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!
Wise: Howdy, Werth. It's Memorial Day weekend and the beginning of summer. Do you have your flip flops, towels and sunscreen ready?
Werth: Um, don't you mean my mosquito repellant and travel wine?
Wise: I forgot that while I'm taking in some seaside sun, you'll be headed to the mountains. But there's one thing we can always agree on: Great Summer Movies!
Werth: My pick this week might have been great, but too many choice ingredients made Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) a sweaty hodge podge of a movie. Suddenly's pedigree certainly pointed towards greatness. You could have swung a dead cat and hit a legend. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with a script written by Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, and starring Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Mercedes McCambridge, producer Sam Spiegel must have smelled Oscar gold. But his nose would wind-up smelling something less fragrant.
Wise: Maybe that dead cat you're swinging around.
Werth: Suddenly opens in the moist setting of New Orleans where brain surgeon Dr. Cukrowicz (Clift) is summoned for an audience with hospital benefactress and all-around rich bitch, Violet Venable (Hepburn). Venable descends in a two-floor elevator to tell the good doctor that she will give money to his failing hospital if he retrieves her niece Catherine (Taylor) from a nun-run mental institution and promptly give her a lobotomy so she will stop saying crazy things about Venable's beloved dead son, Sebastian.
Wise: Because nothing says "I love you" more than severing the frontal lobe.
Werth: As Venable gives Cukrowicz a tour of the Eden-ic garden that her son designed, we get the sense that Sebastian and his mom were a little too close for comfort. And when Cukrowicz meets Catherine to find not a raging lunatic, but a fragile, willful beauty who has been shocked into amnesia regarding Sebastian's mysterious death, Cukrowicz smells something fishy. It doesn't help that Catherine's own mother (McCambridge) urges her to get the lobotomy so that they won't be written out of Violet's lucrative will.
Wise: I'm sure that fishy smell wasn't her White Diamonds perfume.
Werth: Cukrowicz of course falls in love with Catherine because it's impossible not to fall in love with the luminous, young Elizabeth Taylor, and has a final showdown in front of the family where a little sodium pentothal reveals what really happened to dear Sebastian... kind of.
The ending of Suddenly was as ripe for parody as it was for head-scratching and contributed to the overall sense of audience and critical confusion about the film. The offscreen history probably didn't help. Clift was still in recovery from a car accident that messed up his face and found it difficult to perform long takes. Mankiewicz was rumored to have been so cruel to Clift, that at the end of shooting, Hepburn spit in Mankiewicz's face.
And troubles with the Production Code meant Williams and Vidal (but apparently entirely Vidal) had to write the script so it dealt with incest, cannibalism and homosexuality without pissing off the Legion of Decency. The film wound-up garnering Oscar noms for Hepburn and Taylor and for the art and set design of Sebastian's gothic garden. But overall, this summer film landed in the winter of Hollywood's discontent.
Wise: Summer Stock (1950) is not Judy Garland's best film, but it may be her sunniest. As farmer Jane Falbury, she reluctantly allows her younger sister Abigail (Gloria DeHaven) to bring a theater troupe to stay at the farm to rehearse a new show; in return, the actors promise to lend a hand around the struggling farm. The director of the troupe, Joe Ross (Gene Kelly), notices Jane's singing and dancing talent and encourages her to perform in the show the troupe is rehearsing,
much to the chagrin of Jane's stodgy fiancé Orville (Eddie Bracken) and his even stodgier father Jasper Wingait (the always wonderful Ray Collins). The town fathers attempt to drive off the theater folk, but eventually cooler heads—and some swinging dance numbers—prevail.
Werth: Dance numbers always prevail.
Wise: The plot may be silly, but Summer Stock is chock full of great music and performances. Kelly performs a career defining solo in a darkened barn, using a creaky board and an old newspaper as props. The concept doesn't sound very promising, but Kelly's ability to transform the ordinary into something transcendent became part of his signature style.
He and Garland share one of their best dance duets in "Portland Fancy" by turning an old folk tune into swing. Phil Silvers has some fun comic moments as Kelly's sidekick, but the best laughs go to Marjorie Main as Garland's housekeeper.
Werth: Don't forget handsome MGM musical chorusboy Carleton Carpenter. He's a delightful gentleman who can add old school glamor to a night at Marie's Crisis.
Wise: In some ways, it's surprising that Summer Stock is Garland's last film at MGM, the studio that had nurtured (and occasionally tortured) her from adolescence and into stardom. She sings with gusto and brings both her crack comic timing and her tender vulnerability to a role that was designed to be an easy fit after her spectacular flame-out in the preparation for Annie Get Your Gun. But off-screen, all the familiar problems plagued the production, and once the shoot was over, Garland and MGM parted ways.
Even so, Summer Stock contains some memorable performances, including an impeccably timed number on a tractor and the legendary "Get Happy" which proved that Garland could sizzle hotter than the August sun.
Werth: All this talk about summer is making me want to turn on my AC and strip down to my unmentionables.
Wise: Tune in next week for more fun in the sun with Film Gab!
Wise: Howdy, Werth!
Werth: Don't howdy, me! After all you've done to me, I would think you would be ashamed to even speak to me!
Wise: Hunh?
Werth: I just figured with all the Hollywood couples that have been breaking up, maybe we should have a blow-out so we can make some headlines.
Wise: As opposed to making headlines for being such a great writing team?
Werth: Come on Wise! Bad couples are so much more fun to watch! Take Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Mike Nichols's screen adaptation of Edward Albee's Broadway sensation was the perfect film to showcase this fiery Hollywood couple in all their dysfunctional glory. Taylor and Burton first met at a party in 1952 while Liz was married to Michael Wilding, but it wasn't until the two were teamed up in the mega-budget epic Cleopatra (1963) that sparks and gossip columns started to fly. By 1964 the two had rid themselves of their spouses, laughed at a Vatican condemnation, and tied the knot.
Wise: Plus made themselves the archetype for every Hollywood power couple ever since.
Werth: In Woolf (Burton and Taylor's fourth screen pairing), the studio played yet again to the public's perception of their wild and passionate relationship only this time the vehicle wound up being a well-crafted Oscar magnet that proved the acting talents of both Taylor and Burton.
George (Burton) and Martha (Taylor) are a middle-aged couple who live near the campus of the college where George teaches and where Martha's dad is president. From the first shot of the two entering their home, Nichols throws the audience a major curveball. Handsome Burton is wrinkled and worn-out in a sweater and glasses, and the normally glamorous and sexy Taylor is replaced by a frumpy, loud-mouthed house frau.
Bickering about a line from a Bette Davis movie, Martha continues her drinking jag, "braying" and chewing on her ice while George keeps pace with her drinking and her verbal barbs. It's all a warm-up for the battle of wits royale that will take place in front of (and include) a new university couple (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) that innocently accepted an invitation for a nightcap, but wind up staying for a night of "games" and revelations.
Wise: Sounds like their martinis were shaken and stirred.
Werth: George and Martha seethe with rancor for one another to the point that you can't imagine why they are together. But that's the real beauty of this work. Taylor and Burton not only masterfully depict the snide resentment, but also the tender attachment of two people who are so lost they only have each other to cling to.
It's hard to believe that their real-life marriage was full of as much venom and spite as George and Martha's, but considering their divorce, then re-marriage, then re-divorce eight years later, you can't help but think Dick and Liz brought a little of their tumultuous relationship to these characters. However they did it, both were nominated for Oscars (Taylor and Dennis won) and the film remains a mesmerizing example of how to translate a cerebral stage property to the screen.
Wise: Another play-turned-film that also features a couple both at war and in love with each other is The Letter (1940), director William Wyler's adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's 1929 play of the same name. Justly famous for the opening scene where Bette Davis as Leslie Crosbie guns down her lover Geoff Hammond (David Newell) on the steps of her husband's rubber plantation in British Malaya, the film follows that initial salvo with a crackerjack combination of marital infidelity, deceit and manipulation.
Werth: And fantastic lace-making!
Wise: Disguising the crime as an act of self-defense, Leslie is sent to jail as a mere formality until the native assistant to her attorney Howard Joyce (James Stephenson) delivers a copy of an incriminating letter written by Leslie to her lover. Joyce immediately tracks down Hammond's widow (a scintillating Gale Sondergaard in full dragon lady drag) who insists on an outrageous ransom for the return of the purloined post.
Werth: Sondergaard would give Myrna Loy and Luise Rainer a real run for their money in a "white chick playing Asian" contest.
Wise: Davis earned a nomination for Best Actress for The Letter, and it's easy to see why: her turn as a killer who's also a wronged woman fighting for her life in a courtroom drama is mesmerizing. It also represents what Davis did perhaps better than any other classic Hollywood actress: playing the woman who deserved her sorry end and yet was principled enough to know it. Her performance is a thrilling combination of cruelty and honor.
Herbert Marshall as the wronged husband has fewer scenes, but is no less potent as a man who would give up anything to save his wife.
Werth: Herbert Marshall would get more marital woe from Davis when they were paired again a year later in The Little Foxes.
Wise: Of course the film wouldn't gel without James Stephenson's excellent work as attorney Joyce. A relative unknown when he was cast, he went on to earn an Oscar nomination for the role. His performance both supports Davis's heavy lifting, as well as functioning as audience surrogate, reacting to Leslie's deeds with both admiration and revulsion.
Guiding all these performances through an Orientalism-inflected noir landscape, director Wyler suggests that marriage is after all the perfect balance between crime and passion.
Werth: I'm sorry I yelled at you earlier, Wise. Let's make up.
Wise: Did you just realize that we could get press coverage by getting back together like K-Patt?
Werth: I realize we'll both be back next week for more Film Gab!
To warm you up for Sunday's Oscar glamour-fest, U.K. paper The Telegraph has a great photo collection online of past winners of the Academy Award with their statuettes. Where else will you see Barbra Streisand kissing John Wayne?
Werth: Hey Wise—Film Forum is at it again!
Wise: Did you bribe the programming director to schedule another Joan festival?
Werth: Starting today, Friday October 21st, Film Forum is celebrating the centennial of legendary film composer Bernard Herrmann by showing 22 of his most famous films!
Wise: Wow! That's a lot of Herrmann!
Werth: Starting off with a bang in 1941, NYC native Herrmann composed the soundtrack to Orson Welles' mammoth film standard, Citizen Kane, and proceeded to churn out soundtracks for 34 years for unforgettable films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Cape Fear (1962) and even Taxi Driver (1976).
Wise: You left out all the great movies he scored for Alfred Hitchcock.
Werth: I saved the best for last. Herrmann scored some of Hitchcock's best including The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), North By Northwest (1959) and perhaps his most innovative and memorable score, Hitch's masterpiece, Psycho (1960).
Wise: I thought Hitchcock's masterpiece was Vertigo (1958).
Werth: Herrmann did that soundtrack too—but for my money Hitchcock was at his most clever and visually innovative in Psycho, and Herrmann's soundtrack was an integral part of the film's brilliance.
To synopsize Psycho is pointless. It is one of the most well-known films in the world and its matchless shower scene a source of horror and parody worldwide.
Wise: And also the reason why I keep all the wigs and chocolate syrup under lock and key at my house.
Werth: Brilliant shower scene aside, the rest of the movie is one smart, thrilling cookie. Clever shot set-ups that make inanimate objects living arbiters of fate; startling close-ups on impassive and horrified faces; the use of point-of-view to make us believe we have learned a secret, when in fact, like a master of cinematic sleight-of-hand, the truth is still concealed.
Psycho is about the act of watching: the sunglass-ed highway cop (Mort Mills), Anthony Perkins' peeping Norman Bates, and the windows of the Bates House that gaze out like empty eyes—all for the most important voyeur—us. Herrmann's all-string orchestrations are critical to the schizophrenic pace of the film—at one moment manic and discordant, the next silent, conspicuous by its absence.
It's said that Hitchcock originally wanted the shower scene sans music, but after he heard Herrmann's ideas, he literally changed his tune and now the screaming violins are inseparable from the iconic images of Janet Leigh soapily meeting her maker.
Wise: I'm a fan of Perkins as the ultimate momma's boy.
Werth: He was stellar as the pitiful Norman whose attempts to be normal are so neurotic they're creepy. Unfortunately it was a performance so memorable that audiences couldn't forget it, and Perkins never seemed to emerge from the shadow of the Bates Motel.
Wise: Shadows also play an important role in one of Herrmann's earlier works: the score for Jane Eyre (1943) starring Joan Fontaine as the titular heroine—
Werth: She is very titular...
Wise: And a perplexing Orson Welles as her tormentor and lover Edward Rochester. The film began as a radio play adapted by John Houseman for Welles' Mercury Theatre and was adapted again for the screen at 20th Century Fox using many of the same actors.
Legend has it that Welles was the one to suggest emphasizing the noir aspects of the film—filling the screen with shadows, fog and murky vistas—which preserved the more Gothic aspects of Charlotte Brontë's novel and saved the movie from the rosier, more traditional Hollywood approach to classics.
Werth: If only someone could have saved Welles' waistline.
Wise: Welles nails Rochester's brooding demeanor, although his plump, boy genius face seems entirely wrong for Brontë's haunted hero.
Fontaine has an easier time of it, using many of the same tricks she perfected in Hitchcock's Rebecca: mostly a lot of trembling and hesitating, although the ferocity and devotion expressed through her eyes is fantastic. Mercury regular Agnes Moorehead has a juicy turn as Jane's wicked aunt, and even an uncredited Elizabeth Taylor in her first screen appearance does a creditable job as Jane's sickly schoolfriend.
Werth: "These Kleenex have always brought me luck."
Wise: But it is Herrmann's score that really brings all these elements together, combining the sweeping romanticism of strings with frequent tumbles into dissonance. His music is both eerie and ecstatic, and the perfect compliment to the film.
Werth: I'm ecstatic that we get to see so many of Herrmann's film's on the big screen.
Wise: You have until November 3, to watch his best, and in the meantime we'll orchestrate plenty more Film Gab.
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