Happy 100 Lew!

Wise: Welcome back, Werth!

Werth: Good to be back, Wise. I see you held down the fort with your in-depth review of the new Oz flick.

Wise: It had everything except Mila Kunis' viral BBC Radio interview.

Werth: Now that I'm back, I thought we could wish a happy 100th birthday to Hollywood agent icon Lew Wasserman.

Wise: He repped a Film Gab's who's who of stars: Bette Davis, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Stewart, Judy Garland, Henry Fonda, Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers, Gregory Peck, Billy Wilder and Gene Kelly

Werth: Wasserman became just as famous as many of his clients when, in the 1950's as head of MCA, he helped change the film industry through the practice of film packaging where Wasserman would gather a roster of talent across the spectrum of film specialties (actors, directors, writers, production designers, costumers, you name it!) and then pitch them out on projects as a whole. Not only did this make certain that MCA made a lot of money, but it also kept production teams together, ensuring that these hit-making artisans worked on more than one movie together. 

Wasserman's relationship with Alfred Hitchcock is a perfect example. With MCA since the early Fifties, Hitchcock had become a household commodity through his television show and hit movies, but in 1959, with Wasserman's help, he would make one of his most iconic and popular films, North by Northwest.

Wise: Spy capers were a lot more thrilling in the days before Google Maps.

Werth: From the Saul Bass opening with vivid animation and Bernard Herrmann's sprinting score, North by Northwest flies (pun intended.) Cary Grant is Roger Thornhill, a bachelor advertising exec who accidentally interrupts a page at the Oak Room in the old Plaza Hotel who is calling for George Kaplan. This one quirk of fate sets into motion a cross-country, mistaken identity, cat-and-mouse game between Thornhill and criminal mastermind Phillip Vandamm (James Mason). 

It's a literal planes, trains and automobiles adventure as Thornhill attempts to find the elusive George Kaplan and clear his name before Vandamm or his nefarious "secretary" Leonard (performed with gay, jilted-lover relish by Martin Landau) snuff him out.

Wise: Fey henchmen love to snuff. 

Werth: While riding the Twentieth Century train to Chicago, Thornhill winds up bunking with Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), a cold, mysterious Hitchcock blond if there ever was one. The chemistry between Grant and Marie Saint nearly burns the celluloid. 

Their dinner scene on the train and subsequent makeout session is one of the sexiest bits in classic film that just barely goes under the censors' radars. It's that type of energy that whisks this film through its twists and turns with only small moments to stop and catch our breath and appreciate Grant's Foster Brooks imitation.

Wise: That makes me thirsty for a bourbon, a sports car and a cap gun.
 

Werth: Hitchcock puts the Vistavision film format to its most spectacular use, creating horizons and heights that fill the widescreen with a desolate Indiana cornfield and the top of Mount Rushmore. 

The post-Vertigo use of technicolor is a shade less overt, but still the siennas, salmon pinks, blue greens, and reds punctuate settings and costumes, earning the film a Best Art Direction-Set Decoration Oscar nomination. Many of the sets start off as real exterior shots, but the cornfield, Mount Rushmore, and the U.N. all become meticulously crafted sets or dreamy matte paintings under Hitchcock's direction. 

At the beginning of the film Thornhill says in advertising, "there is no such thing as a lie." In a Hitchock film, everything, from the blonde to the Vandamm house set on top of Mount Rushmore is one thrilling, cinematic lie.
  

Wise: There may not be quite so many lies in The Band Wagon (1953), but it does involve some fancy footwork from another of Wasserman's clients, Fred Astaire.  Considered by many as one of the best musicals from old Hollywood, The Band Wagon casts Astaire as fading movie star Tony Hunter who absconds to New York where he hopes to revive his film career by starring in a Broadway show written by his old pals Lester and Lily Marton (Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray).  Hoping to make a sensation, the trio convinces Broadway wunderkind Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan) to direct the show; instead he transforms the Martons's madcap musical into a grim update of Faust.  

Werth:  I know when I think of Faust, I think of tap numbers.

Wise: Buchanan's one brilliant coup is casting ballet star Gabrielle Gerard (Cyd Charisse) as the female lead despite the reservations of her manager/boyfriend Paul Byrd (Thomas Mitchell).  Beyond that, his grandiose ideas prove to be a flop, and the highly anticipated tryout in New Haven bombs so badly that all the financial backers flee the production.   To save the show, Tony sells his art collection to fund an overhaul and ends up with both a Broadway smash and the girl.  

Werth: The art market was very good in 1953. 

Wise: Screenwriting team Betty Comden and Adolph Green have obvious fun spoofing their own reputations—Fabray and Levant brilliantly capture the team's sophistication and its neuroses—as well as director Vincente Minnelli in the over-the-top campiness of Buchanan.  

Of course Minnelli brings his own signature use of color and deft camera moves to the mix, although he wisely allows Astaire's genius to take center stage.  The sparks never really fly between 

Astaire and Charisse, nevertheless Astaire's dancing is impossibly romantic whether with a shoeshine man (Leroy Daniels) in a Times Square penny arcade or with Charisse in a soundstage version of Central Park that's almost better than the real thing.  

Werth: It's all thanks to the late, great Lew Wasserman—who was better at picking movies than he was at picking eyewear.

Wise: Check back with Film Gab next week for more of our favorite picks.

Some Like it Gab!

Wise: Welcome home, Werth!

Werth: Why, thank you, Wise. It was so nice to come home from my European vacation to find out that BAM is throwing me a special Welcome Home party.

Wise: BAM is throwing you a Welcome Home party?

Werth: What else could a festival of Marilyn Monroe movies mean?

Wise: Right, Lance. And the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade is for your birthday. 

Werth: The festival starts today, July 1st, and runs through July 17th, and includes all of Marilyn's best work. Marilyn was my gateway drug to the world of classic film so I can't wait to catch a couple of these flicks on the big screen. If only I could move into BAM for a couple weeks...

Wise: I know this must be difficult for you, but if you had to choose your favorite Marilyn movie—which would it be?

Werth: I can't. It would be like picking out your favorite child if all of your children were beautiful, talented and never sassed you back. 

Wise: Your children will be genetically full of sass.

Werth: —but for today's Film Gab, I'd like to talk about what many feel is her most well-rounded and fully realized role—the nightclub chanteuse, Cherie in Joshua Logan's Bus Stop (1956). After her uber-successful turn in The Seven Year Itch (1955), Marilyn high-tailed it to New York City to study with Lee Strasberg at the prestigious Actors' Studio, made 20th Century Fox re-negotiate her contract in her favor, started her own production company, and began dating famed playwright Arthur Miller.

Wise: None of that seems to be the work of a dumb blond.

Werth: Exactly. Marilyn was fighting desperately to be taken seriously by the studio and the public, so Bus Stop, the movie version of the highly acclaimed William Inge Broadway play, was critical to her re-creating her persona. Bus Stop tells the story of Beau Decker, a naive, never-off-the-ranch cowboy (played with annoying fervor by handsome Don Murray) who goes to Phoenix to compete in a rodeo and find the gal he's gonna marry. When he hears Cherie singing "That Old Black Magic" in a cheap honky-tonk, he's convinced he's found his "angel." 

Wise: Because nothing puts a man more in the mood for love than bronco busting. 

Werth: But Cherie has no intention of being thrown off her unlikely Hollywood stardom "direction" by being diverted to matrimony on a cattle ranch. So what is Beau to do but lasso Cherie and drag her onto a bus bound for Montana. 

Wise: Who wouldn't fall for a man with a bus ticket and a plan for abduction?  

Werth: While many of the typical Marilyn touches are here (beautiful pale skin and blond hair, singing and humor that relies on her not being the sharpest pin in the cushion) she elevates these elements beyond mere comedy to develop her character—much as a dramatic actress would craft a role. Cherie is so much more than a "dumb hillbilly." She is soft and tender, lost, willful, and earth-shatteringly beautiful without glamor. Her show costume is ripped, her hair mussy and in one scene Logan even catches Marilyn drooling languidly on her arm.

Wise: Drooling usually makes me worry that I've had an aneurysm. 

Werth: Unfortunately Marilyn's desire to re-craft her movie career was not successful, but with Bus Stop, Monroe proved she could act—and it's sad that we never got to see her fully realize her potential as a more mature actress. 

Wise: I think there are a few clues about what that might have looked like in one of her final performances, and while it's a little bit difficult to come by, Something's Got to Give, a reconstruction of her final, uncompleted film, is definitely worth watching.  

Werth: The reconstruction was included as part of the documentary Marilyn: The Final Days. 

Wise: The film, a remake of Cary Grant-starring farce My Favorite Wife, began filming in 1962 under the direction of George Cukor and co-starred Dean Martin as Nick Arden, an attorney who has his wife declared dead seven years after her boat was lost at sea.  Ellen (Marilyn) reappears just before Nick and his new wife Bianca (Cyd Charisse) return from their honeymoon, and the revelation that Nick is an inadvertent bigamist drives all the screwball comedy that follows.  

Werth: Bigamy—Mormonism's greatest gift to comedy.

Wise: The Marilyn that appears in the footage is very different from the comedienne who had been charming audiences for over a decade.  Plagued by an acute sinus infection she had caught on a trip to New York to study with  Strasburg, and still recovering from gall bladder surgery left her twenty-five pounds lighter than her typical adult weight, Marilyn was thinner and more mournful than the giggly buxom blond she normally played. 

Werth: The documentary also points out she was heavy into her affair with one or both of the Kennedy boys—not to mention her addiction to sleeping pills that plagued her last several films. 
 

Wise: There are some great comedic bits that survive (including Wally Cox playing a milquetoast Ellen recruits as an alibi), but an undercurrent of sadness runs through the competed scenes.  Of course, Marilyn's illness was partly to blame, but she's also playing a woman who has lost everything—her husband, her children, her home—and she's not sure whether there's still a place for her among them or even if she wants to be there.  

It makes me wonder how much Marilyn connected this role with the events in her own life; the hardships in both her personal and professional lives must have made returning to a film set into a bit like haunting a world where you no longer exist.  

Werth:  Pretty spooky, Wise.  But Marilyn wouldn't have wanted to creep us out. Let's pep up this Welcome Home party with some blond fireworks.  

Wise: Happy Fourth of July to all our Film Gab readers!