John DiLeo's Blog, page 3

Mogambo (1953)

After reading Peter Evans’ Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, I’m still in an Ava state of mind, which means I’ll probably be calling everybody “honey” for the next several weeks.  The book is an interesting variation on the usual showbiz tell-all, more specifically about the making of a ghost-written autobiography that never quite happens.  True, much of Ava’s life isn’t covered, but, as she and Evans wrestle over what to include and what not to, I felt as if I were getting to know (and like) the “real” unguarded Ava.  And isn’t that why we read such books?

This Ava state of mind led to thoughts about the 60-year-old Mogambo (1953), the film for which Gardner received her only Best Actress Oscar nomination.  It’s not her finest piece of acting, which has to be her performance in the post-nuclear war On the Beach (1959).  She’s so effective in that end-of-the-world drama that I included her achievement in my book 100 Great Film Performances You Should Remember But Probably Don’t.  You might not expect her to show up in a book about great acting, but Ava Gardner was the Hollywood goddess who seemingly stumbled into being a natural (and sometimes inspired) actress.  I’ve also written about her in my book Tennessee Williams and Company: His Essential Screen Actors because of her appearance in The Night of the Iguana (1964).  Many consider her work in Iguana to be her best, but, sensational as she sometimes is, I find her performance to be uneven, not as beautifully sustained as her work in On the Beach.  She essentially plays “playgirls” in all three of these films, with each character feeling like a kindred spirit to what we think of as the real Ava Gardner, the fun-loving, down-to-earth broad.  Though each character is in a different place in her life as a playgirl, all three are realizing their dissatisfactions, acknowledging the bruises despite the pleasures of the ride.

Mogambo is indeed great fun.  It’s also a remake that simply can’t compare with the original film, the 1932 pre-Code Red Dust, which just happens to be one of the zestiest comedy-dramas of the early ’30s.  Aside from sharing the same basic plot, Red Dust and Mogambo famously share Clark Gable.  A testament to his enduring leading-man appeal, Gable starred in both, caught between Jean Harlow and Mary Astor in 1932, then, 21 years later, in the middle of Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly.  In 1932, Gable was a sexually potent, charismatically tough and wry up-and-comer, soon to break into superstardom.  By 1953, he’s looking decidedly worn, perhaps too much so to generate a triangle with the likes of Gardner and Kelly.  But what Gable still carried was the weight of his mega-star presence.  Dimmed, yes, but still vital.  He may be past 50, but, hey, it’s Clark freaking Gable!

The set-up of both versions centers around a hunk, a good “bad” girl, and a bad “good” girl.  In Red Dust, Gable runs a rubber plantation in Southeast Asia.  Harlow is a prostitute, while Mary Astor is the wife of Gable’s new surveyor.  In Mogambo, Gable has an African safari business and also sells animals to zoos and circuses.  Gardner is a WWII widow turned playgirl (to forget her sorrow); Kelly arrives (with a husband) to go on safari.  Gable romances all four ladies.  While Mogambo replaces Red Dust‘s soundstage Asia and black-and-white photography with an on-location Africa and Technicolor, the even more noticeable difference is the sex factor.  Red Dust is filled with racy, snappy one-liners (mostly delivered by Harlow), plus it’s got that steamy star triangle, all of which adds up to an unapologetically lusty, immensely enjoyable piece of action-packed escapism.  Mogambo could never have gotten away with being so lowdown.

Harlow irresistibly wisecracks her way through Red Dust, stealing the movie in much the same way that Gardner swipes Mogambo.  Both are refreshingly honest and intensely likable dames.  And they make us laugh.  For some reason, in both films, Gable prefers the “lady” to the “tramp,” for a while anyway.  (The rest of us have no such problem making a choice.)  Though the character was softened from prostitute to playgirl, Gardner was still able to provide Mogambo with her distinctive brand of loose-living, good-time-gal fun.  As “Honey Bear” Kelly, she’s stranded, stood up by a Maharajah.  Gardner and Gable, in their third film together, have a chemistry similar to the one he shared with Harlow, meaning that, along with their amorous sparks, they get along like pals.  (Gardner even makes reference to his big ears.)  Cut from the same cloth, Clark and Ava are both smart, no-nonsense, and slyly humorous.  They are clearly meant for each other.   

Mogambo is a John Ford movie, though it doesn’t noticeably bear his imprint.  He certainly must share credit for the freedom in Gardner’s performance, not just the sassy one-of-the-boys sense of fun but also her genuine warmth and vulnerability.  If she seems tamer than Harlow, well, that’s more about the Production Code than it is about Ava’s ability to portray a raucously sexual being.  Mogambo goes so far as to have Gardner ask a Catholic priest to hear her confession, which is not something you’ll find Harlow doing.  Because of this milder, more cautious treatment of both its female characters, Mogambo now feels more dated than Red Dust. 

Mogambo also seems padded (a full half-hour longer than Red Dust), overdoing the “wow” factor of its African travelogue, which adds more clutter than depth.  The result might be tagged Red Dust Meets King Solomon’s Mines, and that’s probably no accident, considering the enormous success of the latter picture.  Mogambo is extremely colorful, never more so than when focused on Gardner, perhaps at the peak of her beauty and creamy sensuality.  But she’s a goddess who is also a total delight, carrying a movie with the sheer force of her personality.  This was the only occasion in which she was asked to do such a thing, fully ablaze in the charm and self-assurance departments.  Too often, Gardner was used as window dressing, but Mogambo has the good sense to present her as the main event.  Before this movie, no one had ever thought to use Ava Gardner as comic relief.  Not only does Mogambo employ her (at least partially) in that fashion, it positively celebrates her.  Her performance is the only one from a Ford movie to get a nomination in the Best Actress Oscar category.  That’s impressive.  Maybe her success was due to Ford’s direction, maybe it was her comfortable connection to her free-spirited role, maybe it was her seasoned chemistry with Gable, maybe it was Africa and the animals, but, whatever it was, Ava Gardner dazzles in Mogambo as she does in no other film.   

Shane (1953)

Introducing my review of Alan Ladd’s underrated western Branded (1950), here’s some of what I had to say about Ladd in my book Screen Savers II:

“To describe the very blond Alan Ladd as a limited screen actor is an understatement; he could be downright wooden.  And yet, he was never quite a blank: something seems to be going on within him.  His dispassionate demeanor implies depths he’s concealing and loath to share, and it’s rather compelling.  The alertness in his seemingly sleepy blue eyes conveys not only his potential for cunning action but also allows for occasional hints of the vulnerability he guards so stalwartly.  Therefore, any open expression by Ladd has the power to startle.  If he actually goes so far as to smile, the sheer surprise of his face’s mobility can strike viewers dumb.”

“…he manages to hold the screen by looking as if he doesn’t care if anybody is watching him or not.  That coolness made him a star when he played Raven, a sullen killer, in Paramount’s This Gun for Hire (1942), a tight thriller that kicked off his memorable association with four-time co-star Veronica Lake.  Audiences were fascinated and touched by Ladd’s outcast Raven, in much the same way that Lake’s character warmed up to him and tried to get beneath his hard-shelled alienation.”

September 3rd marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ladd, who died at only 50 in 1964.  (The cause was ruled an accidental mix of alcohol and sedatives.)  Though I usually use this blog to write about lesser-known movies, I’d like to take this moment to revisit Ladd’s most famous film, the 1953 western classic Shane.  Though Ladd plays loners in both This Gun for Hire and Shane, the former film introduced him as a troubled anti-hero, while the latter work mythologized him into an icon of gleaming heroism.  Shane is a roaming knight, changing people’s lives for the better, then moving on, seeming never to stop long enough to claim a lasting happiness for himself.

Shane is not a psychological western, the sub-genre that was the new trend in westerns thanks to great examples like Henry King’s The Gunfighter (1950) and Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur (1953).  Shane is more archetypal, with a very basic plot about homesteaders fighting for their claims, and the heroic figure who comes out of nowhere to save the day.  There are good guys and bad guys and not much room for anybody in between.  (Psychological westerns are all about the in-betweens.)  Shane‘s simple set-up is enhanced by an additional viewpoint, from youngster Brandon de Wilde.  His limited understanding of adult events enriches the cumulative impact.  He’s the heart of the movie, despite the fact that he really has no idea what’s going on between the grown-ups, including his parents Van Heflin and Jean Arthur.  De Wilde is a wonderfully odd child, fresh in a non-actory way, and his acting is carried by his intense and all-out hero worship of Ladd.

Ladd underplays to the point of barely giving a performance, which makes him an ideal Shane:  stoic, private, honest, likable (if remote).  All we come to know about him is that he was a gunfighter.  He shows up and becomes Heflin’s hired hand.  In addition to de Wilde’s wide-eyed perceptions, another fresh element is the unspoken love that develops between Ladd and Ms. Arthur.  In her final big-screen appearance, the gifted Arthur delicately conveys her unexpected stirrings regarding Ladd.  There’s nothing explicit, just a tenderly simmering subtext between them, the longing of a love that can never be.  Then there’s the main villain, Jack Palance (billed Walter Jack Palance), who is a visual representation of pure evil, clad in black hat, scarf, vest, and gloves.  He’s slow, slinky, and softspoken, and, in a chilling touch, you can always hear his spurs when he walks.  But the movie’s richest, fullest performance comes from Heflin, who seems seems authentically of the earth, plain and plainspoken, and deeply humane.

Shane has a self-consciously composed beauty but it’s beautiful nonetheless.  It was shot on glorious wide-open spaces (despite some obvious studio-bound scenes), with a color scheme dominated by blue skies.  (Despite six nominations, including Best Picture, the film’s only Oscar was won by cinematographer Loyal Griggs.)  George Stevens directed with meticulous care and taste (some might say too much so, finding it studied and too self-aware in general).  Stevens reaches beyond stock characters to find a lingering depth of feeling in the central relationships.  Shane manages to be both simple and epic.  There can be no doubt that Stevens wanted to make a formal western, something mythic, something definitive, and perhaps this intention hangs over the film as both a blessing and a curse.  It is a primal work of art, but it’s also not as good or as potent as westerns with much messier outlooks and more challenging multi-dimensional characters.  But there’s no faulting Stevens’ mastery of the medium, his use of long takes (with action stretching far back in the frame) or the way he disrupts his established serenity with startling violence involving both fists and guns.  If much of Shane seems deceptively old-fashioned, well, its filmmaking is state of the art, including consistently thrilling editing and a jolting use of sound.

Shane is occasionally marred by clunky corniness:  patches of wooden dialogue, some weak supporting players, a whiff of banality.  (But when Ladd tells de Wilde to “grow up to be strong and straight,” it doesn’t mean that Shane is a homophobe.)  Despite flaws, Shane is a major American film of its decade, an essential western, and the key Alan Ladd film.

Ladd’s career had begun with many bit roles, including his “reporter” at the end of Citizen Kane (1941), and it ended with his Nevada Smith in the trash spectacular The Carpetbaggers (1964).  He’s remembered by classic-film fans as half of a signature ’40s team (with Ms. Lake).  And he also managed to star as The Great Gatsby (1949), co-star with Sophia Loren in Boy on a Dolphin (1957), and make many good westerns including the aforementioned Branded, The Proud Rebel (1958) with Olivia de Havilland, and The Badlanders (1958), a westernized Asphalt Jungle.  His enduring status rests primarily on This Gun for Hire and Shane, in which we see the newcomer Ladd and the peak Ladd, the anti-hero Ladd and the superhero Ladd.  But in both cases it’s the quintessentially minimalist Ladd, not just small in physical stature but restained in emotion, effortlessly drawing us to him the way that great movie stars do. 

Saratoga (1937)

The reasons that make Saratoga worth seeing have nothing to do with quality. It’s an utterly inconsequential movie, a rote horse-racing picture that climaxes with the unavoidable “big race.” The uninspired plotting is especially confounding in a movie so top-heavy with A-list actors: Clark Gable and Jean Harlow (in their sixth film together), plus Lionel Barrymore, Frank Morgan, and Walter Pidgeon. Seeing it again reminded me of its significance as a piece of Hollywood history, in both obvious and surprising ways, even though it remains fairly worthless as an entertainment. Great incidentals, lousy movie.

Directed by MGM hack Jack Conway, Saratoga follows bookie Gable and well-bred (but now broke) Harlow on the racetrack circuit. Barrymore overacts madly as Harlow’s ornery grandfather, and Pidgeon is properly cardboard as her wealthy Wall Street fiancé. Harlow wants to settle her debt to Gable—her dead father’s sixty grand in gambling losses—before marrying Pidgeon. Of course, Gable and Harlow fall in love along the way, while bickering constantly. The movie is not as fun as I may have inadvertently made it sound.

The movie’s unforgettable claim to fame is not just that it was Harlow’s last but that she died before it was finished, putting the film’s future in doubt. (She was just 26 when she succumbed to kidney failure.) The movie was too close to completion to be scrapped, yet there were several important Harlow scenes yet to be filmed. And so, Saratoga provides moviegoers with one of its more unusual guessing games: the spotting of Harlow’s stand-in in the final third of the movie. Perhaps audiences of 1937 were fooled, and maybe today’s TCM watchers are, too, but once you’re “in the know” it’s really not a difficult game. And it’s certainly no fun to watch the cast, presumably mourning the well-liked Harlow after the shock of her untimely death, proceeding stalwartly with this disposable fare.

I found myself not paying attention to the plot in these scenes (no great loss), transfixed by the alternating appearances of Harlow and her double, Mary Dees (plus vocal dubber Paula Winslowe). Considering the task—impersonating a superstar—they did an admirable job. In the racetrack scenes, Ms. Dees almost never removes her binoculars, quite sensibly. In other scenes, she’s mostly photographed from behind, such as when she is dancing with Pidgeon. The notable exception is the scene in which her face is nearly visible but actually obscured by a picture hat. In the big moment, when she must choose between Gable and Pidgeon, it’s Ms. Dees from behind, placing her hand on Gable’s. The film’s final shot, though, is of Gable and the real Harlow, suddenly, if only fleetingly, making her death seem like a cruel hoax.

Saratoga is no worse a movie for having lost its leading lady. It’s sub-par as a vehicle for its sexy duo, though it proved to be an enormous box-office hit. As for Harlow, she was always better at playing trash, as in her two finest and funniest performances, as the smart-mouthed dames in Red Dust (1932) and Dinner at Eight (1933). (Red Dust is also her best film with Gable.) Here, as a girl with breeding, and time spent abroad, she is miscast (as she was as a socialite in 1931′s Platinum Blonde). The affected speech (faux-British) is intentional, but Harlow just isn’t convincing as snobby or remotely sophisticated. I want her simply to drop the effortful pretense and be the lovably low-down broad that audiences loved. Of course, the Production Code had just about obliterated the typical Harlow role from the screen, making a vehicle as sex-driven as her Red-Headed Woman (1932) unfilmable by 1935. Of her later films, from this new age of censorship, only Libeled Lady (1936) captured some of the earlier Harlow magic. By 1940, had she lived, how much more diluted would her particular brand of loose, tough-talking glamour have become?

A happy Saratoga surprise is that the movie just happens to feature Rhett Butler with Mammy, and the Wizard of Oz with the Wicked Witch of the West, two years before all of these characters were immortalized onscreen. Gable has several scenes here with Hattie McDaniel (billed “McDaniels,” as was sometimes the case in her pre-GWTW movies). She plays Harlow’s lively, good-natured maid, and she has sufficient screen time to establish her easy rapport and winning comic chemistry with Gable, a bond that would pay off so indelibly in GWTW. Charmed by Gable’s roguish character, she tells Harlow, “If he was only the right color, I’d marry him!”

Frank Morgan plays a cosmetics tycoon married to Una Merkel. She’s mad for horses, while he’s allergic to them. Inside a train’s dining car, Morgan is seated next to Margaret Hamilton, a stranger. When she learns his identity, she starts complaining to him about his products, wondering why his foundation cream “cakes” whenever she applies powder. A comic argument ensues, with Morgan trying not to get too testy with a customer, and Hamilton rather formidable but not too prissy. (You almost expect her to complain about his not offering special products for those with green skin.) Morgan invites her to his compartment for a lesson in cream application, with Hamilton assuring Merkel, “I’ll leave the door open.” Merkel looks not the least bit worried.

Hamilton: “You’ll never know what my face looked like before I used your preparations.”

Morgan: “Yes, well, I can imagine.”

They exit, and then McDaniel enters to tell Gable that Harlow’s cold has gotten worse, which sends a shiver regarding her deteriorating health, a reaction that has nothing to do with the plot. Gable, McDaniel, Morgan, and Hamilton had big things ahead of them, but Harlow would never get to see their triumphs in The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind.

“If ever, oh ever, a wiz there was…”

Since my expectations were so low, I decided to delay seeing this past spring’s blockbuster, Oz the Great and Powerful, until it arrived on DVD.  Netflix sent it last week, and so I coincidentally watched it 74 years after the August release of The Wizard of Oz.  This new prequel, which offers an explanation of just how the wizard made his way to Oz, is responsible for one good thing, giving me a nudge to sit myself down and watch the ’39 classic for the first time in about three decades.  It’s always a little daunting to revisit a beloved film, setting yourself up for disappointment, allowing for the possibility of noticing flaws that will forever alter your opinion, potentially leaving you with a feeling of abandonment by a presumably dependable work of art.  Of course, the movie hasn’t changed.  But maybe you have.  Not many films carry the baggage of adoration that The Wizard of Oz does, which almost made me feel that it was perhaps best left in my memory, where it could never be diminished.  Looking back on my childhood, on Oz‘s annual pre-video television airings, I remember my sense, even then, of time passing much too quickly, that—before I knew it—the movie would be over and I’d have to wait a whole year to see it again.  During the commercial breaks, I’d run into the kitchen to check the clock, increasingly mourning the fact that the film was getting closer and closer to being over.

Well, the magic and the power of The Wizard of Oz proved to be intact, undiminished by time (including my middle age).  But what is the essential component of this classic’s timeless appeal?  Sure, the indelibly cast performers are all splendid, the score is beyond sublime, and the production design offers tangible dreamscapes—like a sepia Kansas or a spotless, gleaming yellow-brick road—which have been seared into our collective memory.  (The exception is the tacky, plastic-looking Munchkinland.)  The costumes are iconic, and the special effects remain wondrous.  Still, what is the key ingredient responsible for the film’s ability to touch so many generations?  I got choked up at the end of the movie, even though I’m now 52 and had seen the movie countless times (with most of it still memorized).  No surprise, no big revelation:  the durability of The Wizard of Oz, its core, comes from the character of Dorothy and her relationships with the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion.

The Dorothy of Judy Garland (for which she received a juvenile Oscar) is a lesson in simplicity.  There’s such purity in her acting, a directness as plain and unembellished as Dorothy’s Kansas homestead.  Unaffected, and free of any trace of self-consciousness, Garland simply is.  The unforced radiance of her famous rendition of “Over the Rainbow” (which is as good a character-establishing song as has ever been written) qualifies the sequence as one of the screen’s moments of perfection.  But there’s more to her effectiveness than just beguiling sincerity.  There’s also her strength.  She stands up for herself, and she also defends her new friends in Oz whenever they need her protection.  How can you not love her for that?  Her big heart and loving nature, combined with her no-nonsense sense of right and wrong, make Dorothy a key heroine of American movies.  As she and her trio of Oz pals come together, The Wizard of Oz becomes a heartfelt depiction of both friendship and teamwork, as four strangers form their indestructible bond.  It’s a palpable force in the movie, and it’s the reason why Dorothy’s goodbyes prove to be so poignant.  The internal rewards of this movie surpass its external wonders, and, in this case, that’s really saying something.

You can certainly debate the merits of its “no place like home” conclusion, but I’m more struck by one of its earlier points, the one about learning to accept those attributes we carry unacknowledged within ourselves.  That diploma, handed to the Scarecrow by the Wizard, convinces the Scarecrow that he does in fact have a brain, even though he’s been using his head rather well throughout the story.  The Lion’s new medal of courage may be just a prop, but it will serve him well, bolstering his confidence.  These wizard-endorsed boosts—inanimate objects endowed with positive psychological impact, including the Tin Man’s new ticking heart—are perhaps all that’s required to maintain these fellows’ self-esteem, especially whenever subsequent bouts of insecurity or inadequacy threaten to overtake them.  Back in Kansas, as Dorothy recounts her dream and we begin to accept (unwillingly) that she won’t be seeing her pals in Oz anymore, in walks their Kansas counterparts:  “Hunk,” “Zeke,” and “Hickory.”  And so the trio will continue to be in her life (though in decidedly less extravagant outerwear and without four-hour makeup jobs).  This reunion is a comfort, especially for those who refuse to accept Oz as merely the result of a random hit on the head.

Does Oz the Great and Powerful really need one more pan for its scrapbook?  Oh well, here goes.  James Franco is capable of fine work (127 Hours) but he’s hopeless as the fledgling wizard.  (It would seem to be a role right up Johnny Depp’s oddball alley.)  As played by Franco, the wizard is a con man without panache.  And who wants to look at that?  His performance is reminiscent of his misguided Oscar-hosting gig:  amiable, floundering, clueless.  Any three seconds of Frank Morgan’s 1939 performance told us more about this bamboozling character than Franco is able to convey in two hours.  It’s Frank over Franco anyday.

Despite the advanced technology, the film’s special effects are a snooze.  It’s obvious that almost nothing is actually there, with everything added at a much later date, meaning there’s nothing to be awed by, nothing comparable to the right-before-your-eyes magic of the earlier film.  And it was a sore mistake to try to duplicate the original film’s plot whenever possible, which simply reminds viewers what a bad idea it is to rub so close against a classic.  The film’s generic fake-inspirational message about “believing,” and its attempt to duplicate the emotional intimacy of Garland’s goodbye scene, are empty and futile.  This is a consistently ugly, unimaginative movie, with no one to care about.  And why does only one of the wicked sisters have a British accent?

Though this Oz was a financial success, it is destined to be forgotten, as if it never happened at all.  However, it will always be a good time to revisit Margaret Hamilton’s brilliantly horrid Wicked Witch, Billie Burke’s casually shimmering Glinda, not to mention the ever-dazzling turns of Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow, Jack Haley’s Tin Man, and Bert Lahr’s ingeniously hilarious Cowardly Lion.  Add Frank Morgan’s witty humbuggery and Judy Garland’s inimitable depth of feeling, and there’s no doubt where you’ll find “the great and powerful.”

They Won’t Believe Me (1947)

They Won’t Believe Me offers an unexpected set-up:  Robert Young, Mr. Father Knows Best himself, as a heel dangling three women, including two smart cookies—Susan Hayward and Jane Greer—who just happen to be knockouts.  It’s one of those movies that benefits from an intriguing flashback structure, with Young on the witness stand, on trial for murder.  Its neat, clever plotting carries the film all the way to an unforgettable shockeroo ending.  Maybe we’d hear more about this movie if it had been directed by a “name” in the film-noir racket.  Irving Pichel, just about equally known in the ’30s and ’40s as both an actor and a director, helmed some good movies—The Pied Piper (1942), The Moon Is Down (1943), A Medal for Benny (1945)—but They Won’t Believe Me is his best, a deft mix of calculating coldness and genuine feeling. Pichel’s direction may not be stylish or inventive, and he doesn’t quite fulfill the script’s potential, but he made a flat-out good movie that’s worth seeing (more than once).

This film captures its three stars at significant moments in their careers.  For Young, it was released almost simultaneously with one of his most admired films, Crossfire, a Best Picture Oscar nominee and a taut, socially conscious noir dealing with anti-Semitism, a movie noted for starring three guys named Robert (the other two are Ryan and Mitchum).  Ms. Hayward had just come off her breakout Oscar-nominated performance as the alcoholic singer of Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman, while Ms. Greer would next make Out of the Past (1947), in which she gives, in my estimation, the quintessential “femme fatale” performance in all of film noir.  They Won’t Believe Me is simply a movie lost in that impressive shuffle.

Young’s casting as a womanizing opportunist may be debatable, but the movie actually gains from its dark view of a usually lightweight leading man, similar to the inspired use of Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity (1944).  Married lovelessly to a wealthy woman (Rita Johnson) who adores him, Young is in love with her money while seeking sex and other pleasures elsewhere.  Ms. Greer plays a magazine writer he dumps when Ms. Johnson learns of the affair and offers him an enticing partnership in a brokerage house in L.A., prompting their immediate exit from New York.  Then he hooks up with Ms. Hayward, a gold digger working in his new California office.  What the film delivers is the unmistakable contrast between the women, who really love him, and Young himself, who loves no one (except himself).  He’s a selfish child for whom love is a fleeting fancy.  A liar, a schemer, and a user, he’s not worth the love of any of these women.  If the movie sounds like a basic romantic melodrama, well, it soon finds its footing in the turf of film noir.  What follows is a car-accident death, a mistaken body identification, deadly intent, suicide, a dumped body battered beyond recognition, and, yes, Young on trial for murder.  That’s more than enough black-and-white rottenness for any film noir to handle.

Young isn’t especially sexy or charismatic, yet he still gives a solid, believable performance.  What is interesting about Young’s character is that he’s not an all-out villain, just a despicable “ordinary” fellow with a casual flair for doing (and excusing) anything he wants.  A more dynamic actor might have given the role a bad-boy glamour, but Young’s regular-guy plainness makes his actions all the more chilling.  Hayward, top-billed though clearly in support of Young, is beautiful and likably direct but perhaps too classy for her role as a “little tramp” (as Ms. Johnson refers to her). Greer is lovely and intelligent, but her role is the haziest, the least successfully conceived.  Unfortunately, Hayward and Greer have no interaction.  The film’s best performance comes from poor-little-rich-girl Rita Johnson.  Her role, as the wife, isn’t large, but she’s the most compelling character, the one who gives the film its piercing humanity. She is truly touching as a woman who loves her husband too much to leave him, even though she knows he doesn’t love her.  She’ll do anything for him, certainly buy him anything, even though she knows he isn’t worth it.

Blond, attractive, and raspy-voiced (with a slight lisp), Ms. Johnson, who died at age 52 in 1965, would have turned 100 this week (on August 13th).  She is mostly forgotten, and her personal life was nothing to envy, but luckily she’s in a few still-popular movies (even though most viewers don’t know her name).  She is the woman you love to hate in two classic early ’40s comedies, Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and The Major and the Minor (1942), making her a supreme bitch of Hollywood’s Golden Age.  After They Won’t Believe Me, she played the murder victim (Charles Laughton’s mistress) in The Big Clock (1948), another nifty noir.  Though typed as a bitch, she proved in They Won’t Believe Me that she was a sensitive actress able to portray naked vulnerability and need, endowing this cinematic walk on the dark side with an aching heart. 

Finishing School (1934)

In the nine months between the releases of Flying Down to Rio (1933) and The Gay Divorcee (1934), six other Ginger Rogers movies opened across America.  While she was making this sextet of forgotten movies, Ginger couldn’t have known that her recent “Carioca” with Fred Astaire in Rio would lead to the major stardom granted to both of them once The Gay Divorcee had its premiere.  One of the films in her in-between half-dozen is RKO’s Finishing School, and it cast Ginger in a very definite supporting role, the kind of assignment that would be a thing of the past for her after The Gay Divorcee.  Something else happened between Rio and Divorcee, something affecting many more movie people than just Astaire and Rogers.  It was on July 1, 1934, that Hollywood’s Production Code (adopted in 1930) began its enforcement, meaning that movies would thereafter adhere to the Code’s guidelines on screen content, primarily involving sex and violence (and leading to many an onscreen punishment).  It lasted for decades, dragging on into the 1960s, finally replaced by the ratings system.

Finishing School is of interest not only as one of those brink-of-stardom Ginger Rogers movies but also as one of the last of what have come to be known as pre-Code movies.  (It was released on May 4, 1934.)  Another distinguishing element of this little movie is that it was co-directed and co-written by a woman:  Wanda Tuchock.  A forgotten figure in Hollywood, Tuchock was primarily a screenwriter, with films such as Bird of Paradise (1932), Sunday Dinner for a Soldier (1944), and The Foxes of Harrow (1947) among her credits.  Finishing School was her only feature-film directorial credit, shared with George Nicholls, Jr. (who usually worked as a film editor).  So, for those of us who thought Dorothy Arzner was the only woman directing in 1930s Hollywood, it’s time to acknowledge Tuchock and her brief moment in the director’s chair.  And she made a good movie, one you can watch in just 73 minutes.  It’s no surprise that it’s a juicy, fast-moving melodrama, but you may not expect just how believable you’ll find its central character.      

I’ll get to Ginger, of course, but this movie is anchored by a simple, direct and altogether lovely performance from Frances Dee, the film’s star.  She is clearly aided by the pre-Code nature of the script.  Regarding “old movies” made during the days of the Code’s enforcement, it’s not uncommon for viewers to be able to label characters as “good” or “bad,” usually pretty quickly, almost on sight.  Dee’s character, Virginia, stands out for being refreshingly confusing:  she’s a “good girl” who is certainly not a “goody-goody.”  When she arrives at Crockett Hall, an exclusive all-girl boarding school near Manhattan, Dee is clearly rich and well-mannered but also honest and unspoiled.  Her roommate, played by Ginger, instigates an overnight trip to New York, without revealing the wild night she has planned.  I expected Dee to be horrified by the hotelroom party of men and booze, yet she takes it in stride, admitting that she’d like to know what it feels like to be drunk.  And drunk she gets.  Wait a minute!  How can that sweet young thing suddenly want to behave this way?  Oh, I don’t know, maybe because she seems to be acting like a real person, in intriguingly human terrain, somewhere between complete saintliness and all-out sluttiness.  Even after she’s impregnated by her new boyfriend, medical intern Bruce Cabot, the movie seeks no punishment, no finger-wagging lesson.  And Cabot is no sleaze, actually a great guy who is working his way up from nothing.  Remember, scripts like this one would be banished from the screen in the summer of 1934 (unless they were given complete overhauls).

There are villains in the piece:  Beulah Bondi, as the cruel matron who runs the school and cares far more about the institution’s reputation than its students;  and Billie Burke, as Dee’s horrid mother, who has no time for her daughter.  Both actresses get to show the dark sides of their usual onscreen personalities, with Bondi exposing the manipulations of a supposed nurturer, while Burke lays bare the selfishness beneath her signature flightiness.  It’s hard for this movie not to seem like a posh women’s-prison picture, with Bondi doing a variation of the heartless warden, and Rogers seeming like Dee’s trampy, goodhearted cellmate.  Which brings me to Rogers’ casting.  Though she’s dandy with the zingers, and appears to be using the film as her prep for Stage Door (1937), Rogers (as a gal nicknamed Pony) seems highly improbable as a rich girl at a boarding school, simply too low-down.  (Maybe she’s a Hell’s Kitchen chorine who snuck into the joint, or a moll in the witness protection program?)  Miscast?  Definitely.  Welcome?  Resoundingly.  Rogers is billed third, with Dee first, of course, and Burke second.

Coming off her charming work as Meg in George Cukor’s masterful adaptation of Little Women (1933), the truly beautiful Dee is fresh and sometimes feisty here, getting to show more colors than usual.  Her Virginia is more (rather than less) sympathetic for being someone who acts on her impulses and is interested in having new experiences.  The happy ending has her defying Bondi and Burke, instead choosing marriage (to Cabot) and motherhood.  Prior to this conclusion, Dee contemplates a suicide in which she’d toss herself from a balcony railing.  If Finishing School had been made just a few months later than it was, she probably would have taken that leap, with her story repositioned as a cautionary tale.  How nice to see her escape in the nick of time.

Westward the Women (1951)

Yet another of the seemingly countless high-quality westerns of the 1950s is William A. Wellman’s Westward the Women, a film hardly ever mentioned, perhaps because it is so sturdily basic.  It’s one of those making-of-America new-frontier pictures, rather than a “psychological” western, the sub-genre that would become the decade’s special brand of western, moving away from black- and white-hatted characters and into a world of often disturbing grays.  A great 1950 trio of Anthony Mann-directed pictures—Winchester ’73, The Furies, Devil’s Doorway—plus Henry King’s The Gunfighter (also 1950), significantly sparked this new era.  Westward the Women may not offer such complexities and challenges but it irresistibly mixes hard, tough action with honest sentiment.  One thing that jumps out of its opening credits is “Story by Frank Capra.”  So, with Wellman’s signature grit, Capra’s expected “heart,” plus star Robert Taylor, not to mention MGM’s A-picture machine behind it, this is a movie with everything going for it.  What emerges is a consistently absorbing, rousing, and even touching tale of courage and fortitude, with characters to root for wholeheartedly.  Superbly photographed in black and white, Westward the Women is also immensely likable and genuinely inspiring.  And by including characters who are French, Italian, and Japanese, the film is also about the melting pot doing a little of its melting.

In 1851, a Californian (John McIntire) hires a guide (Taylor) to lead a wagon train whose mission is to transport about 140 women from Chicago to California.  These volunteer females will become the brides of the men in McIntire’s valley.  When it’s clear that the request is for “good women,” two prostitutes (Denise Darcel and Julie Bishop) alter their mode of dress and sign on the dotted line.  Before the trip begins, each woman chooses her “intended” from photographs provided by McIntire.

Ruggedly handsome Taylor is a no-nonsense taskmaster.  After some early troubles with the men he hires for the journey, including a rape, Taylor is left with just two men, which means that the women must assume the abandoned positions, fulfilling every arduous task involved in the crossing of 2000 miles.  Although Taylor is skeptical about the women’s capabilities, he eventually becomes their fiercest supporter and admirer, granting them the utmost respect.  This transition makes it a worthy acting role, with Taylor able to humanize his character slowly along the way.  He and Darcel also get to provide the movie with its sexual tension:  she’s feisty and brazen;  he’s all business…until he isn’t.  There’s a gorgeous chase on horseback through canyons, with Taylor capturing the runaway Darcel, a violent scene that ends in consummation.

This is no fairy tale that pulls its punches.  It’s not a ride concerned with basket lunches and gingham dresses.  Take the formidable widow played by Hope Emerson.  She delivers Beverly Dennis’ illegitimate baby boy in a broken wagon collapsed in the desert.  And how about Marilyn Erskine and Lenore Lonergan?  When they have their fistfight, an explosion of their long-simmering dislike for each other, it feels authentic, not like one of those comical movie “girlfights” meant to make us laugh at the ladies in question.  In addition to the early-on rape of Ms. Bishop, other horrors include a child being killed by an accidental gunshot, a woman drowning in a flooding downpour, the crash of a runaway wagon, and a deadly off-screen Indian attack.  People die, while others carry on and absorb more of the grueling, neverending work.

Wellman, who had recently had one of his biggest commercial and critical successes with the WWII combat picture Battleground (1949), did a beautiful job here, perfectly balancing the breathtaking visual elements with the steady development of the characters and their surging story.  A perfect example of this is the desert sequence.  It begins with the emotionally wrenching moments of the women lightening their loads for the dry and dusty trek, forced by Taylor to abandon most of the treasures they have dragged with them thus far.  There’s poignancy and beauty in the images of these small but staunch figures, most of them walking alongside the wagons in the vast, endless nothingness.  Yes, the natural scenery is stunning and the film has a big-movie grandeur, but it’s the emotional content that makes Westward the Women most deserving of new admirers.  Perhaps the climax is a bit of a fairy tale, yet, after all we’ve been through, it’s so utterly earned, which makes it so deeply satisfying.  The women refuse to enter the valley of their destination until the men provide them with assorted fabrics to help them look more presentable after their hellish journey.  It’s all leading to the lovely moment when the women find their men by matching their clutched photos to the eager men around them.

Robert Taylor was in the process of emerging from his post-war career slump.  His box-office fortunes had been dwindling throughout the late 1940s, and things weren’t looking up at the dawn of the new decade.  Despite the fact that he had just given the performance of his life, as a war-hero Native-American in Devil’s Doorway (one of Hollywood’s unsung masterworks), this did nothing to turn his career around.  It was another film, Quo Vadis (1951), released almost simultaneously with Westward the Women, that suddenly made him bigger than ever, once again a major star (until the end of the decade).  The French Darcel, who had also appeared in Wellman’s Battleground, had her best Hollywood role as the prostitute transformed by love and the promise of a new kind of future.

My only question is where is the ubiquitous Ellen Corby among the 140?  Corby, who seemingly manages to show up in most old movies, somehow missed this particular wagon train.

A Message to Barbra

Dear Barbra,

I hope this blog post finds you well.  I’m just wondering if you’re still considering your much-talked-about proposed film version of Gypsy.  It seems to have been rather on-again/off-again and, to be perfectly honest, I’ve simply lost track of its status.  Every time it appears to be over and done with, well, up pops a rumor about talks being resumed.  If it is, in fact, a dead proposition, forgive this message.  However, if there are still some glimmers of possibility, then here goes…

Most people who love Broadway musicals, and Gypsy in particular, would probably welcome a big-screen remake.  After all, the 1962 film was hardly anywhere near what it could have been, even though it’s far from being among the worst of its era’s movie versions of Broadway shows.  It wasn’t helped by Mervyn LeRoy, a director who had a late-career knack for turning stage material into box-office gold even when, or especially when, he had a sledgehammer’s touch, which he did with Mister Roberts (1955) and The Bad Seed (1956).  But it’s hard to argue with profits.  Thus, Gypsy became another of LeRoy’s visually flat and unimaginative movies.

No one doubts your ability to best Rosalind Russell’s screen performance as Rose, the stage mother of all stage mothers.  (It’s not a fair fight because most of her singing was dubbed by Lisa Kirk.)  Though the great Roz certainly makes an impression, she too often feels like she’s doing a lower-rent variation of her Auntie Mame.  And, let’s face it, one thing Rose is not is Auntie Mame.  Rose was just not Roz’s role.  Yes, the movie should have starred Ethel Merman, in the role she created, or at least Judy Garland, who could have been sensational.  My point is that, despite the Bette Midler TV movie, Gypsy can certainly stand to be remade.  And maybe its time has finally come, with symmetry too good to resist:  you made your screen debut in Funny Girl (1968), the Jule Styne musical that made you a Broadway star, and you could, perhaps, exit your movie-musical career in another legendary backstage Styne show.

Your voice, gutsiness, and humor are inarguably suited to Rose.  The biggest stumbling block—if I may just blurt it out—is your age.  At 71, you are too old to be playing a woman who is half your age at the start of the story, a mother of two little girls.  Yes, you look great for 71, but can you pull off a role that ages from 35-ish to 55-ish?  (Rose is usually played onstage by women in their forties and fifties.)  The character’s biggest of her many big moments, the climactic aria known as “Rose’s Turn,” is the song of a middle-aged woman dealing with, among other things, a mid-life crisis.  Who doesn’t want to see (and hear) you tear into this number?  No problem there.  It’s the first hour or so of the movie that might put a strain on the credibility of your casting.

Forgive my long-windedness as I finally come to my suggestion.  I think it would be easier to accept you as the young Rose if we meet you first as the older Rose.  And it wouldn’t require any rewriting of a sacred text.  What if you just shifted things around a bit and gave the film a Funny Girl-ish flashback structure.  I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that Funny Girl opens with you prowling around backstage and onstage before you settle into a theatre seat for a movie-sized flashback.  Instead of being glimpsed first as the mother of those two adorable tots, barreling down a theatre aisle, we’d instead meet your Rose as the mature woman at the end of the story.  I believe this gives us permission to accept you as the younger Rose, having already made an identification with you as the woman she will become.  Besides, starting the film this way establishes and stresses the backstage-ness of Rose’s entire life.

How exactly would this work?  What if, after the greatest overture in American musical theatre has just accompanied the opening credits, the film began with a suddenly quiet camera crawl through the narrow corridors of backstage?  Voices can be heard faintly, getting louder as we approach a closed door.  For those who know the material, what can be heard is Gypsy‘s climactic mother-daughter showdown, with lines like, “I fought all your life,” coming from behind the door.  When the camera arrives directly in front of the door, you emerge as Rose.  We don’t see anyone in the room as you close the door behind you.  The camera tracks you as you mumble to yourself, finding yourself headed for the stage, positively pulled there.  Maybe some of the lines could be voice0vers from the past, transitioning into the spoken lines that serve as your lead-in to “Rose’s Turn,” such as ”I thought you did it for me, Mama.”  Perhaps you see your aging face in a mirror along the corridor (though you resist the temptation to say, “Hello, Gorgeous”).  Of course, this sequence would stop before you launch into the song, which, of course, would be saved for the film’s real climax, after we have seen and heard that major scene behind the door.  Maybe “What I got in me!” would be a good place to stop this prologue and trigger the flashback, sending us to page one of Gypsy.  When you then enter, you’ll be recognized as a somewhat younger-looking version of the older lady who started the movie, making it easier for everyone to suspend their disbelief.  I really think this will prevent people from muttering things like, “Who is she kidding, trying to pass herself off as the mother of babes?”

If you hate this idea, I apologize for bothering you.  But, if you like it, well, there’s no time to lose.  I wish you had done Gypsy about fifteen years ago, instead of The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), which, come on, was a waste of your time and ours.  Gypsy could be the crowning moment of your career, or it could be a colossal mistake, but, whatever it is, it’s got to be now.

Best to Jim.  And Jason.

Yours,

John DiLeo

 

 

The Splendors of Natalie Wood

It’s hard to believe and yet it’s true:  Natalie Wood would have turned 75 this week (on July 20th).  She was only 43 when she died in 1981.  The murky details surrounding her drowning death have put her at the center of an ongoing Hollywood mystery, one that has shown few signs of ever being definitively resolved.  But let’s talk about her movies.  Though her life was short, her career was long, on an enviable path from child star to teen star to leading lady, worthy of Elizabeth Taylor herself.  I’m not saying that it was smooth sailing at every turn.  Not at all.  Wood’s career had very definite moments of reinvention, even resurrection, timed nearly as perfectly as seven-year itches, arriving whenever it seemed that she was about to be declared “washed up,” or when she appeared trapped in a persona she had literally outgrown.  Then suddenly the right role would come along, and, bam, she was back on top as a new Natalie Wood.

She decisively separated herself from countless cute, aspiring child actresses when she landed the plum role of Maureen O’Hara’s precocious (even jaded) daughter in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), a second-grader who, thanks to Edmund Gwenn’s Kris Kringle, learns to enjoy being a child.  Her transition from cynicism to optimism is as enchanting as it is skillfully executed, proving that Wood had the makings of a real actress.  Somehow her remarkable performance did not win her a juvenile Oscar, even though her work is every bit as impressive as that of other children who did take home junior-sized Oscars that decade.  No comparable role followed, but Wood was certainly a recognizable child actress thereafter.  Before you knew it, she was approaching her early teens in films like The Blue Veil (1951) and The Star (1952), in the latter as none other than Bette Davis’ daughter.  Could Wood survive the ‘tween years, or would she join the heap of ex-child actors who tried and failed to endure beyond their years of being adorable?

Just as her oblivion seemed inevitable, and when most of her work was coming from television, along came Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause (1955), the film that made Wood the poster girl for the modern teenage female.  After all, there she was being romanced by the rebel himself:  James Dean.  Child-star oblivion averted!  In addition to its good reviews and popularity, Rebel also nabbed Wood an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.  Eventually letting go of a “cool” tough-girl facade, Wood exposed her character’s loneliness, vulnerability, and yearning to be loved.  Alongside Dean and Sal Mineo, she was part of an exciting and attractive young trio, all of whom died young.  Despite an essential (but small) role in The Searchers (1956), and then being chosen to play Marjorie Morningstar (1958), Wood had a disappointing remainder of the decade, including two films that tried to make a team of her and Tab Hunter.  As with Miracle on 34th Street, there was no worthy post-Rebel follow-up role to build on her momentum.  By 1960, with starring roles in two duds, All the Fine Young Cannibals and Cash McCall, it seemed that Natalie Wood was not going to be a grown-up movie star.

As if on cue, her next reinvention came with director Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961), which put Wood in the big leagues as never before, working with a two-time Oscar-winning director known for coaxing the very best from his actors, including James Dean in East of Eden (1955).  She would also be creating a role in an original screenplay written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright William Inge.  And she’d be co-starring with a red-hot newcomer, Warren Beatty, from the New York stage.  The success of the film, and the high quality of Wood’s acting (her finest work up to this point), ensured that she would be among Hollywood’s top females of the new decade.  When she ”arrived” this time, she seemed here to stay.

Coming off one of his finest films, the underrated box-office failure Wild River (1960), Kazan had his final commercial success with Splendor, a highly effective though flawed work.  It begins in Kansas in 1928.  Wood and Beatty are high-school seniors and sweethearts:  he’s captain of the football team and a basketball player (also a rich boy and a poor student);  she’s the daughter of a grocer and his wife.  The young couple struggles to sustain their love amid the challenges of unconsummated sexual desire and parental pressures.  If you want to know what screen chemistry is, take a good look at Wood and Beatty.  Yes, they are uncommonly beautiful, but they really snap, crackle, and pop in each other’s presence.  Their connection is palpable.  Beatty has a James Dean-ish persona, as sensitive as he is sexy, and he makes a smashing debut.  Wood reveals a new openness, a stark vulnerability, and a ripening sensuality.  Hers is a fearless performance, thoughtfully developed and shaped, intimately balanced in its effects, from poignant simplicity to harrowing outbursts of emotion.  It’s jolting whenever she simply can’t behave like a perfect little girl for one more second, notably when she breaks down in her bathtub, which stuns her confused mother (Audrey Christie).

Splendor in the Grass is visually rich (with color photography by Boris Kaufman) and it’s beautifully acted by the two leads, but it’s prone to heavy-handedness.  Inge may have won an Oscar for his script (primarily because of his aching depiction of young love and lust), but he goes off the rails any time the focus is on anyone other than Wood or Beatty.  As in Rebel without a Cause, the deck seems stacked:  all the adults are useless or harmful people.  We watch young lives thoughtlessly mangled by overbearing parents.  Example:  Wood’s mother feels it’s her duty not only to keep her daughter pure but to make sure that she feels guilty and ashamed about any sexual longings.  Then there’s Beatty’s oilman father, played by Pat Hingle in a horrifyingly overblown performance that succumbs to flagrant hamminess with every breath.  When the stock market crashes and Hingle leaps from a window you’ll be so glad.  Yet another over-the-top presence is Barbara Loden as Beatty’s slutty, self-destructive flapper sister, the film’s cautionary character.  These and most of the other supporting characters are perilously close to cartoons.  Sometimes it seems that Wood and Beatty are the only two sane people in Kansas.  (Even Inge himself shows up as a reverend.)

As the film wends its way to a bittersweet ending, we’re left with a sense of how unpredictably our lives can work out.  Despite the film’s florid excesses, the simple truths in the feelings and the bond between Wood and Beatty remain true, for 1928, for 1961, for always.  The fade-out leaves you to reflect on passion and comfortability, youth and maturity, and the inexorable passage of time, with no easy answers about how the plot should have best resolved itself.  We’re left with haunting twinges of what might have been and what can’t be reclaimed.  Unlike much of the picture, this feels like real life.

Wood received her first Best Actress Oscar nomination, losing to Sophia Loren (Two Women).  I would have voted for Wood, and I’m very surprised she didn’t win because she had the extra boost of starring in that year’s big Oscar winner:  West Side Story.  Wasn’t this undeniably Wood’s year?  Oh well, she’d be back in an Oscar race for another nuanced performance in another fine, adult romantic picture, Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), opposite another actor, Steve McQueen, with whom she shared an off-the-charts kind of chemistry.  (She lost this Oscar to Patricia Neal in Hud.)  There were other big Natalie Wood movies, of lesser quality—Gypsy (1962), Sex and the Single Girl (1964), The Great Race (1965), Inside Daisy Clover (1965)—and her work in them could be very erratic, sometimes rather poor.  But then came her third outstanding dramatic performance of the ’60s, in This Property Is Condemned (1966), a critical and commercial flop that unfairly did nothing for her.  A second 1966 bomb, the comedy Penelope, made it appear that the reign of Natalie Wood was over, almost directly coinciding with the emergence of the new Hollywood, soon to be ushered in with the 1967 releases of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. 

But, ready for reinvention yet again, Wood starred in one of the most talked-about hits of the new era:  the free-love comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969).  She had defied the odds and proved that she, too, could be a part of this new and explicit era of American film.  Don’t forget, Wood was only 31 in 1969!  We’ll never know how she would have fared in the 1970s because she opted for semi-retirement to raise a family.  Maybe Bob & Carol would have been just a fluke for her.  However, her track record tells us that only a fool would have underestimated the tenacious adaptability of Natalie Wood.     

“Red”-Letter Day

This July 18th is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Red Skelton, MGM’s beloved funnyman of the 1940s and early ’50s.  Skelton, who died at 84 in 1997, smoothly segued from the movies into an even more successful and longlasting career as one of television’s most popular comics.  In his heyday as a film star, Skelton regularly alternated between black-and-white comedies and Technicolor musicals.  (His red hair helped to keep him in front of those color cameras.)  Though his best-remembered comedy is The Fuller Brush Man (1948), which was made on loan to Columbia, I’d like to take a look at two other Skelton films of the ’40s, one a musical and the other a straight comedy.  Neither is especially good, but they are representative of his output, which, it must be said, includes no classics, no wondrous gems to tout.

Skelton worked his way up the MGM ladder rather quickly, thanks to two appearances as a comic orderly in the Dr. Kildare series, plus roles in musicals such as Panama Hattie (1942), with Ann Sothern, and Ship Ahoy (1942), with Eleanor Powell.  His real break came with the comedy Whistling in the Dark (1941), and its two sequels (in ’42 and ’43), in which he played a radio personality, “The Fox,” an amateur sleuth (off the air) who would get himself entangled in real-life crime-solving adventures.  By 1943, with Whistling in Brooklyn and two musicals, I Dood It and DuBarry Was a Lady, Skelton was a full-fledged A-list star on the MGM lot, the studio’s sweetly innocent, perennially childlike clown.

Bathing Beauty (1944) is the movie that presented Esther Williams as MGM’s newest star attraction, and it is rememembered, if at all, as a Williams picture.  With a title like that, how could it be otherwise?  But top-billed Skelton is the picture’s actual star, the already established player on hand for his box-office clout.  Come see Red and then fall in love with the beautiful young woman in the swimsuit, which is exactly what happened.  Bathing Beauty is a typical Joe Pasternak production, a crazily eclectic musical hodegpodge that could seemingly accommodate any kind of musical performer, in this case even organist Ethel Smith.  Who else but Pasternak would employ Harry James and his orchestra and Xavier Cugat and his orchestra?  Not only that, but sometimes James and Cugat are used in the same musical numbers!  This movie plays like some wildly colorful and fearlessly kitschy kind of Hell, a place where specialty numbers never cease.  Is there even enough time here to incorporate a plot?  Barely, but that’s not such a bad thing when a plot is as dumb as the one they cooked up for Bathing Beauty.

For some inexplicable reason, goddess Esther is in love with goofy Red.  Basil Rathbone, as Red’s best pal…okay, wait a second:  what in the world is Rathbone doing in this movie, and in what universe could he possibly be Red Skelton’s best friend?  Anyway, Basil sabotages Esther and Red’s wedding by hiring a woman to pose as Red’s wife and the mother of three suspiciously redheaded little boys.  And Esther believes this!  Why, you may ask, would Basil do such a thing?  It has to do with him being a producer and needing songwriter Red to write the score for his water pageant.  Huh?  Esther, hurt and angry, returns to her job, teaching swimming at a girls’ college in New Jersey.  You guessed it:  Red enrolls, after a technicality is found in the school’s charter.  He’s determined to win Esther back.

Skelton is surprisingly subdued for much of the picture, even occasionally seeming like an actual leading man.  But he, thank goodness, eventually has a comic centerpiece worth all the inanity that has rigged this plot into motion.  It’s a ballet class, complete with Red in a pink tutu.  The teacher, the wonderfully severe Ann Codee, mercilessly slaps him into shape.  (The sequence appears to be the inspiration for Lucille Ball’s great ballet-class episode on I Love Lucy.)  Skelton clunks around the dance floor merrily, gracefully performing the slapstick of klutziness.  None other than Buster Keaton worked with Skelton on the gags and bits for this and other Skelton comedy sequences at MGM.  Imagine being coached by one of the screen’s true geniuses!  Of course, you expect Skelton to be the funniest thing in the movie, but, more surprisingly, he’s also part of the best musical number, pleasantly singing the score’s sprightly duet, ”I’ll Take the High Note,” with bouncy college gal Jean Porter.  Another of the students is played by Janis Paige who, coincidentally, played a swimming movie star, spoofing Esther herself, in Silk Stockings (1957).  

Don’t worry, Esther does star in Basil’s show, with both Harry James and Xavier Cugat!  There’s no mention of WWII during this movie, which makes sense.  This is wartime escapism taken to a delirious level:  jaw-droppingly colorful, outrageously kitschy, and dizzyingly assembled.  All that, plus gorgeous Esther Williams creating a unique kind of musical picture for herself (a formula that would last a solid decade).  And then there’s Red, the big star along for the ride, providing some inspired ballet mayhem and jivin’ good cheer.

On a far more modest scale, Merton of the Movies (1947) is a somewhat undernourished but pleasingly low-key Skelton vehicle.  Set early in the silent-film era, in 1915, this comedy stars Skelton as a Kansas boy with big dreams of movie stardom.  His comic acting here is blessedly short on desperation.  It’s a sweet performance, with comedic flourishes of a mostly gentle variety.  Gloria Grahame is a delight as a dim-bulbed silent star.  Ironically, it would be Grahame who’d win a 1952 supporting Oscar (for The Bad and the Beautiful, another movie about movies), beating Jean Hagen’s ultimate dim-bulbed silent star in Singin’ in the Rain.  In fact, Singin’ lifted an entire sequence from Merton:  Red strolls by three camera-rolling silent-film sets, of different genres, side by side by side, just as Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor would do five years later.

Merton of the Movies was directed by a choreographer, Robert Alton.  It’s a minor effort but not bad at all.  It’s certainly of interest to anyone who enjoys movies about Hollywood, specifically its early days.  Merton’s star-making film is Soles on Fire, which he thinks is a drama though it’s actually a spoof.  A laughing preview audience confirms that he is, in fact, a new comedy star, albeit an accidental one, which makes him very happy.  Audiences did plenty of laughing at (and with) Skelton in the mid-century of movie comedy, whether he was taking ballet class in Bathing Beauty, getting stinko in Ziegfeld Follies (1946), or trying to get on a horse in Neptune’s Daughter (1949).  If there’s no great Red Skelton comedy, well, you could certainly put together a very funny highlights reel of his work.  That may be the best way to celebrate all that he dood.