Film Gab Double J Birthday!

Werth: Wise, today's Film Gab birthday salute is to a really sassy gal.

Wise: You said it! Juliette Lewis has built an entire career on her big-hearted quirkiness. 

Werth: Juliette Lewis? I'm talking about silver screen star and Cross-Your-Heart bra icon, Jane Russell.

Wise: Should we toss a coin or compare cup sizes to see who goes first?

Werth: Decades before Juliette was making lewd tongue gestures at Robert DeNiro, Minnesota native Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell was one of the most talked-about women in Hollywood. 

Her film debut The Outlaw (1943) is the story of Billy the Kid, but one look at the marketing and it was obvious that producer/director Howard Hughes was more interested in telling the story of Jane Russell's cleavage. It was a strategy that worked, and Jane Russell was soon one of the most recognized starlets in Hollywood. Fast forward ten years and Russell's ample talents were being showcased again in what would become another iconic "body" film.  

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) follows chorusgirls Dorothy Shaw (Russell) and Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) as they take a cruise to France to get Lorelei's millionaire boyfriend (Tommy Noonan) to chase her across the Atlantic.

Wise: Which is a clever strategy because most people run toward millionaires—unless it's Donald Trump. 

Werth: Dorothy and Lorelei are the perfect female odd couple. Dorothy is streetwise, sensible and crass; wisecracking that she is looking for a man "who can run faster than I can" as she marches through a gym populated by Olympic athletes. 

Lorelei, on the other hand, couldn't care less what a man looks like as long as his wallet is handsome. And while she might have trouble spelling "tiara," she's smart enough to get rich men to give her shiny objects of affection, even if they have to pry them off their wives' heads.

Wise: I didn't know you could use a chapeau as a safety deposit box. 

Werth: Based on the popular musical, and directed by successful multi-genre director Howard Hawks, Gentlemen is a brisk, funny, tuneful romp that sustained Russell's career, and shot Monroe's into the stratosphere. Both actresses are perfect for their parts—and while that applies to their finely shaped body parts, it's important to remember that both of these gals were more than their measurements. 

Russell's arch banter turns a noir-like worldliness into comic jousting. She's particularly adept at mimicry in one scene where she has to pretend to be Lorelei for a French nightcourt. And Monroe's "dumb" blonde routine was so masterful, it would become the gold standard for comedic female roles for years to come. 

You could say that this is the movie that made Monroe a star, but also trapped her in a screen persona she would learn to deplore. But the sadness that would overwhelm Monroe's later career is nowhere to be found here. She is young, funny, dazzlingly beautiful, and has the whole world by the jewels. Russell and Monroe became friends and seemed genuinely to enjoy each other on the screen. 

They definitely looked chummy in the photos where they are pressing their hands into the wet cement of Grauman's Chinese Theatre, memorializing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and themselves for future film buffs.
  

Wise: While certainly no bombshell, Juliette Lewis has had a long career playing sensitive oddballs and deploying her weird beauty to create characters both subtle and over-the-top.  In What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993), she plays Becky, a teen traveling across the country with her grandmother.  When their truck breaks down in the small Iowa town of Endora, she strikes up a friendship with Gilbert (Johnny Depp).  Gilbert's life is consumed with caring for his mentally challenged brother Arnie (Leonardo DiCaprio), 

and complicated both by an affair with an older married woman (Mary Steenburgen) and by the depression of his severely obese mother (Darlene Cates).  As Gilbert grows increasingly frustrated by life, his troubles multiply, and he risks losing Becky's steadying influence.  

Werth: If Becky were as big as his mother, she'd be more steadying.

Wise: Depp brings tremendous sensitivity to the role, making Gilbert sympathetic while still acknowledging the character's faults.  Revisiting the film, it can be a shock to see Depp so modulated, particularly because his current career seems dedicated to outlandishness.  

He and Lewis are particularly well-matched in the film, and  the halting steps they take in revealing their mutual attraction feels painfully real.  Also painfully real is Darlene Cates as Gilbert's mother.  

Discovered by screenwriter Peter Hedges (who adapted his own novel) on an episode of The Sally Jesse Raphael Show, Cates was an actual recluse who overcame her own insecurities about her weight to take on the role. 

Werth: Cates lost 250 lbs. last year and is hoping to return to acting.

Wise: The breakout star of the film, of course, is DiCaprio who received an Best Supporting Oscar nomination for the role of Arnie.  He loads the character full of verbal and gestural quirks without resorting into caricature or descending into the maudlin.  

His Arnie has believable motivations and strong emotions that he expresses using the character's limited faculties.  When Gilbert abandons him in the bath, Arnie is angry, and even though he is unable to articulate his frustration in words, DiCaprio communicates his character's indignation and hurt as forcefully as any speech.  

Director Lasse Halström carefully integrates his cast's vibrant performances with the sweetly elegiac tone of the film, making Gilbert Grape both a showcase for some great acting as well as a beautifully rendered meditation on life. 

Werth: Since this is a birthday post, we need cake.

 


Wise: I'll grab my 'J'-shaped cake pan. Visit us again next week for more alphabetically delicious Film Gab!

Happy 109th, Archie Leach!

Werth: Wise!

Wise: Werth!

Werth: With all the cake from our recent birthday salutes, I'm busting out of my pants.

Wise: Cake just wants you to be happy.  It's the pants that double-crossed you. 

Werth: Today is really a special birthday, though, as it would have been Hollwood icon Cary Grant's 109th birthday.

Wise: Which means that Taylor Swift is just a bit too old to be his co-star. 

Werth: In his later years, Hollywood did have a habit of making Grant the romantic partner for some much younger leading ladies. But in the 1940 classic His Girl Friday, Grant was evenly matched age- and acting-wise with the fast-talking Rosalind Russell. Grant is Walter Burns, a sly, underhanded newspaper editor who is willing to do anything to break the story. Russell is Hildy, his recent ex-wife who stops by the office to let him know she's not only quitting his rag, 

but she's engaged to be married to insurance salesman Bruce Baldwin who "looks like Ralph Bellamy" (a punchline paid off by the fact that Bruce is played by Ralph Bellamy).



Wise: Making him prince of the second banana role. 

Werth: Walter refuses to lose his best reporter and his wife, so he concocts a plan to trick Hildy into helping with one last story hoping she'll miss her train to Albany and a "normal" life. Walter's plan is helped along by the fact that a controversial execution is about to take place and Hildy can't resist covering it. 

Howard Hawks directed His Girl Friday at a breakneck pace with the comic zingers, sly glances, and even the stripes on Hildy's hat and coat zipping by so fast that we have to lean forward to catch every wonderful moment. It's the perfect pacing for a story about journalism, racing across the screen like an AP newsflash.

Wise: Although at the time, it must have been the teletype machine. 

Werth: Grant's charm and grace make even the conniving Walter loveable and Russell's machine-gun one-liners and asides are comedy perfection. As much electric chemistry as these two generated, Grant and Russell never teamed up on the silver screen again. Perhaps it's for the best, because it's hard to imagine even this great duo topping their performances in this milestone in Hollywood comedies.
 

Wise: Grant plays an equally appealing, although more sinister, character in Suspicion (1941).  As irresponsible playboy Johnnie Aysgarth, Grant stumbles into the train compartment of bookish Lena McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine) and promptly scams her for first class fare before gradually falling for her.  

After a whirlwind romance, the pair elope, much to the disapproval of Lena's staid—and wealthy—parents.  After they return from a grand honeymoon, Lena begins to realize that Johnnie's finances are a tangle of debts, promises, and lost bets at the racetrack.  This being an Alfred Hitchcock film, she also begins to suspect that her beloved husband has a darker side.  

Werth: Why can't Hitchcock's ladies ever trust their men?

Wise: As Johnnie's financial troubles mount, she begins to wonder to what lengths he'll go to shore up his failed business ventures.  And when his best pal—and erstwhile business partner—turns up in Paris dead under mysterious circumstances, she begins to fear for her life.  

Werth: Oh Joan, just drink your milk...

Wise: Fontaine won the Academy Award for this, her second outing with Hitchcock (she was also nominated for her first, Rebecca, the year before), and her evolution—from a dowdy spinster to a woman possessed by lust and finally to a prisoner of her own fears—unfolds thrillingly, yet believably.  

Of course Grant's performance provides the perfect support: his charm could just as easily melt an old maid's frozen heart as it could drain the lifeblood from her veins.  But as a pair, the two make one of Hitchcock's most erotic screen couples.  Grant's roguishness barely conceals his carnal desires, while Fontaine's slightly breathless performance makes audiences wonder if she might willingly sacrifice her life to her husband's gambling addiction in exchange for just one more roll in the sack.  

Werth: Speaking of sacks, I need something to wear that has a little more give than these pants.  

Wise: Just have another piece of cake and we'll both wear muumuus for next week's Film Gab.

  

Happy Birthday, MM!

Werth: Happy... Birthday... to youuuuuuuuu. Happy... Birthday—

Wise: Normally I wouldn't interrupt your introduction, but your breathy birthday song in a skintight spangled gown is making me feel funny... and not where the bathing suit goes. 

Werth: I just couldn't think of a better way to wish Marilyn Monroe a happy 86th birthday than with her very own iconic 1962 birthday song to President Kennedy.

Wise: Perhaps a greeting card from Maxine would have sufficed.

Werth: I just get so excited about Marilyn. She was my entrée into the wonderful world of classic films and I'll always have a soft spot in my lil' ol' gay heart for her.

Wise: Right next to the soft spots reserved for Joan Crawford and dancing at the Pyramid. 

Werth: I'll start off this double-barrel birthday salute to Marilyn with one of her comedies, Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955). When goofy, dime-store novel editor Richard Sherman's (Tom Ewell) wife and son head to the country to escape the brutal NYC summer heat, Sherman and his fertile imagination are left to run wild. Before long he is opening his soda with the kitchen cabinet handle, smoking cigarettes and fantasizing in Cinemascope about all the women who just can't resist his animal magnetism.

Wise: Sounds like an evening at your house.

Werth: But when a new tenant (Monroe) buzzes his buzzer and gets her fan caught in the door, Sherman is flummoxed by a real-life fantasy that could make his summer even hotter.

Wise: Because nothing is hotter than the fish smell on Canal Street in July. 

Werth: Marilyn is at the peak of her comedic talents here, crafting her dumb blonde character to be more than just a bubble-headed male sex fantasy. She may not know who Rachmaninoff is but she knows it's classical music, "because there's no vocal." 

She brilliantly satirizes the commercial spokesmodel by explaining how she does her Dazzledent toothpaste ad noting, "...every time I show my teeth on television, I'm appearing before more people 

than Sarah Bernhardt appeared before in her whole career. It's something to think about." Monroe even gets to enter Sherman's fantasies as a tricked-out Natahsa Fatale-esque temptress. Her monologue at the end of the film about what makes a man exciting flies in the face of her dumb blonde persona—and legend has it, it was done in one take. 

Movie lore abounds about this film with my favorite story being the one about Marilyn's descent down the stairs in a nightie. Wilder ordered her to take her bra off, as it would be ridiculous for a girl to wear a bra under her nightie. Monroe insisted she wasn't wearing a bra, but Wilder refused to believe anyone's breasts could look that good without one. So Monroe grabbed Wilder's hand, put it under her nightie, and settled that argument.

Wise: She should have negotiated for the UN. 

Werth: Marilyn exudes simple, sexual joy in Seven Year Itch, with the famous subway vent scene vaulting her already successful career into the Classic Hollywood stratosphere. It is an iconic scene that exemplifies the sort of sexy wit that makes Seven Year Itch a memorable comedy of the 1950's, and Marilyn the most memorable blonde of the 20th Century.

Wise:  She wasn't quite so blonde—but no less memorable—in Monkey Business (1952), a Howard Hawks screwball comedy about scientist Dr. Barnaby Fulton (Cary Grant) searching for an elixir of youth and the hijinks that result when Barnaby and his wife (Ginger Rogers) keep getting doped up on the formula after one of the lab chimps dumps it into the water cooler.  

Werth: My chimps pour vodka into the water cooler where I work.  

Wise: Grant and Rogers are obviously having a lot of fun acting like teenagers while under the influence of the cocktail, but it's when they're playing adults that the sparks really fly. Grant does a variation on his befuddled-but-charming scientist routine—something he'd perfected in Bringing Up Baby—; 

Rogers, however, is fuller and more womanly than when she was dancing with Fred Astaire.  She'd always played a gal who could handle herself, but in this movie she acts as though she could handle her partner, too.  

Werth: And a couple monkeys.

Wise: Hawks' pacing seems a bit off.  While there are many delightful moments, the film never fully takes flight.  Perhaps it's because the premise doesn't feel grounded in reality; or perhaps the anxieties of living in the atomic age make the possibility of eternal youth feel terrifyingly close at hand.  

Werth: Don't forget to mention the Birthday Girl.

Wise: Whatever its faults, the film gives a captivating glance at an embryonic stage of the Monroe legend.  Playing Miss Laurel, the knockout secretary to the head of the chemical company where Grant works, she naturally becomes the object of Grant's attention when he succumbs to the formula.  

They go for a joyride in a hot rod, take in the afternoon at the pool, and spin around the roller rink—basically all her role required was a sexy jiggle—but Monroe invests her dumb blonde with a lot of smarts.  Even in scenes where she's not the focus of the action, it's impossible not to watch her every move.  





Werth: And pilfering attention from a charismatic screen legend like Grant is no piece of cake.  

Wise: Speaking of cake, how about we indulge in a piece to celebrate Marilyn's birthday?  

Werth: I'm afraid that might make this dress explode.  

Wise: That's fine as long as we can reassemble all the pieces in time for next week's Film Gab.  

 

Pour Some Poison on Me

Wise: Hello, Werth.

Werth: Howdy, Wise.

Wise: What’s with the pen and the REALLY long piece of paper?

Werth: I realized that this week is the 73rd anniversary of the of the infamous Box Office Poison ad that was published in the May 3rd, 1938 Hollywood Reporter—and I think it’s time to update it.

Wise: That Box Office Poison ad was bananas!

Werth: I know! The list was concocted by the President of the Independent Theater Owners of America Harry Brandt in an attempt to get Hollywood to “Wake up!” and give them better movies to exhibit. The films of Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Dolores del Río, Kay Francis, Fred Astaire and Edward Arnold were all labeled “poison at the box office.”

Wise: I’m surprised Mickey Rooney wasn’t in there.

Werth: But one surprising member of the Box Office Poison Club had actually earned the moniker. Despite her meteoric rise in 1932, Katharine Hepburn’s movies were going belly-up at the box office, and in February, 1938 (only months before the poison ad) she starred in a real stinker, Bringing Up Baby.

 

Wise: Hold it right there, Werth. You can make fun of Judy Berlin all you want, but Bringing Up Baby is one of the finest examples of the screwball comedy.

Werth: Oh, I totally agree. Unfortunately the 1938 audience didn’t and they stayed away in droves. Perhaps one of the best examples of “movies ahead of their time,” Baby had a promising pedigree. The talented Hepburn was paired with screen charmer Cary Grant for the second time and the whole project was to be overseen by that master of fast comedy, Howard Hawks. The plot was wacky even for a screwball comedy. A pent-up paleontologist finds himself the unwilling object of affection of a carefree heiress who has just gotten a leopard named Baby in the mail.

Wise: It’s too bad you can’t mail leopards anymore.

Werth: The rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue that Hawks was famous for is unrelenting and all the performers sprint from argument to pratfall in a giddy whirl of happenstance and comic misunderstanding. Baby’s comedy flies and its two stars hold on for dear life. What maybe threw some of the audience off, was the fact that both Hepburn and Grant played slightly against type. Grant often played a suave, carefree, lovable gent, but his Dr. David Huxley is an overwhelmed fuss-budget. His outbursts of frustration are matched by a sort of mimed confusion—making him a veritable one-man Laurel & Hardy. 

Hepburn, who had no trouble playing blue-bloods, gave Susan Vance an air of scatter-brainedness you wouldn’t normally see from her. It’s one of the rare times when she really lets loose and looks like she’s having fun. In one scene she pretends to be a mobster and the film noir tough guy talk that comes out of her mouth is priceless.

Wise: I just imagined her saying, “The calla lilies are in bloom” like Edward G. Robinson.

Werth: But at the end of the day, Baby lost $365,000 and RKO fired Hawks and convinced Hepburn to terminate her own contract around the same time she was labeled “box office poison.”

Wise: Ouch. Baby had claws.

Werth: But those scratches didn’t last long, because in 1940 Hepburn came roaring back to prominence in the smash hit The Philadelphia Story and never had to worry about being poisonous again.

Wise: Half the people on that list eventually turned out to be Hollywood legends, so it’s hard to imagine that any of them were really poison at the box office, but I guess the one thing that most of them have in common is that the list appeared while their careers were going through a transition.  

Werth: Just like we’re transitioning from my half of Film Gab to yours.  

Wise: And I think that’s the best explanation why someone who’s now as universally beloved as Fred Astaire was labelled a stinker by the exhibitors.  After a lengthy and successful career dancing in Vaudeville with his sister Adele, Astaire signed a contract with RKO where he was partnered with Ginger Rogers for a string of classic musicals like Top Hat, Swing Time, and Shall We Dance?  As the decade came to a close, both Astaire and Rodgers wanted to move on to other things.  Rodgers had a slightly easier time finding audience acceptance in different roles, while Astaire floundered a bit before ending up at MGM where he starred in some of Metro’s biggest musicals of the late 40’s and 50’s, Easter Parade, Royal Wedding, and The Band Wagon.  

Werth: No one could dance on the ceiling like Fred.

Wise: But there is a definite difference between these two phases of Astaire’s career.  The RKO films are a lot scrappier, and while his dancing is never anything less than the epitome of elegance, Astaire’s characters were often smart-alecks or schemers.  At MGM, where the ruling style included lush violins and saturated color, Astaire became a much more romantic figure.  And even when he wasn’t working at Metro, this new style followed, most notably in Funny Face (1957) which also starred Audrey Hepburn.  

Werth: Who for once sang without offscreen help from Marnie Nixon.  

Wise: Right.  Astaire plays Dick Avery, a fashion photographer loosely based on Richard Avedon, who is sent by the imperious editor Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson in a hilarious performance) to discover the next big thing: models who think!  

Werth: They must be still looking.  

Wise: Thankfully Audrey turns up early on as a beatnik bookstore employee more enamored of Nietzsche than Givenchy, although a trip to Paris, some incredible fashion, and a few dance numbers with Astaire convinces her to adore both.  

Werth: Seeing both of these movies convinces me that Fred Astaire and Katharine Hepburn were too good to be bad.  

Wise: Exactly.  So fess up, Werth.  Who’s on your 2011 Box Office Poison List?

Werth: I’ve changed my mind. It seems that most everyone on the 1938 list had career resurgences and became cinematic legends and—

Wise: And you don’t want your list to revitalize Renee Zellweger’s career.

Werth: Exactly. Tune in next week when we make or break more Hollywood careers at Film Gab!