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.

  

Two Gabba Gabba

Werth: Happy Film Gab-iversary, Wise!  Our little celluloid-loving blog has just turned two!

Wise: Happy Gab-iversary to you too, Werth.  It's hard to believe that another year has passed, full of thrills, chills, and the eternal cage match between Joan and Bette.  

Werth: Joan would never put herself in a cage.  

Wise: And what better way to kick off a celebration of ourselves, except by revisiting some of our most popular posts from the past year, including one celebrating the birthday of one of Hollywood's biggest stars: Kirk Douglas.  There's nothing better than sharing some cake with a guy who looks great in a loincloth and whose talent is even bigger than the cleft in his chin.  


Werth: But we're not all about lantern jaws here at Film Gab because sometimes we get a hankering for the softer side of things, like dudes in dresses.  

Wise: Or the stranger side, like when we discussed Hollywood's oddball auteur David Lynch.  

Werth: Fun Film Gab fact: Kyle MacLachlan's tuckus is almost as popular among Film Gab readers as Julian Sands' rump.   

Wise: Talk about a celebrity cage match! 

Werth: One of the biggest defeats at the box office this year was Disney's John Carter, a sci-fi flop overstuffed with Martians, mayhem, and Taylor Kitsch attempting to act through his abs.  We had much better luck with our voyages with time and space traveling hunks.  

Wise: Of course we're not adverse to disasters, especially when it gives us a chance to revisit a modern classic like Titanic and plunge into shipboard romances of various stripes.

Werth: Maybe they would have had better luck forming a ragtag band of misfits determined to fight injustice instead of getting caught up in the pitfalls of romance.  

Wise: Some of the most enduring Tinsel Town romances are between celebrities and their political party, much like a certain tap-dancing tot or particular tough guy with brains and a penchant for fast-talking showgirls.  

Werth: We here at Film Gab have a penchant for great actresses, especially those with long and varied careers who aren't afraid to get a little pig's blood on their hands.  

Wise: So, Werth, are there any entries from the past year that you wish had attracted more readers?  

Werth: Well I'm still mourning the loss of gap-toothed classic Ernest Borgnine. A 61-year career in Hollywood deserves props... even with films like Bunny O'Hare on his resume. What about you, Wise?  

Wise: I'd have to say that our salute to Hollywood's funny ladies is one of my favorites.  It's just too bad that a giggly blonde never got a chance to share the big screen with a legendary fast-talking brunette.  

Werth: I know one silver screen pair that's destined for more laughs.

Wise: Join us for another rollicking year of leading ladies, Hollywood toughs, big budget bonanzas, gut busting comedies—

Werth: —And the finer side of Julian Sands.  

   

 

Funny Ladies

Wise: Hello, Werth!

Werth: Hello, Wise.

Wise: I see you've donned a fright wig.

Werth: I thought it was the least I could do to honor the passing of film and television comedienne Phyllis Diller.

Wise: Just don't start calling me "Fang."




Werth: Diller wasn't really that big a movie star, but she definitely gave women a presence in the comedy culutre that helped those who came after her become silver-screen laugh queens.

Goldie Hawn could have been just another pretty face, but in 1968 she proved on TV's Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In that she could take the dumb blonde routine to a new level.

Wise: It takes a special talent to round up belly laughs with just a giggle and a bikini. 

Werth: While still performing on Laugh-In, Hawn jumped into the movie pool and almost immediately won an Oscar for her role in Cactus Flower (1969). That success was followed by second-billing in There's a Girl in My Soup (1969) and $ (1970) until 1972 when she became the top-billed actress in hits like Butterflies Are Free and The Sugarland Express (1974).

After playing second-fiddle to stars like Warren Beatty (Shampoo (1975)) and George Segal (The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox (1976)), Hawn would return to the first position in 1978 with the mega-hit comedy/thriller Foul Play.

Wise: Not to mention Overboard (1987). 

Werth: Foul Play is basically a romatic comedy homage to mystery-thrillers with some obvious tips of the cap to Hitchcock classics Vertigo, Dial M for Murder and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Hawn plays divorced librarian Gloria Mundy who decides to try and be more outgoing by picking up a hitchhiker on her drive back to her home in San Francisco.

Wise: I know picking up total strangers always makes me loosen up.

Werth: Unfortunately this hitchhiker winds up being murdered, tossing Gloria into an intrigue-filled plot to assassinate the Pope involving a man with a scarred face, a scary albino named Whitey, and a hitman known as "The Dwarf."

Wise: I assume he busts kneecaps.

Werth: Gloria's knight in corduroy armor is disgraced detective Tony Carlson (the almost lecherous Chevy Chase), who seems to be spending more time wooing Gloria than figuring out how to stop the assassination.

And rounding out this randy cast is Dudley Moore in his breakthrough American performance as diminutive perv, Stanley Tibbets. The film isn't as whacky as a Marx Brothers movie nor as action-filled as a Lethal Weapon. Underscored by a sappy Barry Manilow tune, Foul Play takes a really comfortable middle-of-the-road route bewteen comedy and thrills and creates a satisfying, but not altogether transcendant experience.

Its charm emanates from its lead, with Hawn taking her dumb blonde act to more palatable levels by putting her in situations where she's not dumb—she or the person she's talking to just doesn't know what the other person is talking about.
It leads to a comedy of misunderstandings that allows for such fun moments as a Burgess Meredith vs. Rachel Roberts karate fight and a multi-car race across San Francisco. All-in-all Foul Play isn't foul at all, playing coy at a time when having an old lady use the F-word in a Scrabble game was risqué comedy.

Wise: Comediennes don't have to be dumb blondes to be successful at comedy.  In fact, being a fast-talking, savvy brunette can also lead to big laughs.  Rosalind Russell hit it big in screwball hits like His Girl Friday (1940) and The Feminine Touch (1941), but it is her performance in Auntie Mame (1958) that has become perhaps her most iconic comedic performance.

Werth: I know you weren't going to continue without mentioning her side-splitting turn in 1939's The Women. 

Wise: Of course not. Based on the novel by Patrick Dennis (actually a fictionalized memoir of author Edward Everett Tanner III's nom de plume), Auntie Mame presents the life of orphaned, ten-year-old Patrick once he goes to live with his bohemian aunt Mame Dennis (Russell).  

Mame's outsize personality transforms the sober little boy, and eventually comes to the rescue when Patrick's Ivy League education threatens to pair him up with a shallow, social climbing bride (Joanna Barnes deploying a really top drawer Locust Valley lockjaw).  

Werth: One of my favorite scenes is when Mame gives the Upsons the what for.

Wise: Surrounded by a cadre of eccentrics—Broadway doyenne and heroic tippler Vera Charles (Coral Browne); lecherous Irish poet Brian O'Bannion (Robin Hughes); Texas oilman Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside (Forrest Tucker)—Russell holds her own.  Having originated the role on Broadway, Russell's performance has an appropriate theatricality about it, but her background in film informs the quieter moments when the camera lingers in closeup.  

At its heart, this is a film about finding love, and the tenderness that Russell exhibits when she realizes how much Patrick means to her anchors the film's oddball delights.

Werth: Not to mention the eye-popping array of gowns created by Orry-Kelly.

Wise: While Russell is the chief pleasure of Auntie Mame, the film is crowded with hilarious turns by gifted actresses.  Coral Browne's Vera has all the grande dame-ness of Bette Davis in All About Eve, but leavens the part with her penchant for booze.  Lee Patrick's daft society matron reveals how dangerously close the suburban set is to bigotry.  

But perhaps best of all is Peggy Cass as Mame's secretary Agnes Gooch.  The socially awkward frump was already something of a cliché by the time Auntie Mame hit theaters, but Cass not only takes the requisite glasses, dumpy cardigan, and sensible shoes to their stereotypical heights, she also gets her very own bombshell moment when she follows Mame's exhortation to "Live! Live! Live!"

Werth: Sounds like all these funny ladies followed that good advice.

Wise: As long as we all follow the laughs to next week's Film Gab.  

No More Teacher’s Dirty Gab

Wise: What’s up, Werth?

Werth: Shhhh!  I’m studying.

Wise: Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s homepage?

Werth: While everyone else is gearing up for the Memorial Day Weekend, I’m studying for college finals. And they can’t happen soon enough.

Wise: Would talking about a school-themed classic film make the time go by faster for you?

Werth: You know me too well, Wise. One of my favorite school movies gives new meaning to the words “School House Rock”. When MGM’s Blackboard Jungle came out in 1955, much ado was made over its gritty depiction of a new teacher literally fighting to teach at an inner city boys’ school. The opening credits were underscored by the unthinkable—a rock-n-roll song.

Wise: Max Steiner must have been appalled.  

Werth: Bill Hailey and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” shot to number one, and legend has it that teenagers tore up movie theaters across the country. Director Richard Brooks uses the song as a rough, musical symbol of a young generation lashing out at a  society obsessed with conformity. He shot Blackboard in dark tones with low lighting and sparse studio sets, cleverly neglecting to mention which city it was set in to remind us this failing high school could be anywhere. There are no great cinematic flourishes here as Brooks went instead for raw, emotional intensity. The scenes of violence (including an attempted rape in a library) are remorseless, bloody and ugly. 

These no-good-niks aren’t your father’s Dead End Kids. Instigated by Artie Wilson (a truly menacing Vic Morrow), they are a lawless, arrogant, sadistic crew that make us question whether Richard Dadier’s (Glenn Ford) goal of teaching them is a misguided pipe dream.

Wise: Having pipe dreams about inner city youth seems like it might get you into trouble.  

Werth: Aside from the stylistic choices, this movie works because of the performances of its two stars—Ford and, in his first major role, Sidney Poitier. Through great films like Gilda (1946) and The Big Heat (1953), Ford had crafted a handsome, intelligent, masculine screen persona that seemed to flow naturally. Like Gary Cooper and Gregory Peck, Ford embodied simple traits and translated them to the big screen to serve the wide variety of films he made. In Blackboard Jungle he is optimistic and strong, not in a saccharine, “Aw shucks, we can do anything” way. He reminds us instead of a tough, flawed, but ultimately well-meaning father figure. And in his moments of doubt Ford really makes us wonder if he believes the convictions he’s been spouting. 

One student he focuses his “you too can learn” philosophy on is Gregory Miller, played by Poitier. Poitier’s electric charm and quick-fuse fury create a performance that portended the great actor this young man would become. He is sleek, angry and gives tantalizing hints of the grace and pride that would become hallmarks of his career.

Wise: Sort of like, Guess Who’s Coming to Detention?  

Werth: Blackboard Jungle may seem a little dated with it’s “Daddy-o’s” and use of the word “stinkin’” instead of another word that ends with a ‘k’, but the issues of social inequality, racism and impenetrable bureaucracy in our schools are as topical today as they were when juvenile delinquents threatened the ‘50’s American Way. And where else will you see an early walk-on from Richard Deacon (Mel Cooley from the Dick Van Dyke Show) and a very young Jamie Farr (Klinger of M.A.S.H fame) as a constantly-grinning hoodlum?

Wise: The hoodlums in The Trouble with Angels (1966) are of the more girlish variety. Angels is something of an anomaly in Hollywood: a slapstick comedy about the lives of teenage girls, written and directed by women and starring an almost all-female cast.  It’s certainly not overburdened by a heavy feminist message, but it does take its characters quite seriously and uses the daily lives of women as fodder for the hilarity that ensues.  Haley Mills, in an attempt to overcome the good-girl image of her Disney past, plays Mary Clancy, a rebellious teenager with a penchant for hijinks, sent to staid St. Francis Academy where she teams up with the morose Rachel Devery (June Harding), and together they run afoul of the Mother Superior (Rosalind Russell).  

Werth: Rosalind Russell—the smokiest Catholic baritone since Joan of Arc burned at the stake.

Wise: It’s also something of a departure for her.  Long after her run in classic screwball comedies and just past her outsize roles in Gypsy and Auntie Mame, Russell still gets to show off her comic chops, but she’s also doing something a bit more subtle.  Amid the pratfalls and double-takes, she exudes wisdom and gentleness and really makes the audience believe that she is a woman with a religious calling and not just a dame in a habit.  

Werth: It probably helped that Russell was a devout Catholic—or as biographers like to say, “deeply religious.”

Wise: That deep humanity runs through the entire film, largely thanks to the direction by Ida Lupino who began her career at Warner Bros. as their second-string Bette Davis and grew into the most prominent female director in 50’s and 60’s Hollywood.  She did a lot of TV (including several episodes of Gilligan’s Island) and B movies, and although a lot of that was genre work, she was consistently able to subvert the conventions of formula work and examine the inner lives of women within the confines of the Hollywood system. 

Werth: Subverting the dominant paradigm is a hoot!

Wise: The Trouble with Angels is one of the rare movies that makes me laugh just as much as an adult as it did when I was a kid.  The timing is so spot-on, but there’s an undercurrent of seriousness that grounds the comedy and makes it not just a picture about jokes, but one about wit. 

Werth: Jesse Tyler Ferguson is very witty.

Wise: What happened to studying for finals?

Werth: Jesse’s ginger-ness is very distracting.

 Wise: Tune in to next week’s Film Gab for more cinematic distractions!