Astor, I Hardly Know Her

Wise: I'm really sorry, Werth.  

Werth: Sorry? Why? Did you not send your condolences to the family of Deanna Durbin? 

Wise: While it's sad when anyone with a connection to old Hollywood passes on, I never really understood Durbin's appeal.  She was all eyebrow and tremolo to me.  But I'm apologizing because I forgot to bake a cake to celebrate Mary Astor's birthday.  

Werth: Astor is one of my favorite actresses from the Golden Era. Not as well remembered today as some of her contemporaries, Astor was a cinematic workhorse starring in films from the silent era until her final role in 1964 in Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte.

Wise: Obviously collateral damage from the Davis/DeHavilland brawl. 

Werth: Astor turned in one of her most memorable performances in the 1941 hard-boiled classic, The Maltese Falcon. Based on Dashiell Hammett's popular detective novel, Falcon stars Humphrey Bogart as iconic gumshoe Sam Spade. Spade receives a visit from the lovely Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Astor) who hires him and his partner, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowen), to tail a man who's done her wrong. When Archer turns up with lead in his guts, Spade becomes embroiled in a crime ring in search of a valuable statue.

Wise: If only he had checked Amazon first. 

Werth: The film is full of a who's-who of Forties character actors. Sydney Greenstreet is a delight as The Fat Man, a chortling, criminal Buddha, earning himself a Best Supporting Actor nom in his first film. Elisha Cook, Jr. is appropriately twitchy as a young gunsel who is just itching to plug Spade.  

Peter Lorre is creepily sinister as Joel Cairo, a lilting-voiced two-timer whose card smells of gardenias, and who practically fellates a cane in Spade's office. Warner Bros. only hinted at this gay character, Hammett's book outright calls him a "queer."

Wise: I wonder if there's an "It Gets Better" video for people who want to marry their walking stick. 

Werth: Bogart had finally gotten a star turn the same year in High Sierra after 27 years of making films, and with the popularity of Falcon, he reached superstar status. Of course, one year later he would become a Hollywood legend in a little film called Casablanca. Bogart's detached and world-weary, good guy persona was a winning combination for the actor, and his gruff and tart delivery of the rat-a-tat dialogue shows the intelligence and charm behind his baggy-eyed exterior. 

Astor plays with and against her good-girl screen image as a patrician, elegant woman whose every line is a lie, her delivery correctly sounding like a performance. But rather than just playing the duplicity of the role, Astor's eyes capture a genuine desperation that make this role one of her best.  

Falcon was John Huston's directorial debut and he made the most of it, earning Academy noms for Best Picture and Best Screenplay, and helping craft the cinematic look that would come to be called film noir. 

Wise: Astor plays a smaller, though no less vital role in A Kiss Before Dying (1956) as the mother who inspires Robert Wagner's murderous desires.  Wagner plays Bud Corliss, an Army vet and college student who discovers that his rich girlfriend Dorie (Joanne Woodward) is pregnant, but instead of eloping and risking her father's wrath (and disinheritance), he plots to murder her, disguise it as a suicide, and marry her sister Ellen (Virginia Leith) instead.  He nearly succeeds, but Ellen, following a few clues and with the help of the hunky nephew (Jeffrey Hunter) of the chief of police, discovers the shocking truth. 

Werth: I've got a few shocking truths to show Jeffrey Hunter.  

Wise: In just a few short scenes, Astor creates a portrait of a woman whose own frustrated marriage forced her to focus her attentions on nurturing her son, only to realize that her efforts have bred a killer.  Astor, who spent much of the 1940s playing wholesome maternal figures, most notably in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Little Women (1949), dials up her performance just enough to make her virtuous screen persona turn slightly off-key.  It's all very Freudian, and A Kiss Before Dying fits neatly into a continuum of murderous mamma's boys from the post-war period of Hollywood that culminated with Norman Bates in Psycho (1960).  

Werth: Did they smell of gardenias?

Wise: Director Gerd Oswald employs an effective strategy in the making of the film: his characters barely speak above a whisper, creating tension by forcing the audience to the edge of their seats.  He also stages long takes with little action, but framed at off-kilter angles, telegraphing both his killer's skewed outlook on life as well as the precarious position of his innocents.  (It's hard to believe this is the same guy who put Bunny O'Hare on the screen.)   

But Robert Wagner is the real revelation here.  To those of us who know him from the latter half of his career playing dashing buffoons in TV series like Hart to Hart or the Austin Powers films, it's a shock to see him slender and beautiful and full of malice.  

Werth: Some would say enough malice to shove his wife off a boat.


Wise: Let's leave the Hollywood conspiracy theories for next week's Film Gab.

 

It's a Wonderful Gab!

Werth: Hello, Wise.  

Wise: Hello, Werth. What cinematic-themed gab awaits us today?

Werth: Well, Wise. If I read my Film Gab Hollywood Birthday Calendar correctly, today would have been the 115th birthday of one of the most memorable directors of classic Hollywood: Frank Capra!  

Wise: Good ol' Capra. No filmmaker became more associated with Americana than Capra with his folksy approach to American society in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and It's a Wonderful Life (1946).

Werth: But what was so great about Sicily-born Capra is that he was equally capable of making flat-out comedies like It Happened One Night (1934)—and one of my favorites, Arsenic and Old Lace (1944).  

Wise: Arsenic and Old Lace. Sounds like our future codenames in the Shady Queens Rest Home.

Werth: Arsenic and Old Lace, based on the hit Broadway play of the same name, was filmed in the middle of a spate of WWII documentaries that Capra shot for the war effort—so its giddy, yet dark treatment of the Brewster Family must have been a refreshing escape from the horrors of the real world for Capra. 

The film opens on Halloween night as author and drama critic Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) gathers up his newlywed bride Elaine (Priscilla Lane) for some honeymoon action.

Wise: Doubles tennis with George Cukor and Edward Everett Horton?

Werth: Luckily for Mortimer, Elaine is the next-door-neighbor to his two spinster Aunts Abby and Martha (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair), so he can say goodbye to them before the happy couple catches a train for Niagara Falls. The only problem is that Mortimer's day begins to unravel as he discovers his sweet, kindly old aunts have been hiding something from him.

Wise: Compromising photos of Randolph Scott?

Werth: Abby and Martha feel so badly for lonely old men with no friends or family that they put notices in the paper for boarders and when these older men come to take the room, these angelic spinsters poison them so the men can stop being so miserable and alone. The most recent victim, Mr. Hoskins, is hanging out in the window seat when Mortimer accidentally finds him.

Wise: Those great old architectural details make a home so inviting—and so convenient for homicide.

Werth: The comic plot spirals wildly from there with Mortimer's loony brother Teddy (John Alexander) shouting "Charge!" everytime he runs up the stairs because he thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt; Mortimer's other brother Jonathan, who has just finished a world-wide killing spree with his plastic surgeon Dr. Einstein (played with unsubtle creepiness by the droopy-eyed Peter Lorre), wanting to use the 

"Panama Canal" in the basement to get rid of his own pesky dead body, and a dopey beat cop (Jack Carson) trying to tell Mortimer his new play idea—all this while Elaine dithers between heady romance and annulment papers.

 Wise: Familial insanity would be enough for me to re-think a marriage.

Werth: At times the insanity is a bit much. Grant makes more bug-eyed faces and does more double-takes than any film of his I can recall and by the end there's a plethora of character types coming in and out of the plot at a dizzying pace. But it's all good fun, with the two murderous aunts coming off as the normal people in this farce. Capra's gift was a directorial light touch that could even make serial murder something to laugh at.

Wise: Here Comes the Groom (1951) stars Bing Crosby as Pete Garvey, an ace reporter assigned to post-war Paris where he files heartbreaking stories about war orphans in the hopes of getting them adopted by well-to-do Americans.  His work is interrupted when his fiancée Emmadel (Jane Wyman) reminds him that he promised to marry her three years ago.  Packing up and setting off for home, he can't help but bring along the two most adorable orphans in the hope that he and Emmadel can adopt them.  Arriving in Boston, he's stunned to discover that Emmadel is planning to marry her high-toned boss Wilbur Stanley (a good-natured Franchot Tone in the Ralph Bellamy role).  

Knowing that his orphans will be sent back to Paris if he doesn't succeed, Pete hatches a scheme to make Emmadel realize she still loves him, as well as helping Wilbur to discover the charms of his dowdy cousin Winifred (Alexis Smith).

 Werth: Because the only thing more adorable than Parisian street urchins is incest.

Wise: With Bing Crosby being the star, it's no surprise when he launches into song.  It's a bit of a shock, however, when Jane Wyman does too.  The film isn't exactly a musical—most of the songs involve Bing leaning against a piano—but there are two production numbers: "Misto Cristofo Columbo" is a spontaneous jam aboard the flight back to the U.S. with cameos from Louis Armstrong and Dorothy Lamour; 

and the Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael tune "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" that begins as something Peter hums with Emmadel in her office and erupts into a full song and dance number amid the filing cabinets and continues on the elevator and into the street.  Wyman spent much of her career playing ice princesses melted by love, but she began as a chorus girl, and seeing her hoof it on the silver screen is a welcome surprise.

 Werth: I guess after you win an Oscar for playing a deaf-mute rape victim, you want to dance with some filing cabinets for a change of pace.

Wise: Crosby is the real mystery in this film.  Capra often unleashed the desperation in his male stars—think of Jimmy Stewart's attempted suicide in It's a Wonderful Life—but Crosby's unflappably romantic persona (honed on the radio and in the "Road" pictures with Bob Hope) prevents the tension from ever escalating and making the happy ending feel a bit flat.  And unlike 

Wyman, who gamely indulges in the pratfalls intrinsic to screwball comedy, Crosby remains aloof.  Still, his charisma is undeniable and when the final credits roll, the audience is happy he's won Jane Wyman back.

Werth: Well after a post full of serial killers and war orphans, I'm ready to lighten up a little.

Wise: I've got some great pics of Randolph Scott, Arsenic.

Werth: Bring 'em on, Old Lace!  

Happy Birthday, Spartacus!

Werth: Happy Friday, Wise!

Wise: Happy Friday, Werth. Why are you wearing a toga?

Werth: Because when you throw a birthday party for Spartacus, you've got to go Roman.

Wise: Kirk Douglas' 95th birthday is certainly an event worth celebrating.

Werth: I'll say. The legendary Hollywood leading man and producer has been growling on the big screen since he first appeared in 1946 in the classic drama-noir, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.

Wise: He even growled at Anne Hathaway at this year's Oscars.

Werth: With a charisma and an energy that few could match, Douglas often plays men who go after what they want. In 1952's The Bad and the Beautiful, Douglas used every ounce of tenacity and charm in his arsenal to play Jonathan Shields, a young Hollywood producer who has a Tinseltown-sized axe to grind. 

Shields' father died a ruined and reviled producer, and young Jonathan vows to do what his father couldn't: rule Hollywood. To do this, Shields does what any good producer does—he finds undiscovered talent, creates a huge success with it, and then tosses it into the gutter.

Wise: Sounds like a Kardashian wedding.

Werth: Told in flashback, Shields' three greatest discoveries—director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), writer James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell), and actress Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner)—convene to hear out their old mentor, now nemesis, one last time. It's a smart dramatic set-up that director Vincente Minnelli milks for all it's worth. As we watch Shields' courageous rise to power, we already know something will go horribly wrong and we can't wait to see it. 

Minnelli is at the peak of his non-musical directorial powers here creating a Hollywood he knew all too well with his overly-fussy sets, sly Oedipal hints, and clever use of hiding and revealing his stars—figuratively and visually. Dick Powell seems effortless as the southern writer who gets wrecked by the Hollywood game. The always complex Gloria Grahame won a Best Supporting Oscar for her role as Amiel's starstruck wife. 

And Lana Turner kicks the idea that she was just sweater-filler straight to the curb. Her harrowing car ride in a thunderstorm after Shields betrays her is an all-time favorite.

Wise: Every time I watch it, I want to buy a car, a mink, and a cyclorama. 

Werth: And at the center of it all, Douglas was nominated as Best Actor for playing Shields as a cad whose passion and electricity is so magnetic that we aren't repulsed by his greed for power. Instead, we actually want to see him succeed—even if that means Lana Turner getting wet. Winning five Oscars and becoming a box-office hit thanks in part to Douglas' gusto-filled performance, The Bad and the Beautiful is all good.  

Wise: Douglas got all wet himself two years later in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954).  Based on the Jules Verne classic, the film was one of Walt Disney's earliest (and most successful) forays into live-action film.  Dispensing with the cheap-y aesthetic of kiddie serials and B-picture Westerns, the film features clever design, spectacular underwater shots and a high profile cast including Douglas as roguish sailor Ned Land, James Mason as the mysterious Captain Nemo, and Peter Lorre as the creepy sidekick, Conseil.  

Werth: If there was a Best Creepy Sidekick Oscar, Lorre would have won it... for every movie he starred in.

Wise: The plot is mostly episodic, but it does feature some of Verne's classic leitmotifs: a dim-witted but honorable scientist plunging into the unknown (in this case Paul Lukas as Professor Pierre Aronnax); a glib adventurer who learns heroism (Douglas); and the gentleman genius whose unwavering ideals condemn him to death (Mason).  

Director Richard Fleischer remained faithful to the source material, but ramped up the action sequences including gun battles, shipwrecks, and James Mason wrestling with a giant squid.  

Werth: Great preparation for working with Judy Garland in A Star is Born the same year.  

Wise: Mason certainly made a career of playing both tortured and noble, but it's Douglas who does the most interesting work here.  Normally so tightly wound in his roles, Leagues allows Douglas a bit more space to be playful: he sings, he plays guitar, he's awestruck by both science and the sea.  Sure, there's still plenty of his typical fisticuffs, but the vulnerability gives the picture an added depth.  

Werth: Depth of say, 20,000 leagues?

Wise: There's just something about a man making puns in a toga.

Werth: Tune in for more costumed cinematic wordplay in next week's Film Gab.