MOVIES OF THE 1960s: A Brief Retrospective

In many ways, the year 1960 reflected a definite changing of the guard in Hollywood. The old guard, best encapsulated in a regal sense of propriety, faux piety and outward glamour, fell at the mercy of more stringent film budgets, a faltering Production Code of Ethics and an investment by the general public in more ‘adult’ entertainments – mirroring a growing social bitterness and general dissolution away from middle class morality.

With the government’s Consent Decree firmly in play, Hollywood studios scrambled to divest themselves, not only of their theater chains, but also their ensconced star system, heavy production overhead and other assets (like their music publishing, shorts subject and cartoon apparatuses) then deemed unnecessary and therefore, unwanted.

Worse, the care and nurturing of talent, that meticulous attention to every detail in daily operations so delicately managed by old time studio moguls had given way to less capable juggling and micromanagement from a seemingly endless line of would be ‘executives’ who had neither the creative finesse nor the intuitive nature to accurately assess what the paying public wanted to see.

Indeed, by the mid-1960s the old guard in body, as well as spirit, had all but vanished from the creative landscape; the one exception being Jack L. Warner who, through finagling and the well timed slitting of a few corporate throats along the way, managed to maintain control over much of Warner Brothers film product throughout the decade.

Over the next five years (1960-1965) the rape and pillage of studio warehouses continued unnoticed with executive logic - ergo greed - dictating the renting, selling or – in some cases – purging of many catalogue titles from their vaults. Television gladly obliged this shortsightedness by buying up block books of classic films for a song and regularly airing them to fill dead air on Saturday afternoons and late night programming.

Despite all the backstage chaos in play, Hollywood continued to churn out grandiose product, most of it in the grand manner of yesteryear, but with increasingly mixed reception at the box office.

Despite a cast that included Frank Sinatra, Maurice Chevalier and Shirley MacLaine, 20th Century-Fox gambled and miserably lost on its costly version of Cole Porter’s Can-Can. Off color results too were forthcoming from Vincente Minnelli’s Bells Are Ringing – a rather lackluster rendering of the Broadway smash; its one saleable feature the effervescence of its star – Judy Holliday.
There were success stories too; few and increasingly far between but most welcome nonetheless. United Artists had a colossal smash with John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven – a sort of sad farewell to the gallant heroes of the old west, while marking the foray into more gritty realism that would soon be the main staple of both the western genre and movie-making in general.
A recent swell of cheaply made Italian epics continued to impact Hollywood’s bloodlust for gargantuan movie making. Kirk Douglas made a startling contribution with Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus – hauling black listed writer Karl Foreman out of his imposed retirement. However, the most impressive epics were yet to come – made abroad and for a fraction of what they would have cost in America.
In America, and, more precisely, on the Universal Studios back lot, director Alfred Hitchcock cast off the peerless glamour of his ‘50s tenure; employing the same scant production crew responsible for his weekly television series and creating what, arguably, remains his most enduring cinematic work: Psycho. Based on the novel by Robert Block, the film was a drastic departure from its text, casting all American ‘pretty boy’ Anthony Perkins as serial killer Norman Bates and forever changing the perception of evil on the screen.

Walt Disney produced a memorable and lavish version of Pollyanna starring his latest ‘discovery’; Haley Mills, then billed as the next Shirley Temple. Owing to Mills’ extraordinary handling of the subject matter, the film managed to remain faithful to its’ novel origins while ever so carefully excising the book’s excessive sugary sweet treacle. Disney took no chances on the film, surrounding Mills with an exceptional supporting cast including Jane Wyman, Karl Malden, Agnes Moorehead and Adolph Menjou.

Other notable productions of the year included the teaming of Audrey Hepburn and Burt Lancaster in The Unforgiven; Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr roughing it in the outback in The Sundowners, and, John Wayne’s personally funded, supervised, starred in and directed The Alamo. Billy Wilder’s The Apartment stood head and shoulders above the rest; a captivating exposé of inner office romance and its inevitable fallout on the marital home front. It took home the Oscar as the year’s Best Picture.
Elizabeth Taylor shone as Best Actress Oscar for Butterfield 8, a rather soapy tale of a self destructive call girl torn between the man she ought to marry and the married man she truly loves. Taylor despised this performance, taking her shoes off during the daily rushes and flinging them at the screen. However, a virulent bout of pneumonia that nearly claimed her life while in England that same year to begin shooting Cleopatra contributed to an undercurrent of sympathy that probably translated into Oscar buzz.

Overall, productions shot in Hollywood were down, though the gap was more than adequately filled by a flood of European films; the most successful of these being Never On A Sunday, starring Melina Mercouri.

Despite the collapse of the star system, new faces continued to emerge and make indelible impressions with audiences; among them Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughan, Charles Bronson, Jane Fonda, Nancy Kwan and George Hamilton. Death claimed cinema's 'king', Clark Gable at the age of 59, just months before the birth of his only son. Though nobody knew it at the time, The Misfits would be Monroe’s last movie too. Gregory Ratoff, Diana Barrymore, Margaret Sullivan and Mack Sennett also took their final bow.

1961: Maverick producer cum spendthrift visionary, Samuel Bronston premiered his epic remake of Cecile B. DeMille’s King of Kings – lambasted and dubbed by the critics as ‘I Was A Teenage Jesus.’ It seems everyone was laughing.

But Bronston had the final chuckle, departing America to found his own studio in Spain and releasing what remains one of the most captivating and impressively mounted super epics in film history: El Cid. The film costarred Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren – the latest and most successful European import.

Already an Oscar winner for the Italian melodrama Two Women, Loren had been dubbed ‘the Italian princess’ – a moniker well deserved. Unfortunately, actor’s ego made Heston and Loren despise one another on the set.

In America, United Artists had a monumental hit with West Side Story; the updated Romeo and Juliet love tragedy relocated to the projects of New York and starring one of filmdom’s most popular stars; Natalie Wood. Directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, the film swept the Oscars with nine wins including Best Picture.
Also notable for the year were Audrey Hepburn’s turn as conflicted call girl Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, based on the frank novel by Truman Capote. Walt Disney supervised his last cartoon classic, One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Disney also had another smash on his hands with Haley Mills – this time, playing twins separated at birth who find one another as teenagers at summer camp in The Parent Trap.
Gregory Peck came out on top in the fictionalized WWII thriller, The Guns of Navarone. Elvis rocked the islands with his mega hit Blue Hawaii; a sort of travelogue set to pop rock and ballads. Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita became the first Italian film to win audiences on both sides of the world.
Arguably, the most compelling movie of the year was Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg; a gripping court room drama about the trial of Nazi officials. Abbey Mann’s screenplay made for well appointed critical argument that revealed no simple answers on either side of the Allied victory.

The curiosities of the year lay in its ambitious failures; Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe’s The Misfits failed to catch on, as did Marlon Brando’s directorial debut One Eyed Jacks. At year’s end, Hollywood was left to mourn the passing of legend Gary Cooper, who died of cancer at the age of 60. Gone too were Ruth Chatterton, one time girlfriend of William Randolph Hearst - Marion Davies, beefcake Jeff Chandler from a brain aneurism, Chico Marx, wily curmudgeon Charles Coburn and crusty Irish wit, Barry Fitzgerald.

New faces emerged to take their place at home and from abroad; among them from Britain; Albert Finney, Italy – Claudia Cardinale; America - Warren Beatty.

1962: The industry approached each new project with caution as overall profits dipped. Though the entrenched mentality of ‘bigger is better’ continued to be the norm in America, it was becoming increasingly apparent, and with growing frequency, that smaller independent films – well scripted and with solid, hard edged acting, made for a fraction of the cost elsewhere - was what the average ticket buyer longed to see.

As such MGM slashed the budget on Billy Rose’s Jumbo. What ought to have been a lavish escapist musical emerged as a rather tired and uninspired road show with Doris Day valiantly attempting to keep her ‘world’s oldest virgin’ persona alive amidst the sawdust, spangles and dreams. Opinion was generally split as to which movie was the most popular of the year. Arguably, the most poignant and introspective was To Kill A Mockingbird; starring Gregory Peck as lawyer Atticus Finch, struggling to defend a black man wrongfully accused of raping a white woman.
David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia was a brilliantly conceived epic that examined one man’s loss of self in the vast expanses of the Nefu desert. The film made instant stars of both British born Peter O’Toole and Egyptian Omar Shariff, while providing Lean’s favorite chameleon, Alec Guinness yet another impressive performance to add to his roster; that of Arab Prince Feisel.
The Manchurian Candidate made for a terrifying glimpse into the dark side of political ambition. Robert Altman’s Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? brought horrific shrieks of another kind. Faded movie queens and real life arch rivals Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were unleashed as a pair of sisters, hell bent on destroying each other.
Initially, Jack Warner refused to have the film shot on his back lot, telling Aldrich “I wouldn’t give you a dime for those two washed up old broads!” When the film proved to be an unexpected smash hit, Warner revised his opinion, welcoming Davis back to the studio she had reigned supreme during the 1940s.

Popular with audiences: the deconstruction of myth in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Natalie Wood shedding a few clothes for Gypsy; Ann Bancroft and Patty Duke’s respective performances in The Miracle Worker, and, Robert Preston’s reprise of his iconic Broadway turn as spurious band leader Harold Hill in The Music Man.

Most of the more memorable films of the year sought to cast an unflattering light on human failings: Otto Preminger’s brutal indictment of American backroom politics in Advise and Consent; the castration of Paul Newman’s disreputable gigolo in Tennessee William’s Sweet Bird of Youth; an exploration of implied lesbianism amongst school teachers in The Children’s Hour, and, salacious relationship between a teen girl and much older man in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita.
For reasons explicable only to him, Marlon Brando chose to play his Fletcher Christian in the first half of a very expensive remake of Mutiny on the Bounty as an effeminate fop. Despite exotic Tahitian locales and the construction of a real life tall ship, the film was lethargic and disappointing. Fox mega star of the 1940s, Alice Faye, was coaxed to rejoin the studio for a remake of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s State Fair – an abysmal misfire that convinced Faye her early retirement had been the more prudent choice. Cinerama; that cumbersome three camera widescreen process glimpsed in only travelogue footage throughout the 1950s, premiered its only two narrative features. The first: The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was received with tepid response from both audiences and critics. The second: MGM’s How The West Was Won was infinitely more satisfying; both artistically and in terms of box office revenues generated. In fact, in its initial run, How The West Was Won became the biggest grossing film of the year.

The most shocking news of the year was the sudden death of 36 year old blonde bombshell Marilyn Monroe; dead of an apparent drug overdose only days before her suspended feature ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ was set to return to filming. The loss put 20th Century-Fox in a particularly precarious financial situation, brought on by continued delays and mounting costs on Cleopatra.

Veteran character actors Frank Lovejoy, Louise Beavers, Thomas Mitchell and Charles Laughton died. Robert Redford, Tom Courtenay, Terance Stamp, Sue Lyons and Suzanne Pleshette arrived on the scene to make indelible first impressions.
1963: Apart from the debut of the cinematic James Bond in Dr. No, that made an instant international star of Sean Connery and generated megawatt box office appeal around the world, it was a very dangerous time to invest in movie production. Audience tastes seemed precariously fickle. What appealed to the public and critics this week, failed to catch on next month…or so it seemed.

Hitchcock released his most technically challenging movie, The Birds – arguably his last enduring cinematic work. John Sturges’ The Great Escape – based on a real life incident during WWII – made a huge star of Steve McQueen, who played a POW with a penchant for ticking off his Nazi captors. Paul Newman gave the performance of his career in Hud; the story of a rough and tumble son of a cattle rancher, forced to come to grips with his own failings as a man.

Fox finally premiered Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra to mixed critical reviews. Though tickets had been sold out well in advance, the film failed to recoup its staggering $30 million investment. Worse, Elizabeth Taylor, who had demanded and received an initial record sum of $1 million to star in the film, publicly decried the final cut.

Mankiewicz had wanted to release two three hour movies; Caesar and Cleopatra and Anthony and Cleopatra. However, the affair between Taylor (then married to Eddie Fisher) and Richard Burton (married to Sybil) prompted Fox to capitalize on the press’s feeding frenzy; truncating Mankiewicz’s vision and distilling the pieces of the puzzle into one ‘almost’ four hour epic.

If Cleopatra was the most expensive movie of the year (or any other for that matter), then Stanley Kramer’s It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was undoubtedly the most star studded; utilizing some 70 Hollywood’s alumni – past and present - and wasting almost all of them to tell the lugubrious and conventional story of what happens to a group of unrelated individuals who learn of a buried treasure in a park in California.

Judy Garland gave it her all in her final musical; a sort of fractured autobiography entitled I Could Go On Singing. Samuel Bronston released 55 Days at Peking – a lavishly appointed, intricate character study that failed to have the same impact as his El Cid. The Best Picture of the year, according to Oscar anyway, was the British made Tom Jones, starring Albert Finney.

The world of entertainment lost character actors Jack Carson, crooner/detective Dick Powell, sourpuss Monte Woolley and cantankerous, Adolph Menjou.

1964: In movies, as well as music, the British invasion was in full swing, prompting Hollywood to counteract the influx with a few homespun movies celebrating the fabled Britain of old. Walt Disney finally convinced author P.L. Travers to sell him the rights to her much beloved children’s novel, Mary Poppins. A huge fan of the book since the 1940s, Disney also imported relative unknown Julie Andrews for the lead.

With the release of Mary Poppins – a superlative last gasp in old time glam’ - Andrews suddenly found herself at the center of a minor controversy. She had originated the part of Eliza Doolittle in Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady on Broadway several years before and had been the original Guinevere in the stage version of Camelot – the performance that brought her to ‘Uncle Walt’s’ attention in the first place. However, despite Andrews’ golden voice and obvious stage presence, studio mogul Jack L. Warner proceeded to cast Audrey Hepburn in his personally supervised filmic adaptation of My Fair Lady.
Hepburn’s presence, though adequately charming, required a vocal dub by professional singer, Marni Nixon – thus prompting the press into a feeding frenzy upon the release of Mary Poppins. Speculation ranked high that Andrews’ Oscar win for ‘Poppins’ was preempted by Hepburn not even being nominated for ‘Lady’.

The foreign market produced The Beatles filmic debut, A Hard Day’s Night; little more than a threadbare reason to string together some of the band’s more popular songs into a sort of extended music video. Much more impressive, particularly as cinematic art, was Umbrellas of Cherbourg; a beautifully composed musical extravaganza buttressing a rather tender love story.

Elsewhere in Hollywood and abroad there was much to cheer. Goldfinger, the third James Bond movie in the franchise, became the highest grossing installment yet. Arguably, the film remains the most celebrated of the Bond movies. Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton sparred magnificently in Michael Curtiz’s epic, Becket. Burton also had a substantial hit with John Huston’s The Night of the Iguana, based on the play by Tennessee Williams.

Anthony Quinn charmed with his zesty performance as Zorba the Greek, though it was costar Lily Kedrova who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her sad, lonely and tragic dowager. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove was a satirically black comedy with several stellar performances by Peter Sellers. The actor also excelled at self parody in Blake Edward’s jaunty romp through the moneyed playground of unscrupulous heels in The Pink Panther. After a career at MGM spent mostly making musicals, Stanley Donen proved he could direct a Hitchcockian thriller with Charade. Initially Cary Grant had refused the part of the amiably glib spy because he believed no one would buy his burgeoning romance with the much younger Audrey Hepburn. Convinced otherwise, the film proved to be Grant’s last truly memorable film role.

For the most part, traditional entertainments faired poorly at the box office; some deservedly so. Audrey Hepburn reunited with her Sabrina costar William Holden for Paris When It Sizzles, a featherweight flat comedy that fizzled at the box office. Paula Prentiss valiantly tried to take the place of Doris Day as Rock Hudson’s costar in the turgid romantic comedy, Man’s Favorite Sport. Joan Crawford reduced her screen image to that of near self parody in Nick Castle’s schlock/shocker, Straight Jacket.

Despite being too young and very much in shape, Debbie Reynolds resurrected the gregarious ghost of Titanic survivor Molly Brown for The Unsinkable Molly Brown; costarring Broadway’s Harve Presnell. The Rat Pack was put to relative good use in Robin and the Seven Hoods – a preposterous, though melodic tale of feuding mob bosses and featuring an electrifying routine by Sammy Davis Jr. as well as introducing the Sinatra standard, ‘Chicago’.
Two noteworthy epics bookended the year; the first starring Michael Caine as a British officer under attack in Zulu; the second, Samuel Bronston’s gargantuan and darkly brooding The Fall of the Roman Empire; starring Sophia Loren, Stephen Boyd, James Mason, Christopher Plummer and Alec Guinness. Produced with staggering meticulous attention to every detail and three dimensional free standing sets of epic proportion, Bronston’s movie failed to catch on at the box office. The world of entertainment bid farewell to George Burns’ better half, Gracie Allen; as well as William Bendix, Eddie Cantor, Cedric Hardwicke, Peter Lorre, Harpo Marx and Alan Ladd.
...to be continued...
@ Nick Zegarac 2009 (all rights reserved).

THE 1960's IN FILM

...THE LAST FIVE YEARS OF A TURBULENT DECADE

1965: Still reeling from the financial debacle that was Cleopatra, Fox released their filmic adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s last notable stage success The Sound of Music without much fanfare or expectation. Though director Robert Wise had been granted permission to shoot his film in Austria, inclement weather forced the production back to Hollywood for most of the interiors. Nevertheless, The Sound of Music proved a sleeper hit, garnering renewed business and gradually building a reputation as one of the best musical entertainments to be released in a long while.

British film star, Julie Christie had her breakout performance and won the Best Actress Oscar for ‘Darling’, a film that cast her as a disreputable social climber who uses sex as a weapon to get what she wants. Christie also appeared as Lara, the ill-fated love to a Russian poet in David Lean’s masterful epic, Doctor Zhivago. Based on the novel by Joseph Pasternak (a book banned in his native Russia for some years to come), the film initially did poor business, though it gradually garnered a following to become one of the most successful releases of this year.

Hollywood afforded two bio pics to screen legend Jean Harlow: the first starring Carroll Baker, the second Carol Lynley. Neither proved memorable. Lawrence Olivier directed himself in an uninspired version of his stage celebrated Othello. Blake Edwards’ The Great Race was a lavish, though turgid and, at times, utterly boring, spectacle about a series of speed car enthusiasts set to compete in a global trek for prize money. Sean Connery starred in The Hill, a brutal WWII melodrama, but increasingly found that he could not escape his alter ego, James Bond in the public’s estimation.
Thunderball became the first James Bond movie to be shot in Panavision, easily out grossing all other films in the Bond franchise and raising Bond-mania in America and Britain to an all time high. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, starring Richard Burton, illustrated a much darker reality of being a spy.

Charlton Heston was miscast twice; first as The War Lord, then as Major Dundee – his larger than life acting style somewhat incongruously matched to less than grand material. Heston did prove a fitting match as Michelangelo opposite Rex Harrison in The Agony and The Ecstasy; though Carol Reed’s direction lacked…well…direction – occasionally bringing the story to a dead halt. Despite a cast of stellar actors at his disposal, director George Steven’s attempt at making Jesus Christ a superstar in The Greatest Story Ever Told was more laborious than epic.

The year was marred by the loss of many great talents, among them songstress Jeanette MacDonald, ‘IT’ girl Clara Bow, comedians Constance Bennett and Margaret Dumont, tough guy Steve Cochran, Everett Sloane, Mary Boland and Stan Laurel. Cancer claimed one of the all time truly gifted comedians, Judy Holliday much too soon.
Premature too was the loss of sultry Dorothy Dandridge who died mysteriously in her hotel room. Linda Darnell was consumed in a tragic house fire in Vancouver. Producer David O. Selznick, who never entirely recovered his reputation as a film pioneer after the release of Gone With The Wind also died, leaving behind a legacy of independent productions unlikely to be surpassed.

1966 was the year television paid $2,000,000.00 for the rights to air The Bridge on the River Kwai in prime time. Overnight, Hollywood’s more recent films became fodder to fill programming on major networks. It mattered not that these movies were interrupted by commercials or that their expansive 2:35:1 aspect ratios were now severely cropped to fit the less than forgiving 4:3 screen. Audiences who had fallen in love with movies like ‘Kwai’ at their local movie palace were rekindling their memories in the comfort of their own homes.
The Best Picture of the year was Fred Zinnemann’s A Man For All Seasons; a compelling character study immeasurably nourished by Paul Scofield’s indelible performance as Sir Thomas Moore. As big a hit as the film was, Zinnemann’s other endeavor of year – the epically mounted ‘Hawaii’ – proved an abysmal flop.

Elizabeth Taylor gave a scathingly acidic performance as the frustrated, embittered hag of a university professor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It won Taylor her second Oscar as Best Actress. In the looser moral code of the ‘60s, Michael Caine became an overnight sex symbol after playing naughty playboy, Alfie.

John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix was exhilarating in its racing sequences, even as the melodramatic back story of racing enthusiasts and their groupies putting it all on the line left something to be desired.

Charlton Heston and Lawrence Olivier sparred against the exotic backdrop of Khartoum; one of the last big epics produced by Julian Blaustein. Lana Turner had a big hit with Douglas Sirk’s rather soapy remake of Madame X. Peter O’Toole and Audrey Hepburn made a winning pair in the frothy comedy with class, How To Steal a Million, directed by William Wyler. Director Robert Wise’s The Sand Pebbles was a fairly compelling sea epic set in Red Chinese waters and starring Steve McQueen.

Perhaps the most perplexing of the year’s misfires was Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, a project that unfortunately ended his longtime collaboration with composer Bernard Hermann. The film starred Paul Newman as a double agent and Julie Andrews as his confused fiancée. Unfortunately, Newman’s method acting and Hitchcock’s meticulous attention to camera design did not happily coincide. Worse, the onscreen chemistry between Newman and Andrews was practically nonexistent.

The world of entertainment lost Buster Keaton, Francis X Bushman, Hedda Hopper, Clifton Webb and Herbert Marshall among others.

No loss was more heartfelt or internationally mourned than that of Walt Disney; dead at the age of 65 following surgery for lung cancer. Disney, who had pioneered the feature length animated motion picture and created the ideal template for what is today considered the ‘theme park’ with Disneyland, was preparing The Jungle Book at the time of his death. The film would go on to be one of the studios’ most popular.

1967 proved the last year for discernable dualities between the old and new in American cinema. On the one hand, Hollywood mounted some thoroughly engaging old time fun; musicals Thoroughly Modern Millie, Half a Six Pence, Doctor Doolittle, Star!, The Happiest Millionaire and Camelot. Unfortunately, only ‘Millie’ proved a winner with audiences; a farcical glance at 1920s flapper chic wrapped inside a white slave trade mystery.

Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner was a gentle, if thought provoking exercise in tolerance; tenderly nursing the pensive subject of race relations into the public spotlight. Undoubtedly more frank and less forgiving on such discussion was In The Heat of The Night; costarring Sidney Poitier, as a committed attorney and Rod Steiger as a racist sheriff. Both men discover an unlikely alliance, mutual understanding and friendship while attempting to solve a murder in a small, but bigoted southern town.

Other notable productions of the year included Far From The Madding Crowd – a meticulous recreation of Thomas Hardy’s England costarring Terrance Stamp, Julie Christie, Alan Bates and Peter Finch; Blow Up – a depiction of London’s swinging mod scene with David Hemmings discovering a murder being committed in one of the photographs he’s taken, and, the counterculture WWII action movie The Dirty Dozen, about a team of criminals and reprobates being trained by the U.S. military for a suicide mission inside Nazi Germany.

On the other hand, violence was steadily replacing spectacle as the big box office draw with Cool Hand Luke and Bonnie And Clyde raising the bar on acceptable levels of screen brutality. Expressing a personal interest to pursue other avenues as an actor, Sean Connery appeared in his second to last Bond film; You Only Live Twice.

Mike Nichol’s The Graduate proved an unlikely sleeper hit, making relative unknown Dustin Hoffman a movie star overnight.

Initial reaction from critics, as per the casting of Hoffman to play the emotionally stunted Benjamin who has an affair with his parents’ close friend, Mrs. Robinson, were negative to cruel. The hero of the original had been a blonde haired, blue eyed Adonis. Casting against type, Nichols found Hoffman more endearing and realistic. So did audiences.

With its nonlinear narrative, Stanley Donen’s Two For The Road was ahead of its time. Despite winning performances from Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn the film found limited favor with audiences. Hepburn had greater success and popularity with Wait Until Dark; the story of a blind woman terrorized by a trio of drug dealers. It was a project personally produced by her former husband Mel Ferrer.

On the misfire side of things: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had their first flop as a couple with a turgid adaptation of Graham Green’s The Comedians. John Huston’s Reflections In A Golden Eye, the story of marital infidelities on a military base also did nothing to advance Taylor’s career – this time cast opposite Marlon Brando. Huston’s original intent was to have the entire film photographed in sepia; a devise overruled by Jack Warner who fired Huston from the project and had the film re-cut and re-tinted.

Charlie Chaplin’s return to directing with A Countess from Hong Kong was utterly disappointing. Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book – an adaptation largely removed from Rudyard Kipling’s beloved children’s story and heavily driven by star character vocalizations - proved the last animated feature to bear Uncle Walt’s personal stamp of approval. It was a colossal hit with the kiddies, despite being derided by most critics.
Death claimed two of Hollywood’s greatest stars: Spencer Tracy and Vivian Leigh. Tracy had just finished shooting Guess Whose Coming to Dinner and did not live to see the finished film. Leigh died backstage from a fatal bout of tuberculosis. Entertainment also lost character actors Mischa Auer, Charles Bickford, Jane Darwell, Basil Rathbone and Claude Rains. Sexpot and Marilyn Monroe knock off Jayne Mansfield was decapitated in a horrific automobile accident.

Until 1968, Hollywood had remained rather circumspect about human sexuality despite the fact that the self regulating production code of motion picture standards had, for some years, fallen by the waste side. However, by 1968 porn and underground films were reaching a much larger cross section of the American public, forcing the industry to go for more obvious and explicit entertainments. Paul Morrissey’s Flesh and Russ Meyer’s Vixen were just two examples of this looming sex-ploitation.

On the whole and with rare exception, Hollywood went for grit rather than glamour. Tony Curtis reinvented his pretty boy personality as The Boston Strangler. Steve McQueen drove a harrowing car chase in the no holds barred detective/thriller, Bullitt. Clint Eastwood’s high plains drifter was brutalized in Hang ‘Em High.

John Wayne bucked the trend, proving that pride of American militarism was still appealing film fair with The Green Berets, despite some vehement opposition from anti-war protest groups who pigeon marked Wayne as a lumbering relic pitted against their anti-Viet Nam propaganda. Roman Polanski’s American debut, Rosemary’s Baby, proved a particularly terrifying portrait of satanic worship amongst the elderly.
Sci-fi had its mixed blessings in 1968. Barbarella was a bizarre intergalactic sex-kitten fantasy starring Jane Fonda in skimpy latex and plastic outfits. Charlton Heston wore practically nothing as he gave an uncharacteristically bleak performance in the watershed thriller, Planet of the Apes. But undoubtedly, the most intellectually stimulating of the lot was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – a hypnotic journey to the outer reaches of the infinite. Time has since proven Kubrick’s film far more science, than fiction.

Romance was more flawed than tragic in the movies. Franco Zefferelli’s take on Romeo and Juliet was hailed as a masterpiece, though time has not been kind to the adolescent renderings from Leonard Whiting or Olivia Hussey. In more contemporary times, Faye Dunaway unsuccessfully attempted to snare herself a thief and a hubby in The Thomas Crown Affair, costarring Steve McQueen as a multimillionaire who robs banks for a thrill.

On opposite ends of the musical spectrum there was the colossal crash and burn of Star! – 20th Century-Fox’s gargantuan, if flawed, valentine to stage legend Gertrude Lawrence starring Julie Andrews, and, Columbia’s world wide success with Carol Reed’s rather turgid recreation of Dickensian London in Oliver! – the film that took home the year’s Oscar for Best Picture.

Somewhere between these two was Francis Ford Coppola’s Finian’s Rainbow – a badly dated, budget restricted mish-mash that nevertheless afforded audiences one last look at the ageless brilliance of Fred Astaire.

For only the second time in the history of the Academy Awards, the Oscar vote for Best Actress was split down the middle; with newcomer to films Barbra Streisand and veteran screen legend Katharine Hepburn sharing the award for their performances in Funny Girl and The Lion In Winter respectively.
While audiences thrilled at the filmic debuts of Genevieve Bujold, Beau Bridges, Katherine Ross and John Voight, the world of entertainment lost film legends Tallulah Bankhead, Franchot Tone, Dorothy Gish and Mae Murray. Director Anthony Asquith, who directed two of the 60s most popular ensemble melodramas - The VIP’s and The Yellow Rolls-Royce - also died, as did director Robert Z. Leonard.

But the most chillingly bizarre death of the year belonged to silent screen legend, Ramon Navarro – the original Ben-Hur. Found bound and sexually brutalized in the bedroom of his mansion, it was later determined that the bisexual Navarro had been the victim of a pair of gay hustlers.

Everything about 1969 seemed to suggest counterculture; particularly audiences’ aversion to lavishly appointed traditional fair. Sweet Charity, based on the Fellini film Nights in Calabria and re-envisioned on the Broadway stage by choreographer/director Bob Fosse was a colossal misfire. In adapting this tender tale of a taxi dancer desperate to eschew ‘the life’ Fosse ran amuck of the narrative with some garish and weighty tripe.

MGM, who had spent the decade on the verge of financial ruin, attempted to resurrect one of their all time 1939 weepies, Goodbye, Mr. Chips for a new generation. But the subtle magic and tender poignancy of the original story painfully eluded Peter O’Toole and Petula Clark – both miscast in this musical version, void of a single spark of creative originality.
The same could not be said of Hello Dolly! – a brilliantly conceived, gargantuan, yet buoyant musical mélange that tragically came at the end of that popularity cycle and love affair between audiences and movie musicals. Behind the scenes, a mutual hatred between Barbra Streisand and costar Walter Matthau made for daily conflicts and many a backstage headache for director Gene Kelly, though none of this animosity reflected itself on the big screen.

Critical and audience praise instead focused on the more daring testaments of that year: Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch – a sort of anti-heroic western celebrating the lawlessness of a troop of reprobates; the youth-orientated drug and hippie culture love in – Easy Rider – and ‘Z’, a foreign made political thriller/melodrama. Veteran director Henry Hathaway and John Wayne had their biggest hit with True Grit – the film that won Duke his long overdue Best Actor Oscar.

Taking over the role of James Bond from Sean Connery, George Lazenby made ample eye candy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – one of the most intricate and intensely written movies in the Bond franchise. Unfortunately, ego preceded stardom for Lazenby and his contract was promptly canceled by producer Cubby Broccoli following the film’s rather tepid response at the box office.
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice extolled the virtues and vices of the swinger’s scene. Liza Minnelli stepped outside the musical genre with an uncharacteristically powerful performance in The Sterile Cuckoo, while Ingrid Bergman could be seen jazzing it up along side Goldie Hawn in the offbeat comedy, Cactus Flower. The Battle of Britain proved to be the heavyweight of the year, as one critic put it, “containing more guest stars than airplanes.”

British actress, Maggie Smith had a pair of winners with the musical ‘Oh What A Lovely War’, and the scintillating melodrama ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ – the latter winning her the Best Actress Academy Award. Paul Newman and Robert Redford were costarred in the playful, yet serious Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – the best of the revisionist westerns though Sergio Leone’s lengthy Once Upon A Time In The West was the culmination of the best of his particular brand in spaghetti westerns.

For period melodrama there was nothing to touch the sparing between Richard Burton as Henry V and Genevieve Bujold as the title character in Anne of the Thousand Days – a brilliantly conceived screen adaptation of the stage hit. It was a busy year for Burton, who also appeared opposite Clint Eastwood, hanging up his spurs in the WWII adventure yarn, Where Eagles Dare. Burton’s most uncharacteristic performance of the year was as Rex Harrison’s pert and witty gay lover in Stanley Donen’s Staircase.

Hollywood said goodbye to too many stellar talents this year; directors Josef von Sternberg and Leo McCarey and actors Robert Taylor, Boris Karloff and Jeffrey Hunter among them. The little girl with the big voice, Judy Garland, tragically died of an accidental drug overdose in London. Her New York funeral drew more than 200,000 weeping fans.

But the most haunted of passages went to rising film star Sharon Tate; the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, who was brutally slaughtered in her home along with other guests by a brainwashed group of ‘worshipers’ following warped counterculture guru Charles Manson.

By the end of the ‘60s, Hollywood turned yet another corner – away from home grown studio projects toward a more streamlined policy of providing rental facilities for independent producers. Gone or retired were the veteran alumni who had developed not only the system for making movies, but also the trademark of individualized studio styles.

The early part of the 1970s mirrored this trend toward smaller movies. Several major studios became the target of hostile corporate takeovers with MGM – once the biggest and arguably, the best of the lot - closing up shop entirely after being sold to Las Vegas financier Kirk Kerkorian. Many critics pondered the future of Hollywood in general. But the era of the blockbuster was just around the corner.

@Nick Zegarac 2009 (all rights reserved).

SALUTING THE LIFE & LEGACY OF RONALD REAGAN: Part I

“He took an America suffering from 'malaise'... and made its citizens believe again in their

destiny.”

- Edwin Feulner, President of the Heritage Foundation

It is a fair assessment that were it not for Ronald Wilson Reagan’s other career as commander and chief his film legacy might have gone largely unnoticed in the annals of Hollywood history.

For although Ronald Reagan was an amiable leading man during Hollywood’s golden age, who occasionally displayed the hallmarks of an exceptional acting prowess, and, in some very important starring roles in A-list movies (Knute Rockne: All American, The Winning Team, Kings Row The Hasty Heart and Storm Warning among them), Reagan’s tenure in films was made brief by studio shortsightedness -more so than from a general lack of either talent or will to succeed.

Realistically, today Ronald Reagan is readily remembered as the beloved 40th President of the United States; an inspired leader with an indomitable ‘can-do’ spirit: and this is as it should be.

What made the Reagan Presidency so indelible was that Reagan’s causes seemed to intently focus on the plight of each and every American. Even Reagan’s most ardent detractors in the political arena were, at one time or another genuinely moved into offering a kind word or even impassioned praise after one of his moving speeches.

Reagan’s politics crossed party lines. It inspired. It instilled a sense of value, not only in the office of the President, but in the country’s self worth and image and its’ importance as a progressive super power on the world stage. Reagan’s America was all about pride.

In recent months, the media has resurrected many a Reagan-ism to brighten the hour of the latest race for the White House. Growing up, I recall how we all looked forward with waited anticipation to the nuggets of wisdom from Ronald Reagan.

These nuggets often took on the form of a story conveyed with a wit, charm, an actor’s gift for memorization and a healthy dose of frank honesty; lengthy excursions perhaps, though never anything less than thoroughly engrossing to listen to.

Almost from his inaugural in 1981, Reagan’s presidency had momentum, optimism, prominence and distinction. Reagan’s was the personification of hard-headed determinism married to an imperishable and alluring sway – hypnotic and thoroughly beguiling. Reagan’s rapport with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher remains one of the all time great Anglo-American alliances of the 20th century.

While many of Reagan’s predecessors had adopted various façades to meet the changing political landscape they oversaw, Ronald Reagan engaged each new challenge with only one face; open, accepting, friendly, even tolerant of the media’s scrutiny and ridicule; yet granite-like and firm when pushed to reconsider any of the ideals he held strongly.

Reagan was not a sentimentalist, though at times when America needed to let its collective hair down – as in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster – Reagan could move his audience to the brink of a good heartfelt cry and then, just as easily, rally his people to stirring calls of cheer and a look to the future – with a wink, a smile and his personal renewal of a promise made and as yet unfulfilled; that America’s best days lay ahead of her.

In our memory then, Ronald Reagan has not aged. It is, of course, an illusion of the mind, for the man is no more. But Reagan gave us the impression that the sun would never entirely set on his time. Arguably, it never has. He remains one of the distinctly American, truly iconic figures of the 20th century; ensconced in our collective hearts and minds as eternal.

Hence, we have to remind ourselves that Ronald Reagan is gone. For in his thought, word and deed, Ronald Wilson Reagan left behind much more than a Presidential legacy. He gave American back its dream; a blueprint for the prosperity of a nation. While he lived, he provided guidance and wisdom in ample doses of Teflon-coated ideology. He stood tall and proud; and in the years since his presidency it is this seemingly intangible legacy of intrinsic values that remains the primary reason why Ronald Reagan – the man – endures.

LET’S START AT THE BEGINNING…

“Democracy is worth dying for because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.”

– Ronald Reagan

Ronald Wilson Reagan was born above a bank in Tampico, Illinois on February 6, 1911. Reagan's father Jack nicknamed him ‘Dutch’ in reference to his ‘fat little Dutchman-like appearance. In his youth, Reagan's family briefly lived in Monmouth, Galesburg and Chicago; though it was the family’s move to Dixon that made the most lasting impression on young Reagan.

At Dixon High School, Reagan indulged in acting and sports; acquiring a job as a lifeguard at Lowell Park in 1926. After high school, Reagan attended Eureka College where he majored in economics and sociology and also played football.

In 1932, Reagan landed his first job as a small town radio broadcaster for the University of Iowa football games; rating $10 per game. A full time staff announcer's job at WOC radio station in Davenport hiked his pay to $100 a month. But in 1937, while traveling to cover a football game in California, Reagan took a screen test that instantly led to his being offered a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers.

His first screen credit was the starring role in the undistinguished Love Is on the Air (1937). Though studio president, Jack L. Warner had a lot of faith in his new acquisition, Reagan’s early tenure at the studio was largely forgettable. He was unaccredited as a radio announcer in Hollywood Hotel (1937).

On April 29th of that same year, Reagan completed a home-study Army Extension Course and enlisted in the Reserves. He was assigned as a private to Troop B, 322nd Cavalry at Des Moines, Iowa, then appointed Second Lieutenant in the Officers’ Reserve Corps on May 25, and later assigned to the 323rd Cavalry on June 18th.

Warner Bros. recalled Reagan to their stable to star in one of the worst movies ever produced at the studio; 1938’s Swing Your Lady – a backwoods hillbilly musical that ironically also featured Humphrey Bogart. 1938 distinguished itself in another way for Reagan. On the set of Brother Rat, Reagan fell in love with his costar Jane Wyman.

Fan magazines dubbed it a love match and Reagan next appeared in support of Bette Davis in Dark Victory, a considerable effort in which he played Alec Hamm; a drunken ever-faithful friend to Davis’ Judith Traherne. In 1940, Reagan had his best role to date as ill-stricken George Gipp in Knute Rockne: All American. To inaugurate the year, Reagan married Wyman on January 26, 1940.

Reagan’s first attempt at functioning as something more than an actor within the Hollywood social structure came in 1941 when he was elected to the Board of Directors of the Screen Actor’s Guild as an alternate. That same year, Reagan’s eldest daughter Maureen was born.

As the war in Europe heated up, Reagan was ordered to active duty on April 18, 1942. Unfortunately, his nearsightedness classified him for limited service at Fort Mason, California as a liaison officer of the Port and Transportation Office.

Upon approval from the Army Air Force, Reagan was assigned Public Relations duties in the First Motion Picture Unit in Culver City, California. The move afforded Reagan the opportunity to serve his country while he continued making movies for his Hollywood bosses.

By far, Reagan’s most gripping performance to date came in Kings Row (1942); a poignantly dark and brooding melodrama about small town hypocrisy. He plays wealthy playboy, Drake McHugh, whose affair with Louise Gordon (Nancy Coleman) is objected to by her father; the sadist/Doctor Henry Gordon (Charles Coburn).

After Drake’s fortunes are liquidated, Drake falls on the mercy of his longtime friend, Randy Monaghan (Ann Sheridan); a poor girl who, with the help of her father, gets Drake a job working the railroad. As a quiet understanding and, later, romance develops between Randy and Drake, Louise falls into a deep state of melancholy.

An unfortunate accident leads to the summoning of Doctor Gordon to tend to Drake’s wounds. However, presuming that his own daughter could never love an invalid, Gordon deliberately and needlessly amputates both of Drake’s legs – sending him into an immediate and deepening depression.

Reagan always considered his performance in Kings Row to be his finest and reflected viewing of this film certainly bears out his assessment. There is a startling clarity to Drake’s transformation from amiable man about town to dissolute recluse; the resurrection of his spirit at the end of the film, with the aid of friend Parris Mitchell (Robert Cummings), in hindsight, a rousing glimpse into the eternally optimistic spirit Reagan would bring to his future calling in the political arena.

For now, Reagan contented himself with a series of forgettable roles in subsequent Warner product. A bright spot was his casting as Johnny Jones in Irving Berlin’s blindingly all-star tribute to the Armed Forces; This Is The Army (1943). In January 1944, Captain Reagan was ordered to temporary duty in New York City; a tenure that lasted until he was reassigned to Fort MacArthur in California on December 9, 1945.

By war’s end, and despite his lack of active duty, Reagan could be proud of the fact that he had produced over 400 training films for the army. On the home front, the Reagan’s welcomed the prospect of a second child. It would be the last happy news for their marriage.

Reagan became the Screen Actor’s Guild’s (SAG) third Vice President in 1946 and its’ elected President in 1947. That same year however, a second daughter Christine was born and died on June 26, 1947. Although the stigma of this loss was slightly eased by the adoption of a son, Michael that same year (Michael was actually born in 1945) Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman divorced one year later on June 28, 1948.

During Reagan’s SAG tenure and following his divorce from Wyman, he threw himself into work almost entirely, overseeing and bringing about resolutions to labor-management disputes within the film industry and also contributing to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings.

In 1949 Reagan delivered one of his best performances as the compassionate solider of war – ‘Yank’ in The Hasty Heart. Though this film was ultimately a showcase for Richard Todd, Reagan’s presence distinguished itself in a sentimental and memorable story.

The year was also marked by a most fortuitous chance meeting between Reagan and MGM contract actress Nancy Davis. She had been mistaken for another Nancy Davis who was suspected of being a communist. As such, her name had been added to the McCarthy blacklist.

In his role as SAG’s President, Reagan helped to resolve this snafu for Davis and the two became immediate friends. “I don’t know if it was love at first sight,” Nancy would later muse, “But it was pretty close.”

In March 1952, Nancy Davis became the second Mrs. Ronald Reagan.

The last two remarkable movies in Reagan’s tenure were 1951’s Storm Warning and 1952’s The Winning Team. In the former, Reagan plays a District Attorney investigating small town racial bigotry and debunking the presence of the KKK – responsible for the murder of a man on a public street. In the latter, Reagan was cast as legendary baseball player, Grover Cleveland Alexander opposite Doris Day.

In between these two films Regan made his one glaring blunder as an actor in the infamously bad Bedtime for Bonzo (1951); cast as a Professor who befriends a chimp. It is largely due to the legendary status of this misfire that Democrats were quick to judge Reagan’s film career in totem as that of a forgettable B-movie actor.

In response to the allegation, Reagan jokingly replied that in his day “…they (producers) didn't want them good, they wanted them Thursday”. However, behind the scenes Reagan often held a bit of regret that his tenure in Hollywood was never again to be taken seriously.

Although Reagan was an early critic of television, the medium proved to be very good for his career in more ways than one. He became the host of General Electric Theater; a weekly series that netted him the then plush salary of $125,000 per year in this role.

From 1964 to 1965 Reagan would have a reoccurring role in the popular western series; Death Valley Days. But it was another burgeoning side interest that, by the end of the decade, had begun to garner real purpose for Ronald Reagan.

...to be continued...

@Nick Zegarac 2008 (all rights reserved).

SALUTING RONALD REAGAN: PART II

INTO THE SIDE SHOW

“I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.”
- Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan began his political affiliations as a Roosevelt Democrat, but shifted to Republicanism beginning in the early 1950s, endorsing Presidential candidacies Dwight D. Eisenhower(1952 and 1956) and Richard Nixon(1960). Going as far back as his tenure with General Electric Theater, Reagan had been required to give speeches.

These were frequently conservative in tone and written entirely by Reagan. Hence, and although he would later have speech writers in the White House, Reagan continued to be his own best editor – reshaping and evolving the themes and concepts to suit his own inimitable style and delivery.

In 1964, Reagan campaigned for Barry Goldwater, revealing his own ideologies in a memorable speech on Goldwater’s behalf on October 27, 1964. “The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people,” Reagan reasoned, “…and they knew when a government sets out to do that it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.”

The speech made a decided impression on California Republicans who took it to heart and successfully elected Reagan as their governor in 1966. It was a rocky relationship almost from the start and in hindsight seemed to reflect Reagan’s stalwart approach to politics.

For example; in 1968, Reagan attempted to test the presidential waters himself with disastrous results. He ultimately finished in third place on the Republican ticket. It was a minor embarrassment to Reagan who followed the defeat up with a major misfire at home. In 1969, Reagan called out the Highway Patrol and other law enforcement to Berkeley’s university campus to quell student protests. The incident eventually came to be known as ‘Bloody Thursday’ and forced Berkeley into a state of emergency. After the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst and demanded the distribution of food to the poor as trade for her release, Reagan jokingly quipped, “It's just too bad we can't have an epidemic of botulism.”

In 1970, Reagan was re-elected as Governor of California. Outspoken in support of capital punishment, Reagan’s second term in office helped to refine a political platform he would later ride to victory in the White House; advocating less government regulation of the economy and reduced taxation. In 1976, Reagan challenged incumbent President Gerald Ford in a bid to become the Republican Party's candidate for President.

Despite early victories in North Carolina, Texas, and California, Reagan ultimately lost in New Hampshire and Florida and lost the candidacy to Ford. However, in 1980 Reagan effectively defeated incumbent President Jimmy Carter. In his inaugural address to the nation, given in the shadow of 52 hostages being held by Iran, Reagan revealed his promise for the future of America; promises that, by and large and in retrospect, he admirably fulfilled.

“The business of our nation goes forward,” Reagan explained, “…We are a nation that has a government; not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people…

Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it's not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work; work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it… We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we're in a time when there are not heroes; they just don't know where to look…Your dreams, your hopes, your goals are going to be the dreams, the hopes, and the goals of this administration, so help me God…

Above all, we must realize that no arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is as formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women…The crisis we are facing today… require, however, our best effort and our willingness to believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds, to believe that together with God's help we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us.

And after all, why shouldn't we believe that? We are Americans.”

It was this speech that set the tone for Reagan’s presidency; one aggressively pursued in policies that brought about substantial changes to both the domestic and world stage. Reagan’s resolve on matters of state never wavered, but his personal resolve was put to a dramatic test of faith on March 30, 1981 when would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr. fired into an open crowd, wounding Reagan in the chest and narrowly missing his heart.

Coughing up blood, but maintaining his sense of wit, Reagan was rushed to George Washington University Hospital with a collapsed lung where he jokingly told the attending physicians, “I hope you're all Republicans!” Though lead surgeon Dr. Joseph Giordano was not, he affectionately replied, “Today, Mr. President, we're all Republicans.”

Despite the fact that Hinckley’s bullet had seriously injured Reagan, he recovered from this attempt on his life with remarkable speed and was released from the hospital on April 11 – a mere 12 days later. His approval rating shot to 73%.

Immediately following this attempt on his life, Reagan began to show the sort of hard as nails leadership that would eventually brand him a determinist. He made good on a 1980 campaign promise to appoint the first female Supreme Court Justice by nominating Sandra Day O'Connor to fill a vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Potter Stewart.

His critics were quick to attack his plans, but Reagan held firm on virtually all issues that crossed his desk. For example: when the Air Traffic Controllers violated a regulation prohibiting government unions from striking, Reagan ordered the employees back to work within 48hrs or face forfeiture of their tenured positions. It was a test of Presidential will versus union might. Ultimately, Reagan would fire 11,345 air traffic controllers and bust the union for disobeying his direct command.

Another problem immediately facing Reagan’s presidency was the economic slump America was in. Reagan’s across the board tax cuts – critics dubbed ‘Reaganomics’ - was responsible for a galvanic reinvigoration of the American economy. His Economic Recovery Tax Act was signed into law in 1981 and revised in 1986. Although the unemployment rate was to peak to a record 10.8% by Christmas of 1982, throughout the rest of Reagan’s presidency that figure steadily and significantly dropped.

As a result, sixteen million new jobs were created and inflation plummeted. There remains some debate even today as to the foresight in Reagan’s economic stimulus. Pundits have pointed out that Reagan’s reduced spending on Medicaid, Federal Education and food stamps benefited the rich and middle classes - not the poor.

There can be no doubt that Reagan viewed America as the land of opportunity. As such, it was the responsibility of the poor to seek out that opportunity and improve their own situations. Reagan sought to purge tens of thousands deemed to be ‘milking the system’. But he also was quick to protect entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

To exercise America’s renewed supremacy on the world stage, Reagan’s ‘peace through strength’ program generated a record 40% peacetime military buildup by 1985. Once again, the pundits saw this increase as a throwback to over-budgeted military spending that occurred immediately after WWII.

However, in 1983, 241 American servicemen were murdered by a suicide bomber in Beirut; an act of unprovoked aggression that Reagan publicly called ‘despicable’ and used to further illustrate the need for increased military spending. Two days after that attack, Reagan ordered U.S. forces to invade Grenada.

Reagan also escalated the Cold War by implementing new policies towards the Soviet Union; reviving the B-1 bomber program and producing the MX Peacekeeper missile. Becoming the first American president ever to address British Parliament, Reagan dubbed the Soviets ‘the evil empire’ and proudly predicted that Marxism-Leninism would soon become a thing of the past.

By the spring of 1983, Reagan had introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI); a ground to space-based system that would protect the United States from attack by nuclear ballistic missiles. Opponents dubbed the project ‘Star Wars’ and argued that it was technological fancy at best. The Soviets, however, particularly leader Yuri Andropov, were thrust into an immediacy of grave concern.

THE SECOND TIME AROUND

In hindsight, Reagan’s second term in office seems almost a given. By 1984 he was a beloved figure in American pop culture; a President to be parodied on The Tonight Show, but a man to be taken seriously elsewhere at home and on the world stage. Perhaps it was his actor’s training working overtime, but Reagan enjoyed his celebrity with the masses. He also knew how to laugh at himself.

When incumbent Walter Mondale suggested that Reagan’s age was a valid precursor to his being considered for a second term in office, Reagan confronted the question head on, but with humoring. “I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” he told his audience during the second Presidential debate, “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponents youth and inexperience!”

The quip was well timed and solicited applause from the audience and even Mondale. That November, Reagan made a clean sweep of 49 of 50 states – the only loss being Minnesota; Mondale’s home state.

Reagan’s second term was early dogged by controversies; his first involving a visit to the German military cemetery in Bitburg where he laid a wreath for the fallen soldiers with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Earlier, it had been determined that Nazi soldiers were also buried there. On the home front, Reagan’s laconic stance towards the growing HIV-AIDS epidemic garnered outrage from the gay and lesbian communities.

During the summer of 1985 Reagan underwent surgery to remove cancerous polyps from his colon and skin cancer cells in his nose. Reoccurring cells in his nose were removed successfully that October. In each case, Reagan was presented as the picture of health and vitality. In fact, he returned to work the same day as his surgeries with a ‘business as usual’ attitude that only endeared him further with the conservative base who by now perceived him as the salvation of their nation.

On October 27, 1986 Reagan made his aggressive stance on the war against drugs more concrete with the signing of an enforcement bill, openly criticized for promoting racial disparity in prison populations because of its differences in sentencing for crack and powder cocaine offenders. Critics also charged that the bill in no way reduced the availability of drugs on the street.

Once again, it was Reagan’s response to a national tragedy that brought the country together. On January 28 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated in mid-air a mere 73 seconds after liftoff as a televised audience looked on in horror. Postponing his State of the Union Address, Reagan instead delivered one of the most moving speeches of his Presidency:

“… Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss…We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together…they, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.

…The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

…There's a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and an historian later said, ``He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.'' Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete.

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth' to `touch the face of God.”

Three days later Reagan delivered an even more eloquent address during the Johnson Space Center memorial service that, in part read:

“We come together today to mourn the loss of seven brave Americans, to share the grief that we all feel, and, perhaps in that sharing, to find the strength to bear our sorrow and the courage to look for the seeds of hope. Our nation's loss is first a profound personal loss to the family and the friends and the loved ones of our shuttle astronauts. To those they left behind -- the mothers, the fathers, the husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, yes, and especially the children -- all of America stands beside you in your time of sorrow.

What we say today is only an inadequate expression of what we carry in our hearts. Words pale in the shadow of grief; they seem insufficient even to measure the brave sacrifice of those you loved and we so admired. Their truest testimony will not be in the words we speak, but in the way they led their lives and in the way they lost their lives -- with dedication, honor, and an unquenchable desire to explore this mysterious and beautiful universe.…

We will always remember them, these skilled professionals, scientists, and adventurers, these artists and teachers and family men and women; and we will cherish each of their stories, stories of triumph and bravery, stories of true American heroes. …Dick, Mike, Judy, El, Ron, Greg, and Christa -- your families and your country mourn your passing.

We bid you goodbye; we will never forget you. For those who knew you well and loved you, the pain will be deep and enduring. A nation too, will long feel the loss of her seven sons and daughters, her seven good friends. We can find consolation only in faith, for we know in our hearts that you who flew so high and so proud now make your home beyond the stars, safe in God's promise of eternal life. May God bless you all and give you comfort in this difficult time.”

LAST ACT FINALES

It is fair to say that Reagan’s final years in office represented new challenges to his presidency that were met with varying and indifferent levels of success. Throughout Reagan’s presidency, political relationships between Libya and the United States were contentious at best.

In April 1986, the detonation of a bomb in a crowded Berlin discotheque (which resulted in 63 American military personnel being injured and one death of a serviceman) prompted Reagan to authorize a series of air strikes designed to halt Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s ability to export terrorism around the world. Defending the strikes, Reagan concluded in a televised address that "When our citizens are attacked or abused anywhere in the world on the direct orders of hostile regimes, we will respond so long as I'm in this office."

The year was also marked by Reagan’s signing of the Immigration Reform and Control Act that made it illegal to knowingly hire or recruit illegal immigrants but also granted amnesty to approximately 3 million illegals who had entered the U.S. prior to January 1, 1982. But perhaps 1986 will remain best remembered as the year Reagan’s presidency was rocked by the Iran-Contra scandal.

In essence, the administration was accused of funneling monies from covert arms sales to Iran to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. The International Court of Justice ruled that the U.S. had violated international law and Reagan was forced to profess general ignorance about its existence. During the resulting televised inquest, Reagan's popularity plummeted from 67 to 46 percent in less than a week.

To some extent, Ronald Reagan’s next challenge to newly appointed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was prompted by the very real fact that by 1980 the U.S.S.R had built a military arsenal and army surpassing that of the United States. Since the Revolution, the Soviets had been fronted by some very hard line communist dictators and by a stalwart lack of diplomacy with the U.S. Both countries thought of the other as their elemental threat.

Reagan, however, sensed a change in the wind with Gorbachev’s appointment and set out to forge a new alliance with ‘the enemy’ state.

At the same time, Reagan’s diplomacy had persuaded Saudi Arabia to increase its oil production; a move that caused gas prices to fall in the U.S. but crippled Soviet export revenues. A seemingly more liberal and open leader than his predecessors, Gorbachev agreed to meet Reagan for four summit conferences around the world: in Geneva, Iceland Washington and Moscow. Just prior to the third summit, Gorbachev announced his intention to pursue significant arms agreements with the U.S.

During this interim, Reagan also put forth a challenge to Gorbachev at the Berlin Wall, declaring that if the U.S.S.R. truly desired peaceful relations between the two nations, the exercised proof would be in Gorbachev tearing down this blockade that, for so long, had represented communist oppression.

Together, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty at the White House in 1987. Passed into law the following year as Reagan was attending the final summit in Moscow, the treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. Treated as a celebrity by the Russians while in Moscow, Reagan conceded that he no longer considered the Soviet’s the ‘evil empire’. In 1989, the world looked on with general amazement as the Berlin Wall – a cold war symbol of Soviet noncompliance for so many decades was torn down by eager revelers on both sides. Two years later, Communism was no more.

To say that the end of the Reagan Presidency in 1989 was the end of an era is putting things mildly. Despite political crises, health concerns and often formidable opposition to his plans for economic reform from the Democratic Party, Ronald Reagan had accomplished a staggering amount of the precepts he had set out to establish at the start of his first inaugural.

In his 34th and final address to the nation, Reagan continued to display the optimism and passion for the country he had presided over for 8 years.

“It's been the honor of my life to be your President So many of you have written the past few weeks to say thanks, but I could say as much to you. Nancy and I are grateful for the opportunity you gave us to serve.

One of the things about the Presidency is that you're always somewhat apart. You spend a lot of time going by too fast in a car someone else is driving, and seeing the people through tinted glass -- the parents holding up a child, and the wave you saw too late and couldn't return. And so many times I wanted to stop and reach out from behind the glass, and connect. Well, maybe I can do a little of that tonight.

People ask how I feel about leaving. And the fact is, ‘parting is such sweet sorrow.’ The sweet part is California and the ranch and freedom; the sorrow - the goodbyes, of course, and leaving this beautiful place…It's been quite a journey this decade, and we held together through some stormy seas. And at the end, together, we are reaching our destination.

…The lesson of all this was, of course, that because we're a great nation, our challenges seem complex. It will always be this way. But as long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours. And something else we learned: Once you begin a great movement, there's no telling where it will end. We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.

…But life has a way of reminding you of big things through small incidents. Once, during the heady days of the Moscow summit, Nancy and I decided to break off from the entourage one afternoon to visit the shops on Arbat Street -- that's a little street just off Moscow's main shopping area. Even though our visit was a surprise, every Russian there immediately recognized us and called out our names and reached for our hands.
We were just about swept away by the warmth. You could almost feel the possibilities in all that joy. But within seconds, a KGB detail pushed their way toward us and began pushing and shoving the people in the crowd. It was an interesting moment. It reminded me that while the man on the street in the Soviet Union yearns for peace, the government is Communist. And those who run it are Communists, and that means we and they view such issues as freedom and human rights very differently.

We must keep up our guard, but we must also continue to work together to lessen and eliminate tension and mistrust… I want the new closeness to continue. And it will, as long as we make it clear that we will continue to act in a certain way as long as they continue to act in a helpful manner. If and when they don't, at first pull your punches. If they persist, pull the plug. It's still trust but verify. It's still play, but cut the cards. It's still watch closely. And don't be afraid to see what you see.

…Finally, there is a great tradition of warnings in Presidential farewells, and I've got one that's been on my mind for some time. But oddly enough it starts with one of the things I'm proudest of in the past 8 years: the resurgence of national pride that I called the new patriotism. This national feeling is good, but it won't count for much, and it won't last unless it's grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions.

…But now, we're about to enter the nineties and some things have changed. Younger parents aren't sure that an un-ambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven't re-institutionalized it. We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom -- freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs protection.
So, we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important… Let's start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.

And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

And that's about all I have to say tonight, except for one thing. The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the ‘shining city upon a hill’. The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was 8 years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

We've done our part. And as I walk off into the city streets, a final word to the men and women of the Reagan revolution, the men and women across America who for 8 years did the work that brought America back. My friends: We did it. We weren't just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger, we made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all. And so, goodbye, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America."

Immediately following his departure from Washington, the Reagans traveled between their Bel Air home and ranch in Santa Barbara. Once, in a long while, they would appear on behalf of the Republican Party.

In November 1991, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library was opened to the public with a dedication ceremony that included five presidents. Reagan’s final public address came on February 3, 1994 during a tribute in Washington; his last major appearance in April for the funeral of President Richard Nixon. But it was a hand written confession penned in August of that same year that proved the most stunning revelation of them all:

“I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease,” he wrote, “…at the moment I feel just fine. I intend to live the remainder of the years God give me on this earth doing the things I have always done…I know begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead. Thank you, my friends. May God always bless you.”

As the years went on, the disease slowly eroded Reagan’s mental capacity. Questioned by CNN’s Larry King, Nancy Reagan confessed to the nation that her husband’s condition had worsened to the extent that he would like to be remembered as he had been and not as he currently was. As such, Reagan remained out of the public spotlight, sequestered to his beloved ranch where a fall and subsequent hip surgery did much to slow down this once vital man.

Ronald Wilson Reagan died in Bel Air, California on June 5, 2004 – ten years after his Alzheimer diagnosis. He was 93 years old. June 11 was declared a National Day of Mourning by President George W. Bush. Reagan's body was taken to the Kingsley and Gates Funeral Home in Santa Monica and then, on June 7 to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. On June 9, Reagan's body was flown to Washington where he became the tenth United States president to lie in state; the first since Lyndon Johnson in 1973. During those thirty-four hours 104,684 people filed past the coffin.

On June 11, a state funeral at Washington’s National Cathedral prompted heartfelt eulogies from both Presidents Bush, former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and, perhaps most poignant of all, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (through pre-recorded address).

Today, Ronald Reagan’s presidential legacy remains open to debate. While some continue to laud him for his economic reform and bringing about an end to the Cold War, others have argued that his policies created a major deficit and sacrificed the U.S.’s reputation on the world stage.
To what extent Reagan’s fortitude brought about an end to communism has also been debated by pundits even though Gorbachev himself has said that "Reagan was instrumental in bringing about the end of the Cold War;" a plaudit concurred by Britain’s Margaret Thatcher who added that “Ronald Reagan had a higher claim than any other leader to have won the Cold War for liberty and he did it without a shot being fired.”

Reagan’s political views also helped to reshape the Republican Party as a modern conservative movement. More men voted Republican under Reagan; the so-called ‘Reagan Democrats’. In the final analysis, Reagan had become the iconic symbol of influence within the Republican Party.
Of his ability to connect with the masses – dubbed ‘The Great Communicator’ – Reagan himself had always been both modest and reflective; “I never thought it was my style that made a difference — it was the content. I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things.”

Indeed, he had. As it turned out, Ronald Reagan proved a very tough act to follow. In June 2005, The Discovery Channel ran a popularity poll that asked its viewers to vote for The Greatest American of all time: Ronald Wilson Reagan received that honorary title.

@Nick Zegarac 2008 (all rights reserved).

PARALYZED IN THE DARK - a tribute to the movie palace

"No palace of Prince or Princess, no mansion of millionaire could offer the same pleasure, delight, and relaxation to those who seek surcease from the work-a-day world, than this, where delicate dreams of youth are spun...Here in this Fox dream castle, dedicated to the entertainment of all California, is the Utopian Symphony of the Beautiful, attuned to the Cultural and Practical...No King...No Queen...had ever such luxury, such varied array of singing, dancing, talking magic, such complete fulfillment of joy. The power of this we give to you...for your entertainment. You are the monarch while the play is on!"

- June 1929 newspaper advertisement for San Francisco’s ‘fabulous Fox Theater (right)

In 1960, fading movie queen Gloria Swanson posed majestically against the half-gutted backdrop of the soon to be demolished Roxy Theater in New York City. It was a fitting tribute to the old time movie palace once christened ‘the Cathedral of the Motion Picture’ by its founder Samuel L. Rothapfel. A Swanson movie had opened the Roxy to great pomp and fanfare some thirty years before.

But by 1960, Hollywood was already in a bad way – financially speaking - and the movie palace itself in even worse condition to weather the changing tide in audience tastes and dwindling theatrical attendance from the onslaught of television. A decade earlier the U.S. government had forced a split between theater chains and movie studios; seen as an antitrust move that would generate more free market enterprise for the independent distributor. Instead, it crippled both the theatrical and production apparatuses and sent an already fragile entertainment industry into a tailspin toward receivership en masse.

(above: the gargantuan lobby of New York's Roxy Theater circa 1940)

Movie palaces, with their four to six thousand plus seating and lavishly appointed lounges had suddenly become expendable behemoths of a bygone era that independent theater management simply could no longer afford. Even if the theater itself was part of a larger retail and/or hotel complex, it often failed to provide its own sustainable income.

Like the great dinosaurs of the ancient past, these majestic creatures of stark and surreal beauty from a not so distant age, and not to be found anywhere else in the architectural landscape, became the undeserving recipients of shoddy attempts at ‘conversion’ into more mainstream and commercially viable multiplexes during the mid-1960s; gutted to make way for bargain department stores, parking garages or, when no other usefulness for their vast cavernous spaces could be deduced, slated for the wrecking ball to make way for an ultimately far less artistic structure entirely void of such refined opulence.

With so much confusion, careless mismanagement and blind ignorance in play, is it any wonder that so few of the grand picture palaces of yore have survived?

Not all is lost, though so much has been relegated to the dust bins of history. After the cavalier purge and demolition in the mid to late 60s, the early 1970s saw a sudden revival of interest in these crumbling paradises, most immediately from civic-minded cultural preservationist groups who aggressively campaigned to raise money and save their picture palaces that had fallen on hard times.

(above: Virginia's Loews Carpenter Theater)

This move towards preservation came too late for the Roxy, as it did for New York’s Paramount, Chicago’s Paradise, Detroit’s Michigan Theater and San Francisco’s ‘fabulous’ Fox – the latter described as ‘irreplaceable’; all victims of the wrecking ball.

(above: Illinois Uptown Theater auditorium)

The tragedy of this shortsightedness is that a considerable loss of architectural greatness unique to the era roughly between 1929 and 1939 will likely never be repeated again. It is no longer feasible to build such epic monuments to entertainment. Arguably, the talent for design and construction no longer exists. Hence, the current relegation of our movie going experience sends audiences into nameless, faceless ‘big box’ multi-screen complexes; a trend likely to continue long into the future.

Today’s multiplexes cannot compare to yesterday’s movie palaces; either in scope, luxury of presentation or in their sheer ability to dazzle us with the houselights left on. As the ultimate place of worship for what entertainment used to be – an art form – in a way, the creation of today’s multiplexes mirror popular entertainment; temporary, slickly marketed and disposable. Hence, the magic has gone out of going to the movies.

here are success stories too. New York’s gargantuan picture palace – Radio City Music Hall (left)– has managed to live through the age of instability to be regarded as a cultural icon for the performing arts; with live stage shows, limited movie engagements, classic movie revivals and its world famous Rockette Christmas show spectacular dazzling spectators. From coast to coast, preservation groups have taken up the challenge of raising badly needed monies to refurbish, restore or merely preserve and maintain the theatrical establishments.

(above: the Avalon on Catalina Island. Left: Dallas' Majestic Theater)

The St. Louis Theater, as example, has been preserved as well as transformed into Powell Hall (the namesake derived from Walter S. Powell, whose $2.5 million dollar endowment saved the aging film palace from certain demolition after 1966). The magnificent art deco Paramount Theater in Oakland California was lovingly cared for by the Oakland Symphony from 1970 until 1975 when receivership of the Symphony forced a sell-off to the city of Oakland for one dollar.

Today, the city of Oakland continues to market the Paramount as a Theatre of the Arts. In Ohio, the Ohio Theater was rescued by a group of local citizens turned preservationist experts; their meticulous efforts in restoration effectively resurrecting the authenticity of the theater’s original construction. And in 1981, St. Louis’ Fox Theater became the subject of a rescue effort launched by Leon Strauss – recreating virtually all of the old time opulence with painstaking attention to every detail.

These examples, and others like them, are reasons to remain hopeful about the future of so many picture palaces that continue to lay dormant across the United States. There is always hope. But in the beginning; there was much more – skill, artistry, excitement and pride; the hallmarks of genuine greatness for a primitive dumb show that had quite suddenly captured the public’s fascination.

ART FOR COMMERCE SAKE

Despite their mind-boggling elegance that could rival even some of Europe’s grand opera houses, movie palaces were more of a necessity than a luxury during the early part of the 20th century. At the movies’ infancy, it had been quite acceptable to show silent shorts in refurbished store fronts along the already constructed downtown core. Primitive Kinetoscope projection devices were hardly capable of blowing up an image to vast screen proportions while maintaining integrity and sharpness of the image. In any event, audience appeal for the movies in general had been deemed as limited and fleeting at best by the critics.

(right: California's Wiltern Theater, lobby)

However, in 1893 Thomas Edison made a good showing of a series of short subjects at the Chicago World’s Fair, showcasing rarities that the common patron found exotic and beguiling.

These first movies were nothing more than life studies but the patrons who saw them quickly developed a voracious appetite for more of the same. Within a few short years, technological advancements had paved the way for longer movies structured around crude narratives.

(right: the grand lobby of San Francisco's 'fabulous' Fox Theater)

In no time at all, early Kinetoscope parlors were becoming as popular as the penny arcade. Then, in 1905, the first Nickelodeon debuted in Pittsburgh, PA – launching a franchise that would soon grow to monumental proportions. Even so, the movies and their showplace venues quickly acquired unflattering monikers like ‘the fleapits’ to denote class distinction. Live theater was for the highbrow. The movies appealed the lowest common denominator.

Determined to break that line of distinction, in 1904 entrepreneur William Fox established the Greater New York Film Rental Company with the purchase of a dilapidated Nickelodeon in Brooklyn. Thereafter, Fox quickly set about creating a monopoly of theatrical establishments.

(right: lobby of the historic 'Los Angeles' Theater)

The Kinetoscope gave way to the single projector and the first legitimate movie ‘theaters’ were born. Plain and primitive, these early theaters attracted enough attendance to warrant new legislation in both local and federal public safety laws. The chief concern then was fire, since movies were shot on highly flammable nitrate stock and patrons frequently enjoyed their cigars in the isle, while hot stage lamps were precariously located near fabric drapes.

Hence, the new generation of movie theaters began with the dream merchants acquiring failed opera houses, concert halls and churches – buildings already up to code that had been specifically designed to hold large congregations of people. The problem was simply one of supply and demand – the public’s insatiable interest in the movies outweighing the number of available properties that could be incorporated to show them to a large audience. More and larger auditoriums were needed.

It is one of the ironies of the movie industry that its purveyors – once common folk themselves - suddenly became multimillionaires. Hence, this rise in the movie’s stature amongst popular forms of entertainment demanded a more mainstream and cultured setting in which to showcase them. At the same time, old established forms of entertainment like ballet and the opera were readily falling out of favor and patronage.

(left: exterior of Frisco's Fox Theater)

There were obvious pluses to acquiring these venues for the movies; most notably, in that they already contained the essentials of space and structural requirements necessary to accommodate an audience. Furthermore, they were clean and well-appointed in luxuries far surpassing the movies’ current venues.

Built in 1902, Tally's Electric Theater in Los Angeles became the first permanent structure converted as a showcase for the movies. However, the entrepreneurial spirit of theater moguls and their architects would not simply be satisfied with the acquisition of hand me downs. In the west, Sid Grauman became the most prolific exhibitor; moving out to Hollywood to build his famed Egyptian (1922) and Chinese theaters (1927). In the east, Manhattan’s Samuel Rothapfel proved to be the trend setter; first ensconced as manager of the Capitol (1919) before becoming chief architect of a visionary picture palaces too grand to last – the Roxy (1927).

Adopting the edict of film pioneer Marcus Loew, that “we sell tickets to theaters, not movies”, the major Hollywood studios quickly began to horn in on the independents – hiring the best architects who had already proven their worth in designing theatrical venues elsewhere. One of the most promising, Thomas W. Lamb had begun his career designing classical architecture in New York and New England. For Loew’s Incorporated, Lamb embarked upon a level of opulence unseen before for the movie palace. Lamb’s debut of the palatial Kansas City Midland Theater (1927) and two more titanic picture houses in Syracuse, N.Y. and Columbus, OH the following year set the standard for movie palaces elsewhere.

(above: Stanley Theater in Utica. Left: New York's Roxy Theater, the grandest picture palace of them all)

Meanwhile, the amalgamation of Lasky/Famous Players into Paramount Pictures united the creative design talents of ‘Balaban and Katz’ and ‘Rapp and Rapp’ – two rival architectural firms that together expanded their operations in design well beyond Lake Michigan.

Rapp and Rapp built Time Square’s Paramount Theater (1926) as well as other similar movie palaces in Seattle and Portland. They also freelanced, building the Westchester (1930) and Erie (1931) for Warner Brothers; a studio that had first acquired the independent chain of Stanley theaters designed by Hoffman and Henon.

In Hollywood, the creation of United Artists by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin put architect Howard Crane to work with impressive debuts in Chicago and Detroit (both in 1928). But Crane’s prowess in design was most readily exercised for rival film pioneer, William Fox. By 1930, Crane had designed lavishly for Fox on twin 5,000 seat behemoths in Detroit and St. Louis. He had also unveiled his craftsmanship with The San Francisco. William Fox proudly proclaimed that the sun never set on a venue in which his name did not appear.

But within two years, financial hardship ousted Fox from the empire he had worked so hard to build. Although he lived the rest of his days in relative comfort, William Fox would never again participate in either the theatrical or production end of motion pictures after 1932.

WELCOMING THE BRIEF AGE OF MAGIC

“A shrine to democracy, where the wealthy rub elbows with the poor…”
– George Rapp

The birth of the movie palace was an instant and palpable commercial success. Between 1914 and 1922 over 4,000 picture palaces opened in the United States. Although the architectural heritage of these leviathans borrowed readily from virtually all the classical models of imperial Europe and other exotic locales, the special needs and design of movie palaces presented unique challenges, not the least of which was their consignment to irregular plots of land.

(right: lobby of New York's Radio City Music Hall)

Movie palaces were among the very first super structures to incorporate central cooling. They were also among the first to utilize incandescent lights to inspire mood and atmosphere.

The initial inspiration for movie palace’s exotic interiors is generally linked to the 1922 much ballyhooed discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb and great hall of Karnak. Overnight, the far away and the mystical had become fascinating to the common man. To this initial mix of intrigue, theater designers borrowed heavily on Oriental elements; the most readily and instantly recognizable of these still Sid Grauman (left) and his Chinese Theater in downtown Hollywood.

Theater exteriors incorporated a large horizontal canopy – usually slightly bumped out in the middle - and a giant vertical electric sign; a holdover borrowed from the early Nickelodeon days. For their time, these signs, with their ingenious nighttime illuminations (a combination of bulb and neon tubing), were cutting edge miracles of design – eye-catching to deliberately entice patrons with the promise of even greater spectacle lurking inside.

Theater lobbies were strategically located on every level; vast, spacious and opulent beyond all expectation in order to divert patrons’ attentions from recognizing how long they had to wait for their tickets and other concessions. While lobbies were brightly lit, auditorium lighting was much more subdued; partly to induce a romantic look and mood, but more prudently so as not to detract from the central focus – the movie screen itself.

(left: lobby of Boston's Keith Memorial Theater, below: stage of California's State Theater)

Most movie palaces also had smoking rooms, men’s and women’s lounges, children’s playrooms and emergency aid areas. The splendor of public amenities extended to the private dressing rooms located below and backstage for the performers who, with increasingly regularity, rounded out the movie goers’ experience with lavish stage spectacles.

In the grander movie palaces it was not uncommon to find more obscure and somewhat bizarre amenities. New York’s Roxy, as example, had a barber shop and billiard room to service its patrons. Chicago’s Southtown had a reflecting pool in its lobby populated by live fish and the occasional flamingo. In their efforts to provide ‘one of a kind’ experiences for the movie-going patron, designers of these fanciful creations cannibalized virtually every conceivable architectural style from the past – combining them when necessary to produce what one critic in 1928 called a “pitiful degradation of…art” and “the prostitution of architecture” with “taste and beauty abased to the lowest degree”.

Not surprising, many of these designers were European born; hence the first wave of picture palace construction celebrated French and Italian influences. Scottish born, Thomas Lamb (right)pioneered this first wave of lavish escapism. However, it was Austrian John Eberson who took theater décor in a new direction by creating the ‘atmospheric’ theater – romanticized revisions on a Mediterranean courtyard theme; ceilings painted as though they were sky and with tiny pin pricks of light as stars filtering through. Even more startling in appearance were the suddenly popular creations of whimsy anchored to a Spanish Colonial Revival style pioneered by The Boller Brothers; a Missouri design firm.

By the end of the 1920s, the meticulous intricacies of these early efforts gave way to the ultra modern chic of Art Deco pioneered by California architects S. Charles Lee in Los Angeles and Timothy L. Pflueger in San Francisco. Lee’s 1930 designs for the Fox Wilshire may have launched the Deco trend, but it was Pflueger’s Paramount Theater in Oakland that set the standard in 1931.

(Below: auditorium of New York's Radio City Music Hall, and bottom: the lobby as they both appeared in 1942.)

The final jewel from this period opened one year later; New York’s Radio City Music Hall – a gargantuan homage to the end of an era in construction. With the Great Depression biting hard into pocket books even Rockefeller Center’s newest showplace struggled to turn a profit almost from the moment it opened.

LEGENDS AFTER THE FALL

In hindsight, precursors to the demise of the motion picture palace seem obvious. The Depression was only half of the story. Blind-sighted by the meteoric rise in popularity of the movies themselves, the dream merchants built their arsenal of glamorous picture palaces too fast – overextending into cavernous spaces that simply could not be filled by a single entertainment.

By the mid-1930s, theater owners were juggling live stage performances, guest appearances from stars of stage and screen, movie premieres and often unrelated weekly contests and promotions as part of their regular repertoire of attractions, just to break even.

(right, top: New York's Paramount Theater. Built as the studio's east coast flagship theater, only the marquee remains in tact today.)

The stylish lobbies that had been designed with care to stand alone as glamorous examples of stunning architecture were now cluttered with poster art and other advertising campaign materials to lure patrons into seeing the movies. By the mid-1940s booths selling war stamps and bonds were also added.

At wars end, the debut of television cannibalized theater attendance by half and the move away by baby boomers from cluttered city centers to the more spacious suburbs meant that movie palaces suddenly found themselves located in ‘out of the way’ districts inaccessible to most of the paying public.

(right: one of the few jewels to remain relatively unscathed; the Chicago Theater.)

Theater owners responded to this mass audience exodus in a destructive way; by subdividing their cavernous auditoriums into smaller venues without much regard for the original architectural design. Balcony boxes were removed; cornices and ornamental coves cut into by partitioning walls. Picture palaces were streamlined, but with little regard for keeping their original esthetic value in tact.

(Above: two views of the Michigan Theater: on the left - the lobby as it appeared in its heyday and right, in 2004 after serving for nearly two decades as a parking garage.)

The more savvy theatrical businessmen revived stage shows and put on rock concerts to supplement their revenue. Too late to save many of the ailing picture palaces, did the cultural tide shift in the mid-1970s toward preservation and restoration efforts, with many state and local theaters being added to landmark registries. In between their initial rise in popularity and this much welcomed resurrection/conversion to ‘performing arts’ centers there came an abysmally dark period of pillaging and dismemberment.

San Francisco’s ‘irreplaceable’ Fox Theater – arguably one of the most lavish of Thomas Lamb’s early designs – was among the first to be hit with the wrecking ball in 1963; two years after Samuel L. Rothapfel’s (right) beloved Roxy in New York had suffered the same fate. The Paramount on New York’s 43rd Street toppled not long afterward; its attached skyscraper still in existence today – marking that point where art trailed off and commerce continued along the road into immortality.

Realistically, not every movie palace of yesteryear can be converted into a contemporary performing arts center. Arguably, perhaps not all of them should. Too many of these remaining aging leviathans require major and costly rehabilitation – well beyond what is either financially feasible or, in some cases, structurally possible. Scores more, like The Michigan, have gone beyond that threshold where any sort of refurbishment would make a difference.

(below: the beautifully restored auditorium of The Ohio Theater in Columbus.)

However, those that do survive and are in a relatively sound condition, and, are of cultural significance to a specific region should at least be deserving of a more concerted effort to salvage them from the brink of extinction; if for no other reason, then because today’s architects of the movie multiplex no longer think along esthetic lines. Theirs’ is a strictly functional domain, where the maximization of audience capacity per screen outweighs establishing a timeless opulence for all to admire. Thankfully, we have the opportunity to preserve and rescue a fair portion of the wondrous historical record that remains left behind. Time is of the essence, but the surreal and sublime beauty of these great picture palaces will always be timeless.

@Nick Zegarac 2008 (all rights reserved).

MOST 'LOVERLY' OF ALL...

Why Audrey Hepburn is ‘our fair lady’

by Nick Zegarac

“The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside; somewhere where they can be quiet alone with the heavens, nature and God. As long as this exists, and certainly it always will, I know there will always be comfort for every sorrow. And I firmly believe nature brings softness in all troubles.”

– Audrey Hepburn

To imagine Audrey Hepburn is to conjure to mind the image of a most beautiful flower in the perennial serenity of some eternal garden. Her willowy body is like an elegant branch, perched with the most idyllic blossom of a human visage ever known to man. Although there is far more to Audrey than her ethereal good looks, this botanical reference serves to illustrate her resiliency against the storms of personal tragedy and professional success. Neither ever went to her head.

It seems fitting then, that Audrey Hepburn’s foray into the world of entertainment was as an aspiring ballerina. For, although she never danced professionally in any of her films she seems to pirouette about our collective memory as something of the flavor and coloring of a lovely Shakespearean sprite. Her commitment to the resistance in Holland during World War II was a precursor for later humanitarianism. Arguably, it is Audrey’s tireless efforts as UNICEF’s Goodwill Ambassador that remain her most important and enduring legacy; an enigmatic and compassionate envoy of world benevolence.

For a brief time Audrey’s film career was everything. Yet, in totem she was only a veteran of 27 features before officially retiring from the screen. A chance meeting with fashion designer, Hubert Givenchy engendered a life-long alliance of enchanted sophistication. Audrey’s earlier collaboration with French author Colette cemented her public reputation as everyone’s favorite gamin in Broadway’s Gigi; a moniker well suited.

For Audrey was atypically authentic and genuine in a profession built almost exclusively on superficiality and artifice. Therein lays the forte of Audrey’s radiance; in an innate ability to project beyond mere vulnerability and allure, though both qualities were amply provided for in her brief cannon of stage and screen appearances. Each has yielded, by measure, to the outreach of her boundless love for humanity.

“Remember,” Audrey once said, “…if you ever need a helping hand, it’s at the end of your arm. As you get older, remember that you have another. The first is to help yourself. The second is to help others. People, even more than things, have to be restored, revived, reclaimed and redeemed. Never throw out anyone.”

When Audrey Hepburn departed this life on June 20th, 1993 only the abstraction of her physical commitment in both her time and energies, that had generated a fervent desire to make this world a better place while she lived, was taken from us. But what Audrey has left behind is an authenticity for people and an aide memoire - that such impeccability for the human spirit is not only within our grasp, but utterly vital to our survival on this planet.

In reverence, Tiffany & Co. outlets around the world declared a day of mourning on June 20th by closing their doors and hanging this epitaph in their windows: “To Audrey Hepburn – our Huckleberry friend.” She will always be appreciated and adored as that most munificent of human beings; a very profound quality that so very few words seem adequately to suffice.

AUDREY – A HISTORY

“I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it.”
- Audrey Hepburn

Although her baptismal certificate reads Hedda Van Emstra Hepburn Ruston, Audrey Hepburn was born Audrey Kathleen Ruston in Brussels, Belgium on May 4, 1929. Her mother was a divorcee with two sons and a member of the Dutch aristocracy who married for a second time, beneath her station, to Joseph Hepburn Ruston. Ruston fancied himself a banker, but his penchant for living the good life leant itself more to the spurious conniving of a wheeler/dealer. Life in the Ruston home was hardly idyllic, with the Baroness and Joseph frequently feuding over money concerns.

Hence, Audrey’s youth was spent mostly in the care of nannies and in the company of her two older half brothers, Ian and Alexander. By all accounts, Audrey was a shy, introverted tomboy – a mold her mother was determined to break by sending her daughter away to a boarding school in England when she was only five years old.

In 1934, Joseph Ruston had embraced the pro-German propaganda machine that had slowly begun to grip the European landscape. Although the Baroness tolerated her husband’s political views she never took to them herself and in 1938, with WWII looming on the horizon, the Baroness and Ruston divorced.

By her own account, Audrey described her exile to school as ‘shock therapy’, but of a positive nature, for it encouraged the young girl to indulge in her love of ballet. In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and the Baroness, fearful of their long distance separation, recalled her daughter to Arnum, Belgium where the family resided. It was a fateful decision. On May 5, 1940 the Nazis seized Arnum. Ian was sent to an internment forced labor camp and Alexander went into hiding. Audrey’s mother assumed the general care of her upbringing and tutelage.

Recognizing her daughter’s gift for dance, the Baroness sent Audrey to the Arnum Conservatory. In the evenings, Audrey gave what were then known as ‘blackout performances’ – recitals in someone’s basement to raise monies for the Allied resistance. Occasionally, Audrey also served as a courier, delivering secret messages to and from various locations about town under the watchful eye of the Nazis. But the greatest hardships of the war were yet to follow.

On September 17, 1944 the Allies made Arnum the central initiative of Operation Market Garden – the single greatest blunder of the conflict. In the hailstorm of land and air fire power that followed the city of Arnum was mercilessly leveled to the ground and Audrey and her family forced to flee for their lives. Living off of tulip bulbs and cooked grass, Audrey and her mother barely kept body and soul together during the long months of starvation. On May 5, 1945 Germany surrendered and aid from UNRA (a precursor to UNICEF) began to pour into Arnum. Audrey was reunited with her half brothers, but the family quickly realized that there was no future for them in the decimated ruins that had once been their home.

In 1948, Audrey and her mother immigrated to London, England where Audrey was awarded a ballet scholarship. But at the age of 19, and at a height of 5 ft. 7 inches, Audrey was devastated to learn that she was both too tall and too old to pursue ballet as a career. She regrouped quickly, dropping all of her birth names except Audrey Hepburn, and quickly procured several lucrative dance jobs in the chorus of London’s West End theater shows. She also became a favorite at Ciro’s; a fashionable nightclub frequented by magazine photographers and movie personnel.

To say that Audrey’s aspirations for a film career were well thought out would be an overstatement. “I never thought I’d land in pictures with a face like mine,” Audrey would later admit, “I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career I lacked the experience. I was asked to act when I couldn’t act. I was asked to sing…when I couldn’t…and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn’t dance…and do all kinds of things I wasn’t’ prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it.”

In fact, Audrey always considered her film ‘discovery’ a happy accident that began with brief appearances in The Secret People and The Lavender Hill Mob. In 1951, Audrey was given a sizeable role in Monte Carlo Baby – a forgettable romantic comedy that nevertheless caught the eye of French author Collette who recommended Audrey as the lead for the Broadway debut of Gigi.
Boarding the Queen Mary for New York, Audrey appeared at the Fulton Theater on Oct. 3, 1951 in Gigi. The reviews were unanimous and ecstatic. Hollywood called, with a personal invitation from director William Wyler to audition for the role of a princess in Roman Holiday. Audrey won the role opposite Gregory Peck and shortly thereafter, also won her costar’s heart. Their platonic mutual affection blossomed on set and Peck went to Wyler to insist that Audrey get star billing.

The film was both an artistic and commercial smash and Paramount quickly capitalized on the success of their ‘new find’ by casting Audrey in Billy Wilder’s lush romantic/comedy Sabrina (1954). Audrey played a reclusive chauffeur’s daughter harboring a deep dark crush on the son of a wealthy house and, once again, exhibited the sort of elusive childlike innocence and womanly charm that had made her so appealing to audiences.
Just prior to Sabrina’s shoot, Audrey was first introduced to couturier Hubert Givenchy. So the story goes, Givenchy had received a call from Paramount informing him that a “Miss Hepburn” was coming to view his collection. As Audrey had only just debuted in Roman Holiday and was, as yet, not well known, Givenchy thought that the studio was sending over Katherine Hepburn. Hence, when Audrey arrived, Givenchy did not recognize her as his potential client and furthermore, suggested that she simply go to the racks to make her selections. Eventually, Audrey informed Givenchy of her purpose. It was the beginning of one of the most lucrative and memorable film/fashion collaborations in screen history.

The shooting of Sabrina was also notable for Audrey’s first great romance with a costar; 34 year old William Holden. Sparks flew, but their passion quickly cooled when Holden informed Audrey that he could not have children. Audrey wanted a family more than she desired a career and so the affair ended amicably. Audrey announced, much to everyone’s surprise, that she was leaving Hollywood for Broadway to costar with Mel Ferrer in Ondine – a supernatural romantic melodrama. Though the play opened to mixed reviews, Audrey was quick to fall in love with Ferrer who was twelve years her senior and already twice divorced.

Ferrer convinced Audrey that acting could be just as rewarding as dancing and, under his tutelage, Audrey grew to respect her craft. It was a lesson well timed, since Audrey was soon to learn that not only had she won the Tony for her performance in Ondine, but also that she had been awarded the Best Actress Academy Award for her performance in Roman Holiday. Accepting the Oscar with both grace and humility, Audrey admitted, “It’s too much. I want to say thank you to everybody whom these past months and years have helped, guided and given me so much. I’m truly, truly grateful and terribly happy.”

Audrey capped off her successes of 1954 by marrying Mel Ferrer in a quiet private service in France on September 25, with the solemn vow that she would never allow either celebrity or the demands of her career to negatively impact her marriage. “Success,” Audrey once said, “…is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same. There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl’s complexion.”

Shortly after marrying Ferrer, Audrey realized that she was pregnant. Unfortunately, she was unable to carry the child to term and the resulting miscarriage thrust her into a severe depression. To ease her emotional pain, Ferrer suggested that they both go back to work in War and Peace (1956) – a lavishly mounted, though ultimately leaden translation of Tolstoy’s immortal novel. Much more successful on every level were Audrey’s next two film projects; the first costarring Fred Astaire in the musical, Funny Face (1957) and the second, opposite Gary Cooper in Billy Wilder’s sly romantic comedy, Love In The Afternoon (1957). But by now, Audrey had tired of playing fairytale gamins. She longed for personal fulfillment in her private life and to be taken as a serious actress in her professional career.
To this end, Audrey’s next film was The Nun’s Story (1959) – a movie of stark emotional intensity and without the benefit of lush settings and stunning costumes. Audrey’s gripping performance earned her a third Oscar nomination as Best Actress. Unfortunately, Audrey’s next two films; Green Mansions (1959) and The Unforgiven (1960) were modest flops. It was at the tail end of this latter project that Audrey learned she was pregnant yet again. Taking no chances this time, she retired to the home she and Ferrer had purchased in Switzerland where she remained bed ridden until the birth of their son, Sean on January 17, 1960.

Returning to Hollywood, Audrey starred in the film that would forever become synonymous with her name; Breakfast At Tiffany’s. Cast as the expensive call girl of Truman Capote’s novel, Audrey’s superb performance provided both a strong core and heart-breaking charm. It also afforded her the first opportunity to sing on screen – warbling a few bars of what would eventually become an iconic movie anthem; Henry Mancini’s Moon River.

Pre-screening a rough cut of the film for Paramount executives, it was suggested that director Blake Edward excise the song from the final cut. “Over my dead body,” was Audrey’s curt reply. Her celebrity already assured, the song was allowed to remain in the film. Moon River won the 1961 Best Original Song Oscar and audiences have been grateful for Mancini’s lilting, semi-tragic lullaby ever since.

The early 1960s were Audrey’s final blossoming as far as her film career was concerned. She appeared to haunting effect in the stark melodrama with lesbian undertones, The Children’s Hour (1961); was appropriately full of devious intrigues in Stanley Donen’s suave spy thriller, Charade (1963), and lighter than air in the romantic comedy Paris When It Sizzles (1964). But of all the films that Audrey made, none generated as much initial hype, or post production fallout as My Fair Lady (1964).

Jack Warner had passed over Broadway’s Eliza Doolittle – Julie Andrews – to cast Audrey in the film with the fervent understanding that she would do all her own singing. Only after the ink had dried on Audrey’s contract did Warner ‘suggest’ that ghost singer Marni Nixon would be dubbing all of the vocals. Audrey was furious. She had hired a singing coach and had pre-recorded virtually all of the key musical sequences for the film. Thanks to surviving archival records, today’s film historian is able to compare Audrey’s vocals to those dubbed in by Nixon. Though Audrey is unable to hit the high notes, her vocals reveal a genuineness of heart and emotion that would probably have sufficed.

Dubbing has always been an integral part of Hollywood, even since the beginning of movie musicals. However, the leaking of information about Nixon’s dubs to the press undercut critic’s expectations of Audrey’s performance. As a result, Audrey was universally overlooked and not even nominated for an Oscar – one, that ironically went to Julie Andrews for her debut in Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins.
Despite this critical snub, Audrey’s popularity with audiences remained unchanged. But by now, Audrey’s marriage to Mel Ferrer was on the rocks. Another miscarriage in 1965 only further strained their bond, even as Audrey retreated to Paris to film How To Steal A Million (1966). Audrey followed up this performance with another superior turn in Two For The Road (1967); ironically, the story of a couple whose idyllic romance turns rancid with marriage. In a last ditch effort to patch together their own crumbling union, Ferrer suggested that he and Audrey collaborate on Wait Until Dark (1967) – a terrifying suspense thriller in which Audrey is a blind woman being hunted by a trio of drug smugglers. A year later, on November 20, 1968, Audrey divorced Mel Ferrer.

She shocked her contemporaries and even the closest of her friends by falling in love almost immediately with Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti whom she married in January 1969. Shortly thereafter, Audrey gave birth to her second son, Luca. But the marriage was already on very shaky ground, buffeted by frequent rumors that Dotti’s roving eye had resulted in several extramarital affairs. In an attempt to be more the wife and mother than the actress, Audrey retreated from public life and her career for the next five years. Increasingly however, she and Dotti were leading separate lives.

After an eight year absence from films, Audrey was coaxed from retirement for Robin and Marian (1976); a light romance that cast her opposite Sean Connery. Audrey also was introduced to Dutch actor Robert Wolders who was the widower of American actress Merle Oberon. The two found that they had much in common and shortly thereafter moved in together. It was an enduring union that would bear itself out in blissful contentment for the rest of Audrey’s days. When, after nine years together, television interviewer Barbara Walters asked Audrey why she and Wolders had never married, Audrey’s coy reply was that they were married…“just not officially”.

Audrey continued to act to lesser effect – first in 1979’s Bloodlines and then in 1981’s They All Laughed – a movie overshadowed by the brutal murder of one of its costars; Dorothy Stratten who was also the lover of its director, Peter Bogdanovich. The best of Audrey’s later film roles was as HAP, the angel in Steven Spielberg’s Always (1989); itself a remake of A Guy Named Joe in which Audrey eases a reluctant Richard Dreyfuss into accepting the fact that he is already dead.

Audrey’s most genuine and ardent commitment during these waning years of her professional film success came from her involvement with UNICEF. “Taking care of children has nothing to do with politics,” Audrey once said, “I think, perhaps with time, instead of there being a politicization of humanitarian aid, there will be a humanization of politics.”

As UNICEF’s Goodwill Ambassador, Audrey was integral in bringing home the message of human suffrage from around the world. Using her celebrity as a sounding board for the cause, Audrey was tireless. At the age of 63, she made her final pilgrimage to Somalia on behalf of UNICEF and was visibly shaken and disturbed by the moral, as well as physical starvation of its peoples. But midway through her campaign, Audrey was befallen by acute stomach pains.

Returning to Switzerland under the belief that she had contracted a virus from the unclean living conditions, Audrey underwent an emergency laparoscopy at which time it was discovered that she had abdominal cancer that had spread to her appendix. Her family was shocked to learn that Audrey was given three months to live. She spent those final days in the solace of family and friends. “We kept the good and left the sadness behind,” son Sean Ferrer admits.

On January 20, 1993, Audrey Hepburn died. She was laid to rest in a simple grave on the grounds of the home she and Robert Wolders shared. “There are few people in one’s life that you never truly feel are gone,” director Blake Edwards admitted in an interview some years ago, “I have to remind myself that she isn’t around.”

Indeed, since Audrey’s death there doesn’t seem to be a day that goes by that we are not reminded of her in some way. Whether through endless revivals of her film legacy on television and in theaters, or through the reconstitution of her graceful image in commercial ads, magazine and newspaper tributes; Audrey Hepburn endures as few of her contemporaries have.

She retains a timeless and magical allure with audiences. She communicates that intangible quality of complete radiance on a level for mass appeal. The sun may have set on her time, but the light that was and remains her living legacy, the best of the human heart, mind and spirit, is perennially renewed in our collective admiration for her. Thus, Audrey Hepburn is ever more loved and beloved and for all the right reasons – because she was a very great lady.

In later years, Audrey’s humanitarian legacy became linked to ‘Time Tested Beauty Tips’; a poem written by Sam Levenson which she read with an internalized understanding of its deeper meanings.

For beautiful eyes, look for the goodness in others.
For beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness.
For beautiful hair, let a child run his or her fingers through it once a day.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
And for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.
@Nick Zegarac 2008 (all rights reserved).

JOAN CRAWFORD: An Appreciation - Part I

by Nick Zegarac

“Hollywood is like life…you face it with the sum total of your equipment.”
– Joan Crawford

Joan Crawford: perhaps no other name in showbiz conjures to mind as much elegance, egotism and maternal demagoguery all in the same instance. Crawford is more than a woman – even more than a film star. She’s iconographic and the name Joan Crawford appears to have no middle ground amongst popular opinion.

Child activists decry her abuse of daughter Christina as exaggerated in the memoir ‘Mommie Dearest’ while legions of her fans – then and now – are as fiercely loyal to the preservation of her image as the supreme star. It seems a fitting tribute. After all, she was as staunchly devoted to them, answering her own fan mail with hand written and personalized notations.

On the set, she was a force to be reckoned with; a consummate technical professional who knew virtually everything and anything about the ‘picture making’ business. Female co-stars respected the power she exuded both on and off camera. Male co-stars were often intimidated by her authority, and every director – so it has been suggested elsewhere in print – had his turn, though arguably not his way, with her.

Joan Crawford is the ultimate star; a creature so over the top and larger than life that she at once inspires and defies parody. True enough, Crawford’s films rarely represented the very best that Hollywood had to offer. Of her many movies, only a handful are standouts. Yet what makes a Crawford movie – any Crawford movie – so memorable is Crawford herself. She’s a stunningly poetic, glycerin tear and porcelain skinned mannequin; a clothes horse, beautifully backlit and forever on the prowl for the public’s adoration.

When frequently asked to quantify her personal animosity toward Crawford, arch rival and grand dame, Bette Davis used to distinguish between her innate ‘talent’ versus Crawford’s manufactured stardom. Yet, a more critical review of Crawford’s flops – films in which she boldly attempted to step beyond that studio created mould of the shop girl makes good – illustrate that Crawford was ever bit the talent Davis was.

Sold differently to the public, perhaps. But Crawford’s marketability at MGM often removed and isolated her from that talent in favor of concocting a radiant, elegant thing of beauty. To her own credit, throughout the years Joan Crawford maintained that image. “When I leave this apartment,” she told a reporter, “I am Joan Crawford. If you want the girl next door – go next door!”

Without question, Crawford could be harsh. Perhaps more than anyone, she understood the fickle nature of the movie business; knew the ropes of finagling better contracts by heart and recalled too well what an uphill climb her career had always been – but especially prior to the gold-star treatment at MGM – and how easily if might all go away. No one was going to take anything away from Joan. Arguably, no one ever did.

If Crawford’s relentless pursuit of perfection kept her youthful, then it also isolated her from any genuine and everlasting happiness. All five of Crawford’s marriages were more short-lived than some of her ephemeral film plots. Though Crawford remained on amicable terms with all of her former husbands, she was also quick to recognize that there was only one great love in her life – her career.

Despite rumors, lurid tales and unsubstantiated innuendoes readily printed in gossip rags and the tabloids of her time, Crawford’s own worst enemy – particularly in her later years – was herself. Her bitterness at slowly slipping from the top eventually turned inward through destructive alcoholism. Outwardly, that slippage manifested itself as almost insane jealousy and often articulate rage toward the younger actresses rising through the ranks.

Then what are we to make of Joan Crawford as woman; piteous or proud? Perhaps Crawford’s last words, reported to have been uttered on her deathbed, suffice: “Don’t you dare ask God to help me!” Clearly, as far as Joan was concerned there was no need for help to arrive. And there was also nothing to forgive. In life, Crawford may have done her worst, but always in service of some greater good that has often been overlooked since her passing through a calculated manipulation of some of the facts about her personal life and an endless mockery of her image overblown by drag queen impersonators.

Yet, the legend endures. Why? Because Crawford conquered. She endured. She continues to reign as few have been able to. An indomitable tower of electricity, Joan Crawford will always be a star; partly, because there is no one, then or now, to compare to her, but mostly because she digested the rigors of stardom as her daily diet. She took her breaks and her disappointments seriously. Nothing was ever left to chance. What she wanted she had. Joan didn’t ask – she demanded and she took.

Yet, Crawford could be gracious too – almost to a fault. There is little to suggest that Joan would have preferred either her life or career to go the easy route. She thrived on adversity, yielding to no one and nothing; her journey from Lucille Fay Le Sueur to Billie Cassin to Joan Crawford a seamless morphing into an otherwise rough and tumble existence from cradle to grave.

In the final analysis, Joan Crawford was a die hard perfectionist rather then a slave to her art. Whatever the part required, she gave to it in spades. When asked by Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM why she had campaigned so hard to play the part of Crystal Allen – a backstabbing bitch in The Women (1939), Crawford deftly replied, “I’d play Wally Beery’s mother if the part were right!” And Joan was not kidding. She didn’t simply want success. She sought it out.

How well Joan Crawford succeeded in her career is a matter of public record and now a question for the ages to decide. As a star, Crawford continues to resonate a mystique, a power and a prestige.

She is woman as beacon – the sad-eyed gal who isn’t going to let a little thing like the Hollywood boy’s club and patriarchal nepotism stand in her way. She may not pin her motto in a place where the janitors can see it, but she can play hard ball like one of the guys. She’s her own person through and through and well above par of our collective cinema firmament. She is Joan Crawford – star. If necessary, God bless and forgive her for it.

IN THE BEGINNING

“You have to be self-reliant and strong to survive in this town. Otherwise, you will be destroyed.”
– Joan Crawford

In 1925, MGM VP Harry Rapf acquired a ten week contract of an unknown hoofer who was all the rage in Hollywood nightclubs. Around town, her Charleston had already become legendary and her closet full of loving cups and trophies proved it. That girl was Lucille Fay Le Sueur and her ability to maximize her own potential through limitless drive and ambition was cause for generating much self publicity.

MGM was eager to present Le Sueur as a ‘new find’ but Louis B. Mayer – then the undisputed monarch of MGM – thought ‘Sueur’ sounded too much like ‘sewer.’ Something had to be done. Still, the girl had spunk, and perhaps even ‘star quality’; the latter exercised to wasted effect opposite Norma Shearer in Lady of the Night (1925).

That same year, Le Sueur was given a choice role in Pretty Ladies opposite Zazu Pitts, this time as a glorified chorus girl. Through her brief appearance managed to break through to positive public response, the film was a dud and Le Sueur worried that her brief tenure at MGM would come to not.

She made a friend of then popular leading man, William Haines. He confided his homosexuality to her (a certain kiss of death for his career) and she took to his friendship with sincere loyalty. Le Sueur was also feeling her own after hours in the hot spots around town – her penchant for booze, boys and badinage was of slight consternation to the studio’s publicity department.

Eventually, Le Sueur latched on to a young man from a wealthy family. Although the boy was willing, the family was not. They quickly judged Lucille as ‘unsuitable’ and dissolved the union behind closed doors. It was merely one snub in a long line of such indignations that the struggling young actress had endured almost from birth.

Born into poverty on March 23, 1906, Lucille Fay Le Sueur developed an innate mistrust of men almost from conception. Her father, Thomas did not stick around to see his daughter’s first birthday. However, baby Lucille also despised her mother, by all accounts an aspiring Vaudevillian who moved through three fleeting relationships during Lucille’s formative years and took in wash in between relationships to keep the family clothed, housed and fed. Daddy #2 was a theater manager, Billie Cassin from whom Le Sueur would borrow his name to launch her own career as a hoofer at Roseland Dance Club on Broadway.

Eventually, Le Sueur’s mother moved the family to Los Angeles and Le Sueur – with nothing more than a forth grade education – made her way through studio auditions as a dancer. Groomed at MGM in the deportment and styling of a lady, Le Sueur took to her accoutrements easily enough and even embraced Louis B. Mayer’s idea of a name change. The studio ran a contest. Joan Arden was the first name chosen. Unfortunately, it belonged to another actress. Hence, the runner up - Joan Crawford - became the moniker by which young Lucille would forever more be known.

As Joan Crawford, she appeared in MGM’s Sally, Irene and Mary (1925) – an early hit that proved to be her first big break. Oddly enough, her success in that film did not lead to more of the same until one year later when Crawford was next seen to good effect in The Taxi Driver (1927). She outshone her costars in the rather depressing material and was labeled in Variety as a ‘fresh new face.’

That same year, Crawford had two of her best show pieces; the first, as a conniving circus performer opposite Lon Chaney in The Unknown (1927); the second as a tart aboard ship in Twelve Miles Out (1927).

Even at this early stage in her career, Crawford had a firm understanding of one essential in show biz – that it was more prudent and savvy to cultivate a roster of friends behind the camera. The grips, prop masters, costume, hair and make-up assistants, lighting crew; these were the people responsible for making a star shine at its best. They deserved special consideration and Crawford gave it to them.

As proof: when a gaffer fell from a considerable height off some rickety scaffolding, Crawford not only rushed to his aid almost immediately but readily telephoned the fallen worker while he convalesced and even went to visit him at the hospital on occasion until he recovered.

In later years, after her stardom had set in, Crawford continued her diligence with behind-the-scenes personnel; handing out personalized and often expensive gifts to each and every one of her ‘friends’ at Christmas. It was good PR – not the kind readily exploited as philanthropy inside the gossip sheets, but serving a purpose nonetheless.

Ironically, Crawford was less congenial toward the higher ups at MGM; L.B. Mayer and VP in Charge of Production Irving Thalberg – the two men who could either make or break her fledgling career. Worse, Crawford made no bones about her general dislike of actress, Norma Shearer who was married to Thalberg.

“How can I get a decent part around here,” she would openly tell cast and crew, “Norma sleeps with the boss!” Thalberg was quick to ‘reward’ Crawford’s impertinence by placing her in a B-western The Law of the Range (1928) – a film that neither damaged nor advanced her career. Crawford took the hint and her lumps in private. Crawford’s opinion of Shearer would not change, but her determination to beat her rival in the business had just received a shot in the arm.

STAR RISING

“I think that the most important thing can have – next to talent – is, of course, her hairdresser.” – Joan Crawford

In retrospect, MGM was rather careless about molding Joan Crawford’s early foray in the movies. They toyed with their ‘new find’ as they tended to with a lot of young beginners in those days, liberally experimenting to a point until something either clicked with the audience or, in the worst case scenario, it didn’t and the contract player was then relegated to B-movies or discarded all together.

In Joan’s case, the studio next cast her in Our Dancing Daughters (1928) – the tale of a nightclub-loving hoofer who makes good and wins the man in the final reel. It was typecasting and it worked beautifully. Left to her own devices, Crawford emerged as her own distinct filmic personality, prompting imminent writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald to comment that “Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper. The girl you see in smart nightclubs, down to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal with wide hurt eyes; young things with a talent for living.”

MGM elevated Crawford’s salary to $500.00 a week and helped her buy her first home on Brentwood Avenue. She was suddenly their hottest commodity and the studio wasted no time in exploiting her popularity in a series of largely forgettable roles that the public ate up. Still, as popular as Joan was, her social standing within Hollywood’s hoi poloi continued to lag.
The year before, Crawford met Douglas Fairbanks Jr. through an impromptu letter of congratulations she had written him following his debut on Broadway in ‘Young Woodley’. A romance began in earnest, but the affair looked to have all the ear-markings of another short-lived romp when Fairbanks Sr. and his wife, Mary Pickford openly frowned on Joan appearing at their seaside home; Pickfair.

Nevertheless, Douglas Jr. continued to court Joan in private, resulting in a whirlwind elopement in June of 1929 – just one month after Crawford’s iconic stature in the movies had been cemented – literally – along with her hand and footprints in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

The press labeled their elopement ‘the marriage of the century’ and lavished an absurd amount of coverage on the couple. Although Fairbanks Jr. tended to shy from this sort of publicity, Crawford devoured every headline and sound byte. For her, the endless barrage of interviews and photo ops meant that she had at last arrived.

At MGM Crawford was cast opposite the studio’s #1 A-list male superstar, Clark Gable for the first time in Dance Fools, Dance (1931). Gable, who was married to the much older Josephine Dillon at the time, began to take his late night suppers with Crawford – an affair that continued for several years. That same year Crawford starred with Gable in two more solid offerings; Laughing Sinners – in which she was a repentant harlot saved by Gable’s Salvation Army worker – and Possessed – a scintillating crime/drama.

In 1932, Crawford officially came into her own with what would become physical trademarks throughout the rest of her career - exaggerated eyebrows, large lips and accentuated eyes. She also developed a symbiotic working relationship with MGM’s leading couturier, Gilbert Adrian (known simply as Adrian). Together, Adrian and Crawford set movie fashion and style trends in her next film – Letty Lynton (1932) and, in that same year, Grand Hotel. In the latter film, Crawford was billed in the esteemed company of two Barrymores (John and Lionel), Lewis Stone, Jean Hersholt and the elusive enigma – Garbo.

Though Crawford was honored by this inclusion into MGM’s top tier of respected company, her singular regret on the project stemmed from the fact that she and Garbo had no scenes together. Nevertheless, Grand Hotel was MGM’s all-star Academy Award winning masterpiece of that year and Crawford’s casting in it signaled the beginning of a meteoric rise as one of the studio’s most bankable stars.

THE GOOD YEARS

“I never learned to spell ‘regret’.” – Joan Crawford
From a vantage of untouchable talent, Crawford might have climbed to even greater heights. Regrettably, instead she campaigned to be loaned out to United Artists for Rain (1932) – a seething melodrama in which she played the fiery and embittered prostitute Sadie Thompson. Though Crawford’s performance yielded some powerful and sustaining nuances, the role was not one her fans took to and the film flopped at the box office.

She returned to MGM, moderately repentant and vowing never again to veer so far from the built in expectations of her fans. Her first duty upon returning to MGM was to appear as a sort of goodwill ambassador locally for a publicity event showcasing new talent. It would be a fortuitous assignment.

The specifics revolving around the now legendary life long rivalry between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis perhaps had their aegis at this event. Crawford was already a star; Davis, a newcomer to the Warner back lot. Evidently, Crawford’s arrival at the event occurred at precisely the moment when Davis was addressing members of the press; Crawford’s built in popularity effectively upstaging the ingénue. Whether Crawford intended it that way or even timed her entrance to coincide with Davis’ speech is quite another matter.

Certainly, in later years Crawford and Davis were bitter enemies. However, at this point in their respective careers Davis had not been able to break through the invisible ceiling of widespread popularity, while Crawford was well into her second decade of fame. In that light it seems rather unlikely that Crawford would have viewed Davis as a threat to her own supremacy in the movies – at least enough of a threat that required a deliberate upstaging of Davis for the benefit of the press.
Career wise, Crawford was hotter than ever. MGM spent lavishly on her next movie, the elephantine (and somewhat garish) response to Busby Berkeley’s film musicals at Warner Brothers – Dancing Lady (1933); costarring Clark Gable again. The film also featured Franchot Tone – a cultured New Englander who would soon be garnering a lot more of Crawford’s time.

At home, the rift between Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks had reached its critical breaking point. While Crawford had relished playing the part of Hollywood hostess in a series of glittering private parties, Fairbanks did not. Their numerous affairs aside, Crawford’s marriage to Fairbanks ended in May 1933 and shortly thereafter she began a very public liaison with Tone.

Crawford’s next picture also starred Gable – Chained (1934). By now, the on again/off again affair with Gable had mildly cooled, in part due to Joan’s romantic affiliation with Tone which was garnering considerable steam and speed. While filming Chained on the set, Crawford received an unexpected visitor from her past – her biological father.

It was a bittersweet reunion, made all the more complex by Crawford’s ongoing love/hate relationship with her mother and brother, Hal. Strained and awkward, Crawford would later write of her father with a sad affection. “Both of us were trying to make a relationship and never quite succeeded. On the last day in town, I looked across the soundstage and saw his eyes filled with tears. He waved goodbye and blew me a kiss…and I never saw him again.”

In retrospect, Crawford’s relationship with men in general had always been complex. Arguably, she craved their affections and attention, though quickly grew tired and found them a disposable caveat unable to coincide within her own career. In truth, Crawford’s career had always been paramount and would remain so until her death. In 1935, Crawford made I Live My Life – a minor melodrama in which she first emerged as a truly independent woman of the world. In reality, she was preparing for another marriage – to Franchot Tone on October 11, 1935 – despite the fact that she had told a fan magazine a scant three months earlier that “…if anyone catches me marrying again, I hope they give me a good sock in the mouth!”
Crawford’s marriage to Franchot Tone could not have been more different from her first to Fairbanks Jr. Once a flashy fixture, the new couple spent quiet secluded evenings at home. Tone introduced Crawford to art and literature and even encouraged her to do radio plays of imminent stage classics. Ironically, with this sophistication came a sudden downturn in Crawford’s box office popularity.

MGM cast her with Gable once again in Love on the Run (1935) a romantic comedy, but their old sexual chemistry was absent. For The Bride Wore Red (1937) – costarring Tone - Crawford adopted an entirely new look that failed to gel with her fans. In that film, Crawford and Tone played faithful married lovers though in reality theirs was an open marriage. Tone’s frequent dalliances with starlets (at one point he was accepting calls on Crawford’s dressing room wire while she was being made up in between takes), eventually broke both Crawford’s spirit and the marriage. Both began to rapidly deteriorate.

On the set of her next film, Mannequin (1937) Crawford indulged in her own brief affair with costar Spencer Tracy. Unfortunately, Mannequin was also not well received by the public and L.B. Mayer began to reassess his commitment to Crawford’s stardom. Mayer offered her a measly one year extension on her soon-to-expire contract. Instead, Crawford shrewdly assessed the writing on the wall and bargained for a five year renewal at a considerable cut in her per picture salary; informing Mayer that she no longer wished to play “goddamn shop girls.”

In hot pursuit of rejuvenating her career, Crawford sought out the part of Crystal Allen, a malignant mantrap in George Cukor’s all-star The Women (1939). The film costarred old rival, Norma Shearer. So long as Shearer’s husband, Irving Thalberg had managed her career, Crawford had had to be content with the roles Norma cast aside. Now, with Thalberg prematurely dead and buried, the two old rivals would be neck and neck in the same movie. Undoubtedly, Cukor feared that his project would prove the catalyst to spark an all out knock down catfight.

Although filming of The Women went relatively smoothly, there were a couple of tense instances that bear mentioning. The first involved Crawford’s commitment to feeding her costar her lines while the camera filmed Shearer in close-up. It is a customary practice that when the camera is on one actor, the other playing in the scene will stand behind the camera to provide a counterpoint that the star being filmed can respond to. Instead, Crawford chose to sit off to the side and ignore Shearer entirely while she gave her performance, knitting and distracting Norma with the clickity-clack of her needle work. In response, when it came time for Crawford’s close-ups, Shearer all but refused to come out of her dressing room, leaving Crawford with a blank space to react to.
In the second instance, Cukor was soon to discover that neither Crawford nor Shearer wished to be the first to arrive on set for publicity photos. Instead, the ladies sat in their respective limos, circling the parking lot until Cukor went out to fetch them. Once on set however, both actresses behaved as professionals and the production wrapped up on time and under budget. When The Women was released, it proved to be a colossal smash.

Awash in her newfound success, Crawford became more determined than ever to attain greater control over her personal life as well. For almost a year she had become a creature of habit, bewitched by gardenias and obsessed with cleanliness. But now, Crawford wanted something else, something more from life. She wanted a child.

Unable to conceive, Crawford used a Las Vegas baby broker to adopt Christina (originally named Joan Jr.) after social services rejected her legitimate application. Then, as now, the arrival of a baby to a star was news in Hollywood. Hence, when gossip columnist Louella Parsons arrived to cover the story and suggested to Crawford that she provide her with a scoop on Franchot Tone’s latest spate of extramarital affairs, Crawford instead publicly announced that she was divorcing Tone – a rumor in print made concrete on April 11th of that same year when Joan filed for divorce.
The next few films at MGM continued Crawford’s brief on screen resurrection; Strange Cargo (1940) with Gable, and Susan and God (1940) a turgid melodrama that nevertheless yielded some powerful moments of bravado. Cukor and Crawford reunited for A Woman’s Face (1941) – in retrospect, one of the best movies she ever appeared in.

Unfortunately, Crawford’s performance as an emotionally tainted/physically scarred creature of self destruction did not bode well with the public’s fascinations and L.B. Mayer, who had already begun to focus his energies on the next generation of stars, quietly allowed Crawford’s screen image to steadily slip.

By 1942’s Reunion in France – an absurd war time melodrama – Crawford realized she had reached the end of the line in her professional association with MGM. She asked Mayer to buy out her contract and, to her great dismay, was not surprised when he did. An eighteen year association ended quietly, with no one but MGM’s security guard bidding Crawford farewell on her last day.
That same year, Crawford indulged in one of her more superfluous whims – a brief and disastrous marriage to B-actor, Philip Terry and the adoption of a second child, Philip Jr. During the next three years, Crawford would play war bride to Terry’s enlisted G.I. With no film work on the horizon, Crawford closed up her fashionable Brentwood home, save a couple of rooms, and let her staff go. In the evenings and to divert her frustrations at home, Crawford attended The Hollywood Canteen – a meet and greet venue for enlisted men that had been established in support of the war effort.

JOAN CRAWFORD: AN APPRECIATION - PART II

OLD WOUNDS

NEW BEGINNINGS

“I love playing bitches. There’s a lot of bitch in every woman…a lot in every man.”
- Joan Crawford

Had it not been for the maverick showmanship of rival studio head, Jack L. Warner, it is doubtful that Joan Crawford’s post war film career would have been successful or perhaps even resurrected.

However, Crawford’s dismissal from MGM had come at a particularly fortuitous crux in the volatile relationship between Warner and his own diva, Bette Davis. Always at odds with his most famous female star, Warner saw Crawford as a counterbalance to Davis’ – a way of keeping Davis’ ever increasing demands on the studio at bay and in check. If Davis refused to do a project, Warner reasoned that he could always threaten her with the prospect of casting Crawford in her stead.

Unfortunately for Jack Warner, he underestimated Crawford’s own resilience in refusing projects until she was absolutely satisfied with the material offered. Crawford’s personal satisfaction eventually settled on Mildred Pierce (1945) a film noir based on James M. Cain’s scathing novel of family incest and marital deceptions. Originally, the project had been offered to Davis, then Rosalind Russell – both turned it down.

Told of Crawford’s interest in the property, director Michael Curtiz was less than enthusiastic about casting her until she agreed to do a screen test. The test won Curtiz over and the resulting film became both a critical and financial success, winning Crawford her one and only Best Actress Academy Award.

For the next few years, Crawford continued to dominate with back to back hits – an achievement not lost on Davis, whose own box office and backstage clout continued to slip in proportion to Crawford’s success. Crawford’s next two movies Humoresque (1946) with John Garfield and Possessed (1947), a psychological melodrama costarring Van Heflin elevated her stature and popularity. She was suddenly a rival grand dame in the woman’s picture, a note of distinction once solely occupied by Davis on the Warner back lot.

Crawford’s next two films were almost as good. In Flamingo Road (1949) she plays a sideshow performer who refuses to be chased out of town by a corrupt city official, and in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), Crawford ran the gamut of emotion and situations to deliver a high caliber performance. In between these films, she even found time to spoof her own image with a cameo in It’s A Great Feeling (1949) – slapping costars Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan. When asked why she struck them, Crawford coyly replies, “I do that in all my pictures!”

During Flamingo Road, Crawford had begun a behind the scenes affair with married director Vincent Sherman. The affair was fleeting and ended bitterly when Sherman refused to divorce his wife. By the time the two collaborated on The Damned Don’t Cry, director and star were at odds.

At one point during the shoot, Crawford was admonishing her son Christopher for a minor indiscretion made in public. When Sherman quietly suggested that perhaps there was both another time and place for such hysterics, Crawford redirected her anger at Sherman instead, attempting to trip him as he exited her trailer, whereupon Sherman turned around and severely struck his star in the face.

After the release of The Damned Don’t Cry, Warner Bros. chose to loan Crawford out to Columbia Pictures for Harriet Craig (1950) a rather semi-autobiographical tale about a woman who was obsessed with maintaining a perfect home. Upon completion of the film, Crawford took an overdose of sleeping pills – perhaps accidentally - and had to be rushed to hospital to have her stomach pumped.

Next, Warner Bros. acquired the Broadway hit Goodbye My Fancy (1951). But its lackluster performance at the box office convinced Jack Warner that Crawford’s appeal had at last begun to wane. 1952’s This Woman is Dangerous was a B-movie that effectively terminated Crawford’s association with the studio. Her first freelance film, Sudden Fear (1952) became a colossal box office hit, proving once more that in the right film vehicle she was still a star to be reckoned with. Evidently, MGM agreed, wooing Crawford for a comeback in the lugubrious clunker, Torch Song (1953) – a musical so absurd and inanely painful to watch, that today one wonders why Crawford accepted it in the first place.

REFUSING TO FADE INTO OBSCURITY

She was the perfect image of the movie star and, as such, largely the creation of her own indomitable will.
– George Cukor


In her youth and at her zenith at MGM, Joan Crawford had always been on the cusp of setting new fashion and style trends. What eventually became known as ‘the Crawford look’ was largely a collaborative effort between Crawford, Adrian and MGM’s makeup artist extraordinaire, William Tuttle. However, beginning in 1951, and partly because she was nearly the age of fifty, Crawford’s look steadily grew more harsh and unappealing.

Although Crawford’s body remained as toned and solid as ever, thanks to her relentless regime of physical exercise, Crawford’s face became almost warrior-like in appearance. Her eyes were now cold and bulging; her hair cropped and died a reddish brown; her overdrawn lips seeming to swallow the lower half of her face while her once rounded jaw line had turned square and heavy. Hence, in review of Crawford’s next movie, a bizarre western melodrama entitled, Johnny Guitar (1954) one critic aptly nicknamed the film ‘Beauty and the Beast with (costar) Sterling Hayden as beauty.’

The film also sparked a painful rivalry between Crawford and costar Mercedes McCambridge. Both were closet alcoholics off camera while maintaining an air of perfection on set. When one of McCambridge’s scenes solicited applause from the crew, Crawford responded by tossing all of her costar’s costumes into the street. This scandalous incident eventually found its way into the new gossip tabloids that had replaced the once glowing studio PR sanctioned publications of old.

Even so, Crawford’s galvanic reputation at the box office continued to cling together over the course of her next two movies; Female on the Beach and Queen Bee (both in 1955) – perhaps because she fought so readily to maintain an impossible façade of Teflon-coated perfectionism. Cliff Robertson, Crawford’s costar in Autumn Leaves (1956) - a perfunctory bit of melodramatic nonsense - recalls a moment in the shoot when Crawford asked their director Robert Aldrich whether or not the pending scene to be shot would require tears. When Aldrich suggested to Crawford that she might consider that option, she was quick to reply, “Fine. Which eye?”

The last memorable role in Crawford’s cinematic canon would be The Story of Esther Costello (1957); a film in which she played a woman who discovers that her husband has been sexually abusing their adopted deaf mute daughter. From this high point, Crawford’s time would increasingly be spent on the most unlikely of endeavors; especially for a resilient movie queen – that of public spokeswoman for Pepsi-Cola.

IT’S LOVE SHE’S AFTER

“Recently I heard a wise guy story that I had a party at my home for twenty-five men. It’s an interesting story, but I don’t know twenty-five men I’d want to invite to a party.”
- Joan Crawford

While filming Queen Bee, Crawford had indulged in an affair with costar John Ireland. However, almost overnight, she also began a more lasting romance with Alfred Steele – the President of Pepsi-Cola. In hindsight, Crawford’s marriage to Steele on January 14, 1956 could be easily misconstrued as opportunistic. Crawford probably realized that she was no longer the most desirable commodity sought after by film producers. Even more over, perhaps she had finally grown tired of the media spotlight and had arrived at the realization that there was more to life than being a flickering personality.

Whatever the reason for her decision to quit the screen, over the next three years, Crawford became a fixture synonymous with the Pepsi brand. She toured the country with Steele and took an active membership on the company’s board of directors – becoming a savvy businesswoman in the process. Home now became a $300,000 New York apartment overlooking Central Park – lavishly appointed with seemingly endless closet space housing all of her dresses, shoes and other accoutrements.

Unfortunately for the couple, their marital bliss ended abruptly when Steele died of a heart attack on April 6, 1959. At her husband’s funeral, a genuinely heartbroken Crawford was approached by a rabid fan who demanded an autograph. When Crawford quietly turned away to hide her grief and tears, the fan abruptly tore off her mourning veil. It was a symbolic gesture reflecting a definite change in the ‘relationships’ between stars and their fans.

In retrospect, it seems unlikely that Crawford would have contemplated such an extended leave of absence from her film career without at least having been determined to make her new life and marriage a success. By all accounts, at least on the latter score, she had succeeded. She and Steele were sublimely content in their private lives. With Steele’s passing, Crawford was to realize that she not only had an emotional deficit, but a financial one as well. Filling the void with modest television work and a trite cameo in 20th Century-Fox’s The Best Of Everything (1959), Crawford took whatever properties came her way, the best of these undoubtedly coming from Robert Aldrich’s invitation to costar in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962); the movie that put her in close proximity to arch rival Bette Davis.

From the start, the shoot proved to be a match made in hell. Jack Warner not only slashed the budget of the project, he also forbade Aldrich to produce the film on the Warner back lot, declaring “I wouldn’t give you a dime for those two old washed up broads!” As Aldrich commenced with his shoot, the rivalry between his costars flared to near epic proportions. During the scene where a paralyzed Crawford attempts to have her sister (Davis) committed to an institution only to be violently confronted, Davis ‘accidentally’ kicked Crawford in the head, necessitating two stitches.

In another scene, where Davis binds Crawford to a hook to keep her from leaving her bedroom, Crawford declared that the rope around her wrists was too tight, to which Davis simply replied “It has to look real” before applying a tape patch to Crawford’s mouth to stifle any further objections while she (Davis) and Aldrich discussed the scene.

However, Crawford had her own revenge during the scene where Davis drags Crawford’s lifeless body out of bed and down a flight of stairs. Informed earlier by Davis not to act as a dead weight while she was being carried (Davis had a bad back) Crawford did just the opposite, sending Davis to the hospital for nearly a week.

Despite these animosities, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? was a monstrous hit. Unfortunately, its grim ‘horror’ premise had a proportionate backlash on the sorts of projects both Crawford and Davis were to be offered in the resulting decades. For Crawford, the projects were distilled into mostly character roles in like-minded B-movies.

Meanwhile, Aldrich was planning his reunion picture for Crawford and Davis: Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964). However, when Davis began to act up on the first few days of shooting – even going so far as to install a Coca-Cola machine on the set out of spite to Crawford’s allegiance to Pepsi – Crawford suffered a minor nervous breakdown, then quietly chose to bow out of the project. Her role was eventually filled by Olivia De Havilland.

LAST ACT FINALES

“Send me flowers while I’m alive. They won’t do me a damn bit of good after I’m dead.”
- Joan Crawford

The last act of Crawford’s film career is hardly what she would have chosen for herself. Beginning with 1964’s Strait Jacket for William Castle and culminating with 1970’s abysmally inarticulate Trog, the Crawford canon in both film and television work degenerated into a macabre and bizarre blend of schlock B-horror movies and cameo appearances so perversely below par for her talents that even today it remains quite baffling as to how and why Crawford should have accepted these projects in the first place. After all, after Baby Jane’s success, Crawford was once again a solvent and popular actress. She could have bided her time.

Christina Crawford’s snap critique that has distilled her adopted mother’s persona into that of an unrepentant gargoyle with a rabid fascination to be perennial in the public spotlight seems, in hindsight, grossly unfair. While it is true that Crawford adored her fans, she was also not reserved in her condemnation of all that Hollywood had become by the early 1960s, telling guests during an interview with David Frost in 1968 that the industry had changed for the worst.

So why did Crawford remain in Hollywood after 1960?

Alfred Steele’s assets left to Crawford upon his death included shares in Pepsi that, when push came to shove, his fellow executives chose to ignore and thereafter shabbily buy off from Crawford, effectively disowning her from the company ledgers. Though Crawford was hard pressed for cash immediately after Steele’s death, she eventually showed a modest profit from the settling of his estate and that, coupled with the success of Baby Jane ought to have been enough to sustain her for the rest of her days.

Always proud and immaculate about her appearance in public, Crawford’s visage was eventually demonized in the tabloids. “If that’s the way I really look they’ll never see me again,” she commented to a close friend, and for all intensive purposes, Crawford held true to that promise. She became a recluse in her apartment and, in later years, kept secret her diagnosis of the cancer that would eventually claim her life.

In light of a subsequent revelation from Crawford’s last will and testament, that left “no provision for my daughter Christina or son Christopher for reasons well known to them”, Christina Crawford chose to write the scathing ‘tell all’ memoir, Mommie Dearest – a brutal deconstruction of the Crawford myth and persona as pure evil. The book, a trendsetting first in the publishing industry that popularized the dismantling of iconic pop figures was eventually made into a movie in 1981 with actress Faye Dunaway delivering an eerie camp performance.

Ironically, in the years preceding her own death Crawford had praised Dunaway as the only actress of her generation likely to exhibit ‘star quality.’ Now, that very luminosity was being put to use in support of stripping bare the Crawford mystique. It is interesting to note that immediately following the film’s premiere, Dunaway quietly disowned both the film and her involvement in it for reasons she has yet to make entirely clear. So too, in more recent times, have many of the situations depicted in the book come under closer scrutiny from the other siblings Crawford adopted after Christina.
The undoubted reality is that Joan Crawford ought never to have considered becoming a mother. She was, after all, a driven creature of varying ambitions; all energies converged on attaining and maintaining her peerless screen image. “If you’ve earned a position be proud of it. Don’t hide it,” Crawford once told a reporter, “When I hear people say, ‘There’s Joan Crawford’ I turn around and say, ‘Hi! How are you?’”

Indeed, the public always came first in Crawford’s estimation. Perhaps, it is one of Hollywood’s small ironies that a similar code of career ethics belonged to Crawford’s arch rival - Bette Davis. In retrospect, both Crawford and Davis seem to have run parallel courses, converging as a train wreck on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Both Crawford and Davis were prone to extremes and personal obsessions. Each was driven to excel at their respective alma maters and both ended up with unrepentant children who wrote unflattering alternate truths to their lives from the skewed perspective of a parent’s shadow.
Yet, despite Mommie Dearest, Joan Crawford as ‘star’ is much more pervasive and everlasting today than Joan Crawford the woman reconstituted in bio fiction. Hence, when one stops to think of her now, a myriad of glamour floods the sensory capacities of the immediate memory. The reflections or even hints of that last act of decay are more distant somehow – not quite a part of the person most of us only knew from her movies – the shop girl desperate to make good; the sad-eyed girl with a penchant for dancing; the wily and self destructive vixen; the self-sacrificing maternal martyr.

“There’s that ‘you’re only as old as you feel business’”, Joan once suggested, “…which is fine to a point. But you can’t be Shirley Temple on the good ship lollipop forever! Sooner or later, damn it, you’re old!”

Yet, Crawford never quite took her own advice. In the 1960s and 70s she readily appeared in rather garish accoutrements, tempting the specter of youth with flashes of flirtation as she waxed affectionately about the good ol’ days in Hollywood while on the talk show circuit, all the while conscience of the fact that her own youth had passed her by. Her stardom was by then equally a relic of her past.

“I was born in front of a camera,” Crawford used to say, “I don’t know anything else.”

Yet, Crawford’s self perception of her own stardom is not entirely the truth either. Crawford was not a child star as Shirley Temple or Judy Garland had been. She did not perform in Vaudeville. She came into this career as a poor girl who first marveled customers as a hoofer at local dance halls. She was a teenager by then and before that limited popularity set in. She was well into her twenties by the time the camera even took notice of her for the first time. Yet, Joan Crawford remains a star.

The ‘how’ and ‘why’ of Joan Crawford’s stardom are perhaps two questions best resolved by viewing a retrospective of her films. Hence, today Joan Crawford remains strangely that ‘other.’ As an actress, she is undoubtedly a supernova – blistering bright and casting a wild beam of light in performance after performance that continues to inspire and entertain. Yet, and even despite the fact that her once invisible image is now largely tarnished, as a star par excellence, that light continues to generate its own third degree burns.

@Nick Zegarac 2008 (all rights reserved).

AMERICAN HITCHCOCK: PART I (1940-1953)

The enduring cinematic legacy of the undisputed ‘master of suspense’

by Nick Zegarac

“A good film is when the price of dinner, theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.”
– Alfred Hitchcock

Two undisputed facts exemplified the filmic legacy of director Alfred Hitchcock; first - that he is, and remains, the master of suspense in ‘pure cinema’; and second - that Hitchcock had his share of trying projects that – try as he might – never fully lived up to either the his legacy or audience expectations. Yet, to even suggest that Hitchcock had a box office flop seems sacrilege, considering the overwhelming and unparalleled string of successes he enjoyed throughout his lucrative tenure in Hollywood.

There are those like film critic Leonard Maltin who would argue that Hitchcock never made an ‘artistic’ flop. This reviewer’s curt reply however would be “see Under Capricorn (1949) or Jamaica Inn (1939)”. Arguably, even these movies have their points of interest and, to some extent, cinematic merit. But to say that Hitchcock made an occasional ‘bad’ movie is not to stain his entire palette of creativity with a whitewash of unwarranted scrutiny. It is merely suggesting honest critique through further reflection.

Partly for concision, Hitchcock’s tenure in British films has been excluded from this article. His years with Lasky and the Gainsborough Studios in England yielded some miraculous early works, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes among them. However, this early tenure is beyond the scope and focus of this article and therefore will remain conspicuously absent for another place and time.

It is important, however, to note that Hitchcock’s British years could easily fill as much space in print as the article you are about to read. Perhaps, because so much of his early works have been improperly preserved in archives, or have not been made readily available to audiences in North America, Hitchcock’s British period is widely unknown and arguably forgotten on this continent to this day; his American tenure eclipsing it and this is indeed a shame.

Over the years almost as much has been written about Hitchcock the man as there has been a thorough critique of his movies; a good many stories and personal reflections from those who worked with Hitch’ and knew him best, but also more than a handful of rumors from dubious sources that, over the years, have attempted to mar or tarnish the director’s reputation. Therefore, to set the record straight before proceeding to the filmic examples of the master at work, it becomes necessary to dispel certain myths in Hitchcock’s personal life.

To be clear on a quotation that continues to falsely resonate, Hitchcock never said that ‘actors are cattle’, merely that they should be treated as though they were cattle; a fine line of distinction perhaps – though Hitch’s favorites (among them Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, James Stewart and Farley Granger) have all gone on record as acknowledging the director’s respect for talent. Furthermore, rumors of Hitchcock’s tastes in humor on the set bordering on sadism seem to be largely a matter of taste.

As example: to gauge the barometer in shock value he was attempting to illicit from his audiences, Hitchcock had his crew frequently surprise star, Janet Leigh by leaving various incarnations of ‘mother’ inside her dressing room on the set of Psycho (1960). Depending on Leigh’s response to the discovery, Hitch’ chose the appropriate corpse that appeared in the finished film.

Hitchcock was perhaps more than a bit droll about his handling of talent in general. He also was quick-witted about his own place within the cinema firmament. During his British tenure, Hitch’ had had plenty of practice ‘getting into the act’ as his own extra during crowd scenes; a necessity then that later would become a much sought after signature trademark in his movies.

Occasionally however, Hitchcock’s genuine respect for talent would be tested. For example, when Paul Newman suggested a meeting to discuss his character on the set of Torn Curtain (1966) the actor was politely told by Hitch’ that everything he needed to create his performance was already in the script. When Newman pressed the point by inquiring what his motivation might be for a specific scene, Hitchcock adroitly shot back, “Your salary.”

A more lighthearted incident involved a grip on the set of Lifeboat (1944) who whispered in the director’s ear in between takes that his star Tallulah Bankhead was not wearing any underwear beneath her costume. Unnerved, Hitch’ quietly replied “I don’t know whether that’s a concern for wardrobe or hairdressing.”

In another instance, actor Montgomery Clift suggested to Hitch’ on the set of I Confess (1953) that his placement within a certain shot seemed unnatural, and furthermore, that he was not entirely certain he wanted to be in that particular location for the scene. Rather than argue the point Hitchcock merely replied “Well, you better…because that’s where the camera will be.”

Indeed, Hitchcock’s fascination with the movie camera was absolute throughout his career. His films were meticulously storyboarded from start to finish and once drafted on paper each concept was fastidiously adhered to on the set. Actors of the golden age in Hollywood were perhaps more used to such rigid craftsmanship than the ‘method actors’ who populated Hitchcock’s later movies of the 1960s and early 70s.

However, a Time Magazine reporter on the set of Rope (1948) noted actor James Stewart’s grumblings that ‘the only thing around here that’s been rehearsed is the camera’. Evidently, Stewart recovered from this initial assessment of the director at work because in the years that followed he starred in three additional films for Hitchcock (Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo).

By the late 1930s Hitchcock had already managed a minor coup in Hollywood – to market himself as the first director who was as readily famous and easily identifiable as the film product he created. When Hitchcock segued into television in the mid-1950s he took that ‘brand name’ with him. However, when a Time Magazine reporter suggested that he diversify the type of movies he was making Hitch’ shrugged his shoulders politely and replied “If I made Cinderella everyone would be looking for the body in the coach.”


HITCHCOCK AND SELZNICK
AN ANGLO-AMERICAN DÉTENTE

“There is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
– Alfred Hitchcock

The arrival of Hitchcock in Hollywood began innocently enough with a personal invitation from producer David O. Selznick to work on the story of the ill-fated Titanic for Selznick Pictures. Arguably, Selznick had zero interest in this project, but he knew that it was of considerable interest to Hitchcock. Instilled in a comfortable bungalow in Hollywood but with precious little to do, Hitch’s dismay was somewhat quelled when he and Selznick concurred on Rebecca (1940) as his foray into American movies. The author of the novel, Daphne du Maurier was not only greatly admired by Hitch she was also a close personal friend.

To say that Hitchcock was wholly unprepared for the omnipotent and intrusive way that Selznick ran his studio is perhaps an understatement. Though Hitchcock has been described by some as the movies first great auteur, he failed to recognize before the ink had dried on his contract that, although his boss’s official credit was strictly as producer, Selznick considered himself more a co-collaborator than a mogul. On the set of Rebecca, Hitchcock found himself taking ‘advice’ from Selznick in everything from the way certain scenes should be shot to his choice of leading lady.

Rebecca is essentially Bronte’s Jane Eyre set in modern times. A young nameless waif (Joan Fontaine) marries aristocratic, Maxim de Winter (Lawrence Olivier) while vacationing with her paid companion, Edythe Van Hopper (Florence Bates) in Monte Carlo. For a while Maxim and his new bride are divinely happy. However, upon returning to Maxim’s home, the foreboding seaside estate - Manderly, the spirit essence of Maxim’s first wife – the late, though haughty Rebecca, begins to intrude on the couple’s serenity. It seems that everyone from Maxim’s sister, Beatrice Lacey (Gladys Cooper) to the matronly, yet strangely demonic housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) will not allow Rebecca’s memory to fade.
Feeling stifled in her new home, the second Mrs. de Winter (never named in either the novel or film) decides to throw a costume ball to liven the mood. However, her plans go horribly awry when she appears at the ball costumed in a gown that Rebecca wore the year before; one that Mrs. Danvers deliberately suggested. The costume sends Maxim into a rage and he orders his wife to go upstairs and change.

The new wife and Danvers have their confrontation in Rebecca’s bedroom with Danver’s attempting to brainwash the bride into committing suicide. Instead, the discovery of a shipwreck on Manderly’s rocks leads to the discovery of another sunken vessel with Rebecca’s concealed remains. Maxim further complicates matters when he confides to his wife that he knew all along the body was there. “How did you know?” his wife asks. “Because I put it there,” Maxim explains.
This filmic revelation is worthy of consideration because it is not as it appears in the novel. In print, du Maurier had made her hero a murderer as well; Maxim killed Rebecca in a fit of rage after she announced to him that she was pregnant with another man’s child. Selznick, a purist in adapting literary works to the big screen, utterly detested the revision imposed on the film by the Censorship Production Code of Ethics from murder to accidental death. In truth, what ought to have been a moment of shocking revelation now plays as slightly anticlimactic, though Olivier’s power in orating the tragic moment when Rebecca accidentally stuck her head on a sharp piece of ship’s tackle adds considerable weight to the tepid revision.

Exonerated from any wrong doing at a public inquest, Maxim hurries home to his new wife whom he realizes he truly loves, only to discover that Mrs. Danvers has gone mad and torched his beloved Manderly – presumably with his new wife inside. After a brief frantic search, the lovers are reunited on the front lawn just in time to witness Mrs. Danvers being consumed by the flames.

As Hitchcock’s American entrée, Rebecca is impressive to say the least. In hindsight, Selznick’s constant badgering through memos strengthens the novel’s loose construction. Hitchcock, though a meticulous technical craftsman was not always as well served after he and Selznick parted company. On the heels of Selznick’s gargantuan success with Gone With The Wind (1939), Rebecca proved a valiant successor, popular with audiences and receiving critical praise and accolades; including the Oscar for Best Picture of 1940; the first, last and only time an Academy Award would be bestowed on a Hitchcock film.

Awash in Rebecca’s heady triumph, it seems inconceivable that Selznick would allow his star director the opportunity to make a movie for someone else. In point of fact, after acquiring Hitchcock’s services but having nothing for him to shoot, Selznick quietly loaned Hitchcock to independent producer Walter Wanger for Hitch’s first big hit, Foreign Correspondent (1940); a taut and timely spy thriller set at the cusp of WWII. Though shot before Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent was ultimately released after the former’s debut.

In hindsight, Selznick may have already been moving away from producing his own movies to assume the roll of a savvy business agent; setting up projects, acquiring scripts, getting talent in front of and behind the camera on board and then wholesale farming out the package deal for a considerable fee and percentage of the finished film’s gross.
Foreign Correspondent is the story of Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea), a newspaper hound who is sent to Europe to cover the pending political upheaval. Rechristened Huntley Haverstock, Jones is introduced to the curmudgeonly Stebbins (Robert Benchley) who instructs him to play everything low key, including his role as a ‘foreign correspondent.’ But Jones is determined to make good on his assignment.

Finagling a brief interview with diplomat, Van Meer (Albert Basserman), Jones is plunged into the middle of political intrigue when Van Meer is seemingly murdered before his very eyes. Though a resulting chase across the stark landscape of Holland reveals that the diplomat’s double is the one who has been assassinated, Jones is unable to prove his findings when the real Van Meer once again disappears.
Jones’ investigation is further complicated by two unforeseen circumstances; first - his main contact, Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall) is actually a double agent working for Nazi intelligence, and second - Jones has fallen in love with Fisher’s daughter, Carol (Laraine Day) who knows nothing about her father’s corruptions. Attempting to confide in Carol, Jones is nearly run over, pushed off a high tower and murdered in a struggle with Fisher’s henchman, Mr. Krug (Eduardo Cianelli). Eventually, the plot to obtain state secrets is foiled and Fisher, along with his daughter and Jones are trapped in a plane bombed by the Axis en route to Britain. In the resulting flood and deluge Fisher saves his daughter from drowning then nobly commits suicide – leaving Jones free to rekindle his romance with Carol.

Originally, the story that Wanger owned dealt with espionage of a different kind during the Spanish American war. As that conflict had already faded into obscurity by the time this film was set to go before the cameras, Wanger had the premise updated to reflect the dangerous rise of fascism in Europe. The final sequence – with Jones delivering his patriotic summation of ‘why we fight’ during a London bombing was a tack-on after production had wrapped and Hitchcock had already turned his attentions to filming Rebecca. Ironically, Wanger shot this final speech himself – an intervention Hitchcock deplored though it has remained one of the galvanic moments most readily admired by audiences and easily associated with the film.
The demand for Hitchcock’s services following these back to back premieres was overwhelming. While Selznick toyed with developing future in-house projects he loaned Hitchcock to RKO for an unlikely dabbling in screwball comedy; Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941). Scripted by Norman Krasna, the film tells the rather conventional tale of married couple Ann (Carole Lombard) and David (Robert Montgomery) who are floundering for reasons to stay married. The problem it seems stems from the couple’s ‘one question a month’ rule.

Ann asks David if given the opportunity to go back in time and, knowing then what he knows now would he still have married her. In a moment of honest weakness, David confesses that although he loves his wife he also misses his freedom, leading Ann to deduce that he no longer loves her at all. David’s response is made even more problematic when the couple learns that their marriage is not legal because of a state boundary dispute. Recognizing that he has been free all along and assuming the question is therefore moot, David decides to propose marriage to his wife again. Only, it is now Ann who contemplates the practicality of spending the rest of her life with David.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith is an admirably nutty bit of unhinged comedy – masterfully pulled off by Lombard and Montgomery. But given Hitchcock’s proven prowess in the field of suspense one wonders today what could have possibly been going through the executive mindset at RKO to hire him for a romantic comedy.

Hitchcock shoots his film with uncharacteristically non-Hitchcockian flair. His direction is solid and more than salvageable, if not on par with the mastery of directors like Leo McCarey and Preston Sturges; both refined Sultans of the screwball. In this respect, Hitchcock clearly lags behind his contemporaries with providing the subtle nuances that might otherwise have made Mr. and Mrs. Smith not merely equitable comedy, but an outrageously ingenious one.

At roughly this point in his American career Hitchcock had begun to grow restless with the films he had been assigned. Under an ironclad contract and rented out to direct at Selznick’s whim distinctly paled to the relative autonomy and prestige Hitch’ had enjoyed in England.

A reprieve of sorts arrived just in time with Hitch’s next project for RKO; Suspicion (1941), the story of wealthy wallflower, Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine) and her inexplicable romantic obsession with male gold digger, Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant). Defying her parents, Lina becomes Johnnie’s wife then slowly begins to realize what a scamp her new husband is.
After the death of her father, Lina is shocked to learn she has been left out of his will. For Johnnie, the snub is more critical. He has mortgaged their fabulous lifestyle on the assumption that Lina’s inheritance would bail them both out of debt. Now, Johnnie is forced to find other means to sustain the lifestyle to which they both have become accustom. Johnnie confides a get rich quick scheme to close friend, Gordon ‘Beaky’ Thwaite (Nigel Bruce), who agrees to help fund Johnnie’s plans – then mysteriously dies after the project is established. Suspecting that her husband may be a murderer – a progressive thought that ought to have led to an entirely different third act in the film – Lina resigns herself to the love she feels for Johnnie, despite her misgivings about his own sincerity in their relationship.

Johnnie tells Lina he is taking her to her mother’s because he cannot stand the fact that she distrusts him. On the way there Lina’s car door suddenly flies open and Lina, assuming that Johnnie is attempting to throw her from the speeding vehicle, fights him as his hand reaches for her. Instead, Johnnie pulls the car aside and tells Lina that she is a fool. He then further confides that he has always been in love with her – an unsatisfactory bit of tacked-on nonsense that succeeds in convincing Lina to get back into their car. The two drive home together – all mistrust between them seemingly forgiven.
Suspicion is based on Anthony Berkeley’s popular novel. In the novel’s original ending, Lina discovers that her worst fears are true – Johnnie is Thwaite’s killer and is planning to murder her next for the insurance money. An inexplicable obsessive love prevents Lina from saving herself. Knowing that she will be dead by morning, Lina writes her mother a note of confession, explaining the truth about Johnnie; then asks Johnnie to mail it for her after he has already made her drink a glass of poisoned milk. Lina dies and Johnnie, believing that he has managed to murder his wife while making it appear as a suicide, decides that the least he can do for the deceased is to mail her final letter home. The last shot in the film was to have been Johnnie tossing Lina’s letter to her mother in a postal mail slot – thereby ensuring audiences and the censors that justice would eventually prevail on Lina’s behalf.

The censors balked at this scenario, arguing that it did not resolve in very clear and concrete terms for the audience the apprehension of a cold-blooded killer (one of the absolute ‘musts’ in the Production Code of Ethics) and furthermore, that presenting Cary Grant as a murderer would do irreprehensible damage to the actor’s reputation with fans. Unable to sway the censors otherwise, revisions to the shooting script were eventually made and the film’s ending was awkwardly diluted. Though Suspicion did respectable business at the box office, it proved to be less successful than Hitchcock’s previous efforts; the one exception being that Fontaine’s performance as Lina ultimately won her the Best Actress Oscar statuette.
Hitchcock’s next project, Saboteur (1942) returned the director’s footing to familiar ground – in hindsight, perhaps too familiar in light of Foreign Correspondent’s success. Produced independently for Walter Wanger, the story is that of Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) an aircraft factory worker who is suspected of being a Nazi saboteur after a fire kills his best friend. On the lam, Barry meets kindly blind man, Phillip Martin (Vaughan Glasser) and his niece Pat (Priscilla Lane). Though Pat is ready to believe the worst about the mysterious man hiding in her uncle’s cabin – even going so far as to make several valiant attempts to return Barry to the authorities – Phillip reminds his niece that not all men accused of a crime are guilty of it.

Eventually winning Pat’s trust, Barry embarks on a cross country chase after the man he knows is the saboteur the police are looking for; Frank Fry (Norman Lloyd). Narrowly escaping a lavish house party where his arch nemesis, the ever plotting Nazi sympathizer, Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger) is waiting to kidnap Pat and murder Barry – Barry instead tracks down Fry and chases him to the top of the Statue of Liberty. Fry loses his footing and falls to his death with Pat ably explaining to the police that he, not Barry is the saboteur.

Saboteur is a patchwork of themes visited more skillfully elsewhere in the Hitchcock canon; its screenplay by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison and Dorothy Parker extremely episodic and often not terribly engaging. Decidedly uneven in its plotting, the film provides Hitchcock with an opportunity to test his globe-trotting agility across the continental U.S. – an exercise more fully and artistically realize a decade later in North by Northwest (1959).
There are many reasons why Hitchcock considered his next filmic endeavor one of his best. Certainly, with Shadow of A Doubt (1943) Hitchcock was given the opportunity to break away from Selznick’s hawk-eyed scrutiny which he regarded as oppressive at best. The production also realized Hitchcock’s desire to direct films that he also produced; this one for his own company Skirball Productions – peripherally aided by Walter Wanger. The film also realigned Hitchcock’s inherent zeal for directing cloistered suspense thrillers in confined spaces – a Hitchcock forte in England where money was tight and production schedules tighter still. Despite director/historian Peter Bogdanovich’s statement that Shadow of a Doubt is Hitchcock’s “first American thriller” – by that he means it was set in America instead of England – that dubious honor goes to the aforementioned Saboteur instead.
The script by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson and Alma Reville concerns the congenial Newton family living in the sleepy hamlet of Santa Rosa, California. Charlie (Teresa Wright), a teenager emotionally wilting from misperceived boredom, is invigorated to learn by telegram that her Uncle Charles (Joseph Cotten) – for whom she has been named – is arriving in town for a visit. There’s just one problem: Uncle Charles is also The Merry Widow strangler, responsible for the heinous murders of rich elderly dowagers.

Despite the fact that Charles presents the Newtons with lavish gifts upon his arrival in town - token souvenirs from his brutal slayings – the motive for his killings is not money. In one of his most uncharacteristically wicked moments ever inserted into a Hitchcock movie, Uncle Charles illustrates his indelible contempt for “rich, fat, greedy women”, equating their useless lives to that of slovenly animals fit for the slaughter.

The declaration raises more than a few curious eyebrows around the dinner table, particularly Charlie’s – who has begun to contemplate that her uncle is perhaps not what he appears to be. With a bit of amateur sleuthing Charlie learns the truth about her beloved uncle, though she is initially reluctant to share it with the family, particularly her emotionally fragile mother, Emma (Patricia Collinge) to whom Charles reappearance in town has meant everything.
Instead, a dangerous game of cat and mouse ensues. Charlie threatens her uncle with exposing the truth unless he leaves Santa Rosa immediately. After several failed attempts on Charlie’s life, Uncle Charles agrees to Charlie’s demand. However, once aboard his train Charles isolates his niece until the cars begin to pull from the station – intent on throwing her into the path of an oncoming locomotive. Instead, Charles loses his footing and slips between the two speeding trains, crushed to death beneath its wheels.
Shadow of a Doubt is a beautifully crafted drawing room murder mystery – methodically paced and quite stylish in its evocation of idyllic Americana turned upside down. Hitchcock shoots the Newton house – an actual home in Santa Rosa – with loving care for its cloistered hominess, as though it were the epitome of small town gracious living. He furthers this idealism by populating the home with a solid cast of stellar supporting performers, including Henry Travers as Mr. Newton, Hume Cronyn, a humorously meddlesome neighbor with a murder fixation, Herbie Hawkins, and Macdonald Carey (a Fox favorite) in probably his best role, as the sympathetic police detective, Jack Graham with whom Charlie has begun an adolescent romance.
From the onset, Hitchcock’s directorial footing is secure and swift, maneuvering his characters to their inevitable conclusion but in such a way that belies where the story is actually headed – thus, keeping his audience guessing. His subsequent film ventures of this period would not be quite so decisive in their narrative path.

A MAN APART
LEAVING SELZNICK BEHIND

“Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.”
- Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock moved into a rather bleak, if brief, interim of undistinguished film work following Shadow of a Doubt, beginning with a thinly veiled claptrap of plot elements from both Foreign Correspondent and his penultimate British thriller, The 39 Steps, with Bon Voyage (1944), a convoluted tale about an RAF pilot who may or may not be involved in espionage for the Axis powers. This he immediately followed up with another war propaganda short subject, Aventure malgache (1944) before recovering artistically – if not financially - with his next project: Lifeboat (1944).

Loaned to 20th Century-Fox for this adaptation of Steinbeck, Lifeboat became the first of Hitchcock’s attempts at shooting an entire film within the confided space of one set. In this case, that set is a lifeboat. The story concerns a small group of survivors attempting to keep body and soul together after their luxury liner has been torpedoed by a German U-boat. The survivor’s list includes feisty reporter Constance Porter (Tallulah Bankhead), mistrustful, John Kovak (John Hodiak), spirited businessman, Charles Rittenhouse (Henry Hull), loyal nurse, Alice Mackenzie (Mary Anderson), proud cook, George Spencer (Canada Lee), lumbering Gus Smith (William Bendix) and trusting Stanley Garrett (Hume Cronyn).

Along the way this group fish out the captain of the U-boat that sunk them, Willy (Walter Slezak). Although Willy first presents himself as grateful and sympathetic – he slowly begins to despise the lot of Americans as his sworn enemies and thereafter plots to murder them one by one. After amputating Gus’s infected leg in order to save his life, Willy waits until the rest of the survivors have fallen asleep before sadistically pushing the crippled man overboard.
Claiming that Gus’s death was accidental, Willy next lies about their whereabouts. He is not sailing them to an American port in Bermuda as planned but toward a German rescue vessel where he will be saved, but the others, most likely slaughtered or sent to a concentration camp. Charles learns first what Willy is up to and incites the rest of the crew to mutiny. The crew kills Willy in a mob rule before the Axis rescue ship is reached. A battle breaks out between that German ship rapidly gaining on them and an American war vessel looming on the horizon. The German ship is sunk by the Americans with the presumption that the American ship will now rescue the surviving members aboard the lifeboat.

It is interesting to note that although Hitchcock avoids garnering any audience support over the prospect of emotional salvation for the lifeboat survivors – as per their collective crime of murder - he also fades to black before the American war ship has rescued its inhabitants, leaving the fate of the lifeboat survivors an open ended question mark.
Initially written by imminent American author John Steinbeck, Lifeboat is perhaps Hitchcock’s most finely wrought character drama to date. The performances throughout are top notch. However, Hitchcock infuriated Steinbeck’s sensibilities as an author when he called writer Ben Hecht in to rework several key sequences including the film’s ending. Interestingly enough, despite its overwhelmingly positive conclusion – that of the assumed rescue of the survivors - the film was misperceived and reviewed by the top film critics in the country as un-American and worse – pro-fascist propaganda. Concerned that this litany of negativity would also blacklist him a communist, Fox’s CEO Darryl F. Zanuck pulled the film from circulation shortly after its premiere, despite the fact that it opened to positive opening weekend box office receipts and steady business thereafter. Lifeboat would remain buried in the Fox vaults for the next 40 years.
Hitchcock’s next two projects temporarily relegated him under David Selznick’s autocratic control; Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946); the first, a psychological thriller, the latter, arguably Hitchcock’s most sublime tale of Nazi espionage. Though both were produced at RKO, Selznick’s interference on each film resulted in his Selznick International banner preempting the title sequences instead of RKO’s trademark radio tower. Subsequent reissues of both films have attempted to alternate the logo that appears before the credits. Regardless, and in essence, the two films bear Selznick’s stamp of meticulous structure and planning.

After initial apprehension, Hitchcock persuaded Selznick to purchase the rights to the novel ‘The House of Dr. Edwardes’ for $40,000. Hitchcock also scored a minor artistic coup by suggesting to Selznick that renown painter Salvador Dali (left) stage the elaborate dream sequences that would stand in as the main character’s psychoanalytic nightmares. Spellbound begins in earnest with the introduction of Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman); a somewhat sexually repressed psychotherapist analyzing other sexual neurotics at Green Manors; the county sanitarium.

Although Constance cloistered professionalism becomes the brunt of Dr. Fleurot’s (Jon Emery) cynical jokes and flirtations, her own romantic life kicks into high gear with the arrival of new chief of staff, Dr. Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck) who will be replacing retiring head, Dr. Murchison (Leon G. Glenn). However, certain phobias begin to manifest in Edwardes’ character, drawing Constance romantically closer to him, but at the same time, exciting the mother instinct in her to protect Edwardes – both from himself and the authorities, who suspect him in the murder of the real Anthony Edwardes.

Hitchcock’s battles with Selznick on the set of Spellbound were daily and exhausting. At one point the director pleaded with Selznick to buy out the rest of his studio contract and find another director to complete the film. Selznick retaliated with the threat of a lengthy lawsuit, forcing Hitchcock back in the saddle on the project. He also encountered resistance from Salvador Dali, who had planned an elaborate dream sequence far too costly and much too lengthy for the purpose of the film.

Although Hitchcock convinced Dali to reduce his scale – many sequences that were filmed were eventually excised by Hitchcock from the final release print to tighten Dali’s meandering symbolism. None of these edits pleased Dali’s artistic sensibilities. For his part, Selznick intruded on the production by hiring a psychotherapist to act as his ears and eyes, and to make suggestions. After clashing with Hitchcock as to where the film deviated too liberally from the domain of legitimate clinical psychotherapy, Hitchcock reportedly told Selznick’s advisor, “My dear, it’s only a movie.”
After Spellbound’s premiere, Hitchcock focused his attentions on crafting Notorious. Believing that Spellbound’s narrative still lacked in clarity, Selznick pulled the general release print and removed a montage explaining the clinical treatment of patients; effectively eliminating an additional fourteen minutes from the finished feature. Even after enthusiastic reviews and favorable box office, Selznick seemed dismissive about the final film, calling it “just another man-hunt wrapped up in pseudo-psychotherapy.”

Notorious (1946) was an entirely different matter. Free of most of the angst and headache that had dogged previous Selznick/Hitchcock collaborations, Hitchcock was afforded a rare freedom in artistic expression. Selznick had been forced to bow out of the project while it was still in preproduction. He would eventually sell off his rights as part of a package deal to RKO which included stars Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, and Hitchcock’s services for a slick $800,000, plus half the revenue made from the finished film. Selznick used this money to help finance a project more close to his heart – the grandiose and oddly absurd western epic, Duel in the Sun (1946).

Based on a novel by John Taintor Foote, Ben Hechte’s screenplay opens the story with Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) whose father has just been convicted of being a Nazi spy. Alicia’s notoriety as a public party girl with a list of spurious associates garners the attention of the FBI, who sends special agent, T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) to blackmail Alicia into participating in their infiltration of a Nazi League stationed in Buenos Aires. Devlin falls in love with his secret agent; a complication magnified after Alicia agrees to marry one of her father’s old Nazi friends, Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains) to keep up appearances. However, from the start Alex’s mother Anna (Leopoldine Constantin) is critical of the union – suspecting that her daughter-in-law is not all she pretends to be.
At a gala party, Devlin discovers uranium being smuggled in wine bottles inside Alex’s cellar, accidentally breaking one of the bottles in the process. To cover up his tracks, Devlin embraces Alicia under Sebastian’s watchful eye, thereby drawing suspicion to her marital fidelity rather than his scheming. It is a superficial diversion and Alex quickly discovers the truth about Alicia. Together with his mother, Alex attempts to quietly poison his wife. The resulting rescue of Alicia by Devlin draws suspicion from the Nazi plotters who decide for themselves that Sebastian is an unstable link in their chain; one that cannot be allowed to live.
Notorious is Hitchcock’s most perfectly realized American thriller from his 40s vintage. It is full of stylish subtle nuances and visual mastery of film as pure art. Hitchcock also scored a subtle coup against the censors who – in their infinite wisdom to ban salacious sexuality from the movies - had deemed that any on screen kiss should last no more than a few seconds. Placing his camera only inches away from Bergman and Grant’s faces, Hitchcock had the actors merely peck one another over and over again for almost a minute; intermingling the touch of their lips with erotically peppered bits of dialogue. Though none of the ‘kisses’ lasts for more than a second, the cumulative result on screen became akin to observing two people in the throws of some great lustful passion.

The Paradine Case (1947) effectively ended the association between Hitchcock and Selznick with a modest thud. That the resulting project failed to live up to everyone’s expectations (coming directly after Notorious) belies Selznick’s intervention on the project, even though the film itself is consistently charming and moody, if nowhere near the caliber of its predecessor.

Originally Hitchcock had wanted either Ronald Colman or Laurence Olivier for the role of the barrister, Anthony Keane. There is some speculation that Hitch’ also sought the elusive Greta Garbo as his Mrs. Paradine. Disinterested in paying for these loan outs, Selznick assigned his own homegrown contract players to the cast. Hitchcock was disenchanted with this decision. Although he greatly admired Gregory Peck, Alida Valli and Louis Jourdan as actors, he felt all of them entirely unsuited for their roles.

Nevertheless, the project progressed at a grueling ninety-two day shoot – the longest of any Hitchcock shooting schedule to date. At the start of shooting it had been Selznick’s intension to create yet another colossus in film length – an extensive courtroom melodrama with obsessive love as its underpinning. Working from a script by Selznick and Ben Hecht, Hitchcock chose to acquiesce to Selznick’s demand rather than fight his desires for a really big movie; delivering nearly three hours of rough cut to Selznick at the end of the excursion. For once, Selznick felt that a film could in fact be too long and, after having disposed of Hitchcock’s services once and for all, he went to work chopping the narrative down to a modest 125 minutes.
Though the cuts are not damaging to the overall continuity of the story, they do tend to reduce various characters to mere cardboard representation. Imminent personalities such as Charles Laughton and Ethel Barrymore – cast in the film as tawdry philanderer, Judge Lord Thomas and Lady Horfield - simply float in and out of the story rather than becoming an integral part of it. So too, does the ending in hindsight seem slightly rushed.

The story that emerges on screen is rather threadbare and in viewing the film today one wonders just how much more there might have been to sustain an audiences’ interest for three hours. The plot concerns one Maddalena Anna Paradine (Valli), the late wife of a blind colonel whom she is accused of poisoning to death. It seems Mrs. Paradine has been having an affair with her husband’s valet, Andre LaTour (Jourdan). On the advice of legal council, Sir Simon Flaquer (Charles Coburn) Maddalena hires handsome hotshot attorney, Anthony Keane (Peck) as her defense. But the trial is made problematic when the married Keane begins to invest in Maddalena’s innocence on the basis that he is slowly becoming enamored with her. Keane’s wife, Gay (Ann Todd) is patient in her love, allowing her husband his romantic fancies while all the while knowing that they will come to not; for Maddalena is guilty of the charge.
Given the severity of Selznick’s editing, the distillation of Hitchcock’s usual sterling zeal for generating suspense into tepid melodrama at best is perhaps forgivable. The resulting film is much more a polite melodrama of manners than political/crime thriller. There are no surprises, no great complexities to wade through and no rivalry between characters once the audience has figured out that the accused is in fact destined to die.


ON HIS OWN
AND FEELING HIS ROOTS

Hitchcock’s first effort as a freelance director and his first film in color was Rope (1948) for Transcontinental Pictures. The original story is based partly on the Leopold Loeb case and more directly derived from Patrick Hamilton’s modestly successful stage play; ‘Rope’s End’. In the original tale, a pair of homosexual school mates strangles a straight colleague for kicks, then throw a party for the deceased’s family while the body is still hidden somewhere in the house. The film went one step further, placing the body inside a rather large credenza and then serving food and drinks to the family from its closed top converted into a dining table.
To augment the oddity of the exercise, the murderous duo also invites their old college professor Rupert Cadell to the party for two reasons: first because he is supposed to have instilled in them Nietzsche’s theory of the superman, thereby providing a theory of justification for their killing, and second, because Cadell is to have had a homosexual affair with one of the killers.

Given the climate of censorship in Hollywood at that time, Hitchcock could not directly suggest any of the aforementioned aspects about the crime, though he did succeed in creating a rather sycophantic closeness between the two actors who eventually played murderers, Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and Philip Morgan (Farley Granger). For his part, Hitchcock used Rope as his second exercise in shooting an entire film on one set; a technical gimmick he promoted as a film having ‘no edits’ or shot in ‘one continuous take.’ The premise, while interesting from a technical standpoint, proved improbable. Only ten minutes of film existed in a camera at any given time.
Undaunted, Hitchcock rehearsed his camera movements meticulously, closing in on an actor’s back or close up of a wall at the end of ten minutes before reloading the camera for his next reel. The resulting assemblage of film footage thus gives an awkward illusion of the continuity Hitchcock desired – an ‘uninterrupted’ photographic account of the stage play - though it also makes the viewer acutely aware of the gimmick every ten minutes throughout the story.

In hindsight, the chief problem with Rope is in its central casting of James Stewart as Rupert Cadell, the boy’s criminology professor. Unable to project the subtext of homosexuality onto the squeaky clean persona of Stewart places the film’s chief premise off balance, for no such motive or intimate understanding between Brandon, Philip and Rupert ever exists in the finished film.

Stewart is thus left with the mundane responsibility of detecting their crime and bringing his former pupils to justice. Perhaps feeling more than a tad insecure about his role, James Stewart reportedly told an interviewer midway through the shoot that “the only thing that’s been rehearsed around here is the camera” – a bit of uncharacteristic bitterness that, if not entirely, then at least for the most part, was true. His comments leaked out to the trades before the film had its premiere. When Rope was finally released it did respectable business but was by no means a resounding success. However, it was not a failure either.
The next two years were trying for Hitchcock. Though Rope faired on average, his next project Under Capricorn (1949) was a miserable flop – both artistically and financially. Rebounding with another production for Transcontinental, Stage Fright (1950), Hitchcock cast the sultry Marlene Dietrich as greedy chanteuse, Charlotte Inwood. In the flashback that opens the story, Charlotte arrives on her lover, Jonathan Cooper’s (Richard Todd) doorstep with her dress bloodied. She has presumably just shot her husband and is seeking asylum and an alibi.

To protect Charlotte from the crime, Jonathan returns to her home to get her a clean dress. However, in attempting to make the homicide look like an accidental killing after a burglary, Jonathan is discovered by the upstairs maid who alerts the police of her findings. Fleeing the scene, Jonathan relies on his good friendship with Eve Gill (Jane Wyman) to aid in his escape. The subtext is that Eve harbors an unrequited puppy love for Jonathan and proves the weight of her affections by taking him to her father, Commodore Gill’s (Alistair Sim) remote seaside cabin to hide out for a few days. There’s just one problem: everything until this point in the narrative has been a lie. Told from Jonathan’s perspective, the flashback is a rouse that neither the audience nor Eve is aware of.
The rest of the story is rather benign and meandering as Eve masquerades as a maid to secure employment in Charlotte’s house with the hopes of discovering some evidence against her for the crime of murder. Meanwhile, congenial Scotland Yard Detective Wilfred Smith (Michael Wilding) has begun to harbor affections for Eve. The nearer he draws to her side, the closer he suspects he is coming to the truth about Jonathan – though oddly enough ‘love’ rather than ‘sleuthing’ seem more on his mind. Despite these problems in narrative construction, Hitchcock’s direction excels during two pivotal sequences.

The first is an outdoor charity fundraiser where Charlotte is scheduled to sing. Doubting Jonathan’s theory about the crime, Eve’s father sends a girl scout up to the stage with a baby doll that he has soiled in a red stain to resemble the blood on Charlotte’s dress. The rouse works, interrupting Charlotte’s performance and drawing suspicion away from the real culprit. The scene is a brilliant bit of Hitchcock staging with hardly any dialogue. But it also tends to support the false premise that Charlotte – not Jonathan – has committed the murder.

The latter moment of artistic brilliance comes at the very end of the film; concealing Jonathan deep within the bowels of the music hall, Eve confronts him with her suspicions about the crime. Before her very eyes Jonathan crumbles, confessing to Eve his obsessive love that drove him to murder Charlotte’s husband. Hitchcock captures this sequence almost entirely in extreme close-up with Richard Todd and Jane Wyman’s eyes growing larger; his with rage, hers widening in fear. This sublime moment of visceral chills ends with a chase through the music hall. Jonathan is accidentally cut in two by the steel safety stage curtain. By the time, Hitchcock exposes the truth about Jonathan, even the audience finds it difficult to believe that they have been left out of the narrative loop.
Hitchcock redeemed himself in the public’s estimation as the master of suspense with his next thriller; his first for Warner Brothers; Strangers on a Train (1951) a diabolical and terrifying excursion into the mind of a psychotic. The film is based loosely on the dark elegant novel by Patricia Highsmith. Hitchcock wanted and received the services of hard-boiled detective writer Raymond Chandler for the screenplay. A master of dialogue, Chandler’s narrative construction left something to be desired, and Hitchcock then turned the project over to Czenzi Ormonde to polish the script into its final form.

The story begins in earnest with a chance meeting between two men, one a sycophantic mama’s boy, Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), the other the all-American hunk and tennis pro, Guy Hanes (Farley Granger). After forcing a luncheon meeting on Guy, Bruno confides in him a plausible way of committing the perfect murder. Two strangers meet and swap crimes – each murdering a total stranger, thereby foiling the motive necessary for any criminal investigation to convict.

The idea, while intriguing to Guy – whose wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers) is attempting to blackmail him with a pregnancy for alimony – is dismissed once the train pulls into Guy’s hometown of Metcalfe. However, Bruno takes the challenge seriously. Tailing Miriam to a fair ground, Bruno isolates his prey in a darkened corner and strangles her – returning to Guy with Miriam’s broken glasses as proof that she is dead. Appalled, Guy threatens to expose Bruno’s crime, a move Bruno discourages because, after all, Guy is an accessory before the fact. Also, Bruno is in possession of Guy’s cigarette lighter which he threatens to give to the police as proof of his complicity in Miriam’s strangulation.

The resulting plot entanglements are a race against time, as Guy struggles to find a way of exposing Bruno as the real killer.
The film throughout is peppered in Hitchcockian twists and turns, not the least of which is Hitchcock’s casting of real life daughter Patricia as Barbara; the younger sister of Guy’s new fiancée, Ann Morton (Ruth Roman) and a dead ringer for Guy’s late wife, Miriam. After finagling his way into a house party at Sen. Morton’s (Leo G. Carroll) Bruno, mistakenly believing that Barbara is the ghost of Miriam, nearly strangles a wealthy dowager during a parlor game.

The suspense culminates with a dramatic showdown at the fairground where Miriam was murdered. Bruno attempts to throw Guy from a racing carousel. Instead, the carousel spins out of control, killing Bruno but not before he exposes to Guy and the local authorities that he is still in possession of Guy’s lighter, thus releasing Guy from the suspicion of murder.

For this climactic finish, Hitchcock wanted a shot of a man crawling beneath the racing carousel en route to its emergency release lever located in the center axis. After toying with the idea of incorporating rear projection to accomplish the feat, the stunt was instead accomplished live by Harry Hines who performed it without trick photography or safety devices – his head only an inch away from being decapitated by the whirling floor boards of the ride. In an interview conducted many years after the fact, Hitchcock’s face grew pale and nervous when he spoke about Hines’ fool bravery.

Hitchcock immensely enjoyed working on this film, perhaps because the problems he had had previously with structure and staging were absent from the Chandler/Ormonde screenplay allowing him to indulge in creating his ‘pure cinema’ without having to constantly perform a patch up job on the script.
In retrospect, the next two films Hitchcock did for Warner Brothers were rather straight forward set pieces: the crisis of conscience potboiler, I Confess (1953) and the experimental 3-D who done it, Dial ‘M’ for Murder (1954). I Confess is the story of Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) a Catholic priest who, after learning that his gardener, Otto Keller (O.E. Hasse) has brutally murdered the church’s unscrupulous lawyer, is bound by his vow of silence not to pass along the confession to the police. Father Logan’s faith is tested from all sides, including a subtle threat made by Police Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden); that his former lover – prior to entering the priesthood - the now married Ruth Grandfort (Ann Baxter) might be called upon to testify.
Hitchcock ran into considerable defiance from Clift throughout the shooting. The actor questioned the director incessantly as per his character’s motivation. During one scene that called for Clift to raise his head as he exited the courthouse, thereby providing Hitchcock with an eye-line match to the subsequent shot that explained the action was moving toward the Chateau Frontinac Hotel, Clift reportedly told Hitchcock, “I don’t think my character would look up then”, to which Hitchcock replied, “Well you better.”

Despite solid performances from the entire cast and a fairly taut climactic showdown between the insane Keller and Father Logan – the rest of the George Tabori/William Archibald screenplay is rather unevenly paced and hampered by a lengthy flashback that needlessly fleshes out the romance between Ruth and Michael. If, in hindsight there seems to be little to recommend the film as one of Hitchcock’s best, there are also few negative qualities that make the film unmemorable. Despite his confrontational attitude on the set, Clift delivers a solid performance as the man torn between his own conscience and succumbing to a breech of faith. Hasse is a spooky villain – greedy, vial, yet tragic too in his exploitation of even his ever loyal wife in his vane attempts to remain free of incarceration.


THE PLAY’S THE THING

Hitchcock once confided to Peter Bogdanovich that when all creativity seemed to fail, the best any director can hope for is a pre-sold stage hit that he can easily transform into a presumably equally popular film. However, Hitchcock also advised Bogdanovich that the worst thing any film director could do was to ‘open’ a stage work ‘up’ to the infinitely larger cinematic canvas of possibilities. Instead, Hitchcock suggested that the play’s original construction should be adhered to as closely as possible throughout. For the most part, Hitchcock took his own advise on his next project; Dial M for Murder (1954), the film based on the play by Frederick Knott who also, at the director’s behest, wrote the screenplay.

The story concerns one Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) a former tennis pro who regrets giving up his racket for a quiet married life with socialite Margot (Grace Kelly). Tony’s distemper is furthered by the discovery that his wife has been having an affair with successful writer, Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings). When Mark arrives in London for a visit, Tony invites him to a stag party, thereby leaving Margot quietly home alone to get murdered.

Previously, Tony had exposed to his old college mate, Charles Swann (Anthony Dawson) his own knowledge about Swann’s blackmail dealings and his involvement in the mysterious death of a wealthy dowager. To forget all that he knows, Tony proposes to Swann that he kill Margot for a few thousand pounds. As there is no correlation between Swann and Margot or Swann and Tony no one need be the wiser for the crime and Swann will be much the richer. Caught with being exposed for his past indiscretions, Swann agrees to kill Margot.
But Tony’s plan goes awry when Margot accidentally kills her attacker in self defense instead. Through a series of plot twists, Tony concocts a scenario that makes it appear as though Swann was trying to blackmail Margot for her affair with Mark, thereby making her killing Charles appear as a desperate act motivated by revenge and fear than self defense. At first, this alternative theory gains the attention of Police Inspector Hubbard (John Williams). Margot is arrested and put on trial for murder. However, as Mark grows ever more suspicious of the facts Tony begins to plot anew, hoping to incriminate and exact his own revenge on the lovers.

As per the studio’s request, Hitchcock shot Dial M for Murder in the gimmicky process of 3-D, then a popular new process that promised to lure audiences away from television and back into theaters. However, unlike most films shot in 3-D, Hitchcock employed the image trickery sparingly, only providing two instances where objects appear to fly out of the screen and into the audience. In the first instance Grace Kelly’s hand, reaches behind her for the scissors that will mortally wound Swann in the back during her attempted strangulation. In the second example, Hitchcock allows a vital bit of evidence that will convict Tony – his hidden hall key discovered by Inspector Hubbard – to be put on display as Hubbard’s hand slowly projects the evidence forward for the audience’s consideration..
For the rest, Hitchcock structured each scene in the film to consist of a definite foreground, middle ground and background – inviting his audience to indulge their voyeurism somewhere between the last two plains and making the audience part of the action within the cinematic space of the room. In the end, all of Hitchcock’s planning was for not: by the time Dial M for Murder was released into theatres the fad of 3-D had quietly died out. Although several theatres equipped to show the film in 3-D were provided with that option, the bulk of the paying public only saw it in the more traditional ‘flat’ screen projection as it currently exists today.

@Nick Zegarac 2008 (all rights reserved).

AMERICAN HITCHCOCK PART II (1954-1959)

HIT AFTER HIT
FROM THE MOUNTAIN

HITCHCOCK & PARAMOUNT PICTURES


“There is nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever.”
-Alfred Hitchcock

Arguably, Hitchcock’s golden renaissance as a filmmaker began with another change of venue from Warner Bros. to Paramount in 1954 and the release of Rear Window later that same year. In many respects, Rear Window is a watershed film for its director. First, it was Hitchcock’s initial foray into the studio’s patented VistaVision widescreen process that Hitchcock would use for the rest of his movies. The film was also a reunion of sorts, bringing together Hitchcock’s favorite blonde Grace Kelly with James Stewart whom Hitch’ had already collaborated with on Rope (1948). While Rope had not been an ideal experience for either director or star on Rear Window Hitchcock and Stewart struck a chord of symbiotic harmony that would result in their collaborating on two more films later in the decade.

In Rear Window James Stewart is L.B Jeffries, a somewhat sexually repressed magazine photographer who is laid up with a leg he broke while on one of his assignments. To pass the time, Jeffries spies on his neighbors: the voluptuous Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy), forlorn Miss Lonely Heart (Judith Evelyn), frustrated composer (Ross Bagdasarian) and frisky newlyweds (Rand Harper, Havis Davenport). However, Jeffries attentions shift to the spurious comings and goings of one Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) after Thorwald’s wife, Anna (Irene Winston) suddenly vanishes from their apartment without a trace.
At first Jeffries girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) and his physical therapist; straight shooter Stella (Thelma Ritter) believe Jeffries’ cabin fever is getting the better of him. But then there are the unexplainable bits of business observed through Jeffries rear window that draw attention toward a more sinister conclusion. Did Thorwald murder his wife? It isn’t long before Lisa has decided to play amateur sleuth – nearly getting herself killed in the process.

The level of tense economy Hitchcock achieves by confining his action to one set is not merely equitable, to his similar experimentations on Lifeboat and Dial M for Murder but, herein borders on some cinematic genius. Every pivotal moment in the plot takes place from roughly the same limited vantage of L.B. Jeffries’ rear window view, yet the action itself never seems redundant or straining for some new revelation. Part of the reason for the film’s perceivable freshness lies with Hitchcock’s clever maneuvering of the camera within these confined apartment spaces. The limited movement provides the audience with a view, primarily, of only what the characters see, hence the audience – like the characters – is in a constant state of wanting to learn and see more than they can or have been allowed to.

Jeffries apartment, courtyard and facing apartment facades are built as one gigantic three sided indoor set inside Paramount’s Stage 11, removing the false floor at ground level to create a greater sense of depth and height; allowing for total control of lighting and sound. Hitchcock further instructed composer Franz Waxman to underscore the film using recycled musical cues from previous efforts at the studio or popular music of the day to give the action a sort of benign musical familiarity. All of this attention to detail works to the film’s advantage; the neighborhood appearing as any neighborhood within a confined cityscape; the sounds readily accepted by the audience with authentic verisimilitude.

For the film’s climactic showdown Hitchcock restricts his camera movement to basics; the audience is as confined as Jeffries is in his wheelchair and forced to sit and wait for Thurwald’s inevitable arrival.

Hitchcock’s next film for Paramount, To Catch a Thief (1955) proved a bittersweet occasion, for it presented him with the dilemma of working with his favorite ‘cool’ blonde, Grace Kelly for the last time before she departed Hollywood’s high society for even higher society as Princess Grace of Monaco. Commencing his shoot in the south of France, Hitchcock was also hampered by the studio’s insistence on extensive location work to take full advantage of VistaVision’s claim in ‘motion picture high fidelity’, though only Hitchcock would have considered the lushness of Monaco a deterrent rather than a plus.
To Hitchcock’s testament, the matching of real life locations in France with photographic work done back on soundstages in Hollywood was invisible to the naked eye. John Michael Hayes began his lucrative association with Hitchcock on this project, providing a slick and stylish script with plenty of smart repartee and engaging situations to divert attention away from the fact that the film’s focal point was not the apprehension of a jewel thief – as the title suggested - but rather the cleverness with which Grace Kelly’s protagonist snared herself an attractive, though decidedly confirmed middle aged bachelor.
To Catch a Thief begins with a round of perilous jewel robberies inside the posh hotel suites of some very ritzy guests. The police suspect that the crimes are being perpetrated by John Robie (Cary Grant) a one time jewel thief who fought for the resistance in France during the war and was pardoned for his crimes. Danielle (Brigitte Auber), the daughter of Foussard (Jean Martinelli) one of Robie’s former accomplices during the war years, but currently reduced to the menial tasks of a restaurant wine steward, also believes that John has come out of retirement.
From here the story shifts its focus to headstrong wealthy girl-about-town Francie Van Allen (Kelly) and her sustained infatuation with John. Francie’s mother, Jessie (Jessie Royce Landis) is a flirtatious matchmaker. With her eye on John, Jessie goads her daughter into developing a relationship in order to get closer to the truth. But when Foussard (Jean Martinelli) is accidentally murdered, the police conclude that he was the man they were looking for all along. Unfortunately, that’s just the moment when John begins to have second thoughts about Foussard’s daughter, Danielle.

Critics of the day were quick to regard To Catch A Thief as lightweight, though nevertheless pleasurable entertainment. In truth, the film represents Hitchcock at his most elegant and edgy sex fantasy, but with a decided twist. Still, with its focus more on romance rather than suspense, the movie does tend to illustrate a fundamental truth about audience expectations and in subsequent screen outings Hitchcock would never again so readily divorce the romantic elements of his stories from the tautness of his thrillers.

The most readily recalled sequence from To Catch A Thief today is Robie’s seduction by Francie while fireworks explode wildly outside her Riviera hotel window. Taunting and testing Robie’s desire to possess either her or her diamond necklace, Robie’s keen eye for legitimate ice leads him to deduce, “these are fakes.” “But I’m not,” Francie coos, allowing John to lean her into the couch.

That ‘lean’ was cause for the censors to demand that Hitchcock eliminate the sequence entirely as it obviously suggested the beginnings of a sexual encounter. Hitchcock refused. The censors next made suggestions where to cut the sequence so that no ‘lean’ was implied. Hitchcock quietly took the censor’s concerns under advisement then, backed by Paramount released the film with the sequence virtually in tact.
Given the flourish of success Hitchcock sustained during the early fifties within the realm of dark and suspense-laden melodrama his next choice of project – the decidedly light black comedy The Trouble With Harry (1955) seemed an unlikely candidate for his celebrated directorial prowess.
The trouble with Harry is that he is dead – assassinated in the pastoral woods of Vermont within the first few minutes of on screen time and shortly thereafter encountered by nearly every small town kook within twenty miles who attempt to bury, then dig up, then re-bury his slowly decomposing remains somewhere in the forest. The irony of the piece revolves around the town’s folk ability to internalize the murder as preventable and, more to the point, something that even those who only knew the deceased in passing suspect they are now somehow remotely responsible for.

Shirley MacLaine was top cast as Jennifer Rogers, Harry’s wife. She is not very upset to learn her husband’s dead – though it is unlikely that she killed him. Capt. Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) discovers the body first. Together with amateur criminologist Miss Ivy Gravely (Mildred Natwick) the two contemplate the recourse of burying Harry in the glen. Enter local artist Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) who is intrigued, but not terribly upset by the prospect of having a human cadaver stored in Jennifer’s bathtub.
Given Hitchcock’s aversion toward location shooting, he must have been put off by delays brought on by a sudden frost and winter storm midway through his shoot. The snow and ice effectively reduced all the lush fall colors to leaf piles blowing in the wind. The net result: Hitchcock and company returned to Paramount mid-way through production with bags of leaves that were meticulously glued onto fake trees inside a Paramount soundstage.

Hitchcock returned to form with an anomaly in his American tenure; a remake of his own The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), a thriller Hitch’ chose to relocate to Marrakech. The 1934 original had been set in Europe. Regardless of this change in locale, the narrative structure of the original was faithfully retained. Years later, Hitchcock would muse that his original had been made by an amateur while the remake was crafted by a master.
In the remake medical doctor, Ben McKenna (James Stewart) his wife, Jo (Doris Day) and their son Hank (Christopher Olsen) are on holiday in Marrakech where Ben is attending a conference. Jo is a retired star of the London stage and easily recognizable to her fans. While at a restaurant the McKennas are introduced to Lucy and Edward Drayton (Brenda de Banzie and Bernard Miles) – presumably fans of Jo.

The McKennas also meet mysterious Frenchman, Louie Bernard (Daniel Gelin) who offers to act as their cultural liaise while on holiday. However, when Bernard, disguised as a native, is stabbed before Jo and Ben’s eyes in the marketplace he manages to confide an ominous secret to Ben before dying; that a high ranking political official is to be assassinated somewhere in London, England. The plot thickens as Ben learns that the Draytons have kidnapped Hank and are holding him hostage to buy Ben’s silence until the assassination can take place.

Hitchcock reportedly did not want to work with Doris Day at the start of production – assuming that her talents lay in the delivery of a song rather than solid acting. However, Day proved her worth to Hitchcock as a serious actress in the sequence where Jo - having learned that her son has been kidnapped and furthermore, that her husband has drugged her to calm her down prior to divulging this information - suffers and emotional breakdown.

Nevertheless, to appease fans of Doris Day musicals and the front offices at Paramount, Hitchcock reluctantly agreed to allow Day to warble a song in the film – but only if the song could be incorporated as a pivotal plot element within the story. That song – Que Sera Sera became a number one best selling single and an Oscar-winning hit.

For the scene where the McKennas are approached by the mortally wounded Bernard, Hitchcock had wanted the actor’s dark facial make-up used to disguise him to come off as he collapses in Ben’s arms, thereby revealing his true identity. Unfortunately, after several failed takes it was discovered that the thick make-up application simply would not smudge. Eventually, Hitchcock came up with his own clever solution – applying flesh-colored make-up to James Stewart’s hands instead. As Ben catches Bernard’s face between his fingers, the flesh tone in the palms of his hands wipes off on the actor, implying that the opposite has occurred.

Hitchcock also indulged in another brilliant bit of ‘pure cinema’ during the climactic Albert Hall sequence where the assassination is supposed to take place. In the twelve minute reveal, uninterrupted by dialogue and accompanied by the suspenseful Storm Cloud Cantata conducted by Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock recreated the memorable sequence of his 1934 original almost shot-for-shot. The sequence begins as Jo enters the concert hall and the London Orchestra begins to play. She spots the balcony boxes at opposite ends of the venue where assassin, Rien (Reggie Nalder) and his chosen victim, the Foreign Prime Minister (Alexi Bobrimskoy) are seated. Unable to intervene, Jo is powerless and driven to panicked frustration while Ben frantically combs the upper balconies in search of the assassin and some answers to their son’s whereabouts.

At a pivotal break in the music, Jo lets loose with a blood-curdling scream – distracting the crowd and causing the Foreign Prime Minister to lurch in his seat just as the assassin fires his bullet. Initially aimed as a kill shot to the heart, the bullet instead takes the Foreign Prime Minister in the shoulder. Ben bursts into the balcony box where the assassin has been hiding and after a brief struggle the assassin plummets to his death without revealing Hank’s whereabouts.

Perhaps more than any other Hitchcock film of the decade, The Man Who Knew Too Much reveals how far Hitch’ had come in his mastery of the cinematic medium. His handling of all the elements is both swift and assured and he manages to invest the characters with a sense of immediacy that escalates almost from the moment Hank vanishes from Marrakech. Upon its original theatrical release, The Man Who Knew Too Much was hailed by critics and audiences alike.
Perhaps as a rebuttal to all the high profile ultra-gloss entertainment he had been indulging in, Hitchcock next film The Wrong Man (1956 and for Warner Bros.) was a relatively low budget, dark and brooding story shot in black and white and based on a real life case of mistaken identity surrounding one Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda). Manny is a trumpet player at the Stork Club who is wrongfully accused of holding up a local insurance agency after his wife, Rose (Vera Miles) is denied coverage for some much needed dental surgery. Everyone in the burgled insurance office who testifies against Manny is convinced that he is the man who held them at gunpoint and made off with a considerable bankroll. The problem is that Manny is actually innocent.

An unusual departure for Hitchcock, who also briefly narrated the prologue, the film was based on Maxwell Anderson’s novelized account of the real Christopher Balestrero’s struggle to clear his name. Though remaining faithful to the book (the screenplay was also penned by Anderson and Angus McPhail) Hitch’ deliberately omitted textual references that in the novel cleared Balestero of the crime beforehand and thus would have defused the tensions in the film.

Nevertheless, Anderson’s wordy prose seems to have inadvertently hampered Hitchcock’s agility as a cinematic storyteller. His lack of engagement with the material is evident from the moment the awkward narration opens the story. For the first time in his career, Hitch’ is relying more on ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’ the audience what they need to know – his sense of ‘pure cinema’ relegated to a rather straight forward faux noir crime story that simply fails to maintain its level of suspense throughout. If Hitchcock’s 50s tenure does have a weak spot, it is The Wrong Man.
The decade would be rounded out by two of the best movies Hitchcock ever made; Vertigo (1958) and North By Northwest (1959). It is one of Hollywood’s great ironies that only the latter film was a critical and box office success at the time of its theatrical release. However, time has proven the artistic merit of both efforts; each clearly belonging in a league of their own.

For years Hitchcock had wanted to make a film set in San Francisco – a city he regarded as one of the most cosmopolitan metropolises in the world. Bad timing and other pending projects for the movies and his weekly commitment to his own television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents… precluded Hitch’ from realizing his dream project until 1956 when the novel d’Entre les Morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac was brought to his attention. The book was a critical examination of the all consuming aspects of obsessive love tinged on this occasion with elements of the supernatural and an intriguing crime story besides.
In realizing the story for the screen, Hitchcock turned to famed author, Samuel Taylor and Alex Coppel; the former a master at creating romantic melodrama, the latter an expert constructionist in penning mystery/thrillers. For the re-titled film, Vertigo, Hitchcock once again turned to everyman, James Stewart as his central protagonist; this time cast as retired police detective turned private investigator, Scottie Ferguson. Suffering from bouts of dizziness in high places (hence, the title of the film) after witnessing the death of a fellow officer off the side of a Frisco high rise, Ferguson’s career seems at an end. He is brought out of retirement by former college acquaintance, Gavin Elstor (Tom Helmore).
It seems that Elstor’s wife, the cool Madeleine (Kim Novak) is plagued by mysterious blackouts. Elstor confides to Scottie that he believes in the very real possibility that Madeleine is being possessed by the spirit of Carlotta Vance – a well known tragic historical figure who will not rest until she has driven Madeleine to suicide. At first, Ferguson refuses to believe this far fetched tale. Gradually, however, he begins to piece together a premise that does indeed suggest some other worldly explanation for Madeleine’s frequent disappearances. After rescuing Madeleine from a failed suicide attempt at Golden Gate Park, Ferguson discovers that he has begun to fall in love with her himself, much to the chagrin of his friend, brazier designer Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes).
Actually, the whole premise is a rouse concocted by Elstor and Judy – the woman impersonating his wife, Madeleine whom Elstor has already murdered. Luring Ferguson to the mission bell tower at Old San Juan Batista – and knowing that Scottie’s vertigo will prevent him from catching up to her in time - Judy/Madeleine appears to commit suicide by throwing herself off the tower’s belfry right before Ferguson’s eyes. Driven into a catatonic state, Ferguson is gradually nursed back to health by Midge, only to accidentally run into Judy on a street in San Francisco in her original brunette hair and make-up. After an awkward meeting, Judy agrees to go out with Ferguson. Shortly thereafter, he becomes obsessed with remaking her into the image of his dead love interest.
In many ways Vertigo shows off the combined essences of Hitchcock’s cinematic prowess to their very best advantage: from the film’s inventive spiraling main title sequence designed by Saul Bass, to Hitchcock’s extraordinary usage of color to evoke mood, to his memorable montage illustrating Scottie’s dizzy spells (a forward zoom/reverse track camera trickery devised by Irmin Roberts), the film is a cinematic feast for those clever enough to appreciate that exposition in film storytelling is not everything.

After the disappointing box office performance of Vertigo, Hitchcock’s last film of the decade, North By Northwest (1959 for MGM) returned to a more reliable blend of dark sadism and light humor to ensure its returns and audience popularity. Determined to write the ‘wrong man’ movie to top all the rest, screenwriter Ernest Lehman devised a stylish thriller incorporating nearly every Hitchcockian film devise from the director’s illustrious tenure into one seamless roller coaster ride of masterful thrills and humorous suspense.

Over the years, rumors have circulated that Hitchcock unintentionally mentioned the idea for the project to James Stewart while production was wrapping on Vertigo. When Stewart became eager to play the part of Roger Thornhill, Hitchcock was forced to admit that he had Cary Grant in mind all along. However, there are problems with this theory.

First, Hitchcock seldom worked far in advance in planning his subsequent projects. In general, but specifically at this point in his career, Hitch’ took his time deciding what film would come next. Also, once he was involved on a movie, he committed himself wholly to that project until it was completed. Since North By Northwest was not a pre-sold play or movie property already waiting in the wings, but one commissioned from Lehman by Hitchcock, it seems unlikely that the idea came to him well in advance of wrapping production on Vertigo.

Second, given the solid working relationship between Hitchcock and Stewart, it does not make much sense that Hitch’ would have merely mentioned a movie idea to his star without having Stewart in mind for the lead. More than likely, MGM did not want Stewart cast – either because he seemed too old for the part, was not one of their stars under contract or was inadvertently being blamed for Vertigo’s poor performance at the box office.

Whatever the reason, North By Northwest stars Cary Grant as harried ad man, Roger O. Thornhill. After being mistaken for a secret agent by Phillip Van Damme (James Mason), Roger quickly discovers that he is a sitting duck, rift for multiple assassination attempts by Van Damme’s men unless he can get to the bottom of things.

Unfortunately, Roger’s attempts at contacting UN political analyst, Lester Townsend (Philip Ober) goes horribly awry when one of Van Damme’s assassins kills Townsend in the middle of the United Nations lobby while making it appear as though Roger is the killer. Considered a fugitive from justice, Roger next stumbles onto Eve Kendell (Eva Marie Saint), a mysterious flirt traveling by train and oddly intent on helping Roger elude the authorities.
Slowly Roger comes to trust Eve and eventually the two have an affair. However, when Eve appears to be working for Van Damme, Roger confronts the motley crew in the open, thereby exposing Eve to terrible danger. Eve is the double agent that Van Damme has mistaken Roger for.

Hitchcock relied heavily on matte paintings and process photography in North By Northwest to sustain a level of purely escapist make-believe. The film’s two most memorable set pieces – a bi-plane assault on Roger along a lonely stretch of North Dakota road – and the scaling of Presidential faces carved into Mount Rushmore were both elaborately staged at MGM rather than shot on location. In the former instance, Grant was placed on a treadmill in the foreground, running for his life while reacting to a process screen of rear projection with the bi-plane photographed separately.

In the latter sequence, MGM’s scenic art department crafted an elaborate replica of Rushmore’s faces, relying on equally elaborate matte paintings to capture the steep downward perspective as Eve and Roger appear to be dangling from the jagged precipices for the film’s climactic showdown. Some surviving studio memos indicate that this final race across Rushmore was recreated out of necessity rather than from Hitchcock’s innate dislike of location shooting. It was only after the State Park denied MGM access and even permission to use the real location for the film that the decision was made to recreate Rushmore on the back lot.

MGM licensed Paramount’s patented VistaVision process for North By Northwest after Hitchcock refused to photograph the film in Cinemascope. Although the making of the film proved an enjoyable experience for all concerned, the film also marked the last time Cary Grant worked for Hitchcock.
Today, rumors abound as to why these two alumni never reunited for another try – especially since North By Northwest was one of Hitchcock’s most profitable thrillers. One plausible reason is that Grant had begun to feel as though his days as a leading man were numbered. While the actresses Grant was frequently being paired with were increasingly getting younger, Grant himself was already well into his middle age at the time North By Northwest went before the cameras. Following the success of the film, Grant would reluctantly agree to make only one more thriller: Stanley Donen’s faux Hitchcockian spy movie: Charade (1963).

@Nick Zegarac 2008 (all rights reserved).

AMERICAN HITCHCOCK - PART III (1960-1976)

THE BEGINNING OF THE END
PECKING OUT A LASTING LEGACY IN THE SIXTIES

“Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.”
- Alfred Hitchcock

By 1960, Alfred Hitchcock was an international celebrity – instantly recognizable around the world. Only part of this notoriety was due to his films. Hitchcock’s more palpable form of celebrity came from his weekly appearances, introducing segments of his own television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents on NBC. Budgetary restrictions and the fast pace of shooting television would come to serve as a template for Hitchcock’s next, and arguably his most popular, cinematic endeavor.

Often sited as the film that matured American cinema into its present state of sublime cynicism, Psycho (1960) is based on a novel by Robert Bloch that has its roots in the real life criminal activity of a deranged farmer who quietly butchered his neighbors. In the book, Norman Bates is a rather pudgy middle aged recluse – easily identifiable as someone with a darker side to his character. By transplanting the attributes of a serial killer onto the seemingly normal and youthfully handsome Anthony Perkins, Hitchcock plays upon our erroneous misperception that evil is immediately identifiable or, as Shakespeare most astutely observed, “he that smiles may smile and be a villain.”

Budgeted at a remarkably modest $800,000, Psycho went on to earn forty million in its first release – a telling sign of the more cost-cutting that would come to exemplify film making in the sixties. Joseph Stephano’s screenplay carried an immersive under layer of psychoanalysis, perhaps because the writer was also in therapy at the time he wrote the script.

The story begins with Marion Crane (Janet Leigh); a hot and bothered secretary whose lover, Sam Loomis’ (John Gavin) is unable to commit to marriage because he is struggling to pay for his ex-wife’s alimony. To expedite her way to the altar, Marion decides to steal fifty thousand dollars from her employer as a runaway down payment for the fantasy life she misperceives can be hers.

Unfortunately, en route from Phoenix to Fairfax the weather turns ugly, forcing Marion to take a night’s refuge at the Bates Motel from which she will never return. The motel’s proprietor, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) a congenial mama’s boy on the surface quickly develops a paralytic sexual frustration toward Marion that manifests itself as murderous psychosis while pretending to be his mother. After stabbing Marion to death inside one of the motel showers, Norman disposes of her body in a nearby swamp. Enter private investigator, Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam). Assigned by Marion’s employer to track her down, Arbogast eventually traces Marion’s route to the Bates Motel and shortly thereafter suffers the same fate as our heroine. Forced to take matters into their own hands, Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) and Sam journey to the motel and that now infamous old gothic house on the hill – actually a free standing set built on Universal’s back lot.

Lila hides herself in the cellar, the last place she thinks anyone will look for her. Unfortunately, the basement is home to the real truth behind Norman Bates; that his mother, who earlier figured prominently as a possible suspect in Marion’s disappearance is actually a mummified corpse, dressed in a shawl and wig, but rotted nonetheless. Hitchcock frames Lila’s terrifying moment of realization in extreme close up, with mother’s back to the camera, then slowly spins her chair around to reveal a shriveled corpse, its cavernous sockets blankly staring into the camera.

For its time, Psycho was a disturbing revelation in American cinema signifying the weakening of the Production Code of Censorship that would never have allowed such a grotesque moment to be seen on the screen. The shower sequence in Psycho remains one of the most effective and masterful bit of editing ever put on film.

Involving ninety cuts, a partially nude stand in for Janet Leigh, and a melon being slashed to simulate the sound of steel cutting into flesh – the sequence unravels as an assault on the audience’s collective expectation of what murder should be – providing quick horizontal and vertical cuts whereupon our collective imaginations reassemble those bits and flashes into a brutal homicide that, in truth, is never entirely realized on screen.

When the film debuted it was readily denounced by the Catholic League of Decency as well as by a select few film critics who condemned the movie and Hitchcock as going too far. The backlash, coupled with Universal’s clever marketing of the movie only served to further fuel the public’s rabid fascination to see it. In the final analysis, Psycho became Hitchcock’s most successful movie to date.

Immediately following the film’s triumphant premiere, Hitchcock took a three year hiatus from making movies. However, he was far from idle – investing a considerable amount of effort in continuing his television series and returning to the screen with what would be his last great cinematic triumph; The Birds in 1963. Working from a short story by his favorite author Daphne du Maurier, Hitchcock commissioned screenwriter Evan Hunter to flesh out the story and provide cohesion to du Maruier’s episodic series of bird attacks.

The plot eventually concocted concerns the quaint hamlet of Bodega Bay: weekend getaway for hotshot defense attorney Mitchell Brenner (Rod Taylor). While in San Francisco, Mitch tweaks the nose of Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), a spoiled wealthy socialite and practical joker whose wild past has been expounded in the tabloids.

Mitch and Melanie quickly escalate their mutual interest in one another from tempestuous rivalry to smoldering romance; a move quietly abhorred by Lydia (Jessica Tandy), Mitch’s mother and even more quietly observed by old flame, Annie Haywood (Suzanne Pleshette). But then, there are the birds – those fine feathery fowl who run amuck in the town, smashing into buildings, attacking school children, pecking out a farm neighbor’s eyes and blowing up the town gas station.

From a technical vantage, The Birds remains Hitchcock’s most ambitiously mounted film, relying heavily on matte photography that only occasionally belies its origins under today’s closer scrutiny of special effects. The sodium screen employed in the film’s matte photography was largely the invention of Disney SFX specialist Ub Iwerks after Hitchcock became dissatisfied with the less than stellar results reproduced by the more traditional ‘blue screen’ process. While ‘blue screen’ tended to produce blue halos around hair and other fine details, the sodium screen process generated a virtually flawless matte with no discernable traces of separation between the various photographed elements.

Hitchcock’s second unit spent days at the city dump photographing thousands of sea gulls circling the skies and then matting them into the foreground action shot on location and on the Universal studio back lot.

Admired from a Seago shampoo commercial, but with no prior acting experience to her credit, Tippi Hedren was Hitchcock’s first and only choice to play the film’s central protagonist, Melanie Daniels. Groomed in the manner of a Grace Kelly, Hedren received a lavish wardrobe designed for her by Edith Head prior to principle photography commencing on the film. In retrospect, Hedren is the last of the memorable Hitchcock blondes; statuesque, cool and strangely removed from her surroundings.

Initially, filming began with high spirits; the chemistry between Hedren and Rod Taylor, palpably engaging. However, after being told by Hitchcock that a pivotal scene involving Melanie attacked in the upstairs bedroom of the Brenner family home after the birds have pecked through the roof would be shot using matte photography and reaction shots, Hedren arrived on set to discover that the entire bedroom set had instead been enclosed in a cage, and, that real life birds – hurled at her by a wrangler – would be used instead.

Reluctantly, the actress submitted to an afternoon of being assaulted by live animals after which she quietly slipped into a catatonic state from that she failed to recover from by the following Monday morning. Hedren’s failure to report back to work necessitated the use of her double for a subsequent sequence where Melanie’s badly pecked at and bloody head is bandaged by Lydia in the living room.

The overwhelming box office success of The Birds was encouraging to Hitchcock. Perhaps, in Tippi Hedren he had at last found a replacement for the blonde ideal that Grace Kelly had once represented so clearly for him. His faith in Hedren secure, Hitchcock cast her in Marnie (1964) – a Freudian psychological sex mystery where she played a manipulative and compulsive thief, but with a sinister underlying current of sexual frigidity.

Hitchcock had wanted to make Marnie immediately following Psycho and, from the start, he had envisioned the story as Grace Kelly’s triumphant return to the screen. Although Kelly had initially agreed to do the film she eventually reneged on her acceptance and at the last minute – after Hitchcock had already commissioned a screenplay from John Michael Hayes. Reports on Hitchcock’s reaction to Kelly’s final decision vary from utter rage to sad disappointment. What is true enough is that after learning Kelly would not be able to do the film Hitchcock issued a polite letter of regret to the Princess; then chose to shelve the project rather than recast her part.

By the time Hitchcock had convinced himself that Tippi Hedren would be ideal to play the lead in Marnie he was readily clashing with screenwriter Evan Hunter over the handling of a scene in which Marnie – having been forced to marry Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) or face imprisonment for stealing from his publishing company is then forced to have sex with her husband after launching her own strenuous objections.

The ‘rape’ scene – as it came to be known – generated a creative impasse between Hitch’ and Hunter; the latter arguing that if any sympathy was to remain for the character of Mark he could not be seen forcing himself on his own wife. Hitchcock readily disagreed and promptly fired Hunter in favor of Jay Presson Allen (a novice in the medium of film, and with only two professional stage writing credits to her name).

In rewriting the story, Allen altered key sequences that were part of Winston Graham’s original novel and Haye’s original treatment; changing the office lover’s triangle between two men, Mark and his rival for Marnie’s affections – Terry – to the more subversive pseudo-lesbian fascination finally embodied by Lil,’ Mainwaring (Diane Baker). She also removed a key sequence where Marnie seeks professional treatment in the office of a psychoanalyst. Henceforth, the responsibility of getting at the crux of Marnie’s sexual repressions fell to the character of Mark – possibly as a way of redeeming him in the public’s eyes after he had already raped his wife.

Clearly an attempt on Hitchcock’s part to revisit themes and issues he had more readily and to better effect rounded out in Spellbound, upon its release, Marnie received almost unanimously negative and scathing reviews from the critics. Its failure at the box office effectively ended Tippi Hedren’s brief career and arguably wounded Hitchcock’s reputation as the purveyor of solid chills. That reputation would be further dismantled with Hitch’s next project.

In hindsight, Hitchcock’s shortcomings on Marnie seem at once more pronounced, yet more easily forgivable. Tippi Hedren is wooden next to Sean Connery who, despite his enviable charm, still comes off as something of a sexual sadist and a cold-hearted brute while trying to deconstruct his wife’s troubling sexual past. By promoting Marnie as a ‘sex mystery’ Hitchcock creates a false audience expectation that perhaps damaged the film’s box office potency.
Marnie is not about sex but rather the absence of any intimacy in the sexual act itself. The linkage between Marnie’s frigidity and the convoluted logic behind her kleptomania is fundamentally flawed and not readily apparent on a first viewing of the film. Allen’s screenplay takes far too much time unraveling the bizarre relationship between Marnie and her mother, Bernice (Louise Latham) while seeming wholly disinterested in the more weirdly sexual obsession that lures Mark into marrying Marnie in the first place.
Liberal changes in the cultural climate toward a more perverse and voyeuristic standard, the erosion of the studio system, and, the removal of the Production Code that precluded explicitness of any kind on screen: these were perhaps disquieting developments that an old master like Hitchcock found out of step with his star-driven slickly packaged movies from the 1950s. In that vein, Marnie is very much a throwback attempt by Hitchcock to revisit his atypical ‘50s glamour. The film is not a ‘sex mystery’ except if one chooses to entertain the screenplay’s very loose interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis.

In hindsight, Marnie is the real finale to Hitchcock’s American career. Though Hitchcock continued to make movies well into the decade, he had arguably and irreversibly lost his toe-hold in cinema as its undisputed master of suspense.


THE FAREWELL YEARS

Torn Curtain (1966) is probably Hitch’s most awkwardly miscast thriller. It improbably stars fresh-faced pert and plucky Julie Andrews miscast as Dr. Sarah Louise Sherman; fiancée to a brilliant lecturer, Professor Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman). The two are in Copenhagen for a conference where Sarah begins to suspect that Mike is becoming a communist defector. Like Lina’s contemplation over her husband’s innocence in Hitchcock’s Suspicion, made nearly two decades before it, Sarah’s assumptions about Michael in Torn Curtain turns out to be false and misleading – the screenplay by Brian Moore incessantly toying with her ‘what if’ scenarios and generally blowing them out of proportion with ironically timed unhappy accidents.

From its conception, Torn Curtain struck a decidedly sour note for all concerned. After penning a score for the film, a personal disagreement effectively ended Hitchcock’s association with long-time musical collaborator Bernard Herrmann. His score would eventually be replaced by Hitchcock. Paul Newman, a method actor out of sync with Hitchcock’s way of working, frequently clashed with his director over his part. Worse, the chemistry between Newman and Andrews failed to materialize as principle photography commenced. Hitchcock, who acknowledged that Julie Andrews had been thrust upon him by studio executives who found her enchanting in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, readily tired of making any attempt to mold a plausible dramatic performance from his star, choosing instead to grumble over the fact audiences would expect Andrews to break into song.

What is perhaps even more troubling about the film is that in hindsight it seems desperately struggling for something intelligent to say. More often the screenplay comes up with preposterous bits of dialogue that string the story along to its inevitable and contrived conclusion. The humorous bits are not funny and the dramatic moments are not nearly as suspenseful as they ought to be.

The film’s one memorable moment is the awkward murder of Hermann Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling) a double agent working for the Russians who too late realizes Michael’s defection is a fraud. Here, Hitchcock illustrates for his audience just how difficult it is to kill a man – particularly when the adversaries are evenly matched. Michael attempts to strangle, stab, strike down with a metal skillet, then gas his assailant in a small cottage in the middle of nowhere. He is successful only in the last of these methods.

“When was the last time Hitchcock went to the movies?” one reviewer proposed upon Torn Curtain’s release; an understandable inquiry, given the film’s unnatural blend of matte shots and largely indoor set pieces shot at Universal that seem pronouncedly obvious in their poor recreations of European country sides and utterly one dimensional. Hence, of all of Hitchcock’s later endeavors, Torn Curtain is the one that has worn the least well.

Dated in its fixed cold war premise, its awkward acting and bizarre amalgam of stylistic elements, Torn Curtain today appear as a forgotten relic from some archaic and strangely disembodied decade in cinema history that never existed. The film is neither a product of vintage 60s film fare nor is it an attempt at knocking off the stylish post-war elegance of slickly packaged entertainments like To Catch a Thief or The Man Who Knew Too Much. For all concerned then, Torn Curtain proved to be a forgettable footnote.

Following the Torn Curtain’s disastrous premiere, Hitchcock departed making movies for nearly three years before bringing Topaz (1969) to the screen. He could just as easily have taken another year to convalesce. Based on the sprawling best-seller by Leon Uris, Topaz is the story of a highly ranked Russian official, Boris Kusenov (Per-Axel Arosenius) who defects to America. After a lengthy prologue in which Kusenov and his family narrowly escape Russian agents in Denmark, the film settles into a rather standard and plodding narrative written by Samuel Taylor; the crux being that Kusenov’s defection might actually have been a rouse.

Enter Agent Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe); a rather benign sort who enlists the aid of his more flamboyant French spy and personal contact, Andre Devereaux (Frederick Stafford) to do a bit of homegrown subversion involving Castro and the Cuban communist resistance. André accepts the assignment, though his wife Nicole (Dany Robin) suspects that part of the allure has to do with sultry Cuban communist, Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor) the wife of a dead freedom fighter who is actually a double agent. The plot is further complicated with the introduction of Andre’s son-in-law, Michèle Picard (Claude Jade) who inadvertently uncovers a murder plot - then nearly becomes part of the body count himself.

With the success of the James Bond film franchise in the back of his mind, Hitchcock delves into espionage more deeply than in any of his other films, coming up with his own brand of cloak and dagger that never gets beyond the drawing board stage. In terms of box office appeal, Topaz has the insurmountable task of overcoming an inherent lack of star power. Though each is competent in his/her performance, none of the actors in the film particularly stands out with the sort of ‘star quality’ so vital and necessary for the overall marketability of the film.

Hitchcock’s first sneak preview of Topaz with an ending that had André in a duel inside a vacant soccer stadium was an absolute disaster, universally receiving the worst reviews of any Hitchcock picture to date. In planning another ending for the film, Hitchcock made two compromises, arguably neither completely satisfying – the latter with André and Nicole departing on a plane for France with their seemingly shattered marriage brought back into perspective; the other involving the off camera suicide of Claude Martin (John Van Dreelan) – the suspected head of the international cartel who had had an affair with Nicole.

To suggest that Hitchcock’s sensibilities as a director were hopelessly out of touch with audience tastes of the 1960s is perhaps a tad too sharp a condemnation. However, film critic Leonard Maltin’s suggestion that Hitchcock was making more personal films – not in tune with immediate public tastes perhaps, though solid entertainment nevertheless – is far too liberal a critique than any screening of Topaz should allow for. The film is sluggishly paced and confusing to follow, particularly during its final reels. At best and in retrospect, Topaz remains an unusual error in Hitchcock’s craftsmanship.

If there were those who thought Hitchcock was finished as a director upon Topaz’s release, his next film Frenzy (1972) provided a considerable reprieve, if not completely, then mostly to reinstating his status as the master of suspense. Based on Arthur La Bern’s novel, Farewell Piccadilly, So Long Lester Square, Frenzy represents Hitchcock at his most uncharacteristic and undeniably gruesome. In many ways the film is a throwback to the kind of entertainment Hitch’ was making in Britain prior to leaving England for Hollywood in the mid-1930s.

Shot on a modest budget and on location in the UK, Frenzy opens with the discovery of a naked female corpse floating face down in the Thames; the latest victim of The Necktie Killer. After Hitchcock’s prerequisite cameo, as a passerby who observes the recovery of the body, the narrative constructed by Anthony Shaffer moves to the firing of bartender Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), after being caught by his employer attempting to steal a drink from the pub. Blaney’s girlfriend, barmaid Babs (Anna Massey) encourages Richard to keep a stiff upper lip. Richard is next scene strolling through the marketplace at Covent Garden by friend, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) – the actual serial killer.

Rusk suggests that Richard move on to greener pastures, but all Richard can think of is to revisit his past; his estranged wife; employment councilor, Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt). Shortly thereafter, Rusk also pays Brenda a call – one that ends with her becoming the next victim of the Necktie Killer.

The killings in Frenzy are not only amongst the most brutal ever created for a Hitchcock film, but they tend to take on a distinct note of pandering to the times. Hitchcock ups the ante he first established in Psycho by inserting gratuitous nudity into several key sequences – titillating his audience with the prospect of exploitative erotica turned upside down; lust escalating into violent crime and death.

Although the inclusion of violent rape represents something new for a Hitchcock film, the staging of the strangulations in quick cuts is pure homage to the shower sequence from Psycho. Already in declining health, Hitchcock clearly relished the opportunity to revisit some of the familiar locations he had known as a boy. Hence, Frenzy was, in its own way, the return of Hitchcock as England’s prodigal son, come home. A financial success, Frenzy also introduced scores of younger filmgoers to Hitchcock in the movies even though it had become quite apparent to his most ardent fans that his best works were now truly behind him.

Family Plot (1976) effectively brought down the curtain on Hitchcock’s career with a preposterously lumbering bit of inane nonsense. The story concerns a fake medium, Madam Blanche (Barbara Harris) and her taxi driver boyfriend George (Bruce Dern) who cleverly scams naïve rich people out of their life savings. At present, their sitting duck is Julia Rainbird (Cathleen Nesbit), a widower who is certain that the ghost of her dead sister has come back to haunt her.

George and Blanche accidentally cross paths with a pair of spurious diamond merchants Arthur Adamson (William Devine) and his attractive girlfriend Fran (Karen Black). The two are behind a series of VIP kidnappings in the San Francisco Bay area. When Blanche is asked by Julia to channel her nephew, whom she had given away for adoption many years earlier, this improbable greedy foursome concoct a scheme in which to lighten the dowager of her considerable bank load.

Based on Victor Canning’s novel, the plot as reconstituted by Ernest Lehman’s screenplay for the film remains inconsequential, tired and meandering. Everyone seems to be going through the motions – particularly Barbara Harris, who plays up the camp elements of the story more than the suspense, as though the entire production were a sort of Freak Friday Part Two instead of a Hitchcock thriller.

In point of fact, Hitchcock had long admired Harris as an actress. However, his usual indiscriminant zeal for strict adherence to his scripts was, on this occasion, relaxed, allowing Harris to improvise the final scene, whereupon she addresses the camera – and therefore the audience – with a wink.

Hitchcock was also rather lax about re-shooting scenes with actor Roy Thinnes, whom Hitchcock fired after his first choice for the role of Arthur Adamson - William Devanes - suddenly became available. Although Hitchcock was forced to re-shoot close-ups and medium shots already made with Thinnes in the role, for continuity sake, the long shots of Arthur walking away from the camera are not Devanes but Thinnes.

In hindsight, and with his health in steep decline, one wonders why Hitchcock chose to shoot Family Plot at all. In point of fact, he relied heavily on his second unit to lens the more strenuous action sequences. Clearly, Hitchcock was a man of means. He did not have to continue working and yet he did – mostly to the detriment of his otherwise sterling reputation within the industry. Throughout his career, Hitchcock was most readily proud of his MacGuffins - objects or devices seemingly integral to his narrative, yet otherwise inconsequential to the story once their purpose had been served. However, in his last few outings the MacGuffin which had proved so malleable and easily identified within his personal style suddenly becomes strangely absent. The proof is in his body of work. Hitchcock’s last three movies (Topaz, Frenzy, Family Plot) barely resemble the rest of his canon, both from a stylistic and narrative perspective. Instead, and particularly with the advent of home video that has made entire bodies of work viewable in chronological order, these last few Hitchcock films exist today as strange anomalies apart from what was then referred to as Hitchcock’s auteur style.

In recent years Hitchcock’s daughter, Patricia who sometimes costarred in his movies, has defended against the rumors that have circulated about her father: that his humor lent itself more to cruelty than in fun; that he rarely socialized with people outside of the making of his movies; that he derived a sick fascination by playing on actors phobias, and, that he firmly believed all actors were cattle. The Hitchcock family legacy in private reveals a man unlike the persona of the macabre gentleman glimpsed in his features or adroitly providing glib sarcasm on the set as introductions to his weekly television series.

No, Hitchcock in private is arguably not the Hitchcock the public knew and came to love. True enough that as a showman, Hitchcock was ever concerned with cultivating his reputation as a loveably brooding ham and even more meticulous about the films he produced than in the public’s misperceptions about who he was in the roles of man, husband and father. Yet, in the final analysis Alfred Hitchcock lives primarily in the public’s estimation through that on screen persona and with the sort of product he produced during one of the most successful and lucrative tenures in Hollywood.

That the resulting body of work should lean more toward darker tastes and themes was in servitude to giving the public what Hitchcock perceived they wanted and what he knew they had come to expect from him – rather than revealing any sort of deep inner aversion or dower glimpses into the heart of the man behind the curtain. That Hitchcock himself chose work over a quiet retirement is also admirable from the perspective that he remained an aspiring artist to the very end – even if his last few ventures were ‘less than’ what he might have provided his audiences during his golden period.

Today, Alfred Hitchcock is widely regarded, revered and respected both for his public persona and for that body of work. The two remain indivisible in the eyes of his adoring fans. However, the truth about Hitchcock is less nefarious than his plot lines: that he was ever the kindly understanding and devoted husband to Alma Reville: a tenure made more precious to Hitchcock as a man than any piece of celluloid that emerged from his ever creative closet of terror.

@Nick Zegarac 2008 (all rights reserved.)

MEN OF VISION - LOUIS B. MAYER...

...and the Dream Factory that Was

by Nick Zegarac

“He was the most honest man I ever met in Hollywood. L.B. had a sense of romance about the movie business…he was really an entrepreneur in the old-fashioned sense…He believed. He adored the business and he understood it.”
– Katharine Hepburn

In the roughly 51 years since his death, movie mogul Louis B. Mayer has been described as everything from a benevolent father figure to a “courtly polished villain”. Whatever the public’s perception of this great man today Mayer’s legacy has endured as a formidable star maker and purveyor of some of the grandest motion pictures that Hollywood has ever produced. “He was truly a great administrator,” said agent/producer Charles Feldman, “…if they had more men in the business with the sort of imagination and daring that Mayer had in the years of his prime, the business would not be wallowing in the slough of despond that it’s in today.”

Perhaps. But Mayer’s sense of what made good movies seemed woefully out of touch even by 1950, the last full year of his reign as MGM’s undisputed monarch. That in the post-war years L.B. would see his supremacy in the picture business topple at the behest of lesser men (Dore Schary and Nick Schenck) who misperceived their own stepping into the light at Mayer’s expense, but quickly discovered they could only tread as paltry substitutes in his shadow, speaks not only to Mayer’s preeminence as a ‘great administrator’ but also as one of those truly gifted archetypes of the movie mogul – a extinct breed in Hollywood today, replaced by the bean counter and corporate ‘yes’ man.
During his reign at MGM, Mayer’s policy for building the studio to prominence was simple: hire good people and leave them alone. He trusted and admired creative individuals for the areas in expertise that he admittedly lacked. “Mayer’s great faculty was the wooing of stars,” said director King Vidor, “The perpetuation of the star system.”

True - and every star was equal in L.B.’s eyes. When new contract player, Lena Horne was told that the commissary was closed to ‘her kind’, Mayer invited Horne and the entire cast of Cabin in the Sky (1943) to sup with him in his private dining room for the afternoon, then issued a direct memo to all studio departments that read, ‘All colored performers and other employees at MGM will, in future, have the same access as white performers and employees to all facilities of this studio!’ As if to back this claim through external deeds, Mayer further courted the acceptance of Walter White, president of the NAACP, proclaiming that “I live and breathe the air of freedom and I want it for others as well as myself!”
In hindsight, L.B.’s personal reflections after being deposed from MGM in 1951 were cluttered with residual resentment toward Dore Schary and Nick Schenck – the two men directly responsible for his removal - and a growing bitterness that eventually consumed his every thought, though his words have also accurately foreshadowed the mire of making movies today. Offering his opinion on the business in 1955, the impassioned Mayer publicly fretted that “We have so few real stars today. The glamour’s gone out of the business. Imagine public idols, gods, washing dishes, wearing blue jeans, going to psychiatrists. How can anyone idolize people like that?”

Indeed, by 1960 L.B.’s dream factory was in a bad way. The appointment of Dore Schary by Loewe’s chairman Nicholas Schenck, as V.P. in Charge of Production almost a full decade after Thalberg’s death had been an ill fit for the studio from the start. Schary and MGM were not only strange, but highly incompatible bedfellows. Schary was an ambitious writer/producer and an intellectual, “…so constipated with his own importance that his smallest pronouncement sounds like the Pitt of the Elder” (S.J. Perelman).

He was a man who reveled in what is commonly referred to today as ‘message pictures’ – movies with parables to tell. His artistic sensibilities clashed with MGM’s old world glamour and more importantly with L.B.’s idea of what stars should be. “Louis B. Mayer made more stars than all the rest of the producers in Hollywood put together,” defends director and Mayer loyalist, Clarence Brown, “He knew how to handle talent; he knew that to be successful, he had to have the most successful people in the business working for him. He was like Hearst in the newspaper business…he made an empire out of the thing.”


MAYER VS. SCHARY


“If seriously challenged L.B. would maul you to death. Nick (Schenck) would do you in with a cyanide cocktail.”
– Dore Schary

To understand Mayer’s resentment toward Dore Schary is to first admittedly reflect briefly on the man who would eventually come to be L.B.’s quiet nemesis and successor. Born in 1905, Schary was an MGM alumni thrice removed from power by producer Harry Rapf before being appointed by Nick Schenck to oversee daily production. In his early years at the studio, Schary had been a successful screenwriter, but had also managed to acquire the patina of being a devious backstabber – thanks in part to an incident where he attempted to pass off Irving Brecher’s screenplay for the Marx Bros. Go West (1940) as his own work.

Despite his reputation, or perhaps in spite of it, Schary was a rising star at MGM who had managed a modestly impressive slate of projects under Rapf’s supervision; including Lassie Come Home, Journey For Margaret and Bataan. However, when Mayer elected to cancel two of Schary’s more weighty projects, Schary chose to skulk off to David O. Selznick, then RKO rather than work within Mayer’s framework.

Though Schary’s initial exchanges with Mayer after his appointment as V.P. at the studio had been cordial – even respectful – slowly a quiet crisis between the old and new regimes on the back lot increasingly generated friction in business acumens as well as personal tastes. Mayer had two edicts by which he oversaw daily production: ‘do it big’ and ‘give it class.’ Schary was inevitably more cerebral, some would suggest highfaluting: teach your audience something. Hence, the mounting tensions between Schary and Mayer were both a contradiction of styles and a clash of wills.
To be certain, L.B. could harbor a grudge. He also preferred things be done his own way – not an outrageous request considering that after Thalberg’s death the sole responsibility of daily operations had been placed squarely on his shoulders with much trepidation but with regular success. Mayer intuitively understood the artistic, as well as the business end of making movies. His shift away from more ‘adult’ movies into ‘family entertainment’ bode well with the wholesome appeal for ‘clean entertainment’ during the war years. He would be less successful and popular with the post-war generation.
Worse, the creative landscape of Hollywood that surrounded L.B., the Hollywood that Mayer half-heartedly and unsuccessfully attempted to reenter a half dozen times as ‘star maker’ after his ousting from the studio, had so drastically changed with the onslaught of television that it must have seemed a remote and foreign enterprise to this man who once was regarded as at the forefront of his craft.

Perhaps one of the greatest misperceptions about L.B. Mayer was that he was a very fortunate tyrant – an uncouth and uneducated dictator who made and ruined talent to suit his own changeable whims. On the contrary, upon discovering a talent – any talent - Mayer would do everything in his power to expose and nurture it – cultivate it through acting, dancing and singing lessons, instructing his writers, directors and producers to craft tailor-made product for it and ever fine-tuning finished films to ensure that every star shone brighter than most others in the cinema firmament.

Nothing was too good for Mayer’s protégés. Though not initially one of his favorites, Judy Garland was quickly embraced and even coddled by Mayer’s patience and respect, primarily after L.B. heard her sing ‘Dear Mr. Gable’. Mayer could certainly recognize a talent and with Garland he did not have to look hard or long. Today, Mayer’s sanctioning of prescription sedatives to help Garland quell the emotional fragility that plagued the latter half of her life has been misinterpreted as Mayer’s acting as Judy’s drug dealer – a sort of manipulative rouse by the mogul to get his actress hooked on pills that could be used to bend her will and make her a more manageable commodity for the studio to exploit.

In fact, Mayer was only making available to Garland whatever medicinal cures existed in a concerted attempt to straighten out her erratic behavior. Since Mayer knew nothing of mental illness or even that prolonged exposure to such sedatives leads to addiction, it seems highly unlikely in retrospect that his intensions toward Garland were laced with anything but the milk of human kindness. To be certain, Mayer wanted Garland back on the job – but not unhealthy or uncontrollable, to hold up the company with countless costly delays.

For Mayer, Judy was necessary to MGM’s musical success – ergo, she needed to be cured. That no cure proved instant or lasting was a tragedy and likely not one that Mayer would have wished on one of his most popular stars. Mario Lanza – whose ego alone could have occupied two floors of the Thalberg Memorial Building also could do no wrong as far as Mayer was concerned. Mayer’s grandson Gerald would later admit “I think there’s a misapprehension that he (Mayer) was lucky. Most men won’t hire people who can replace them, but he hired Thalberg and Cedric Gibbons and a lot of others…He had a kind of genius.”

That genius would be tested immediately following the untimely death of MGM’s V.P. in Charge of Production Irving Thalberg in 1936. The relationship between Mayer and Thalberg, as all relationships between Mayer and fellow colleagues who were at least on equal creative and/or business plains, had been periodically strained. Following Thalberg’s demise, it had been quietly rumored around town that MGM’s supremacy in the industry would soon be in jeopardy. Instead, Mayer took control as few of his peers expected, ushering in the golden age of musicals under Arthur Freed while developing and maintaining complete and absolute control over all daily operations.

“L.B. wasn’t crude at all,” Esther Williams would later reflect, “Super-intelligent people might have found him common or crass, but he was trying to be the kind of executive that Lew Stone or Walter Pidgeon would play. He may have been an immigrant with a good suit of clothes, but never forget that this was a man working hard to be an American!”

At the dawn of her MGM tenure, Williams had been one of Mayer’s reluctant discoveries. Although Mayer’s initial response to signing this champion swimmer had been “How the hell do you make movies in a swimming pool?” a quiet and mutual respect developed between mogul and future star almost from the moment the ink on her contract had dried. Williams no nonsense approach to celebrity garnered L.B.’s admiration.

Reportedly, after their first and only disagreement, Williams quietly let L.B. rant for a few moments before informing him that he should not raise his voice to her again. When asked by a perplexed Mayer why this was so, Williams calmly added, “Because you can’t get to the other end of the pool.” Mayer considered that he was not a great or even a good swimmer. “They’d say swimmer take your mark,” Williams went on, “I’d go to the other end and you’d go right to the bottom.” Agreed. It was a tete a tete between equals. Mayer had his strengths. Williams had hers.


THE BEGINNING

& THE END


“Placed in his proper perspective, he was probably the greatest single force in the development of the motion picture industry to the heights of prosperity and influence it finally attained.”

– Daily Variety

Louis B. Mayer was born Eliezer Mayer in Minsk Russia in 1885, the son of an immigrant junk dealer who moved his family from New York to Halifax before settling in Haverhill Massachusetts in 1904. He was Jewish but only by birth, forever extolling the virtues of God in public and in print while rarely entering the synagogue to confirm that devotion. Mayer was not formally educated but he became master in his profession and a legitimate authority on movie making. It was not an immediate or an easy climb.

Purchasing a small theatre in Haverhill, by 1914 Mayer was president of the largest theater franchise in New England. But his heart and ambitions lay elsewhere. He would later cogitate, “I realized then that movies are the only thing you can sell and still own.”

In 1917 Mayer launched Louis B. Mayer Productions, entering into a lucrative business arrangement with theatre magnet Marcus Loewe; moving his producer operations to Los Angeles while acquiring Metro Pictures in the process. There, an alliance with Samuel Goldwyn (who had already been successfully producing) resulted in the creation of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios – a company that in a mere ten years became the largest and most profitable film factory on the west coast, in no small part thanks to L.B.’s constant foresight and vision.

Certainly, MGM’s V.P. Irving Thalberg was responsible for the slate of super productions that MGM made during these early years. But Thalberg made these movies with Mayer’s unassuming guidance and quiet faith that whatever Thalberg did – especially in the early days of their alliance – was destined to garner the studio both profits and prestige. “When I came out here in 1939,” screenwriter Bernard Gordon proclaimed, “I drove by MGM and thought to myself…by God – that’s Hollywood. No other studio compared and Mayer was the boss. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Mayer!”

At the time of Thalberg’s death, Mayer could already lay claim to the most up to date production facilities, most proficient technical staff, an ever-growing roster of top quality star talent and the biggest commissary in Hollywood. With its own fire and police departments and an educational facility for its expanding youth roster, MGM was legally classified as a city – Culver City. The studio’s supremacy in the public’s mind drew loud applause in theaters even as Leo the Lion roared before each feature.

But MGM’s stature was also reflected in films made at other studios. When Warner Bros. or Paramount gambled on their own one or two big movies per annum, these were readily referred to by critics as ‘of MGM’s quality.’ In fact, what other studios spent on two or three movies made up the budget of just one MGM movie; and a B-feature at that. B movies were afforded A-list budgets and A-list movies exemplified the studio’s wealth and stature with mind-boggling artistry. Of the top 10 box office draws in the country, at least 5 were under contract to Mayer’s dream factory at any one time between 1933 and 1949.
A formidable businessman, Mayer’s lack of formal education didn’t seem to hurt his prospects. As he ruled MGM with an iron fist though arguably gentle hand, Mayer became the highest paid personage in the industry and President Hoover’s very first guest at the White House. Despite his accolades and admiration from without, within the organization of Loewe’s Incorporated, Mayer had his detractors. When Marcus Loewe died, Mayer found himself pitted against wily corporate wheeler and dealer – Nicholas Schenck. When Schenk plotted in the late thirties to sell MGM to rival mogul William Fox – a move Mayer successfully thwarted through his political connections – a professional wound opened that would have serious repercussions for Mayer and his studio years later.

The rift between Schenck and Mayer, though bitter, was perhaps not quite as apparent immediately after Thalberg’s death. After all, there were too many good movies being made at MGM; The Human Comedy, Girl Crazy, A Guy Named Joe, Meet Me In St. Louis, Gaslight, National Velvet, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, The White Cliffs of Dover to name but a handful. With profits soaring, Schenck had to concede that Mayer knew what he was doing. “Mayer had wonderful intuition,” Esther Williams would later reflect, “He worked purely from instinct. He didn’t read. He couldn’t create from scratch. But give him the framework and he could assemble the pieces like his life depended on it…which it did.”

After Thalberg’s death, Mayer assumed total control of all MGM productions with what affectionately became known around the back lot as his ‘college of cardinals’ – a troupe of producers beholding to Mayer and responsible for making his kind of entertainment; light, frothy and lavish. “MGM functioned like General Motors", recalled Ricardo Montalban, “It was run with such efficiency that is was a marvel…it was amazing.”

For a while this formula assembly line worked, particularly since what became known as ‘the MGM style’ remained a slow, though ever-evolving constant on the screen, overseen behind the camera by Production Designer Cedric Gibbons. Henceforth, MGM’s movies were an architectural treat for the eye as much as they were emotionally satisfying for the heart and soul. Mayer’s zeal for ‘family’ films bode well with war time audiences who sought escapism over reality. However after the war, audience tastes changed considerably while Mayer’s perception of wholesome entertainment did not.

Nick Schenck, who had been forced into silence after his failed merger with Fox and during the heady profit-driven days, could be more public now with his distemper toward Mayer. MGM had failed to earn a single Oscar between 1946 and 1948. What had been popular with the masses a few short years earlier was now either only moderately successful or falling shy of expectations. The world of entertainment was evolving. MGM was not. Something had to be done.

In the interim, Mayer had become preoccupied with interests outside of the studio’s domain. First on this list of distractions was Mayer’s divorce from his first wife, Margaret. By all accounts, L.B.’s sexual appetites were robust. After Margaret’s hysterectomy, Mayer confided to close male friends that the thought of making love to his wife was repugnant. Gradually, Mayer’s eye began to wander – first to close female friends, then starlets under contract, though as an aging lothario L.B.’s technique in the art of seduction was hardly on par with his prowess as MGM’s mogul and chief. A series of light-hearted ‘social’ affairs often ended badly. Then finally, L.B. became smitten with society matron Lorena Danker. The two were eventually married.

However, Mayer had also found time away from skirt chasing to indulge yet another passion that had absolutely nothing to do with making movies. At any given time of day, L.B. could be found on Lot 13 – a quaint euphemism for Santa Anita Racetrack where he frequently bet on his ever-increasing stable of prized thoroughbreds.

It is likely that if MGM had been taken care of first, Nick Schenck would have continued to look the other way on everything else that Mayer had been investing his time. But with profits at their lowest since the Depression, Schenck seized upon the opportunity to project his own authority over Mayer. Ordered by Schenck to find ‘another Thalberg,’ Mayer settled on Dore Schary. More Schenck’s choice than Mayer’s own hand-picked candidate, Dore Schary moved into his Vice Presidency with all the comfortable assurances from both Schenck and Mayer that one might expect of a man who had just been handed the keys to the most formidable kingdom in all of Hollywood.

The argument has often been made in Schary’s defense that, unlike Mayer, he was a man trying to keep up with the times; meaning he desperately wanted to make more socially conscious films that reflected an awakening away from the glamorous haze that movies in general and MGM movies in particular had provided audiences. To this end, Schary’s revamping of the studio’s film line up resulted in individual budgets being slashed by 25 percent.

However, Schary, unlike Mayer, had far too many blind spots to effectively run MGM – except perhaps, into the ground. He simply could not see the validity in maintaining a certain status quo that had been – and might have continued to be - MGM’s bread and butter. Schary also had little stomach for molly-coddling delinquent stars. Lana Turner’s late night carousing and various public scandals were a prime example. To censure Turner without appearing outwardly obvious, Schary instead put the actress in two colossally stupid movies – their back to back flops at the box office suggesting both to Turner and her fans that her days as MGM’s reigning sex goddess were rapidly coming to an end.
Schary also had no taste for musicals – a genre he did not appreciate or even understand, as is apparent by his suggestion to producer Arthur Freed that the climactic shooting match between Annie (Betty Hutton) and Bill (Howard Keel) be cut from Annie Get Your Gun (1950). The problem herein was that musicals were an MGM main staple – like shredded wheat or ma’ and homemade apple pie. Worse, Schary believed that both MGM’s star system and its producer system were top heavy hindrances to the fiscal future of the company. In his tenure at MGM Schary would add only two actors to its roster, James Whitmore and Nancy Davis – both credible actors, neither up to Mayer’s vision of the classic ‘star.’ Responding to Schary’s ambition for producing message pictures, producer/director Mervyn LeRoy reportedly told his boss, “If you want to send a message, go to Western Union!”
The alliance between Mayer and Schary eventually became so confrontational it resulted in a showdown that ended disastrously for Mayer. Assuming that his tenure through ‘lead by example’ had provided him with a Teflon coating, Mayer gave Nick Schenk an ultimatum – “It’s either me or Schary!” The die had been cast. Schenk fired Mayer in 1951 almost without blinking – his belief in Dore Schary as Mayer’s successor shaken to its core a scant four years later when Schary’s ambitions eventually sank the studio’s bottom line deep into the red.

Over the next several years Mayer made several attempts to regain his foothold in the film business – but these ventures – such as his appointment to run the board responsible for Cinerama - were half-hearted at best. By 1957, the strain of struggling to prove he was still worth his metal was too much. Embittered and alone, Mayer resigned himself to ranting in private, than publicly to anyone who would listen on how he had been wronged by Schary and Schenck. That same year, a lethargic Mayer would check himself into the hospital for a general physical only to learn that he was dying of leukemia. He did not last the year. His last words were to friend and publicist Howard Strickling, “Nothing matters…nothing matters.”


REFLECTIONS

ON A GREAT MAN


“Dore Schary could write a script and Dore Schary could make a speech. But Mayer was a showman. He had an uncanny knack for picking talent in executives and actors. He knew how to delegate power, which many executives can’t. He was more of a businessman than a creator, but don’t you think it takes creativity to build a company like MGM? He couldn’t write. He couldn’t direct. But he had a greatness.”
- Ralph Winters

Those who knew L.B. Mayer in his prime have had conflicted recollections of the great man since. Debbie Reynolds has echoed the vast perception shared by many from the old MGM alumni of ‘Papa Mayer’, a gentle, almost saintly coddler of his stars. “He would do anything for us,” former child star Freddie Bartholomew jokingly observed years later, “except pay us what we were worth.”

Yet, Bartholomew’s assessment seems grossly unfair in retrospect and casts a miserly pall on an individual who in truth was far from Ebenezer Scrooge. While it can be argued that Bartholomew’s MGM salary pales to what child stars receive today, it was nevertheless a proportionally responsible pay scale for its own time, comparable with what other child stars of his day were being paid at rival studios – save Shirley Temple’s gold star treatment at Fox (and rightfully so, since Shirley alone was responsible for pulling 20th Century-Fox out of receivership).

Furthermore, Mayer was ever the philanthropist throughout his life’s work. Whatever his personal failings, he always found time to invest in projects that could in no way advance his reputation as a film maker. He frequently invested in entrepreneurial projects put forth by other people and gave freely of both his funds and time in doing good by both the young and old. Perhaps it was all merely a façade; just another way to present himself to the world as a great man. Those who knew him best, however, doubt such planned cleverness. “I found him wonderful,” recalled Howard Keel, the star of such MGM classics as Showboat and Kiss Me Kate, “Doing benefits for charities and old people. When I reached out to shake his hand and thank him for the opportunity he had given me he pulled back a moment and pointed his finger at me, saying ‘Don’t thank me. Thank your mother.’”
Gene Kelly’s glib response to an interview in 1990, “I didn’t like him, he didn’t like me…it was mutual” also seems more than a tad unfair in assessing Mayer’s general respect for talent – given Kelly’s repeated penchant for defying studio edicts by doing his own stunt work. If, as Kelly has suggested, Mayer never cared for him particularly, then Mayer could so easily have black-balled the fledgling star, not only from MGM but Hollywood in general. With Mayer’s overriding integrity and power it would have been so easily accomplishable. The fact that he did not fire Kelly during the mid-forties, long before Kelly proved his own saleable commodity at the box office with mega-hits like On The Town, An American in Paris and Singin’ In The Rain, attests to a more patient and forgiving nature than Kelly has ever given Mayer credit for.

In recent years, Mayer’s own words have come back to haunt his reputation. Upon leaving the funeral services for Irving Thalberg, Mayer is reported to have nudged Eddie Mannix and muttered, “Isn’t God good to me?”; a murderous statement by any standard. Yet, given the climate of tension, conflict and perceived animosity between him and his Vice President at the time of Thalberg’s death, one can almost sympathize with Mayer’s sense of relief. A thorn had been removed from his side.

The more recent rumor, that L.B. Mayer somehow managed to hasten Thalberg’s demise by generating more stress in Irving’s professional life, also seems rather misguided. If anything, following Thalberg’s first heart attack in 1933, Mayer tried to alleviate his stresses by giving Irving his own production unit while creating smaller units not under his authority, thereby lightening Irving’s load of responsibilities by with more time for convalescence. That Thalberg was impassioned about his job, an obsession that drove every fiber of his being past the point of no return is well documented.

As First Lady of the American Theater, Helen Hayes would reflect on Thalberg running the studio, “It killed him. He died of genius” – not Mayer! If Mayer did nothing else to temper this dynamo, he also did not add to Thalberg’s uncontrollable zest for his work, work and more work long after the twenty-four hours in each day had already been thoroughly spent.
After Mayer’s dismissal MGM was never quite the same again. The consistency that Mayer had provided – the idyllic circumstances for a fertile proving ground where creative talents could function at their zenith was gone. Schary’s tenure at the studio was brief, rather than galvanic, and disastrous to say the least, and, it was followed by an ever-changing cavalcade of appointments that barely had enough time to place their personal seal on any film before being ousted in favor of another major executive upheaval. “I think when (Mayer) died he took the studio with him,” reflected June Allyson – Metro’s most popular musical sweetheart, “…so he didn’t really lose in the end.”

There is little to deny that many of the films produced after Mayer’s departure lost some of their showmanship and ability to recapture the imagination that exemplified the best of the studio’s product under L.B. While the lion’s share infrequently managed a bit of the old luster that lived up to the studio’s motto of ‘ars gratia artis’ – loosely translated into ‘art for art’s sake’ with mega-hits like North By Northwest (1959) Ben-Hur (1959) Gigi (1958) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) for the most part, a genuine and overriding sense of finality to the good ol’ days had crept onto the back lot.

Indeed, by 1959 the studio system that Mayer had worked so diligently to cultivate and preserve was, sadly, a thing of the past. If Mayer had succeeded in making his comeback to Culver City he would have discovered a very different studio awaiting his command. Instead, and perhaps with the underlying knowledge that the times had made his sort of autocratic diplomacy as much of a relic as the Weimar Republic, Mayer chose an imposed isolationism for his final years. Though few who had trailed on his coattails visited him in the twilight of his life, if nothing else, L.B. Mayer could reflect with pride that his had been the most prosperous tenure of any mogul at any of the film studios in Hollywood.

The old edict once applied to Thalberg – “as long as Irving lives we are all great men” – could just as easily be ascribed (and should have been) to L.B. Mayer. Esther Williams has quipped, that Mayer’s number one compensation for his lack of culture and education was ‘intimidation’. To some extent this is true, as in the time Mayer became so displeased with resident operatic diva Jeanette MacDonald’s singing that he dropped to his knees to belt out a Jewish hymn with tears in his eyes to illustrate for MacDonald how she should carry a tune.

Yet, those who found Mayer temperamental were themselves temperamental artists of considerable merit. Hence, Mayer may have bruised their vanity, though little else. If he exuded God-like control over his stars and starlets he was in keeping with the general mentality of his contemporaries (Jack Warner, Darryl F. Zanuck, et al) in exercising rights of ownership in order to ensure that every artist at his studio came off like a gentleman or lady.

Perhaps former child star and frequent L.B. favorite Mickey Rooney best summed up the confusion surrounding Mayer’s legacy with, “After he died everybody wrote every nasty book about him, while he was alive he was the greatest guy in the world to everybody…I mean everybody.”

@Nick Zegarac 2008 (all rights reserved).