Wise: Werth, where's your life jacket?
Werth: With my yacht.
Wise: It's the anniversary of both the launch of the Titanic and the Johnstown Flood which makes it highly probable that something disastrous is going to happen today.
Werth: You can't avoid disaster, Wise. But you can prepare yourself by indulging in some classic disaster flicks and gleaning some tips for making it out alive.
Wise: San Francisco (1936) is one of the first great disaster flicks, setting the template for all the films that follow its lead. The film opens on New Year's Eve 1904, and stars Clark Gable as Blackie Norton, a casino owner from the wrong side of town, and Spencer Tracy as his best friend Father Mullin who happens to be the local parish priest. Blackie has no time for religion, but he is determined to spend his wealth trying to make things better for anyone down on his luck. After a fire ravages a run-down boarding house, Blackie offers a job to displaced chanteuse Mary Blake (Jeanette MacDonald) who has dreams of singing in the local opera house.
Soon, the two fall in love, but Mary flees into the arms of Jack Holt (Jack Burley), the richest man in town, when she realizes that she'll lose good-girl image if she becomes Jackie's bride. What she doesn't know is that her new beau made his fortune building shoddy tenements, leaving the city vulnerable to catastrophe.
Werth: Never date a contractor.
Wise: When that catastrophe strikes in the form of the famous San Francisco earthquake of 1905, the city is thrown into chaos and only those with quick wits and good morals survive. Gable plays a variation of his famous tough-guy persona, but he's also a man on a spiritual journey.
Contemptuous of religion, the tragedy forces him to confront both despair and the threat of losing the two people he loves most. Cast in the familiar role of the understanding clergyman, Tracy has less of an emotional arc, but his palpable chemistry with Gable makes them believable lifelong friends. MacDonald was the biggest star of the three at the time of the film, and it's interesting to see how MGM's star diva stepped away from the operettas for which she was famous and into a grubby, frontier town.
Werth: "As she stood in the ruins and sang. A-A-And saaannnggg!"
Wise: To be honest, for years I thought San Francisco was something of a joke, based mostly on the fun Judy Garland made of it when she sang the title song. But it's actually quite moving, full of the spectacle and big emotions that have become characteristic of this type of film. Nothing about it is subtle, but it's full of passion, of Clark Gable's snarls and tenderness, of Spencer Tracy's wry morality, and the peculiar—yet compelling—sight of Jeanette MacDonald stooping to a project she clearly felt beneath her, but still having a grand time.
Werth: San Francisco must be ground zero for cinematic disasters because Irwin Allen's hit epic, The Towering Inferno (1974), is also set there. Architect Doug Roberts (Paul Newman) is ready to leave the rat race behind after designing a 138 story skyscraper for building guru Jim Duncan (William Holden.)
But he soon uncovers some shady building practices that Duncan's son-in-law, the corner-cutting queen Roger Simmons (Richard Chamberlain in a rare unlikeable role) has been implementing to lower costs and pocket kickbacks, threatening the safety of the building. Unfortunately, while a red carpet opening event is in full swing on the top floor, an electrical box in a storage room that just happens to contain buckets of flammable material, a wall of Krylon spray-paint cans, and what looks like someone's discarded wedding dress bursts into flame and an evening of blazing terror in the world's tallest building begins.
Wise: Shelley Winters' swim team gold ain't gonna fix this mess.
Werth: After striking box office gold with The Poseidon Adventure in 1972, Allen stuck to his hit-making blueprint and stocked Inferno with just about every star in Hollywood. Aside from Newman and Holden, there's Steve McQueen as tough-as-nails Fire Chief O'Hallorhan; Faye Dunaway as Roberts' over-sexed wife; Fred Astaire as a dapper, washed-up con man;
Jennifer Jones as an art tutor with cheek implants that would make Madonna jealous; Robert Wagner as an executive who dips into the secretarial pool; and even O.J. Simpson as a take charge security officer who can't resist rescuing a kitten.
Wise: Making this scene the most ironic in Hollywood history.
Werth: All of those stars certainly attract attention, but unfortunately, there are too many of them to allow much character development. Newman and McQueen mix up a welcome testosterone cocktail whenever they are together, but for the most part the fragmented stories don't allow for the cohesion that Allen achieved in Poseidon. Inferno is too complicated and too cynical to achieve the heartfelt catharsis of its predecessor, but that doesn't stop it from being a hoot.
Like a cinematic flume ride, Inferno flies through its sometimes ridiculous plot providing the audience with the thrills it desires—mainly stars (and extras) screaming, falling and burning... in a couple cases all three at the same time.
While it falls short of the heights achieved in Poseidon, Inferno earned eight Oscar noms, winning three—including one for best song, "We May Never Love Like This Again" which, if you think sounds familiar, it's because it was both written and sung by the same folks who brought you the Oscar-winning song from Poseidon, "The Morning After."
Wise: With all this talk of disaster, maybe we should check out this week's premiere of After Earth.
Werth: I'd rather sit through the San Francisco earthquake... on fire...
Wise: Check back next week for more earth-shaking Film Gab!
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.
Werth: What's up, Wise?
Wise: Ugh, I'm having a weird craving for smorgasbord. Kind of like the place near my parents where busloads of seniors come to feast on a mile-long buffet of food. And afterward maybe I could catch a showing of Movie 43 because sometimes the only thing that will satisfy is an overflowing serving of mixed delights.
Werth: According to early reviews, you might not want to mix food and Movie 43. Might I suggest you curb your hunger pangs with our own festival of ensemble films?
Wise: Will there be an all-you-can-eat sundae bar included?
Werth: I'm afraid you'll have to bring your own frozen treat.
Wise: Well, I suppose I could do worse than Lucille Bremer's chilly mug in one of the greatest line-ups of MGM stars ever assembled: Ziegfeld Follies (1946).
Werth: Ann Miller lovingly dubbed Bremer, "Arthur Freed's whore."
Wise: But she was at the apex of her professional life in Ziegfeld. Paired with Fred Astaire in two elaborate musical numbers, she joined a cast that included some of the studio's best song and dance talent, including Gene Kelly, Astaire, Judy Garland, Cyd Charisse and Lena Horne.
The film also included some of the studio's top comedy stars with the likes of Lucille Ball, Fanny Brice and Red Skelton dishing out the laughs. William Powell reprises his role as the titular Broadway impresario from The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and envisions casting one of his legendary revues with the top stars of the day.
Werth: A white-haired Powell replaced the original opening which included puppets doing blackface and a talking Leo the Lion.
Wise: Fred Astaire opens with "Here's to the Girls," a confection of song and dance that includes a carousel of live horses, the requisite Ziegfeld girls bedecked in frothy layers of pink tulle, and a ballet solo by Charisse. Later, Ball emerges from the chorus and takes up a sequined whip to tame a pack of black-spangled dancers in puma costumes.
Werth: It's nice to see they used a little restraint in the first number.
Wise: Producer Arthur Freed had spent years assembling a team of top talent at MGM, and his production unit had proven itself with hits like Babes on Broadway (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944); Follies capitalized on that success and predicted two decades of the most sophisticated and popular movie musicals ever made.
And at the center of the Follies is a Judy Garland number titled "A Great Lady has an Interview" where she parodies a certain type of self-serious, Oscar-winning actress (think Greer Garson) who would much rather play a Betty Grable role. The segment was directed by Vincent Minnelli, choreographed by Charles Walters, written by Kay Thompson, and epitomizes the kind of smart, yet exhilarating, movie entertainments that came from Freed's wildly talented collaborators on both sides of the camera.
Werth: Another film that seems to have just about everyone in Hollywood in it is Stanley Kramer's 1963 epic comedy, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. After a group of travelers survive a car smash-up on a Southern California highway, they witness the last words of crook Smiler Grogan (played with bucket-kickin' glee by Jimmy Durante), detailing the whereabouts of a stash of hot loot.
Soon, it's every funny man and funny lady for themselves as they take cars, planes and even a little girl's bicycle to find the mysterious "big W" in Santa Rosita State Park.
Wise: I'm usually watching out for bears when I'm outdoors.
Werth: Following these cash hounds is Captain T.G. Culpeper (Spencer Tracy), who is hoping to end his career on a high note by finding the stolen simoleans. Mad World is truly madcap with several storylines breaking off and coming back together, then breaking off again before the big finish (three hours after it began) at a Long Beach hotel that is about to be demolished.
If it sounds exhausting, it is, but it is worth it to have fun with some of the great comedic talents of the era. Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters, Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Terry Thomas, Ethel Merman, Phil Sivers, Dick Shawn, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Peter Falk and that pint-sized ham Mickey Rooney trip, slap, insult and swindle their way across gorgeous Southern California.
And if that's not enough talent for you, the cameos include everyone from Jack Benny to the Three Stooges, Buster Keaton, Zasu Pitts, Joe E. Brown and Wise favorite, Edward Everett Horton.
Wise: I cribbed all my best comedy bits from him and Laura Hope Crews.
Werth: Mad World was a runaway smash and if it doesn't still hit all of its comedic marks today, it gives us some great nostalgia amongst the images of Mickey Rooney trying to fly a plane and Ethel slipping on a banana peel.
Wise: Speaking of bananas I'm ready to eat.
Werth: Strap on your feedbag and join us next week for another heaping helping of Film Gab!
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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