Laszlo's on Lex

Laszlo’s on Lex: closing time

2011-09-11T09:11:00.000-07:00

It was Friday night; they usually closed slightly later to get the last minute business that was still straggling up from downtown. Instead of closing at nine, Ilsa was running an hour late. But now, her final tasks done, she looked around for the last time. Everything was in order. The transition had gone smoothly.

Ilsa looked out the large store window -- the reverse image of the letters always amused her. She threw the main switch, picked up the package she had put together for a light supper. Fish cakes, of course. She smiled and thought of those Fridays of yesterday. It was early January and the streets still had scattered mounds of that dirty snow made more unsightly by the endless stream on buses on this major avenue.

Ilsa Lund Laszlo opened the door, passed through it, turned and locked each lock carefully. She had left the neat printed sign, inside, hanging from a strong cord in the door window. Laszlo’s on Lex -- Closed.

Words and Images 62

2011-05-31T01:00:00.000-07:00

Ten Random Thoughts on the Tenth: May 2011

2011-05-10T01:00:00.000-07:00

--- What is this committed Julie Andrews enthusiast to do when he watches Star! and Darling Lili every time out, but shuns The Sound of Music?

--- We’re told that James Thurber said of Cecil B. De Mille’s The Ten Commandments: “It makes you realize what God could have done if He’d had the money.”

--- David Thomson in The Whole Equation says of Louis B. Mayer: “He had noticed that people liked going into the dark to see the light.”

--- Paul Stewart is one of my favorite character actors.

--- If they remade the filmed version of Sorry Wrong Number these days, one wonders if they would have the Stanwyck character using a smart phone, her (method?) thumbs, and text messages.

--- I think the young Patty McCormack would have been just right for playing the young girl in H.H. Munro’s short story: The Open Window.

--- Charlton Heston’s In the Arena tells us that of the forty some actresses with whom he worked the most difficult was Ava Gardner (in 55 Days at Peking).

--- I wish Jim Jarmusch made more movies.

--- I regularly dip into all the editions of David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film (he is excellent on actresses) but I find most of his film reviews less satisfactory in Have You Seen …? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films.

--- If you cannot get to Mumbai, go to Southall in West London -- The Glassy Junction accepts rupees as legal tender for the bill.

Note: “Random thoughts” pieces bring to mind the great Jimmy Cannon, whose “Nobody Asked Me, But” set the form. Any similarity stops there.

Film Makers 10: Monroe Stahr

2011-05-07T01:00:00.000-07:00

Listen … has your office got a stove in it that lights with a match?

I think so.

Suppose you're in your office.

You've been fighting duels all day.

You're exhausted.

This is you.

A girl comes in.

She doesn't see you.

She takes off her gloves.

She opens her purse.

She dumps it out on the table.

You watch her.

This is you.

Now ...

She has two dimes, a matchbox and a nickel.

She leaves the nickel on the table.

She puts the two dimes back into her purse.

She takes the gloves ... they're black.

Puts them into the stove.

Lights a match.

Suddenly, the telephone rings.

She picks it up.

She listens.

She says, "l've never owned a pair of black gloves in my life."

Hangs up.

Kneels by the stove.

Lights another match.

Suddenly,

you notice ...

... there's another man in the room ...

watching every move the girl makes.

What happens?

l don't know.

l was just making pictures.

What was the nickel for?

Jane, what was the nickel for?

The nickel was for the movies.

Admit one: 5 cents

Film Makers 9: Otto Preminger

2011-05-03T01:00:00.000-07:00

The Preminger quote is often cited. But offered here because the picture is of interest: a 28-take photograph, perhaps.

Words and Images 61

2011-04-30T01:00:00.000-07:00

The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968

2011-04-26T01:00:00.000-07:00

“If the heroes of Ford are sustained by tradition, and the heroes of Hawks professionalism, the heroes of Walsh are sustained by nothing more than a feeling for adventure.”

• The Fordian hero knows why he is doing something even if he doesn’t know how.

• The Hawksian hero knows how to do what he is doing even if he doesn’t know why.

• The Walshian hero is less interested in the why or the how than the what. He is always plunging into the unknown, and he is never too sure what he will find there.

… Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968

I find the clarity of Sarris’s three- director comparison neither without controversy nor typical of his writing. But it is very representative of the way he looks at film, film history and the center of his focus: the director.

The American Cinema came into my life in the 1960s as it did to many of my generation. And Andrew Sarris’s film counsel has to this day remained a constant in my life. Finding representative scenes to support Sarris’s claim for Hawks and for Walsh posed little difficulty. Not so with Ford. The second part of Sarris’s premise: “… even if he doesn’t know how” eliminates many choices.

Words and Images 60

2011-04-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

Titanic: April 15, 1912

2011-04-15T01:00:00.000-07:00

The following entry appeared in a slightly revised format on April 15 and 16, 2010.

Titanic

The big ship ran across an ice field shortly before midnight. Within three hours, one of the great dramas of the twentieth century unfolded. In a disputed section of ocean, the ice prevailed, the ocean abided, and the sepulchres went unmarked.

Titanic was theatre, in real time, in three acts. The time it took to sink approximated that which it takes to perform a play. Ice, then heroism and cowardice, acceptance and denial shared the decks. Death took no holiday, heeded no class. The rich drowned among the poor. Mrs. Straus chose to stay, and from such drama sprang the literature, from the literature -- the legend. And Lady Marjorie later went into the Atlantic as did Noel Coward's newly wed Marryots.

It is said that an era died on that cold night a scant two years before the lamps went out and the east wind blew. The Edwardians are gone, but the world long remembers a maiden voyage, a wicked ocean, and the night Titanic slipped into the sea.

Note: About thirty years ago, I wrote the above as an introduction to the Titanic section in an antiquarian book catalogue for Gravesend Books.

I first crossed the North Atlantic on a troopship in 1958. And then I crossed westbound in January 1960. My wife and I traversed it numerous times since, during the next half century. And each time, on each trip, when we pass reasonably close to those unmarked sepulchres, one can almost hear again that simple piece of music which some called Autumn. For when at sea, one cannot help but hear the sounds of yesteryear, listen to the voices of those who have crossed before, and to think of the ships now gone to that neverland into which mystical ships pass.

The waters of reverie do not come with proper charts. I was a child of the Great Depression and in those days our parents discussed Titanic in general conversation, spoke of the Morro Castle, and my father, being a New Yorker, talked often about the General Slocum. So peril at sea and on other waterways was part of our world. (As our uncles learned, in the 1940s while travelling in khaki aboard the great Queens.)

I later learned about Titanic in the relatively dry surroundings of Bronx movie houses. The first I remember was the Negulesco / Stanwyck film (with the great Thelma Ritter) and some others which used a Titanic-like motif (e.g., History is Made at Night). A few years later came the Walter Lord book and its filmed manifestation: the excellent A Night to Remember. A spate of books (and television versions) carried us through the next decades until 1995 when Titanic surfaced on Broadway in a very good musical: Titanic.

The public memory of the play has been somewhat swamped by the later film spectacle of 1997, on which I shall refrain from comment. Like the controversial Captain Lord of the Californian, I will ignore the rockets glare from that aberration and return to my reverie.

Titanic (the musical) played at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Broadway from April 1997 through March 1999. It ran through 804 performances. I saw it first alone and then, a second time, with my wife. We were both quite moved by it.

Ten Random Thoughts on the Tenth: April

2011-04-10T01:00:00.000-07:00

--- After watching Frankenstein last week, I still cannot rid myself of an image I have long had of an assistant director on the back lot shouting at the extras to turn in their instruments and pick up their torches.

--- It is likely that Paul Douglas’s underlying vulnerability makes me invariably enjoy his screen persona, whereas the more blustery style of Broderick Crawford wears thin.

--- I suspect Joseph Cotten has been in more great films than almost any other featured player.

--- I am tired of seeing and hearing the over-anthologized grapefruit scene in Public Enemy -- Mae Clarke deserves better.

--- I am not sure if I was ever taken with Wuthering Heights, but in recent years if it shows up on the same day as Cobra Woman, I’ll opt for Montez.

-- I think it was on Turner Classic Movies that I heard the following: Cagney performances were never real but always true.

--- I revisited Antonioni’s Il Grido on Netflix Instant last week, after last seeing it a half century ago, and enjoyed it immensely.

--- I like Mamet-speak.

--- I have a friend in Gravesend (Kent) who has an excellent collection of Laurel and Hardy materials but is also a Luddite -- he attends no cinemas, has no personal computer, no television, no DVD or VCR player.

--- In 2004, I was on a French tour of Normandy D-Day sites where the French guide likely used the term “liberators” a few hundred times -- while I heard the following three words only once: American, British, Canadian -- each in connection with a cemetery.

Note: “Random thoughts” pieces bring to mind the great Jimmy Cannon, whose “Nobody Asked Me, But” set the form. Any similarity stops there.

Off the Lot 5: Closing a circle

2011-04-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

William J. Stewart, Jr. Born March 12, 1928. A reflection.

He was a marine at the end of World War Two. He did not fight as a Marine but sure could fight when he was living with our family. He was my older brother and afraid of no one. Bill, or Billy, made a hard life for himself and for others. He died an alcoholic at thirty-seven. My brother left home early first to join the Marines, and later to marry -- probably to get away from the rest of us.

Billy married a very decent, somewhat older woman with whom he had two children. He later abandoned all three and had two children with another woman who could have been played on film by an aging worn-out Mary Astor. Continuing his downward spiral, he kept his job working for the railroad, but did two other jobs to keep the alcohol coming: tending bar and as driver on small time grocery store stickups. He drank double Vodkas with a Vodka highball chaser every round I ever drank with him, which was relatively often.

Billy ended up in Bellevue Hospital, in the “drunk section” very similar to that shown in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend. My brother died there while experiencing Delirium tremens. It was different from Wilder’s vision but equally depressing to watch.

When he and I were still at home, and throughout his life, he was a voracious reader. The source of most of his books was the mass market paperback. His reading life likely started when that publishing phenomenon was in its infancy.

Billy was raised during the Great Depression in a lower middle, working class background. And like many young from those ranks almost always had a paperback tucked in a pocket somewhere. He left these books all around the apartment where we lived and I was drawn to them. I started to read them but made little distinction between W.R. Burnett, William Faulkner, Dashiell Hammett or James M. Cain. There was also a good sampling of books related to the American Revolution -- always Howard Fast and Kenneth Roberts.

My brother was not much interested in movies, so my interest in that all-encompassing world came not from him. But my passion for books did: from his love of reading, his need for the companionship of books, and his joy in what he had learned.

So at least one good legacy can be found among the cinders of a life long gone – that of a person who could have been so much more.

Nunnally Johnson at the keys

2011-03-29T01:00:00.000-07:00

Leonard Mosley recounts the following events in his Darryl Zanuck: the Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Last Tycoon.

In 1951, Darryl Zanuck and the decision makers at Twentieth Century Fox struggled to implement Cinemascope. It was a revolutionary new process, originally intended for primary releases, using wide screen technology instead of the traditional aspect ratios of movie theatre screens. (Television was encroaching.)

It was difficult, envisioning how the existing Fox movie-making mindset would fit into the new technology. No one had an immediate answer. Even Darryl Zanuck was perplexed. When asked how to handle the transition to Cinemascope, he and the other executives had no immediate solution.

But around that time, Nunnally Johnson returned to Zanuck and Twentieth Century Fox. Johnson was a highly respected Hollywood writer (and producer/director). He was one of the cooler heads to prevail. And when asked how he was going to cope with the new demands of Cinemascope, he told an interviewer:

“Easy. What I’m going to do from now on is put the paper in my typewriter sideways.”

Note: Artwork by Andy Warhol.

Words and Images 59

2011-03-23T01:00:00.000-07:00

Words and Images 58

2011-03-17T01:05:00.000-07:00

Suggested by Enola Stewart

Ten Random Thoughts on the Tenth: March

2011-03-10T01:00:00.000-08:00

--- We’re told that when Molly Haskell married Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael declined to attend the ceremony saying she would attend Molly’s next wedding.

--- Stephen Lang's Stonewall Jackson in Gods and Generals gets me every time.

--- Once, in the MOMA cafeteria, after a Fellini film, the table next to me had three Italian women speaking their language animatedly – and my eyes glanced below their table, looking for subtitles.

--- When I was much younger, Andrew Sarris helped me realize that it is all right not to like The Ox-Bow Incident.

--- Marilyn Monroe after entertaining the troops during the Korean War purportedly told Joe DiMaggio “Joe, you’ve never heard such cheering.” To which The Yankee Clipper replied “Yes … I have.”

--- I prefer the Julien Duvivier / Vivien Leigh Anna Karenina
to the Clarence Brown / Greta Garbo version.

--- When I was around fifty, I took a vacation day from work and went to see a daytime showing of The Purple Rose of Cairo at which a woman on the ticket line asked me: “Why is a young man like you going to a movie when you should be working?”

--- I revere Now Voyageur and Dark Victory and do not object to the term "woman’s pictures," but recoil from the phrase “chick flicks.”

--- When I asked my English friend, Nicholas, who worked in Malaysia for decades, the difference between a typhoon and a hurricane, he told me it was the spelling.

--- I first saw Frances McDormand in Blood Simple but she opened my eyes in Short Cuts.

Note: “Random thoughts” pieces bring to mind the great Jimmy Cannon, whose “Nobody Asked Me, But” set the form. Any similarity stops there.

Film Makers 8: T.E.B. Clarke

2011-03-06T01:00:00.000-08:00

Words and Images 57

2011-03-03T03:30:00.000-08:00

A brief afterthought on those ceremonies

2011-03-02T01:00:00.000-08:00

For those who might have missed David Hinckley’s review of the televised Oscar ceremonies. From the New York Daily News, Monday, February 28, 2011, the first two paragraphs only:

Partway through the Oscar telecast Sunday night, a well-dressed man and woman informed the worldwide audience that ABC has cut a deal to continue telecasting the Academy Awards through 2020.

But they didn't mean we'll get shows for the next nine years. They meant that at the pace it was moving, Sunday night's show might not finish until 2020.

Source of artwork is Half Hour Please.

Vere Hodgson (four): At the Pictures 2

2011-02-27T01:00:00.000-08:00

In Which We Serve

June 20, 1943: Sunday (at Brum). Then Cath and I saw the film In Which We Serve. Splendid. We sat through it twice. Saw Dunkirk and several sea battles. Blitz on Plymouth was exact – wailing of the sirens and the fall of one bomb after another. We have heard them so often, but have been luckier than the family in the film for so far we have not been buried under the debris.

(And on food): May 9, 1943. Sunday. Dr Remy came to tea, and as cakes and scones are uneatable if bought from shops – unless you are starving, we are not – I made some. Tossed together something or other.

The Moon is Down

August 22, 1943: Sunday. Went with Mrs T. to The Moon is Down by Steinbeck, about Norway under the Germans. Cedric Hardwick is the German officer, occupying a mining village. We saw the stunned demeanour of the inhabitants, and the terrible awakening to what had befallen them – and the gradual rise of opposition.

All people inclined to be pacifists should see this film, and they would realize what we have been saved from. The Navy and Air Force saved us by a hair’s breadth. What we owe to those few gallant souls who prepared in time! Just a few people of exceptional intelligence and perspicacity knew long ago and got ready, while the rest of us were stupidly repeating ‘There can be no war ...’ In so many cases these Few lost their lives saving those too blind to see the danger.

(And on food): Plenty of plums, apples and tomatoes in the shops.

Citizen Kane

August 29, 1943: Sunday. Saturday went to see Citizen Kane – one of those old classic films. It was about a blustering unlovely American businessman. His last word on earth was Rosebud, so the film digs back into his life to see what it meant. Never discovered. Most unsatisfactory!

I enjoy listening to the gospel singer on the radio.

(And on food): My osteopath just back from the Castle of Kilrorke in Nairn, where he has a patient. Seems to be 12th C. but every modern convenience inside. As for food they do not know up there that there is a war on. He had cream on his porridge every morning – and pints of it seemed to be wandering around the house.

Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

October 3, 1943: Sunday. Went to see Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Low created this character in the years before the war as a figure of fun, but when trouble came we had to depend on him and his like, for there was one else. When the new men got going Colonel Blimp was put in the Home Guard. He was a gentleman, and attributed to his enemies his own high motives. Anton Walbrook, as the German of old-fashioned honour, would have pleased Dr Remy. There is a decent German in the film - something rare. However, they do exist.

(And on food): One morning we had coffee at Kunzle’s and an ersatz cream-bun. They tell us that the last genuine Cream Bun in the world was eaten last weekend in Portugal! Now all is finished until the war is over.

Battle of Britain

October 17, 1943: Sunday. Mrs. O. came for the week-end. Went to see the Battle of Britain produced by the Americans. Idea is to present to the American people exactly what we did for the world in 1940-41. Splendid. Mr Churchill gives the introduction. All very vivid – pictures of Hitler and Goering planning this and that against us. Bombing depicted. The women buckling to – men rushing to catch the paratroops or join the Home Guard.

(And on food): October 4, 1943: Sunday. Apple Rings in again and we like them.

San Demetrio London.

February 28, 1944: Monday. Went to see film of San Demetrio about the Jervis Bay Convoy. We follow the fortunes of one lifeboat. After three miserable days they sight the San Demetrio again, their own ship, which ought to have blown up. They reboard her, though in flames and with petrol – she is a Tanker, and after amazing hardships bring her safely to the Clyde.

(And on food): February 27, 1944. Sunday. Lemons on sale this week. I have had four and made pancakes three nights running.

(Other): Queues for the Tubes start at 4 p.m. … children, prams, old people. At Holland Park there are bunks for 500. They have had 1,500 people there this week. They sleep on the platforms with trains passing. One night they had to send the train on as the passengers could not alight among the sleepers.

The First of the Few. (Picture of the burning of Kiev) .

March 5, 1944: Sunday. Saw The First of the Few with dear Leslie Howard. Went with one of my former Wimbledon pupils. It is the story of R.J. Mitchell who invented the Spitfire. He died before the war, but did as much as anyone to win the Battle of Britain, and save us all. I was specially interested in the Schneider Trophy. One year the Italian won it – it was Major de Bernardi with great rejoicings. A nice modest hero he was.

I knew the family well in Florence. When we won the trophy outright I watched from the Solent. Did not realize Lady Houston gave the money for us to enter, that we learned no end from it. In my short-sighted fashion I deplored it all at the time – not being able to see any use in tearing the sky at such speeds. But it was a glorious sight – sky a perfect blue.

I believe Lawrence of Arabia had much to do with the Race. Many great minds were working to save England even then. But most of us little realized it at the time.

Saw also a Picture of the burning of Kiev – how deeply the Russians must feel as they re-enter their ruined cities – seething with the desire for revenge. It was heart rending – mercifully a silent film, as we could hardly have borne to hear the agonizing cries of the women as they found relatives dead by the burning houses. Some turned their faces to the camera. My blood ran cold, thinking how easily it might have happened in London or Birmingham.

(And on food): My first oranges. Lady in next flat queuing up so kindly took my ration book and got me three lovely ones. She waited three quarters of an hour. We have seen orange peel in the street – most refreshing even to look at it.

The Four Feathers

September 11, 1944: Monday. Went to the Cinema. Enjoyed The Four Feathers with Ralph Richardson. Also the News with pictures of the Germans being marched through Moscow. The expression on the faces of the Generals as the population glared at them …

(An ominous entry two days later)

September 13, 1944: Wednesday. We have heard a lot about the big explosion heard all over London on Friday night. There is nothing about it in the papers … word is just going round. But we fear it is the V2 which has arrived.

For those so inclined:

First editions of Vere Hodgson’s Few Eggs and No Oranges (1976) are somewhat difficult to come by. A reprint edition in paperback is currently available from the publisher: Persephone Books, London at 59 Lamb's Conduit Street, London WC1N 3NB. Recommended.

Note: Top image is from the London Transport Museum. Poster: Seeing it Through: Station Woman, by Eric Henri Kennington, 1944.

Vere Hodgson (three). At the Pictures 1

2011-02-24T01:00:00.000-08:00

Poster’s note: The bulk of Vere’s work has to do with the war and its impact. Captured in these extracts is the part of each entry dealing primarily with a film she saw. Sidelights about food in the same, or nearby entries, are often included. Vere Hodgson was certainly more interested in onions than in Olivier. Film was but a diversion. Yet we might reflect on what one of those who came before us watched, and thought about, in dark buildings when film was in its Golden Age and the world on a death watch.

“One can only go to bed and trust to wake in the morning” … Vere Hodgson

(Vere Hodgson’s first entry)

June 25, 1940: Tuesday. Last night at about 1 a.m. we had the first air raid of the war on London. My room is just opposite the police station, so I got the full benefit of the sirens. It made me leap out of the bed half way across the room. I shook all over …

Pinocchio

September 5, 1940: Thursday (At Brum, i.e., Birmingham). Mother and I are off to Sutton Coldfield to see Ariel and Cecilia. Hope they will come with us to Pinocchio tomorrow. It is warm here. All theatres in Brum are over by a quarter to nine, to let people get home before warnings.

September 7, 1940: Saturday (At Brum, i.e., Birmingham). Much enjoyed Pinocchio. All came back to tea.

The Great Dictator

March 1, 1941: Saturday. Went to see The Dictator today. How I enjoyed it! Superb satire! For all its tomfoolery written with a profundity of serious purpose. The speeches of Hynkel, half-German, half-English are there. People who understood German were even more convulsed than I was. How Dr Remy would enjoy it … and Aunt Emy too. The palace scenes, where Hynkel did not waste a moment, were all in the spirit of German thoroughness. But Mussolini in real life does not smile so much. All done by an East End Jew! How Hitler would writhe if he could see us laughing at him –and the Italians would flash with fury. Last speech was good, but Chaplin has not the magnetic elocution that Charles Laughton had for that kind of appeal.

Goodbye, Mr Chips

June 24, 1941: Tuesday. Went to see Goodbye, Mr Chips. How I enjoyed it. We sat round it twice. Have an idea the boys were from Rugby.

(And on food): Shopping last Saturday I was behind a dear old lady who had been in her prime under the regime of the late Queen Victoria. She asked for salad oil, and was amazed to be told she could not have any – and moreover would not be likely to have any in the future, as it was unobtainable! 'What are we going to do?' She asked, much puzzled. The shop assistant sweetly replied: ‘We will just have to go without Madam.’ The old lady turned away amazed.
……….
Tomatoes are to be 1 /4d a pound on Monday, although I doubt if we will see any. Sardines are getting scarce. I was charged 10½d for a tin containing four.

Fantasia

August 5, 1941: Tuesday. Monday we did Disney’s Fantasia. The idea is that every musical sound makes a pattern and a colour … these were thrown on the screen. Lovely classical music. One composer wrote The Creation, and Disney pictured it all – chaos and earthquakes. Then life appeared with the amoeba, and finally prehistoric beasts who moved in the rhythm of the music. There was a glorious mythological one, where the Flying Horses were among the loveliest creatures I have ever seen. A work of genius.

(And on food): Returned to Auntie’s flat for tea, and opened a tin of pineapple we found among Auntie’s treasures. Also a tin of prawns to go with our salad.

(August 17, 1941: Sunday.) Macaroni seems unobtainable now. A nuissance! Perhaps a shipload will come in. I asked for it the other day, and a man behind me said: ‘Can I have three bowls of gold dust, please ...’ However, there are some figs which is an agreeable change. And we can get green apples. We all have to register for milk this week – but how much we are going to be allowed, I don’t know. I take half a pint a day – but it may not be that much.

[It Started With Eve] and Bombay Clipper

January 11, 1942: Sunday. Even had the energy to go to the Pictures. Managed to get a packet of soap powder. Clutching this began to wait in the queue. My feet as cold as ice; but after waiting half an hour, felt I must wait the other half. Lovely and warm inside. Saw Mr. Churchill giving part of his speech. Looked old, though and I am afraid when the need is over the string will break suddenly. Charles Laughton with Deanna Durbin [It Started With Eve]– very good show. Also Bombay Clipper. But these American films go too fast. In the end I did not know how the villains were defeated, nor on which side they were.

Poster’s note on Bombay Clipper: Directed by John Rawlins. 1941. With William Gargan, Irene Hervey and Maria Montez.

How Green Was My Valley

June 21, 1942: Sunday. Mabel Lucy and I thoroughly enjoyed How Green Was My Valley. Cheapest seat was 2/6d. Enormous price for a film, but is result of Government tax. But it was worth it – all about a Welsh mining valley – feel much more interested in the Welsh now.

(And on food): June 7, 1941: Sunday. Did some cooking for those staying the night. Bought gigantic cauliflowers, and with a piece of cheese sent from S. Africa and a tin of milk, made four dishes of cauliflower au gratin.

Petrified Forest

April 18, 1943: Sunday. Saturday night Marie and I went to Petrified Forest. Setting in Arizona. All very exciting. Came out in daylight. Piccadilly is a thrilling place these days.
……….
(And on food): A confession about a bottle of Lemon Cordial! Brought me by Kit some time ago – rare, so I determined to save it for my visitors. In this I failed utterly. Each night arriving back have felt cruelly thirsty, and this glorious bottle reposing on my shelf was too much. Little by little I have drunk the lot. The craving for lemon juice by the British Public is almost an obsession – we feel we could drink it neat by the gallon.

(Note: These entries will conclude in the next posting.)

For those so inclined:

First editions of Vere Hodgson’s Few Eggs and No Oranges (1976) are somewhat difficult to come by. A reprint edition in paperback is currently available from the publisher: Persephone Books, London at 59 Lamb's Conduit Street, London WC1N 3NB. Recommended.

Vere Hodgson (two): Few Eggs and No Oranges

2011-02-22T01:00:00.000-08:00

Vere Hodgson:

And then it came to pass that the war came to Vere Hodgson. First on the radio, then on her local streets and later when the sky was full of aircraft. London: 1940. Ladbroke Road, just up from Holland Park.

Look west to Hammersmith. Look north to Shepherd’s Bush. Look south to the River, look east to Holborn and beyond: to Silvertown, to Canning Town, to The Isle of Dogs. Watch the next wave of aircraft approaching the east to the Docklands, to the flames and the sinking ships and barges. Vere Hodgson, London and England were at war.

All the while, she went to work, went about her private life, visited with friends and listened to the radio. Vere Hodgson drank tea, did without, kept calm and carried on.

She regularly recorded her everyday thoughts about what was happening in London and afar. This social worker entered those reflections in letters, diaries and journals. She wrote about the enemy, until at night his aircraft came again. And Vere Hodgson went to market. In such places it was soon: “few eggs and no oranges.” The phrase eventually moved from sentence to book title. It became the name of her collected wartime compilation, published decades later: Few Eggs and No Oranges. A woman who lived on Ladbroke Road told us about what it was like to be a Londoner at war.

As it came to pass.

Note:

Throughout the war Vere Hodgson’s captured thoughts related to her everyday life: philanthropic work, other activities, social group, news of war, and the impact of that conflict on this conscientious woman and her circle. Shortages of food and goods were rarely out of mind. The prospect of death was always in her margins: mentioned and accepted. A cat might cavort or cower as Vere wrote, depending on the proximity of targets and the sounds of exploding bombs. The world, the war and Vere’s pen moved on.

Going to the “pictures” was apparently not a major part of Vere Hodgson’s wartime schedule, but an occasional diversion. Yet offered are her thoughts on films she saw, so that we might reflect when we see the same films now. The next two postings (Vere Hodgson goes to the Pictures) sample her entries on fifteen films that she saw in London or Birmingham and mentioned in Few Eggs and No Oranges. Her comment on Citizen Kane has already been put forth.

Vere Hodgson (one): on Citizen Kane

2011-02-19T01:00:00.000-08:00

But then again, during those years, Vere Hodgson did have German bombers with which to contend. Three postings on the good Miss Hodgson and her Few Eggs and No Oranges will follow in days to come.

Words and Images 56

2011-02-17T11:00:00.000-08:00

What Danny wouldn't do

2011-02-14T01:00:00.000-08:00

Andrew Sarris in "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet": The American Talking Film / History and Memory 1927-1949 discusses actresses tested for the part of the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca. Margaret Sullavan was among them.

"Margaret Sullavan was too assured, too confident, for the part of a socially intimidated bride hopelessly out of her depth. She would have had Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers doing windows in no time flat."

Note: Sarris, in the same book, mentions a radio version of Rebecca in which Sullavan did play the second Mrs. de Winter.

Ten random thoughts on the tenth

2011-02-10T01:00:00.000-08:00

--- I wish I was in Hammersmith.

--- I like the idea that Turner Classic Movies showed a baseball movie around the same time as The Super Bowl on February 6.

--- We're told that when William Wyler tired of watching excessive close-ups in others' films he would try to look around the subject's head to see what the other characters were doing.

--- When I was a boy, in a dark movie house, The Spiral Staircase scared me more than any of the Universal horror films.

--- My favorite mogul was (and still is) Louis B. Mayer (I know all the bad stuff).

--- I usually admire Lee Marvin, and Jane Fonda was a good comedienne and sexy then -- but the motor of Cat Ballou belongs to Nat Cole and Stubby Kaye.

--- Am I the only one who would have preferred Eli Wallach rather than Frank Sinatra as Maggio?

--- When I go on about being there, back during the Sarris-Kael dust-ups, I feel like one of those cantankerous old Civil War veterans in thirties westerns.

--- Watching it again on Turner Classic Movies in January, I had forgotten how good 99 River Street is.

--- My English friend, Nicholas, of High Barnet, whose family hails from the north, is fond of saying: “You can always tell a Yorkshireman -- but you can't tell him much.”

Note: “Random thoughts” pieces bring to mind the great Jimmy Cannon, whose “Nobody Asked Me, But” set the form. Any similarity stops there.

Source: Photograph of the young woman at the tube platform is from As I Travel

In search of a posting

2011-02-04T05:00:00.000-08:00

This photograph enthralls and has for some time. When in need of a posting, I return to it again and again. Somewhere in my memory, perhaps folded into reverie, perhaps behind one of those storefronts, lies a tale that I might link to my past and then to the photo. But such can be elusive.

The location is the Midwest, the village probably Brooklyn, Michigan. The main or "high" street, as our English friends would call it, is quite ordinary. The movie theatre is the Star. I am told the year is 1941, a peaceful yet ominous time. The storefronts are not quite discernable from the camera's point of view. Might one of them initiate a reflection from my past? I could map out a probable store-by-store makeup based on memories of small towns, or from films or photographs from a similar time. And from that map I might locate a misplaced memory: something to take me back to that time, yet to a different place. But such is not likely.

So, I have been unable to find a personal connectivity. And, perhaps, that is as it should be. Seventy years have passed and each enthralling photograph does not a posting make. I will let it stand on its own, still more than six hundred miles away from the Bronx, to a region near Lake Erie, where it will always be 1941 -- before December came.

I will seek no further memories from the townsfolk shown, or their surroundings. I will leave them stranded in time in a long-ago yesterday -- with Fritz Lang’s Western Union playing over and over at the Star. And the photograph will remain in search of a posting.

.....

An afterword on the photograph. It is from l'art et l'automobile. A brief caption provided the state, the year and the name of the film. Cinema Treasures helped locate the village as Brooklyn (known better for its New York manifestation).

Like Unto 16

2011-02-01T01:00:00.000-08:00

Film Makers 7: Alfred Hitchcock

2011-01-29T06:00:00.000-08:00

Against Mahdist forces: January 26, 1885

2011-01-26T01:00:00.000-08:00

General Charles George "Chinese" Gordon (1833-1885), who was killed at Khartoum whilst defending that city against Mahdist forces.

The Onslow Ford statue when it was at Khartoum.

They tell a tale in Gordon circles of a time when the Empire was drawing to a close and the sun setting in places it had not set before. And as British garrisons closed their gates, and Retreat sounded for the last time, British officers, troops, and their families headed back to the homeland. Khartoum in the late 1950s was such a place.

One of those military families had been at Khartoum in those waning days. Father was a Colonel, mother was “the Colonel’s lady” and there were two sons, aged eleven and eight. And since their early times at Khartoum, they had maintained a family ritual.

On evenings when the Colonel was not on duty, he would take his two sons to visit the famous Onslow Ford statue of Gordon on a camel. Father had initially instructed the children that each evening they should bid goodnight to the statue until the next evening or visit. And they should carry forward the tradition thereafter until such time as the Khartoum sun set for the last time prior to their leaving for home. Each evening, the boys would dutifully salute and say “Goodnight Gordon” before trudging back to their quarters.

So came the day. Came the last evening, came the final farewell, came that moment of sadness as “Goodnight Gordon” murmered the elder, and “Goodnight Gordon” whispered the younger. The Colonel beckoned and they turned to leave, but the boys were in tears, and the father was close to that condition, yet holding back. It was then that the youngest boy turned to the Colonel and asked quietly: “Father ………… who is that man on Gordon’s back?”

The Onslow Ford statue at Woking:

The Onslow Ford statue was originally near Trafalgar Square, later moved to Khartoum, and finally to Gordon’s School at Woking. At the statue is the late David Dixon -- a friend, a scholar, a good fellow, and one the finest men my wife and I have ever met.

Words and Images 55

2011-01-20T01:00:00.000-08:00

Like Unto 15

2011-01-17T01:00:00.000-08:00

Raymond Massey on James Dean (and Jo Van Fleet)

2011-01-14T01:00:00.000-08:00

Cover illustration from the book: East of Eden.

Raymond Massey comment from: Films of the Golden Age. Number 61. Summer 2010. Raymond Massey: The Transatlantic Actor. An interview by James Bawden.

Question by James Bawden: "How often do people ask you about Jimmy Dean?"

“Raymond Massey: In every interview! At every party! That movie [East of Eden] has a life of its own but Jimmy was dead by the time it went into release. Did he give a coherent performance? No! He was studying The Method which might have left him as mixed up as Monty Clift if he’d lived longer.

"The success of that film is due to director Elia Kazan. He’d add some bit of unrehearsed business to a take, to surprise Jimmy, and presto, we have our scene. Jimmy couldn’t do the same take twice because he had no training. He couldn’t match long shots with close ups -- that was still beyond him. There is a great performance buried in it – Jo Van Fleet as the mother, she's a force unto herself. In scenes with Jimmy, she just blows him away.

"In that scene where he rushed into the train car to toss down the lettuce, Jimmy went up and we just stood there for the longest time. Then Burl [Ives] turned to me and said, ‘Guess Jimmy’s got to hate that ice’.”

Films of the Golden Age is an illustrated, fan-based film quarterly magazine produced by one of the fold. Bob King, a very sincere and enthusiastic fellow, is the Editor. He includes a mix of articles that cover a balanced cross-sampling of stars and much lesser-known players. Pieces on the latter group are often quite lengthy and helpful when light is cast in shadowy corners not ordinarily probed.

Mr. King also includes letters, moviegoers’ memories of their past and a regular contribution on character actors. Rather a noble endeavor in an age when film blogs abound and many in the magazine/journal industry are hoping that Mr. Brink stays up in the old apple tree.

Ten random thoughts on the tenth

2011-01-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

--- She wasn’t always Walter Mitty’s mother.

--- I believe John Mills would have been the best General Gordon on film, but understand that a star of Heston's magnitude was necessary to carry the costs of Khartoum.

--- Having watched more than one hundred French films through Netflix last year I have developed a better appreciation of Jean-Paul Belmondo.

--- At Marylebone, near Baker Street, a half decade ago, a pleasant older man said to me that he thought the facial image of the Sherlock Holmes statue was odd looking -- and after pausing -- suggested that I resembled the statue.

--- In 1998, enjoying Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, and then listening to her post-film interviews, I was never more convinced of the legerdemain of screenwriters.

--- After watching Richard Chamberlain as Edmond Dantes again recently, my wife and I are certain that the Gerard Depardieu version of The Count of Monte Cristo is leagues ahead of all the others.

--- George Raft annoys me.

--- My knowledgeable film friends (and wife) despair when I tell them how much I admire Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract.

--- My wife and I stumbled across Ed Harris’s Appaloosa recently and were pleasantly surprised.

-- Henry Ford told us “If I had asked my [early]customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse'.”

Note: “Random thoughts” pieces bring to mind the great Jimmy Cannon, whose “Nobody Asked Me, But” set the form. Any similarity stops there.

Film School: The Devon

2011-01-01T09:00:00.000-08:00

It opened in 1928, I am told, but did not become part of my world, and later my history, until around 1940. It was on Tremont Avenue, a major east-west Bronx thoroughfare, just one half block from the Grand Concourse. The Devon Theatre was my first film school. We called it the Dee-von, not Devon (as in Evan). And it was neither picturesque nor palatial. It was a small 600 seat Art Deco movie house in the mid-Bronx, two blocks from where I lived. Perhaps I saw my first movie there, perhaps not. Try to remember.

But the Devon soon became my first film school. The curriculum did not start with Griffith, Eisenstein, or the Danes. It was a third run house -- the movies that came there reached its confines last -- usually tired prints accompanied by worn and folded one sheets, half sheets, and lobby cards.

Prints of these films had by then descended from the likes of Radio City, the Roxy, the Capitol, and lesser venues. When projected, they glistened less, perhaps, because of their meandering journeys. But, I suspect, as poor print quality took its toll on the images of those oversized studio performers -- I noticed little, or not at all.

The range of films was eclectic. And there was certainly a copious sampling of such as When the Daltons Rode, a rhythmic title that stays in mind, or similar western fare. It was a bit early for the deluge of war films but they were soon to come. And Maisie and Boston Blackie were in evidence. So the distribution cycle went from opulent to Poverty Row.

These were the first movies of what would become, as best as I can calculate, well more than ten thousand seen in a lifetime. In the Devon, I saw the forties films in the forties and the early fifties films in the early fifties. And some thirties films found their way into that broad two decade montage.

The faculty at my first film school, as best I recall, was six in number. Try to remember. There was a girl or a lady in a glass and metal box out front who dispensed tickets. A little man in a red jacket at the inner entrance took my ticket, tore it in half, returned a piece and placed the other half into a waist-high wooden box, behind which he stooped. At quiet moments, he sat on a small stool. There was a matron, with a flashlight, dressed as nurses used to dress, a projectionist (unseen) and a lady behind a candy counter. (Popcorn was a futuristic concept then and even in later years that would be upscale Bronx anyway.) I suppose there was a manager somewhere.

Course materials were a blank slate of mind, and remembrance of tales previously told by others of things seen in the dark – larger than life images cast upon a screen. The only qualification was young eyes waiting to see such illusion. There was no cafeteria or commissary. We ate on the premises: candy in little boxes most often, something with a lot of little pieces. Unmentionable things moved on the floor there, as they did at home, but I did not see them. My eyes were affixed on the screen as I sat behind the fourth wall.

By some strange confluence of events and coincidence, the photograph shows the Devon just about the time I was coming of age (for movies). It is almost certainly from 1940, when at six years of age I was likely first taken there. It was when I was about to be enrolled in my first film school. The photograph shows the structure as I recall it – abutted by a group of stores that I still remember well. I have in later years seen the films displayed on the marquee.

Like any good school, there was connectivity with other institutions of advanced learning and these had names like the Avalon, the Jerome, the Fox Crotona, the Loew’s Burnside and the Loew’s Paradise. And foreign languages were heard in the distance and later beckoned me to the Ascot and the Lido. But those were film schools for other days or later times -- tales of which might be told in some future posting. Try to remember.

An epilogue

The lower photograph was taken some twenty years and two wars later: Easter Sunday, 1960. The film school can be seen, apparently still operating. At that time, when the flight to the suburbs was already in full force, some students remained just a little while longer. Much of the Bronx eventually went into uncertainty, decay and ruin. The Devon, far less fortunate, became the location of two ordinary stores. Current Internet mapping sites indicate the stores are still there on a business street in a tired borough. I keep hoping they are false fronts.

Note: The photograph of the Devon Theatre is courtesy of Cinema Treasures.

Christmas moves on

2010-12-29T01:00:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas by Jimmy Cannon

2010-12-24T01:00:00.000-08:00

There was a game the man played with himself Christmas week a year ago in the visitor's room on that floor of the hospital which looked down on the city, southward across Central Park. The man's right eye was infected and he couldn't read or watch television for two months. His vision was obscured by the medication the nurses dropped into his eye every hour around the clock. The sedatives handled most of the pain but not all of it.

So at dusk, led there by boredom, the man would go to the visitor's room. He closed both his eyes and then, slowly, opened the bad one. It was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen.

The lights of the city ran together, in a furry confusion. They didn't collide or sparkle but blended together in a glowing softness. The lights of the city were more like the petals of flowers strewn across the night which seemed to be made of silk. The colors of the night seemed to be dye that had flowed from a child's dream of Christmas.

The buildings lost their shape. They rippled and bulged, like a happy fat man's vest billowing with laughter. The sky was tender above them, more like a luminous moon-dappled sea. The stars lost their hard gleam. They shone, marvelously distorted, in fuzzy bursts, as though they were diamonds that had exploded into fluff. The moon melted into a wide bloated caricature of a man in the sky.

After a while the man strolled to the night nurse's desk to chat. They had sent most of the patients in the children's room home for Christmas. The ward was shut down. Three of the children had been brought to the floor where the man was to spend Christmas. One was Penelope.

There stood Penelope small and sedate in her maroon bathrobe. There she was, imbedded in her silence, proudly inquisitive, a child with russet hair, primly defiant. She came onto this floor of sick adults as an equal. Penelope was too stern, too poised, too serene for childhood.

This is Penelope, the nurse explained to the man, she is a little lady. She was, the nurse said, the perfect patient who had become accustomed to the routine of hospitals. It seemed logical for her to be there at Christmas time. The man thought it must be terrible for a child who has been in hospitals so much that she does not find them strange. The other children cried, the nurse said, but Penelope was brave and dignified and not even afraid of needles.

The flattery did not touch Penelope. She examined the man with a decent inquisitiveness. The dark glasses and his heavy beard did not startle her. In her childhood, spent in so many hospitals, all men had defects. No one was whole, only the doctors and the nurses. Penelope had a cleft palate. There had been a series of operations. One of the great surgeons had become interested in her case. It was slow but Penelope had been educated to wait.

Penelope, the nurse said with a sorrow that wasn't professional, refused to talk. The ridicule of other children had shut her up. The crippled voice had been imitated by bantering playmates. So Penelope spoke to no one.

The man, who is a bachelor, is clumsy with children. Always he has been an alien among them. They make him a stranger and he is uncomfortable in their presence. But this pretty child was not one of them but a tiny adult, experienced in pain and humility. The man leaned down and attempted to be casual.

My name is Jimmy, the man said. You're Penelope, aren't you? The blue eyes, clear and interested, were blank in their beauty. So the man asked about her dolls and her story books. He wanted to know what she wanted for Christmas. There was no reply, only that somberly interested look ...

He was dozing when the nurse knocked. With her was Penelope who held a picture book in one hand. The nurse said Penelope had been found wandering in the corridors, tapping on doors and calling the man's name in her tortured voice. It was, the nurse said, the first time she had heard the child speak.

The nurse left. The man, who finds all children strangers, sat on the bed and Penelope pretended to read from the book. The man will never forget that voice, struggling and grotesque, and he was very close to weeping. After that Penelope came every day and read to him. But she would not utter a sound if there was any one else in the room.

They spent part of Christmas together in his room. The man is everlastingly grateful to her. She gave him the most precious of all gifts when she allowed him to reach her. Never before had he felt the true meaning of this day until he heard Penelope say Merry Christmas.

Note: This tale appeared in a collection of articles by Jimmy Cannon in “Who Struck John?” Dial Press, 1956.

Ten random thoughts on the twentieth

2010-12-20T10:00:00.000-08:00

--- When it comes to the sisters Bennett, I am in the Joan column.

--- Robert Ryan confronting the soldier in the bar in Odds Against Tomorrow is about as scary (and satisfying) as it gets.

--- Holmesian acquaintances wince when I tell them my favorite Sherlock Holmes on film is Robert Stephens in Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

--- Rather than his directorial efforts, I prefer Martin Scorsese’s work as film enthusiast, preservationist, historian, and keeper of the flame.

--- I am investigating to find out if Dangerous Crossing with Jeanne Crain has been shown on Fox Movie Channel more times than Cunard’s original Queen Mary crossed the Atlantic.

--- Wandering around Leicester Square some years back, I heard an irate, thirtyish American wife raging at her husband “We did not travel to England to go to the movies.”

--- While my wife and I watched The Keys of the Kingdom last week, I thought of an English film critic, when reviewing a new film, stating that he could feel his fingernails growing.

--- Billy Wilder is my favorite (émigré) American director, but his delirium tremens scene in The Lost Weekend pales compared to that in Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge.

--- Where Danger Lives has astutely commented that Ella Raines’s beauty was rarely captured on film posters -- and it appears to me somewhat the same with her publicity stills.

--- Just once have I been the only person in a theatre -- a noon showing of the fiftieth anniversary edition of Casablanca at a downtown New York theatre toward the end of the run.

Note: “Random thoughts” pieces bring to mind the great Jimmy Cannon, whose “Nobody Asked Me, But” set the form. Any similarity stops there.

Patti LuPone, Steven Sondheim and Susan from Seattle

2010-12-19T01:00:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, my wife and I were acquired by Susan from Seattle in a legal matter resolved in a different galaxy in a bygone era. Susan is fond of saying that my wife and I “were part of the settlement.” But that is a tale best left for another day.

Before Seattle, Susan had lived in a diverse series of locations from the coal regions of Wilkes Barre (where we met), to Houston, to places certainly made no brighter by her departure. In recent times she has settled in Seattle.

Susan is a woman of exquisite taste, both in food and in wine. She has a curious mind, an appreciation of special films, good books and beguiling music. She is longtime aficionado of Steven Sondheim, and a fervent admirer of Patti LuPone (as are legions of others). Susan is currently relishing a passion for Mr. Sondheim's and James Lapine's Passion, with Donna Murphy.

The King’s spies being everywhere, I recently learned that, in distant Seattle, Susan has new Internet capabilities installed at her home. So it occurred to me to brighten her Sunday morning with an image that would please -- and which might lead her down whichever meandering path she chooses to follow today in her new environment.

Into the woods,
It's time to go,
I hate to leave,
I have to, though.
Into the woods --
It's time, and so
I must begin my journey.
Into the woods.

(Lyrics, of course, by Mr. Sondheim -- and they have been known to be used as a header phrase for the slumbering Poconotions.)

Like Unto 14

2010-12-17T05:00:00.000-08:00

Gladys Cooper

Elisabeth Risdon

Film Makers 6: Louis B. Mayer

2010-12-14T09:00:00.000-08:00

Louis B. Mayer’s puritanical streak manifested itself in many aspects of his personal life and in the nature of his films at MGM. Scott Eyman in his Lion of Hollywood: the Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer uses a well-known comment to describe how L.B. reconciled his moral code with the flamboyant sexual conduct of some of his early stars. John Gilbert was a notorious womanizer; William Haines liked men and boys.

Eyman tells us: "Mayer’s feelings about sex were similar to those of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who made the famous remark about not caring what people did -- as long as they 'didn’t scare the horses'.”

Ten random thoughts on the tenth

2010-12-10T01:00:00.002-08:00

--- I am frequently torn between my adoration of Julie Harris and my disregard of James Dean -- because of the conundrum of Julie having a high regard for Dean’s work.

--- I would relish an article on how the Turner Classic Movies monthly schedule is constructed. From one who knows. What is included? Which films play when and why?

--- Neither my wife nor I are overly committed fans of Olivia de Havilland, but every time The Heiress is televised (TCM this past Wednesday) we are hooked. Richardson is glorious; the property is foolproof. And Olivia is excellent.

--- It seems many of our female bloggers (particularly the younger) are partial to the suave: e.g., Franchot Tone, William Powell, and Warren William. Might this have to do with the look and style of the younger males to whom these bloggers come into everyday contact?

--- Finished reading Todd McCarthy’s Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. A very good book, which understandably seems to tail off as the author discusses Hawks’s later work.

--- My wife and I watched Ruth Chattterton in Female and spent the better part discussing who might have been a more appropriate lead (ignoring studio restrictions): Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell or Mary Astor?

--- How good was Virginia Weidler? Very. She seems to be omnipresent on Turner Classic Movies lately.

--- My wife and I finished watching the complete series of The Wire together (it took us about two months for the sixty episodes). It was her first viewing -- my fourth or fifth. She was taken with it.

--- Because it appears on television with some regularity, we watched a bit of Three Came Home again. It is a decent film with an aging star, later in her career, but it has such a cramped look. I know it is prison based -- but?

--- The anniversary of the shooting of John Lennon seems to have received much more Internet and television coverage this week than the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Note: “Random thoughts” pieces bring to mind the great Jimmy Cannon, whose “Nobody Asked Me, But” set the form. Any similarity stops there.

Pearl Harbor

2010-12-07T01:00:00.001-08:00

December 7, 1941

“We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the United Press. Flash. Washington. The White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor …”

Pearl Harbor: The War Against Mrs. Hadley

Mrs. Stella Livingstone Hadley, a well-to-do Washington widow, was celebrating her birthday on Sunday, December 7, 1941. An unwelcome singing telegram started the festivities, her birthday cake told us the date; the radio brought her birthday gathering news of the attack. And her children, household staff, social circle and world were never again the same.

The War intruded on Mrs. Hadley’s life. It started with a broken teacup and culminated with a son in battle. She resisted and resented, but she ultimately repented. Without benefit of nocturnal ghostly visits, this somewhat softened stylish harridan has her moment of truth, sees the light and joins the war effort.

She is finally drawn to the cause by her unselfish children, her patriotic household staff and the firm patient goodness of Elliott Fulton, a long time ex-suitor played by Edward Arnold. Spring Byington, Connie Gilchrist and Sara Allgood ably support the conversion. Fay Bainter is Stella Hadley.

Pearl Harbor: Fay Okell Bainter Venable

Andrew Sarris has reflected on parallels between actors and the roles they play. Consider Fay Bainter in 1943, playing Stella Hadley living in 1941. Consider Fay Bainter playing the birthday scene when the radio brings news of war. If ever an actress lived a flashback, such a stage was set. Remembrance would have been inevitable. Less than two years had passed since Pearl Harbor, and she was of a generation which carried memories of that day to their graves.

Remember the day. Fay Bainter was likely in California. It was her birthday as well as Mrs. Hadley's, so there was probably a cake in the wings. Was there a calendar on the wall? There was certainly a radio: and then the broadcast. Her husband was Navy, so the family would know a bit about our Naval Station in Hawaii. Pearl Harbor. December 7, 1941. Nothing would be quite the same thereafter: for Fay Bainter Venable, for Mrs. Stella Hadley or for the better part of one hundred and thirty three million Americans.

An afterword

Fay Bainter’s career lasted into 1961 with her role in The Children’s Hour, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. Fay Bainter Venable died in April 1968. She rests at Arlington National Cemetery with her husband.

Acknowledgements

The calendar is reproduced from the C.E. Daniel Collection

The broadcast text is that heard in New York on WOR at approximately 2:26 p.m., interrupting a football game. It is not the broadcast used in The War Against Mrs. Hadley.

An earlier version of this posting appeared on this site in January 2010 as Once Young 1.

Laura reviewed this film at Laura's Miscellaneous Musings on January 21, 2008.

Like Unto 13

2010-12-05T01:00:00.000-08:00

Diana Lynn

Mona Freeman

Celebrating Julie Harris at 85 (Voices redux)

2010-12-02T01:00:00.000-08:00

Some people hear voices when no one is there. In April 1972, I saw Voices, and there was certainly someone there: Julie Harris. The play ran for only eight performances at The Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. It was poorly reviewed but I enjoyed it.

The primary characters are a troubled couple caught in an old dark house trapped by a snowstorm. They hear voices, a ball bounces down a stairway, and ghosts may or may not be in attendance. I recall a plot twist at play’s end indicating that the two are actually the ghosts, having been killed in an automobile accident prior to their appearance at the house. Modern day summaries on theatre websites indicate otherwise.

Voices featured Julie Harris, a national treasure, and Richard Kiley some seven years after his success in jousting at Broadway windmills.

As to Julie Harris, I was enthralled. I could watch her play cards for three hours -- which I did some 25 years later in the Broadway revival of The Gin Game. As to Richard Kiley, windmills to the contrary notwithstanding, I carried a grudge. I could never, ever, forgive him for killing Moe in Pickup on South Street. Being a communist? Yes. Killing Moe? No.

But there is an epilogue to this story of Voices. One Miss Lisa Essary appeared as a child in the play. She was the stepdaughter of Mafia gangster Joey Gallo. After the April 6 performance, a Gallo entourage collected Lisa at the theatre, celebrated at the Copacabana, and in the wee hours of morning, went to Umberto’s Clam House for a repast. They were joined after a while by a group of assassins from a rival Mafia gang with weapons drawn. Some twenty shots were fired, and Joey Gallo’s life and celebrity ended under a restaurant table. It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold.

Young Lisa Essary and her newly widowed mother survived. It was the morning of April 7. After the April 8 performance, Voices closed. As far as I know, the play’s demise was not related to that of Mr. Gallo’s.

Voices. Voices and ghosts. Some from a stage, some from a restaurant in Little Italy, all from long ago.

Julie is at Cape Cod these days, but Richard Kiley died in 1999. Ms. Lisa Essary is a successful casting director.

An afterword: This, first posted in January 2010, is reissued in commemoration of Julie Harris's 85th birthday.

Miss Otis Regrets 6

2010-12-01T01:00:00.001-08:00

She's unable to lunch today ...

Going and Coming: Eleven Days in 1941

2010-11-28T05:17:00.001-08:00

Shanghai, China: November 28, 1941

Sixty-nine years ago today, members of the United States Marine Corps, Fourth Marine Regiment Band (with accompanying troops) left the International Settlement at Shanghai. This photo captures the moment. It was but ten days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War II.

Shanghai, China: 8 December 1941

Ten days later, on December 8, the Japanese occupied the International Settlement. In a Hollywood retelling, an English boy is lost in the confusion in a harrowing scene from my favorite Steven Spielberg film.

Note: Fourth Marine Regiment Band photo courtesy of China Marines website.

Short Cuts 9: The Mystery of Edwin Drood

2010-11-24T09:00:00.000-08:00

The Mystery of Edwin Drood: the book

In 1870, Charles Dickens lay dead; The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished. The secret of Edwin Drood had died with Dickens. The incomplete book on Drood was published posthumously. And "the most intricate literary problem in the English language" required a solution.

So it came to pass that a divergent group of scholars set about pondering the puzzle of Dickens's last plot. And for 140 years thereafter, scholars have discussed the deviltry or devotion of John Jasper, the identity of Dick Datchery, and the fate of Edwin Drood.

If, as we were taught in our early Latin classes, “All Gaul is divided into three parts;” then all Charles Dickens likely divides more-so. And within those divisions, that which relates to Drood is particularly susceptible to sub-sectioning. There are Dickensians, and among them Droodians or Droodists, or Drood-hunters, or as Chesterton was wont to call them: Druids. And within this sect there are Bazzardites, Landlessites and Tartarites, among others; the latter a minor sect we're told.

Those scholars were a boon to the Dickens fellowship, to the publishing industry, and to book collectors who extended a branch of the Dickensian tree to one of rather lengthy proportion. And so went this literary game for some sixty years until the Great Depression, when scholarly concentration on the criminous occurrence in the shadow of the cathedral appeared to ebb.

Yet evidence of the quest still surfaced occasionally and, in the heart of that Depression, in 1935, Universal Pictures produced a film version titled Mystery of Edwin Drood, directed by Stuart Walker. I remembered seeing the film on television long along but details had faded from memory.

Mystery of Edwin Drood: the film

I was reminded of the 1935 version this week as I came across Heather Angel playing a maid in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion. In Mystery of Edwin Drood, she plays Rosa Bud. The next day, I sought and watched the film on You Tube. Claude Rains stars as John Jasper and Valerie Hobson as Helena Landless. (In an early scene, Rosa Bud tells Helena Landless to call her "Rosebud” -- which I mention for those film purists inclined to stray off subject.)

Douglass Montgomery plays Neville Landless and David Manners is Edwin, called Ned. A fine sampling of Dickensian types supports, such as a reasonably slim Francis L. Sullivan, Walter Kingsford, and Forrester Harvey as Durdles. Oddly, as if escaped from some wagon train gone far astray, there are brief appearances by Walter Brennan and Will Geer.

The single propeller plane flies around the globe and the Universal Pictures logo lets us know we are in for Universal Studio atmospherics. From an opium den in London we move to the County of Kent, within which lies the cathedral town of Cloisterham (nee Rochester). European sets, more often reserved for vampires and other creatures of the night, serve as the mews, closes, and alleys surrounding the English cathedral. A perfect setting for a mid-Victorian malfeasance. And all because of “Rosebud.”

Three men are involved in the affections of one girl. One kills, and another dies, leaving the third to marry. There is an abundance of cobblestoned streets, church steeples, bells, tombs, crypts, graveyards and bedposts, that in dreams, morph into church spires. And the villagers gossip and suspect the wrong fellow for a while, but they are not the usual rambunctious European contingent with torches -- the English being masters of good form.

John Jasper is the obvious dispatcher of Edwin Drood, who sleeps with the quicklime. And the tempestuous Neville Landless’s return from Ceylon is rewarded as those cathedral bells ring. The film is a moody piece as was the unfinished original novel. The cast, and the source, and the Universal Studios look make the trip to Cloisterham in Kent worthwhile.

An afterthought on You Tube

You Tube is often the court of last resort. I recently purchased a 26 inch personal computer monitor for just such contingency (and for Netflix downloads). As of November 23, You Tube had the complete film in six sections and I watched it immediately. (One must do so with scarce materials in that environment.) Alas, the second half of the film has You Tube synchronization problems. But one suspects Claude Rains out of sync is clearer to the ear than most anyone else then, or now.

And an afterthought on wagon trains going astray

My friend Bob Wyatt of Wokingham once showed me the place where the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show played in Wokingham (Berkshire) but that was some thirty five years after poor Edwin went to rest in the quicklime. The show also played in Chatham, near Rochester, on August 28, 1903.

Like Unto 12

2010-11-20T01:00:00.001-08:00

Patricia Morison on the right

Gail Patrick on the left

True and False 1

2010-11-17T01:00:00.001-08:00

Short Cuts 8: Around the World in Eighty Days: 53 years later

2010-11-14T20:00:00.000-08:00

Around the World in Eighty Days: 53 years later.

It was a “big ticket” date -- a bit difficult to comprehend in these times, perhaps, but Around the World in Eighty Days at New York’s Rivoli Theater in early 1957 was a big ticket date -- and an event. It had opened in late 1956, yet tickets were still hard come by, particularly at a working class salary. But there were ways.

My date and I lived in the Bronx. I do not recall, but we certainly would have taken the Independent Line “D” train at Tremont Avenue downtown to the Times Square area. And we probably had something to eat – maybe at Al Muller’s German restaurant over by the old Madison Square Garden. Or, perhaps, the Howard Johnson’s in the photograph. And then the movie. We were young and in love.

Last night, more than nineteen thousand days after that date, my wife (she of the date) and I had the film on Turner Classic Movies in our kitchen while preparing a simple Saturday night supper. (We are accustomed to using overly familiar movies as kitchen background music as we go about our culinary endeavors.)

Occasionally, she or I would remark “there’s Melville Cooper” or “there’s Buster Keaton” and as I turned the oven to broil, and moved our plates to table: “there’s Marlene Dietrich.” (Thank heaven for small kindnesses when George Raft appears only in a cameo.)

The film made a nice travelogue in spots. We sat and ate somewhere between Shirley MacLaine and the elephants. And we finished the simple repast around the time that Phileas Fogg returned to the Reform Club (with Princess Aouda in tow), entered those sacred premises, and the Empire was announced to have fallen.

Last evening, we could not remember the theatre where we originally had seen Around the World in Eighty Days. An Internet search this morning turned up the Rivoli, stately as it was around the time we saw the film. Note the Lindy’s (famous as Runyon’s Mindy’s) to the left of the theatre, as well as the men in fedoras, and a New York policeman, of course. The Rivoli is long defunct, having succumbed to modern moviedom in 1984.

Last night was November 13, 2010. So it was Around the World in Eighty Days -- 53 years later. The movie has not held up. Nor did it have a chance in a kitchen with a humming refrigerator, the sounds of supper, and on a 26 inch television screen in lieu of that on which we first saw it: some 75 by 30 feet.

So, the memory of the “big ticket event” is cast in an odd mix of mental granite and smoke. The film was not nearly as good this time as the first time, nor was it likely very good then -- but that was long ago and far away -- and films seen in our distant past are often steeped in the magic of yesterdays.

Veterans Day 2010

2010-11-11T01:00:00.000-08:00

Veterans

Veterans seemed omnipresent in my youth, in my teen years and well into my twenties and thirties. They are still among us but less in evidence, certainly less celebrated. As Rear Admiral Tarrant notably once said: “Where do we get such men?” The answer is as simple as it is complex: from our families, from those with whom we have worked and played, and from those with whom we may have served.

Veterans were my uncles: quiet men from Greenwich Village, Saugerties, and Catskill, who spent some time in the nineteen forties in North Africa, in Southern Italy and one of them -- just beyond the beach at Normandy in June 1944. (Gliders could land anywhere.)

Seven years after Al Stephenson, Fred Derry and Homer Parrish came home to Boone City after World War II, I went to work for a public utility in New York City as a messenger. After a year, I was moved to our IBM Tab Machine installation where I learned to operate the devices that preceded mainframe and personal computers (You often see Tab machines in forties movies showing FBI installations.)

I was trained by men some ten or more years older than I -- many were veterans of World War II. They had survived the war, some of them serving more than five years, where they helped save a nation at peril. (Arthur Hunt was a cook in the Ardennes when the Germans coveted Bastogne; Charlie Montag spent Easter Sunday 1945 off the coast of Okinawa.)

Most of these men came home unceremoniously, but at least, to a G.I. Bill that offered an education and the opportunity to buy modest homes on Long Island or other suburban areas. They were a good honest lot, with an occasional oddball. They were veterans.

Although I worked in Manhattan, I lived in the Bronx, the borough directly to the north. On evenings and weekends, I spent time at a lacklustre Bronx neighborhood bar – a poor American version of the Englishman’s local. A goodly number of its habitués were also veterans, who like those at work, had been similarly engaged during World War II. And they had formed a social group (The Mickey Jones Club) named after a neighborhood friend who had fallen in the Pacific. They were veterans.

In 1958 and 1959, because of the requirements of the Selective Service System, I found myself in Germany, a private in an Armor Group, a neophyte serving under men who had seen war in all its aspects.

Our Group Commander was Colonel Kane, a decorated hero of the Second World War. My section leader was Major Prichard -- who once whimsically reminisced that he had served under Patton in World War II and had, on occasion, told the General that he was going the wrong way.

Our officers were all armor men who had fought in World War II and in Korea and each had a subdued, fragmented tale to tell. S-3 was Operations. We had three captains: Leroy Lafayette Schaefer and two others. Sergeant First Class Campbell, my immediate superior, had been a prisoner of war in Germany. He told me of his experiences only once. These men, too, were veterans -- but still serving.

These warriors knew from reality and experience what we in the lower ranks knew only in the abstract, but could not truly comprehend. The situation is best summarized in the following, extracted from the American Cold War Veterans Internet site:

“No headlines, but just honest and faithful service — peacekeepers who stayed combat ready and willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. NATO had 21 divisions facing 175 soviet and Warsaw Pact divisions in 1955. Our troops stayed on alert, with their basic load of ammunition ready for war. Those troops in the Fulda gap had no illusions about their role — they would buy time for a counterstrike if and when war began.”

Those at work, those in my family, those in that neighborhood bar, and those under whom I served in Germany are all gone now. But I will think about them for a while today on Veterans Day -- close to sixty nine years after Japanese squadrons flew from the west, the north and the east -- past Diamond Head -- on their way to Pearl Harbor.

Where did we get such men?

An afterthought:

The tone of this reverie reflects days past and conflicts fading from modern sensibility. Yet each new generation produces its own veterans who move into that brotherhood.

Credits:

Artwork at the top is Barse Miller’s Waving Goodbye and Good Luck. Small town artwork is a Saugerties street (Partition at Montrose) by Edward Lazansky. Okinawa LST photograph is from WW2incolor.com. The soldier in the Fulda Gap region is from the Blackhorse Trooper website. The famed return to Boone City still is etched in most of our memories.

Short Cuts 7: "Stranglers’ Day"

2010-11-07T07:15:00.000-08:00

Short Cuts 7: "Stranglers’ Day" at Fox Movie Channel and Turner Classic Movies (Saturday, November 6, 2010)

Yesterday might have been billed as “Stranglers’ Day” on Fox Movie Channel and Turner Classic Movies as my wife and I first watched The Boston Strangler (again), followed by Dial M for Murder (yet again) and finally Marlon Brando in Lewis Milestone’s Mutiny on the Bounty (never again).

The first had an excellent underplayed performance by Tony Curtis, who oddly does not appear for almost the first hour of the film. It was shot using a plethora of those unusual two, three and four segment split screens, a vogue which was popular in the 1960s and which revisits us sporadically. The Boston Strangler was directed by Richard Fleischer -- rightfully known for his terrific The Narrow Margin. We had not seen The Boston Strangler in some time, but Mr. Curtis was fresh in mind and a phrase Matthew Coniam recently used lingered: “fine work, in a wearily frenetic movie.” Matthew’s comment certainly well describes Curtis’s portrayal as well as that first non-Curtisian hour.

The second film was Hitchcock, but not really Hitchcock, rather a filmed play, rich in color. Both Hitchcock and Truffaut virtually ignore it on the Hitchcock/Truffaut tapes. (See the Charlie Parker site on Hitchcock/Truffaut if you have some 25 hours to spare.) Dial M is not quite a strangle movie, but a beautiful neck does come into play (endangered twice as it turns out), as does a pair of scissors, a Scotland Yard inspector, and some endless business about latchkeys. Truffaut and Hitchcock did not much care for the “too colorful” Inspector – but then again, Hitchcock did not care for Kim Novak in Vertigo either. But my wife and I enjoyed Dial M again none-the-less.

Finally, came Marlon Brando strangling (both on screen and off, reportedly) the oxygen, the warm Tahitian air and the credibility out of a sure-fire property. (The film, at least, looks very good.) I never thought I would feel sorry for Captain Bligh, but soon into the first reel, I was hoping someone would keelhaul Brando somewhere off the Isle of Wight. Never have I appreciated Clark Gable more.

“Strangler’s Day.” Saturday afternoon and evening on Fox Movie Channel and Turner Classic Movies.

Dial M photo by Icône

Film Makers 5: Henry Hathaway

2010-11-05T01:00:00.000-07:00

Unless, of course ...

Film Makers 4: Hawks on Dirt

2010-11-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

Amanda’s Cinema Survey (A Noodle in a Haystack)

2010-10-27T02:27:00.000-07:00

Amanda’s Cinema Survey (A Noodle in a Haystack)

Amanda at A Noodle in a Haystack has posted a Cinema Survey, the questions of which are of particular interest and can be difficult because there are no correct answers. She has a diverse following, which makes for an entertaining kaleidoscope of preferences. And, as one would expect from her site, the discourse is civil and collegial. (I commented to Amanda that I think her survey questions tell us as much about her film tastes as her answers,)

I responded in Amanda’s Comment section, but am inclined also to post on this site. It provides an opportunity to append a few additional remarks and to reflect on a few comments Amanda received (including her own choices) which refreshed my memory. It also allows me to include photos of players past and players present to whom I am particularly partial.

1. What is your favorite movie starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, excluding all of The Thin Man films?

Manhattan Melodrama because of them and for the rare depiction of the General Slocum disaster. There is also the Dillinger connection that was used to good effect in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies.

2. Name a screen team that appeared in only one film together but are still noteworthy for how well they complemented each other.

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart: In a Lonely Place.

3. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' best film together?

Top Hat.

4. Your favorite actor named "Robert"?

Robert Montgomery

5. An actor/actress who, when you see one of their movies, you always wish that someone else was in his/her role?

Jack Nicholson.

6. An actor/actress that someone close to you really loves that you can't stand or vice versa?

None that fits “can’t stand”.

7. An actor/actress that you both agree on completely?

Bette Davis and James Cagney.

8. Complete this sentence: Virginia O'Brien is to Ethel Merman as...

Mrs. Danvers is to Bullwinkle.

9. What is your favorite film starring Ray Milland?

The Major and the Minor.

10. You had to have seen this one coming: what is your favorite movie of the 1960s?

Easier than I thought: Le samouraï. Mythical Monkey’s comment, however, reminded me of The Apartment. So I will include both and categorize one as favorite foreign and one as favorite American.

11. An actor/actress that you would take out of one film and put into a different movie that was released the same year?

Alan Curtis in Phantom Lady. Get him away from Ella Raines. There were four East Side Kids movies in 1944. Put him in one of those.

12. Who was your favorite of Robert Montgomery's leading ladies?

Audrey Totter.

13. You think it would have been a disaster if what movie starred the actor/actress who was originally asked to star in it?

Fredric March in the Cary Grant role in Bringing Up Baby. Oh God! Source: Todd McCarthy in Howard Hawks: the Grey Fox of Hollywood.

14. An actor/actress who you will watch in any or almost any movie?

Ethel Barrymore. Any. No almosts. Just going to the Broadway theatre named after her is splendor.

15. Your favorite Leslie Howard film and role?

The Scarlet Pimpernel (with ‘Pimpernel’ Smith as a chaser).

16. You have been asked to host a marathon of four Barbara Stanwyck films. Which ones do you choose?

Double Indemnity / Meet John Doe / Baby Face / Ball of Fire. I am a Sturges fan but had to leave something out.

17. What is, in your mind, the nearest to perfect comedy you have ever seen? Why?

Bringing Up Baby. On board were the following. One of our greatest actresses. One of our greatest actors. One of our finest American directors. And Dudley Nichols writing. Stellar supporting cast. Hawks thought a flaw was that there were no normal people in the movie – virtually all were screwballs. I think it matters not. He did, though, try to temper his next great comedy (His Girl Friday) with the introduction of the Ralph Bellamy character.

18. You will brook no criticism of what film?

I Know Where I'm Going!

19. Who is your favorite Irish actress?

Maureen. Inevitable.

20. Your favorite 1940s movie starring Ginger Rogers?

I’ll Be Seeing You. This is a very personal favorite. It is one of a quartet of films done by William Dieterle in a seven year period (1944-1950) all of which included Joseph Cottten. The other three are: Love Letters, Portrait of Jennie, and September Affair.

21. Do you enjoy silent movies?

Yes. But I came late. When younger, I had inexcusable and ill informed prejudices about silent films.

22. What is your favorite Bette Davis film?

Dark Victory.

23. Your favorite onscreen Hollywood couple?

Linda Darnell and Paul Douglas. Tough edges but perfect pairing. Only three films that I know.

24. This one is for the girls, but, of course, the guys are welcome to answer, too: who is your favorite Hollywood costume designer?

Orry-Kelly.

25. To even things out a bit, here's something the boys will enjoy: what is your favorite tough action film?

The Wild Bunch.

26. You are currently gaining a greater appreciation for which actor(s)/actress (es)?

Classic: Jean Harlow
Modern: Rebecca Pidgeon (realizing I am in a distinct minority)

27. Franchot Tone: yes or no?

Slightly enthusiastic yes. Just having been in Phantom Lady helps.

28. Which actors and/or actresses do you think are underrated?

Jean Hagen. Particularly in Asphalt Jungle. (Afterthought: Dawn’s mention of Spring Byington is perfect.)

29. Which actors and/or actresses do you think are overrated?

Jack Nicholson. Grimace and shout.

30. Favorite actor?

Joseph Cotten. He was in so many landmark films: Citizen Kane, The Third Man, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Shadow of a Doubt for starters. Then the four personal favorites as listed in my answer to Question 20. And so many more.

31. Favorite actress?

Bette Davis. There was a time when I thought it was Katharine Hepburn -- but then I found myself saying “I always think Kate is our best film actress – until I see another Bette Davis movie.”

32. Of those listed, who is the coolest: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Steve McQueen, or Patrick Stewart?

Sorry -- but I must go off path. Elizabeth of “Oh by Jingo” enlightened me in the past with her choice of Hoagy Carmichael. Flawless choice.

33. What is your favorite movie from each of these genres:

Comedy: Bringing Up Baby.
Swashbuckler: The Mark of Zorro (Tyrone Power)
Film noir: Criss Cross
Musical: Gold Diggers of 1933 (I just love Aline MacMahon)
Holiday: It’s a Wonderful Life
Hitchcock: Vertigo

Amanda’s Cinema Survey (A Noodle in a Haystack)

Triad 2 (redux)

2010-10-24T01:00:00.000-07:00

Triad 1 (redux)

2010-10-17T01:00:00.000-07:00

Like Unto 11

2010-10-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

Bonita Granville (on the right)

Priscilla Lane (on the left)

Or is it the other way around?

Note: I used this pairing earlier this year (in April) in response to a question in Millie and Kate’s Brilliantly Evil Asthmatic Survey. I enter it now as earlier intended in the Like Unto series.

Co` latha breith sona dhuibh!

2010-10-10T01:00:00.000-07:00

A personal favorite of recent decades: Rebecca Pidgeon. Born this day forty-five years ago.

The man from the telephone company

2010-10-07T01:00:00.000-07:00

As the story goes, an actor is on stage as the curtain rises and the drama is to begin with a telephone ringing. But as will happen in theatre, someone has not done their job. The telephone is not on stage. Hence, no ringing. The actor looks at an empty end table, looks at the audience and then offstage at a stagehand.

The stagehand, realizing what is amiss, picks up the nearby telephone prop and walks onstage. “Hello” he says to the actor “I’m from the telephone company -- where should I install the phone?" The actor gestures. The stagehand places the phone on the end table, sticks a wire somewhere below and departs. Once he is offstage, the telephone rings. The play begins.

Making do.

Retold from Theatrical Disasters by Gyles Bandreth.

Hastings Pier: burning yesterdays

2010-10-05T01:00:00.001-07:00

Hastings Pier: burning yesterdays

Hastings Pier burned last night. I can claim neither a history with Hastings, nor any specific connectivity. A few days only in a lifetime. But the image lingers.

My wife and I had spent some time in Southampton in May 2006, while immersed in one of our annual peregrinations around our favorite island. As planned earlier, we decided to take a train over to Hastings for a few days: a journey of approximately three hours.

We stayed at The White Rock Hotel, across the promenade from the pier. (Later that year the pier was closed for safety reasons.) My wife took the accompanying photograph from our room. During our stay, as was the case during last night’s conflagration, Hastings was buffeted with high winds. (My wife’s diary has an entry which states: “… a big window looking out at the old Victorian pier and at the water … great wind blowing … furious waves … high waves breaking under the pier across the road.”)

I have trawled my mind for remembrances of Hastings Pier in film. Without research, I can think of none, but television is likely another matter. My wife and I are partial to Foyle’s War. We have seen the complete series at least three times. But it has been a while since last we watched, so we cannot recall in which episode (or episodes) the pier might have been shown. But we suspect the pier is evident somewhere along his rounds, as Inspector Foyle roams the region, maintaining order on the home front while his nation is at peril. (The pier seemed too iconographic not to have been used.)

So Hastings Pier is in my mind this morning. Another vestige of another yesterday that is not what it was. There is a sadness about burning yesterdays. So I will not add a picture of last night’s carnage but rather leave the photograph as our remembrance of a few windy days in Hastings. And, were some juxtaposition of time and reality possible, I can picture the good Inspector Foyle standing on the promenade this morning and watching the fire subside, manifesting that little facial tic of his, and showing just a glint of sadness in his eyes.

(A note for our English friends only. If early reports are true, the fire which destroyed a century-and-a-half old pier was attributed to arson caused by two yobs. That might qualify for an Asbo each.)

Words and Images 54

2010-10-03T01:00:00.000-07:00

He could handle Handel like no one can handle Handel but Daphne was a different matter.

Tony Curtis

2010-09-30T01:00:00.000-07:00

Remembering Tony Curtis and the Loew’s Paradise

I never thought much about Tony Curtis during my formative years, although we were both denizens of the Bronx, he preceding me by a decade. He was of Hungarian Jewish background, brought up in the Bronx during the Great Depression on the eve of World War Two. The borough was about fifty percent Jewish at that time and although I was a Gentile, a young boy takes on many of the trappings of his surroundings -- I have always been comfortable in that milieu. And I have always had a fond appreciation of those who came out of that culture -- having myself been so enveloped by it. So, perhaps, there was a subconscious link. Shared experiences.

Tony Curtis has told us about going to the Loew’s Paradise, a movie mecca in the Bronx, long ensconced on the Grand Concourse – our major boulevard. It was our Broadway. The Paradise, built in 1929, was the 23rd largest movie theatre ever to be built in the United States and had a seating capacity of close to four thousand. Perhaps our paths crossed there once or twice as this was a palace for the people and the young attended the palace rituals with some regularity.

After the war, Tony Curtis moved from the seats of the Loew's Paradise to the screen -- initially in a famous moment, dancing with Yvonne De Carlo in Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross. It is a heated scene which introduces us to Yvonne De Carlo (Anna) on the point of combustion, dancing with the handsome Tony Curtis.

He moves quickly in and out of the frame as we listen to the pulsating music of Esy Morales. It was De Carlo’s showcase, but I am sure the girls noticed Tony Curtis. And, I suspect, I might have seen that screen debut more often than most, because my wife and I are great admirers of Robert Siodmak, particularly his Criss Cross.

Then came Trapeze, Sweet Smell of Success, the Wilder film, The Boston Strangler, and sundry others. But this is not the best venue for a Curtis obituary. Yet, as I trawled the Internet earlier today visiting what are usually good sources for obituaries (e.g., The Guardian, The London Telegraph) those found were rather lackluster.

But I will continue to seek and perhaps find. I would like to see two of my favorite Davids weigh in: Mamet and Thomson. Mamet has stated in his Bambi meets Godzilla that Tony Curtis was a better film actor than Laurence Olivier. And the distinguished playwright and director makes a good case. My appreciation of Tony Curtis grew over the years as I saw his films again and again, saw and read interviews with him, and listened and read carefully when those whom I consider knowledgeable spoke and wrote of him. I have come to respect Tony Curtis and appreciate his work.

So farewell to a fellow Bronxite on a bleak rainy day about one hundred miles from the Bronx and about seventy years from a brief period when we were both there at the same time. And as films and actors throw shadows in the most unexpected places, this morning I thought about the old Bronx, the sound of Klezmer, a landmark theatre on the Grand Concourse and of all the boys met and passed on city streets -- any of whom might have been a handsome kid from those streets who got to dance with Yvonne De Carlo – and then some.

Photo from The Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life

Omar Little

2010-09-26T01:00:00.000-07:00

Omar Little (The Wire)

Recent tides have washed up on the cable shores Boardwalk Empire, which is being touted as the best show produced for television since The Sopranos.

I spend little time watching cable television series and when I do, I watch a full season, or a completed series, in protracted viewing sessions. (Netflix accommodates.) But out of curiosity, and affection for Steve Buscemi, I watched Episode One of Boardwalk Empire.

It was an enjoyable hour with excellent production values and a very good cast, but one episode does not a series make, so only clocks and calendars will tell. (My admiration for Mr. Buscemi goes back to a little film called Trees Lounge issued just before he became well known as a hyperactive miscreant in Fargo.)

As for “the best show produced for television since The Sopranos,” I have heard a similar call before – but from a distant shore. Yet some great Atlantic barrier seems to have kept a sufficient number in the United States from embracing a series which originated here, crossed that wicked ocean to England, found great favor in certain quarters but could never find its way back to welcome shores. That series, comparably, has been called "the best TV show of the last 20 years.” It is The Wire.

Comparisons are beyond my ken because my universe of modern television series seen is limited -- actually beyond scant. To further complicate categorical assessment, the source of films begins to blur.

At this stage of life I watch most films at home. In recent years, I find the distinction between computer monitors and television screens has almost disappeared. And as the receiving media blurs, so does the original format of that which I watch, particularly in modern productions. Was that a cable mini-series, a made for television movie, or a Hollywood movie – itself one of a franchise series? And does it matter anymore?

The Sopranos is obviously the gold standard against which all series are currently compared. I do not doubt the credentials of The Sopranos , which seemed to fill a need in a viewing public ever searching for Godfather IV, but which has been confronted in theatres with the next installment of Harry Potter or some Bourne entity.

No less a film purist than David Thomson has said: “ ... you've got to face the fact that these days television frequently beats out what you see at the movies. And 'The Sopranos' and 'The Wire' and a few other things are just extraordinary achievements … Much as I love the 'Godfather' films, I really do, I think you can make an argument that "The Sopranos" was a greater achievement.”

I have watched random episodes of The Sopranos and the characters and situations seem real to this native northeasterner who has lived deep in city streets, later in suburban sites and spent the better part of my adult life in the company of police. But I never stayed the viewing course. So as commenting on selected components of an antipasto does not comprise a restaurant review, I will refrain. But The Wire is a different matter.

The vast literature of articulate writing about The Wire needs no copying and pasting here, when it is easily available with routine search criteria. Seek and find. Or better yet watch the first three episodes and you might succumb.

I will say only that I watched the entire series through Netflix, then purchased the entire series and watched it again, and I have currently started the journey to the mean streets of Baltimore yet again.

“Down these mean streets a man must go ...” Raymond Chandler told us. I need not go, but I do so willingly. I seek to renew my acquaintance with the good, the bad and the ugly of a fictional Baltimore that probably too closely approximates reality. And on some shambolic city street in that region where good and bad converge, I will be seeking to renew my acquaintance with one Omar Little. Once met, long remembered.

Omar Little.

Words and Images 53

2010-09-24T01:00:00.000-07:00

"Man Wanted" photo from Cinema de Merde

Words and Images 52

2010-09-21T01:00:00.000-07:00

Whither?

2010-09-17T01:00:00.000-07:00

"But you're not out of the woods yet Baxter, because most of them try it again" ... Dr. Dreyfuss

A species present in such small numbers that it is at risk of extinction.

Off the Lot 4: Jimmy Cannon

2010-09-14T01:00:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Cannon

Jimmy Cannon was one of our finest writers but is little known today because he wrote mostly about sports. Born in New York City; he died there some sixty years later. He was a newspaper guy. In appearance, anyway, he was along the lines of those we see in the films of the thirties and forties. He looked world weary, yet wise in the ways of city streets and foreign wars.

I did not know Jimmy Cannon, but met a few who did. They told me that he was a loner: a lifelong bachelor who haunted the baseball stadia by day, the fight arenas by night, and the saloons after the fights. He was New York Irish was Jimmy Cannon, with all that entailed. He stopped drinking along the way for reasons unknown to us.

Jimmy Cannon spent his lifetime probing the mysteries behind Who Struck John? and used that old barroom conundrum as a compass. There was lot of Damon Runyon about him. They were only about a generation apart but Cannon was the better writer. There was a sadder streak throughout his work, and blood in his ink.

Although he focussed on sports, he wrote one of the most moving Christmas pieces I have ever read. The setting is a New York hospital on a Christmas Eve when Jimmy Cannon and a little girl with a cleft palate were brought together. It is a tale O’Henry might have told. And Cannon called it “Merry Christmas.”

Jimmy Cannon came out of the city and lived in the city and died in the city. He loved New York and understood it. He was raised in the old Greenwich Village. His descriptions of the city are urban poetry -- if you were there when guys wore fedoras in the bars all day. If you were there when the only sports that mattered were baseball, boxing and horses. Or if you were there during the August heat waves when there was no air conditioning. Or if you were there when the movie houses were full, the features were double, and the stars no longer in the skies -- but on the screens.

Jimmy Cannon lived sometimes in an apartment and sometimes in a hotel, but always in Manhattan. He cut no grass; he owned no golf clubs. He left his city only to go to war, as did so many of his generation. He was at the liberation of Paris as a reporter for The Stars and Stripes. He was in Korea in that wicked winter of a place in that wicked winter of a war. He came home from each war and wrote for the New York papers.

Jimmy Cannon wrote with an uncanny understanding of his subjects, a number of whom counted him as a friend. Joe DiMaggio was among them. Ernest Hemingway had a high regard for Cannon’s writing. And Frank Sinatra had Cannon’s stuff sent to him wherever he was. Joan Blondell was seen in his company. Dietrich read him poetry in Paris during the war. Woody Allen did not know him, but was influenced by him. Allen has told us that his image of New York City as a black and white Gershwin town comes from reading Jimmy Cannon.

And those of us who lived in the buildings about which Cannon wrote, and who watched the teams about which he wrote, and who watched the athletes about whom he wrote – those of us also read Jimmy Cannon. We were New Yorkers. He read us; we read him.

I delivered newspapers in the Bronx in the Claremont Park section in the late forties and early fifties. I had about fifteen or twenty apartment houses. Only the last one had an elevator. The paper was the New York Post, then in the hands of Dorothy Schiff. But most of my customers read it not for politics but because it had subsumed The Bronx Home News and had good coverage of local events. And it had Jimmy Cannon. And when I reached that last building I would rest young legs made tired by a hundred storeys of stairs and I would sit in a lighted area near the roof -- and under a skylight, I would read Jimmy Cannon.

A sordid postscript:

In recent times, lesser lights have tried to copy Jimmy Cannon’s writing format or emulate his style. But such pretenders rarely acknowledge their source. Now most are journalism majors, from good colleges, who wear expensive suits and play golf, and some of them consort with what now passes for glitterati. At night, they go home to the suburbs or upstate to their million dollar homes. At night, after the fights and the saloons, Cannon was more likely to be found roaming the streets of the city he loved.

Remembering a False Alarm

2010-09-11T13:52:00.000-07:00

Sixty years before September 11, 2001, on December 9, 1941 there was a false air raid warning in New York City. It was two days after Pearl Harbor. In some places schools were closed and children sent home. I distinctly remember the event although reported details vary from my recollection. Some accounts say that children were sent home around noon. I recall being interrupted by an air raid warden on the way to school and told to return home. But the years encroach and memories are suspect.

Apparently on the same day, one of our great local writers, Jimmy Cannon, was stationed in Fort Dix and wrote about the event in a piece that later appeared in The Sergeant Says by Jimmy Cannon, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York in 1943.

I remembered the Cannon piece when September 11 occurred and I think about it again on each anniversary. Because of the parallels. Because of the parallels between what New Yorkers thought, said and did on that day nine years ago and how much those attitudes were similarly reflected in the words of that lifelong New Yorker, Jimmy Cannon, more than a half century earlier. (New Yorkers are a difficult lot, but a special breed.)

Excerpts from False Alarm by Jimmy Cannon

The voice talked about the city. It was a radio announcer's voice and I resented its clean diction and its wheedling salesmanship. The voice of warning spoke to the people of the city as though it were trying to sell them a laxative, a tube of tooth paste, a cake of soap, or a pack of cigarettes. It was a cold voice, aloof and precise, and I knew the announcer had spent a lot of time with vocal teachers.

The voice told the people of the city to stay off the streets, to be calm, to remain in their homes until the all-clear had sounded. The voice said unidentified planes had been spotted beating toward the city. Those planes, I thought, are coming to bomb my family and my friends to try to destroy the city that I love. We sat there in the barracks, waiting to go on guard, and we cursed the planes and I felt angry and helpless.

It was a false alarm. The planes never came. But that polite radio announcer's voice pronouncing the warning made me hate the enemies of democracy more than anything else ever will. I'd always thought of war as being fought in strange lands, in parched fields or in far-away mud. I thought of it as something that happened to remote cities where other peoples lived. Although I have always thought our life and our property were in jeopardy, I never imagined New York under fire. I do now. I think of my family and friends and the city I love every time I take a rifle in my hands and every time I fix my bayonet.

Poster’s Note: Jimmy Cannon served in World War Two covering the war in Europe for The Stars and Stripes.

The View from Afar 8

2010-09-07T01:00:00.000-07:00

Elia Kazanjoglou. Born this day: September 7, 1909

Words and Images 51

2010-09-02T01:00:00.001-07:00

Origin of the Breed

2010-08-31T01:00:00.000-07:00

Joe: Ever wonder why the dalmation's the symbol of the firehouse?

Ann: First organized fire department was on the border of Dalmatia and Sardinia in the year 642.

Joe: That's why the dalmation?

Ann: It was either that, or a sardine.

Words and Images 50

2010-08-28T01:00:00.000-07:00

Short Cuts 6: Sundown

2010-08-25T01:00:00.000-07:00

Sundown -- and Retreat

“It is bad form talking during Retreat.”

Lieutenant Roddy Turner (Reginald Gardiner) says that to his colleague in Sundown during the playing of Retreat at an English outpost in Kenya during the early years of the Second World War.

Sundown is a World War Two movie made by a very capable director (Henry Hathaway), ably supported by Gene Tierney, George Sanders, Bruce Cabot and Reginald Gardiner. The star is stunning to the eye, the cinematography is exceptional, the action is straightforward, and there is a pre-Miniveresque conclusion – with Cedric Hardwicke on hand to lend it gravitas.

My friend Leo was ever fond of saying he never saw a bad movie that included tracer bullets. (He also had a thing about moats, but that’s a tale for another day.) So Sundown, recently shown on Turner Classic Movies, provided me the opportunity once again to see tracer bullets (which actually have a plot purpose) and to see the ever urban Marc Lawrence as an irascible Arab. And to see, of course, the beautiful Gene Tierney in a pristine state playing an exotic tribal princess. I had seen the film as a boy, but not again in recent decades. So those cited images and portrayals were the film’s primary vestiges in my memory.

In my youth, when I followed an usherette with a flashlight, I never quite knew my destination. My first viewing of Sundown likely took me to Equatorial Africa. This recent viewing with the evocative phrase “It is bad form talking during Retreat” took me to West Germany in the late 1950s.

I served in the peacetime Army and was stationed at Gibbs Kaserne in Frankfurt am Main in 1958 and 1959. A chance remark in an older film can take you down a path that was once well traveled, but now long ignored.

When my unit was not in the field, Retreat signalled the end of our official day. I worked in the Headquarters Building shown in the following photograph. The picture brings back memories of late afternoons when I left my office and walked across the parade ground to my living quarters.

Occasionally, my walk across the parade ground would occur when Retreat was sounded. Everything ceases movement. Everything. (Imagine a freeze frame.) Moving vehicles stop. Walking personnel halt, stand at attention and face the flag. The sounds of a military base switch to silence. I stopped, I stood at attention and I faced the flag. Retreat was followed immediately by the lowering of the flag (photo at top) at which time I saluted until the ceremony was complete. If I was with someone, we never spoke. “It is bad form talking during Retreat.”

I recall stopping on that parade ground at Retreat often during my time at Gibbs Kaserne. I recall standing at attention and saluting as the flag was lowered and I recall reflecting on my surroundings. Retreat was the one time of day, during an abstract period of my life, that I felt I was really a part of something. It is a vivid image and a moving memory that I have carried into my later years. Sundown. Retreat. End of day.

Words and Images 49

2010-08-23T01:00:00.000-07:00

Words and Images 48

2010-08-21T01:00:00.000-07:00

Reinventing the wheel

2010-08-19T01:00:00.000-07:00

Shirley MacLaine tells us about Vincente Minnelli’s perfectionism in her book: My Lucky Stars: a Hollywood Memoir. She and Minnelli were on location in Indiana (with Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and others) filming Some Came Running. Sinatra could be obstreperous, Minnelli meticulous and ponderous.

One night, Minnelli was shooting a particularly difficult scene that appeared toward the end of the film. This was the dramatic carnival sequence, an iconic element of which was a large Ferris wheel.

Minnelli was taking a particularly long time framing an important shot. Cast and crew stood by. Hours passed. One supposes Minnelli did that which directors do -- framing the shot, gesturing with his hands, nodding negative and then affirmative, framing the image with his hands, looking reflective, endlessly framing the image with his hands.

All the while, Frank, Dean, Shirley and the cast were waiting for Minnelli to make the decision. It was nearing dawn as Shirley tells it. Those on hand knew that once Minnelli was satisfied, he would likely tell the crew “Move the camera” and the shot would proceed.

Minnelli stopped gesturing. Apparently, the moment had come. Finally, according to MacLaine, he “came out of his reverie” and gave the order: ….. “Move the Ferris wheel.”

Miss Otis Regrets 5

2010-08-17T01:00:00.000-07:00

She's unable to lunch today ...

Like Unto 10

2010-08-15T01:00:00.000-07:00

Like Unto 9 (Like Unto 2 redux)

2010-08-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

No score

2010-08-11T01:00:00.000-07:00

Gary Marmorstein tells an interesting tale in his book: Hollywood Rhapsody: Movie Music and its Makers - 1900 to 1975. In the late 1960s, Bernard Hermann had grown disillusioned with the studio scene and settled in England, where, he believed, his talent was more appreciated.

In 1973, when William Friedkin had finished a rough cut of The Exorcist, he summoned Bernard Hermann back from his home in England to view the film in Los Angeles. After Hermann had viewed it, Friedkin said to him “I want you to write me a better score than the one you wrote for Citizen Kane.”

Hermann (known to be particularly caustic, irascible, and outspoken) replied: “Then you should have made a better movie than Citizen Kane.” Friedkin, insulted, left the screening room. And Bernard Hermann went on to another project in Hollywood.

Patricia Neal (1926-2010)

2010-08-09T01:00:00.001-07:00

Word of the death of Patricia Neal starts that playback of her films in my mind and the most prevalent images are from In Harm’s Way and The Subject Was Roses. The latter has the most significance to me for two reasons: it is my favorite role of hers and -- on one occasion, I actually told her so in person.

In June 2000, my wife and I were aboard Cunard’s QE2 on the westbound trans-Atlantic run from Southampton to New York City. Patricia Neal was on board as a guest celebrity and she gave two presentations with question and answer periods following. These sessions occurred on Monday, June 26, 2000 and again on Wednesday, June 28. (My wife keeps an accurate diary.)

In the latter session, Patricia Neal was reminiscing, and said she did not think much of The Subject Was Roses. But I was able in the follow-up question and answer period to address her personally. I told her that I thought she underestimated her performance in the film. (It is fair to say I was nervous speaking with her.) She was gracious in her response and thanked me. June 28, 2000: a day on the North Atlantic that I have long remembered.

QE2 was an intimate ship and my wife and I would pass her occasionally on one of the decks during the crossing. She was rather infirm even then – a decade ago. But today, a day after her death, my memory of Patricia Neal is not of an elderly lady at sea. But my memory is that of a stunning, clear of eye woman in her prime who held her own with the best. And she did so whether the subject was extraterrestrials, the battle of the sexes, war, architecture -- or, of course, when the subject was roses.

An afterword:

Interesting, that when Patricia Neal did the interview with Robert Osborne for Turner Classic Movies in 2004, she spoke much more positively about The Subject was Roses.

This posting has been expanded from a comment I sent to Tom of Motion Picture Gems in March 2010.

Patricia Neal photo by: djabonillojr.2008's photostream

Ella Raines (1920-1988)

2010-08-06T01:00:00.000-07:00

Like many of those Hollywood studio storefront towns, the mill town of Snoqualmie Falls does not exist anymore. By the later 1950s, the town had served its purpose. Its occupants moved on, some structures were demolished and others were carted away and settled elsewhere. It ceased to exist after about forty years, and then faded into the receding regions of memory.
The last house, perhaps, leaves from the late Town of Snoqualmie Falls.

The Town of Snoqualmie Falls was initially built during World War I to house mill hands, loggers and their families. The nation was at war and the work force was needed to satisfy the lumber requirements of the war effort. The community comprised some two to three hundred homes and support structures. It was envisioned by Weyerhaeuser that it would exist and operate as would any small town in the country. But it was a rough-hewn community, one imagines, given the nature of the work at hand and the lack of communal history to which planned communities are subject.

But in its short existence, the mill town of Snoqualmie Falls found its way into the ledgers of Hollywood history. On August 6, 1920, born in its environs was one Ella Wallace Raines, who in her early years had an interesting twenty film career. Her stunning image was best cast in the shadows of black and white. She, like her home town, is no longer with us, but she has forever left her mark on this lifelong film enthusiast. Ella Raines: “Kansas” from Phantom Lady. Born on this day, August 6th, in 1920.

Note: Background subject matter and top photo is from an excellent article in Arcade Magazine: Architecture and Design in the Northwest. Gone Missing: The Town Of Snoqualmie Falls. By Don Fels.

From a Personal Film Library 8

2010-08-04T01:00:00.000-07:00

A copy of The Complete Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson, given by Basil Rathbone to Ouida Bergere, less than a month after they first met. The front free endpaper is inscribed: “Ouida my own, my dearest / from Basil / Dec 14 1923 / O’ Ye gods render me worthy …” (The quote is from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.)

Note: In 1975, Gravesend Books issued: Basil Rathbone: A catalogue of the collection acquired from the estate of Basil and Ouida Rathbone. This inscribed copy of Stevenson’s poems was part of the collection but withheld from inclusion in the catalogue and retained in the library of Enola and Gerald Stewart.

2010-08-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

(Cover art © by Terry Witmer)

Basil Rathbone (1892-1967)

Today, August 1, 2010, Turner Classic Movies features the films of Basil Rathbone to start its Summer under the Stars festival.

In 1975, I worked on the catalogue of the Basil Rathbone Collection for the antiquarian book firm: Gravesend Books. The Proprietress was my wife, Enola Stewart. The catalogue was printed in 500 copies and cast out upon the collector’s waters. The contents virtually sold out in one half hour. Most of the items now reside at Boston University.

It occurred to me that the original Introduction to that long ago catalogue might be of interest. So I have reproduced the text of the original 1975 Introduction (unchanged) into this blog format.

Basil Rathbone: A catalogue of the collection acquired from the estate of Basil and Ouida Rathbone. Including books from their library, personal photograph albums, holograph manuscripts, and letters from celebrities in the performing arts. Also included are scrapbooks, programs, playbills, souvenirs, photographs and ephemera pertaining to their film, stage, television and radio careers. Gravesend Books, 1975. Cover art © by Terry Witmer.

Introduction

The Man

Basil Rathbone walked on to a stage in 1912 and played Hortensio in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. In 1967, he walked off a sound stage, having completed the film Hillbillies in a Haunted House. What happened to the man's life between those two milestones says much about two countries, our times, and the various art forms that his talent encompassed. The course of his life between those events is represented at its various stages by the material listed within this catalogue.

Early research to provide background for this catalogue indicated that printed information on the actor's life was limited to a few sources. Rathbone detailed his own life in an unsatisfactory book and Michael Druxman catalogued the actor's films, and little else, in a book published in 1975 by a house apparently as uninspired by the subject as was the film organization that conceived the actor's last film.

We cannot fault others for not writing the book that Rathbone did not write himself, but I believe that a biography of Rathbone, if an understanding one will ever be written, can only be written by a biographer with solid credentials in the theatre. Until such a book is written, this collection can provide some insight through the study of the source material within it.

Rathbone married a playwright and this is a significant and consistent point in his life. The playwright was a failure in her chosen craft and I suspect Rathbone's own professional life was a failure by his own standards. Throughout this collection is evidence of his discontent. Only in the bright moments and brief successes of J.B. and The Heiress do we find a satisfied Rathbone. He succeeded financially, and to many of us, aesthetically, in film. But he was a man of the theatre, disillusioned with film, who would write: "It is the shadow of the substance." He viewed film in that light and appeared unable to take it on its own terms.

He left Hollywood in 1946 and returned to a theatre, which if not unhealthy, was at least poor soil for his own new flowering. He had his moments of new growth, but they were few, and he spent his later years bringing talent and enthusiasm to tired summer audiences who confused Noel Coward for Neil Simon, and to young college students who perhaps carried some light from his Evening with Basil Rathbone into their later lives.

But Rathbone belonged to the theatre, which by its nature, unlike film, cannot be preserved in its performers but only in its words. Here then he is preserved, within the limits and life span of words and print and fading pictures; of ink on fragile paper and programs and playbills; all of these -- vestiges of a time when young Shakespearean actors were presented to queens.

Pieces of the whole. Fragments of a career. He has crossed his century and the stage work is ended. And if we will have him reside on Baker Street, it will have to be on film. But I feel the loss he may have felt for himself and for all the audiences who never had the privilege of seeing Basil Rathbone on a stage as Sherlock Holmes, or as Judas, or more sadly -- in his and our waning youth -- as Romeo to Katherine Cornell's Juliet.

The Woman

Ouida Bergere was an established scenarist and a socially prominent member of the film and theatrical community when she met and won the young actor's heart in 1924. Thereafter, as Ouida Rathbone, she was in his shadow but did emerge as a famed party giver, particularly in the Hollywood success period of the late 1930s and early 1940s. She contributed to Basil's career as an advisor and an intermediary. And he adored her.

Throughout the period of their marriage, she wrote a series of unsuccessful, mostly unperformed, plays in a, heavy-handed style that had the essence of being written in magic marker (clutched in) mittens. The plays themselves, with the possible exception of the Liszt piece, lack originality, and are virtually all adapted from other sources, or were the results of inbreeding from her own prior work.

The three dimensional strength and attractiveness that must have resided in the woman is not overly apparent in the two dimensional face of this collection. If the catalogue suggests something akin to a coolness for Ouida, perhaps the cataloguer has lived too long among the effects of others and wandered too far across the bridge from bibliography to biography.

The Collection

Ouida Bergere Rathbone, who survived her husband by seven years, died in November 1974. After her death, the material in this catalogue was acquired over a one year span from two sources. The books were purchased from an estate buyer who had acquired them from the lawyer representing the estate. The scrapbooks, photographs, letters and other memorabilia were willed to the Actor's Fund. These were acquired directly from the Fund a year after the books. Again a few items were acquired from the estate buyer who had since acquired pieces of the collection from the Fund.

Solicitations to purchase elements of the collection before it was catalogued were refused. I wanted the catalogue to become a permanent record of what the Rathbones retained.

The collection is offered as it was acquired. Nothing has been added. Everything has been included except a Robert Louis Stevenson collection of poetry and a Phyfe photograph of Rathbone as Romeo. These were kept by the cataloguer. Nothing was broken down and pictures listed as extracted from scrapbooks were already in that state when acquired. Items were placed together so that material relating to a particular event or performance could be offered as a unit.

Rathbone's books were not kept in collector's condition. They were read, used and annotated. Those books without indication of Rathbone ownership have the following written in pencil on the front free endpaper: "Purchased from the estate of Basil and Ouida Rathbone by Gravesend Books, 1975."

Words and Images 47

2010-07-31T01:00:00.000-07:00

A moment of reverie, or a song remembered, perhaps, by Millie Stephenson.

... Music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Listen to Jo Stafford sing.

Words and Images 46

2010-07-29T01:00:00.000-07:00

Film Makers 3: Scorsese on Powell

2010-07-27T01:00:00.000-07:00

A master discovers a masterpiece

Criterion Collection’s I Know Where I’m Going! contains a thirty minute documentary titled I Know Where I’m Going! Revisited. Within it, Martin Scorsese recounts his first encounter with the film.

As he was just about to begin shooting Raging Bull, he came into possession of a video cassette of I Know Where I’m Going! (Video cassette technology was new at that time.) He watched the film, apparently not alone, for when he described the experience he used the collective "we."

Martin stated that one of the few films he hadn’t seen was I Know Where I’m Going! (One assumes he meant of the Powell/Pressburger films.)

“We watched this film which we fell totally in love with, and it was such an incredible ... uh ... quote, discovery, unquote. Other people knew about it. I didn’t. And I remember a few months later seeing Michael again and saying "Hey, I just saw a new masterpiece.”

Mirror Images 18

2010-07-25T01:00:00.000-07:00

Greta Garbo as Mata Hari looking in a mirror -- with a reflection of herself and the mirror in a mirror showing herself looking in a mirror. With a reverse mirror image of Greta Garbo as Mata Hari looking in a mirror -- with a reflection of herself and the mirror in a mirror showing herself looking in a mirror.

Note: A variant of this posting appeared as Mirror Images 4 in January 2010.

Acknowledgement: The first photo shown is from Film Noir Photos.

New York Stories 2

2010-07-23T01:00:00.000-07:00

David McCullough recounts in People Books and Book People a tale Peter De Vries has told about himself. One time apparently, Mr. De Vries was hungover, ashen pale, and in dire need of a pick-me-up.

He headed to a renowned New York bar, noted for its cocktails and asked the bartender “Do you serve Zombies?” To which the bartender responded: “Yes sir, what would you like …? "

Words and Images 45

2010-07-21T01:00:00.000-07:00

Words and Images 44

2010-07-18T01:00:00.000-07:00

Words and Images 43

2010-07-15T01:00:00.000-07:00

Words and Images 42

2010-07-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

New York Stories 1: Woody Allen on Jimmy Cannon

2010-07-11T01:00:00.000-07:00

An extract from In the editing room with Woody Allen: from defense to offense. By Ira Berkow. International Herald Tribune, November 2, 1995.

"Jimmy Cannon's New York is my New York," Woody Allen said recently, sitting in his home-away-from-home, the suite at the Beekman Hotel on Park Avenue where he edits his movies. "My whole feeling of New York City as a black-and-white Gershwin town comes from reading the late Jimmy Cannon," Mr. Allen said. "I never missed him."

Mr. Allen … can still recite passages from Cannon's sports columns in The New York Post during the 1950's: the time he described "the serene dependability of Stan Musial," or "the bookmaker who took a guy's money all year and then gave him a ball-point pen for Christmas." And he still remembers Cannon describing how he had been in a New York apartment late at night where Frank Sinatra was singing at a piano, and then how he walked home alone through the melancholy New York streets as the sun was coming up.

An afterthought: I have been working on a posting about Jimmy Cannon, which should appear before too long. When I was growing up, and even later, like Woody Allen, I never missed a Cannon column.

Night Mail

2010-07-09T01:00:00.000-07:00

Night Mail

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

The opening of Night Mail by W.H. Auden, which was used to glorious effect in Harry Watt and Basil Wright’s Night Mail, a documentary film made by the General Post Office Film Unit, United Kingdom, released in 1936. I first saw this at The New School in New York City in a documentary course, probably in the 1970s. The course also included showings of Pare Lorentz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River, 1936 and 1938 respectively. Each seemed to have the same haunting rhythm of Night Mail. (I have wished for years that such talent had turned their directorial skill, their facility with language and their cameras on the work of Vachel Lindsay.)

Postscript: I attended the film course in the fall of the year and the instructor/presenter delighted in showing us Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens on Halloween night. She thought it more frightening without the English subtitles -- and she was correct.

Click here for a You Tube showing of Night Mail.

Words and Images 41

2010-07-07T01:00:00.000-07:00

Bellinger

2010-07-04T01:00:00.000-07:00

Bellinger

Sir Robert Bellinger’s son was born in 1948, the only fruit of an already tired tree of a marriage. A marriage that was not meant to be. The child had a proper name, also Robert, yet from the boy’s infancy, Sir Robert always called him “Lochnevis.” The child’s mother thought this unusual but unworthy of comment.

She had met Sir Robert in London the year he had come back from the Isles after the affair with the girl from the Midlands. It was a tale he told in the same manner, and with the same disregard, as that of some small merger gone wrong at CCI.

Yet even now, Sir Robert thought of the girl on occasion -- usually on days when the wind was high or when he heard the swirl of pipers at some ceremonial event. He had met and admired the girl. Mutual benefits were obvious and, finally, arrangements were made. He thought an island setting for a marriage might appeal to, and impress her.

But Sir Robert Bellinger had not planned on the haze of wartime, when schedules were rarely met, and when mostly everyone seemed to act out of station. Imagine a storm scuttling a marriage. Imagine a missed boat changing the course of a young girl’s life. Imagine three pipers playing tunes they were not meant to play.

During those wartime days, during their courtship, Sir Robert was accustomed to tell the girl “do as you like my dear.” And finally she had done so. She had done so. She had off and married a naval officer, a would be Laird of something or other: some insignificant rocky Lairdship by the sea.

So Sir Robert Bellinger lingered briefly on an island for which he had little interest -- even the fishing was inadequate. He returned to his natural habitat and resumed his work. In due time a more suitable marriage was arranged, built as he would build some new property in his business. The structure was suitable. The materials were adequate to the purpose. His wife was excellent at Bridge, excelled at overseeing the household staff, and preferred her holidays in sunny Mediterranean regions.

But then again, there were those occasions, when the wind was high, or when he was at a ceremonial event, that the slightest doubt entered his mind. He realized for a moment that he had forgotten where he had been. And he wondered if, just wondered -- if he knew where he was going.

Six months in: Laszlo’s on Lex

2010-07-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

Having issued one hundred and thirty-six posts since beginning January 1, 2010, I would like to celebrate the first half year anniversary by reissuing my first posting. Its name, not coincidentally, also carries the name of this overall endeavor. Thank you.

Laszlo's on Lex

Ilsa Lund Laszlo cleaned the celery stalks, took off the ends, and started chopping the stalks on the wooden board behind the counter at the rear of the store. Little Ricky slept in the carriage at the front, which was placed to catch the morning sun, slanting through the buildings opposite.

She had to do more tasks lately since Victor was less involved in the day to day work. She knew Victor did not like making sandwiches, did not like some of the German-Americans who came in, and was more interested in organizing the tenants in their building. But Sam helped, it was good to have him here now that the Parrot gig fell through and he was back in the States.

Organizing the tenants had become Victor's somewhat unreasonable passion. He resented the landlords, likening them to Nazis. She told him often that landlords were not like Nazis: "… most of them are Jews, Victor" -- but he was obstinate. She knew, too, he had been meeting the young Hungarian girl at Sascha's candy store on 81st Street. He came back always with the smell of halvah about him.

New York was not Paris, yet all things considered, she had few complaints. The delicatessen was doing well, sales had been up this year, and there had not been a postcard from Brazzaville in two years.

She heard the baby stir, so she moved to the carriage, wiping her hands on her long apron. She gently sang to him a few bars of the song Sam had sung in the old days “… the fundamental things apply …." Which reminded her of the fish cakes. It was Friday, so they would need at least sixty.

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2010-06-29T01:00:00.000-07:00