wouldn’t you know the men all light up using the same lit cigar, despite Chris’ superstitious reaction (including crossing his fingers)? Haven’t these guys ever seenThree on a Match?(If not, see FlickChick’s Three on a Match review over at A Person in the Dark from last fall!)  With life seemingly bypassing Chris and his cronies now that they’re nearing retirement age (I say they should stop whining and use their free time to mentor kids or something!), it’s no wonder they stare longingly, if not lasciviously, at the beautiful blonde in the big boss’ limo, clearly being pampered by her rich sugar daddy. But Chris has his own simple pleasures, like his hobby, painting—that is, when his harridan wife Adele (British character actress Rosalind Ivan) isn’t nagging him or reminiscing about her late heroic husband, Detective Homer Higgins, who drowned trying to save a woman in the East River. The pose in Homer’s portrait is hilariously pompous, and I love the dry disdain that slips into Chris’ tone when he says Homer’s name. It reminds me a bit of the scene in Witness for the Prosecution when Elsa Lanchester’s chirpy, peripatetic Miss Plimsoll chatters about her lawyer fiancee’s death: “Peritonitis set in, and he went like that (snapping her fingers).” Charles Laughton growls, “He certainly was a lucky lawyer.” Ever “supportive,” Adele constantly belittles his neo-primitive artwork, which others say lacks perspective. Too bad Adele didn’t join Homer in the East River! Sheesh, with all those negative, browbeating busybodies breathing down Chris’ neck, Michelangelo himself would be so distracted that he’d be lucky to finish drawing a stick figure, much less create a decent painting! It’s almost funny to hear Chris and his aging colleague Charlie (Samuel S. Hinds, whose resume includes Buck Privates; It’s a Wonderful Life; Call Northside 777) talk about having too much time on their hands, when nowadays so many people are either overscheduled or while away too much time on TV or the Internet. Can I get the free time that our hapless hero finds himself in, minus the agita?

Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Chris' dignity?

After the company dinner, Chris sets out for his Brooklyn apartment, and finds himself losing both his perspective and his sense of direction in the streets of Greenwich Village while he tries to find his way back home. (For those who aren’t familiar with the Village’s layout, things get tricky once you leave Manhattan’s numbered streets and find yourself confronting actual street names such as Perry Street, Barrow Street, and Houston Street, the latter being pronounced “House-ton.”) He comes across upon a pretty young brunette in a see-through raincoat who’s being assaulted by an equally young ruffian. Chris gets his Sir Galahad moment as he smashes the jerk with his umbrella in the great Foul Play tradition!
The brunette’s name is Katherine “Kitty” Marsh, a slightly naïve yet bold and beguiling brunette whose hints of tawdriness go sailing over Chris’ poor innocent head. For a tawdry dame, she sure has a smart Travis Banton wardrobe, especially after Chris becomes her sugar daddy.(For some reason, the IMDb doesn’t show Travis Banton’s SS screen credit, but you can read Christian Esquevin’s great 2010 “Batty for Banton” post over at Silver Screen Modiste!) Flattering our Gent of a Certain Age, Kitty coos, “You’re not so old…You’re not a boy, you’re just mature.” As they share a drink at local watering hole Tiny’s, Chris unwittingly talks about his love of painting in ways that mislead Kitty into thinking Chris is a man of financial means, and persuades Chris to get a gorgeous pad on the titular street that he can use to paint in peace. What’s more, the joint used to belong to renowned artist Diego Rivera, no less (including pictures he drew randomly around the house)!
Part of me wanted to hug Chris because I felt badly for him, while another side of me wanted to shake him by the shoulders, yelling, “Dude, snap out of it! That dame is trouble! Scram outta there and stay out, before it’s too late!” Besotted Chris doesn’t realize that the ruffian he smacked with his umbrella also happens to be the ironically-named Johnny Prince (Duryea), who happens to be Kitty’s boyfriend, though Kitty’s passing Johnny off as her friend/roomie Millie’s beau when Chris is around. People will say they’re in love, though the understandably cynical Millie (Margaret Lindsay from Jezebel;Bordertown;The Dragon Murder Case; The House of the Seven Gables; and the Ellery Queen movies of the 1940s) begs to differ, since it’s clear to her that Kitty and Johnny, shall we say, like it rough (maybe Kitty had an abusive childhood):

Millie:“That guy pushes you around the way I wouldn’t push a cat around.”
Kitty:“You wouldn’t know love it if hit you in the face.”
Millie (as Kitty storms out): “If that’s where it hits you, you oughta know!”

The look of love? Not for conniving Kitty!

What’s more, Kitty comes honestly by her nickname, “Lazy Legs.” She may have gorgeous Banton clothes, but with her apparent allergy to work (including housework), she won’t be seeking employment as a cleaning lady anytime soon! Things get even crazier when Johnny decides to get Chris’ paintings evaluated—and bona-fide art critics love them! In rapid succession, sly Johnny becomes Kitty’s agent; Adele sees the amazing art of “Katherine Marsh;” Chris finds out Kitty's been selling his paintings under an alias—and he’s thrilled, because now he thinks this will help him keep Kitty! I’ll say this for Chris: he sure knows how to take life’s lemons and make lemonade, without noticing any sour aftertaste.  It’s enough to keep your head spinning as screenwriter Nichols’ tangled but compelling web also encompasses Det. Homer Higgins (Charles Kemper of Intruder in the Dust, The Southerner, Where Danger Lives) who’s now a bum back from the dead (he couldn’t stand Adele, either, so he faked his death) and willing to stay that way—for a price. It all ends in betrayal, murder, misery, and frame-ups that stick. Alas, poor Chris’ basic decency is no match for his guilty conscience as the voices of the dead taunt him, dooming him to walk all over New York, homeless and hopeless. With the crazy twists and turns plot-wise and emotion-wise, at times it’s almost like a pitch-black comedy (not necessarily a bad thing)!

Wonder if this toenail-painting scene gave Kevin Smith the idea for Clerks?

Even considering its then-controversial subject matter, SS certainly had an impressive pedigree, including a script by Dudley Nichols adapted from Jean Renoir’s 1931 French melodrama La Chienne (The Bitch). Nichols had already grabbed Hollywood’s attention when he won the Best Screenplay Oscar in 1936 for The Informer—and refused it, in order to show solidarity with his colleagues at The Screen Actors Guild, who were on strike at the time. I wonder if that’s what gave Marlon Brando the “Sacheen Littlefeather” idea back in the 1970s? (Nichols eventually got his Oscar statuette in his hot little hands in 1949.) Nichols went on to write such classic screenplays as Bringing Up Baby (1938), Stagecoach (1939), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), and And Then There Were None (1945).  I found myself wishing that Ball of Fire’s Professor Potts and Sugarpuss O’Shea could’ve shown up to have an intervention with Chris before he got in too deep! Consider this a compliment, because it means Lang and Nichols made me care about these characters, especially poor hapless Chris. This role captures Robinson at his most endearingly, tragically vulnerable. How the man never won an Oscar in competition is one of the Academy’s mysteries. Yeah, I know Cary Grant and Myrna Loy and countless other greats didn’t get Oscars or even nominations, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. At least he reportedly knew he was going to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award before he died of cancer, though it’s a shame Eddie didn’t live long enough to enjoy even that honor. I’m glad we have so many of his movies to remember him by and enjoy, though!

Decision:  If you like your Fritz Lang film noirs with a spoonful of hope, chances are you'll love The Woman in the Window.  If you like yourFritz Lang noirs dark, with wry gallows humor, head for Scarlet Street.
See, there's something for everyone!

Bonus! !:George "Spanky" McFarland's show-stealing moment in The Woman in the Window!

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TOPKAPI: Go Schmo!

April 20, 2012, 11:52 am

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I first saw United Artists/Filmways’ Topkapiwith my older siblings onone of our local New York TV stations during my grade school days in the Bronx, where Topkapi’s director/producer Jules Dassin happened to have spent much of his own youth. They liked it, but I must confess that at the time, Topkapi’s inimitable leading lady Melina Mercouri kinda freaked me out!  Of course, at the time I didn’t realize Mercouri was an international star. All I knew about her was that she was a blonde lady with dark kohl-rimmed eyes, who spoke in a low, growling voice and had a predatory look. (At the time, Mom had taught me what “predatory” meant, and I was pretty darn proud to have learned how to memorize it right away!) She had a witchy look and a booming laugh that sounded scary to me at the time as she exulted, “That’s the way it can be done!”

But what a difference a decade makes!  When I watched Topkapi again in my teens, what I’d thought was witchy was now bewitching. I ended up loving it for Manos Hadjdakis’ zesty music; the colorful locations in Istanbul (not Constantinople), as well as Paris, France at the Boulogne-Billancourt Studios; and of course, its great cast of confident, breezy, likable bon vivants (more about them in a moment)!  In fact, the only problem I had with Topkapi in later viewings was that the strobe effect of the rays and blinking lights in the opening credits initially triggered my migraines! Luckily, we figured out how to fine-tune the TV, and the problem was solved. (Reading fellow blogger Vulnavia Morbius’ take on Topkapi in her own excellent Krell Laboratories blog from last year, I see she is apparently lucky enough to have no problems with Topkapi’s opening light effects, lucky gal that she is!  But I digress….)

As The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther said in the opening lines of his 1964 Topkapi review, “Imagine Jules Dassin’s Rififi done in the spirit and style of his comical Never on Sunday and you have a good idea of the nature of his latest film, Topkapi (pronounced top-cappy)….”   If Dassin’s landmark 1954 thriller Rififi is the dark side of the caper film, then his 1964 follow-up Topkapi was Rififi on the sunnier, funnier, more stylishly playful side of the street with its witty, suspenseful screenplay by Monja Danischewsky (his screenwriting credits include Ealing Studios’ Whisky Galore! and Rockets Galore!,a.k.a.Mad Little Island), loosely adapted from Eric Ambler’s novel The Light of Day.

The first character we meet is our dazzling leading lady (Mercouri), who calls herself Elizabeth Lipp because it’s “convenient.”  She introduces herself to us viewers in a most kaleidoscopic fashion, her voice and attitude smokier than a five-alarm fire. Elizabeth explains that we’re in Istanbul, Turkey, in the Seraglio’s Topkapi Palace Museum. Many moons ago, before the museum became a tourist attraction, the joint was the home of SultanMahmud I and his many wives. When Elizabeth literally beckons us viewers to follow her, we’re intrigued before we start!  But our gal isn’t really greedy; of all the museum’s treasures, Elizabeth is only interested in a particular golden dagger adorned with “the four greatest emeralds the world has ever known,” bringing new meaning to the phrase “the wearing of the green.” For the record, Elizabeth seems especially keen on the rectangular emerald. As she leans against the glass, “a strange feeling comes over me,” she moans, almost orgasmically. Director of Photography Henri Alekan (Roman Holiday; the 1946 version of Beauty and the Beast;Wings of Desire) truly makes Mercouri look like she’s making sweet love to the camera!

Babe in Toyland!

Elizabeth leaves Turkey for Paris, where we meet her former flame: suave, Swiss Walter Harper (Maximilian Schell, Oscar-winner for Judgment at Nuremberg; Oscar-nominee for The Man in the Glass Booth and Julia; and scene-stealer in one of my favorite Adrien Brody films, The Brothers Bloom). Oh, did I mention that Walter happens to be holding a gun to a man’s back at the time? Luckily for his nervous mark, Walter pleasantly lets the guy leave with his life. Elizabeth has been watching, and the pair is more than happy to pick up where they left off, both romance-wise and theft-wise—and why not, with their great chemistry? Here’s one of my favorite bits of dialogue:

Elizabeth:“Do you mind that I am a nymphomaniac?”
Walter:“It’s your most endearing quality.”
Elizabeth:“Don’t waste it, use it.” (Couple time ensues.)

"I wish I may, I wish I might, steal the jewels I wish tonight!"

Walter is on board with Elizabeth’s dagger heist plan, on one condition: he’ll only work with amateurs who have no pesky police records that might tip off John Law and trip up our happy thieves. The recruits include:

• Englishman Cedric Page, eccentric but genial inventor and whimsical master of all things mechanical, including security systems. He’s played with mischievous delight by the great Robert Morley from TheAfrican Queen; Hot Millions (more about that shortly, too); Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe; and Theatre of Blood, among others;
• Muscular Hans Fischer (Indiana-born character actor Jess Hahn, who mostly performed in foreign films) to help with heavy lifting and the like;
• Giulio the Human Fly (French actor/writer/songwriter/acrobat Gilles Ségal), the mute acrobat who actually steals the dagger as he’s lowered from the museum ceiling to outfox the floor-mounted alarm. Word has it Ségal’s stunts inspired the trickwire stunts for both the original TV seriesand the Tom Cruise movie versions of Mission: Impossible..

Objects in the rear-view mirror may be more cowardly than they appear!

I needed this today?!

Now all the gang needs is a patsy to throw the police off the scent. Enter bumbling jack-of-all-trades and small-time would-be con man Arthur Simon Simpson, succinctly described by Walter as “a historian, guide, and schmo.” Arthur is played endearingly and effortlessly by Team Bartilucci fave Peter Ustinov, one of the funniest and most versatile men who ever graced stage, screen (big and small), and comedy albums. Ustinov not only won the second of his two Best Supporting Actor Oscars for Topkapi (he’d previously won for Spartacus in 1961)  but he and Ira Wallach also received Oscar nominations in 1968 for their hilarious screenplay for the clever caper comedy Hot Millions. And of course, let’s not forget Ustinov’s turns in Logan’s Run; the animated Grendel Grendel Grendel (another Team B. fave); and several delightful whodunits based on Dame Agatha Christie’s mysteries about the beloved detective Hercule Poirot, among many others.  As you’ve probably noticed, we could cheerfully blather away about all things Ustinov in a blog post all about the great man himself, but we’ll do our best to pull ourselves together and focus on Topkapi!

Gerven knows how to make guests feel welcome!

Melina coaxes Max out of his Schell!

Laughter is the best medicine for jewel heists! Who knew?

Now then, where were we? Ah yes, Elizabeth and Walter need a schmo for their heist plan. Even the tourists don’t take Arthur seriously—especially those who he’s tried to expose to local night life—sidestepping him as if he had dog poop permanently stuck to his shoe. In short, Arthur is perfect for our thieves’ purposes!  They hire him to drive a white luxury Lincoln convertible into Turkey which, as the B-52’s sang, seats about twenty. Little does Arthur realize the car’s full of hidden explosives and firearms for the upcoming robbery, and he’s been set up as the poor patsy driver in case there’s trouble at the border!  Arthur’s role in the scheme almost literally blows up in his face, especially when Turkish Customs officials see that Arthur’s passport has long since expired (maybe Arthur and Oscar Homolka’s Prof. Gurkakoff from Ball of Fire can trade expired-drivers’ license anedotes). The car is searched, the firearms are confiscated, and Arthur becomes the catch of the day: Grilled Simpson!  The Turkish Secret Police, led by  the sinister yet undeniably cool-looking Major Ali Tufan (Turkish actor Ege Ernart) and his colleague Harback (character actor Tito Vandis, billed here as “Titos Wandis.” His many roles include The Exorcist; Never on Sunday with Mercouri; and Team B.’s favorite among his roles, the lovesick shepherd from Woody Allen’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* [*but were afraid to ask]).  Major Tufan and Harback are sure our gang is plotting an assassination at an upcoming military parade, and they recruit Arthur to spy on our lovable rogues, under threat of death! The joke’s on them, as Arthur is as much of a bumbling spy as he is a bumbling con man, trying to  pass along useless intel in cigarette packs. Too bad Arthur doesn’t seem to have gotten the hang of thorough toilet-flushing. And we’re not even in the Topkapi Museum yet!  But as they say, getting there is half the fun—heck, it’s all the fun, especially with a suspenseful climactic robbery sequence that rivals Dassin’s own Rififi! Akim Tamiroff(his roles ranged from Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek to Touch of Evil and other Orson Welles films, and so much more!),is another scene-stealer as Gerven, a drunken cook who unwittingly throws a new monkey wrench in the works. I can say no more for fear of giving away any more of Topkapi’s sparkling surprises (and we don’t just mean emeralds), but I will say it includes my favorite usage of the phrase “A little bird told me.”

Joseph Dassin, Jules' son: proof that nepotism can be a wonderful thing!

Fun Facts: In Ustinov in Focus by Tony Thomas, Ustinov admitted, "I have a special affection for Topkapi. The character is so absurd. I love the idea of a man who aims low and misses. Simpson is the kind of man who wears blazers a little too consistently, the kind with military presumptions, who has to belong to a cricket club. He's a man who hovers between the more reprehensible columns of The News of the World and oblivion." Also, Joseph Dassin, singer/songwriter son of director/producer Jules Dassin, plays Josef, dashing proprietor of the traveling fair display that’ll spirit the dagger out of the country. It proves that nepotism can be a wonderful thing! 

Would it surprise anyone to hear that soon after its theatrical success, Topkapi inspired a real-life theft in my hometown? Three men broke into New York City’s  American Museum of Natural History and escaped with the famous Star of India, the De Long Ruby, and other priceless treasures. They were eventually caught, and admitted in custody that they had seen Topkapi prior to their robbery. See, life sometimes does imitate art!

Arthur has vertigo! When did this become a Hitchcock movie?

The Annual 43-Man Squamish Tournament begins!

As Elizabeth Lipp, Melina Mercouri can join our Red Hat Society anytime!

Nobody's here but us thieves!

I got me a Lincoln, it seats about twenty....

By DorianTB

LADY ON A TRAIN: The Singing Detective

May 4, 2012, 10:24 pm

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My interest in the Christmas-season 1945 comedy-thriller Lady on a Train(LoaT, not to be confused with SoaT, the abbreviation of Strangers on a Train) and its beloved star, singer/actress Deanna Durbin, began with our friend and fellow classic movie blogger Michael Troutman of I Shoot the Pictures. In December 2011, Michael had innocently let it slip that that he wasn’t acquainted with the winsome Miss Durbin’s movies. Three of our awesome fellow bloggers felt strongly that it was time for Michael to become acquainted with Durbin’s work: whistlinggypsy of Distant Voices and Flickering Shadows; Page of My Love of Old Hollywood; and Jessica of Comet Over Hollywood. Together they, shall we say, encouraged Michael, and the result was a delightful six-part series of blog posts titled My Deanna Durbin Punishment (see links at the end of this post).

I’ve always loved comedy-thrillers ranging from Bob Hope in The Ghost Breakers and My Favorite Brunette, to Charade, to Foul Play and so many more, so when I read Michael’s blog post about LoaT, I couldn’t resist tracking it down, and I’m glad I did, because it was great fun!  So I thank Michael—and by extension, whistlinggypsy, Page, and Jessica—for helping me discover another comedy-thriller to add to my collection. I’m delighted to say it was well worth seeing—again and again, at that!

As heroine Nikki Collins, Deanna Durbin has great pipes and great gams!

LoaT’s script was based on a story by Leslie Charteris of The Saint fame, with a screenplay by Edmund Beloin (My Favorite Brunette; My Favorite Spy; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; The Great Lover; Donovan’s Reef) and Robert O’Brien (By the Light of the Silvery Moon; Fancy Pants; The Lemon Drop Kid; and many TV series, including The Red Skelton Hour; Here’s Lucy; and The Lucy Show). That’s a fairly long way from the classic 1936 short “Every Sunday”that put both Durbin and Judy Garland on the map (more about that here, at the TCM Web site)!  By 1945, the young girl with the amazingly mature, operatic coloratura singing voice had blossomed into a lovely young woman. To this reader, Durbin proved to have legs in every sense of the term, showcasing her gorgeous gams and her flair for fast-talking comedy in the opening scene on the titular train, where we meet Durbin’s character, San Francisco debutante Nikki Collins. While Nikki waits for her cross-country train to stop at New York City’s Grand Central Station (yay, another comedy-suspense movie set in my hometown!), she’s devouring another page of the juicy mystery novel she’s been reading, The Case of the Headless Bride by best-selling mystery author Wayne Morgan. And what a page-turner it is, as Nikki reads aloud:

"'I killed him. I had to kill him. I thought I’d be safe.’ Over and over, the words droned through her mind. And yet, with a cold, horrible certainty, she knew that death was outside….”

Is there any shadow of a doubt that Nikki saw a rear window murder? (Note the telltale slippers!)

Yeah, outside the elevated window of another passing train, where Nikki sees two men: an older, white-haired gent, and an apparently younger man in a hat. The men argue, and then Hat Man pulls down the window shade, and *WHAM*, here comes death by crowbar!  Naturally, nobody believes Nikki, especially when she’s toting The Case of the Headless Bride to read while she’s waiting for someone to take her seriously. Nikki’s credibility is apparently often in question since she tends to jump to conclusions, like the time she was sure a buck-toothed gent at the Golden Gate Bridge was in fact a Japanese spy. It’s up to our spunky, adorably sly (if somewhat naïve) heroine to take the initiative, solve the case, and redeem herself!

Wayne Morgan demonstrates the stark realistic storytelling that keeps thriller readers eager for more!

Nikki is visiting her Aunt Martha in The Big Apple for her Christmas vacation. Her busy but loving dad in San Francisco has provided her with an Assistant in Charge of Keeping Nikki Out of Trouble: the jittery Mr. Haskell from the New York office. Haskell is played by one of Team Bartilucci’s favorite character actors, the ever-delightful and effortlessly funny Edward Everett Horton, whose long career ranged from films such as The Gay Divorcee; Here Comes Mr. Jordan; Arsenic and Old Lace; and even the Fractured Fairy Tales narrator on TV’s animated Rocky and His Friends. Poor Mr. Haskell is always being charmingly and hilariously bamboozled by Nikki, and/or being knocked out by no-goodniks; I hope they pay him well!  Even when poor Haskell gets a little down time, Nikki’s still on the case, dashing around New York and environs, getting mixed up in hairstyles and Howard Greer fashions ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous (one of her hairstyles is a double-bun Princess Leia would have been proud to wear).

Mr. Haskell may feel fresh as a daisy after being clobbered by bad guys, but he looks like a black-eyed susan to us!

Amateur detective Nikki attempts to contact mystery author Wayne Morgan for help, and she gets a break when she tracks down the increasingly bewitched, bothered, bewildered  and eventually happily besotted Wayne (David Bruce from A Dispatch from Reuters; The Sea Hawk; Sergeant York; a bit part in The Letter; and the dark holiday noir Christmas Holiday with Durbin). She catches him in a movie theater where she tries to talk about the murder with Wayne, much to the annoyance of the moviegoers—especially Wayne’s fiancée, self-centered fashion model Joyce Williams (Patricia Morison from The Fallen Sparrow; the 1946 Sherlock Holmes mystery Dressed to Kill;Without Love; and ironically, two films you’d think might be musicals but weren’t: Song of the Thin Man and the Oscar-winning The Song of Bernadette), who’s trying to enjoy a newsreel of herself modeling the latest fashions. Nikki’s persistence pays off when she sees a newsreel about the dead man! The deceased is ship magnate Josiah Waring (Thurston Hall of The Great Lie; Theodora Goes Wild; and the role he’s best known for here at Team Bartilucci H.Q.: blustery credit-stealing boss Mr. Pierce in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty). And wouldn’t you know the newsreel mentions the whereabouts of The Willows, where the Waring estate is? (Nowadays, the joint would probably be crawling with armed guards and other kinds of security!)

Did you know Nikki is a master of disguise? Here she is as an unusually pensive Pippi Longstocking!

When Nikki trespasses and finagles her way into The Willows, she arrives just in time for the reading of Josiah Waring’s will. We find that Waring was not only a ship magnate, but also a chick magnet when our amateur sleuth Nikki is mistaken for nightclub entertainer Margo Martin, Waring’s beloved mistress. (I was rather touched when we finally met the real Margo Martin, played by Maria Palmer from By the Light of the Silvery Moon. In her scenes, she truly seems to be heartbroken over Waring’s death.)  Samuel S. Hinds, who played Edward G. Robinson’s retired pal in Scarlet Street, appears briefly as the Waring family’s lawyer in the gathering at The Willows. Before Nikki knows it, she’s embroiled in all manner of suspense and zaniness, with incriminating bedroom slippers and two Waring heirs making eyes at her: Arnold (Dan Duryea of Ball of Fire,The Woman in the Window,andScarlet Street, in a more likable mold), and his brother Jonathan (versatile Ralph Bellamy, best known for never getting the girl but always charming about it in comedies like The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday, as well as thrillers like Rosemary’s Baby, not to mention Team B. fave Trading Places).  As you can see, LoaT is brimming with great character actors, including Elizabeth Patterson (best known by TV fans as babysitter Mrs. Trumbull on TV’s I Love Lucy, but also a memorable character actress in Intruder in the Dust; Hail the Conquering Hero; Miss Tatlock’s Millions; I Married a Witch; Remember the Night, and more) and George Coulouris (Arabesque; Murder on the Orient Express; Citizen Kane, appropriate considering the Citizen Kane shoutouts in LoaT).

Clever Nikki sneaks onto the Waring estate disguised as a weather vane!

And of course, with Deanna Durbin as the star, you know music will fill the air!  The songs really do fit smoothly into the plot. My favorites among her numbers here include her soulful performance of “Silent Night” sung to her dad—while Waring chauffeur/henchman Danny (Allen Jenkins from Ball of Fire; The Falcon Takes Over; Pillow Talk; TV’s animated Top Cat) waits to strangle her, only to find himself all teary-eyed as Nikki sings. Music soothes the savage beast—at least until Danny knocks out Wayne and Mr. Haskell well after Nikki is safe! Then there’s our heroine’s hot, playfully sexy rendition of “Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya, Huh?,” sung to Wayne at The Circus Club, a theme nightclub that’s bigger than a Hollywood soundstage (with equally big doormen, including Lock Martin, Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still). I got a kick out of that dreamy look in Wayne’s eyes! I must confess, however, that I thought Durbin’s torchy rendition of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” could have been more torchy and less operatic; somehow I felt like she needed to cut loose a bit more with her rendition. Speaking of music, as a Miklos Rosza fan, I really enjoyed LoaT’s musical score; its blend of suspenseful notes and comical touches was perfect for the film. And I love that final scene; wonder if it’s where Alfred Hitchcock got the idea in North by Northwest?

Born Edna Mae Durbin on December 4^th, 1921 in Canada (where my dear hubby and Team Bartilucci computer whiz Vinnie was born), in the 1930s and ’40s, wunderkind coloratura Durbin became to Universal what Judy Garland eventually became to MGM: a wholesome, wildly popular singing movie star. Durbin also proved to be a compelling actress in a Screen Guild Players radio version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt on CBS.

According to Margarita Landazuri’s TCM article, producer Felix Jackson married Durbin soon after making LoaT, but they divorced in 1948. Durbin retired from movies in 1950 and moved to France with her husband and LoaT director Charles David, who’d also been the production manager on La Chienne, remade in the U.S. as Scarlet Street. Durbin and David reportedly lived happily together until David’s death in 1999 at 92. As of this writing, Durbin is still alive and well and, by her own choice, happily out of the spotlight.

Santa, baby, hurry down the chimney tonight! (And bring me a blackjack in case of unexpected visitors, OK?)

Wanna follow Michael Troutman's My Deanna Durbin Punishment series? Here are the links!

Part 1 of Michael Troutman’s My Deanna Durbin Punishmentseries:
http://ishootthepictures.com/2011/12/15/my-deanna-durbin-punishment-part-i-three-smart-girls-1936-worth-a-look/

Part 2 of Michael Troutman’s My Deanna Durbin Punishment: First Love:
http://ishootthepictures.com/2012/01/20/my-deanna-durbin-punishment-part-ii-first-love-1939-worth-a-look/

Part 3 of Michael Troutman’s My Deanna Durbin Punishment: It Started with Eve
http://ishootthepictures.com/2012/01/23/my-deanna-durbin-punishment-part-iii-it-started-with-eve-1941-approach-with-caution/

Part 4 of Michael Troutman’s My Deanna Durbin Punishment: Can’t Help Singinghttp://ishootthepictures.com/2012/01/27/my-deanna-durbin-punishment-part-iv-cant-help-singing-1944-not-recommended/

Part 5 ofMichael Troutman’s review of Lady on a Train from I Shoot the Pictures: My Deanna Durbin Punishment

http://ishootthepictures.com/2012/02/05/my-deanna-durbin-punishment-part-v-lady-on-a-train-1945-recommended/

Part 6 of Michael Troutman’s My Deanna Durbin Punishment:http://ishootthepictures.com/2012/02/17/my-deanna-durbin-punishment-part-vi-something-in-the-wind-1947-approach-with-caution/

This joint has everything, even free bagels in your hair!

Turn around, Nikki! There’s a clue in the newsreel!

This time master-of-disguise Nikki goes undercover as the chair-woman of the board!

Wayne and Nikki don’t care what people say about them as long as their names are spelled right!

Nikki, I know we’re all economizing these days, but hold out for the glass slipper instead!

HAVING WONDERFUL CRIME: Like, Write On, Rice!

May 18, 2012, 8:36 pm

≫ Next: ARABESQUE: Burnoose Notice, Special 2012 Horseathon Edition!

≪ Previous: LADY ON A TRAIN: The Singing Detective

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(Apologies in advance for the photos not being quite as sharp as I'd hoped!)

With a novel based on the work of the funniest, zaniest, most surreal mystery writer the comedy-thriller genre had ever known at that time, I would have been more surprised if I hadn’t enjoyed the 1945 film version of Craig Rice’s novel Having Wonderful Crime(HWC)! What’s more, despite the masculine nom de plume, Craig Rice was a woman; specifically, she became the first female mystery novelist to make the cover of Time Magazine, plus she practically invented the screwball noir!  Back in high school at dear old St. Catharine Academy in the Bronx, I read and very much enjoyed several of Rice’s books, especially the Malone stories I’d found in mystery anthologies in our school library. After graduating from Fordham University, I’d been prowling used bookstores to find Rice’s books. Even now, with eBay making it easier to track down hard-to-find books, I’ve barely scratched the surface, partly from rarity, partly from poverty. All I need is a winning lottery ticket to actually afford all the vintage books I want!

But first, a little background: Rice’s original stories and novels are set in 1940s Chicago with her popular protagonist, Attorney-at-Law John J. Malone. These stories were especially popular, with their lively blend of zaniness and surrealism. If Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man showed that marriage and murder-solving was a match made in mystery fiction heaven, then consider the books showcasing Malone and his friends to be screwball noir turned up to 11!  Meet our protagonists:

• Malone, our lovable girl-chasing hero, renamed Michael J. Malone for the film version of HWC.  (Apparently someone at RKO was fond of the letter M.)  Malone is played in HWC by Pat O’Brien (Knute Rockne All-American; Crack-Up; Angels with Dirty Faces; Some Like it Hot);
• Malone’s breezy pal, the two-fisted (but only when necessary) press agent Jake Justus, played by George Murphy (Broadway Melody of 1940; This is The Army; Battleground);
• Helene Brand, Jake’s lovely, wealthy, eccentric sweetheart, who becomes Mrs. Justus in both the novel and movie versions of HWC when the newlyweds break the happy news to Malone early on—not that these lovebirds would ever let a little thing like a honeymoon put the kibosh on their penchant for recreational sleuthing. The new Mr. and Mrs. Justus are compulsive amateur gumshoes, always cooking up new murders to solve! To borrow a line from Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, these two just love “weird excitement!” Helene is played by the lively, lovely, luminous Carole Landis, dubbed “The Ping Girl” by a press agent who explained, “She makes you purr.” In happier days, Landis lent her bubbly personality, talent, and beauty to such films asTeam Bartilucci favorite I Wake Up Screaming; My Gal Sal; Turnabout; Topper Returns; One Million B.C.; Four Jills in a Jeep, in which co-writer Landis and her fellow actresses Kay Francis, Martha Raye, and Mitzi Mayfair reenact their real-life USO tour during World War 2; and The Powers Girl, a film close to Team Bartilucci’s heart because our late mom and aunt were both John Robert Powers models back in the day! (More about Landis and Murphy shortly.)

Sweet, sassy Helene can get on our case anytime!

If you thought The Thin Man’s Nick and Nora Charles could put away liquor with the greatest of ease, wait’ll you get a snootful of Malone, Jake, and Helene! In Rice’s novels, when our trio wasn’t solving murders, they hung out at Joe the Angel’s City Hall Bar, where they’d good-naturedly rib homicide cop Daniel von Flanagan (he’d added the “von” so he wouldn’t seem like just another just another Irish cop. Sorry, von Flanagan isn’t in the film version of HWC). According toTom & Enid Schantz of Rue Morgue Press,“such antics eventually earned (Rice) the unheard-of sum (for a mystery writer) of $46,000 a year by 1945.” Is it any wonder Rice’s inimitable brand of daftness made her books smash hits, with her kisser on the cover of Time in the bargain?

That said, Rice's life wasn't necessarily a bed of roses—or maybe it was, if you count all the thorns. So many talented comedy writers and comedy novelists seem to have a “sad clown” thing going on. Alas, Rice wasn’t immune.  She was born Georgiana Craig in 1908 to a wanna-be painter and a wanna-be sculptress, who named the little girl Georgiana. Too bad her folks apparently didn’t wanna-be responsible, loving parents; poor kid! To make a long, sad story a bit shorter, little Georgiana was schlepped from pillar to post. Being unable to conceive a child of their own, Craig’s half-sister Nan and her husband Elton were happy to adopt the child, whose name officially became Georgiana Craig Rice. Still, even with all her success in her adult life as an author, it seems Rice was never quite able to get past the rejection she’d experienced during her childhood. Over time, her life was further complicated by her chronic alcoholism (what is it about renowned authors and substance abuse?!), glaucoma, deafness in one ear, blindness in one eye, and possibly bipolar disorder. With everything Rice had to contend with, I’m surprised she even made it to the age of 49! And yet with all these obstacles in her way, somehow she managed to achieve success as a popular author, blending nutzoid comedy and suspense like nobody's business!

When you smile, the world smiles with you. When Helene and Jake are the only ones smiling, it means you’d better get tea bags, because they’re about to get Malone into hot water!

Rice’s novel output (in every sense of the term) ranged from her 1939 novel 8 Faces at 3, through her 1957 novel My Kingdom for a Hearse, published two weeks after her untimely death at the age of 49 from a fall down the stairs. Several posthumous Craig Rice story collections were completed by other authors and published: The Name is Malone (1958); ThePeople vs. Withers and Malone, a 1963 short story collection completed by author Stuart Palmer, featuring his beloved Hildegarde Withers character; the short story collection Murder, Mystery and Malone (2002); and The Pickled Poodles (1960) by Larry M. Harris,  a continuation of the John J. Malone series.

A number of Craig Rice’s books were adapted for the big screen, and of course, HWC was among them!  The trio of screenwriters include:

•  Howard J. Green (I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang; Morning Glory; Reveille with Beverly);
•  Parke Levy (My Friend Irma and its sequel, My Friend Irma Goes West; TV’s Many Happy Returns; Pete and Gladys; and December Bride);
• Stewart Sterling, a.k.a. Prentice Winchell, popular and prolific pulp author of the Gil Vine and Fire Marshal Pedley novels, as well as a producer of crime fiction for radio and magazines. For the record, I am the proud owner of a 1954 book Sterling and Dev Collans co-authored, I Was a House Detective.

Admittedly, HWC takes liberties with Rice’s plot, but the film’s frantic and funny shenanigans nevertheless have that Craig Rice feeling (not to be confused with that Barton Fink feeling), capturing the overall madcap air and good-natured goofiness of Rice’s storytelling style. With its fleet-footed 70-minute running time, its sharp and snappy comedic timing, and its great cast, I enjoyed HWC  all the way!

With composer Leigh Harline’s sparkling score in the background, we first meet Helene onscreen in media res, nervously holding a gun on an ominous thug (who looks and sounds like the guy running Florian's in Murder, My Sweet, but he's not credited) as she talks to an impatient desk sergeant who’s obviously used to Jake and Helene playing amateur detective: “Please hurry, Sergeant, I’m biting my fingernails already, and you know how hard it is to get a manicure these days!” Luckily, the long-suffering Malone manages to save his friends’ bacon in the proverbial nick of time!

Slipping out of their firearms and into a nearby theater once Malone points out he’d withheld important evidence to crack their current case, our heroes have no sooner found three on the aisle than it’s announced that the show won’t go on: it seems someone’s misplaced the star attraction, The Great Movel (George Zucco from My Favorite Blonde; Topper Returns; The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as Professor Moriarty; The Mad Ghoul with Lady on a Train’s David Bruce; and Team B’s fave, After the Thin Man, as  Dr. Adolph Kammer)! You’d think that since Jake and Helene are on their honeymoon (heck, they seemed to be truly into each other even without the homicide angle), they’d surely be more interested in, as the song says, the “sweet mystery of life” rather than scampering around solving other people’s murders. (Maybe it’s the lovebirds’ idea of foreplay? Hey, whatever floats their collective boat!)

With Chili Williams around, everyone has spots before their eyes!

Jake and Helene are spending their honeymoon at charming Lenhart Lodge, with Malone aiming to take a separate room and check out the single girls, including a cutie with a polka-dot wardrobe (model/actress Chili Williams, a nice bit of eye candy). However, a fender-bender involving our merry trio changes everyone’s plans when the hot young couple from The Great Movel’s act, French-accented Gilda Mayfair (Lenore Aubert fromthe Bob Hope/Dorothy Lamour comedy-thriller They Got Me Covered; Bud Abbott & Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein; and Bud Abbott & Lou Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff), and her hunky hottie, Lance (Richard Martin, seen in The Bamboo Blonde and such Westerns as West of the Pecos with Robert Mitchum) find themselves in a trunk full of trouble, literally. Soon the exasperated Malone and our kooky newlyweds find themselves embroiled in a murder mystery involving the fussy hotel manager (Charles D. Brown from The Killers; The Grapes of Wrath; and Team B’s favorite among Brown’s roles, Norris the butler in The Big Sleep), the Lenhart sisters, one of whom signs checks in vanishing ink (silent film actress Blanche Ring); sleepwalking after practically each member of the cast unwittingly doses Gilda with a sedative (The Great Movel sees a lawsuit in the Lenhart Lodge’s future!); falling ladders; hairbreadth escapes; a lovely swimming champ (Anje Behrens, better known as Gloria Holden of Dracula’s Daughter;The Life of Emile Zola; The Corsican Brothers) and speedy, snappy patter that makes His Girl Friday sound tongue-tied!

Poor tearful Helene! It’s no laughing matter when you're cornered by a killer.

Yikes!Has The Great Movel played his final matinee?

Not to be a downer, but it’s such a shame that Craig Rice and Carole Landis both ended up being “sad clowns” who died too young. Landis had so much charm, beauty, and screen presence, yet somehow her career began to flounder in the mid-1940s. Only 29 years old, Landis had already been married and divorced twice, and her third marriage was already going down for the last time.  She had an adulterous romance with Rex Harrison, who was apparently was also about to end their relationship. What happened? Did poor Landis have emotional problems in addition to the health issues with malaria and pneumonia she’d been battling since her days of entertaining the troops during World War 2?  Whatever contributed to Landis’ downward spiral, it all tragically ended for her in July of 1948, when she left a suicide note and took a lethal overdose of Seconal; Rex Harrison reportedly found her body. Landis’ pallbearers included HWCco-star Pat O’Brien, actor Cesar Romero, director Eddie Sutherland, actor Willard Parker (A Slight Case of Murder; Kiss Me Kate); and Carole’s close friend and personal make-up man William Nye. Aw, man! It’s times like that that I wish I had a time machine and could help folks like Landis to get their lives turned around live in joy and triumph. Incidentally, author Jacqueline Susann based tragic character Jennifer North partly on Landis in her best-seller Valley of the Dolls.

As for Rice, The April Robin Murders was her final novel after her fatal fall. In fact, the novel was only two-thirds finished at the time of Rice’s death, so the rest was completed by the great Ed McBain, a.k.a. Evan Hunter, author of the 87th Precinct novel series and screenwriter of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's The Birds, among other triumphs. I remember reading and enjoying The April Robin Murders years ago and finding it quite entertaining, with a nice balance of comedy and sentiment. Several posthumous Craig Rice story collections were completed by other authors and published: The Name is Malone (1958); ThePeople vs. Withers and Malone, a 1963 short story collection completed by author Stuart Palmer, featuring his beloved Hildegarde Withers character; the short story collection Murder, Mystery and Malone (2002); and The Pickled Poodles (1960) by Larry M. Harris, a continuation of the John J. Malone series.

Sim Sala Bim! Now you see The Great Movel, now you don't!

HWC co-stars Pat O’Brien and George Murphy had much happier endings to their life stories. O’Brien had a long career and lived to the ripe old age of 84. George Murphy served as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s, and retired from acting in 1952. He was eventually elected Senator of California in 1964 and served for six years.

With so many Rice books and films I haven’t caught up with yet, I think it’s time for a Craig Rice renaissance, in both books and films! Who’s with me?

We crown Helene the Queen of Screwball Noir!

I don't know about you guys, but I'm a sucker for a romantic ending!

ARABESQUE: Burnoose Notice, Special 2012 Horseathon Edition!

May 26, 2012, 12:22 am

≫ Next: MINISTRY OF FEAR: The Cake is a Lie!

≪ Previous: HAVING WONDERFUL CRIME: Like, Write On, Rice!

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Our great pal and fellow blogger Page of My Love of Old Hollywoodcreated a Blogathon dedicated to great horses in movie history: the Horseathon! From May 25th through May 27, you'll find a bevy of splendid steeds for every horse-lover's needs! I'll be revising a new-and-improved post about one of my favorite comedy-thrillers, the 1966 comedy-thriller Arabesque. Hope you'll enjoy it!!
Saddle up and CLICK HERE here for the post

MINISTRY OF FEAR: The Cake is a Lie!

June 8, 2012, 4:17 pm

≫ Next: HUDSON'S BAY: Eager for Cregar!

≪ Previous: ARABESQUE: Burnoose Notice, Special 2012 Horseathon Edition!

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I proudly proclaim that as of this writing, it's my birthday!  I’m now a fresh-faced lass of 49 summers! Director Fritz Lang’s 1944 film adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1943 suspense novel Ministry of Fear(MoF)struck me as the perfect movie to blog about today. It’s got everything this birthday girl could want in a suspense movie blog post: suspense; paranoia; atmospheric lighting and cinematography by Henry Sharp (Duck Soup; The Crowd; It Happened on Fifth Avenue); offbeat comedy, and most importantly for any celebration, cake!

"I took my troubles down to Madame Ruth...."

Stephen's thrilled to be free to eat tasty cake again!

The setting is wartime 1941 England, and our hero, Stephen Neale, is played by Ray Milland, always awesome whether he’s in comedies such as Easy Living or The Major and The Minor; suspenseful yet urbane thrillers like The Big Clock and Dial M for Murder; chilling science fiction like X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes; and of course, his Oscar-winning performance in The Lost Weekend. I’ve always particularly liked Milland’s sensitive side. For me,  MoF works so well because the character he plays seems so likable and poignant, especially considering what he’s been through. Milland should’ve gotten an Oscar nomination for MoF.  The script by screenwriter/producer Seton I. Miller (Scarface, The Dawn Patrol; Here Comes Mr. Jordan; The Adventures of Robin Hood) is pretty wild, but it had me hooked!



We first meet Stephen sitting in a dimly-litroom as he waits for parting advice from Dr. Norton (Niagara;The Prize; TV’s 77 Sunset Strip). As Stephen literally watches the clock, the dialogue sets the scene:

Stephen:“You know, it’s interesting to watch the last minutes crawl by, after so many of them.”

Dr. Norton:“I always meant to speed it up.”
Stephen (wryly yet ruefully):“Fine time to think of it.”

Although the good doctor urges Stephen to make his fresh start in a quiet town far from the madding crowd of Blitz-plagued World War Two London, Stephen says thanks, but no thanks: “I’m gonna spend the first month being pushed and jammed by the biggest crowds I can find. I want to hear people talk and laugh…seeing faces will be a good tonic.” We finally see the name of the place Stephen’s leaving: Lembridge Asylum! Dr. Norton kindly but firmly advises Stephen not to get involved with the police: “A second charge wouldn’t be easy.”  Um, we’re not talking about a ticket for jaywalking here, are we, Stephen?

As our hero awaits the next train, he finds himself at a jolly village fete with games, kids, and food, particularly a tasty-looking cake set to be raffled off for a local charity, The Mothers of the Free Nations. The fortune-teller, one Mrs. Bellane (Aminta Dyne), gives Stephen unusually specific weight and measurements for the cake in order to win that tasty dessert. Who knew innocent charity fetes were fixed? But it’s easy to understand why the cake is so coveted, considering flour and butter weren’t easy to come by during wartime.  In fact, the ladies in charge of the fete get awfully anxious when it appears Stephen won the cake in error, to the visible annoyance of another apparent cake-lover, a gent named Cost (Dan Duryea, the man people loved to hate in other Fritz Lang noirs, including Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window, not to mention Duryea’s funny/menacing henchman in Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire). No wonder Cost and Mrs. Bellane look pretty darn peeved when Stephen leaves with the cake.
As our friend and fellow blogger Yvette of …in so many words put it so well in her own 2010 MoF post:

That's the second-biggest scissors I've ever seen!

“(Duryea is) everyone's favorite sleaze of a villain, so you know right away something is definitely up. The thing about the 'country fete' is this: the place appears 'normal' but with a very sinister vibe, seriously creepy. Yet Milland, just released from incarceration, pretends, I suppose, that he doesn't notice or maybe he thinks this is the way the world acts on the 'outside'. Hard to tell. The war is a burden on everyone and maybe this is the new normal.” For the record, my favorite bit in this scene is when Stephen guesses right about the cake’s weight; suddenly everyone and everything goes silent, as if it was one of those E.F. Hutton commercials from the 1960s and ’70s!  It’s a brief, deft blend of comedy and foreboding.  Talk about a strange twist of fete! 

Figuring out the tasty treat's weight is a piece of cake!

“Jai Guru Deva. Ommm… nothing’s gonna change my séance…”

War is hell, but at least they have slumber parties!

I hope Miss Penteel's pad won't be hard to find!

Stephen’s sudden journey down the rabbit hole gets progressively more surreal when he boards his train to London. A blind man (Eustace Wyatt of Gaslight; Journey Into Fear; Madame Curie) sits there, and they share the cake. Too bad Stephen doesn’t notice that the supposedly-blind man keeps darting glances at our hero! When the guy tries to kill Stephen and grab the cake, things start blowing up real good, and that’s only the beginning of Stephen’s suspenseful, nutzoid ordeal! Increasingly paranoid, our beleaguered hero retains irascible, mercurial private detective George Rennit (Erskine Sanford, who performed with Orson Welles and his Mercury Players in Citizen Kane; The Magnificent Ambersons; The Lady from Shanghai), only to find Rennit's office ransacked.  The strange trail of clues leads to Mrs. Bellane—but not the one we viewers met at the fete! This new Mrs. Bellane is a babe, played by the ever-slinky and mysterious Hillary Brooke (Invaders from Mars; The Maze; Alfred Hitchcock’s1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much; and quite a few Sherlock Holmes films and Abbott and Costello comedies).  Too bad this rather glamorous séance ends up in murder, with Stephen the victim of the biggest frame-up since Whistler's Mother! Without giving too much away, I can sum up Stephen’s plight in two words: Nazi scum!   Even with everything Stephen goes through in this cinematic rollercoaster ride, he often manages to be saner than the oddball characters (including Alan Napier in his pre-Batman days) who are out to get him! At least Stephen seems to have found allies in Carla Hilfe (Marjorie Reynolds of His Kind of Woman; Holiday Inn; and The Time of Their Lives, not to mention playing Peg Riley on TV’s Life of Riley) and her brother, Willi (Carl Esmond of Sergeant York; The Dawn Patrol; Her Highness and the Bellboy), good-natured Viennese refugees who are helping The Mothers of the Free Nations. Need I say romance between Stephen and Carla isn’t far behind? My heart really went out to poor Stephen, and he truly engaged my sympathy as he did his best to hold onto his hard-won sanity in the midst of chaos not of his own making. I was especially touched by the scene where Stephen confides in Carla about the tragic circumstances surrounding the “mercy killing” of his beloved wife, resulting in his two-year stint at Lembridge Asylum.

If, like me, you love fast-moving, complicated, convoluted plots, chases, and eccentric touches, I think you’ll find MoF worth celebrating anytime!

For more MoF fun and info, check out these links:

* From the TCM Web site* From Yvette’s 2010 …in so many words blog post about Ministry of Fear

Er, I’m not into nonfiction. Where’s your mystery/suspense section?

Even in life during wartime, there's always time for romance, by George!

 

Stephen takes a shot at making Mrs. Bellane v.2 confess!

One of my birthdays during high school. Note the movie motif, including a plastic film reel!

HUDSON'S BAY: Eager for Cregar!

June 22, 2012, 10:07 pm

≫ Next: Hitchcock Blogathon update - lock in yer dates!

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Take a gander at Laird Cregar as lovable rogue Gooseberry!

To some people, the name Hudson’s Bay (HB) may simply bring to mind the famous Canadian department store, but of course there’s a rich history behind it—rich enough for 20th Century-Fox to green-light it as a lavish biopic directed by Irving Pichel (The Most Dangerous Game; the 1935 version of She), with a remarkable all-star cast!  Hudson’s Bay’s leading manwas the great actor Paul Muni, whose amazing four-decade career included stage triumphs (born Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, Muni got his start in the Yiddish theater); movies (Muni won the Best Actor Oscar for the 1936 biopic The Story of Louis Pasteur, with another nomination in 1937 for The Life of Emile Zola, and six other Oscar nominations, along with a New York Film Critics Circle award for …Zola); and an Emmy nomination for his performance in the 1956 Playhouse 90 TV drama “The Last Clear Chance.”  No wonder: Muni was a true chameleon, renowned for his amazing ability to dive into every aspect of his roles. I wonder if Meryl Streep considered him as one of her role models? (Click here for a scene from the film!) 

That said, as awesome as Muni was, I must confess that although he gets top billing in HB, it was actually a member of HB’sfine supporting cast that really made me eager to see it: Laird Cregar (Samuel Laird Cregar, for completists)! I’ve been a fan of Cregar’s ever since I first saw him as the smilingly sinister NYPD Inspector Ed Cornell in the film adaptation of Steve Fisher’s novelI Wake Up Screaming.I found myself fascinated by Cregar’s relentless pursuit of Victor Mature, wondering if there was more to it (if you haven’t seen the movie, I won’t spoil it for you).  I had to know more about this actor!  With each new (to me) Cregar film, I’ve been wowed by his ability to be a witty, smooth-talking adversary, or a tormented but terrifying foe. In fact, for those of you who may not have read Team Bartilucci’s Flico Suave blog post, here’s our entry about our lad Laird:

LAIRD CREGAR. Silky-voiced, Philadelphia-born Cregar looked like a fearsome mountain of a man, an image that served him well in such classics as I Wake Up Screaming(1941), Heaven Can Wait (1943), and the 1944 remake of The Lodger. However, he blazed his own trail, mounting his own acclaimed stage productions of Oscar Wilde and The Man Who Came To Dinner. His smooth voice served him well in radio plays, including the role of Caspar Gutman in a production of The Maltese Falcon. But Cregar longed to leave his villain roles behind and move into romantic leading man parts, and to his frustration, his 300-pound girth stood in his way. He slimmed down on an insane crash diet in order to look as suave as his voice sounded. Tragically, the diet took a terrible toll on Cregar’s health, and he died of heart failure at the age of 31, just before the debut of the film that essentially killed him, Hangover Square (1945). Ah, the suavity that could have been….  For more about our special Flico Suave post, in which Fredrico Fabuloso of noirbabes.com has joined forces with Team Bartilucci to craft a terrific slide show devoted to Cregar, please click this link:

The Supremes, in a command performance!

When our friend and fellow blogger Laura of Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings recently wrote about several films showing up on the Fox Movie Channel, I was intrigued when I saw HB would be among them. It seemed like a typical costume epic, certainly a departure from the film noirs and comedy-thrillers that I usually blog about here at TotED. But onceI saw Cregar’s name among the cast members, I was definitely interested, especially when it became clear that both Muni’s and Cregar’s characters would be more scrappy and lighthearted, with lots of joking and brawling—and don’t forget those suave French-Canadian accents! Alfred Newman’s score understandably leans on instrumental versions of the moving anthem “O Canada.”  HB frequently uses another song whose title escapes me. It’s derived from a beloved traditional folk tune, but I keep remembering hearing it in, of all things, the Elvis Presley comedy-thriller Double Trouble, with these lyrics: “I only love one girl/The one I have my arms around/I only love one girl/One in every town!” (Just as well I never opted for a career in music—but if you need a gal who can hum or whistle, let me know!)

For those of us who were too easily distracted to give our history classes our full attention back in school (and even if we had, I’m betting 20th Century-Fox probably took liberties with the real facts anyway), the script by Lamar Trotti (The Razor’s Edge; The Ox-Bow Incident; There’s No Business Like Show Business) helpfully provides this preamble:

“In 1667 Canada, under the French flag, was a vast uncharted wilderness. Montreal and Quebec were hardly more than trading posts on the St. Lawrence River. Our story opens farther south, at the Albany Government House, in the British colonies.” Does it ever! First we viewers see Indians getting thrown in prison for alleged thievery at the hands of stern-looking upper-class twits with long curly wigs and fancy clothes. One of the stuffed shirts sniffs, “These savages must realize that New York is a British possession…twenty lashes in the public square!” I couldn’t help thinking of a sarcastic line from Witness for the Prosecution:“Lovely you all look in them wigs.…”  As the understandably sullen Indians are given the heave-ho, two fur trappers/traders arrive: diminutive Pierre Esprit Radisson (Muni) and tall, wide, bear-shaped Médard Chouart Sieur des Groseilliers, a.k.a. Gooseberry (Cregar). (I’m guessing this is where/how today’s Radisson Hotel chain got its name?) It’s clear that these French-accented, smooth-talking yet scrappy trappers have been here before, asking for the money and supplies they need for an expedition into the north country. Radisson and Gooseberry kinda freak out the stuffed shirts with their boisterous barging-in, their ruddy cheeks, handmade buckskin, and fur hats; I liked them immediately!

Pierregets no kick from champagne, but he’s always up for a brawl!

The bewigged bigwigs aren’t interested in our boys’ proposed expedition to Canada’s Hudson’s Bay because “His Majesty’s government is not in the fur trade,” and besides, they’re convinced that Radisson and Gooseberry must be “rogues,” if they can’t get the funding from their own government.  Humph! They say “rogues” like it’s a bad thing! Those silly “suits” in suits don’t realize our boys aren’t the types to meekly take no for an answer, especially when they’re threatened with jail. It’s clobbering time as a royal rumble breaks out! Radisson and Gooseberry get tossed in Ye Olde Holding Cell, but at least it’s a good place to make friends: Lord Edward Crewe (John Sutton from Jane Eyre; My Gal Sal; A Yank in the R.A.F.) is cooling his heels in the slammer, too!  Seems Lord Eddie was banished by Prince Charles (the great Vincent Price, one of Team B.’s favorite scene-stealers) on account of drunken pranks that went too far. Edward convinces Radisson and Gooseberry to help him blow this popsicle stand, and after our scamps hit Montreal, Radisson and Gooseberry sell Edward on the idea of putting up capital for their Hudson’s Bay expedition.
It helps that Radisson happens to be best buds with the Indians, and he’s adamant about sharing their booty with them, fair and square. In fact, Orimha (Chief Thundercloud, who graced many a Western and even comedies like The Cat and the Canary during his 21-year film career) is Radisson’s Indian foster dad. Still, it takes lots of brawling to make Edward and the other city-boy white guys get their act together, stop treating the helpful Indians like “savages,” and get it into their fool heads that you can’t just pay the Indians in trinkets and brandy if you’re serious about making Hudson’s Bay a solid nation full of decent, fair-minded human beings. As Radisson explains in his charming patois during what I like to think of as his Yoda Moments:

“Wine very bad for Indians—make him crazy like the wolf. He get one little drink, pretty soon he drunk, go on warpath, kill everybody, cut their throat, maybe get his own throat cut. Then he don’t know where he is. What he do? By and by, he don’t hunt no more, he don’t fish, he don’t catch the beaver, he don’t do nothing but make trouble. He in pretty bad fix, no?”

Frankly, I was itching to see Edward get punched in the nose in the 1660’s equivalent of a playground!  With a little help from Radisson and Gooseberry, who are already tight with their Indian pals, “Holier than Thou” Edward eventually gets an attitude adjustment, courtesy of Yoda Radisson:

“This Country, this Canada, she’s like a pretty woman, waiting for big, strong fella to come live with her, raise big family. She say, ‘Look, I have fine prairie to make big farm. I have nice trees for house, rivers to fish. I have big heart to love all the world, make you very happy.’ And she say, ‘Those fellows who live in Europe, they crazy, they fight all the time, kill one another for a little dirt that don’t grow anything. (Sarcastically) They got to bow down when Edward Crewe comes in the room. But here, I give you nice big place to live in, I give plenty to eat, I not let anybody be better than you. ‘Then she say, ‘But you must not cheat my little children because they are not so strong as you. You must not make them drunk, bring war with you. You will love, like the Bon Dieu planned, or I give you big tweak in the nose…I think maybe this Canada have plenty happy people someday, feel same way. Them maybe people, they say, ‘This Radisson, he big fool, but he’s right. Now I think we talk too much.”

(Lamar Trotti not only knew how to write rousing speeches, he knew when to stop!)

As Lady Barbara, lovely Gene Tierney is worth risking prison for!

“Think of it, darling, there are millions of beavers waiting to be caught!” (Actual line from the film!)

All the agita of starting a new colony is finally paying off—until French Governor  D’Argensen seizes our heroes’ furs (polyester and microfibers weren’t invented yet) as “payment” for fines enacted that very morning! So Radisson and Gooseberry indignantly steal their furs back and return to England with Edward; that’ll show ‘em!  Eddie’s nervous about being back in England—remember, he’s supposed to be banished—but Edward’s cousin Sir Rupert (Nigel Bruce—Dr. Watson himself!—not to mention Bruce’s supporting roles in Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Suspicion) is willing to help sort things out, with encouragement from the intrigued Prince Charles, who admits to liking “rogues” (there’s that word again!), and is willing to help Radisson, Gooseberry, and Edward as long as they can keep it on the QT until they get their booty. Besides, news of fabulous furs from the New World goes a long way toward our guys being forgiven, especially when Edward is reunited with his beloved fiancée, Lady Barbara Hall (Gene Tierney at her most beautiful and winsome). I love the way Edward and Barbara only have eyes for each other as Prince Charles’ scolding falls on deaf ears; Charles might as well be talking in that Peanuts “blah blah blah” gibberish!  Radisson sagely notes, “These English, they like to make a little money, no?” Prince Charles gives them the supplies and boats they need, though he cautions them: “There will be no talk of a charter until we see 300,000 pelts that the Governor of New France did not steal.” Radisson sweetens the pot by naming the first Hudson’s Bay post Fort Charles after the King himself.

No lackeys in Canada? You mean I have to w-w-w-work?!

Lady Barbara is so impressed with Edward’s new success, maturity, and overall manly-man qualities that she suggests that when they return to Hudson’s Bay, they should bring her younger brother Gerald (Morton Lowry of The Hound of the Baskervilles; The Picture of Dorian Gray; How Green was My Valley). Bad move, guys!The novelty wears thin fast for spoiled baby brother Gerald Whiny-Pants;  he’s more interested in plying the Indians with brandy and cheap useless tchotchkes than in making Hudson’s Bay succeed and flourish by getting off his bratty butt and *gasp* pull his weight! When Gerald disobeys Radisson’s rules, drunken violence erupts all over the colony, and a friendly Indian tribe is senselessly slaughtered. This means war, since the Indians are understandably furious at these Eurotrash white guys making a mess of things. Having witnessed similar massacres in his time, Radisson reaches a grim decision: in order to patch things up with the warring Indians, he elects himself judge, jury, and executioner, ties up Gerald, and shoots him dead. Our heroes aren’t exactly happy campers (even though Gerald had it coming, in my opinion).  When Radisson, Gooseberry, and Edward return to London and explain the tragedy, Prince Charles fumes: “The very idea, going around shooting my subjects, and without my consent!”

Lesson learned: Don't bring troublemaking siblings to faraway outposts!

Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Radisson, Gooseberry, and Edward? Luckily for our boys, riches triumph over dead trouble-making relatives: 4,000 pelts in perfect condition is an end that justifies the means, big-time! In fact, as Edward urgently points out, if Radisson and Gooseberry are hanged, there won’t be any Hudson’s Bay Company, because Canada would then belong to France, not England! Turns out our lovable slyboots Radisson fixed it in advance with the Indians that if anything happened to them in England, the Indians would take all those lovely, expensive furs to the French, Radisson’s biggest fans!  All is forgiven; I think even Lady Barbara knew in her heart of hearts that Gerald was a little good-for-nothing creep. Our roguish heroes are the toast of the town, Radisson and Gooseberry walk off singing, boy gets girl, Hudson’s Bay is born—what’s not to love?

Asterix and Obelix

Vinnie imagines Laird Cregar and Paul Muni as Obelix & Asterix!

My husband Vinnie is a big fan of the Franco-Belgian series of Asterix comics created by René Goscinny and illustrated by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (if you haven’t had the pleasure of reading Asterix,click this link), and he noticed that Muni and Cregar had a striking resemblance to Asterix and his big pal Obelix! Anyway, just hearing the cheerfully boisterous Cregar doing a French-Canadian accent made me smile.

It was fun to see another side of our lad Laird, since I’d seen him showing a flair for comedy even in his bad-guy roles. To my surprise and delight, Muni and Cregar turned out to be a rollicking comedy team, stealing their scenes and my heart!  With their rambunctious, devil-may-care shenanigans and great buddy chemistry, Muni and Cregar make a totally appealing pair! Muni has a playfulness about him, and a clever way of talking around things when the suits in London and France get restless; nevertheless, when push comes to shove, he does the right thing when it counts most.  HB has great production values, too, with Travis Banton’s costumes including posh threads at the palace and buckskin in the wilderness, as needed. For my money, Muni and Cregar are so good together, I was wishing 20th Century-Fox had figured out a way to make one or more sequels about Radisson and Gooseberry’s exploits. Even their accents and mischievous grins had me laughing and smiling (for all the right reasons)! In particular, Vinnie and I thought it was tons of fun to watch Cregar launch his monstrously huge body at smug, unsuspecting fops and dandies, knocking those pretty-boys over like bowling pins!  Go, Team Gooseberry!

"Poor lady!" (Another actual line from HB!)

It's Spring Break in Canada, and they're gonna party like it's 1667!

You can meet the most interesting people at these pot luck dinners! (Left to right: Laird Cregar, Nigel Bruce, Vincent Price, and Virginia Field)

Hey, Gooseberry cleans up pretty good! He's going do-me-do-ing in his do-me-do duds!

Radisson's livin' on a wink and a prayer!

Iron bars do not a prison make — when the prisoner is Gooseberry!

Hey, just imagine Laird Cregar, Paul Muni, and John Sutton cleaned up some, wearing musketeer garb. Would Laird have been an awesome Porthos, or what?

Hitchcock Blogathon update - lock in yer dates!

June 24, 2012, 6:59 pm

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We've got 48 folks signed up for our Best Hitchcock Films Hitchcock Never Made Blogathon, which is a wonderful response, and thanks to all for wanting to participate!
With two weeks to go, we want to get the schedule for everybody's posts in place.  So if you're participating in the blogathon, please send me an email and let me know what day you'd like to post your contribution.  For the folks who haven't chosen a film, do let me know your choice as well!
To keep things spread out, we want to limit it to about six posts a day. So if more than six people ask to post on any one day, we'll take the first requests we get.
The deadline to reserve a day is Friday, June 29th.  After that, we'll assume you're able to post any day, and we'll assign days randomly, and post the final schedule that Saturday. 

(If you can't get your post up on the day selected, we won't send Leonard after you; just get it up as close as you can!)
When you post your contribution, please send me an email with the address of the post, so I can update the schedule quick like a bunny!

Feel free to link to the main info page on your blog to let everyone know about the event, and share the news with everybody!

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How Christina and Nicole Spent their Weekend Vacation

July 6, 2012, 9:00 pm

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This post is part of The Best Hitchcock Movies (That Hitchcock Never Made) Blogathon, running from July 7th through July 13th, 2012. On July 7th, please wish Sir Alfred Hitchcock's lovely and talented daughter Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell a very happy 84th Birthday!

Henri-Georges Clouzot, the director of French suspense films such as The Wages of Fear and Le Corbeau, premiered his 1955 thriller Diaboliquein New York City at what was then The Fine Arts Theater. How ironic that this premiere was doubling as a benefit for the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund, considering the moviegoers found themselves gasping for breath from terror!  Produced by Vera Films, named after Clouzot’s leading lady in real and reel life, Vera Clouzot (The Wages of Fear; Les Espions), Diabolique continues to haunt audiences not only because of its fear factor, but also for its moving characterizations and performances. Diabolique’s title translates variously as Les Diaboliques; The Fiends; and The Devils, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s one of cinema’s most suspenseful films in any language! (For those of us who don’t speak French, distributor Janus Films provided subtitles.)

You're witnessing a rare sight: Christina DeLassalle smiling!

It’s been said that no less than Team Bartilucci’s favorite fearmeister Alfred Hitchcock was itching to get the rights to the source material, the French suspense novel She Was No More (Celle qui n'tait plus) by Pierre Boileau &  Thomas Narcejac, only to find Clouzot had just beaten Hitch to the punch. Either way, Hitchcock made darn sure he got the rights to another Boileau & Narcejac thriller pronto: D’Entre Les Morts, translated as From Among the Dead—or as Hitchcock and companymore intriguingly titled it,Vertigo. In any case, for Diabolique, director Clouzot worked with co-writers René Masson, Frédéric Grendel, and Jérôme Géronimi to adapt Diabolique for the big screen.

Over Diabolique’s opening credits, there’s a tight close-up of already-brackish water, accompanied by a quote from French author Barbey D’Aurevilly, who specialized in tales of mystery and suspense exploring hidden motivations, hinting at evil without being explicitly concerned with anything supernatural:

“A painting is always quite moral when it is tragic, and it gives the horror of the things it depicts.”

D’Aurevilly is starting to sound like the French granddaddy of film noir to me! Heck, even Armand Thirard’s saturated black-and-white cinematography plunges us viewers into a sense of eerie foreboding without even trying. Just watching a lady walking with an open umbrella primed me to get ready to flee, or at least duck!

Our story begins at Institution DeLassalle—or as the subtitles I.D. it, DeLassalle Boarding School, which has clearly seen better days.  It’s bad enough that Headmaster Michel DeLassalle (Paul Meurisse of Army of Shadows; The Truth; Le deuxième soufflé) is sadistically cruel to his lovely but sickly wife, Christina (Ms. Clouzot), who has a serious heart condition. Michel’s idea of kindness and sympathy is to cruelly tease Christina about being a “cute little ruin.” But Michel doesn’t stop there; he even mistreats his mistress and fellow teacher Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret, Oscar-winner for Room at the Top and nominee for Ship of Fools, among her other triumphs).  Indeed, when we first meet teachers Christina and Nicole, they’ve long since bonded over their mutual love-turned-hatred for Michel, to the amazement of the rest of the school’s mostly male staff. On top of that, Christina is paying for the school in every sense; she’s not only footing the bills (it’s clear Michel married Christina for her money), but she’s also paying in emotional abuse, including her sorrow for the way the schoolboys have to eat lousy food, and how she has to beg for every little thing, as if she was some kind of servant instead of being the head of the school.  No wonder she and Nicole have joined forces to put Michel’s lights out—and we’re not talking about the school’s electric bills! The murder plot has poor Christina even more jittery than usual, since she’s a staunch Catholic, and she takes the whole “Thou shalt not kill” thing seriously.  (Sadly, those were the only three films Vera Clouzot made; ironically enough, it turned out that like the character she played in Diabolique, she really did have a weak heart, and she died in 1960.) 

Anyone can have a love triangle, but these three have a hate triangle!

Although Christina is glum and/or fearful more often than not, when she’s walking and talking with her fellow teachers early in the film, we briefly see her as the bright, happy young woman she must have been before Michel wormed his way into her heart and bank account in her native Brazil. The holiday weekend has begun, and Christina is wearing a perky little outfit and twirling her parasol.  Her lovely smile almost breaks my heart, because life with Michel gives her so few things to smile about. Let this be a lesson, all you headstrong movie romantics: Get to know your sweeties before you decide to make a life with them!  Heed the lessons learned the hard way by Christina, Audrey Hepburn as Reggie Lampert in Charade, and so many others! Oy!

You know, if the DeLassalle Boarding School was a real place and its shabby conditions were discovered today, some hotshot news team would make it a cause célèbre even before anyone got wind of the murder plot Nicole and Christina are hatching!  I can see it all now: muscular, no-nonsense Robert Irvine of The Food Network’s Restaurant: Impossible storming in to kick the entire staff’s collective butt while overhauling the menu big-time, then force-feeding Michel DeLassalle his own disgusting rotting fish. Meanwhile, the equally tough-as-nails Anthony Melchiorri of The Travel Channel’s Hotel Impossible would overhaul the kids’ shabby dorms, too!  Do the boys’ parents ever actually visit this neo-hellhole? If Diabolique took place today, there would be lawsuits galore!  By the way, fans of Michel Serrault, perhaps best known to us Yanks as the star of La Cage Aux Folles and its two sequels, as well as Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud and Deadly Circuit, plays one of the teachers, Monsieur Raymond. He and the other teachers mostly put-up and shut-up; I guess they figure a job in a crummy boarding school with a nasty headmaster and unappetizing food is better than no job at all. And don’t get me started on that nasty, brackish swimming pool; the best use for it would be for a remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon…or an ingeniously wicked murder plot which ultimately pulls our gals into a murderous game in which death is only the beginning of their nightmare! I can say no more!

Nobody will be seated during the disgusting rotting fish scene!

As is the case with Hitchcockian thrillers such as, say, Stanley Donen’s 1963 thriller Charade, Clouzot’s Diabolique is one of the (say it with me, people) Best Hitchcock Movies that Hitchcock Never Made!The crucial difference is that Charade and other playful Hitchcockian thrillers (as opposed to genuine Hitchcock films by Big Al himself) recall Hitchcock’s polished, soignée-yet-cheeky side a laNorth by Northwest, while Diabolique is more like a precursor of Hitchcock’s darker, more sinister thrillers such as Psycho; Shadow of a Doubt; The Wrong Man; Strangers on a Train; or Frenzy. I’ll admit it would have been fascinating to see how Hitchcock would have approached Diabolique. Darkly magnificent as Psycho is, Diabolique’s gloomy, misogynistic take on the story sinks into your gut and haunts your dreams, especially with the film’s taunting suggestions that perhaps there’s a touch of the supernatural in all this that nobody can escape. Even Diabolique’s opening credit sequence immediately makes us uneasy with that merciless close-up of the rainy, run-down DeLassalle Boarding School’s murky swimming pool, accompanied by children shrilly singing Georges Van Parys’ music off-key and off-screen. The film starts out at a leisurely pace, but as it goes along, the tension tightens like a noose, helped by skillful use of shadows and light. Without giving away its twists, I’ll only say that Diabolique gives new meaning to the phrase “cruel to be kind.”

“First I add a generous portion of gasoline. Then some nitroglycerine… a goodly amount of gunpowder…some Uranium 238…shake well, strike an ordinary match, make Michel drink it, and voila!”

"Do you have Prince Albert in the can?"

Has Michel come back to life just for the school picture? Now that’s school spirit!

"Here's looking at you, kids!"

Vera Clouzot and Simone Signoret are electrifying as partners in suffering and murder. As the women plot to kill the bastard, Ms. Clouzot’s delicate loveliness and her anxious air plays beautifully off Signoret’s sexy, smoldering intensity and streetwise demeanor. As Christina and Nicole try to act like nothing is wrong after Michel takes his final dip in the DeLassalle School’s pool, weird things keep happening that make them wonder if Michel is somehow still alive after all their efforts. Michel’s suits unexpectedly turn up from the local cleaners, and in the school picture, there’s a shadowy figure who looks unnervingly like Michel!  Is the creep still alive and messing with the women’s heads, or is it karma, or could there really be something supernatural going on? (*GULP!*)  

On top of that, Inspector Fichet (Charles Vanel of Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear and Hitchcock’sTo Catch a Thief, as well as several Tintin movies!)has been trying to help Christina in his kindly Columbo-esque way, but is this likable shaggy dog of a man actually a bulldog hot on the scent of the women’s guilt?That’s not to say there aren’t touches of comedy, albeit of the pitch-black variety. I especially got a kick out of of the scenes earlier in the film, when Nicole and Christina come to town for the next phase of their murder plot. As Christina and Nicole lure Michel to come to town for a permanent dip in the bathtub, their upstairs neighbors, Monsieur and Madame Herboux (Noel Roquevert and Therese Dorny) are unable to hear whether or not they won a prize on the radio show, because the tub the women use to weigh Michel down gets noisy when they have to drain the tub!  Diabolique is even darker than Hitchcock at his darkest! Which is scarier, the water sports in Diabolique or in Psycho? Watch them and decide for yourselves! :-)

I won't spoil the big shocker ending for you; I'll just repeat the request from the filmmakers:

"Don't be devils! Don't ruin the interest your friends could take in this film. Don't tell them what you saw. Thank you for them."
Trust me, your patience will be rewarded!

Happy Second Anniversary to TALES OF THE EASILY DISTRACTED!

August 21, 2012, 7:09 pm

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Great heavenly days! As of August 22nd, 2012, Tales of the Easily Distracted(TotED,for any newcomers)is two years old today! Where the heck does the time go?   Time to party!

Timber-r-r-r! Could Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) throw a shindig, or what?

What a difference two years makes! I’ve made so many friends, and I’ve read so many fascinating and entertaining blogs, and learned so much more about classic movies than I ever imagined. I also got the hang of Blogathons, thanks to talented folks like Page Inciardi from My Love of Old Hollywood, as well as Becky Barnes from ClassicBecky’s Brain Food,who, along with my sweet and supportive hubby Vinnie Bartilucci and our favorite inspiration, our 15-year-old daughter Siobhan, gave me the courage to put on my own Blogathon this past July, The Best Hitchcock Movies (That Hitchcock Never Made), for which I continue to be grateful!  The support from my family and friends also spurred me to finish writing and polishing my suspense novel The Paranoia Club, and thanks to my wonderful editor Nicole Bokat (if you need a great editor, Nicole is your go-to gal!), I’ve finally begun sending queries to agents. I know getting published is a long, hard road more often than not, but I’m going to give it my all; nothing ventured, nothing gained. Wish me luck!

Revisions, revisions, always revisions! ( Kate Hudson and Luke Wilson in Rob Reiner's Alex and Emma)

Thanks so very much, everyone, for welcoming me among all you wonderful people in the dark—and out of the dark, for that matter!  Here’s to another year of film fun and frolic, with many more to come, I hope!

Our favorite contemporary Oscar-winning actor 
and all-around nice guy Adrien Brody approves!

Interested in the origins of TotED? Check out the link below!

http://doriantb.blogspot.com/2010/08/picture-of-dorian-tenore-bartilucci-or.html

Gene Kelly Unplugged: Half-Singing, Half-Dancing, All Acting Team Bartilucci Double-Feature!

August 22, 2012, 1:43 pm

≫ Next: The Mad Miss Manton: Swing Out, Sisters!

≪ Previous: Happy Second Anniversary to TALES OF THE EASILY DISTRACTED!

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This post is part of the CMBA Gene Kelly Blogathon, running from August 20 through August 25, 2012.   

We of Team Bartilucci have joined forces for another double-feature in the CMBA's salute to the one and only Gene Kelly!  We hope you'll enjoy our mad yet lovable ramblings! 

Dorian’s Pick: The Devil Makes Three (1952)

With so many of us writing about Gene Kelly’s musicals for the titular CMBA Blogathon, I thought it would be an interesting change of pace to focus on one of Kelly’s action-adventure films. Mine has a Salzburg Connection, though it doesn’t have a Helen MacInnes plot (that would be the bailiwick of our friend and fellow blogger Yvette Banek of…in so many words fame)!  I chose the 1952 action-drama The Devil Makes Three (TDM3). The title explains a tenet in Islam: an unmarried boy and a girl should never be alone together. It’s acceptable to have two boys or two girls in a room, or larger numbers and permutations. But if a boy and a girl are alone together, it’s said the devil is the third person in the room. With that in mind, I’d say the real devil to fear in this moody suspenser is the poverty and desperation which force hard choices on our protagonists, Captain Jeff Eliot (Kelly, excellent in a dramatic role); and the vulnerable yet determined Wilhelmina Lehrt (Pier Angeli of Somebody Up There Likes Me; Teresa; and Merry Andrew, who left us way too soon), or “Willie,” asJeff affectionately nicknames her. But you know what really piqued my interest in TDM3? Two words: Snowmobile Nazis! How’s that for a high concept?

Disney on Ice is nowhere near as badass as these snowbound Wild Ones on Ice!

Set in 1947 just after the war, we viewers get a catch-up prologue from Colonel James Terry (Richard Rober of The Well; Father’s Little Dividend; The Tall Target),with our story being “a composite of case histories taken from the Munich headquarters file, Criminal Investigation Division Corps of Military Police, United States Army.” Over footage of the notorious Braunes Haus that housed the Nazis, Col. Terry dryly notes, “There isn’t even a ‘For Sale’ sign on the lot where the Braunes Haus once stood.”  After this prologue, the action begins! Around the Christmas holidays, a woman (Charlotte Fleming) drives on an icy road, skidding. She stops, hurries into a phone booth, and speaks urgently—only to have her phone call cut off permanently when two motorcycle cops pull up and shoot her dead in a hail of bullets! Yikes! Talk about Hell on wheels!The only clue is a business card with the insignia “Silhouette.”

I see a little Silhouette of a club! (Scaramouche! Scaramouche!)

Meanwhile, our hero Jeff has just left the U.S. to return to Germany (instead of vice-versa as one would expect). Jeff has been writing to the Lehrt family and sending them gifts since he returned to the States, and he’s brought all the trimmings of an old-fashioned Christmas to thank the Lehrts for saving his life during the war. But when he drives to the address he knew, he finds the place practically in ruins, with a German family that’s definitely notthe Lehrts! The family now living there are strangers to Jeff; they shamefacedly admit nobody else has lived there for ages, and they’ve been accepting Jeff’s care packages all this time because otherwise, they’d be starving in the rubble of what’s left of their ramshackle home. Being a decent joe despite his frustration and puzzlement, Jeff gives the bombed-out family the gifts he’d intended to give the Lehrts, then sets out to see what the heck happened to them.

Our hero Captain Jeff Eliot thinks he can see  his house from here!

When Jeff gets together with Lieutenant Parker (the versatile Richard Egan from Love Me Tender; Violent Saturday; Pollyanna), he and us viewers get more background. The Lehrts were a family of musicians and singers, and pretty young Willie was only 15 the last time Jeff saw her. He’d met the family during the war, when his outfit was captured in a raid over Innsbrook, then thrown into a nearby prison camp. Two days later, the Lehrts had managed to hide the injured Jeff in the family’s cellar. Shortly after New Year’s Day, the family smuggled him to an area where he’d be able to walk to safety. Parker suggests they check the Central Registry, where there’s a complete casualty list, even if it means forgoing his previously planned evening of beer, bratwurst, and knockwurst—now That’sEntertainment (not to mention friendship)!

In Germany, our heroes hope for the best, but expect the wurst!

At the Central Registry, Jeff and Parker get the bad news: Mr. and Mrs. Lehrt were killed by bombs in July 1944, and there’s no further info about Willie on file. Parker deduces that Willie would be about 18 by now: “If she’s still alive, and she’s still pretty, there are just so many joints in Munich where she could be, and I know every one of them.”  Jeff is skeptical: “Not Willie. She wasn’t the type.”  Parker ruefully replies, “If she’s been hungry long enough, she’s the type.”  So the search for Willie begins. On the bright side, if all else fails, at least our heroes will get a pub crawl out of it!

Is that a bruise under Willie's eye? Poor girl, she probably wishes shecould be marching home!

Their search bears fruit. Of all the gin joints in all the world, Jeff and Parker find Willie (Angeli) at her workplace—none other than Silhouette! It’s full of beautiful girl singers and tough-looking guys who aren’t exactly gentlemen. Let’s just say the gals at Silhouette aren’t working there because it’s their dream job. Willie has grown up into a lovely, doe-eyed young woman with a bruised psyche. Having been orphaned and living on her own, she’s become understandably cynical since she last saw Jeff. They talk as they walk among the bombed-out buildings in the moonlight (almost sounds romantic, in a film noir way):

Willie:“Enjoying the sights, Captain?”

Jeff: “Oh…from the air, it all looks different. You had one idea up there, and that was to navigate the plane to the aiming point.”

Willie (sarcastically):“You did a good job.”

Another of my favorite TDM3lines:

Willie:“You will like it here at Silhouette. At midnight, Kris Kringle comes down the chimney and does a strip-tease.”

Jeff wants to make amends and thank Willie on account of her late parents having saved his life. He’d like to start by giving Willie the Christmas holiday with all the trimmings that she’d loved in happier, pre-war, pre-Nazi days. Since Jeff is doing well at his navigation instructor job in the States, he wants to go all out to show Willie a happy time, so they’re off to Salzburg for the holidays! I love Willie’s running gag about “getting a commission” from businesses around town, like at the car dealership. Ah, but as soon as Jeff and Willie hit the road, good ol’ Honest Oberlitz (Bum Krüger) scrambles into the garage, yelling in German, and who should come roaring out but those evil motorcycle guys, hell-bent for leather and burning rubber! What the heck do those no-goodniks want from our heroes?

As they drive on the Autobahn, which Jeff compares favorably to the Pennsylvania Turnpike (wow, the Autobahn must have been way less crowded in the 1950s!), Willie gives Jeff a history lesson:

Willie: “The Fuhrer built it. It was supposed to carry its conquering armies to glory. Now it carries the conquerors. How does it feel to be a conqueror?”

Jeff:“Most of the guys stationed here would rather be driving along the Turnpike. We’re not cut out to be conquerors.”

I must say I enjoyed TDM3’s touches of wry humor, poking good-natured fun at the gentler post-war changes at Germans vs. Austrians, such as the Austrian diner with a juke-box, where the personnel use American slang like “Adam and Eve on a raft.” I also loved the beautiful locations, with shots of the locations as pretty as a postcard, especially since this is probably the closest I’ll ever get to that part of the world!

I keep expecting to hear Gene Kelly and the kids singing “I Got Rhythm” in German!

But things get serious when Parker discovers that, unbeknownst to Jeff, that German car is chock full of contraband—specifically, there’s gold under the car’s top coat!  It turns out Willie had to secretly drive contraband across the Austro-German border, though Willie is having second thoughts after falling in love with Jeff (can you blame her?), plus the poor phone booth gal killed earlier in the film was a friend of Willie’s, and she doesn’t want to meet the same awful fate. What’s more, apparently this dastardly Nacht de Legernogen (sic), described as “The Last Will and Testament of the Third Reich,” outlines chilling procedures after the hoped-for defeat. Grr! Nazis—I hate those guys (don't we all?)! Can Willie and Jeff conquer the bad guys and go on to live happy lives of baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, Chevrolets, and, for Willie, American citizenship?  Although Kelly doesn’t get any song-and-dance numbers, I found him both tough and tender as the determined yet caring Jeff, and I thought he and Angeli worked well together. I was especially moved as Willie did her best to survive with dignity while being forcedinto hard choices just to stay alive.

No mistletoe required!

TDM3was filmed on location in Munich and Salzburg, with a screenplay by Jerry Davis (known for such Warner Bros TV series as 77 Sunset Strip, Bourbon Street Beat,Surfside Six,Bewitched, and The Odd Couple, as well as the 1955 horror thriller Cult of the Cobra),and based on a story by producer Lawrence P. Bachman, known for his 1960s series of comedy-whodunits based on Dame Agatha Christie’s Miss Marplemysteries, starting in 1961 with Murder, She Said. That movie series is dear to Team Bartilucci’s collective heart, especially since it starred the delightful Dame Margaret Rutherford (and we all know there’s nothing like a Dame!), as well as Children of the Damned, the 1964 sequel to the horror classic Village of the Damned.

Uh-oh! X doesn’t mark the spot in a good way here!

Hurry, Jeff, distract the villain with a dance number!

The film was directed by Andrew Marton, who was no stranger to action films and war films. His work included The Longest Day; the 1950 version of King Solomon’s Mines; science-fiction thriller Crack in the World,another Team B. fave;and the 1964 version of James Jones’ celebrated novel The Thin Red Line. (Terence Malick’s 1998 version included an all-star cast, including future Oscar-winner and Team Bartilucci favorite Adrien Brody, but that’s a story for another time.)  The driving rhythm of Bronislau Kaper’s music (Gaslight; Whistling in the Dark; The Naked Spur) sets an appropriate pulse-pounding pace as TDM3 moves along. But it’s not all action movie music by any means. Since the story is set in post-war Munich and Austria during the Christmas season, there's poignancy and grim reminders of the aftermath of World War 2. Bombed-out ruins, some of which housed the Nazis (good riddance, Nazi scum!), sit side-by-side with the new buildings of the ongoing reconstruction, while ironic reminders of the war appear along with holiday music such as “Oh, Christmas Tree” (in both English and German). TheNew York Times movie reviewer, identified only as H.H.T (the venerable Howard Thompson, perhaps?) was underwhelmed with Jerry 

“Hi, I’m Claus Clausen, I’ll be your Otto Preminger for this evening….”

Boy, Oberlitz's coffee sure is a knockout!

Davis’ screenplay for the post-war adventure drama The Devil Makes Three (TDM3). Oh, well, can’t please everyone!

Vinnie’s Pick: What A Way to Go! (1964)

I must confess to bending the rules slightly with this entry.  This is undoubtedly a film that belongs to Shirley MacLaine.  Like a housecat who graciously lets people live in their homes, Shirley allows several leading men to share the screen with her, and each time she makes them feel comfortable, like they're the only man in the world.  Gene Kelly is the last of them, but it could be argued that his appearance is the grandest and most over the top.

Shirley plays Louisa May Foster, a shy, unassuming girl who through no fault of her own, appears to be cursed.  For every time she attempts to marry for love, her husbands seem to become bestowed with uncontrollable success.  Everything goes their way, they become engrossed in their work, and it ends with them dying in progressively outlandish fashions, leaving her alone, and each time, exponentially wealthier.  The film begins with her attempting to give all her money to the IRS in the form of a single check for 250 million dollars.  She is met with doubt, and is sent to a psychiatrist (Bob Cummings) to whom she bares her tale of woe. 

Starting with her childhood in Crawleyville, named after the town's richest family, she is pressed by her mother (Margaret Dumont!) to marry the Crawley's indolent son, Leonard (played by the indolent Dean Martin).  She instead turns her eye to Edgar Hopper (Dick Van Dyke), owner of a barely open general store, who lives his life by the tenets of Thoreau. They marry, and out of spite Crawley proceeds to make their life hell, mocking their meager existence.  Hopper snaps, and becomes a marketing dynamo, turning his general store into the most successful business in town, driving the Crawleys into bankruptcy.  The strain is too much for him, and he dies from a massive (and ironic) coronary, his last words being "a little hard work never hurt anybody!"

Louisa is now a wealthy woman, and travels to Paris to start anew.  There she meets Larry Flint - not that one, a struggling artist played by Paul Newman.  He lives the stereotypical life of an artist, in a loft surrounded by other eccentric creators, including a chimpanzee who's currently more productive than any of them.  Larry's medium is a mechanical painting device of his own invention that converts sound to brush strokes.  Louisa, happy to find another man who abhors wealth, marries him, and they live the simple life in their paint-stained loft.  But she whammies him as well, and when she suggests he play beautiful music for the machine to interpret, it paints a masterpiece.  He builds an assembly line of them, and is making money hand over waldo, leaving her alone again, first figuratively, and later literally when the machines turn on him and turn him into their living (for a while) canvas.

Her third try, she goes the opposite direction - Rod Anderson (Robert Mitchum) is even more staggeringly wealthy than she, and they hit it off immediately.  During a wild montage of parties and truly spectacular costumes (all created by the equally spectacular Edith Head), Rod is amazed to learn that athough he's been totally ignoring his business, he's actually made MORE money.  However, Louisa convinces him to sell everything and live his dream - to move back to a farm like the one he grew up on.  They do so, and are blissfully happy...until one morning, Rod accidentally tries to milk their prize bull, Melrose.  The moment is understated and only implied, but is truly hilarious - his last words, "Melrose, forGIVE me!", are preceded by a strained and surprised bovine bellow, and followed by him being kicked out the back of the barn.

Her next paramour comes in the form of Pinky Benson (Yes folks, you've been patient - it's Gene Kelly) an earnest but happy where he is song and dance man who performs in a local tavern called the Cauliflower Ear.  His act is pure schmaltz - he wears a clown getup, and does a fast hoofer nonsense number in the style of fifties performer Pinky Lee. He's barely noticed by the audience, which is just fine by the owner - a status quo that's lasted fourteen years.  Once again, Louisa thinks she's found a man who wants no more out of life than he's already got, and they wed.  And it all goes very well.  Until...

One of the recurring motifs in the film is Louisa's complimentary comparison of each of her marriages to a different kind of classic film. Her early time with Hopper was like a melodramatic silent film where love conquered all, her time in France like a French impressionistic picture, and the high-rent world of Rod like a series of lavish entrances in a "Lush Budgett" glamour film.  Her time with Pinky / Kelly, predictably enough, is portrayed as an over the top musical production.  Kelly, at 52 by the time of this film, is still staggeringly light on his feet, and Shirley more than keeps up with him.



Heading out for his birthday party after a performance, Louisa suggests he save time by not applying his makeup, and do the act in his street clothes.  He feels a bit shy without his costume, and he sings his number softly, and at half speed.  Rather than his clownish (naturally) buck and wing, he does a gentle soft-shoe number. As the raucous restaurant slowly grows silent to pay attention to him, Louisa realizes she's done it a again.  Pinky is discovered before they can finish a whip-pan, and Louisa is morosely lounging around a massive Hollywood mansion as Pinky works on a number of films at once.  Far from the soft-spoken hoofer she married, Kelly now plays Pinky in full-on parody mode, with a brassy voice and the traditional "My public" mode of the triple-threat mogul. 
At his latest premiere, they arrive in an all-pink Rolls, Louisa's head buried in a pink wig, and wrapped head to toe in pink mink.  The film, naturally, is a smash.  The surging crowd of fans are out of control, and his producers suggest he leave out the back entrance.  Just as they're about to leave, he realizes he can't do it to his fans, and pops out from the alley to surprise them.  BAD move.  They thunder toward him, their advance deftly mixed with shots (and sound effects) of stampeding elephants.  He is literally trampled to death by his adoring public.

As the dream sequences get progressively longer, so too her time spent with each husband, which means that Kelly gets the most time on screen.  He gets to play a good spectrum, from the shy tavern performer, to the lovestruck husband to the bombastic movie icon.  MacLaine is adorable throughout the film, eternally desperate for love, spending most of her time swathed in the most astounding finery, alternately covering her entirely, and leaving so little to the imagination you wonder how brother Warren didn't storm onto the set and slap all the cameramen. Her high pitched voice sounds like if she were in a comic book, it'd have little musical notes in her word balloons, like Melody from Josie and the Pussycats did.

I deliberately tried to keep my summaries of the rest of her paramours brief, as this is a Gene Kelly tribute.  But let me assure you, I left out a LOT of detail, and it's all worth a look.  The film's been making the rounds on cable, and is pretty easy to catch up with.  And well worth doing, as well.

The Mad Miss Manton: Swing Out, Sisters!

September 7, 2012, 7:12 pm

≫ Next: What A Character! Frank McHugh, Annabelle’s Husband, & So Much More

≪ Previous: Gene Kelly Unplugged: Half-Singing, Half-Dancing, All Acting Team Bartilucci Double-Feature!

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When RKO’s 1938 screwball comedy-mystery The Mad Miss Manton(TMMM) was shown on TCM, our genial host Robert Osborne noted that Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda had made three films together, all comedies: TMMM, The Lady Eve, and You Belong to Me, the latter two released in 1941. Set in then-contemporary New York City (but actually filmed in Burbank, CA in 100-degree heat, according to John M. Miller’s TCM article!), TMMMcame first. Director Leigh Jason had also worked with Stanwyck and co-star Hattie McDaniel in The Bride Walks Out (1936), before McDaniel won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Gone With The Wind (1939). 

Stanwyck’s part was originally meant for Katharine Hepburn, but Bringing Up Baby’s bad box office put the kibosh on that, though of course nowadays it’s hailed as a classic. Besides, things worked out fine for Hepburn, as she moved on to her Oscar-nominated performance in The Philadelphia Story (1940), among so many other triumphs. In any case, Stanwyck’s flair for comedy is just right for her role as Melsa Manton, madcap heiress extraordinaire. That’s my favorite kind of heiress, especially if she’d like to plunk a few bucks into my pocket during one of her charity scavenger hunts!

Melsa Manton has The Thin Man’s Nick and Nora Charles beat when it comes to chic yet zany sleuthing, at least when it comes to sheer numbers: she has eight gorgeous debutante girlfriends who are as loyal as they are endearingly kooky, with no-nonsense maid Hilda (McDaniel) shaking her head at these nutty rich folks. For the most part, the girls are happy to help Melsa solve murders, the occasional growled threat or thrown knife notwithstanding. Fun Fact: Melsa and her eight gal pals were no doubt playfully modeled on the northeastern women’s colleges known as “The Seven Sisters:” Barnard; Bryn Mawr; Mount Holyoke; Radcliffe; Smith; Vassar; and Wellesley. Of course, this being a Hollywood movie, another “sister” was added.  That’s Hollywood for you, always making everything bigger and bolder!

We first meet Melsa walking a gaggle of cute little dogs at the ungodly hour of 3 a.m.; is this how our pet-loving heroine makes extra spending money, or does she prefer to take her pets walkies when the neighbors are in bed, unaware Melsa’s pooches are leaving, er, souvenirs?  She notices Rex Realty signs plastered all over the house. Turns out it belongs to Sheila Lane (Leona Maricle, who’d also worked with Stanwyck in My Reputation), the wife of wealthy banker George Lane. Suddenly a car speeds past the site of the new subway. Melsa recognizes local gent Ronnie Belden (William Corson). Unlike the usual stereotype of New Yorkers who mind their own business, Melsa lets her curiosity get the best of her. Her impromptu investigation brings her to the deserted Lane house, where she finds a diamond brooch—and Lane’s bloodied body! As she flees in panic, Melsa drops the brooch. By the time Melsa gets ahold of Lieutenant Mike Brent (Team Bartilucci fave Sam Levene from The Killers; After The Thin Man; Shadow of The Thin Man; Last Embrace), the corpse has gone AWOL.

Don’t worry about the press as long as they spell your name right!

Lt. Brent and the rest of New York’s Finest are pretty darn peeved, considering that Melsa and her friends have a reputation as merry pranksters. Too bad our heroine happens to be dressed in a Little Bo-Peep costume for an artists’ ball, which doesn’t exactly do wonders for her credibility. Granted, Melsa swears their playful pranks were only meant to draw positive attention for the good causes they work on in the name of their various charities, like running a TB clinic and other helpful, clean-cut activities. Melsa and her pals clearly mean well, but haven’t they ever heard that charity begins at home? Maybe they should stay out of trouble by making lanyards for the poor or something. To add insult to injury, not only do Lt. Brent and his men refuse to investigate, but Peter Ames (Fonda), editor of The Morning Clarion, writes a stern article about Melsa’s hijinks, resulting in much comical slapping. One lawsuit, coming right up! With their reputations on the line, Melsa and the girls become amateur sleuths.  Debutante Roll Call, sound off now! 

1. Frances Mercer as Helen Frayne, the most sensible of Melsa’s gorgeous friends. The daughter of prominent East Coast sportswriter Sid Mercer, the raven-haired beauty was a “Powers Girl” model in New York in her teens back in the 1930s (as were my dear mom and aunt. Wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall with those gals swapping stories). Mercer went on to act and sing on stage, screen, and TV, including the Broadway musicals All the Things you Are;Very Warm for May; and Something for the Boys.
2. Kay Sutton as Gloria Hamilton. This lovely brunette’s screen credits include Carefree; The Saint in New York; Vivacious Lady. Gloria gets a nice punch line when the girls find what may or may not be bodily fluids:
   Dora:“How can that be blood? It’s blue.”
   Gloria:“Maybe he shot Mrs. Astor.”
   
   

   Oh, Kay!

3. Catherine O’Quinn as ditzy Dora Fenton. I’m almost certain O’Quinn is one of the blonde Goldwyn Girls in Team Bartilucci fave The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947). Anyway, she gets some delightful lines here, especially this TMMMbit, which becomes a running gag:
   Melsa:“Helen, you search the upstairs.”
   Helen:“Oh, no, I was never much of an individualist. If the upstairs has to be searched, we’ll search it together.”
   Dora:“Why, that’s Communism!”
4. Whitney Bourne, as Pat James(Blind Alibi; Double Danger; Beauty for the Asking, with Lucille Ball)), who never saw a snack she didn’t like, even at a murder scene! I’m sure Lt. Brent is thrilled to see his crime scene ruined. Hey, Pat, you gonna finish that? Don’t your rich parents feed you at home, you poor little rich girl you?
5. Ann Evers as Lee Wilson (If I Were King; Gunga Din; Casanova Brown).
6. Linda Perry, billed here as Linda Terry. By any name, she plays Myra Frost, Melsa’s flirty friend. Ms. Perry’s credits include They Won’t Forget; The Great Garrick; and the 1937 movie adaptation of the Perry Mason film The Case of the Stuttering Bishop.
7. Vickie Lester (billed as Vicki Lester) as Kit Beverly. Vickie’s star was born in Tom, Dick, and Harry; Tall, Dark, and Handsome; The Great Plane Robbery.
8. Eleanor Hanson as Jane.  (Guess it's one of those one-word names, like Margo or Annabella.) She also appeared in the Western Flaming Frontiers and bit parts such films as The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, and worked again with TMMMco-star Penny Singleton in Blondie Goes to College. Wonder if Singleton and Hansen ever reminisced about making TMMM?

One stiff, hold the mayo!

Before long, the lawsuit takes a back seat, along with a corpse or two, as Peter finds himself falling in love with the spirited Melsa and trying to save her from shady characters like ex-con Edward Norris (Stanley Ridges of Possessed; To Be or Not to Be; Sergeant York), a convicted murderer who’s working on the subway and just might have a score to settle. Even Blondie gets into the act—no, not songbird Debbie Harry, but the original Blondie, Penny Singleton, formerly Dorothy McNulty from After the Thin Man. She’s funny and memorable in this pre-Blondie comedy caper as Frances Gluck, who’s stuck on Norris and tries to convince the girls of his innocence, even trying to pass off the future Blondie Bumstead as an old chum, with hilarious results and a smattering of social commentary.

Kit(talking to Hilda with her mouth full): “Have you another piece of cake, Hilda?”

Hilda:“Yes, I have, but the kitchen’s closed for the night.”

Melsa:“Hilda! Miss Beverly is our guest.”

Hilda:“I didn’t ask her up!”

Helen:“Come the revolution, we’ll stop being exploited by our help.”
Melsa (giving Hilda a wry look):“In my house, the revolution is here!”

Who needs Charlie's Angels with 8 crimefighting debs?

“Lt. Brent, the good news is we’ve found George Lane’s body. The bad news…er….”

Blondie Beats a Murder Rap!

Lt. Brent saves the day! Who knew he was a counter spy?

Although Fonda and Stanwyck were great onscreen, Henry Fonda was less than thrilled with his role. He’d been borrowed from Walter Wanger Productions and, as Axel Madsin wrote in his biography Stanwyck, Fonda “...hated his role, hated the script's sneering repartee with his leading lady, and tried his best to ignore everybody.”  Fonda himself later admitted, "I was so mad on this picture; I resented it." Philip G. Epstein’s script from an unpublished Wilson Collison novel was clearly meant as a female star vehicle, and as Miller suggested, “Fonda probably did not appreciate the scenes in which he was beaten up by eight flighty debutantes!” But Fonda got over it, happily co-starring with Stanwyck again in two other hits, as mentioned earlier, and becoming close friends. In fact, Robert Osborne said Fonda admitted to his subsequent wives that he carried a torch for Stanwyck for the rest of his life (and why not?)!

Here's a link to our pal Dawn Sample's great Noir and Chick Flicks blog post from 2011!


http://dawnschickflicks.blogspot.com/2011/05/mad-miss-manton-1938_27.html

I knew those crazy kids would make beautiful music together!

You say you want a revolution? Hilda's your go-to gal!

What A Character! Frank McHugh, Annabelle’s Husband, & So Much More

September 22, 2012, 7:36 pm

≫ Next: The Cat and The Canary (1939) - Cat Ballyhoo!

≪ Previous: The Mad Miss Manton: Swing Out, Sisters!

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Whoop it up, wranglers! Frank and the boys show Texas visitors action in All Through the Night

This review is part of theWhat A Character! Blogathon,hosted by Paula of Paula’s Cinema Club, Kellee of Outspoken and Freckled, and Aurora of Once Upon A Screen. The Blogathon runs from September 22nd through 24th, 2012. By all means, please leave comments for one and all! :-)

My husband Vinnie and I first saw character actor Frank McHugh (1889-1981) on TV, when we were watching the 1942 Warner Bros. wartime comedy-thriller All Through the Night(ATtN) on TCM. We of Team Bartilucci loved both Frank and the movie right away!  And why wouldn’t we, with its great high concept: “Damon Runyon Kicks Nazi Heinie in NYC.”  Heck, we could easily devote this entire blogpost to ATtN alone, considering the cast’s many wonderful character actors. In addition to our Frank, ATtN’s cast included Humphrey Bogart (who I’ve always thought had the soul of a character actor along with his star quality); William Demarest; Jackie Gleason; Phil Silvers; Barton MacLaine; Edward Brophy; Wallace Ford; Charles Cane; Conrad Veidt; Judith Anderson; Martin Kosleck; and Peter Lorre.  But for us, Frank stole the show as Barney, the newlywed among the tough but good-natured “sports promoters” (translation: bookies and gamblers) in Bogart’s crew. We’ll always affectionately think of Frank as “Annabelle’s Husband” in honor of Barney’s new bride (Jean Ames), who barely even gets time to kiss her groom before Bogie & Company whisk him away to fight Fifth Columnists in New York City. As Barney, Frank gets some of the best lines in this totally entertaining blend of comedy and action:

Barney:“Annabelle’s waiting for me…after all, I’m a married man. I got obligations.”

Gloves (Bogart):“All right, send her flowers.”
 Barney:“Well…that wasn’t my idea.”

 

Slugger Frank clobbers Fifth Columnists in All Through the Night!

Talking to Madame (Anderson) at the auction house after Gloves and Sunshine (Demarest) are knocked out and tied up:

Barney:“Lookit, lady, when we started out tonight, there were three of us. Twenty minutes later, there was only two. Now there’s only one. One of us isn’t enough to leave here alone!”

Hooch your daddy? Frank and James Cagney in The Roaring Twenties (1939)

Of course, before Frank became one of our favorite character actors,Francis Curray McHugh was born in Homestead, PA in 1889, the youngest member of a family of character actors. Indeed, the McHugh family had their own stock company, including sister Kitty McHugh and brother Matt McHugh. Sometimes they got screen credit, and sometimes they didn’t, but the McHugh family was always working, whether it was Matt playing uncredited roles like “Third Man on Death Row” in My Favorite Brunetteor faux waiter Frisco inThe Mad Miss Manton, or Kitty McHugh getting screen credits as Mae in The Grapes of Wrath or Goldie in Blonde Trouble. Fans of the 1947 film noir The Dark Corner may also recognize Matt as the milkman who comes to Lucille Ball’s apartment. At the age of 10, young Frank literally got into the act and began his own acting career with the rest of the clan.

Frank and James Cagney as sea salts in Here Comes the Navy (1934)

Frank made his Broadway bow in 1925 in The Fall Guy. Five years later, Hollywood came a-knockin’, and he made his film debut in The Dawn Patrol.  Warner Bros. hired him as a contract player, where he usually played the hero’s sidekick and/or comedy relief.  Usually looking and sounding nervous yet likable, Frank appeared in over 90 movies at Warners, as well as Paramount’s Going My Way and My Son John, both of which cast McHugh as priests. (My Son John was Robert Walker’s last film, which you can read about in myStrangers on a Trainpost, if you’re interested.  But I digress….).  Frank’s regular-joe characters ranged from mechanics to newspapermen to sidekicks to tough guys—or not-so-tough guys, like the aforementioned Barney—with hearts of gold.  Frank often appeared with another in-demand character actor, Allen Jenkins (Ball of Fire;Lady on a Train; the voice of TV’s Officer Dibble on Hanna-Barbera’s Top Cat). Sometimes Frank even got the girl, a laATtN!

Frank as Father Timothy O'Dowd in Going My Way

During Radio’s heyday, Frank proved to be as versatile a voice actor as he was a film actor, starring in 1935’s in Shell Chateau, and then in 1938 in the Warner Brothers Academy Theater. The next decade saw Frank performing in several Radio dramas. Then, in 1946, Frank got another break: popular Film and Radio comedian Stuart Erwin had been starring on the CBS Radio sitcom Phone Again, Finnegan.Realizing he was spreading himself too thin with commitments, Erwin stepped down, and Frank got the gig, joining the cast as Fairchild Finnegan.  By the early 1950s, Frank’s film career was winding down, so he migrated to Television, racking up over 80 TV credits. From 1964 through 1965, Frank and his Going My Way co-star teamed up for The Bing Crosby Show, where Frank played Bing's comic foil, Willis Walter.

Frank's in the swim with Elvis in Easy Come, Easy Go (1967)

Ironically, Frank had supporting roles in two different films titled Easy Come, Easy Go (ECEG),which just goes to show that everything old is new again, at least when it comes to movie titles! The first ECEG was a 1947 comedy-drama described on the IMDb as “A film that possibly held the record for the most Irish-descent players in an American-produced movie before The Quiet Man was shot on location in Ireland, and that includes The Informer.”  The secondECEG was a 1967 Elvis Presley comedy-adventure with Navy frogman Elvis and local shopkeeper Frank joining forces to find undersea treasure—which turns tricky when Frank’s character, Captain Jack, confesses he’s afraid of water!

Being an in-demand character actor is thirsty work!

Frank quietly retired from show business in 1969 with his wife, Dorothy, and died of natural causes in 1981, survived by his wife of 48 years and his three children. Of course, he lives on in the hearts and films of his many fans, including all of us here at Team Bartilucci HQ.  What A Character, indeed!

The 1947 Easy Come, Easy Go. Don't mix those two up!

If you want to hear more about All Through the Night,check my review here.

The Cat and The Canary (1939) - Cat Ballyhoo!

November 4, 2012, 9:06 am

≫ Next: THE GHOST BREAKERS: Havana Frightful Good Time!

≪ Previous: What A Character! Frank McHugh, Annabelle’s Husband, & So Much More

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Where there’s life, there’s Hope—Bob Hope!  Okay, so I borrowed that from an ad line from another one of Hope’s comedies, but the point is, Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard were a delightful team in their first film together, Paramount’s The Cat and The Canary (TC&TC).  Produced by Arthur Hornblow of Witness for the Prosecutionfame,and based on John Willard’s original 1922 stage play, the popular thriller was eventually adapted for both stage and screen in 1927 and 1930.  Director Elliott Nugent(My Favorite Brunette, Up in Arms)joined forces with Hope and Goddard for this 1939 version of the story, adding more witty, playful comedy and romance to Willard’s thriller. This version worked so well that Hope and Goddard made two more films together: The Ghost Breakers (1940), and Nothing But the Truth (1941).  For the record, there was also a 1979 version.  I never saw it, but the stars sound promising:  Yanks Carol Lynley and Michael Callan, and Brits Honor Blackman, Wendy Hiller, Edward Fox, Olivia Hussey, Daniel Massey, Peter McEnery, and Wilfrid Hyde-White. But I digress….

 Here's looking at you, kids!

Universal actually owned the rights to Willard’s play, but sold them to Paramount. Fun Fact: the film, along with the 1940 film The Ghost Breakers(which I’ll discuss next time), was an inspiration to Walt Disney for his Haunted Mansion attraction at Disneyland!   Focusing on the funny, The New York Times’ film critic Frank S. Nugentdescribes Bob Hope not as the thing with feathers a la Emily Dickenson, but as having“a chin like a forehead and a gag line for every occasion… (This version of the story) is more hair-brained than hair-raising, which is as it should be.”  I agree: with this cast, fun and suspense make a swell team, including the delightful Nydia Westman (the 1933 version of Little Women;The Remarkable Andrew; The Ghost and Mr. Chicken) as Cousin Cicily, a charmingly daft flibbertigibbet among the late Cyrus Norman’s relatives. The supporting cast weren’t small potatoes, either, with George Zucco (The Mummy; After the Thin Man; The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Gale Sondergaard(Anna and the King of Siam; The Letter; and Best Supporting Actress Oscar-winner for Anthony Adverse).  I especially enjoyed Sondergaard as Miss Lu; she’s kinda like a sophisticated Bayou Mrs. Danvers played for straight-faced laughs, blending mystery, menace, and mirth. Both Zucco and Sondergaard  playfully spoof the more ominous roles they were known for, while still being spooky enough to keep viewers on their toes, blending suspense and comedy into a sparkling cocktail. As Lawyer Crosby (no relation to Hope’s future screen co-star Bing Crosby), George Zucco’s foreboding presence adds the right touch of menace.   

Meet the lady known as Lu!

Hope’s movie career had begun with The Big Broadcast of 1938, and Goddard started her career as a child model, debuting in The Ziegfeld Follies at the tender age of 13!  Goddard’s fame as the Follies’ girl on the crescent moon put her on the map.  She was married to a a millionaire at the age of 16—and divorced not long after that.  After dissolving her marriage in 1931, Goddard went to Hollywood, where her natural talent and beauty sent her stardom soaring, bewitching Hollywood’s elite.  She earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination in the 1943 war drama So Proudly We Hail! She attracted some pretty remarkable fellas as husbands, too:  Charlie Chaplin; Team Bartilucci fave Burgess Meredith; and author Erich Maria Remarque of All Quiet on the Western Front fame. Goddard also did her bit for higher education, leaving over $20 million to New York University when she died in 1990.  What a gal!

Hello, I’m Mrs. Trumbull! Mrs. Ricardo recommended me. Anyone need a babysitter for spectral spooks?

The plot involves a gaggle of distant cousins who’ve come together after 10 years for the reading of Cyrus Norman’s will.  In the great comedy-thriller tradition, the prettiest and most generally winsome gal, Joyce Norman (Goddard) finds herself the designated Lady in Distress, while the affable, quip-slinging actor Wally Campbell (Hope) has noticed how little Joyce has grown up quite nicely.  Attraction is in the air, and no wonder, with the delightful chemistry between Hope and Goddard!  I especially liked the way Wally manages to be brave for Joyce in spite of his nervousness. 

Joyce and Wally ain’t afraid of no ghosts! That comes later, in The Ghost Breakers!

In addition to Joyce and Wally, the prospective victims, er, heirs include Fred Blythe (John Beal of Double Wedding; My Six Convicts; The Firm); Charlie Wilder(Douglass Montgomery, another 1933 Little Women cast member); and Aunt Susan (Elizabeth Patterson, whose long career included Intruder in the Dust;Lady on a Train; TV’s I Love Lucy as babysitter Mrs. Trumball).  Wally tries to put the others at ease with quips: “I hear old Uncle Cyrus’s ghost is holding bank night.”  What’s more, thanks to Wally’s theatrical background, he can’t help predicting each new spooky suspense cliché, keeping the others’ heads turning suspiciously, prompting Wally to suggest to Joyce, “I’ll recommend a nice quiet bomb-proof cellar to you for the next 30 days.”  Sorry, guys, everybody’s gotta stay overnight whether they want to or not.  As Wally wryly explains, “The members of Local Number 2 of the Bayou Canoe Paddlers and Putt-Putt Pushers Union fold putt after midnight.” Well, that’s OK; Wally and Joyce and company can always while away the time looking for a diamond necklace worth a fortune while trying to avoid being bumped off.

Oops, Joyce grabbed the wrong book. She was looking for Bazooka Joe’s bubble gum bio, The Psychology of Fleer!

On top of the creepy goings-on at ol’ Blue Bayou, the local authorities announce that there’s a fugitive psychopath on the loose from Fairview, the local asylum. “That’s all we needed,” Wally says. “Well, anyway, he’ll feel right at home.”  The killer is known as “The Cat,” but this “Cat” sure isn’t the suave Cary Grant/To Catch A Thief kind of cat burglar!  Soon Wally and Joyce are up to their ears in danger and romance, with more secret panels than The Game Show Network as Miss Lu stirs the pot with ominous warnings and whatnot!  Can Wally and Joyce live happily ever after, “live” being the operative word?  One thing’s for sure: with Hope and Goddard, it’ll sure be fun finding out! 

Hey, Joyce, give a guy a hand!

Fun Facts: 

• According to Wikipedia, Universal owned the rights to Willard’s play and sold them to Paramount Pictures.  Indeed, it inspired Walt Disney to create the original beloved Haunted Mansion at Disneyland!
• Don’t blink during the first scene, or you’ll miss Chief Thundercloud(Hudson’s Bay)as an Indian guide!

If you like The Cat and The Canary, check out other reviews of this fun film by other swell bloggers!

1.) Yvette Banek from her stupendous blogIN SO MANY WORDS from March 2012!

2.) John Greco’s Twenty-Four Framesreview from May 2011! 

Also, don't miss an uncredited Charles Lane (Ball of Fire; I Wake Up Screaming, etc.) in the final scene!  I admit it, I'm a sucker for a happy ending, especially a funny one!

THE GHOST BREAKERS: Havana Frightful Good Time!

November 19, 2012, 4:00 pm

≫ Next: The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942): Wild and Woolley!

≪ Previous: The Cat and The Canary (1939) - Cat Ballyhoo!

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As fond as I am of the 1939 version of The Cat & The Canary, the words of that great philosopher Daffy Duck leap to mind:  “If they like that mess, they’re starvin’ for some real hoofin’!”  Well, if Paramount’s 1940 tweaking of The Ghost Breakers (TGB) isn’t the real hoofin’, I don’t know what is!  It’s a premium blend  of snappy comedy, playful romance, and genuine spooky suspense.  Producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr. (Witness for the Prosecution; The Asphalt Jungle; Oklahoma!) reunites The Cat & The Canary co-starsBob Hope and Paulette Goddard, as well as director George Marshall (The Gazebo; It Started with a Kiss). Their funny, sparkling chemistry together is better than ever, blending warmth, romance, and comedy as deliciously as a daiquiri.  Hope and Goddard are so darling together, I want to hug them and bring them home for the holidays!  (But a DVD will do!)  I like the cheeky references to Paulette Goddard’s Cecil B. DeMille movies, too (Unconquered; Reap the Wild Wind, etc.).

Be very, very quiet; we're hunting ghosts!

Based on the work of Walter DeLeon and based on the play by John Willard and Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard (any relation to co-star Paulette Goddard?), the film gets off to an exciting start in New York City during a violent thunderstorm that’s almost worthy of Hurricane Sandy.  “Nice night for a murder,” says our heroine Mary Carter (Goddard) as she packs for her voyage to pre-Castro Cuba.  She only thinks she’s kidding, with all the mystery and intrigue afoot!  You see, Mary’s off to Cuba to claim her family inheritance, Castillo Maldito, or “Black Island.”  Sounds cozy already, huh?  Mary’s mom had told her about Black Island and its sinister legends, but Mary’s a good-natured yet skeptical New Yorker who doesn’t scare easily: “(My mother) also told me about Santa Claus, Snow White, and the Seven Dwarves.”  Of course, her Cuban advisor, Senor Havez (Pedro de Cordoba of Anthony Adverse;The Corsican Brothers; Hitchcock’s Saboteur) gives Mary a last friendly warning: “We must admit there is a dividing line somewhere between superstition and the supernatural.  All I know is that during the last twenty years, no human being who has tried to spend the night in Castillo Maldito ever lived to see a sunrise.”  You never know; I can imagine the eager developers eventually showing up waving contracts for chain restaurants and hotels anytime now!  But Mary gets an urgent phone call from Ramon Medeiros (Anthony Quinn of Road to Singapore and Road to Morocco, aswell as winningBest Supporting Actor Oscars for Lust for Life and Viva Zapata!) about her upcoming trip.Alas, whatever it was he wanted to say gets lost in a hail of gunfire, and poor Medeiros is no more.  What was Medeiros trying to tell Mary before everyone got trigger-happy?

"Johnny Ola told me about her! They call her 'Superman'!"


Meanwhile, meet our hero, radio star Larry Lawrence (Hope) and his valet Alex (Willie Best of High Sierra; Cabin in the Sky; and Hope and Goddard’s third film together, Nothing But the Truth). Larry’s full name is in fact Lawrence Lawrence Lawrence, a name so nice they named him thrice!   “My parents had no imagination,” Larry explains.  He and Alex are packing for a fishing trip, but will they end up sleeping with the fishes instead?  You see, as if the storm and the hotel’s resulting blackout weren’t already agita-inducing, Larry’s radio show focuses on dishing the dirt on notorious criminal underworld types. Wouldn’t you know Larry has run afoul of gangster Frenchy Duvall (Paul Fix of After the Thin Man;Dr. Cyclops; and ironically, TV’s The Rifleman, as Marshal Micah Torrence!)?  Now Duvall is out for blood.  Sheesh, underworld types can be so sensitive!  As more gunplay ensues, Larry fears he’s the one who accidentally killed Medeiros, and he and Alex end up unwittingly joining Mary on a slow boat to Cuba! 

Young Richard Carlson as The Man in the White Suit!

Romance blooms for Mary and Larry, though that doesn’t stop others from trying to keep our heroes from reaching Black Island, including Dr. Parada (Paul Lukas of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; Watch on the Rhine, the film that won Lukas his Best Actor Oscar), Anthony Quinn again, this time as Ramon Medeiros’ brother Francisco.  Look sharp during the scene at the Las Palmas nightclub with Lloyd Corrigan (Whistling in the Dark; The Big Clock;The Manchurian Candidate; the Boston Blackie movies) for a brief appearance by lovely Dolores Moran (To Have and Have Not; The Horn Blows at Midnight; Old Acquaintance) and a dapper young Richard Carlson (The Little Foxes; The Creature from the Black Lagoon; It Came from Outer Space; and the fact-based 1953 to 1956 TV series I Led Three Lives) as Mary’s old friend Geoff Montgomery. Carlson is in one of my favorite scenes:

Geoff:  “A zombie has no will of his own.  You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.”

Larry:  “You mean like Democrats?”

They won't hear nothin' more from The Mighty Quinn....

 TGB’s comedy and horror elements blend superbly, with character actor Noble Johnson (King Kong; Jungle Book; The Most Dangerous Game) playing a truly haunting, memorable zombie.  John M. Miller from the TCM Web site notes that TGB pre-dates Val Lewton’s I Walked With A Zombie by three years.  For better or worse, like any actors who were even remotely swarthy, both Anthony Quinn and Noble Johnson were frequently cast in supporting roles at Universal Studios and RKO as Native Americans, Latinos, Arabs, and other so-called “exotic” types. 

...Or will they? He resurrects real good!

TGB’s production values are top notch, from Edith Head’s gorgeous wardrobe for Paulette Goddard, to Hans Dreier and Robert Usher’s Art Direction, to the cinematography of Charles Lang (Charade;Some Like It Hot; How to Steal a Million).  Farciot Edouart’s special effects photography with the ghosts emerging is eerily captivating.

Willie Best was highly praised by none other than his co-star Bob Hope, who said Best was one of the best actors he ever knew—and yet so many people have criticized him, or more specifically, the African-American stereotypes he was called upon to portray. I say you can’t fault a performer (or anyone else) for NOT being ahead of his time!  My dear friend and fellow blogger Becky Barnes of ClassicBecky’s Brain Food renown agrees: “Willie Best was one of the best comedians of the era. It's such a shame things were the way they were then. I think he just about carried The Ghost Breakers, and he deserves acclaim for his work.”  Amen to that, sister!

Bob Hope and Willie Best agree: no comedy-thriller holds a candle to The Ghost Breakers!

 Just as zombies never die, neither do remakes:  The Ghost Breakers was successfully remade in 1953 for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis as Scared Stiff, with Lizabeth Scott as the heiress-in-distress, including voiceover cameos by Bob Hope and Bing Crosby! 

I think Mary would prefer a free drink or a mint on her pillow!

Ooh, The Zombies!  I loved that band!

Laura, er, Mary is the face in the misty light....

Aha, we've solved the mystery! Mary's ancestor was Dr. Phibes!

Don't you just love a happy ending on the high seas?

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The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942): Wild and Woolley!

December 10, 2012, 11:33 am

≫ Next: An Evening with Bill Murray about HYDE PARK ON HUDSON

≪ Previous: THE GHOST BREAKERS: Havana Frightful Good Time!

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It all started with the famous Algonquin Round Table, where New York City’s elite would meet to eat, drink, and crack each other up with sly, witty bon mots. The most outrageous gadabout of them all was Alexander Woollcott, a larger-than-life character even by the Algonquin Round Table’s standards.  Woollcott was one of the most eminent critics and radio personalities of the 1920s and ’30s—and also one of the most maddening men you’d ever meet!  As author Jared Stone describes him in his 2006 book Moss Hart: A Prince of the Theatre, “While many prominent people called Woollcott a friend, he was also known for his acid tongue and demanding, impossible-to-please attitude. He could be charming and generous one minute; petulant and venomous the next.”

As Andrea Passafiume explains on the TCM Web site, Woollcott’s many notable friends included the very successful playwriting team of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart: “One evening while Woollcott was visiting Moss Hart, he made an unusual request. He wanted Hart and Kaufman to write a new play for him to star in. Woollcott had dabbled in acting before, and thought that being in a play would be a new way in which to reach his massive audience.  Somewhat dubious, but not wanting to disappoint his friend, Hart agreed to give the matter some thought.”  Then Hart remembered an overnight visit with Woollcott in his country home.  Woollcott had badgered Hart and his household with all manner of unreasonable non-stop demands.  He unfairly accused Hart’s servants of stealing; he whined for cookies and milkshakes at odd hours; he demanded the heat be turned off; he insisted that Hart trade beds with him — it was always something!  As Hart described the maddening no-sleep-over to Kaufman, he had a brainwave:  “Wouldn't it have been awful if (Woollcott) had broken a leg and been on my hands for the rest of the summer?”  Ta-da!  A classic comedy was born!  Talk about turning lemons into lemonade!

Sophisticates on a Train!

George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner(TMWCtD) debuted at New York City’s Music Box Theatre on October 16^th, 1939.  It made Monty Woolley a Broadway star, and in January 1942, he became a movie star, too, when the Warner Bros. film version hit theaters.  The film version pretty much became an instant classic.  Even today, TMWCtD is a gift that’s kept on giving to delighted audiences over the decades, with awards and revivals in New York and London.  There was even a 1950 Radio broadcast starring Clifton Webb as Sheridan Whiteside, and Lucille Ball as Maggie Cutler.  Knowing that Webb and Ball were equally talented in both comedy and drama, I for one can cheerfully imagine going back in time to hear Webb and Ball do comedy together after their awesome dramatic performances in The Dark Corner!   I wonder howTMWCtD‘s Sherry (as friends call him) and Laura’s Waldo Lydecker would have gotten along, murder not withstanding?

Oh, my!  Will the gifts be returned?

Born in August 1888, Monty Woolley came from an elite family, owners of the renowned Marie Antoinette Hotel on Broadway.  Despite his youth, Woolley cut quite a swath through Manhattan society, along with Master’s degrees at Yale and Harvard.  He returned to Yale as an English instructor and drama coach, counting Thornton Wilder and Stephen Vincent Benet among his students, intimates, and confidants.  Woolley’s friend Cole Porter (we should all have such friends!) encouraged him to become a stage director himself, resulting in such Broadway hits as Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), The New Yorkers, and Jubilee (1935). Woolley took his first Broadway bow in the hit musical On Your Toes (a revival is set for 2013) and soon it was Hollywood’s turn to sit up and take notice as Woolley ascended the ranks of supporting actors at MGM, Warner Bros., and Paramount.

Maggie loves Bert because he's a good skate!

Woolley came into his own in the 1940s, with hits like the Christmas classic The Bishop’s Wife; When Irish Eyes are Smiling; the rather fanciful Cole Porter biopic Night and Day; and best of all, two Oscar nominations: a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his role in the WW II drama The Pied Piper (1942), and a Best Supporting Actor nomination for another war classic, Since You Went Away (1944).  But for the life of me, I can’t imagine why Woolley wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for his iconic performance for TMWCtD!Just one of cinema’s little mysteries, I guess!

Only two actors besides Monty Woolley reprised their original Broadway roles for the movie:

• Mary Wickes (Now, Voyager; June Bride; It Happened to Jane; and many TV series, including several with frequent co-star Lucille Ball), making her Broadway debut, and then her movie debut, as Miss Preen, the ever-startled and put-upon nurse.
• Ruth Vivian, who plays the sweet, soft-spoken, but apparently batty Harriet Stanley (Confidential Agent; A Letter to Three Wives).

Then television came along, bringing a (reportedly so-so) 1972 TV movie starring Orson Welles, Lee Remick, and even Mary Wickes reprising her debut role.  In 2000, there was a delightful Broadway revival at The Roundabout Theatre, starring Team Bartilucci favorite Nathan Lane, also broadcast on PBS (which we watched and loved). There had even been a musical version in 1967, Sherry!, by none other than James Lipton!   Alas, it was short-lived, but the soundtrack is still available on Amazon.com as of this writing, with a powerhouse cast including Lane, Bernadette Peters, Tommy Tune, and Carol Burnett!

But of course, movies are the medium we’re most mad about here at TotED, so we’re focusing on the 1942 Warner Bros. version of TMWCtD, one of our favorite holiday comedies!  Naturally, Warner Bros. snapped up the movie rights, and the result has something for everyone:  comedy chock-full of witty dialogue by brothers Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein (the writers who brought us such hits as Casablanca and the film version of Arsenic and Old Lace), adapted from Kaufman and Hart’s play, of course, not to mention romance and rivalry; gorgeous gals; screwball comedy; even penguins and octopi!  How’s that for getting your movie-going money’s worth (so to speak, considering most of us here are most likely watching in on DVD/Blu-Ray and such)? 

Granted, at that time, Monty Woolley wasn’t as familiar to moviegoers as he was to Broadway audiences, so Warner Bros. surrounded Woolley with a galaxy of stars, including:

•  Bette Davis, incomparable superstar and two-time Oscar-winner, as Sherry’s secretary Maggie Cutler. In fact, Davis had gone to New York to see the play herself, and she loved it.  She thought this comedy would be a nice change of pace from her usual heavy dramatic roles, and having Davis’ star power on the marquee sure couldn’t hurt!
• Billie Burke as the dithering Mrs. Stanley, known and loved from the Topper films, the Father of the Bride films, and most iconic of all, her performance as The Wizard of Oz’s Glinda the Good Witch!
• Grant Mitchell as the ever-irked Ernest Stanley, known for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Arsenic and Old Lace; The Grapes of Wrath;
• Reginald Gardiner as Noel Coward manqué Beverly Carlton, also known for Laurel and Hardy’s The Flying Deuces, as well as The Great Dictator and Christmas in Connecticut;
• Ann Sheridan, the “Oomph Girl” herself, as the popular, man-hungry movie/stage star Lorraine Sheldon, who was known for They Drive By Night; Nora Prentiss; George Washington Slept Here.  At the same time she made TMWCtD, the busySheridan was also shooting Kings Row (1942).
• Jimmy Durante as Banjo, the husky-voiced zany with the impressive proboscis and rapid-fire wacky wit, inspired in real life by Harpo Marx. Durante could do it all, in every medium, as an actor (You’re in the Army Now; It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; On an Island with You), comedian, composer, singer, and songwriter.  Who can forget Durante’s hit songs "Inka Dinka Doo," Umbriago,” and “Make Someone Happy,” especially at holiday time? Heck, while I was writing this post, I heard Durante’s cheerfully gruff voice singing “Make Someone Happy” for a commercial for Hotels.com!

Sheridan Whiteside calls in the Cavalry in his ongoing war against happiness in those other than himself!

The film opens on Sherry and his longtime secretary Maggie Cutler, arriving from New York City to do a favor for Sherry’s old friend Harry Clarke, who’s running a lecture tour.  Despite the friendship, Sherry’s raising the roof even before the train to Mesalia, Ohio has pulled into the station:

 Sherry: “I simply will not sit down at dinner with Midwestern barbarians.  I think too highly of my digestive system.”

 Maggie:  “Harry Clarke is one of your oldest friends.”

Sherry: “My stomach is an older one.”

Merry Christmas to Sherry from Madagascar!

The worldly, arrogant, tart-tongued Sheridan Whiteside — “Sherry” to his sophisticated friends — couldn’t be more different from the genteel — if impatient — bourgeois ball-bearing magnate Ernest Stanley and his wife, Daisy.  It’s clear that Sherry is a termagant under even the best of circumstances.  Then Sherry slips and racks himself on the Stanleys’ snowy, poorly-shoveled steps, and the Stanleys’ well-organized life turns upside-down, with wickedly funny results!  The shenanigans bring to mind a quote from a lecture by Stephen King during my college days at Fordham University:  “When bad things happen to others, it’s funny.  When it happens to you, it’s horror!”  Luckily for us viewers, the funny parts override everything else in this hilarious nightmare!

Sexy stage siren Lorraine Sheldon can always get a cab!

At least Sherry is a witty, entertaining, fun-to-watch tyrant, as long as you don’t cross him somehow.  He’s a great host — albeit at the bedeviled Stanleys’ expense — as he invites everyone and everything to his hosts’ home, from convicts to overseas visitors from many lands and languages, even different  species, including octopi and penguins.  Those poor Stanleys — their phone bills alone must be through the roof with the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and Sherry’s other famous friends gabbing away!  Slipping on ice and landing painfully on his rump certainly may not always lift Sherry’s spirits, but it sure leaves us howling with laughter as pandemonium reigns in the Stanley home, with scads of famous friends calling and visiting while Sherry amuses himself with gossip and guile.

We give Lorraine's blouse buttons 3 thumbs up!

Call it Stockholm Syndrome, or call it just plain warming up to each other, but as Sherry’s convalescence progresses, he finds himself taking a liking to some members of the household, including the couple working for the Stanleys, John (Edward Starkey) and Sarah (Betty Roadman), which just goes to show that if you feed people well, they’ll be your friends for life!  Sherry also takes a shine to the Stanley family’s young adult kids, June (Elisabeth Fraser) and Richard (Russell Arms).  Mr. Stanley keeps the young folks on short leashes, and when they confide in Sherry about Richard’s aspirations to be a professional photographer and June’s love for a labor union agitator who Mr. Stanley disapproves of, Sherry does his bit to help them while at the same time ensuring apoplexy from the easily-shocked Ernest and Daisy.  That’s what I call a win-win situation!

Sheesh, Lorraine! Beverly C helps Maggie phone it in!

Meanwhile, sophisticated Maggie finds herself drawn to the editor of the Mesalia Journal, Bert Jefferson (Richard Travis from The Big Shot; Mission to Moscow; and many TV Westerns — appropriate, since his real name was William Justice!).  Bert proves to be an easygoing, affable fella; indeed, he must be the most laid-back newspaperman in or out of movies!   Bert doesn’t even get rattled when Sherry tricks him out of a dollar to pay the cab driver — which Bert firmly but good-naturedly gets back from Bert.  Good for you, Bert!  No wonder Maggie’s falling for this sweet,  handsome, refreshingly uncomplicated man.  Bette Davis turns out to be a swell comedienne with her droll delivery, while subtly letting her both her hair and her guard down to let Bert win her heart.Will there be a Christmas wedding with everyone living happily ever after?  Not so fast!  When Sherry realizes love is blossoming between Maggie and Bert, Sherry doesn’t like it a bit!  Beneath Sherry’s acid tongue, he’s genuinely fond of Maggie, but he’s even more fond of having everything his own way, with no disruptions of his precious routine!  So the rascally Sherry launches his secret weapon:  glamorous actress Lorraine Sheldon, who’s been looking for a new play to star in, and is always open for mixing business with pleasure.  Without spoiling the screwball surprises, I can only say that love just might conquer all with a little help from your zaniest, most talented friends!  That said, I must say Maggie needs more faith in Bert.  Newspaperman or not, I don’t think it’s occurred to Bert that Lorraine’s hot for him.  Maybe he’s too uncomplicated?

The secret of "Oomph Girl" Lorraine's fab  figure: she sleeps in a mold!

Banjo meets Miss Preen. Hello, Nurse!

Considering how many stars vied for roles in TMWCtD, there could have been several versions filmed to keep everyone in Hollywood busy!  According to the TCM Web site, the following actors all wanted to be considered for roles:

Laird Cregar (Ooh, would that have been awesome, or what?!)
Orson Welles
Charles Laughton
Fredric March
Robert Benchley
Cary Grant
Rosalind Russell
Myrna Loy
Jean Arthur
Olivia de Havilland

At one time, Howard Hawks was interested in directing The Man Who Came to Dinner.

Bette Davis desperately wanted John Barrymore to play Sheridan Whiteside, but Barrymores drinking problem prevented him from being able to handle the film's snappy, complicated dialogue.

A dog bite to the nose temporarily  kept Bette Davis from being able to film scenes.

The character of Lorraine was reportedly based on actress Gertrude Lawrence.

In the film Jimmy Durante's character Banjo refers to Ann Sheridan's character Lorraine as "The Oomph Girl,” which was Sheridan's real-life nickname. In the original play, Banjo calls Lorraine "Old Hot-Pants.”

Mary Astor was tested for the role of Lorraine. (She'd have been a great choice, too!)

Danny Kaye tested for the role of Banjo. (0h, I can just imagine the awesomeness!)

Harpo Marx played the role of Banjo himself in a 1941 stage production at the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania.

The character of Beverly Carlton was based on Noel Coward.

Rosalind Russell, Myrna Loy, Jean Arthur and Olivia de Havilland were considered to play the role of Maggie.

The play The Man Who Came to Dinner was considered to be the last great collaboration between the team of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.

According to the IMDb, co-star Richard Travis came back to the town of Paragould, Arkansas to host the World Premiere of The Man Who Came to Dinner at the Capitol Theatre.  Travis had previously lived and worked there as the editor of the theater's coming-attractions magazine!  What’s more, Travis’ real name was William Justice, which no doubt explains why he went on to many Western roles. 

All of us here at Team Bartilucci HQ wish you and yours a truly joyful and safe:
Merry Christmas!
Happy Hanukkah!
Happy Kwanzaa!
And/or anything else 
you and yours wish to celebrate!

An Evening with Bill Murray about HYDE PARK ON HUDSON

December 29, 2012, 8:09 pm

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As longtime TotED readers know,I rarely review current movies here, but when I heard about Focus Features’ fact-based comedy-drama Hyde Park on Hudson (HPoH), I didn't want to wait for the rest of the world to decide whether or not this film was a future classic!  On Sunday, October 14th , 2012, I was lucky enough to attend a sneak preview in my hometown, New York City, at Manhattan’s Florence Gould Hall.  The stars, Bill Murray as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Laura Linney as Daisy Suckley, surely need no introduction, being Oscar nominees themselves: Murray for Lost in Translation (2003), and Laura Linney for The Savages (2007), Kinsey (2004), and You Can Count on Me (2000), among their other memorable films.

In HPoH, distant cousin Daisy comes to Hyde Park in upstate New York (played by England) as a companion/assistant to Franklin. Her duties include helping to keep the extent of the32nd President’s polio on the downlow; nobody wanted FDR to be shown as frail or helpless, especially with war looming on the horizon.  Daisy tends to her aunt, too, which delighted me, because Auntie is played by Team Bartilucci favorite Eleanor Bron (Help!, Alfie; Two For The Road; Bedazzled — the original 1960s films, not the remakes from the early 2000s)! 

Eleanor Bron as Daisy's Aunt

Daisy and Franklin have lots of interests in common, and soon literally become kissing cousins and confidants. The film’s narrative unfolds in an endearingly low-key style, almost as if these iconic historical figures could be members of your own family, albeit better dressed. I particularly liked the scenes with the Royal Couple, King George VI (played poignantly and ultimately endearingly by Samuel West) and Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman from Hot Fuzz;The Iron Lady).  Both George and Elizabeth are terrified of somehow screwing up this momentous occasion.  In particular, I found myself both amused and sympathetic toward the Royal Couple during the running gag about the King and the Queen not quite knowing whether to be insulted or just plain terrified when they’re faced with (gasp!) hot dogs, fearing an international incident if they do or say the wrong things.  George and Franklin even have a bit of a father-and-son aspect to their talks together. I’ll confess I’ve never seen the Oscar-winning The King’s Speech, but now that I’ve seen and enjoyed HPoH, I’d like to see both films back-to-back!  In any case, while some reviews were mixed, I found HPoH  to be witty, droll, and just plain endearing!

But you all really want to talk about Bill Murray, don’t you? Sure, we all do!  The New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff conducted the Q&A and Murray was a breezy, good-natured delight with both the interviewer and the questions from the enthusiastic audience.  Quoting from Itzkoff’s intro: “WHAT do we still want from Bill Murray?  His unpremeditated film career—in which he has parlayed performances as the happy-go-lucky heroes of 1980s-era slapstick into the existentially uncertain leading men of thoughtful comedies like Groundhog Day, Rushmore, and Lost in Translation—would seem to be sufficient. Yet we demand more from this 62-year-old actor, on whose rugged face a playful smirk and a contemplative gaze look equally at home, and he appears happy to give it to us in his life beyond the screen. Tracking his movements in the wild, as he crashes karaoke parties and kickball games, has become an online pastime; Mr. Murray himself has become the folkloric equivalent of a leprechaun or fairy godparent, popping up at unpredictable yet opportune moments.”

Murray’s amiable unpredictability has always been part of his charm.  For example, as Itzkoff got to see first-hand while visiting NYC on the film’s behalf: “… Mr. Murray gave a journalist a front-row seat to see his carefree philosophy in action. Actually, closer: After Mr. Murray’s interview with another interrogator ran overtime, I was invited to accompany him to an evening appearance at Florence Gould Hall — and onto the stage of its theater, where a private chat turned into a public spectacle for a few hundred members of the Screen Actors Guild. (Imagine accompanying Mr. Murray on a version of the famous tracking shot from “Goodfellas,” through the back rooms and bowels of an unfamiliar building until the moment you expect to part ways and take your seat in the audience, only to realize then that you’re part of the act.)  Murray apologized: “I’m sorry I went too long. I just feel badly when someone doesn’t have enough. Everyone wants to talk longer. Even I want to talk longer sometimes. And then I dig myself into holes I gotta get out of.”

Regarding feedback on his performance, Murray said, “I’m curious to see what people think of it, just ’cause it is not like an ordinary movie. I don’t know if it’s great or not. We’ll see what you get.”  Indeed, he was genuinely surprised to be offered this iconic role at all:  “I thought, ‘Can this guy be serious?’  I wouldn’t have cast myself. But this guy did, and about halfway through I went, ‘Wow, he really was right.’  Not to compare myself, but certain personality things were similar, like the way he tried to leaven things and move attention around a room, get everyone their little slice of the sun.”

Have you seen Bill Murray, baby, standing in the shadows?

Asked how he prepared for the role, Murray cited his days at the celebrated Second City comedy troupe in Chicago.  There, he’d worked with the great writer, actor, and improv master Del Close, who’d explained to him: “You wear your characters like a trench coat. It’s still you in there, but there’s like a trench coat.” Murray added, “So I figured this was like a winter trench coat, because there was just a little bit more character that comes to the party. So I did a lot more reading, a lot more studying. People ask, “Did this really happen?”  Well, if you read the diaries, it’s very clear that it happened.  The writing changes. You read this later stuff, when we’re at war, and he’s not telling his wife, he’s not telling the cabinet—they don’t know where he is. But he’s sending messages by courier to her every day. This girl was the vault. I love that expression: ‘She’s the vault.’ He could tell her anything, and it wasn’t leaving her head.”

Murray wasn’t out to sully the real-life people involved, though. “The thing I was concerned about was: The story that we’re going to tell, is it going to be a tearing-down of an icon?  I don’t know if I want to be part of that kind of action, where you trash someone.  What was the John Travolta movie, Primary Colors?  I didn’t want to do something where you were really just napalming someone.”

Itzkoff notes the joy Murray brings out of people when they encounter him, to which Murray smiles and says, “Some are more joyous than others. I’m of the habit that if there are people waiting outside the hotel, you don’t sign those autographs there. Because that means when you come back in the middle of the night, they’re still there. It’s usually a one-time thing. That’s it; that’s your one time. You try your hardest, but you can’t always be perfect.”

As he responds to this question, Murray brings Itzkoff with him onto an elevator, guiding him through a backstage area and onto the stage, where the expectant audience applauds rapturously. Even though these plans were surely explained to me ahead of time, the effect is one of dreamlike disorientation, followed by a deep breath and a tacit decision to follow Murray’s lead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1mHtkpkxiA

Itzkoff says:  “We were just talking about the joy you bring out of people. Do you believe it now?”

“Is this like the Oprah show?” Murray playfully replies. “Does everyone have a gift under their seat?  You guys are pretty jazzed up.”

Murray reminisces about the first time he’d went to Wrigley Field in Chicago as a boy. “I was a big Cubs fan, and I watched all the games on TV, but when I grew up, TV was in black and white. So when I was 7 years old, I was taken to my first Cubs games, and my brother Brian said, ‘Wait, Billy,’ and he put his hands over my eyes, and he walked me up the stairs.  And then he took his hands away.”  Choking up, Murray continues, “And there was Wrigley Field, in green. There was this beautiful grass and this beautiful ivy. I’d only seen it in black and white. It was like I was a blind man made to see. It was something.”

There seems to be so much serendipity in Murray’s life that Itzkoff couldn’t help but ask whether he’s actively cultivating these moments, or just hoping that they come to him.  “Well, you have to hope that they happen to you. That’s Pandora’s box, right? She opens up the box, and all the nightmares fly out.  And slams the lid shut, like, “Oops,” and opens it one more time, and hope pops out of the box. That’s the only thing we really, surely have, is hope.  You hope that you can be alive, that things will happen to you that you’ll actually witness, that you’ll participate in, rather than life just rolling over you.  Life rolls along, and holy cats, you wake up and it’s Thursday, and what happened to Monday?  Whatever the best part of my life has been, has been as a result of that remembering.

Everyone has days where you wake up and think: “Nothing good has come to me in a little while. I’d better prime the pump’?   Well, who hasn’t woken up thinking, “God, nothing good has come to me in a while,’ right?  When I feel like I’m stuck, I do something—not like I’m Mother Teresa or anything, but there’s someone who’s forgotten-about in your life, all the time.  Someone that could use an ‘Attaboy’ or a ‘How you doin’ out there?’  It’s that sort of scene, that remembering that we die alone.  We’re born alone. We do need each other. It’s lonely to really effectively live your life, and anyone you can get help from or give help to, that’s part of your obligation.”

Even today, Murray is pleasantly surprised that the roles that he’d done years ago, if not decades ago, still endure.  “When you did the job, you thought you were just trying to amuse your friends who are all on the job. I’m just trying to make the sound guy laugh, the script supervisor.  Take a movie like Caddyshack, I can walk on a golf course, and some guy will be screaming entire scenes at me and expecting me to do it word for word with him. It’s like: ‘Fella, I did that once.  I improvised that scene.  I don’t remember how it goes.’  But I’m charmed by it. I’m not like, ‘Hey, knock it off.’ It’s kind of cool.”

Eleanor Bron from A Little Princess, because it's a better pic of her :-)

Murray continues to be pleasantly surprised that the lessons he learned back in Second City would pay off later in life.  “It pays off in your life when you’re in an elevator and people are uncomfortable.  You can just say, ‘That’s a beautiful scarf.’  It’s just thinking about making someone else feel comfortable.  You don’t worry about yourself, because we’re vibrating together. If I can make yours just a little bit groovier, it’ll affect me. It comes back, somehow.”

Hyde Park on Hudson is currently in limited release, and will be in wide release in January 2013!

Until then, check out these fun tidbits about the film, courtesy of Focus Features! Here's the link:

http://focusfeatures.com/hyde_park_on_hudson

On How Crime Does Not Pay - Even in the Movies

January 1, 2013, 3:17 pm

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Team Bartilucci's hubby half, Vinnie Bartilucci, is in the spotlight this time, with one of our favorite genres, Heist movies!  Take it away, Vinnie!
Heist movies have been around as long as movies.  The Great Train Robbery was one of the first films, made in 1903, a staggering twelve minutes long.  And for almost all of that time, until the Seventies at least, the rule was that the criminals could not get away with their gains. They'd be caught, shot, betrayed, done under by their own greed, or some combination of the above. The idea was all based around what we now call "Imitable Action," what they analyze children's TV shows for. The idea is if something looks cool, people will try to do it. We claim that's a lot of flummery, but about 47% of YouTube videos put the lie to that.

Even Alfred Hitchcock, on his classic TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, was forced to add codas to his stories that revealed that no matter how perfect the murders or crimes were, the miscreants were found out after the cameras stopped rolling.   Sometimes they were witty epilogues, like the one in the classic Lamb to the Slaughter, but more often than not they were almost throwaway, half mumbled, "Of course they were eventually found out and convicted for their crimes" that almost ended with a wink. That rule about The Guilty Must Suffer was all but inviolate.

Heck, even in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, they couldn't get the money, and they didn't even STEAL it. All they did is get greedy, and it was only ONE of them. One almost gets the impression that the message trying to be hammered home wasn't "Don't steal," but "Don't try to better yourself, stay in your place."  But of course, that would be excessively paranoid, wouldn't it?

Come the Sixties, we started to see a subtle shift to the Caper Movie; the planning was much grander, and the payoffs larger than ever. Instead of a mere carefully-planned bank robbery or some such, we'd see a meticulously organized break-in, or perhaps a complicated con job. Plans so outlandish and daring that you want them to get away with it out of sheer respect.   But still that rule had to go and piss on the fish. They came up with a new twist, though; the caper-planners might be able to avoid incarceration, but they could still never get away with the money. So in the original Ocean's Eleven, the money gets burned up as carcinogenic co-conspirator Tony Bergdorf  (Richard Conte) gets unexpectedly cremated. Michael Caine and the gang from The Italian Job get placed in a deadly balancing act with the escape bus teetering on the brink, with the lovely lolly at the far end over the cliff. Every time they try to creep forward to grab it, the bus CREEEEKS precariously forward. I always thought this ending was what was being tributed at the end of Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Even my beloved Fitzwilly couldn't get away with the money, no matter how benevolent his reasons.

The Wife analyzed Topkapi a few months back, another example of a cast that you really want to see get away with it, but simply can't. We admire and  appreciate the work of the mastermind of a fine caper, and enjoy watching the exploits of such films come together, as much as we hate watching them fall apart at the end.

The more outlandish the capers got, the more you wanted them to get away with it. They tried everything - they made the miscreants likable, even noble. Two films with somewhat similar capers were also forced to slap on the ironic punishment.  1967's Who's Minding the Mint? (available from the Warner Archive) put Jim Hutton (TV's Ellery Queen) in a position where he's forced to break into the mint to print off legal tender to make up for an accidental destruction of fifty thousand dollars to avoid incarceration.   Long story short, it balloons into printing millions of dollars, and results in a goddamn brilliant madcap comedy. But again, they can't possibly be allowed to get away with the money, so it accidentally gets picked up as trash, leading to a mad chase across town to catch up with the garbage truck before the money is dumped on a barge and lost. This being one of the cases where the crime was for a good reason, enough is salvaged to save Jim's bacon, but no more. At least in this case, they added a coda to suggest they might yet succeed, as over the closing credits, the cast is in scuba gear, heading down to try to retrieve their surreptitious spondulix.  Another house favorite, Gambit, has a similar "Maybe it's not too sad an ending," where while Michael Caine won't benefit from his crime, another cast member might.

Ocean's 11 (1960)

A year later, Seven Times Seven was released in Italy with the same crime - break into the Mint and print a bunch of cash. This one was a bit more complex - the plotters were in prison, so they would have to break OUT of prison, INTO the Mint, then back INTO prison, wait out their sentences, and pick up the cash when they're released. The big soccer final gives them a perfect opportunity, as the guards' eyes will all be glued to the TV, and only occasionally to the security monitors. So a film loop of the convicts milling around the common area will suffice for their cover. It goes pretty smoothly, even with a last-minute reprieve at the end, and they make it back in time.   But of course, The Guilty Must Suffer, so when they go for the money after they're all released, it turns out they used the wrong ink in the printing, and it's faded, rendering the bills worthless. Now one could ask why they had fading ink in the Mint, but that would just confuse things, wouldn't it? It also had a damn fine theme tune.

Ocean's 11 (2001)

It wasn't for some time that the film industry decided there were some cases where it was okay to see the caperists get away with it. Maybe they're really doing it as part of a larger benevolent action like The In-Laws, or they're stealing from a bad guy like in The Sting, or in the case of the remake of Ocean's 11, someone whom we've been educated is just Not Nice. The rise of the antihero helped this along, where we're supposed to like the bad guy, so theoretically that helped. One could argue that the desire to see the bad guy win had been there for years - John Dillinger and Bonnie & Clyde were folk-heroes at the time they were in action, on and off the screen. But on the whole, people just like to see people get away with it, especially if, as mentioned, they're stealing from a person or organization that is deemed "bad". Brett Ratner's recent Tower Heist was better than the attention it got, and is worth a look on cable. And while I didn't get a chance to see Robot and Frank, everything I've heard suggests I should.

I've mentioned before how much I look forward to the return of the Gentleman Bandit genre. George Clooney's version of Danny Ocean is very close to that; I've often said I think Will Smith could do a great Raffles. Combined with an outlandish Caper Plot, a new Raffles film could burn up the box office.

Saluting our Real-Life Auntie Mame

January 19, 2013, 5:30 pm

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Auntie Joy and Mom in Florida, 2007

Auntie Mame has done it all!  Author Patrick Dennis (pseudonym of Edward Everett Tanner III)  took irresistible, unforgettable Mame Dennis’ fictional exploits, inspired by Dennis’ own free-spirited aunt, Marion Tanner, and let them happily run amok in every form of storytelling, including Dennis’ original 1955 novel and its sequel, Around the World with Auntie Mame as well as:

• The 1957 Broadway stage hit Auntie Mame, earning a Tony nomination for leading lady Rosalind Russell and a Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress Peggy Cass as naive stenographer Agnes Gooch;
• The 1966 Broadway musical hit Mame, starring Angela Lansbury and Beatrice Arthur, with both actresses winning Tony Awards. The show  was adapted for the stage by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee;
• And of course, the Oscar-nominated 1958 Warner Bros. film version of Auntie Mame!  Broadway.com reports that Oscar-winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton) is working on a new film version!
• 1974 brought us the Warner Bros. musical version, Mame (1974), starring Lucille Ball.It was a mixed bag at best,but that didn’t stop Mame from becoming a box office hit at Radio City Music Hall, where I saw it with my Girl Scout Troop.  I guess it just goes to show that some movies are bulletproof, especially with Jerry Herman’s wonderful musical score (like Mame's"Bosom Buddies")!

But in a way, I feel like I’ve always known all these versions of Auntie Mame so well, because our family had our own real-life Auntie Mame:  our beloved mother, Jacqueline Tenore Kehoe (1927—2009), or “Jackie,” as friends and loved ones called her.  No doubt you’ve already realized this post is as much about Mom as it is about the classic 1958 movie!  With Mom’s warm, loving, colorful, multifaceted personality, we’ve enjoyed many memorable family anecdotes about her exploits and her overall amazing life,including this one (click here). 

Enter the Dragon! Patrick and Norah find Auntie Mame in Asian mode

Patrick meets Auntie Mame's spectacular coterie!

Mame wigs out when Babcock makes a surprise visit!

On January 22nd, 2013, our family will commemorate what would have been Mom's 86th birthday.  Those who knew and loved Mom can attest that she was strong, stylish, and mesmerizing, yet also kind, warm, and witty in the great Cherry Girl tradition. Yes, Cherry happened to be the maiden name of Mom and her sister, our late Auntie Joy (they died a few months apart from Pulmonary Fibrosis).  And yes, The Cherry Girls were equally smart, witty, and soignee, as well as being Auntie Mame fans.  In their teens, Mom and Auntie Joy were sometimes the subject of racy jokes about their surname from those naughty boys—but of course, the Cherry Girls would glide past those insolent youths without a second thought!  Mom and Auntie Joy also loved Auntie Mame on both stage and screen.  As my cousins and I grew up (variously in New York and Wilmington, Delaware), Mom and Auntie Joy were both dubbed “Auntie Mame” at various times.  With both the Cherry Girls gone now, but by no means forgotten, I sometimes wonder if Mom and Auntie Joy each thought the other was the Vera Charles of the pair!  For more about Mom’s fond, funny life and times, feel free to check out my salute to Mom and the movie that became her favorite during the last two years of her life, The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men:

http://doriantb.blogspot.com/2011/01/no-country-for-old-men-tell-mother-i.html

In a delightful parallel to Mom, even Auntie Mame’s kaleidoscope opening credit sequence is perfect in showing how multifaceted Mame Dennis is, just like our mom.  The music by Bronislau Kaper (Whistling in the Dark; Gaslight; Them!) is perfect, sprightly yet swanky. And who could bring the lives and times of such real and fictional characters as Mame Dennis and our real-life Cherry Girls better than Betty Comden and Adolph Green?  Comden and Green, both fellow native New Yorkers (Betty was from Brooklyn, Adolph was from The Bronx) were legendary for their hit musical comedies such as Singin’ in the Rain; On the Town; Bells are Ringing; Applause; Wonderful Town; and so much more.  However, Comden and Green adapted Auntie Mame as a straight comedy for the movie version, and it was as sparkling and delightful as if it were indeed a musical.  I like the theatrical way the film’s scenes fade out on Rosalind Russell’s face just like on Broadway.  For those who thought Comden and Green were husband and wife, sorry—they were only good friends and collaborators, both happily married to others.  Even Mom had been sure Comden and Green were a married couple!

Onstage, Mame's jewels go jingle-jangle-jingle!

Peachy-keen Mame in Georgia!

Superstar Rosalind Russell’s long, triumphant career ranged from her 1934 film debut in Evelyn Prentice (co-starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, though this was definitely not a light-hearted comedy-mystery a la The Thin Man!) to her final role in the made-for-TV 1972 mystery The Crooked Hearts.  Russell was nominated for four Oscars in addition to Auntie Mame:My Sister Eileen (1942); Sister Kenny (1946); Mourning Becomes Electra (1947).  Russell won plenty of Golden Globe Awards, though, for ….Electra;Sister Kenny; A Majority of One (1961); Gypsy (1962); the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1973.

Good thing Patrick brought Auntie Mame's copy of Riding Side-Saddle on Horseback for Dummies!

Patrick Dennis’ beloved fictional heroine walked into my life one rainy day when my family and I happened to be watching the 1958 movie version on TV on one of our local movie programs (on WPIX, if I recall correctly).  We were all delighted by the warm, funny film about the irrepressible Mame Dennis, with Russell reprising her Broadway triumph. Sitting there enjoying ourselves, we kids affectionately dubbed Mom “Auntie Mame.” In particular, Mom was pleased as punch when I said, “Mommy, she’s like you, only you’re even prettier.”  High praise, considering Rosalind Russell was stiff competition (no, I don’t mean Auntie Mame’s morning sidecars)!

Foxy Auntie Mame wins Beau's heart, and Patrick has a dad!

Auntie Mame’s zany yet tender saga ranges from the days of bathtub hooch and the Charleston, through The Great Depression, the 1940s and the 1950s.  We first meet young Patrick Dennis (Jan Handzlik, reprising his Broadway role) at the tender age of  9, coming to 3 Beekman Place with his adult companion Norah Muldoon (Connie Gilchrist of A Letter to Three Wives; Long John Silver; Song of The Thin Man; and many TV appearances) to live at Auntie Mame’s luxurious (and constantly changing) pad  after his dad dies unexpectedly. It’s one of Mame’s wild parties, but she makes them feel at home right away, with Mame’s fabulous coterie of wild-and-crazy yet likable Bohemian types. Patrick jumps into life with Auntie Mame feet-first, bless him.  I like the kid's willingness to go with the flow of Auntie Mame’s cheerful screwball antics, trying new foods and such, unlike many modern kids. Maybe kids were less finicky back then. (Can you tell I’m the mother of a finicky yet adorable kid?)  I love when Patrick reads from Auntie Mame’s list of new words to learn:  “‘Karl Marx.’  Is he one of The Marx Brothers?”  Although young Handzlik was talented and endearing in the role, he eventually dropped out of acting completely, and grew up to be a successful law partner at the renowned law firm of Kirkland and Ellis in Los Angeles, where he's a specialist in white collar crime.  He's  been listed several times in Who's Who in America. (Kids grow up so fast!)  I’m glad to hear Handzlik didn’t become one of those child actors who came to a tragic end— but I digress!

At Peckerwood, Mrs. Burnside is not to be sneezed at!

But Mame and Patrick’s happy household is in jeopardy when The Great Depression wreaks havoc on the nation.  A battle of wills begins between our heroine and Patrick’s trustee, Mr. Dwight Babcock (Fred Clark, one of the masters of the slow burn, deft at playing everything from a vicious villain in Ride the Pink Horse, to comic foils in Bells are Ringing, as well as many TV classic sitcoms).  Mame’s longtime friend, stage star Vera Charles (Coral Browne of Theatre of Blood; The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone; The Ruling Class. She was also Mrs. Vincent Price!) lands Mame a small role in her new play, Midsummer Madness, to earn money to get Patrick back.(Mame’s name is dead last and in teeny-tiny letters on the theater poster; gotta start somewhere!) Mame's jangly jewelry infuriates Vera, but wreaks hilarious havoc for us viewers. But Rosalind Russell wasn’t the only scene-stealer.  Look and listen very carefully to the actors onstage, and you’ll recognize Margaret Dumont of The Marx Brothers fame!  Nobody looks and sounds as much like Margaret Dumont as Margaret Dumont, by golly!

A tip of the hat to Mom & all us Cherry Girls!

Russell and young Jan Handzlik reprise their Broadway roles here, and you can’t help loving the mother-and-son-style bond between Auntie Mame and the “little love” she takes under her wing, eager to open new windows for her nephew after his dad’s death. It’s soon clear that Patrick’s late dad wasn’t exactly the “open new windows” type, but the endearing lad quickly takes to Auntie Mame’s joyful approach to life. I know Patrick’s dad died of a combination of too much exercise and arrogance, but I’ve always wondered whatever happened to Patrick’s mother?  Did the poor dear woman die of Old Movie Disease?  By the way, that’s director Morton DaCosta (The Music Man) playing the voices of both Edwin Dennis and “Manny, Moe, and Jack” of Pep Boys fame during the Christmas scene.

Invasion of the Patrick Snatchers?!  Oh noooo!!!

Peggy Cass thinks it's hilarious to tell the truth!

I love the wonderfully theatrical fade-outs with Rosalind Russell; very appropriate, since the book became a Broadway hit, and then, of course, a hit movie!  I especially love Auntie Mame’s priorities.  Her response to her publisher beau Lindsay Woolsey (Patric Knowles of The Adventures of Robin Hood as Will Scarlett; The Charge of the Light Brigade; Another Thin Man) makes me smilewhen he suggests they marry. Mame replies:  “How can I be a wife?  I’m too busy being a mother.”  I also like the irony that Patric Knowles was a bookbinder in his youth, and went on to play a publisher in Auntie Mame!  Knowles also has the funniest double-takes when responding to Mame’s wacky wit.  Other members of the Broadway cast  (at the Broadhurst Theatre, appropriately enough) include Yuki Shimoda (Career; A Majority of One; the British TV series A Town Like Alice) as playful houseboy Ito, and Peggy Cass as Mame’s “Boswell,” the hapless but lovable stenographer Agnes Gooch who, to borrow a lyric from Bye Bye Birdie, finds herself with a lot of living to do, getting a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination in the bargain. Cass’ long career also included one of Vinnie’s favorite game shows, To Tell the Truth! 

Brian O'Bannion approves of Agnes Gooch's' makeover!

Mame, Patrick, Ito, and Norah end up having a Merry Christmas after all when her goof at her Macy’s salesgal gig results in love and marriage between kind-hearted Southern oil millionaire Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside (Forrest Tucker of The Yearling;Boston Blackie Goes Hollywood; TV’s F-Troop).   Soon the family are off to Peckerwood, Beau’s family ancestral home.  It’s The Big Apple vs. The Georgia Peaches! But if Mame can’t outsmart them, nobody can.

With rakish memoir-collaborator Brian around, will Mame become a merry widow?

When Beau is accidentally (albeit in a dark comedy way) killed on the Matterhorn, the now-adult Patrick comes home from college to help, and he’s engagingly played by 1950s/1960s heartthrob Roger Smith (Man of a Thousand Faces; TV’s 77 Sunset Strip; *snap snap*; and the TV series version of Mr. Roberts. He’s also Ann-Margret’s husband of many years).  Patrick suggests this would be a great opportunity for Auntie Mame to work on her memoirs.  He hires poet Brian O’Bannion (Robin Hughes from Dial M for Murder as Police Sgt. O’Brien; Cyrano de Bergerac; and many TV series episodes, including an episode of 77 Sunset Strip!) With Beau’s death and Brian’s brooding Irish charm asserting itself (and eating them out of house and home; good thing Mame can afford this chowhound!), Patrick is starting to feel jealous, making him susceptible to Mr. Babcock, or as Patrick has begun to call him, “Uncle Dwight.”  Yikes, brainwashing!  Under Babcock’s influence, will Mame’s “Little Love” wind up a Babbitt, an “Aryan from Darien”?!  Would Auntie Mame let that happen? As if!

Patrick Dennis, the gent behind the woman!

In her wily yet ultimately helpful way, Mame tackles snobbery, stupidity, andbigotry in the form of Patrick’s  beautiful but dreary fiancée Gloria Upson (actress-turned-writer Joanna Barnes, from both the 1961 and 1998 versions of The Parent Trap) and Gloria’s jolly yet equally dreary parents Doris (Lee Patrick, so memorable as Sam Spade’s Girl Friday Effie Perrine in The Maltese Falcon)and Claude (Willard Waterman, who deftly filled in Harold Peary’s shoes as The Great Gildersleeve on Radio and TV from 1950 to 1955).  Don’t get me started on the Upsons’ recipes for the clam juice-and-peanut butter ground-meat hors d’oeuvres, not to mention Claude’sdiabetes-inducing daiquiri recipe; makes me glad I’m a teetotaler! 

Peggy Cass won the 1957 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Drama for Auntie Mame, and she reprised her scene-stealing role in the film.  As an understudy, Cass took Jan Sterling’s role in a national tour of Born Yesterday.  Cass wasfinallycast in her own right in the 1949 Broadway musical Touch and Go. The mid-1950s brought her the defining role of Agnes Gooch in Auntie Mame.  Her stage and screen performances earned her a Tony and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. Of course, my quiz show-loving husband Vinnie first knew of Cass from her regular television quiz show appearances, such as Password All-Stars and To Tell the Truth, as well as guest appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Phil Silvers Show, among others. The IMDb adds, “She was very smart and very funny, but her signature was her unmistakably raspy voice.” (Which I’ve always liked, by the way!)  Sadly, Cass died of heart failure on March 8, 1999, at Manhattan's Sloane-Kettering Hospital, but for her fans here at Team Bartilucci HQ, Peggy Cass’ delightful performances on stage and screen live on!

Actual dialogue from Auntie Mame: Secretary Pegeen Ryan (Pippa Scott of The Searchers) and adult Patrick discuss Mame's Danish designer. Pegeen: "It's by the famous Danish designer Yul Uhlu." Patrick: "Who?" Pegeen:(slowly, with innocent yet sensuous lips): "Yul Uhlu." Patrick:"Say that to the right fella and you'll get kissed."

I bet the Upsons think Mame is serving fish for dinner!

And what became of author Patrick Dennis in later years?  Well, according to Wikipedia, he led a double life:  conventional husband and dad by day, bisexual man-about-town by night.  In later life, Dennis became a well-known participant in Greenwich Village's gay scene. Sadly, Dennis' rollicking tales fell out of fashion in the 1970s, and all of his books went out of print. In his later years, he left writing to become a butler—and he liked it!  In fact, Dennis  worked for McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc!   Apparently, although he was finally using his real name, Dennis was in essence working yet again under a pseudonym, since his boss hadn’t a clue that their butler, Tanner, was the world-famous author Patrick Dennis!  I wonder if Dennis thought it was a hoot to play butler after all his escapades?

Alas, Dennis died of pancreatic cancer in Manhattan in 1976 at the age of 55.  But a memorable character can never truly die:  the 21st century has gotten Auntie Mame and Patrick new young readers and movie buffs interested in Auntie Mame’s exploits — HOORAY! With many of his novels available in print again, Dennis’ son, Dr. Michael Tanner, wrote introductions to several reissues of his dad's books, as well as some of Dennis' original manuscripts at Yale University and Boston University.

And remember Auntie Mame’s wise advice:
"Live!  Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!"

Review - Danny Kaye: King of Jesters

January 28, 2013, 11:47 am

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Danny Kaye was the first performer ever to be personally requested by His Highness to headline a Command Performance, making him King of Jesters and Jester of Kings—but as far as we of Team Bartilucci are concerned, he’s always been royalty in our book!  As longtime TotED readers know, I’ve been a big fan of Danny Kaye (1913—1987) since I was a kid. 

If you’re as much as a Danny Kaye fan as I am, author David Koenig’s latest book: Danny Kaye: King of Jesters (Bonaventure Press, 2012) is a MUST-read!  Koenig’s previous books include Mouse Tales: A Behind-the-Ears Look at Disneyland; and Mouse Under Glass: Secrets of Disney Animation & Theme Parks. He truly does Kaye justice with his affectionate yet clear-eyed view of Kaye’s long, remarkable career—a refreshing and welcome change of pace from certain other biographers who flaunt unfounded rumors about him, using un-called-for scandal-sheet tactics!  Koenig’s book focuses on Kaye’s film and TV work, and the behind-the-scenes info about the making of Kaye’s 17 theatrical films, as well as his TV shows, including his award-winning variety series The Danny Kaye Show (1963—1967).

Like so many great entertainers, the former David Daniel Kaminski was a native New Yorker, born in Brooklyn.  Back then, I was a child growing up in the Bronx in the early 1960s, seeing Danny Kaye for the first time on TV.  One weekend afternoon, WPIX was broadcasting Samuel Goldwyn’s delightful and surprisingly soulful 1947 film adaptation of James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and it quickly became one of my all-time favorite movies (and still is!).  Moreover, our mother was a Danny Kaye fan with a passion for fashion; in fact, Mom and my Auntie Joy had been models in their youth, getting opportunities to wear the fashions of designers like …Mitty’s Irene Sharaff, including fabulous hats, some almost as daring as the ones from …Mitty’s “Anatole of Paris”number. Mom could rock a chapeau like nobody’s business!  Anyway, at home, our whole family often enjoyed Danny’s films, with their catchy music, clever slapstick, and zany wordplay, courtesy of the brilliant, talented woman behind the man:  the amazing Sylvia Fine, Danny’s lyricist, composer, manager, and in 1940, his wife for the rest of his life. The talented Sylvia was responsible for many of Kaye’s most popular songs and musical routines; no wonder Danny became my first celebrity crush, with him and Sylvia as one of my favorite show-biz power couples!

Actress and co-star Betty Garrett (On the Town; Neptune’s Daughter; TV’s Laverne & Shirley) recalled the chemistry between Sylvia and Danny when they met at the Sunday Night Varieties: “I was with Danny in the little Manhattan club when Sylvia was brought in to write some special material. I observed the magic moment when they discovered each other. It was truly love at first sight. I think they fell in love with one another’s talent as much as with one another.”

As Koenig says in his introduction, Wonder Man wasn’t merely the title of one of his hit movies. With his remarkable range, Kaye was versatile as all get-out, racking up triumphs in the worlds of records, television, stage and screen.  To some extent, the versatile, multifaceted Kaye was almost too good, at least from a branding standpoint!  Then as now, agents had to market their clients, but Kaye had so many talents and hooks, the powers that be apparently didn’t quite know where to start with him, as Koenig explains:

“…Kaye’s greatest obstacle to mass popularity was that he could do too much, too well.  He was impossible to classify. Without a brand, he found it difficult initially to make a name for himself and ultimately to keep that name remembered. For his most celebrated triumphs were live on stage, creating an in-person experience that could not be preserved to its full effect except in the memories of the individuals in the audience.  Film, as it turned out, was possibily the worst medium at capturing a Danny Kaye experience—trapping him in a particular character and story, awkwardly trying to show off as many of his divergent talents as possible…Nonetheless, the motion picture is entertainment’s most faithful time capsule, and consequently, offered Kaye his best-remembered roles: the storyteller Hans Christian Andersen, the daydreamer Walter Mitty, and the tongue-tied Court Jester with the vessel in the pestle.  Or was it the flagon with the dragon?”

Danny Kaye and frequent co-star Virginia Mayo

When Danny signed with his first agent, Harry Bestry, in 1937, he'd developed a “Mad Russian” character, to introduce a thickly-accented version of the song “Dinah” (“Deenah, is there anyone feenah/In the state of Caroleenah?”)  Bestry began marketing Danny as The Mad Russian. This character was also spoofed in Warner Bros’. Looney Tunes: the hilarious 1945 short Book Revue (a.k.a Book Review), directed by Bob Clampett.  How fitting, considering Danny’s comedy was broad early on, from his years as a tummler in the Borscht Belt. As you can well imagine, Kaye had audiences in stitches with his over-the-top accents, screaming, and facial contortions.  How could anyone not laugh?

According to the IMDb, although Danny made his Broadwaydebut in Straw Hat Revue (1939), it was the stage production of the musical Lady in the Dark (1940), starring Broadway superstar Gertrude Lawrence, that brought agents flocking to Danny’s door at last.  Sylvia helped create the routines and gags, and wrote most of the songs that he performed. Danny could sing and dance like many others, but his specialty was reciting those tongue-twisting songs and monologues.. Danny could sing and dance like many others, but his specialty was reciting those tongue-twisting songs and monologues.

Koenig goes on to say that Samuel Goldwyn had intended to use Kaye as a new Eddie Cantor. Goldwyn did end up hiring Thurber to contribute to the script, but most of his suggestions were ignored. The ones that were used justifiably got the boot (and I don’t mean the film’s villain!), including a melancholy Irish daydream and lots of small talk between Mitty and his dreary so-called loved-ones. I'd heard that other …Mitty scenes left on the cutting-room floor included a pub scene (meant as part of the Irish scene, perhaps?) included a scene with our hero dealing with a Frankenstein monster (to play off co-star Boris Karloff, maybe?), or something like it!

Then there was the epic comedy The Court Jester (1956), now justifiably hailed as a classic. It was well received upon its original theatrical release, but it ended up being so expensive to produce that it seemed doomed to lose money—sheesh, it’s always something! Even more frustrating, Kaye’s star had begun to fade, since he’d  been off movie screens for two years, albeit for humanitarian reasons:  he’d been traveling the world for UNICEF (more about that shortly).  Luckily, time has been kind; over the years, The Court Jester started to turn up frequently on TV and on Blu-Ray and DVD, getting discovered by new audiences who love to laugh.

Danny enjoyed appearing onstage, but seemed uncomfortable doing interviews, talk shows, or other promotional work on his days off; to be fair, who can blame him?  Still, by the early 1950s, his agent thought he needed better rapport with the general public.  Fate stepped in on a jet plane, where Danny found himself sitting next to the head of UNICEF. Their work helping the impoverished children of the world touched Danny deeply. He agreed to travel to promote the organization, and did so tirelessly for the remaining 32 years of his life. 

Furthermore, earlier this month, TCM celebrated Danny Kaye’s 100^th birthday (give or take a year) with a 24-hour marathon of virtually every one of his classic movies, hosted by Robert Osborne and Danny's journalist daughter Dena Kaye, as well as airings of The Danny Kaye Show and a 1968 episode from his stint on The Dick Cavett Show.  Dare we hope there might also DVD/Blu-Ray editions of Kaye’s classic films in the near future, too?

Click here to read John Greco's great Twenty-Four Frames interview with author David Koenig!

Coming Soon to TotED:Wonder Man!
Enjoy the Looney Tunes cartoon "Book Review" playfully spoofing Danny Kaye!