Wise: Howdy, Werth.
Werth: Good evening, sir. May I offer you a cocktail?
Wise: I'll take the booze, but what's with the penguin suit?
Werth: Lee Daniels' The Butler opens today and I'm getting ready for the juggernaut of Hollywood talent that plays presidential dress-up in a fictionalized version of the life of White House domestic Eugene Allen. Alan Rickman plays Reagan, James Marsden plays Kennedy, Jane Fonda plays Nancy Reagan—
Wise: But will any of them be as good as Oprah?
Werth: Not if she has a scene where she marches through a cornfield. Hollywood realized the scratch to be made by lumping together their top stars early on, and when the silents turned to talkies, MGM tried the tactic to beat its competitors to the musical punch with The Hollywood Revue of 1929. It's one of those cases where the title says it all. Mimicking the Broadway and vaudeville stage shows of the time, MGM put together a group of musical numbers, comedy sketches, and dance routines using a "galaxy of stars" both known and relatively unknown.
Wise: It's one way to keep idle stars off the skids.
Werth: Master of Ceremonies Jack Benny had been a vaudeville regular, but his violin-toting, deadpan act was still in its infancy for Revue. Benny mugs and puns as he introduces the acts, including then matinee idol Conrad Nagel as the evening's Interlocutor.
Wise: Evidence of Nagel's long and successful career in film, television and radio can be seen in his three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Werth: Fame seemed to haunt Revue. Buster Keaton shimmies as an Egyptian dancer in "The Dance of the Sea" but the stoic-faced comic's most notable years were behind him. Meanwhile Laurel and Hardy perform a magic act complete with a cake-in-the-face pratfall while they were moving from silent short stars to feature-length comedy stars.
Other silent luminaries who transitioned to sound successfully in Revue are Norma Shearer, William Randolph Hearst's main squeeze Marion Davies, and a young Joan Crawford who dances and sings like her life depended on it. But some counted Revue as the sunset of their careers with both dashing William Haines and handsome but prissy-throated John Gilbert ending their careers by 1936.
Marie Dressler's career was supposedly over by 1929, but a year later this vaudeville veteran would be seeing a career re-birth by starring with Garbo in Anna Christie and getting an Oscar for Min and Bill.
Wise: Nothing like a little song and dance to jumpstart a comeback.
Werth: Revue is one of those early sound films that's best watched like it's a filmic cave drawing. Sound was only two years young at this point, and many directors, including Revue's, were unskilled at moving the camera. The dialogue is stilted, numbers seem to go on interminably and most scenes are shot with a static camera facing the stage as if you were sitting in the audience of George White's Scandals.
But cinematic touches appear in a couple numbers with a strange film negative minstrel show, a special effects shot of dancer/singer Bessie Love miniaturized (twice), the use of two-strip Technicolor for a couple scenes, and kaleidoscopic, overhead shots of the not-so-precise dancers dancing in fear to "Lon Chaney's Gonna Get You If You Don't Watch Out."
These shots must have been informed by choreographer Busby Berkeley's earlier Broadway work, but he was not involved with the filming. He would start revolutionizing film a year later when he staged the dances for Samuel Goldwyn's Whoopee!
Whatever the primitive flaws of Revue, it was a hit and earned an Oscar nomination that year garnering a lot of attention for the song, "Singin' in the Rain," and its lyricist, future musical mogul Arthur Freed.
Wise: The success of Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and its long list of La-La-Land luminaries prompted a surge in adaptions of Agatha Christie penned mysteries, and one of the most enjoyable is The Mirror Crack'd (1980). Elizabeth Taylor and Kim Novak play Marina Rudd and Lola Brewster, two long-time rival actresses who descend on a tiny English village to film a lavish costume picture based on contretemps between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots.
Adding to the pressure cooker atmosphere is Marina's husband Jason (Rock Hudson), the director of the film, and Lola's husband Marty (Tony Curtis), who's the producer. At a village reception, a gushing fan brags about her devotion to Marina, only to wind up dead after sipping from her idol's cocktail.
Marina spirals out of control after this attempt on her life, and order is only restored upon the arrival of Angela Lansbury as Christie's beloved Miss Jane Marple in sensible shoes and a tightly curled wig.
Werth: From Miss Marple to Jessica Fletcher. No one should commit a crime around Angela Lansbury.
Wise: Part of the pleasure of these big ensemble films is the opportunity they give big stars to play outsized versions of themselves. Taylor as Marina gets to be both more extravagantly beautiful (she arrives on screen wearing a helmet made of lilacs) and more dramatic (the hysterics of her breakdown would have sunk a less starry film).
She and Novak trade a few delicious barbs whenever they're in the same scene, taking full advantage of the public's endless appetite for the kind of cooked up, bitchy antagonism that sells a lot of movie magazines even to this day. Tony Curtis plays a seedier version of his character in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957).
Only Rock Hudson seems a little subdued; his supportive husband lacks the winking charm that made him so great in so many films.
Werth: For a second, I read that last line as if Rock Hudson had a supportive husband... which he should have.
Wise: Lansbury's performance is a little less broad than her co-stars' efforts, but she still gets to have a lot of sly fun as Christie's grandmotherly know-it-all. She always has a bit of business to perform—knitting, cooking, pulling a Mackintosh more securely about her shoulders—that distracts both the audience and the criminals from observing her deductive powers at work. Like the most satisfying whodunnits, the identity of the murderer is the least likely suspect, but the pleasure of the revelation comes from the clever, cat-like way that Lansbury's Marple unravels the mystery in the final reel.
Werth: Well, Wise, I guess we should reveal that this is something of the final reel for Film Gab.
Wise: Right. After almost three years and several hundred movie recommendations, we're going to be taking a little break from our weekly updates.
Werth: But fear not, loyal Gabbers. We'll be popping in from time to time comment on new films, Hollywood trends, and to salute the passing of our Tinsel Town heroes.
Wise: In the meantime, why not take a sentimental journey back to the beginning of Film Gab and catch up on any of the flicks you may have missed?
Werth: And if you ever need a little live Film Gab in your life, just remember that our extensive love of Hollywood lore can be had for the price of a couple drinks. Cheers!
Film Gab is saddened to learn of the death of MGM's aquatic superstar Esther Williams. Born to a working class family in Los Angeles, she learned to swim at an early age and nurtured Olympic dreams until they were dashed by the onset of World War II and the cancellation of the games. Instead, she found herself with a contract at MGM testing out her audience appeal as one of Mickey Rooney's endless string of girlfriends in Andy Hardy's Double Life (1942). Audiences went wild and for nearly two decades she starred in a parade of musicals featuring her talent (and long legs) in a series of increasingly elaborate water ballets. The studio excavated a huge pool for her and deployed Busby Berkeley to marshal the corps de piscine into his signature kaleidoscopic effects. Her best known film is perhaps Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), but she had some success outside of the pool as the owner of a ball team in Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949) alongside Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly. Whatever the role, Williams infused all her work with athleticism, cheerfulness and grace.
Werth: Hey, Wise, can you spare a dime?
Wise: Oh, gee, Werth, I don't typically carry change. It's a plastic society, you know.
Werth: Save your explanations, Wise. I was referring to the anthem of the Great Depression with lyrics by the great E. Y. Harburg. With Lawless opening this Friday, I've been nostalgic for the Hollywood classics made in the decade after the 1929 stock market crash. Americans struggled with wild unemployment, severely reduced incomes and homelessness and longed for an escape from the world of Hoovervilles and soup kitchens.
One of the easiest places for people to go to forget about their troubles, was their local movie theater. Everyday stories of fearless heroes and glamorous heroines unspooled for an audience hungry for distraction—all for the price of one quarter.
Wise: The Gay Divorcee (1934) eschews the realities of the Great Depression almost entirely and instead presents a romanticized version of life among the jet set. After being abandoned by her geologist husband, Mimi Glossop (Ginger Rogers) heads to England where she seeks the advice of her serially married aunt on how best to obtain a divorce. Aunt Hortense (Alice Brady) calls upon her bumbling lawyer Egbert Fitzgerald (the ever delightful Edward Everett Horton) who schemes to have Mimi caught in a staged affair, only to have the plan go awry when Mimi mistakes besotted dance man Guy Holden (Fred Astaire) for the gigolo.
After a series of mistaken identities, sudden reversals and transcendent dance numbers, the missing geologist is revealed to be a cad and Mimi can guiltlessly dissolve that failed marriage and embark on a happier union with Guy.
Werth: I think all divorce proceedings should require a tap number.
Wise: Of course the plot is littered with roadblocks just to allow the audience the pleasure of witnessing Mimi and Guy fall in love. Mimi's reluctance and Guy's persistence is beautifully realized in their duet to Cole Porter's "Night and Day."
Choreographed by Astaire and longtime collaborator Hermes Pan, the number exemplifies what made Depression-era audiences clamor for the Astaire/Rogers dance team: his elegance and crack precision; her insight that acting while dancing was just as important as during the dramatic bits. It's a seduction as poetic as it is erotic, leaving both Mimi and the audience shuddering with pleasure.
Werth: Shuddering with pleasure. Sounds like a shaky Newport cigarette ad.
Wise: Perhaps the most delightful, non-Astaire/Rogers number in the film is Betty Grable's flirtation in song "Let's Knock Knees." In pursuit of Horton's prissy Egbert, she leads the chorus of beach goers in a spirited novelty dance that showcases both her tap dancing chops and Horton's finely honed comic persona. In real life, it would be a ridiculous pairing, but in the fantasy world of the silver screen, it somehow makes sense that a dithering, old-maidish man would fall for a teenage, platinum blonde hoofer.
Werth: Happens in Hollywood real life. Just ask Kelsey Grammer.
Wise: But that's all part of why these Hollywood fantasies work: an ordinary-looking fellow like Fred Astaire could have an extraordinary talent that elevates him to a world just beyond the grasp of the everyday, transporting audiences away from their cares and toward a glittering Art Deco place in the imagination.
Werth: From the opening number of Gold Diggers of 1933, you'd think director Mervyn LeRoy was also shooting for some cinematic escapism from the troubles of the breadline. Ginger Rogers (boy, that girl got around), all fresh-faced and spunky sings "We're in the Money" while a bevy of finely coiffed chorus girls dance around her holding giant coins in skimpy Orry-Kelly costumes blinged out with enough change to excite all of New York's panhandlers. But the number is rudely interrupted by a group of policemen who close down the rehearsal and the show because the producer can't pay his bills.
Wise: Could that please happen to The Client List?
Werth: Ginger is out on the street, and her pals—Carol (Joan Blondell who would have celebrated her 106th birthday this week), Trixie (Fanny Brice wannabe Aline MacMahon), and Polly (Ruby Keeler)—are all worried where their next dollar is going to come from as they share one dress and steal milk from across the breezeway for breakfast. But this is a musical, so of course they can't wind up hooking it on the corner or living in a Hooverville. Cigar-chomping producer Barney (Ned Sparks) has an idea for a show and all he needs is the money to put it up.
Luck would have it that the next door neighbor, Brad (gooey-toned Dick Powell), is a wildly talented composer who also happens to be a secret blue-blood to boot. So the money appears, everyone gets a part in the show—
Wise: —and they all live happily ever after.
Werth: After the requisite mistaken identities, romantic hijinx, Guy Kibbee mugging and lavish, kaleidoscopic Busby Berkeley dance numbers, yes. But along the way, the poor showgirls get the upper hand on the upper crust, and the finale, "Remember My Forgotten Man" gives the audience a touching reminder of the real world that escapist fantasies like Gold Diggers were trying to help them escape from.
Wise: I guess with fantasies about superheroes, plucky archers and foul-mouthed teddy bears, Hollywood is still using escapist fare to help us forget our current financial woes.
Werth: As long as they don't help our readers forget next week's Film Gab.
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