Cuckoo for Cukor!

Werth: Hello, Wise.

Wise: Hello, Werth. Still basking in the glow of our weekend movie marathon?

Werth: Yes, and my cranberry sparkly cocktail.

Wise: It was great fun to watch the American Masters documentary On Cukor (2000) as well as one of his masterworks, The Philadelphia Story starring his frequent collaborator and longtime friend Katharine Hepburn.  Based on the Broadway smash by Philip Barry, the film opens with one of the most recognizable (and funny) scenes in all of screwball comedy.

Hepburn plays Tracy Samantha Lord, an imperious socialite from the Philadelphia Main Line, who divorces her first husband, playboy C.K. Dexter Haven (Grant), and chooses self-made man George Kittredge (John Howard) as her next fiancé.  The nuptuals attract the attention of the tabloid press and with the help of Dexter, reporter Macauly Conner (Jimmy Stewart) and photographer Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) finagle invitations under assumed names sparking a series of madcap adventures, revelations, and hijinks that eventually lead to happily ever after.  

Werth: Don't forget the drunken shenanigans!

Wise: After rapidly ascending the Hollywood ladder in the mid-30's, Hepburn's star had been somewhat tarnished by a series of misfires and flops at the end of the decade, prompting theater owners to label her "box office poison."  Hepburn retreated to the stage, found a hit in Barry's play, and with the help of then-sweetheart Howard Hughes, she purchased the film rights and brought the project back to MGM where she insisted that Cukor direct. 

It turns out to have been a savvy decision because his guidance helped her forge a performance that embraced both her somewhat prickly image as well as her more tender, romantic side.  

Werth: Not to mention directing Stewart to his only competitive Oscar win.

Wise: The rest of the cast is uniformly excellent.  Grant deploys all his usual charms, although he mutes his performance with a tinge of sadness, marking him as a heel who has seen the error of his ways.  Stewart also shows unsuspected facets of his personality, leavening his everyman quality with a romantic passion that makes him alluring to Tracy.  Cukor's hand is everywhere evident in the finished film, coaxing greater nuance from his actors and allowing the camera to linger on their faces, bringing the film's drama and humor into greater focus.

Werth: I found it interesting that On Cukor neglected to mention the long relationship Cukor enjoyed with film queen Joan Crawford. Starting with his pinch-hitting direction of 1935's No More Ladies, Cukor would direct Crawford only four times, but his work with her on 1939's The Women helped catapault Crawford into a new phase of her career, and started a lifelong friendship.

Crawford credited Cukor with helping her give more depth to her roles, and the Cukor Effect is on full display in their 1941 collaboration, A Woman's Face. A re-make of a 1938 Swedish film that helped launched Ingrid Bergman's career, A Woman's Face begins in a Swedish courtroom where Anna Holm (Crawford) is on trial for murder.

Wise: Sounds like Mildred Pierce meets the Swedish Chef.

Werth: Witness testimonies kickstart the flashback where Anna meets spendy playboy Torsten Barring (Conrad Veidt) as he struggles to pay his check at her restaurant, a Hansel and Gretel-esque setting with Anna as the waiting witch. We also see a fantastic makeup job as shadows and Anna's turned head are undone and we discover that half of her face is horribly disfigured.

The scarring is repellant and made more dramatic by the fact that we can still see half of Crawford's legendary face—a constant reminder of the beauty that might have been. Shunned and mistreated all her life, Anna's soul is as disfigured as her face, so she makes a living as a blackmailer and falls in love with the no-good Torsten.





Wise: I guess absconding with sopranos to the basement of the Paris Opera House was out of the question. 

Werth: During a blackmail touch gone wrong, Anna meets plastic surgeon Dr.Gustaf Segert (Melvyn Douglas) who decides to re-make Anna's face. Like a Pygmalion of the soul, Dr. Segert hopes that by restoring the beauty to Anna's face, he can restore the beauty to her conscience. But Anna is now torn between two men and herself. Crawford often played tough cookies who were bad because they'd been made that way. But in no other film is this theme given such graphic visual expression.

Anna is coarse, cold-blooded and, in one particular slapping scene, vicious. But we see the grisly reason why: Crawford's innate sense of "otherness" is given a physical reality, so when her face is returned to normal (if Crawford's unique features could ever be considered normal) Crawford gives a great performance struggling to undo the hard exterior she'd formed to protect herself and become a woman deserving of love.

Wise: If only Faye Dunaway had been half as successful in removing her horrifyingly deformed mask. 

Werth: Cukor was not usually known for thrillers, but the melodrama in A Woman's Face winds up going in that direction. Cukor made the unique decision not to include underscoring in some of the tensest scenes, letting the environmental sounds of a waterfall and jangling sleighbells give an eeriness to the proceedings.

It's not entirely successful, but A Woman's Face is clearly a warm-up for Cukor who three years later would make one of the best psychological thrillers of the Forties, Gaslight.  

Wise: We'll have to watch that one on our next Cukor Festival.

Werth: I'll get the cocktails ready. Film Gabbers, what director-focused film festival would you like to gab about?



Order in the Gab!

Wise: Hi there, Werth.  Why the glum face?

Werth: Oh, hello, Wise.  I've been doing jury duty all week and I'm bored, bored, bored.

Wise: Aren't you excited by fulfilling your civic duty?

Werth: I'd only be excited by my civic duty if it involved Christopher Meloni and the patented Dick Wolf sting.

 

Wise: Come on, Werth.  It's your chance to participate in the wheels of justice.  And, of course, it's the perfect opportunity to salute the pleasures of cinematic courtroom drama, like Billy Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution (1957).  Adapted from Agatha Christie's West End hit dramatization of her own short story, Witness stars Charles Laughton as Sir Wilfrid Robarts, a brilliant English barrister just returned from a months-long stay in the hospital after a heart attack.  

Famous for his unconventional tactics, Sir Wilfrid cannot resist—despite the strenuous objections of his nurse Miss Plimsoll (Laughton's real-life wife Elsa Lanchester)—when an intriguing case falls into his lap.

Werth: Thinking of Elsa and Charles together in flagrante makes me want to object.

Wise: Hapless veteran Leonard Vole (a very sweaty Tyrone Power) stands accused of murdering a rich spinster who had just made him the beneficiary of her will.  His only alibi in the face of mounting circumstantial evidence is the testimony of his frigid German wife Christine (Marlene Dietrich).  

Recognizing that Christine's chilly demeanor will only stymie his defense, Sir Wilfrid instead pokes holes in the prosecutor's theories and seems close to winning until Christine is called to testify against her husband.  At the last minute, a mysterious phone call leads to evidence securing Leonard's exoneration, but it also raises Sir Wilfred's suspicions, culminating in a series of shocking reversals that theater owners warned viewers not to reveal.

Werth: The only mysterious phone call in my jury session was some old lady's marimba ringtone.

Wise: Part of Christie's genius is her ability to indulge in stereotypes as well as subvert them: Sir Wilfrid is both a blustering fool and a canny defender; Christine is both heartless and undone by her emotions.  Wilder capitalizes on this by heightening both the drama and the campy-ness—even creating the role of the nurse to take advantage of Lanchester's chemistry with Laughton—making Witness probably the best film version of any Christie property.

Werth: Even better than Murder on the Orient Express?
 

Wise: Yes, because I think Witness really captures Christie's sense of humor.  Her books feature some brutal crimes, but they're leavened by a certain tongue in cheek quality that the plummier adaptations of her work miss.  For all its pleasures, Orient Express overindulges in nostalgia for 1930's Deco Britain, and misses the point (that Wilder so brilliantly captures) that Dame Agatha's idealized England is the conveyance for murderous hijinks and not the destination itself.
 

Werth: If you're in the mood for hijinks, no courtroom has more of them than the Tracy-Hepburn classic, Adam's Rib (1949). Adam (Tracy) and Amanda (Hepburn) are married lawyers who find themselves on the opposite sides of the table at an attempted murder trial. Adam wants to throw the book at ditzy, would-be murderess Doris Attinger (a sparkling Judy Holliday), but Amanda defends her, turning the trial into a crusade for women's equality.

Wise: I love when homicide transforms into urbane wit. 

Werth: Written by married screenscribes Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, Adam's Rib mines the seemingly endless gold that the Tracy-Hepburn screen-teaming produced.Tracy is gruff and charming as a somewhat old-fashioned man who loves and respects his wife—but believes that the law is the law. Hepburn is regal in her defense of womanhood, but at the same time a giddy woman in love with her man. 

The courtroom moves into the bedroom and vice versa as the two butt heads and soon these two legal eagle love birds are pecking each other's eyes out. The famous massage scene culminates with the heinie smack heard around the world.

Wise: The happy ending joke writes itself.

Werth: By the end we are less worried about who wins the case and more about how these two people who are made for each other will find their way back to a happy marriage. Tracy and Hepburn were so good at these battle of the sexes flicks because they gave their comedy a serious side. 

If he was just a sexist pig and she an overheated women's libber, these movies would never work. But these two actors were so skilled at working their love and respect for each other into their characters that Adam and Amanda feel more full and real—making us see both sides and wanting to find a way for both of them to be right. 

Director George Cukor also wisely enlisted the comic abilities of Holliday and fey-neighbor extraordinaire David Wayne to heighten the level of comedy in the picture without making Tracy and Hepburn shoulder all the humor. Many feel Adam's Rib is the best display of the Tracy and Hepburn magic, and this juror is happy to find in their favor.

Wise: So did your jury service end with you hooking up with Cher like Dennis Quaid did in Suspect (1987)?

Werth: Only the jury box knows for sure. Tune in next week for more legal shenanigans from Film Gab!

Red State Stars

Werth: Happy Friday, Wise!

Wise: Happy Friday, Werth! I trust you survived this week with your chipper-ness intact.

Werth: I did—but with so much focus on Republicans in the media, I got a little antsy.

Wise: Now, now, Werth. Republicans can be a great source of entertainment—and some of them were even great movie stars. Long before she became a pal of high-powered Republicans, or the U.S. Ambassador to Ghana (1974) and Czechoslovakia (1989), but after she had abandoned the frilly dresses and sausage curls, Shirley Temple tried to make a career of being a teenage movie star. 

Werth:  This is the second time you've talked about late-career Shirley Temple.  

Wise: It's a fascinating period as she attempts to transform from Depression-era icon of spirited pluck and into a more complicated image of a young woman whose desire to do right is sometimes torpedoed by her overblown romantic fantasies.  


Werth: The Good Ship Lollipop could have used a torpedo...  

Wise: In The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947) Temple stars as seventeen-year-old Susan Turner who unceremoniously discards her boyfriend after playboy/artist Richard Nugent (Cary Grant) delivers a lecture at her school.  Her sudden infatuation is so intense that her older sister and guardian Margaret (Myna Loy playing a dour, smalltown judge with a bit of a wink) forces Grant to pose as Temple's boyfriend until she gets over the crush.  This leads to some fantastic comedy as Grant gamely delivers nonsensical teenage patois, makes a mad dash in a sack race, and suffers the kind of indignities that only an actor with his unflappable charm could endure.  

Werth: He doesn't tapdance on a stairway with her, does he?

Wise: Screenwriter Sidney Sheldon captures and caricatures the pretensions of each character—including fine comedic work from Harry Davenport, Rudy Vallee and Ray Collins—and won an Oscar for best screenplay.  His script is both funny and savvy and features the kind of cross-talking gymnastics that Grant specialized in during these screwball comedies.  

But it is Temple herself who has the biggest heart and gives the biggest performance in this movie—she is sly, witty, vulnerable and endearing—and it's a shame there aren't more examples of her skills playing a young adult.  

Werth: My favorite Hollywood Republican never had sausage curls, but he was definitely a beefcake. William Holden considered himself a moderate Republican, but was not very politically active, unless you count his stint as best man at Ronald Reagan's wedding to Nancy Davis in 1952 (back when Reagan was still a Democrat.)

Wise: Also before the Republicans abandoned the country club for NASCAR. 

Werth: Holden made a career out of playing leading men who had brains as well as looks, and his turn as journalist Paul Verrall in Born Yesterday (1950) is no exception. Paul is hired by scrap metal magnate cum gangster Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford) to smarten up his ex-chorus girl fiancée (pronounced "fee-an-see") Billie (Judy Holliday) so she won't embarrass Harry while he wines, dines and bribes Washington, DC, congressmen and their wives.

Wise: Now, of course, the obvious path for dim-witted dames afflicted by malapropisms is running for President. 

Werth: Paul wants to write a story on how crooked Harry is, so a civics lesson for Billie is the perfect chance for him to get in close. Following the bible of romantic comedies, Paul and Billie fall in love, but the unique element is how Billie is transformed—not by love—but by knowledge. She goes from being comfortable with being stupid as long as she gets a coupla' mink coats designed by Jean Louis, to a woman who wants a better life for herself and for her country... but who still wears Jean Louis.

Wise: These days you'd be stupid to want mink coats—unless you enjoy having paint thrown at you.

Werth: Directed by George Cukor and based on the successful Garson Kanin stageplay, Born Yesterday has its moments of "too cute" as Billie learns about democracy walking with Paul through quaint '50's DC locations, but the performances of the three leads more than make up for it. Holden is so effortlessly charming on camera that it is impossible not to fall head over heels in love with him—even when he's wearing glasses. 

Broderick Crawford gets the right balance of doofus and menace to make Harry the comic villain that we like less than we hate. And Holliday puts in an Oscar-winning performance as Billie (she beat both Bette Davis for All About Eve and Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard). Following-up her performance in the role on Broadway, she chirps and squawks her way through the film with comic precision and sensitivity—creating a woman that transcends the typical dumb, blonde, mob moll stereotype. 

Wise: See. Didn't I tell you that Republicans could be entertaining?

Werth: At least when they're on the silver screen. Tune in next week when we discuss Michelle Bachman in The Goodbye Girl.

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!