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!

The Big Screen in The Sky

Yesterday marked the passing of someone who experienced Old Hollywood from a child's-eye view. Jackie Cooper was only 7 years old when he first starred in Fox Movietone Follies of 1929. A budding childhood star, he became a regular cast member of the beloved Our Gang shorts and earned his first and only Oscar nomination for the 1931 film, Skippy. He would later go on to fight in WWII in the South Pacific and enjoyed a healthy television career before he got the role that introduced him to a younger generation as the irascible Perry White in the Superman movies. The loss of Cooper and his peers is devastating in that their firsthand knowledge of Hollywood "legend" is priceless. Cooper's story about how director Norman Taurog threatened to kill Cooper's dog so that he could get him to cry during a scene is a prime example of how we must record the stories of those that are still left from the Golden Age of Hollywood in order to preserve that unique history.

For more on Jackie, check out Steve Vaught's brilliant blog: http://paradiseleased.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/a-real-champ-jackie-cooper/

Like, Totally Gab Me with a Spoon!

Wise: Hey there, Werth.

Werth: Oh, hi, Wise.

Wise: Why so glum?  

Werth: Because tonight is the last night of 1984, the fabled NYC 80’s dance party at The Pyramid where I spent many happy nights busting a move.  

Wise: Does this mean I can never break out the dance moves to Thriller ever again?  

Werth: Not unless you’ve installed a light-up dance floor in your apartment.  

Wise: I’ll work on that. 

Werth: I think the only way we can deal with this wrench thrown into our dancing machines is to gab about a movie from that more innocent, neon-colored time.

Wise: Let me slip into a pair of parachute pants.

Werth; Picture it—May 28—the opening of the 1984 Summer Movie Blockbuster Season. I’m still too young for braces, but old enough to want to see one of the most anticipated sequels of the time: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom!

Wise: Not Cannonball Run II?

Werth: I loved Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and I couldn’t wait to see what exciting, whip-cracking archaeological adventures Han Solo—I mean Harrison Ford—would embark on.

Wise: Too bad Chewbacca got stuck at the university teaching a summer course.   

Werth: The film opens with Indy in glamorous 1935 Shanghai at a Busby Berkley-inspired dinner club. While chasing down a precious diamond and a poison cure at the same time, Indy makes the acquaintance of Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw), nightclub singer, chronic whiner and future wife of Steven Spielberg. It isn’t long before they are joined on the run by Indy’s industrious, pint-sized sidekick, Short Round played with Oriental pluck by Jonathan Ke Quan. Something about Jonathan’s performance zeal spoke to me, so I put a poster of Short Round on the door in my closet.

Wise: There are so many things I could say here.

Werth: After foiling certain death by jumping out of a plane and skiing down the Himalayas in an inflatable raft, the intrepid crew comes upon a poverty-stricken village that implores the famous Dr. Jones to retrieve three rocks known as the Sankara Stones that will restore prosperity to their lives... oh and all the kids in the village have been kidnapped and taken to the Taj Mahal up the hill.

Wise: There’s a lot going on in this script.

Werth: That’s not the half of it! But that was the allure of the Indiana Jones films. Spielberg and George Lucas combined fantastic, retro action/adventure-packed stories with cutting-edge special effects to create non-stop cinematic thrill rides. In fact some of the sequences in Temple were considered too thrilling. The scenes of “traditional” Indian haute cuisine and hearts being ripped out of living human sacrifices caused some parents groups to rage that the film’s PG rating was not strong enough. So the MPAA invented the PG-13 rating, assuaging parents and helping blockbuster filmmakers find a comfortable box-office sweetspot between PG and R ratings.

Wise: Because who doesn’t love a theater packed with thirteen year old boys?  

Werth: Fans of the Indiana Jones Trilogy (no, I don't count that recent, stillborn cinematic blunder Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) frequently rate Temple of Doom as their least favorite—maligning Capshaw's spoiled princess character. However, I personally relate to Capshaw's non-adventuress. If I was trapped in a floor-to-ceiling, bug-covered room or dropped into the mouth of a live volcano by a skull-wearing nutjob, I'd be a little peevish too. And I think the choice to break away from Karen Allen’s brilliant “capable dame” performance in Raiders, if nothing else, provides some comic relief from the unrelenting pace. And Capshaw’s Chinese language version of "Anything Goes" is a hoot.

Wise: I often find myself humming along to Mandarin versions of Cole Porter tunes.  

Werth: Time goes by and new technologies have made movies faster, noisier and more like theme park rides than ever before, but nothing can ever really diminish that special pre-adolescent thrill that Temple inspired in this dorky kid from the Heartland. What 1984 flick inspired your dorkiness, Wise?

Wise: Based on Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel of the same name, The Natural recounts the story of nineteen-year-old baseball prodigy Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) who, while on his way to try out for the Chicago Cubs, strikes out a Babe Ruth-like ballplayer at a carnival and is subsequently shot by Harriet Byrd (Barbara Hershey), a madwoman who sees it as her mission to wipe out arrogant baseball players.  The film flashes ahead sixteen years to 1939, when an older, chastened Hobbs appears at tryouts for the fictional New York Knights.  After a rocky start, he eventually impresses the coaching staff, played with cuddly gruffness by Wilford Brimley and Richard Farnsworth, and joins the team as a “middle aged rookie.” 

Werth: Baseball? Wise? Alan Wise?

Wise: Despite his age, Hobbs eventually becomes the star of the team which puts him in the bad graces of the club’s owner The Judge who has a financial stake in the Knights losing the pennant.  When Hobbs refuses a bribe to throw the season, The Judge sends Memo Paris (Kim Basinger) to seduce Hobbs and ruin his career, but a chance encounter with his childhood sweetheart Iris Gaines (Glenn Close) restores his faith in playing ball.  The Judge continues to up the ante, and Hobbs eventually must decide between his health and the game he loves.  

Werth: What’s next? Field of Dreams? Eight Men Out?... Major League II?!

Wise: A number of critics have pointed out how the movie romanticizes the bleakness of Malamud’s novel, but The Natural was clearly made as a star vehicle for Robert Redford and the liberties the producers took in their adaptation seem entirely appropriate to a Hollywood golden boy who was in the early stages of taking a more active role behind the camera.  Both Hobbs and Redford were sterling talents who learned to appreciate the quieter, more hard-won pleasures that come with maturity.  

Werth: Who are you?! Where is my Judy Garland, Oz-loving friend, Alan?! 

Wise: I should also mention how perfect the entire supporting cast is, especially Glenn Close’s Oscar nominated performance which breathed life and humanity into what could have been a merely symbolic role.  Also worthy of a mention is Randy Newman’s soaring yet deeply personal score as well as Caleb Deschanel’s dreamy cinematography.  Has our trip down 1984 memory lane made you feel less depressed about the closing of your favorite danceclub?

Werth: Yes, but now that you’ve exposed your masculine side, I want you to get to work on building that dancefloor.

Wise: Tune in next week for more Popping and Gabbing!

The Greatest Story Ever Gabbed

Werth: Hey there, Wise.  What are you doing?  

Wise: Oh, just filling my basket with jelly beans, candy eggs, Marshmallow Peeps, chocolate bunnies, and popcorn for my Springtime Holiday Film Festival.  

Werth: Um, isn’t that a laundry basket?  

Wise: Maybe.  But there are a lot of movies on my list, films that the big three television networks used to broadcast every year that celebrated rebirth, second chances, the importance of family—

Werth: All sponsored by the Cadbury bunny.  

Wise: Long before any joker could watch Saw III on his smart phone while riding the subway, most Americans had to wait for the annual broadcast of great films like The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Sound of Music, Ben Hur, and Easter Parade.  But the one I looked forward to most was Cecil B. DeMille’s  The Ten Commandments.  

Werth: The movie that made the book of Exodus fun.

Wise: Commandments accomplishes what so few of these giant Biblical epics ever achieve: the perfect balance between corny bombast and heartfelt sentiment.  After the Pharaoh issues an edict condemning all first-born Hebrew males, the older sister of baby Moses places him in a basket and sets him adrift in the Nile.  Found by the Pharaoh’s daughter, Moses is raised in the palace as a favorite of the royal family until his heritage is discovered and he is banished from Egypt.  After wandering in the desert, he marries and settles into the life of a shepherd until one day he encounters a burning bush that speaks the words of God commanding Moses to return to Egypt and free the Israelites from their bondage. 

Werth: I was in bondage once when I saw a burning bush.

Wise: Of course, since Moses is played by Charlton Heston, he succeeds, although not without Heston’s signature blend of orotundity and virility.  He did tend to play this sort of character repeatedly during his career, but Commandments allows him to reveal a more tender side by expressing both reluctance and the residual terrors of having been chosen by God.  Part of this greater depth comes from the casting of Yul Brynner as a rival prince who inherits the throne. 

Both these actors were almost absurdly masculine, and the chemistry from  their testosterone-laden one-up-manship imbues the rest of the picture with a vitality it might not otherwise have had.  

Werth: I missed some of that because I had to cover my eyes during the “staff turned into a snake” scene.

Wise: Of course the rest of the cast is great too.  DeMille manages to coax both comedy and pathos  in equal measure without allowing everything to fall into a round of cornball line readings.  Yvonne De Carlo is particularly tender and effective as Moses’ wife Sephora, while Anne Baxter vamps it up as a vain princess who wants Moses all the more now that he’s been touched by God.  Vincent Price gives a delightfully oily turn as Baka, an Egyptian functionary who delights in his evil ways.  And, Film Gab favorite Judith Anderson plays a venomous maid hellbent on exposing Moses’ past.  

Werth: And don’t forget grumpy old Edward G. Robinson as everyone’s favorite fickle follower, Dathan. “Where’s your Moses now?” indeed.

Wise: I’m not sure that I could watch The Ten Commandments more than once a year, but its mixture of reverence and campiness makes it a delight worth returning to.  

Werth: I’m glad you’ve covered the Old Testament, because my favorite Easter flick is from the New one. It’s not just Good Friday, it’s a Super Friday with 1973’s Jesus Christ Superstar.

 

Wise: I don’t think this was covered in my catechism class.

Werth: After their initial successful recordings of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, budding Brit musical titan Andrew Lloyd Weber and his writing partner Tim Rice returned to the Good Book to see if they could put some guitar licks into the life of Jesus.

Wise: Because a messiah is only as good as his amp. 

Werth: But before producing an actual musical, in 1970 Lloyd Weber and Rice created what was known back in the day as a concept album. It was basically a way to throw your music out in front of the public to see if it stuck—and it did. It spawned the hit single “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” for Yvonne Elliman and later for Helen Reddy. So Superstar was Broadway and inevitably, Hollywood-bound.

Wise: It’s almost like the Last Supper took place at the Chateau Marmont. 

Werth: Director Norman Jewison (no, the irony is not lost on me) shot the entire film on location in Israel. It’s an amazing choice, because the stark, beautiful, ancient setting gives the film a real sense of gravitas. Superstar starts off with a small bus arriving in the desert and a rag-tag group of performers exit and put on their costumes, like a hippy bus and truck tour performing a passion play. It’s an interesting concept that eases the audience into seeing Jesus, Judas and Mary Magdalene sing rock songs. The production design is a blended assortment of period robes and fabrics, bell bottoms and scarves, and strange, S&M-like pharisee hats and harnesses, updating the story of the last days of Jesus without abandoning its roots.

Wise: Which prompted a certain segment of the audience to call the project a desecration, I’m sure.  

Werth: Of course it did, but I don’t understand the hullabalo. For me, Superstar does an amazing job of making Jesus and his followers human. Several of Lloyd Weber’s songs give us a unique insight into these characters obscured by history and dogma. Magdalene’s “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” and “Could We Start Again, Please” are plaintive pleas to reach and understand the man she loves. Judas’ “Damned for All Time” is a wonderfully well-rounded look at one the world’s greatest villains. And “The Crucifixion” and “John Nineteen: Forty-One” mix music and scriptural elements powerfully.

Wise: I’m surprised that Sunday schools everywhere don’t have matinee showings.

Werth: Well... there is “King Herod’s Song” performed by the delightfully fey Josh “Son of Zero” Mostel which might confuse the kiddies, but all in all, I think Superstar raises some excellent questions about faith and religion. And I challenge anyone not to get up and jive to the title track “Superstar.” If nothing else, Superstar is much more fun to watch than the other 1973 Jesus-ical, Godspell.

Wise: I’d need a truckload of peanut butter eggs to make it through that double feature.

Werth: Hand me some of those jelly beans. Tune in next week for more religious film experiences with Film Gab!