Summer-Gab, Summer-Gab Sum-Sum Summer-Gab

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!

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?



Kate's Closet

If you're a fan of old Hollywood and happen to be in New York City this fall, do yourself a favor and check out a special exhibition of Katharine Hepburn's costumes and personal effects at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.  Hepburn, who seems to have been something of a pack rat, was deeply interested in the way costume could help an actor enrich her portrayal of a character.  Plus, her personal style is legendary.  

From The New York Times' write-up of the show: 

Organized by the Kent State University Museum, which acquired her performance clothes (as well as personal items like khakis, shoes and makeup) after her death in 2003, “Katharine Hepburn: Dressed for Stage and Screen” includes more than 40 costumes and other pieces she wore in plays and movies like “The Philadelphia Story,” “Adam’s Rib” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Also on display are letters, scripts and research notes that Hepburn made, and which are part of the library’s collection of her stage papers.

If your travel plans don't include the Big Apple, you can still pick up the accompanying book with essays by the curators discussing this iconic star and and her equally famous wardrobe. 
 

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!

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!