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#Blondell is not so blonde after all
astrognossienne · 3 years
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scandalous star: gary cooper -an analysis
“I don’t like to see exaggerated airs and exploding egos in people who are already established. No player ever rises to prominence solely on talent. They’re molded by forces other than themselves. They should remember this – and at least twice a week drop to their knees and thank Providence for elevating them from cow ranches, dime store ribbon counters and bookkeeping desks. ” - Gary Cooper
He didn’t say much, but when he did, it carried a lot of weight. He was the archetypal hero of the Old West; the quintessential masculine ideal of the stoic and “strong silent type” that most Taurus men are. But for famously laconic Gary Cooper, his good looks and earnest, haunted eyes for decades made him the quintessential lonely American of motion pictures.He was a more equanimous, human protagonist versus boisterous, bigger-than-life Hollywood supermen. He was renowned for his quiet, understated acting style and his individualistic, emotionally restrained, but at times intense screen persona, which was particularly well suited to the many Westerns he made. He was a man’s man...as well as a ladies’ man. Cooper became a hero to many, even as he developed a reputation as one of the most notorious philanderers in Hollywood. Privately a debonair ladykiller with a taste for high society, he crafted an image as just the opposite from his prototype cowboy image he materfully portrayed on the silver screen. He was insatiable, before and during his marriage. How did he reconcile his moral righteousness onscreen (Taurus sun) with his philandering offscreen (Sagittarius moon)? That was the work of the fixers, gossip magazines, and the studio system at large, which ensured that Cooper was never caught, never denounced, and held up as a paragon of American values.
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Gary Cooper, according to astrotheme, was a Taurus sun and Sagittarius moon. He was born Frank James Cooper in Helena, Montana, the second son of an English farmer from Bedfordshire, who later became an American lawyer and judge, Charles Henry Cooper (1865-1946), and Kent-born Alice (née Brazier) Cooper (1873-1967). As a child, he met a freed slave woman named Mary Fields, otherwise known as Stagecoach Mary, and so awed by her was she that he later wrote an account of his memories of her in Ebony magazine. His mother hoped for their two sons to receive a better education than that available in Montana and arranged for the boys to attend Dunstable Grammar School in Bedfordshire, England between 1910 and 1913. Upon the outbreak of World War I, Cooper’s mother brought her sons home and enrolled them in a Bozeman, Montana, high school. Upon graduation, he eventually matriculated at Grinnell College in Grinnell, IA, where he attempted to nurture a passion for drawing - until a serious car accident ended his college days in the summer of 1920. He would recover from his severely injured hip through an odd but painful therapy, horseback riding.
When his father retired from the bench and moved his mother to Los Angeles, Cooper gave up agriculture classes to try his hand as a Hollywood extra. Cooper played an extra in a handful of silent films before arriving on the set of The Winning of Barbara Worth in 1926. The actor cast as the second male lead didn’t show, and someone shoved Cooper into the part. He appeared with Clara Bow (who soon became one of his conquests) in her star-making film It, but it was his appearance in another Bow vehicle Wings, released later that same year, truly launched his career. He plays a World War I flying cadet, and although his screentime was still relatively short, there was one scene — an extended close-up shot, the light streaming in from outside — in which he looked gorgeous. In 1929, he filmed The Wolf Song with Lupe Vélez. He soon had an affair with Velez, who purportedly claimed that Cooper “has the biggest organ in Hollywood but not the ass to push it in well.” For more on their relationship, read my star analysis on Lupe.
Cooper filmed The Virginian — his first real “talkie,” and the film was a major hit and cemented the foundation of Cooper’s image. His ability to project elements of his own personality onto the characters he portrayed, to appear natural and authentic in his roles, and to underplay and deliver restrained performances calibrated for the camera and the screen helped make him a cinematic success, often lauded by those he worked with. However, his good looks and charisma made him a success with women, whether he worked with them or not. Over the next few years, Cooper was paired with the most gorgeous and promising female stars in Hollywood —with Carole Lombard in I Take This Woman (whom he slept with), Claudette Colbert in His Woman (whom he allegedly slept with), Marlene Dietrich in Morocco and Desire (who he famously slept with more than once), and Joan Blondell in Make Me a Star (who he allegedly slept with). In 1932, Cooper and his Paramount “rival,” Cary Grant, were cast against Tallulah Bankhead in Devil and the Deep (1932). Like Lupe Velez, Bankhead was a loose cannon, with most famous quote being:
“The only reason I went to Hollywood was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper.”
Amidst all his public and private action, Cooper began courting Veronica “Rocky” Balfe, a starlet who went by the stage name of Sandra Shaw. She was also best known as the blonde dropped by King Kong. The two were wed in late 1933. Balfe retired from the screen to become a wife and mother, with her giving birth to their only child, Maria, in 1937. Cooper portrayed a new type of hero—a champion of the common man—in films like Mr. Deeds Goes To Washington and 1941′s Sergeant York (which won him his first of two Best Actor Oscars). Cooper met Ernest Hemingway at Sun Valley in October 1940 and they were friends for the rest of his life. He co-starred with Ingrid Bergman (with whom he had a year-long affair with) in a the film adaptation of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. He kept starring in more films and bedding his female co-stars until he got more than he bargained for when he made The Fountainhead. Naturally, the 47-year-old Cooper had an affair with his co-star, the 21-year-old Patricia Neal. However, this time things got crazy: Neal wound up pregnant with Cooper’s child. He insisted she have an abortion. When Cooper’s long-suffering wife found out about the relationship, she sent a telegram demanding he end it. This didn’t work; he also confessed that he was in love with Neal, and continued to see her. Cooper and his wife legally separated in May of 1951. Cooper’s daughter Maria, by then in her early teens, famously spat on Neal in public. Neal later claimed that Cooper hit her after she went on a date with Kirk Douglas. Neal ended their relationship in late December 1951. Amid all this drama, Cooper starred in what is now regarded as his defining role: the beleaguered sheriff in High Noon, which won him his second Best Actor Oscar. In later life, he became involved in a relationship with the costume designer Irene, and was, according to Irene, "the only man she ever loved".
Maybe all his previous actions had an affect on him because Cooper converted to Catholicism in 1958, and reconciled with his wife and daughter. Also, he began starring in films that centered around searching for redemption, such as Friendly Persuasion (1956) and Man of the West (1958). In 1960, Cooper fell ill with prostate cancer, which quickly spread to his colon, lungs, and bones; he died of it shortly after his 60th birthday in 1961. A year after his death, Irene committed suicide by jumping from the 11th floor of the Knickerbocker Hotel, after telling Doris Day of her grief over Cooper's death. Regardless of his philandering, regardless of the arduous work of his studio’s publicity departments, there was something plaintive, almost childlike, maybe even innocent about Cooper, so he can easily be forgiven his sins. He acted out what mattered to millions of people, and that act made him a star beyond measure.
Next, I’ll focus on his former paramour Lupe Velez’s arch nemesis. A woman who happened to be wife of MGM art director Cedric Gibbons (Gary Cooper’s wife Rocky’s uncle). She was another pioneer of Mexican cinema who was arguably the first Latina to successfully crossover to Anglo audiences: Leo Dolores del Río.
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Stats
birthdate: May 7, 1901
major planets:
Sun: Taurus
Moon: Sagittarius
Rising: Taurus
Mercury: Taurus
Venus: Taurus
Mars: Leo
Midheaven: Aquarius
Jupiter: Capricorn
Saturn: Capricorn
Uranus: Sagittarius
Neptune: Gemini
Pluto: Gemini
Overall personality snapshot: He was torn between an instinct to roam free and a determination to find security and make a solid, lasting contribution to the world. As he repeatedly changed horses in search of both ultimate certainties and high-spirited adventure at the same time, he could find himself deeply divided and uncertain. He sought to earth the fire from heaven and put it to work, but he found all too often that it would not let him rest. In his search for stability and security, he became a farmer and was immediately confronted with the changing seasons. He embraced the solid certainties of geology and are hit by an earthquake. He liked to feel the solid earth move. He sought certitude and permanence, yet his endless inquiries constantly confounded yesterday’s certainties. When he got his own uncertainties together (by accepting he wanted the best of both the changing and the unchanging worlds), he could have been a brilliant teacher, conversationalist, counselor, entertainer, wit, creative artist or entrepreneur – in fact he could have been anything he wanted. Once focused, he could be a human dynamo, and wonderfully humorous, witty and entertaining with it. As he discovered, his quest for solid material certainties did not make a happy bedfellow for his yearning for excitement and larger religious and spiritual understanding. In one way or another, be it through philosophy and the spiritual quest or through writing, music or art, he needed to put together and formulate a total vision of the universe which is based on unassailable facts yet satisfying to his idealism.
Constantly seeking, he was a natural agnostic, applying the criteria of science to counter woolly speculations, yet at the same time highly skeptical of the limited and statistical pronouncements of unthinking science. The danger, if he did not marry these elements within him, is that he would swing from one to the other and undermine the virtues of both. A restless changing of jobs, careers, partners, visions or aspirations left him drunk with his own spinning. When he deliberately tried to remain sober and commonsensical, it seemed to make matters worse for there was something of the gambler in him. This all-or-nothing streak can temporarily overcome your natural caution and enable you to burn your bridges (though you will usually ensure there is something tucked away for a rainy day). He felt an impulsive need to do things on a grand scale, to live with commitment, to feast on the world, and to understand what it was to be alive in all possible ways. He seemed to be called both to explore the reaches of the imagination and to build secure foundations. He brought far-reaching visions into manifestation, and these visions injected his conservative desire for stability and security with flair and colour. His vision of tomorrow and the larger world gave spice to any project he undertook. He saw endless possibilities and wanted to make them real. In this he could be the natural entrepreneur who saw economic opportunities at every turn, an inspiring counselor and teacher, and a stimulating companion whatever he did.
His well-shaped body displayed a warm attractiveness and ripeness. In his later years, he may have needed to watch the tendency to gain weight too easily. His strong broad shoulders supported a very large neck size. His most outstanding feature was his eyes and his gentle smile and voice. He was big-boned. He enjoyed dressing well, preferring soft colours. He was practical, steady and patient, but he could  be inflexible in his views. One thing he did have was plenty of common sense and good powers of concentration, although he tended to think that purely abstract thought was a waste of time. His thought processes weren’t as quick as others, but his decisions were made with a lot of thought behind them. He also had the welcome ability to bring people together. He needed to be able to show his originality and independence in any job for complete satisfaction. His work should also satisfy his scientific bent and humanitarian leanings. He needed scope for his inventiveness, because he was able to bring a fresh view to any job. Ideally, his work should permit him to express the idealistic side to him character and allow him to help as many people as possible. He could be extremely efficient in the way that he tried to get maximum result out of minimum effort. He didn’t like extravagance and waste. He was a thoughtful and resourceful person, who was well-informed on many subjects. Success came gradually and as a result of hard work. Success and growth, for him, were expressed by material and financial achievements, bringing status and prestige.Worldly success was well within his reach, because he possessed all the necessary talents to gain power, influence and status. He was practical, determined and patient. When there were hitches in his plans, he simply worked around them. He knew where he was heading to, and had already figured out the best way to use his talents to reach his goals.
Although he could be fairly pessimistic about life in general, it didn’t put him off aiming for the top. He could be very single-minded about reaching his goals, and was prepared to put his career interests above his personal happiness. He was extremely aware of his own worth. He was prepared to work beyond the call of duty. His strong sense of ambition gave him a certain rigidity, arrogance and selfishness in the eyes of others. He belonged to a generation with fiery enthusiasm for new and innovative ideas and concepts. Rejecting the past and its mistakes, he sought new ideals and people to believe in. As a member of this generation, he felt restless and adventurous, and was attracted towards foreign people, places and cultures. As a member of the Gemini Neptune generation, his restless mind pushed him to explore new intellectual fields. He loved communication and the occult and was likely also fascinated by metaphysical phenomena and astrology. As a Gemini Plutonian, he was mentally restless and willing to examine and change old doctrines, ideas and ways of thinking. As a member of this generation, he showed an enormous amount of mental vitality, originality and perception. Traditional customs and taboos were examined and rejected for newer and more original ways of doing things. As opportunities with education expanded, he questioned more and learned more. As a member of this generation, having more than one occupation at a time would not have been unusual to him.
Love/sex life: His sexuality was a wonderful combination of sensuality and basic laziness. He let himself be carried along by his pleasure-seeking instincts, greeting every new experience with fresh eagerness and then slowly draining from that encounter all the joy it has to offer. This passive, easy-going approach to sex not only made for good technique, it also conceals the egocentric strength and stubbornness that was at the core of his erotic nature. People don’t realize that beneath all that luxurious hedonism he was always the person in control. He was a conservative lover for whom appearances were always important. There may have been occasions when his sensuality lured him into indiscretions but he was quick to cover his tracks and hide the evidence. The quiet practicality of his sexual nature served as a handy antidote for his Martian braggadocio. He knew that he was the best there is but he was willing to sit back and let the world find out the good news on its own. In his youth Cooper was endorsed by several female “experts” of the time (such as Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead) as Hollywood’s sexiest man. His soft spoken and manly sex appeal projected just as well on the screen. After marrying at age 32, Cooper’s sex life became somewhat more sedate though he never lost his ability to attract women.
minor asteroids and points:
North Node: Scorpio
Lilith: Scorpio
Vertex: Libra
Fortune: Capricorn
East Point: Taurus
His North Node in Scorpio dictated that he needed to be careful not to let the more emotional side of his personality overwhelm him. Instead, he should have set out to consciously develop his more practical abilities. His Lilith in Scorpio ensured that he was dangerously attracted to those women who seduced and conquered on a daily basis; who liked life intense and was judged for her sexuality and general vibe and learned early on how to deflect moral judgments. His type of women may have been tried in the court of public opinion but no way were they going to show up for the sentencing. His Vertex in Libra, 6th house dictated that he llonged for a union of souls that was based on a model of pure peace and justice. Images come to mind of a mythical life on Venus, the planet of love, where there is never a discordant beat between lovers, but rather, continual harmony even if played in the minor chords. Physical lust was certainly a necessary aspect of two beings eternally intertwined, but the platonic component far outweighed it in importance for him. He had an attitude of duty, obligation and sacrifice when it came to heartfelt interactions. The negative side was the tendency to become hypochondriacal or martyristic to get the love he so desperately wanted. There was a need for others to appreciate the sincerity of his intentions, to the daily tasks he executed in a conscientious and caring way and for others to know that his actions, no matter how routine they may seem, were based on devoted love. His Part of Fortune in Capricorn and Part of Spirit in Cancer dictated that his destiny lay in creating practical and long-lasting achievements. Success came through hard work, determination, responsibility and perseverance. Fulfillment came from observing his progress through life and seeing it take a form and structure that will outlive him. His soul’s purpose guided him towards building security in his life, both emotional and material. He felt spiritual connections and the spark of the divine within his home and family. East Point in Taurus dictated that he was more likely to identify with the need for pleasure (including the potential of liking himself) and comfort.  
elemental dominance:
earth
fire
He was a practical, reliable man and could provide structure and protection. He was oriented toward practical experience and thought in terms of doing rather than thinking, feeling, or imagining. Could be materialistic, unimaginative, and resistant to change. But at his best, he provided the practical resources, analysis, and leadership to make dreams come true. He was dynamic and passionate, with strong leadership ability. He generated enormous warmth and vibrancy. He was exciting to be around, because he was genuinely enthusiastic and usually friendly. However, he could either be harnessed into helpful energy or flame up and cause destruction. Ultimately, he chose the latter. Confident and opinionated, he was fond of declarative statements such as “I will do this” or “It’s this way.” When out of control—usually because he was bored, or hadn’t been acknowledged—he was bossy, demanding, and even tyrannical. But at his best, his confidence and vision inspired others to conquer new territory in the world, in society, and in themselves.
modality dominance:
fixed
He liked the challenge of managing existing routines with ever more efficiency, rather than starting new enterprises or finding new ways of doing things. He likely had trouble delegating duties and had a very hard time seeing other points of view; he tried to implement the human need to create stability and order in the wake of change.
house dominants:
12th
9th
8th
He had great interest in the unconscious, and indulged in a lot of hidden and secret affairs. His life was defined by seclusion and escapism. He had a certain mysticism and hidden sensitivity, as well as an intense need for privacy. Traveling, whether physically across the globe, on a mental plane or expanding through study was a major theme in his life. He was not only concerned with learning facts, but also wanted to understand the connections formed between them and the philosophies and concepts they stood for. His conscience, as well as foreign travel, people and places was also of paramount importance in his life. He loved the totality of the human experience and embraced the whole cycle of human life, including birth, sex and death. His darker side, and the complexes and emotions that he preferred to keep hidden, even from himself was a theme throughout his life. His ability to undergo deep personal transformations and spiritual regeneration was also highlighted.
planet dominants:
Venus
Saturn
Sun
He was romantic, attractive and valued beauty, had an artistic instinct, and was sociable. He had an easy ability to create close personal relationships, for better or worse, and to form business partnerships. He believed in the fact that lessons in life were sometimes harsh, that structure and foundation was a great issue in his life, and he had to be taught through through experience what he needed in order to grow. He paid attention to limitations he had and had to learn the rules of the game in this physical reality. He tended to have a practical, prudent outlook. He also likely held rigid beliefs. He had vitality and creativity, as well as a strong ego and was authoritarian and powerful. He likely had strong leadership qualities, he definitely knew who he was, and he had tremendous will. He met challenges and believed in expanding his life.
sign dominants:
Taurus
Sagittarius
Capricorn
His stubbornness and determination kept his around for the long haul on any project or endeavour. He was incredibly patient, singular in his pursuit of goals, and determined to attain what he wanted. Although he lacked versatility, he compensated for it by enduring whatever he had to in order to get what he wanted. He enjoyed being surrounded by nice things. He liked fine art and music, and may have had considerable musical ability. He also had a talent for working with his hands—gardening, woodworking, and sculpting. He sought the truth, expressed it as he saw it—and didn’t care if anyone else agreed with him. He saw the large picture of any issue and couldn’t be bothered with the mundane details. He was always outspoken and likely couldn’t understand why other people weren’t as candid. After all, what was there to hide? He loved his freedom and chafed at any restrictions. He was a serious-minded person who often seemed aloof and tightly in control of his emotions and her personal domain. Even as a youngster, there was a mature air about him, as if he was born with a profound core that few outsiders ever see. He was easily impressed by outward signs of success, but was interested less in money than in the power that money represents. He was a true worker—industrious, efficient, and disciplined. His innate common sense gave her the ability to plan ahead and to work out practical ways of approaching goals. More often than not, he succeeded at whatever he set out to do. He possessed a quiet dignity that was unmistakable.
Read more about him under the cut.
Actor Gary Cooper was born on May 7, 1901, in Helena, Montana. Spanning from the silent film era to the early 1960s, Academy Award-winning actor Gary Cooper built much of his career by playing strong, manly, distinctly American roles. The son of English parents who had settled in Montana, he was educated in England for a time. He also studied at Grinnell College in Iowa before heading to Los Angeles to work as an illustrator. When he had a hard time finding a job, Cooper worked as a film extra and landed some small parts. After his appearance in
The Winning of Barbara Worth
(1926), a western, Cooper's career began to take off. He starred opposite silent movie star Clara Bow in Children of Divorce (1927). Cooper also earned praise as the ranch foreman in
The Virginian
(1929), one of his early films with sound. Throughout the 1930s, he turned in a number of strong performances in such films as A Farewell to Arms (1934) with Helen Hayes and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) directed by Frank Capra. Cooper received an Academy Award nomination for his work on the film. Cooper continued to excel on the big screen, tackling several real-life dramas. In Sergeant York (1941), the played a World War I hero and sharpshooter, which was based on the life story of Alvin York. Cooper earned a Best Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of York.
The next year, Cooper played one of baseball's greats, Lou Gehrig, in The Pride of the Yankees (1942). Again, he scored another Best Actor Academy Award nomination. Appearing in a film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls,  Cooper starred opposite Ingrid Bergman in a drama set during the Spanish Civil War. This role garnered him a third Academy Award nomination. In 1952, Cooper took on what is known considered his signature role as Will Kane in High Noon. He appeared as a lawman who must face a deadly foe without any help from his own townspeople. The film won four Academy Awards, including a Best Actor win for Cooper. In addition to his excellent on-screen performances, Cooper became  known for his alleged romances with several of his leading ladies, including Clara Bow and Patricia Neal. The affair with Neal, his co-star in 1949's The Fountainhead, reportedly occurred during his  marriage to socialite Veronica Balfe with whom he had a daughter. Their marriage seemed to survive the scandal. By the late 1950s, Cooper's health was in decline. He made a few more films, such as Man of the West (1958), before dying of cancer on May 13, 1961. (x)
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bananaofswifts · 3 years
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Your guide to the singer-songwriter’s surprise follow-up to Folklore.
By
CARL WILSON
When everything’s clicking for Taylor Swift, the risk is that she’s going to push it too far and overtax the public appetite. On “Mirrorball” from Folklore, she sings, with admirable self-knowledge, “I’ve never been a natural/ All I do is try, try, try.” So when I woke up yesterday to the news that at midnight she was going to repeat the trick she pulled off with Folklore in July—surprise-releasing an album of moody pop-folk songs remote-recorded in quarantine with Aaron Dessner of the National as well as her longtime producer Jack Antonoff—I was apprehensive. Would she trip back into the pattern of overexposure and backlash that happened between 1989 and Reputation?
Listening to the new Evermore, though, that doesn’t feel like such a threat. A better parallel might be to the “Side B” albums that Carly Rae Jepsen put out after both Emotion and Dedicated, springing simply out of the artist’s and her fans’ mutual enthusiasm. Or, closer to Swift’s own impulses here, publishing an author’s book of short stories soon after a successful novel. Lockdown has been a huge challenge for musicians in general, but it liberated Swift from the near-perpetual touring and publicity grind she’s been on since she was a teen, and from her sense of obligation to turn out music that revs up stadium crowds and radio programmers. Swift has always seemed most herself as the precociously talented songwriter; the pop-star side is where her try-hard, A-student awkwardness surfaces most. Quarantine came as a stretch of time to focus mainly on her maturing craft (she turns 31 on Sunday), to workshop and to woodshed. When Evermore was announced, she said that she and her collaborators—clearly mostly Dessner, who co-writes and/or co-produces all but one of these 15 songs—simply didn’t want to stop writing after Folklore.
This record further emphasizes her leap away from autobiography into songs that are either pure fictions or else lyrically symbolic in ways that don’t act as romans à clef. On Folklore, that came with the thrill of a breakthrough. Here, she fine-tunes the approach, with the result that Evermore feels like an anthology, with less of an integrated emotional throughline. But that it doesn’t feel as significant as Folklore is also its virtue. Lowered stakes offer permission to play around, to joke, to give fewer fucks—and this album definitely has the best swearing in Swift’s entire oeuvre.
Because it’s nearly all Dessner overseeing production and arrangements, there isn’t the stylistic variety that Antonoff’s greater presence brought to Folklore. However, Swift and Dessner seem to have realized that the maximalist-minimalism that dominated Folklore, with layers upon layers of restrained instrumental lines for the sake of atmosphere, was too much of a good thing. There are more breaks in the ambience on Evermore, the way there was with Folklore’s “Betty,” the countryish song that was among many listener’s favorites. But there are still moments that hazard misty lugubriousness, and perhaps with reduced reward.
Overall, people who loved Folklore will at least like Evermore too, and the minority of Swift appreciators who disapproved may even warm up to more of the sounds here. I considered doing a track-by-track comparison between the two albums, but that seemed a smidgen pathological. Instead, here is a blatantly premature Day 1 rundown of the new songs as I hear them.
A pleasant yet forgettable starting place, “Willow” has mild “tropical house” accents that recall Ed Sheeran songs of yesteryear, as well as the prolix mixed metaphors Swift can be prone to when she’s not telling a linear story. But not too severely. I like the invitation to a prospective lover to “wreck my plans.” I’m less sure why “I come back stronger than a ’90s trend” belongs in this particular song, though it’s witty. “Willow” is more fun as a video (a direct sequel to Folklore’s “Cardigan” video) than as a lead track, but I’m not mad at it here either.
Written with “William Bowery”—the pseudonym of Swift’s boyfriend Joe Alwyn, as she’s recently confirmed—this is the first of the full story songs on Evermore, in this case a woman describing having walked away from her partner on the night he planned to propose. The music is a little floaty and non-propulsive, but the tale is well painted, with Swift’s protagonist willingly taking the blame for her beau’s heartbreak and shrugging off the fury of his family and friends—“she would have made such a lovely bride/ too bad she’s fucked in the head.” Swift sticks to her most habitual vocal cadences, but not much here goes to waste. Except, that is, for the title phrase, which doesn’t feel like it adds anything substantial. (Unless the protagonist was drunk?) I do love the little throwaway piano filigree Dessner plays as a tag on the end.
This is the sole track Antonoff co-wrote and produced, and it’s where a subdued take on the spirit of 1989-style pop resurges with necessary energy. Swift is singing about having a crush on someone who’s too attractive, too in-demand, and relishing the fantasy but also enjoying passing it up. It includes some prime Swiftian details, like, “With my Eagles t-shirt hanging from your door,” or, “At dinner parties I call you out on your contrarian shit.” The line about this thirst trap’s “hair falling into place like dominos” I find much harder to picture.
This is where I really snapped to attention. After a few earlier attempts, Swift has finally written her great Christmas song, one to stand alongside “New Year’s Day” in her holiday canon. And it’s especially a great one for 2020, full of things none of us ought to do this year—go home to visit our parents, hook up with an ex, spend the weekend in their bedroom and their truck, then break their hearts again when we leave. But it’s done with sincere yuletide affection to “the only soul who can tell which smiles I’m faking,” and “the warmest bed I’ve ever known.” All the better, we get to revisit these characters later on the album.
On first listen, I found this one of the draggiest Dressner compositions on the record. Swift locates a specific emotional state recognizably and poignantly in this song about a woman trapped (or, she wonders, maybe not trapped?) in a relationship with an emotionally withholding, unappreciative man. But the static keyboard chord patterns and the wandering melody that might be meant to evoke a sense of disappointment and numbness risk yielding numbing and disappointing music. Still, it’s growing on me.
Featuring two members of Haim—and featuring a character named after one of them, Este—“No Body, No Crime” is a straight-up contemporary country song, specifically a twist on and tribute to the wronged-woman vengeance songs that were so popular more than a decade ago, and even more specifically “Before He Cheats,” the 2006 smash by Carrie Underwood, of which it’s a near musical clone, just downshifted a few gears. Swift’s intricate variation on the model is that the singer of the song isn’t wreaking revenge on her own husband, but on her best friend’s husband, and framing the husband’s mistress for the murder. It’s delicious, except that Swift commits the capital offence of underusing the Haim sisters purely as background singers, aside from one spoken interjection from Danielle.
This one has some of the same issues as “Tolerate It,” in that it lags too much for too long, but I did find more to focus on musically here. Lyrically and vocally, it gets the mixed emotions of a relatively amicable divorce awfully damned right, if I may speak from painfully direct experience.
This is the song sung from the POV of the small-town lover that the ambitious L.A. actress from “Tis the Damn Season”—Dorothea, it turns out—has left behind in, it turns out, Tupelo. Probably some years past that Xmas tryst, when the old flame finally has made it. “A tiny screen’s the only place I see you now,” he sings, but adds that she’s welcome back anytime: “If you’re ever tired of being known/ For who you know/ You know that you’ll always know me.” It’s produced and arranged with a welcome lack of fuss. Swift hauls out her old high-school-romance-songs vocal tone to reminisce about “skipping the prom/ just to piss off your mom,” very much in the vein of Folklore’s teen-love-triangle trilogy.
A duet with Dessner’s baritone-voiced bandmate in the National, Matt Berninger, “Coney Island” suffers from the most convoluted lyrics on Evermore (which, I wonder unkindly, might be what brought Berninger to mind?). The refrain “I’m on a beach on Coney Island, wondering where did my baby go” is a terrific tribute to classic pop, but then Swift rhymes it with “the bright lights, the merry go,” as if that’s a serviceable shorthand for merry-go-round, and says “sorry for not making you my centerfold,” as if that’s somehow a desirable relationship outcome. The comparison of the bygone affair to “the mall before the internet/ It was the one place to be” is clever but not exactly moving, and Berninger’s lines are worse. Dessner’s droning arrangement does not come to the rescue.
This song is also overrun with metaphors but mostly in an enticing, thematically fitting way, full of good Swiftian dark-fairytale grist. It’s fun to puzzle out gradually the secret that all the images are concealing—an engaged woman being drawn into a clandestine affair. And there are several very good “goddamns.”
The lyrical conceit here is great, about two gold-digging con artists whose lives of scamming are undone by their falling in love. It reminded me of the 1931 pre-Code rom-com Blonde Crazy, in which James Cagney and Joan Blondell act out a very similar storyline. And I mostly like the song, but I can’t help thinking it would come alive more if the music sounded anything like what these self-declared “cowboys” and “villains” might sing. It’s massively melancholy for the story, and Swift needs a far more winningly roguish duet partner than the snoozy Marcus Mumford. It does draw a charge from a couple of fine guitar solos, which I think are played by Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver, who will return shortly).
The drum machine comes as a refreshing novelty at this point. And while this song is mostly standard Taylor Swift torrents of romantic-conflict wordplay (full of golden gates and pedestals and dropping her swords and breaking her high heel, etc.), the pleasure comes in hearing her look back at all that and shrugging, “Long story short, it was a bad ti-i-ime,” “long story short, it was the wrong guy-uy-uy,” and finally, “long story short, I survived.” She passes along some counsel I’m sure she wishes she’d had back in the days of Reputation: “I wanna tell you not to get lost in these petty things/ Your nemeses will defeat themselves.” It’s a fairly slight song but an earned valedictory address.
Swift fan lore has it that she always sequences the real emotional bombshell as Track 5, but here it is at 13, her lucky number. It’s sung to her grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, who died when Swift was in her early teens, and it manages to be utterly personal—down to the sample of Marjorie singing opera on the outro—and simultaneously utterly evocative to anyone who’s been through such grief. The bridge, full of vivid memories and fierce regrets, is the clincher.
This electroacoustic kiss-off song, loaded up with at least a fistful of gecs if not a full 100 by Dessner and co-producers BJ Burton and James McAlister, seems to be, lyrically, one of Swift’s somewhat tedious public airings of some music-industry grudge (on which, in case you don’t get it, she does not want “closure”), but, sonically, it’s a real ear-cleaner at this point on Evermore. Why she seems to shift into a quasi-British accent for fragments of it is anyone’s guess. But I’m tickled by the line, “I’m fine with my spite and my tears and my beers and my candles.”
I’m torn about the vague imagery and vague music of the first few verses of the album’s final, title track. But when Vernon, in full multitracked upper-register Bon Iver mode, kicks in for the duet in the middle, there’s a jolt of urgency that lands the redemptive ending—whether it’s about a crisis in love or the collective crisis of the pandemic or perhaps a bit of both—and satisfyingly rounds off the album.
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papermoonloveslucy · 4 years
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MYRNA LOY
August 2, 1905
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Myrna Loy was born Myrna Adele Williams in Radersburg (near Helena), Montana. When she was thirteen, Myrna's father died of influenza in the great flu pandemic of 1918, and the rest of the family moved to Los Angeles. She was educated in L.A. and the Westlake School for Girls where she caught the acting bug. She started at the age of 15 when she appeared in local stage productions in order to help support her family. Her first film was a small part in the production of What Price Beauty? (1925). Later, she appeared in Pretty Ladies (1925) along with Joan Crawford. She was one of the few stars that would start in the silent movies and make a successful transition into the sound era.
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Moving to MGM she got two meaty roles: One was in the The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933), and the other as Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934) with William Powell. Myrna would appear in five more in the series.
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In 1946, she was seen in The Best Years of Our Lives, which went on to win 7 competitive Oscars, including Best Picture. Loy won Best Actress at the Brussels World Film Festival. “I Love Lucy” favorite Tennessee Ernie Ford appears in an uncredited role. “Lucy” extras who appeared include Harry Cheshire, James Conaty, Lawrence Dobkin, Harold Miller, and Bert Stevens. 
NAME GAMES!
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When her father was travelling by train in early 1905, he went through a small station called 'Myrna' - he eventually named her after that station. Changing last name from Williams to Loy was suggested by legendary pulp writer Paul Cain (aka Peter Ruric). Lucille Ball also flirted with a stage name, going by Diane Belmont for several years. 
FATHER FIGURES!
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Lucille Ball initially claimed to have been born in Montana, while Loy actually was! Both Loy and Ball’s fathers died of illness while they were young girls. Ball’s father succumbed to Typhoid in 1914, while Loy’s was a victim of the Flu pandemic of 1918. Like Lucy, once successful, Loy returned to her hometown, Radersburg, Montana (above), posing in front of her parents’ home.
LOY & LUCILLE!
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The only time Loy and Ball appeared in the same film was in Broadway Bill (1934), a Frank Capra film for Columbia. Broadway Bill was filmed between June 18 and August 16, 1934 at Columbia Studios in Hollywood, and on location at Tanforan Race Track in San Bruno, California. Lucille Ball was 23 years old at the time and was a blonde! 
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Lucille Ball played a telephone operator, uncredited. Also in the film were future “I Love Lucy” cast members Charles Lane, Irving Bacon, and Bess Flowers. 
GINGER SNAPS!
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Lucy wasn’t the only star in Hollywood to be a redhead. Myrna Loy managed to show off her red tresses in the 1929 Warner Brothers musical, The Show of Shows, which contained Technicolor sequences, one of which still survives. 
HOLLYWOOD ROYALTY!     
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Loy was a big box-office draw. In 1936, she was named Queen of the Movies and Clark Gable the king in a nationwide poll of movie goers. Her popularity was at its zenith.  Lucille Ball, at the zenith of her television success, was dubbed the Queen of Comedy. 
GIVING A DAMN!
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Both Loy and Ball (among many others) were considered for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939).
SMOKE SCREEN!
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In 1938, Loy signed on to do print ads for Lucky Strike cigarettes. 15 years later, it was Lucy who was hawking tobacco, for Philip Morris, who also sponsored “I Love Lucy.”  The competition for smokers loyalty was so fierce that the word “lucky” was banned from “I Love Lucy” scripts, causing the ‘Lucky Buck’ competition to be re-named the ‘Bonus Buck’ contest! 
GOING WITH THE FLO!
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Loy appeared in the film The Great Ziegfeld (1938), which won an Oscar, while Ball was featured in Ziegfeld Follies (1946). Loy, who received second billing for this film, does not actually appear on screen until 2 hours and 15 minutes into the movie. Coincidentally, Loy’s Thin Man co-star William Powell plays Ziegfeld in both films! This was the fourth of 14 films pairing William Powell and Myrna Loy. In real life, Lucille Ball was actually fired by Ziegfeld from his touring production of Rio Rita in the early 1930s.
ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN?
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Myrna Loy, Fredric March and Lucille Ball took a stand against being accused of Communism when two radio broadcasts called “Hollywood Fights Back” protested the HUAC hearings in October and November 1947. 
LADY / WED!
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The 1936 film Libeled Lady starring Myrna Loy and Spencer Tracey was remade ten years later as Easy To Wed (1946) starring Lucille Ball and Van Johnson. In the remake, Ball did not play the character originated by Loy, which was taken by Esther Williams. Lucy played the role originated by Jean Harlowe. 
MGM MURMURS! 
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A New York Times item mentioned a collaboration between Lucille Ball, Myrna Loy and Clark Gable in 1944.  The film never came to pass. Gable’s first film after his military service was MGM’s Adventure (1945) with Greer Garson and Joan Blondell. Ball did Without Love (1945), also for MGM.
ANGEL / FOREVER!
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Forever Darling was originally entitled Guardian Angel and had been written as a vehicle for Myrna Loy and William Powell. The script had been languishing unfilmed at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for several years. It was finally picked up and polished for Lucy and Desi. 
MOTHER(S) OF THE YEAR(S)!
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Myrna Loy played the mother of 12 kids in Cheaper By The Dozen (1950). In 1968, Lucille Ball made a similar film titled Yours, Mine and Ours with Ball the mom of 18!  The two films have many common scenes: 
The kids line up for their week's ration of clean sheets and toothpaste;
The older daughters have troubles with unbashful beaus; 
The youngsters get in pillow fights; 
There is a suspected case of the flu; 
Jealousies grow between the two sets of children; 
There are four small visitors (all under 5 years of age) who invite themselves to their parents' wedding night and crawl under the covers. 
BROADWAY AMBITION!
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Loy had ambitions to act on Broadway, and finally made her one and only appearance in a 1973 production of The Women. Lucille Ball also had Broadway aspirations. She finally made her one and only appearance in late 1960 in Wildcat. Both women had done regional stage productions that for one reason or another failed to transfer to Broadway. 
GREASE IS THE WORD!
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In the opening shots of the 1978 film Grease, there's a white statue of a girl outside Rydell High – filmed at Venice High School, California, where Myrna Loy was a student. She posed for it when she was 16!  Lucie Arnaz was the studio’s original choice for promiscuous Betty Rizzo (a role that went to Stockard Channing), but Lucy refused to let her do a screen test!  The film featured Ball’s friend and Desilu star Eve Arden (”Our Miss Brooks”) as the principal. The film takes place in 1959/1960, when “I Love Lucy” was wrapping up its history-making run on television.    
BIOGRAPHY!
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Loy wrote an autobiography, Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming, published in 1987. Lucille Ball’s autobiography Love, Lucille, was published posthumously in 1996. 
HONORS!
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Both Lucille Ball and Myrna Loy were honored at “The Kennedy Center Honors”; Lucy in 1986 and Loy in 1988. 
LAST LOOKS!
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In 1991, Loy was given an Honorary Oscar In recognition of her extraordinary qualities both on screen and off, with appreciation for a lifetime's worth of indelible performances. Loy was not present at the awards ceremony. She gave her acceptance speech live via satellite from her Manhattan apartment. This was her last appearance on TV. Similarly, Lucille Ball’s appearance as a presenter at the March 29, 1989 Oscar telecast was her last appearance on TV before her death on April 26, 1989. 
By the time Myrna Loy passed away, on December 14, 1993, at the age of 88, she had appeared in 129 motion pictures. 
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aion-rsa · 3 years
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The Public Enemy Solidified Gang Rule Under James Cagney for 90 Years
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William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931) turns 90 this weekend. When the film first came out, a theater in Times Square showed it nonstop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The movie marks the true beginning of gangster movies as a genre. Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar may have hit theaters first, but The Public Enemy set the pattern, and James Cagney nailed the patter. Not just the street talk either; he also understood its machine gun delivery. His Tommy Powers is just a hoodlum, never a boss. He is a button man at best, even if he insisted his suits have six buttons.
The Public Enemy character wasn’t even as high up the ladder as Paul Sorvino’s caporegime Paul Cicero in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. But Cagney secured the turf Edward G. Robinson’s Rico Bandello took a bullet to claim in Little Caesar, and for the rest of his career Cagney never let it go.
Some would argue genre films began in 1931. Besides mob movies, the year introduced the newspaper picture with Lewis Milestone’s The Front Page and John Cromwell’s Scandal Sheet; Universal Pictures began an unholy run of horror classics via Tod Browning’s Dracula and James Whale’s Frankenstein, with the two turning Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff into household names; and Howard Hawks’ Scarface would land the knockout for the gangster genre, even if it didn’t get released until 1932.
Sadly, the classic “Gangster Film” run only lasted one production season, from 1930 to 1931, and less than 30 films were made during it. Archie Mayo’s The Doorway to Hell started the ball rolling in 1930, when it became a surprise box office hit. It stars Lew Ayres as the top mug, with Cagney as his sidekick. For fans of pre-Code Hollywood, it is highly recommended. It includes a kidnapping scene which results in the death of a kid on the street. Without a speck of blood or any onscreen evidence, it is cinematically shocking in its impact.
Both Little Caesar and The Public Enemy earned their street cred, defying the then-toothless 1930 Motion Picture Production Code, which preceded the Hays Code. After New York censors cut six scenes from The Public Enemy to clear it for release, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) set further guidelines for the proper cinematic depiction of crime.
Public Enemy director Wellman was an expert in multiple genres. He spit out biting satires like Nothing Sacred (1937) and Roxie Hart (1942), and captured gritty, dark realities in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and Story of G.I. Joe (1945). He won his only Oscar for A Star Is Born (1937). The Public Enemy is the first example of what would be his trademark: stylish cinematography and clever camera-work. The dark suspense he captures is completely different from the look of German expressionism. It captured the overcast shadows of urban reality and would influence the look of later noir films. His main character would inspire generations of actors.
“That’s just like you, Tom Powers. You’re the meanest boy in town.”
Orson Welles lauded James Cagney as “maybe the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of a camera.” Will Rogers said watching Cagney perform was “like a bunch of firecrackers going off all at once.” The New York City born performer explodes in this movie. Even in black and white, Cagney’s red hair flares through the air like sulfur on a match. It turns out to be a slow burn, which will reach its ultimate climax in 1949’s White Heat. The Public Enemy is loaded with top talent, but you can’t take your eyes off Cagney. Not even for a second. You might miss some tiny detail, like the flash of a grin, a wink, or a barely perceptible glare.
Cagney had a simple rule to acting: All you had to do was to look the other person straight in the eyes and say your lines. “But mean them.” In The Public Enemy, the characters communicate without lines. When Tom and Matt Doyle (Edward Woods) sneak a peek into Larry the Limp’s casket, we understand this is the first time the two young thugs lost someone their own age. The scene barely implies how fortunate they are not to be in that box, but their curiosity is as palpable as the loss of their last shred of innocence.
Cagney was originally cast as Matt, and scenes were shot with him in the role. The parts were switched mid-production, but they didn’t reshoot the flashback scenes, making it look like the pair swapped bodies between 1909 and 1915. It’s a shame because Frankie Darro, who plays the young Matt, made a career out of playing baby face Cagney, and later joined the East Side Kids franchise.
Former “Our Gang” actor Frank Coghlan Jr. took on the role of young Tom. He takes the lashes from his cop father’s belt, backtalking him the whole time. Tom Powers is reprehensible. He never says thank you and doesn’t shake hands. He delights in the violence and sadism. Powers doesn’t go into crime because of poverty; he just can’t be contained. Cagney’s mobster mangles, manhandles, maims and murders, and still needs more room in his inseam. 
Dames, Molls, and Grapefruits
Besides defying the ban on romanticizing criminals, both The Public Enemy and Little Caesar broke sexual codes. There are explicit signs that Rico Bandello represses his sexuality in Caesar. Scenes between him and his friend Joe, and his gunman Otera, thinly veil homoerotic overtones. Public Enemy’s Powers, by contrast, subtly encourages the gay tailor who is openly hitting on him.
There are strong indications Putty Nose (Murray Kinnell) is grooming Tommy and Matt for more than just fenced goods. Look at the way Putty sticks his ass in Powers’ face while he is shooting pool. Putty Nose’s execution at the piano is creepily informed by the unspoken sins between the men. Tommy relishes the kill.
However, Tommy doesn’t relish being manhandled when he’s too drunk to notice. While the gang goes to the mattresses in the movie’s gang war, Tommy is raped by Jane (Mia Marvin), his boss Paddy’s girl. Powers protests the best he can, but the camera angles leave no doubt. Tommy wakes up hungover, horrified, and feeling impotent. Matt, however, has no trouble getting “busy” with his girlfriend Mamie, played by Joan Blondell, in one of the scenes trimmed by the censors.  Blondell, Jean Harlow, and Mae Clarke, who plays Tommy’s girlfriend Kitty, represent a glitzy cross-section of white Roaring Twenties glamour. In the opening credits, when Harlow and Blondell smile at the camera, male audience members of the time blushed.
Harlow was Hollywood’s original “Blonde Bombshell,” starring in the movie that coined the term. Her earthy comic performances would make her a major star at MGM, but she was a dud to critics of The Public Enemy. Hers was the only part which was criticized, and the reviewers were brutal, declaring her voice untrained and her presence boring.
Harlow’s greatest asset had to be contained within the Pre-Code era. Straddled with a wordy part as a slumming society dame, she is directed to slow her lines to counter the quick patter of the rest of the cast. Yet Harlow uses that to her benefit in the film’s best moment of sexual innuendo. While telling Tommy about “the men I’ve known,” she pauses, and appears to be calculating them in her head before she says, “And I’ve known dozens of them.” When an evening alone with Tommy is cut short, Gwen’s exasperation over the coitus interruptus is palpable. Members of the Catholic Legion of Decency probably had to go to confession after viewing the film for slicing.
Most people know The Public Enemy for the famous grapefruit scene where Powers pushes a grapefruit into his girlfriend’s face. “I wish you was a wishing well,” he warns, “so that I could tie a bucket to you and sink ya.” Tommy treats women like property. They are status symbols, the same as clothes or cars. Kitty’s passive-aggressive hints at commitment get on Tom’s nerves. He can only express himself through violence. There are rumors Cagney, who would go on to rough up Virginia Mayo in White Heat and brutalize Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me, didn’t warn Clarke he was going to use her face as a juicer. According to the autobiography Cagney by Cagney, Clarke’s ex-husband Lew Brice loved the scene so much he watched it a few times a day, timing his entrance into the theater to catch it and leave.
Both actors have said it was staged as a practical joke to see how the film crew would react. It wasn’t meant to make the final cut. Wellman told TCM he added it because he always wanted to do that to his wife. The writer reportedly wrote the scene as a kind of wish-fulfilling fantasy.
The screenplay was written by Harvey F. Thew. It was based on Beer and Blood by John Bright and Kubec Glasmon. The unpublished novel fleshed out press accounts of the bootlegging Northside gang leaders, Charles Dion “Deanie” O’Banion, Earl “Hymie” Weiss, and Louis “Two-Gun” Alterie. Cagney based his Tommy Powers character on O’Banion and Altiere. Edward Woods was doing his take on Weiss. The book reflected the headlines in the Chicago papers, which reported Weiss smashed an omelet into his girlfriend’s face.
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The Public Enemy borrowed from the day’s headlines in other ways too. Hymie Weiss was assassinated in October 1926. It was the first reported “machine-gun nest” murder. It is recreated in the killing of Matt Doyle. While shooting the sequence, Cagney ducked real machine gun fire to bring authenticity to the scene. Also taken from real life is the fact that after O’Banion was killed in ‘24, Alterie’s first reaction was to do public battle with the killers. This is similar to Tommy’s final shootout at Schemer Burns’ nightclub headquarters.
Leslie Fenton’s dashing mob captain Nails Nathan (“born Samuel”) flashes the greatest grin in mob movie history. He is based on Samuel “Nails” Morton, a member of O’Banion’s mob. Both “Nails” were driven to their coffins the way it is depicted in The Public Enemy. The real Morton died in a riding accident in 1923, and “Two-Gun” Alterie and some of the other gang members went back to the stables, rented the horse which kicked Nails in the head, and shot the animal. Mario Puzo may have been inspired by this scene when he wrote The Godfather. It is not only tie to the Francis Ford Coppola movie. Oranges have as much vitamin C as grapefruits. Another similarity between the two films is the threat of being kidnapped from the hospital by a rival gang.
The Powers brothers’ relationship vaguely echoes the one between war hero Michael and Sonny Corleone, who believes, as his father does, soldiers were “saps” to risk their lives for strangers. Donald Cook, who played Mike Powers, didn’t pull any punches on the set. In the scene where he knocks Tom into the table before going off to war, he really connects. Wellman told Cook to do it without warning so he could get that look of surprise. Cook broke one of Cagney’s teeth, but Cagney stayed in character and finished the scene.
“It is a wicked business.”
After the stock market crash, get-rich-quick schemes seemed the only way through the Great Depression. The gangster was an acceptable headline hero during Prohibition because the law was unpopular with the press. But after 1929, the gangster became the scapegoat villain. The Public Enemy was the ninth highest grossing film of 1931. But the genre lost its appeal after April of that year, as studios pumped out pale imitations and audiences got tired of the saturation, according to the book Violence and American Cinema, edited by J. David Slocum. Religious and civic groups accused Hollywood of romanticizing crime and glamorizing gangsters.
The Public Enemy opens with a dire warning: Don’t be a gangster. Hoodlums and terrorists of the underworld should not be glamorized. The only MPAA rule the film didn’t break was portraying an alliance between organized crime and politics. The studios passed the films off as cautionary tales which were meant to deflate the gangster’s appeal by ridiculing their false heroism.
Through this hand-wringing, however, Cagney turns false heroics on its head with the comic brilliance of a Mack Sennett short. Stuck without a gun, he robs a gun store armed with nothing but moxie. Powers never rises in the organization. He takes orders and whatever the boss says is a good cut, only asking for more money once from Putty Nose. Unlike Rico, who rose to be boss among bosses, Powers has no power to lose. This is just the first gig he landed since he was a regular “ding ding” driving a streetcar, and it connected with audiences like a sock on the button. They identified with the scrappy killer, and it surprised them.
Even Gwen notices Tommy is “very different, and it isn’t only a difference in manner and outward appearances. It’s a difference in basic character.” Strict Freudians might lay this on his mother (Beryl Mercer), the greatest enabler Cagney will see until White Heat. Ma Powers’ little boy is a budding psychopath knocking off half the North Side, but look at the head on his beer. For audiences at the time, Tom was the smiling, fresh-scrubbed face of evil. He is consistently unsympathetic but likable from the moment he hits the opening credits.
Like Malcom McDowell’s Alex in A Clockwork Orange, he is the fiend’s best friend. Even if it is Tommy’s fault his best pal Matt gets killed. While Cagney spent his career ducking his “you dirty, double-crossing, rat” line from Taxi, the actor wasn’t afraid to play one in Powers. He’s not a rat in the sense he’d snitch on anyone. He’s the last of the pack who sticks it out for his pals when his back is up against the wall.
A Hail of Bullets
Tommy Powers goes by this credo: live fast, die young, and leave a corpse so riddled with bullets, not even his mother can look at his body when he’s done. But then, no one can end a film like Cagney. He’s danced down the White House stairs in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), been rolled across the concrete steps of a city church in The Roaring Twenties (1939), and was blown to kingdom come in White Heat. He gets two death scenes in The Public Enemy, a rain-soaked climax, and a denouement as scary as The Mummy. Tommy only brings one gun to the gang fight, and by the time he hits the pavement, he’s got more holes in him than the city sewage system.
“I ain’t so tough,” Tommy says on his final roll into the gutter. Cagney’s first professional job was in a musical drag act on the Vaudeville circuit, and he called himself a “song and dance man” long after retirement. For The Public Enemy, conductor David Mendoza led the Vitaphone Orchestra through such period hits as “Toot Toot Tootsie (Goodbye),” “Smiles,” and “I Surrender Dear.” But the song “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” is the one which lingers in the memory. Martin Scorsese has cited it as a reason his films are so filled with recognizable music.
Street violence comes with a natural soundtrack. Transistor radios accompany takedowns. Boom boxes blast during shakedowns. Car stereos boost the bass during drive-by shootings. In The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, mobsters feed quarters into a jukebox to cover up sounds of a beating.
In The Godfather, Part II, a street band plays traditional Italian songs while Vito Corleone puts bullets in the neighborhood Black Hand, Don Fanucci. The last thing we hear in the abrupt close to the mob series The Sopranos is a Journey song. The first thing Tommy’s mother does when she hears her boy is coming home from the hospital is drop a needle on a record.
The ending leaves us with two questions: Who killed Tommy, and what’s his brother going to do about it? We figure whoever did the job on Powers was probably a low-level button man from Schemer’s rival outfit. Probably even lower down the ladder than Tommy, and on his way up, until another Tommy comes along. Crime only pays in the movies, Edward G. Robinson often joked.
Mike’s reaction to the bandaged corpse is ambiguous. He’s already shown outward signs of the trauma following the horrors of war. Is he clenching his fists in anguish or anger? Is he broken by the battlefield or marching off in vengeance, a soldier on one last duty? Cook’s exit can go either way.
After 90 years, The Public Enemy is still fresh. It’s aged better than Little Caesar or Scarface. Cagney wouldn’t play a gangster again until 1938, but the image is etched so deeply in the persona, audiences forget the vagaries of villainy Hollywood could spin, and the range of characters Cagney could play. He and the film continue to influence filmmakers, inform culture, and surprise audiences. Tommy Powers was just a mug, but those streets are still his.
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chiseler · 4 years
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Glad Rags: Fashion and the Great Depression
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Some years ago, in a breathtaking lapse of taste, The New Yorker published a fashion spread that aped iconic photographs of Dust Bowl migrants. I was as appalled as the next right-thinking person by the pouting models in $400 distressed cardigans pretending to thumb rides along desert highways. But if the charge is infatuation with the aesthetics of the Great Depression, I am guilty, guilty, guilty. Throw me in the clink—just so long as it resembles the hoosegow that Barbara Stanwyck saunters around in Ladies They Talk About (1932).
Why was everything, from automats to automobiles, from nightclubs to radios, from skyscrapers to bus stations, from cocktail shakers to the battered hats on homeless men, so elegant in the thirties? Why did bums back then look better than bankers today? Why are the movies and music, the clothes and every aspect of design from typefaces to elevator panels, so intoxicatingly stylish?
The easy answer is that art deco glamour was a form of escapism, a consolation to the down-and-out, and an expression of irrational optimism. Cruise ships, trains, office towers, mechanized restaurants: art deco was all about speed and modernity, the thrill of zooming into the future. (Then why does deco still look modern and alluring, while the space-age design of the sixties just looks dated and silly?) If cynicism was society’s ballast during the Depression, style was the kite-string tugging upward, the flag that kept flying.
It’s not the swells in their glad rags that I admire most, or even the bootleggers in silk shirts, but the wardrobes of working girls. Take the plain, slinky black dress that Stanwyck, as an ambitious office worker in Baby Face, accessorizes with a series of different detachable white collars and cuffs. Those starched cuffs and collars—chic, yet as humble as table-napkins—are perfect, almost poignant symbols of Stanwyck’s determination to better herself with the small means at her disposal. In Golddiggers of 1933, out-of-work chorus girls draw lots for the privilege of wearing a gorgeous, borrowed outfit to an audition. The little hats that hug one side of the head, the soft dresses molded to the hips, the scarf collars and pleated hems, create a look that collapses the two meanings of “smart.”  Neither frivolous nor utilitarian, it’s a neat, streamlined look that is still seductive; it signals quiet confidence and also wit, the sort of wisecracking verbal self-defense these girls mastered.
Movies like Baby Face tell their stories largely through their heroines’ clothes and belongings: they climb from cotton frocks to furs, from paper matchbooks to jeweled cigarette cases. (Clothing is no less crucial to the gangster’s rise; tailored shirts and luxurious overcoats are almost the point of his law-breaking.) Like Stanwyck in Baby Face, Joan Blondell in Blondie Johnson starts out in the drab, shapeless clothes of the down-trodden. Alight with anger after her mother dies, denied aid by a sanctimonious government official, she vows to get hold of dough, “and plenty of it.” Next we see her, she’s wearing a snazzy velvet suit that fits like a glove and conning suckers out of ten dollar bills by pretending to be a damsel in distress. She’s willing to bat her eyelashes and exploit her curves, but it’s really her brain she uses to get ahead, rising to become the head of a criminal “corporation,” and fiercely defending her virtue, even while clad in diaphanous pajamas. In Hold Your Man, Clark Gable calls attention to the warmth of the room, trying to talk Jean Harlow into doffing her coat. She complies, but when he suggests she remove her hat as well, she quips, “I’m pretty cool about the head.”
It’s this sense of wit and sass that’s often missing from latter-day reconstructions of the thirties, making people in period pieces appear overly formal. Current actors, looking embalmed in handsome clothes and make-up, fail to capture the way Cagney in his pin-striped suits was always poised on the balls of his feet, ready to crack into a tap dance; or the stunning bodily freedom with which women wore their thin, fluid, backless gowns, somehow never looking unduly exposed. Carole Lombard in shiny satin wide-legged lounging-pajamas and high heels furiously riding an exercise bicycle: there is the deco spirit in a nutshell. I sometimes wonder if it was the sheer delight of wearing such flattering clothes that gave women in thirties movies their unequaled zing.
Their sleek clothes don’t hide the female form the way dresses of the 1920’s did with their dropped waists and bosom-flattening bands. Neither do they exaggerate it with structured undergarments like those abandoned after the first world war and re-introduced after the second. It takes little insight to observe that the times when fashion has been most extreme in its devotion to the hourglass figure have been repressive eras for women, and periods when their clothes were more androgynous have been times when women made strides toward equality. In the early thirties, however, fashions were feminine without being cartoonishly so; they simply revealed the way women really look. The ideal of beauty was slender but not boyishly skinny, effortlessly athletic without gym-workout muscles.
Thirties dames look sexy on their own terms, not trussed up for male consumption like women of the fifties in their waist-cinching girdles, teetering stilettos and torpedo bras (often filled out with falsies on actresses of the fifties.) Many women in the early thirties wore very little under their clothes, as pre-Code movies prove with their obligatory lingerie shots. One almost feels sorry for pre-Code men faced with gals like Blondell, who in Blonde Crazy allows Cagney to inspect her flimsy underwear but repels his every advance with a slap that sends his head snapping back against his spine.
It is surely no coincidence that the interwar period was perhaps the only time when fashion was dominated, or at least heavily influenced, by women designers. Chanel borrowed from men’s tailoring to make women’s clothes simple, comfortable and sporty, without making them mannish. Madeleine Vionnet pioneered the bias cut, constructing garments so the grain of the fabric ran diagonally across the body, creating that smooth, clinging drape that defines feminine style of the thirties. Stanwyck’s lithe, bold stride wouldn’t be the same without the skirts that show off her beautiful hips and just enough of her killer gams. The jazzy, diagonally-striped ensemble that Claudette Colbert wears in It Happened One Night—something she has apparently purchased with the proceeds from pawning her wrist-watch—is the sartorial equivalent of her cocked eyebrow and throaty, sarcastic delivery.
These are Hollywood movies, of course, in which actresses often wore dresses so tight they couldn’t sit down between shots. But there’s plenty of documentary evidence that ordinary women, while they made have had less perfect figures, had just as much stylistic sass. Inept, small-time criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow might never have become folk heroes if police hadn’t found a roll of undeveloped film in their hideout in Joplin, Missouri in 1932, and if the pictures hadn’t shown Bonnie wearing a snug beret, a skirt and sweater as jazzy as Colbert’s, and standing with her high-heeled foot hiked saucily on the bumper of a Ford V-8.
Or consider the stout matron in Walker Evans’s 1935 photograph of a New Orleans barbershop, sporting a blouse with sizzling concentric stripes, a jaunty black tie and a black hat with a rakish white feather. Men were no slouches either. Evans’s 1936 pictures of street scenes in the “negro quarter” of Vicksburg, Mississippi feature men lounging idly in shirtsleeves, unbuttoned vests and felt hats, each one a fashion plate. Lined up in a row in the wood-frame buildings behind them are hand-painted signs for the Savoy Barber Shop, the New Deal Barber Shop, and the Brother In Law Barber Shop. These men may not have jobs, but at least they have well-trimmed hair.
One can always ask, was there really such an epidemic of elegance in the thirties, or did photographers just seek out images of dignity? In the same way, one can look at the photographs of Robert Frank or the documentary footage of Los Angeles in The Savage Eye (1960) and wonder if there was really an epidemic of ugliness and vulgarity in the late fifties and early sixties, or whether artists just emphasized it. But the question is moot: either way, the images reveal how Americans—or at least their professional observers—saw themselves. Struggling against deprivation and anxiety, they were proud, stoic and stripped to their lean, essential spirit. Prosperous and secure, they were hapless victims of an aesthetic crash. A movie like Murder by Contract (1958), about a hit man killing time in L.A., staying in suffocatingly tacky motel rooms, seems to be the portrait of a man sleepwalking through a society where taste has flatlined.
Fifties style was artlessly boastful; its ideals were plastic mannequins of happiness, innocence and surfeit. This is why when it failed it failed so hideously: the old, the poor, the ugly, the lonely look caught in a pitiless glare, all their shortcomings exposed. The beehive hair, bouffant skirts, school-girl necklines and cat’s-eye glasses made young women look stodgy and matronly, and older women look grotesquely girlish.  In the thirties, haute couture expressed sublime hauteur, but it was based on aesthetic principles so sound that even when they trickled down to the cheapest knock-offs and most threadbare hand-me-downs, they still looked good. And so we come to the paradox of men in breadlines, women in migrant camps, whose je-ne-sais-quoi can inspire fashion spreads.
I am haunted by a bit of archival footage from the superb documentary Riding the Rails (1997), which shows a group of teenage hobos gathered on an open flat-car. Their elegance is unforgettable. It’s partly that their ragged clothes are so well-cut—in those days before baggy, one-size-fits-nobody garments—and partly that they’re worn with such an air. One boy wears an overcoat that’s too big for him and a handkerchief knotted on his head; he looks like a Napoleonic soldier retreating from Moscow. Men today who affect newsboy caps tend to wear them as though they were balancing a plate on their heads, but these boys wear their soft caps pulled down low over one eye, making them look at once tough and shy. They also seem, like everyone Dorothea Lange photographed, to stand and move with uncommon, easy grace: idle, but charged with contained energy. Their faces are wary, reticent and disillusioned. In another archival clip, boys sitting around a fire in a hobo jungle respond to a reporter who asks them why they are on the road. “Out here for my health,” one deadpans. “Just riding,” another tersely shrugs.
These are the real-life versions of the characters played by Frankie Darro and the Warners juveniles in Wild Boys of the Road (1933). Several things about that film are startling. One is how the kids dress and act like grown-ups (at a school dance, they wear evening clothes and circle the floor to “The Shadow Waltz”), as opposed to today, when grown-ups dress and act like kids. Another is how quickly and completely two middle-class boys turn into outcasts, panhandlers, embittered scavengers living in a garbage dump. But most startling of all is the way stoicism and dignity are taken for granted, the universal determination not be a burden or feel sorry for oneself. The elderly interviewees in Riding the Rails are candid, matter-of-fact, wry and compassionate. There is more to elegance than dressing well, than being tasteful or—that overused and inelegant word—“classy.” There is an intangible quality, a kind of mental and moral grace. Elegance has spine, but it’s not rigid; it bends but doesn’t break. It is understated; it is reserved. It knows the virtue of holding something back—some strength, some anger, some sense of irony—because there is more than one rainy day.
by Imogen Sara Smith
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Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn (20 June 1909 – 14 October 1959) was an Australian-born American actor during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Considered the natural successor to Douglas Fairbanks, he achieved worldwide fame for his romantic swashbuckler roles in Hollywood films, as well as frequent partnerships with Olivia de Havilland. He was best known for his role as Robin Hood in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938); his portrayal of the character was named by the American Film Institute as the 18th-greatest hero in American film history. His other famous roles included the eponymous lead in Captain Blood (1935), Major Geoffrey Vickers in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), as well as the hero in a number of Westerns, such as Dodge City (1939), Santa Fe Trail (1940) and San Antonio (1945). Flynn also stirred controversy for his reputation as a womaniser and hedonistic personal life.
Errol Leslie Flynn was born on 20 June 1909 in Battery Point, a suburb of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. His father, Theodore Thomson Flynn, was a lecturer (1909) and later professor (1911) of biology at the University of Tasmania. His mother was born Lily Mary Young, but shortly after marrying Theodore at St John's Church of England, Birchgrove, Sydney, on 23 January 1909, she changed her first name to Marelle. Flynn described his mother's family as "seafaring folk" and this appears to be where his lifelong interest in boats and the sea originated. Both of his parents were Australian-born of Irish, English and Scottish descent. Despite Flynn's claims, the evidence indicates that he was not descended from any of the Bounty mutineers.
Flynn received his early schooling in Hobart. He made one of his first appearances as a performer in 1918, aged nine, when he served as a page boy to Enid Lyons in a queen carnival. In her memoirs, Lyons recalled Flynn as "a dashing figure—a handsome boy of nine with a fearless, somewhat haughty expression, already showing that sang-froid for which he was later to become famous throughout the civilized world". She further noted: "Unfortunately Errol at the age of nine did not yet possess that magic for extracting money from the public which so distinguished his career as an actor. Our cause gained no apparent advantage from his presence in my entourage; we gained only third place in a field of seven."
From 1923 to 1925, Flynn attended the South West London College, a private boarding school in Barnes, London.
In 1926, he returned to Australia to attend Sydney Church of England Grammar School (known as "Shore"), where he was the classmate of a future Australian prime minister, John Gorton. His formal education ended with his expulsion from Shore for theft, although he later claimed it was for a sexual encounter with the school's laundress.
After being dismissed from a job as a junior clerk with a Sydney shipping company for pilfering petty cash, he went to Papua New Guinea at the age of eighteen, seeking his fortune in tobacco planting and metals mining. He spent the next five years oscillating between New Guinea and Sydney.
In January 1931, Flynn became engaged to Naomi Campbell-Dibbs, the youngest daughter of Robert and Emily Hamlyn (Brown) Campbell-Dibbs of Temora and Bowral, New South Wales. They did not marry.
Australian filmmaker Charles Chauvel was making a film about the mutiny on the Bounty, In the Wake of the Bounty (1933), a combination of dramatic re-enactments of the mutiny and a documentary on present-day Pitcairn Island. Chauvel was looking for someone to play the role of Fletcher Christian. There are different stories about the way Flynn was cast. According to one, Chauvel saw his picture in an article about a yacht wreck involving Flynn. The most popular account is that he was discovered by cast member John Warwick. The film was not a strong success at the box office, but Flynn’s was the lead role, and his fate was decided. In late 1933 he went to Britain to pursue a career in acting.
Flynn got work as an extra in a film, I Adore You (1933), produced by Irving Asher for Warner Bros. He soon secured a job with the Northampton Repertory Company at the town's Royal Theatre (now part of Royal & Derngate), where he worked and received his training as a professional actor for seven months. Northampton is home to an art-house cinema named after him, the Errol Flynn Filmhouse. He performed at the 1934 Malvern Festival and in Glasgow, and briefly in London's West End.
In 1934 Flynn was dismissed from Northampton Rep. after he threw a female stage manager down a stairwell. He returned to London. Asher cast him as the lead in Murder at Monte Carlo, a "quota quickie" made by Warner Brothers at their Teddington Studios in Middlesex. The movie was not widely seen (it is currently a lost film, but Asher was enthusiastic about Flynn's performance and cabled Warner Bros. in Hollywood, recommending him for a contract. Executives agreed, and Flynn was sent to Los Angeles.
On the ship from London, Flynn met (and eventually married) Lili Damita, an actress five years his senior whose contacts proved valuable when Flynn arrived in Los Angeles. Warner Bros. publicity described him as an "Irish leading man of the London stage."
His first appearance was a small role in The Case of the Curious Bride (1935). Flynn had two scenes, one as a corpse and one in flashback. His next part was slightly bigger, in Don't Bet on Blondes (1935), a B-picture screwball comedy.
Warner Bros. was preparing a big budget swashbuckler, Captain Blood (1935), based on the 1922 novel by Rafael Sabatini and directed by Michael Curtiz.
The studio originally intended to cast Robert Donat, but he turned down the part, afraid that his chronic asthma would make it impossible for him to perform the strenuous role.[19] Warners considered a number of other actors, including Leslie Howard and James Cagney, and also conducted screen tests of those they had under contract, like Flynn. The tests were impressive and Warners finally cast Flynn in the lead, opposite 19-year-old Olivia de Havilland. The resulting film was a magnificent success for the studio and gave birth to two new Hollywood stars and an on-screen partnership that would encompass eight films over six years. The budget for Captain Blood was $1.242 million, and it made $1.357 million in the U.S. and $1.733 million overseas, making a huge profit for Warner Bros.
Flynn had been selected to support Fredric March in Anthony Adverse (1936), but public response to Captain Blood was so enthusiastic that Warners instead reunited him with de Havilland and Curtiz in another adventure tale, this time set during the Crimean War, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936). The film was given a slightly larger budget than Captain Blood, at $1.33 million, and it had a much higher box-office gross, earning $1.454 million in the US and $1.928 million overseas, making it Warner Bros.' No. 1 hit of 1936.
Flynn asked for a different kind of role and so when ill health made Leslie Howard drop out of the screen adaptation of Lloyd C. Douglas' inspirational novel, Flynn got the lead role in Green Light (1937), playing a doctor searching for a cure for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.[22] The studio then put him back into another swashbuckler, replacing Patric Knowles as Miles Hendon in The Prince and the Pauper (1937). He appeared opposite Kay Francis in Another Dawn (1937), a melodrama set in a mythical British desert colony. Warners then gave Flynn his first starring role in a modern comedy, The Perfect Specimen (1937), with Joan Blondell, under the direction of Curtiz. Meanwhile, Flynn published his first book, Beam Ends (1937), an autobiographical account of his experiences sailing around Australia as a youth. He also travelled to Spain, in 1937, as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War.
Flynn followed this with his most famous movie, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), playing the title role, opposite de Havilland's Marian. This movie was a global success. It was the 6th-top movie grosser of 1938.[25] It was also the studio's first large-budget color film utilizing the three-strip Technicolor process. The budget for Robin Hood was the highest ever for a Warner Bros. production up to that point—$2.47 million—but it more than made back its costs and turned a huge profit as it grossed $2.343 million in the U.S. and $2.495 million overseas.
It also received lavish praise from critics and became a worldwide favorite that has endured for generations. In 2019, Rotten Tomatoes summarizes the critical consensus: "Errol Flynn thrills as the legendary title character, and the film embodies the type of imaginative family adventure tailor-made for the silver screen." In 1995, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation by the National Film Registry.
The scene in which Robin climbs to Marian's window to steal a few words and a kiss has become as familiar to audiences as the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet.[citation needed] Years later, in a 2005 interview, de Havilland described how, during the filming, she decided to tease Flynn, whose wife was on set and watching closely. De Havilland said, "And so we had one kissing scene, which I looked forward to with great delight. I remember I blew every take, at least six in a row, maybe seven, maybe eight, and we had to kiss all over again. And Errol Flynn got really rather uncomfortable, and he had, if I may say so, a little trouble with his tights."[30]
The final duel between Robin and Sir Guy of Gisbourne is a classic, echoing the battle on the beach in Captain Blood where Flynn also kills Rathbone's character after a long demonstration of fine swordplay, in that case choreographed by Ralph Faulkner. According to Faulkner's student, Tex Allen, “Faulkner had good material to work with. Veteran Basil Rathbone was a good fencer already, and Flynn, though new to the school of fence, was athletic and a quick learner. Under Faulkner's choreography Rathbone and Flynn made the swordplay look good. For the next two decades Faulkner's movie list as fencing double and choreographer reads as a history of Hollywood's golden years of adventure yarns [including Flynn's] The Sea Hawk (1940),[31]
The success of The Adventures of Robin Hood did little to convince the studio that their prize swashbuckler should be allowed to do other things, but Warners allowed Flynn to try a screwball comedy, Four's a Crowd (1938). Despite the presence of de Havilland and direction of Curtiz, it was not a success. The Sisters (1938) a drama showing the lives of three sisters in the years from 1904 to 1908, including a dramatic rendering of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, was more popular. Flynn played alcoholic sports reporter Frank Medlin, who sweeps Louise Elliott ( Bette Davis) off her feet on a visit to Silver Bow, Montana. Their married life in San Francisco is difficult, an Frank sails to Singapore just hours before the catastrophe. The original ending of the film was the same as the book: Louise married a character named William Benson. But preview audiences disliked that ending, and a new one was filmed in which Frank comes to Silver Bow to find her and they reconcile. Apparently audiences wanted Errol Flynn to get the girl, or vice versa. (Bette Davis preferred the original ending.)
Flynn had a powerful dramatic role in The Dawn Patrol (1938), a remake of a pre-code 1930 drama of the same name about Royal Flying Corps fighter pilots in World War I and the devastating burden carried by officers who must send men out to die every morning. Flynn and co-stars Basil Rathbone and David Niven led a cast that was all male and predominantly British. Director Edmund Goulding's biographer Matthew Kennedy wrote: “Everyone remembered a set filled with fraternal good cheer.... The filming of Dawn Patrol was an unusual experience for everyone connected with it, and dissipated for all time the legend that Britishers are lacking in a sense of humor.... The picture was made to the accompaniment of more ribbing than Hollywood has ever witnessed. The setting for all this horseplay was the beautiful English manners of the cutterups. The expressions of polite and pained shock on the faces of Niven, Flynn, Rathbone et al., when (women) visitors were embarrassed was the best part of the nonsense.”
In 1939, Flynn and de Havilland teamed up with Curtiz for Dodge City (1939), the first Western for both of them, set after the American Civil War.[34] Flynn was worried that audiences would not accept him in Westerns, but the film was a big hit, Warner Bros.' most popular film of 1939, and he went on to make a number of movies in that genre.
Flynn was reunited with Davis, Curtiz and de Havilland in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), playing Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. Flynn's relationship with Davis during filming was quarrelsome; Davis allegedly slapped him across the face far harder than necessary during one scene. Flynn attributed her anger to unrequited romantic interest, but according to others, Davis resented sharing equal billing with a man she considered incapable of playing any role beyond a dashing adventurer. "He himself openly said, 'I don't know really anything about acting,'" she told an interviewer, "and I admire his honesty, because he's absolutely right." Years later, however, de Havilland said that, during a private screening of Elizabeth and Essex, an astounded Davis had exclaimed, "Damn it! The man could act!"
Warners put Flynn in another Western, Virginia City (1940), set near the end of the Civil War. Flynn played Union officer Kerry Bradford.
In an article for TCM, Jeremy Arnold wrote: "Ironically, the Randolph Scott role [as Captain Vance Irby, commandant of the prison camp where Bradford was a prisoner of war] was originally conceived for Flynn.... In fact, Virginia City was plagued with script, production and personnel problems all along. Shooting began without a finished script, angering Flynn, who complained unsuccessfully to the studio about it. Flynn disliked the temperamental Curtiz and tried to have him removed from the film. Curtiz didn't like Flynn (or costar Miriam Hopkins) either. And Humphrey Bogart apparently didn't care for Flynn or Randolph Scott! Making matters worse was the steady rain that fell for two of the three weeks of location shooting near Flagstaff, AZ. Flynn detested rain, and was physically unwell for quite some time because of it. As Peter Valenti has written, 'Errol's frustration at the role can be easily understood: he changed from antagonist to protagonist, from Southern to Northern officer, almost as the film was being shot. [This] intensified Errol's feelings of inadequacy as a performer and his contempt for studio operation.'" Despite the troubles behind the scenes, the film was a huge success, making a profit of just under $1 million.
Flynn’s next film had been planned since 1936: another swashbuckler taken from a Sabatini novel, The Sea Hawk (1940). However, in the end, only the title was used, and a completely different story was created.
A reviewer observed in Time Aug. 19, 1940, "The Sea Hawk (Warner) is 1940's lustiest assault on the double feature. It cost $1,700,000, exhibits Errol Flynn and 3,000 other cinemactors performing every imaginable feat of spectacular derring-do, and lasts two hours and seven minutes.... Produced by Warner's Hal Wallis with a splendor that would set parsimonious Queen Bess's teeth on edge, constructed of the most tried-&-true cinema materials available, The Sea Hawk is a handsome, shipshape picture. To Irish Cinemactor Errol Flynn, it gives the best swashbuckling role he has had since Captain Blood. For Hungarian Director Michael Curtiz, who took Flynn from bit-player ranks to make Captain Blood and has made nine pictures with him since, it should prove a high point in their profitable relationship." It was indeed: The Sea Hawk made a profit of $977,000 on that budget of $1.7 million.
Another financial success was the Western Santa Fe Trail (1940), with de Havilland and Ronald Reagan, and directed by Curtiz, which grossed $2,147,663 in the US, making it Warner Brothers' second-biggest hit of 1940.
In 1940, at the zenith of his career, Flynn was voted the fourteenth most popular star in the U.S. and the seventh most popular in Britain, according to Motion Picture Daily. According to Variety, he was the fourth-biggest star in the U.S. and the fourth-biggest box-office attraction overseas as well.
Flynn consistently ranked among Warner Bros.' top stars. In 1937, he was the studio's No. 1 star, ahead of Paul Muni and Bette Davis.[43] In 1938, he was No. 3, just behind Davis and Muni.[44] In 1939, he was No. 3 again, this time behind Davis and James Cagney.[45] In 1940 and 1941, he was Warner Bros.' No. 1 top box-office draw. In 1942, he was No. 2, behind Cagney. In 1943, he was No. 2, behind Humphrey Bogart.
Warners allowed Flynn a change of pace from a long string of period pieces in a lighthearted mystery, Footsteps in the Dark (1941). Los Angeles Times' Edwin Schallert wrote: "Errol Flynn becomes a modern for a change in a whodunit film and the excursion proves eminently worth-while... an exceptionally clever and amusing exhibit …" However, the film was not a big success. Far more popular was the military drama Dive Bomber (1941), his last film with Curtiz.
In later years, Footsteps in the Dark co-star Ralph Bellamy recalled Flynn at this time as "a darling. Couldn't or wouldn't take himself seriously. And he drank like there was no tomorrow. Had a bum ticker from the malaria he'd picked up in Australia. Also a spot of TB. Tried to enlist but flunked his medical, so he drank some more. Knew he wouldn't live into old age. He really had a ball in Footsteps in the Dark. He was so glad to be out of swashbucklers."
Flynn became a naturalized American citizen on 14 August 1942. With the United States fully involved in the Second World War, he attempted to enlist in the armed services but failed the physical exam due to recurrent malaria (contracted in New Guinea), a heart murmur, various venereal diseases and latent pulmonary tuberculosis.
Flynn was mocked by reporters and critics as a "draft dodger,” but the studio refused to admit that their star, promoted for his physical beauty and athleticism, had been disqualified due to health problems.
Flynn started a new long-term relationship with a director when he teamed with Raoul Walsh in They Died with Their Boots On (1942), a biopic of George Armstrong Custer. De Havilland was his co-star in this, the last of 12 films they made together. The movie grossed $2.55 million in the U.S. alone, making it Warner Bros.' second-biggest hit of 1942.
Flynn's first World War II film was Desperate Journey (1942), directed by Walsh, in which he played an Australian for the first time. It was another big hit.
The role of Gentleman Jim Corbett in Walsh's Gentleman Jim (1942) was one of Flynn’s favorites.[54] Warner Bros. purchased the rights to make a film of Corbett's life from his widow, Vera, specifically for their handsome, athletic and charming leading man.
The movie bears little resemblance to the boxer’s life, but the story was a crowd pleaser. Despite—or perhaps because of—its departure from reality, “Gentleman Jim” packed the theaters. According to Variety, it was the third Errol Flynn movie to gross at least $2 million for Warner Bros. in 1942.
Flynn eagerly undertook extensive boxing training for this film, working with Buster Wiles and Mushy Callahan. Callahan's remembrances were documented in Charles Higham's Errol Flynn: The Untold Story. "Errol tended to use his right fist. I had to teach him to use his left and to move very fast on his feet...Luckily he had excellent footwork, he was dodgy, he could duck faster then anybody I saw. And by the time I was through with him, he'd jab, jab, jab with his left like a veteran."
Flynn took the role seriously, and was rarely doubled during the boxing sequences. In The Two Lives of Errol Flynn by Michael Freedland, Alexis Smith told of taking the star aside: "'It's so silly, working all day and then playing all night and dissipating yourself. Don't you want to live a long life?' Errol was his usually apparently unconcerned self: 'I'm only interested in this half,' he told her. 'I don't care for the future.'"
In fact, Flynn collapsed on set on July 15, 1942, while filming a boxing scene with Ward Bond. Filming was shut down while he recovered; he returned a week later. In his autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Flynn describes the episode as a mild heart attack.
In September 1942, Warners announced that Flynn had signed a new contract with the studio for four films a year, one of which he would also produce.
In Edge of Darkness (1943), set in Nazi-occupied Norway, Flynn played a Norwegian resistance fighter, a role originally intended for Edward G. Robinson. Director Lewis Milestone later recalled, "Flynn kept underrating himself. If you wanted to embarrass him, all you had to do was to tell him how great he was in a scene he'd just finished playing: He'd blush like a young girl and muttering 'I'm no actor' would go away somewhere and sit down."[63] With a box office gross of $2.3 million in the U.S, it was Warner Bros.' eighth biggest movie of the year.
In Warners' all-star musical comedy fund-raiser for the Stage Door Canteen, Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), Flynn sings and dances as a cockney seaman boasting to his pub mates of how he's won the war in "That's What You Jolly Well Get," the only musical number that was ever performed by Flynn on screen.
In late 1942, two 17-year-old girls, Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee, separately accused Flynn of statutory rape at the Bel Air home of Flynn's friend Frederick McEvoy, and on board Flynn's yacht Sirocco, respectively. The scandal received immense press attention. Many of Flynn's fans founded organizations to publicly protest the accusation. One such group, the American Boys' Club for the Defense of Errol Flynn—ABCDEF—accumulated a substantial membership that included William F. Buckley Jr.
The trial took place in late January and early February 1943. Flynn's attorney, Jerry Giesler, impugned the accusers' character and morals, and accused them of numerous indiscretions, including affairs with married men and, in Satterlee's case, an abortion (which was illegal at the time). He noted that the two girls, who said they did not know each other, filed their complaints within days of each other, although the episodes allegedly took place more than a year apart. He implied that the girls had cooperated with prosecutors in hopes of avoiding prosecution themselves. Flynn was acquitted, but the trial's widespread coverage and lurid overtones permanently damaged his carefully cultivated screen image as an idealized romantic leading player.
Northern Pursuit (1943), also with Walsh as director, was a war film set in Canada. He then made a film for his own production company, Thomson Productions, where he had a say in the choice of vehicle, director and cast, plus a portion of the profits. This picture had a modest gross of $1.5 million. Uncertain Glory (1944) was a war-time drama set in France with Flynn as a criminal who redeems himself. However, it was not a success and Thomson Productions made no more movies. In 1943, Flynn earned $175,000.
With Walsh he made Objective, Burma! in 1944, released in 1945, a war film set during the Burma Campaign. Although popular, it was withdrawn in Britain after protests that the role played by British troops was not given sufficient credit. A Western, San Antonio (1945), was also very popular, grossing $3.553 million in the U.S. and was Warner Bros.' third-biggest hit of the year.
Flynn tried comedy again with Never Say Goodbye (1946), a comedy of remarriage opposite Eleanor Parker, but it was not a success, grossing $1.77 million in the U.S. In 1946, Flynn published an adventure novel, Showdown, and earned a reported $184,000 (equivalent to $2,410,000 in 2019).
Cry Wolf (1947) was a thriller with Flynn in a seemingly more villainous role. It was a moderate success at the box office. He was in a melodrama, Escape Me Never (1947), filmed in early 1946 but not released until late 1947, which lost money. More popular was a Western with Walsh and Ann Sheridan, Silver River (1948). This was a hit, although its high cost meant it was not very profitable. Flynn drank so heavily on the set that he was effectively disabled after noon, and a disgusted Walsh terminated their business relationship.
Warners tried returning Flynn to swashbucklers and the result was Adventures of Don Juan (1948). The film was very successful in Europe, grossing $3.1 million, but less so in the U.S., with $1.9, and struggled to recoup its large budget. Still, it was Warner Bros.' 4th-biggest hit of the year. From this point on, Warner Bros. reduced the budgets of Flynn's films. In November 1947 Flynn signed a 15-year contract with Warner Bros. for $225,000 per film. His income totaled $214,000 that year, and $200,000 in 1948.
After a cameo in Warner Bros.' It's a Great Feeling (1949), Flynn was borrowed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to appear in That Forsyte Woman (1949) which made $1.855 million in the U.S. and $1.842 million abroad which was the 11th-biggest hit of the year for MGM. He went on a three-month holiday then made two medium budget Westerns for Warners, Montana (1950), which made $2.1 million and was Warner Bros.' 5th-biggest movie of the year, and Rocky Mountain (1950), which made $1.7 million in the U.S. and was Warner Bros.' 9th-biggest movie of the year. He returned to MGM for Kim (1950), one of Flynn's most popular movies from this period, grossing $5.348 million ($2.896 million in the U.S. plus $2.452 million abroad) making it MGM's 5th-biggest movie of the year and 11th biggest overall for Hollywood. It was shot partly in India. On his way home he shot some scenes for a film he produced, Hello God (1951), directed by William Marshall; it was never released. For many years this was considered a lost film, but in 2013 a copy was discovered in the basement of the surrogate court of New York City. Two of seven cans of the movie had deteriorated beyond hope, but five survived and are at the George Eastman House film archive for restoration.
Flynn wrote and co-produced his next film, the low-budget Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951), directed by Marshall and shot in France. (Flynn wrote articles, novels and scripts but never had the discipline to turn it into a full time career. Flynn wound up suing Marshall in court over both movies.
For Warners he appeared in an adventure tale set in the Philippines, Mara Maru (1952). That studio released a documentary of a 1946 voyage he had taken on his yacht, Cruise of the Zaca (1952). In August 1951 he signed a one-picture deal to make a movie for Universal, in exchange for a percentage of the profits: this was Against All Flags (1952), a popular swashbuckler. As early as 1952 he had been seriously ill with hepatitis resulting in liver damage.[80] In England, he made another swashbuckler for Warners, The Master of Ballantrae (1953). After that Warners ended their contract with him and their association that had lasted for 18 years and 35 films.
Flynn relocated his career to Europe. He made a swashbuckler in Italy, Crossed Swords (1954). This inspired him to produce a similar movie in that country, The Story of William Tell (1954), directed by Jack Cardiff with Flynn in the title role. The movie fell apart during production and ruined Flynn financially. Desperate for money, he accepted an offer from Herbert Wilcox to support Anna Neagle in a British musical, Lilacs in the Spring (1954). Also shot in Britain was The Dark Avenger (1955), for Allied Artists, in which Flynn played Edward, the Black Prince. Wilcox used him with Neagle again, in King's Rhapsody (1955), but it was not a success, ending plans for further Wilcox-Flynn collaborations. In 1956 he presented and sometimes performed in the television anthology series The Errol Flynn Theatre that was filmed in Britain.
Flynn received an offer to make his first Hollywood film in five years: Istanbul (1957), for Universal. He made a thriller shot in Cuba, The Big Boodle (1957), then had his best role in a long time in the blockbuster The Sun Also Rises (1957) for producer Darryl F. Zanuck which made $3 million in the U.S.
Flynn's performance in the latter was well received and led to a series of roles where he played drunks. Warner Bros. cast him as John Barrymore in Too Much, Too Soon (1958), and Zanuck used him again in The Roots of Heaven which made $3 million (1958). He met with Stanley Kubrick to discuss a role in Lolita, but nothing came of it.
Flynn went to Cuba in late 1958 to film the self-produced B film Cuban Rebel Girls, where he met Fidel Castro and was initially an enthusiastic supporter of the Cuban Revolution. He wrote a series of newspaper and magazine articles for the New York Journal American and other publications documenting his time in Cuba with Castro. Flynn was the only journalist who happened to be with Castro the night Batista fled the country and Castro learned of his victory in the revolution. Many of these pieces were lost until 2009, when they were rediscovered in a collection at the University of Texas at Austin's Center for American History. He narrated a short film titled Cuban Story: The Truth About Fidel Castro Revolution (1959), his last-known work as an actor.
Flynn developed a reputation for womanising, hard drinking, chain smoking and, for a time in the 1940s, narcotics abuse. He was linked romantically with Lupe Vélez, Marlene Dietrich and Dolores del Río, among many others. Carole Lombard is said to have resisted his advances, but invited him to her extravagant parties. He was a regular attendee of William Randolph Hearst's equally lavish affairs at Hearst Castle, though he was once asked to leave after becoming excessively intoxicated.
The expression "in like Flynn" is said to have been coined to refer to the supreme ease with which he reputedly seduced women, but its origin is disputed. Flynn was reportedly fond of the expression and later claimed that he wanted to call his memoir In Like Me. (The publisher insisted on a more tasteful title, My Wicked, Wicked Ways.
Flynn had various mirrors and hiding places constructed inside his mansion, including an overhead trapdoor above a guest bedroom for surreptitious viewing. Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood toured the house as a prospective buyer in the 1970s, and reported, "Errol had two-way mirrors... speaker systems in the ladies' room. Not for security. Just that he was an A-1 voyeur." In March 1955, the popular Hollywood gossip magazine Confidential ran a salacious article titled "The Greatest Show in Town... Errol Flynn and His Two-Way Mirror!" In her 1966 biography, actress Hedy Lamarr wrote, "Many of the bathrooms have peepholes or ceilings with squares of opaque glass through which you can't see out but someone can see in."
He had a Schnauzer dog, named Arno, which was specially trained to protect Flynn. They went together to premieres, parties, restaurants and clubs, until the dog's death in 1941. On 15 June 1938 Arno badly bit Bette Davis on the ankle in a scene where she struck Flynn.
Flynn was married three times: to actress Lili Damita from 1935 until 1942 (one son, Sean Flynn, 1941 – c. June 1971); to Nora Eddington from 1943 to 1949 (two daughters, Deirdre, born 1945, and Rory, born 1947); and to actress Patrice Wymore from 1950 until his death (one daughter, Arnella Roma, 1953–1998). Errol is the grandfather to actor Sean Flynn (via Rory), who starred in Zoey 101.
While Flynn acknowledged his personal attraction to Olivia de Havilland, assertions by film historians that they were romantically involved during the filming of Robin Hood[97] were denied by de Havilland. "Yes, we did fall in love and I believe that this is evident in the screen chemistry between us," she told an interviewer in 2009. "But his circumstances [Flynn's marriage to Damita] at the time prevented the relationship going further. I have not talked about it a great deal but the relationship was not consummated. Chemistry was there though. It was there."
After quitting Hollywood, Flynn lived with Wymore in Port Antonio, Jamaica in the early 1950s. He was largely responsible for developing tourism to this area and for a while owned the Titchfield Hotel which was decorated by the artist Olga Lehmann. He popularised trips down rivers on bamboo rafts.
His only son, Sean (born 31 May 1941), was an actor and war correspondent. He and his colleague Dana Stone disappeared in Cambodia in April 1970 during the Vietnam War, while both were working as freelance photojournalists for Time magazine. Neither man's body has ever been found; it is generally assumed that they were killed by Khmer Rouge guerrillas in 1970 or 1971.
After a decade-long search financed by his mother, Sean was officially declared dead in 1984. Sean's life is recounted in the book Inherited Risk: Errol and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam.
By 1959, Flynn's financial difficulties had become so serious that he flew to Vancouver, British Columbia on 9 October to negotiate the lease of his yacht Zaca to the businessman George Caldough. As Caldough was driving Flynn and the 17-year-old actress Beverly Aadland, who had accompanied him on the trip, to the airport on 14 October for a Los Angeles-bound flight, Flynn began complaining of severe pain in his back and legs. Caldough transported him to the residence of a doctor, Grant Gould, who noted that Flynn had considerable difficulty navigating the building's stairway. Gould, assuming that the pain was due to degenerative disc disease and spinal osteoarthritis, administered 50 milligrams of demerol intravenously. As Flynn's discomfort diminished, he "reminisced at great length about his past experiences" to those present. He refused a drink when offered it.
Gould then performed a leg massage in the apartment's bedroom and advised Flynn to rest there before resuming his journey. Flynn responded that he felt "ever so much better." After 20 minutes Aadland checked on Flynn and discovered him unresponsive. Despite immediate emergency medical treatment from Gould and a swift transferral by ambulance to Vancouver General Hospital, he did not regain consciousness and was pronounced dead that evening. The coroner's report and the death certificate noted the cause of death as myocardial infarction due to coronary thrombosis and coronary atherosclerosis, with fatty degeneration of liver and portal cirrhosis of the liver significant enough to be listed as contributing factors. Flynn was survived by both his parents.
Flynn was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California, a place he once remarked that he hated.
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(Not So) Safe in Hell: The Working Class Heroines of Pre-Code Hollywood
 By Heather Babcock, copyright 2018
Like many women, I was inspired and empowered by the Me Too movement but it also brought back a lot of painful memories. Most of us have probably encountered a "Harvey Weinstein" at some point in our professional lives - I know I have. This type of sexual predator lurks not only in Hollywood but in any environment where there is a power imbalance, which is most workplaces. So whether you are a waitress, a poet, a sales clerk or an administrative assistant, you learn to acquiesce. You learn quickly not to say anything because he's "the boss", "the big cheese" or he's friends with so-and-so who is "really important" and besides, maybe you totally misunderstood and who do you think YOU are anyway?! So you shut up and the silence strangles you. People like Harvey Weinstein do what they do because they know they can do it - they know that we live in a society that values money and status above kindness and integrity. They believe that their wealth and position entitles them to do what they want to whomever they want and what is worse they know the people around them believe this too.
Today, the working class and the working poor rarely see their lives represented on the big screen but this was not always the case. As I have stated here before, during Hollywood’s Pre-Code period (1930-1934), movies that came out of the Warner Brothers studio catered to a working-class audience. For a brief moment in time blue collar workers, taxi drivers, waitresses, maids and the unemployed could see images of themselves up on the silver screen. It is therefore not surprising that many of these films addressed sexual harassment in the workplace with a bluntness and honesty that is rarely seen in the movies today. (It must be noted that, according to author David Thomson in his brilliant book Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio (2017), Harry Warner rebuked actors who sexually harassed secretaries.)
“I related to shop girls and chorus girls, just ordinary gals who were hoping,” said Joan Blondell, one of Warner Brothers’ most prolific stars. “I would get endless fan mail from girls saying ‘that is exactly what I would have done, if I’d been in your shoes, you did exactly the right thing.’”**
Blondell plays a hotel maid in the romantic comedy/crime drama Blonde Crazy (1931). In one scene, a lecherous salesman asks for towels and then tries to grab her. Blondell pushes him away and angrily stuffs his merchandise – the pearls of a broken necklace – down the back of his pants. She gives him a swift sucker-punch in the butt before bolting from the room. Although the scene is played for laughs – and the laughs are at the salesman, not Blondell – her character’s frustration is palpable.
Workplace sexual harassment is presented with much more gravity in William A. Wellman’s Night Nurse (1931). In the film, the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck portrays an idealistic rookie nurse who discovers that the children she has been hired to take care of are being starved to death by their alcoholic mother’s lover (played by a young Clark Gable). The police and the head doctor refuse to help her so she must save the children on her own – with a little help from the friendly neighborhood bootlegger (Ben Lyon). Night Nurse (1931) is the epitome of Pre-Code Hollywood and illustrative of the cynicism that many Americans were feeling at the time toward authority figures and Prohibition (the bootlegger saves the day!). But it also serves as an example of the real life violence and harassment that nurses and Personal Support Workers (PSWs) experience on a daily basis (today, Stanwyck’s character would probably be called a PSW rather than a nurse). In one scene, a friend of her wealthy employer grabs and forcibly kisses her. In another, Gable’s character literally twists her arm and then punches her. For most of the film, her nurse uniform invites both ridicule and sexual come-ons. If you think that incidents like these only happened in the 1930s or in the movies, think again. In 2017, an Ontario Council of Hospital Unions poll found that 68% of nurses and PSWs across Ontario had experienced physical violence on the job at least once during the year and that 42% had experienced sexual harassment and assault. And those were just the incidents that were reported. Watching Night Nurse (1931), I had the sinking feeling that many nurses and PSWs today would sadly relate to the violence and harassment faced by Stanwyck’s character. Night Nurse (1931) was released eighty-seven years ago – when was the last time you saw a Hollywood movie about a Personal Support Worker?
Other Warner Brothers’ movies attempted to turn the tables on the sexual harassment faced by working class women. In Baby Face (1933), Stanwyck plays an impoverished young woman who, sick of being used sexually by men, decides instead to use men “to get what she wants”: namely, sleeping her way up the corporate ladder of a bank (literally “screwing” the bank – Depression era audiences must have really gotten a kick out of that!). Female (1933) took it one step further: in this delightful film, Ruth Chatterton portrays Alison Drake, an intelligent, no-nonsense woman who is the president of an automobile factory. However Alison is not all work and no play: by day, she is all business but by night she slinks around her apartment in a skimpy gown, serving vodka to her suitors (many of whom are her employees) to “fortify their courage”. Her seduction technique involves playing the music from Footlight Parade (1933) on the Victrola and tossing a silk pillow onto the floor. “I decided to travel the same open road that men do,” she candidly tells a friend. When asked whether she’d ever like to settle down and find a husband, she replies “I’d rather have a canary.”
While the shop girls and secretaries who came out to see these films in droves may have smiled and thrilled to the exploits of Joan Blondell, Barbara Stanwyck and Ruth Chatterton, most knew that they themselves would never get away with socking the jaw of a lecherous boss or breaking a bottle over the head of a grabby customer. At best, they would get fired. At worst they would end up in prison. Either way, they would be at risk of never working again. This reality is illustrated in William A. Wellman’s Safe in Hell (1931), a precursor to film noir. In this haunting film, Dorothy Mackaill plays a woman who is fired from her job as a housekeeper after her employer’s wife walks in on him raping her (this story is told by Mackaill’s character months after the assault and she never uses the word “rape”, although it is strongly implied; “rape” was considered a taboo word in the 1930s). Blackballed from finding another reputable job, Mackaill is forced to turn to prostitution.  Although she never worked as a prostitute, my great-grandmother Nellie probably could have related to Gilda, Mackaill’s character in the film. Like Gilda, Nellie worked as a “domestic servant”. Newly widowed in the early 1920s and needing to find employment in order to regain custody of her children who had been put in an orphanage, Nellie answered an ad in the Globe to work as a housekeeper for a farmer. She quickly learned that in addition to cooking and cleaning, the farmer expected her to perform “wifely duties”. Afraid of losing her children again, she acquiesced. In 1928, Nellie was found dead in the field outside of the farmer’s home: the coroner listed the primary cause of her death as suicide from poison.
Whenever I watch Safe in Hell (1931), I think of my great-grandmother Nellie and of all the working class heroines like her, whose stories were spoken in whispers - or never told at all.
Copyright Heather Babcock, 2018
** Note: Joan Blondell quote is from David Thomson’s book Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio (2017)
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The Philadelphia Inquirer - September 11, 1977
“Even Their Warts Are Appealing”
A review of Arthur H. Lewis’ “Those Philadelphia Kellys... With a Touch of Grace” by Kiki Olson
So long, Rona Barrett... ciao Suzy Knickerbocker... catch you later, Larry Fields. In his latest book, "Those Philadelphia Kellys... with a Touch of Grace," Arthur H. Lewis out-dishes you all in his saga of a local family that counts among its members millionaires, sports heroes, politicians, movie stars, playwrights, comics, derelicts, homosexuals, and princes.
The fact that Lewis is a kindly, avuncular septuagenarian, who admittedly doesn't stay up later than 10 p.m., has not stood in the way of his writing a book chock-full of juicy gossip about the Kellys and the fast folk they careen around with.
He supplies information we've all wondered about at one time or another - tidbits like the state of Grace's virginity when she married Prince Rainier; the "other women" in John B. Kelly's life; the real "other woman" in John B. Kelly's life; the Kelly family reaction to brother George's lifelong "friend and companion," William Weagly; what is really lurking 'neath the pantyhose of Rachael Harlow, a companion of Kell's (Jack Jr.) and this city's most toasted transsexual; who really ran the show at the Kelly manse and how she put the kabosh on her son's bid for the mayoralty, and whether Jack really prefers blondes and how some of them rate him as an escort. There's even a crunchy chapter headed "There's Never Been a Good Kelly Marriage."
The photographs that punctuate each of the 34 chapters show a family so uniformly handsome that one would suspect that they had been cloned.
When looking at the group, "normal" hardly seems an operative word.
What normal, poverty-stricken family immigrates from Ireland in the late 1800s and without much education beyond mill-working produces sons who become millionaires, sports and political figures, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights and vaudeville and motion picture stars? Then follows a generation where one goes on to become an Academy Award winner and a princess, and her brother is acknowledged as probably "the most widely known amateur sports figure in the world today."
Normal like the Kennedys, maybe, and a comparison between the two families is inevitable. They're Irish, they're rich, they're attractive, they're political and they've got to win.
Besides interviewing the Kellys themselves, Lewis has gathered material from such local archivists as Stanley Greene, Harry Jay Katz, and Jack E. Edelstein and from West Coasters Dore Schary and Joan Blondell.
Although he opens his book by saying that "it's not easy to be objective about the Kellys since you keep falling in love with them," he has hardly written a book that is gushing with their virtues. He all but refers to Grace as a shill for "the suckers who lose their dough on Monte Carlo's green felt tables," to John B. Kelly as a generous "helluva fellow" who could also be a helluva freeloader as well, and to Kell, who even after all that exercising and all those beautiful women has had his bad times, too. Lewis' chapter on the meeting with Kell's wife, Mary (they've been estranged for nine years), has a wistfulness I can only recall in Francoise Sagan's early novels.
For anyone who has felt the slightest pang of envy for the people born into a family where wealth, beauty, honor and acclaim seem to come so easily, reading this book may be a harmless romp through the land of Schadenfreude - that perspicacious German word expressing "taking joy in the sorrows of others."
Find out why Grace cried a lot and called her friends cross-Atlantic from her pretty Mediterranean palace. Discover why John B's nephew, George, who was a champion pool player, died in a Race Street flophouse. Take a gander at John B. Kelly's last will and testament. Look to see if you're one of the many Philadelphians mentioned in the book. In other words, read all about it.
Ironically, the book ends with a full-page photo of Princess Caroline splashing in the surf in a brief bikini. Since she's the Kelly offspring getting the most ink these days, I'm sure it would be of great interest to his readers if Lewis would spill all he knows about this Philippe Junot fellow.
Kiki Olson is a Philadelphia freelance writer.
SOURCE: Newspapers.com
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I watched some movies
This week I watched “Dinner at Eight” and “The Public Enemy,” two films starring Jean Harlow. Last week I saw “Grand Hotel,” which, like “Dinner at Eight” had John & Lionel Barrymore in the cast. One of my favorite things about Hollywood films is the recurring cast members. Since the studio system relied on stables of talent, watching multiple films with the same stars inevitably means seeing the same supporting cast as well, like the ubiquitous Walter Connolly.
The Public Enemy (1931)
This is the outlier here, since I seldom watch gangster pictures. There’s not much to say beyond praise for Cagney’s performance, which outshines all others for subtlety and gravity. I enjoyed seeing Joan Blondell’s smiling face, having last seen her twenty-six years later in Desk Set (1957) as Katherine Hepburn’s sidekick. My favorite performance belonged to Robert O’Connor as the gangster Paddy Ryan. He stole the scene, even from Cagney, and did most of the plot work. The greatest shock to me came not from the films violence, but from the fact that Cagney’s character is raped in the third act, precipitating his best friend’s death, which leads him into a suicidal rampage. It’s a quiet scene, but still resonates.
As to Jean Harlow’s performance, this was her breakout year. She has a small, substantial role, but doesn’t do much with it. I saw Dinner at Eight first, and so expected more. Maybe she did more in Platinum Blonde (1931) to earn icon status.
Grand Hotel (1932)
I initially wanted to see this to watch Greta Garbo, but by the time I got to watch it I’d already seen Twentieth Century, which sold me on John Barrymore. His turn here has so much of the subtlety and rakishness that he would bring to that later film, but here he’s more romantic than comedic lead. He sells his sudden shift from Joan Crawford to Garbo, and I was shocked and saddened at his character’s fate. It surprises me that Crawford was only a year younger than Garbo. 
Garbo totally sells her “vant to be alone” world-weariness, and had me convinced that she was a better romantic fit for Barrymore’s cynical, selfish thief. Both women are twenty years younger than Barrymore, but that’s Hollywood. Somehow Barrymore seemed appropriate for either women, but Wallace Beery (three years younger than Barrymore) had a horrific, rapacious lean in all his scenes with Crawford. Their relationship contains all the quiet power politics of abusive relationships.
Dinner at Eight (1933)
It’s incredible to me that in between his masterful romantic turn in Grand Hotel and his outrageously funny performance in Twentieth Century John Barrymore made Dinner at Eight. Here he seems to be method acting his role as a washed up alcoholic. I kept waiting for him to charm, but his character only offers sadness. This isn’t bad, but it wasn’t what I expected. At the end of the film, I had one thought. This is a comedy? By the end, almost no one gets what they wanted. Lionel Barrymore (as charming here as in Grand Hotel) will still die shortly, leaving his wife destitute. Their daughter will marry a man she doesn’t love because Barrymore has killed himself. The doctor will go back to cheating on his wife, eventually. And Wallace Beery will not take over the Jordan Line.
Only Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler succeed in their quests. Harlow’s performance here far outshines the earlier film I’d seen her in. These are similar scenes: she’s in a bedroom trying to master a difficult man. Here, she totally controls Wallace Beery’s character, and it’s charming and triumphant. But Marie Dressler stole the film in every scene she’s in, totally earning her top billing. I cannot praise her performance enough. Hilarious, charming, delightful in every scene.
I’ll save Twentieth Century (my favorite Barrymore performance and one of my favorite films) and Nothing Sacred until after I’ve watched To Be or Not to Be and focus the post on Carol Lombard.
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NIGHTMARE ALLEY [1947]
WATCH ONLINE >> Nightmare Alley [1947] www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=F9A4C226B31C2373 ****
Nightmare Alley [1947] @ American Film Institute Production Date: 19 May–late Jul 1947; addl scenes early Oct 1947 Premiere Information: New York opening: 9 Oct 1947 >> DETAILED NOTES SECTION >> EXTENSIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY www.afi.com/members/catalog/DetailView.aspx?s=&Movie=… *************************************************************************************
NIGHTMARE ALLEY By WILLIAM LINDSAY GRESHAM New York: Rinehart, 1946 MOVIE Tie-In Edition: Triangle Books, 1947 N.Y.: Signet Books, 1949 #738 – Cover By James Avati N.Y.R.B.: 2110
*ALL* Editions – Including KINDLE www.amazon.com/Nightmare-Alley-William-Lindsay-Gresham/dp… AND www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Gresham&tn=… AND www.goodreads.com/book/show/548019.Nightmare_Alley *************
MOVIE Tie-In Edition: Triangle Books, 1947 www.amazon.com/Nightmare-alley-William-Lindsay-Gresham/dp… ****
NEW Edition (New York Review Books, 2110): Nightmare Alley By William Lindsay Gresham, introduction by Nick Tosches – *Links* to buy www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/nightmare-alley/ AND www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781590173480 ****
Cult classic ‘Nightmare Alley’ resurfaces more macabre than ever Baltimore-born writer William Lindsay Gresham could be seen as an heir to Edgar Allan Poe By Michael Sragow, The Baltimore Sun – [email protected] articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-04-16/services/bs-ae-night…
" It’s time for Baltimore to claim William Lindsay Gresham as one of the city’s literary native sons and a proper heir to Edgar Allan Poe — and not just because he was born here in 1909. He fits the funk-art aspect of this town as well as James M. Cain or John Waters…
…"Nightmare Alley" is about a geek — but the word means something vastly different in the carnival of this novel than it does in teen comedies, where it serves as a synonym for "nerd. " For the denizens of Gresham’s not-so-greatest show on earth, the geek is, in Tosches’ words, "a drunkard driven so low that he would bite the heads off chickens and snakes just to get the booze he needed."
Gresham first heard about this kind of geek when he was 29 years old, waiting to return to the U.S. after defending the Republic in the Spanish civil war. The story connected so deeply with Gresham’s internal agony that he said, "to get rid of it, I had to write it out."…
He later described the novel’s gestation as "years of analysis, editorial work, and the strain of children in small rooms." He alleviated anxieties with liquor — and became an alcoholic. In the middle of this chaos, he wrote a fictional chart of the lowest depths of drunkenness that also included, in Tosches’ estimation, "the most viciously evil psychologist in the history of literature." Along the way, Gresham managed to debunk feel-good spiritualism and pseudo-paranormal trickery. But the book isn’t an Upton Sinclair-like expose. It’s a lowdown American tragedy…
Tosches, who has been researching Gresham’s life on and off for ten years, says over the phone from New York that he’s clearer on the novel’s roots than he is on Gresham’s. He hasn’t located a marriage certificate for Gresham’s mother and father, "and the Maryland State Archives has stated categorically there isn’t one for them." He knows Gresham was born on McCulloh Street and that his family moved to Fall River, Mass., when he was 7, and then to New York City. "But even though he left Baltimore at an early age, he claimed that the strongest influence on his life was his mother’s mother, Amanda, whose family, the Lindsays, came from Snow Hill, and who embodied, at least to him, the spirit of the antebellum South," says Tosches. (The Greshams came from the Piney Neck area of Kent County.)..
Everything in the book emerges from observation and authentic obsession. "He had a wonderfully perverse mind," recalls his last agent, the legendary Carl Brandt. "I remember with great fondness and amusement that he took me out to lunch once with the Witch Doctor’s Club, a group of magicians who would meet, as I remember, monthly, in a hardly glamorous restaurant." Brandt’s father had been Gresham’s magazine agent, and Brandt thinks the drying-up of the once-lucrative magazine-fiction market partly contributed to Gresham’s growing despair.
In the end, Gresham shared Stan Carlisle’s nightmare vision of life as a dark alley, "the buildings vacant and menacing on either side," and a light he couldn’t reach at the end of it, with "something behind him, close behind him, getting closer until he woke up trembling." Tosches found "a bizarre letter" Gresham wrote a few years before his suicide. "In it he wrote: ‘Stan is the author.’ "… articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-04-16/services/bs-ae-night… ****
REVIEW By Michael Dirda @ washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/12/…
" While I’ve known for a long time that William Lindsay Gresham’s "Nightmare Alley" (1946) was an established classic of noir fiction, I was utterly unprepared for its raw, Dostoevskian power. Why isn’t this book on reading lists with Nathanael West’s "Miss Lonelyhearts" and Albert Camus’ "The Stranger"? It’s not often that a novel leaves a weathered and jaded reviewer like myself utterly flattened, but this one did…
In the opening pages, set in the dilapidated Ten-in-One "carny," handsome blond Stan Carlisle stares at a geek, a supposed wild man who bites the heads off live chickens and drinks their blood. Stan, we soon learn, has been working as a magician and sleight-of-hand artist, but he’s got dreams about the big time…
Throughout these early pages, the carny atmosphere is redolent of sweat, dust, alcohol and pent-up desire. While sex in "Nightmare Alley" is never graphically described, it is always strikingly perverse or distinctly sadomasochistic…
Like many good artists (and con artists), Gresham isn’t locked into a single style: He can swiftly modulate from the colorfully vulgar conversation of the carnies to their smooth, stage-show patter, from the professional lingo of sheriffs, psychologists and wealthy businessmen to a drunk’s hallucinatory stream of consciousness…
Gresham lived a colorful if troubled life. According to the biographical note to this edition, he "lost himself in a maze of what proved to be dead-ends for him, from Marxism to psychoanalysis to Christianity to Alcoholics Anonymous to Rinzai Zen Buddhism." All these contribute to the earthy richness of "Nightmare Alley." ..
Certainly, Gresham’s book chronicles a truly horrific descent into the abyss. Yet it’s more than just a steamy noir classic. As a portrait of the human condition, "Nightmare Alley" is a creepy, all-too-harrowing masterpiece…" www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/12/…
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The Book You Have to Read: “Nightmare Alley,” by William Lindsay Gresham The Rap Sheet
" If noir is the stuff of nightmares–you know what I mean, the kind in which (according to the popular conference definition of the genre) you’re fucked from page one–then a one-off, nearly forgotten classic called Nightmare Alley is surely the biggest freak show of them all…
…Gresham’s book is sumptuous, rich, redolent, and literary. Fused with a classically tragic structure, the plot and characters roil and roll in your head, guests who will never leave. In some ways, it’s a bitter, cynical take on the Horatio Alger myth, a commentary on the Americans America left behind…
…In 1947, Nightmare Alley was fortunate enough to be made into one of the greatest of all film noirs. Starring a terrific Tyrone Power (if you don’t think he could act, you’re in for a surprise) and a strong supporting cast which included the lovely ingénue Colleen Gray, Joan Blondell, and noir stalwarts Mike Mazurki and Helen Walker, the movie is available on DVD. Rent it soon and often, or better yet buy a copy. With a crackling good script by Jules Furthman (The Shanghai Gesture, The Big Sleep), and atmospherically directed by Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel, The Old Maid–we can only wish he’d been given more crime films), Nightmare Alley is a rare example of a movie almost as good as its source material…" therapsheet.blogspot.com/2009/11/book-you-have-to-read-ni… *************************************************
Carnival of lost souls: Nightmare Alley REVIEW By JB @ thephantomcountry
Nightmare Alley covers a lot of territory, both psychologically and geographically, crossing the US by truck, train, car, and on foot until Stan’s world seems not larger but smaller, shrinking to a blackened point. His carnival experience comes full circle, like the embrace of a family whose door always remains forbiddingly open, and some of Gresham’s finest passages evoke for us this family on the move, seductive and grotesque and leaving only cavities in its wake: “It came like a pillar of fire by night, bringing excitement and new things into the drowsy towns—lights and noise and a chance to win an Indian blanket, to ride on the ferris wheel, to see the wild-man who fondles those rep-tiles as a mother would fondle her babes. Then it vanished in the night, leaving the trodden grass of the field and the debris of popcorn boxes and rusting tin ice-cream spoons to show where it had been.” thephantomcountry.blogspot.com/2010_05_01_archive.html
William Lindsay Gresham (August 20, 1909–September 14, 1962) @ Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lindsay_Gresham AND en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley *******************************
Fox Studio Classics – Film Noir – Nightmare Alley – Point Of View williamlindsaygresham.com/
The film Nightmare Alley laid in copyright limbo for over fifty years, a struggle between the estates of producer George Jessel, author W.L. Gresham and the 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. In that time, its cult status continued to grow. Not just from the rarity of its screenings on television and at film festivals, but from the later suicides of the book’s author and the movie’s director, and its remarkably grim, bold, and disturbing look at hucksterism and its milieu.
It was 1946 and Tyrone Power, Fox’s leading male star, had returned from service in World War II. From an acting family and a stage background, he had grown tired of the empty “pretty boy” image that had made him a matinee idol. He wanted a different role. One that would showcase his range and depth and change the public’s (and industry’s) perception of him from a toothpaste ad to a serious actor. He had leaned toward that end with his first post-war duty role by playing Larry Darrell in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.
Power leveraged his past success (and the considerable money he made for the studio) to make Nightmare Alley his prestige project. Studio Head Daryl F. Zanuck was against it from the start but he owed Power gratitude and a bit of artistic license so he green-lighted the film. Ultimately, Zanuck’s instincts would prove correct (as they so often did). The film failed miserably at the box office and Power ended up returning to the adventurous, swashbuckling roles that had made him famous. Interestingly, many of 20th Century Fox’s most unique and enduring pictures were made in this vein, by a proven film artist’s passionate plea and Zanuck’s begrudging nod.
War weary audiences of the late ’40s were not ready for it. Although film noir was seeping into the mainstream, an “A” picture starring the dashing and overwhelmingly handsome Tyrone Power as a greedy, manipulative charlatan was too much for them. Adding to this shock was the story, adapted from a novel immersed in the sleazy world of carny, portraying the darker realities of alcoholism, marital infidelity, religion, spiritualism and ambition by an author who was a known communist, drunkard and wife beater. williamlindsaygresham.com/ ******************************
BOOKS INTO FILM: Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham reviewed by Jim Hitt www.booksintofilms.straitjacketsmagazine.com/support-file…
" In the world of noir novels, Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham stands apart as a totally originally and innovative piece of literature. As in most noir works, the protagonist Stan Carlisle is a flawed individual, and the world in which he lives is a dark world where predator and prey become one. But Gresham’s world is not the world of Cornell Woolrich where the events rush relentlessly toward the climax. On the contrary, the events in Nightmare Alley unfold in at a slower, more deliberate pace, and the construction of the novel is closer to William Faulkner than Cornell Woolrich…
…William Lindsay Gresham wrote only one more novel, the equally bleak Limbo Tower (1949) about Asa Kimball and other men slowly dying of fear, depression, and tuberculosis in hospital. He then fought his own battles against alcohol. His second wife Joy divorced him and taking their two sons, moved to England where she later married C. S. Lewis. Their relationship became the basis for the stage play and film Shadowlands . When in 1962 Gresham discovered he had cancer, he checked into the run-down Dixie Hotel, registering as ‘Asa Kimball,’ and took his own life…
…Just before he died, Gresham, reflecting on his life, told a fellow veteran from Spain, "I sometimes think that if I have any real talent it is not literary but is a sheer talent for survival. I have survived three busted marriages, losing my boys, war, tuberculosis, Marxism, alcoholism, neurosis and years of freelance writing. Just too mean and ornery to kill, I guess."…
…Print quality : An absolutely gorgeous print. I doubt it looked this good in the theaters when it was first released.
Sound : Sharp and clear.
Extras : A theatrical trailer that appears spliced together from various scenes rather than a true trailer. Also a commentary by film historians James Ursini and Alain Silver. The commentary sounds more like a conversation between two knowledgeable experts rather than a straight commentary, and this casual approach works very well. Their comments are insightful if not exactly spirited…
Summary : A terrific film noir, one of the best. Off beat in the sense that it foregoes crimes and violence, which is at the center of most noir films. The characters are full of life and always interesting. Only the part of Molly rings a bit false, especially considering the ill-advised end, which does little to affect the gritty and honest movie. Time has vindicated Tyrone Power’s faith in this material.
Grade: A- www.booksintofilms.straitjacketsmagazine.com/support-file… *********************************************************************
Nightmare Alley: Faustian Carnival Noir: The rise and fall: From Divinity to Geek REVIEW By monstergirl @ The Last Drive In MANY Dozens of Screencaps monstergirl.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/nightmare-alleyfaust… *****************
Nightmare Alley (film and stage musical) Understanding Screenwriting #46 BY TOM STEMPEL @ slantmagazine.com
The best article on Nightmare Alley is by Clive T. Miller and appears in the 1975 book "Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System"… www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010/05/understanding-screenw… ************************************************************
Mister, I was made for it A region 2 DVD review of NIGHTMARE ALLEY by Slarek www.dvdoutsider.co.uk/dvd/reviews/n/nightmare_alley.html
SUMMARY Let’s not sod about, Nightmare Alley is a terrific film noir, a joyously dark story of a destructive and ultimately self-destructive ambition in which just about everyone is attempting to manipulate others for their own ends. It’s cult status was built in part on its long term unavailability, but can now continue on the back of the film’s cinematic strengths, which are considerable.
Eureka’s Masters of Cinema label does the film proud, with a superb transfer and some very worthwhile extras. Noir fans should run to get their hands on it. " www.dvdoutsider.co.uk/dvd/reviews/n/nightmare_alley.html ******************************************************
William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley Tarot: Carnival Trumps Tarot Hermeneutics: Exploring How We Create Meaning with Tarot
William Lindsay Gresham, Joy Davidman Gresham (poetry pseudonym: "Joy Brown"), and C.S. Lewis
***UNUSUAL***, Detailed, Worthwhile tarothermeneutics.com/tarotliterature/nightmarealley.html *****************************************************
LISTEN >> Naxos Audiobooks "Nightmare Alley" Read by : Adam Sims ISBN: 1843794829 ISBN-13: 9781843794820 Format: CD – Search for other formats www.audiobooksdirect.com.au/William-Lindsay-Gresham/Night… ***********************************************
GRAPHIC NOVEL [= Comic Books for Literary types] Nightmare Alley: Spain Hernandez’s graphic adaptation of the William Lindsay Gresham novel *Links* to Buy >> www.indiebound.org/book/9781560975113?aff=sfnybal
"…Spain Hernandez’s graphic adaptation of Nightmare Alley is at least as successful as its predecessor versions. The artwork is black and white; sometimes cartoony, sometimes realistic. Close-up character studies alternate with splash pages and occasional landscape shots so well done that they resemble woodcuts. Hernandez’s story-line follows Gresham’s novel closely; I don’t recall any major scenes or sequences being left out. He does not stint on quoting Gresham’s dialogue; his word balloons are as packed as any I have ever seen. The story of Stan Carlyle’s rise and fall is as compelling in graphic novel form as it was in earlier versions.
Nightmare Alley is an important work of American crime fiction; it is perhaps unique in that memorable versions of the story are now available in three different media." www.crimeculture.com/21stC/fried.html **************************************
Gresham, William Lindsay (1909-1962) | Wheaton College Archives & Special Collections archon.wheaton.edu/index.php?p=creators/creator&id=77
Location: Archon Send Email | Wheaton College Archives & Special Collections archon.wheaton.edu/index.php?p=core/contact&f=email&a… ****************************************************
Posted by mhdantholz on 2011-02-20 12:09:24
Tagged: , NIGHTMARE , ALLEY , [1947]
The post NIGHTMARE ALLEY [1947] appeared first on Good Info.
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papermoonloveslucy · 4 years
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MARILYN MONROE
June 1, 1926 - August 4, 1962
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Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane Mortenson) was an actress, model, and singer. Famous for playing comedic "blonde bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s and was emblematic of the era's changing attitudes towards sexuality. She was a top-billed actress for only a decade, but her films grossed $200 million by the time of her death in 1962. More than half a century later, she continues to be a major popular culture icon.
"When I was five I think, that's when I started wanting to be an actress. I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. When I heard that this was acting, I said that's what I want to be. Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I'd sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it.” ~ Marilyn Monroe,1962
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Lucille Ball never worked with Marilyn Monroe, but meet her in 1953 at Ciro’s Nightclub on Sunset Strip, along with Betty Grable, and Red Skelton. Monroe’s immense popularity permeated Ball’s work none-the-less. 
At the start of “Changing the Boys’ Wardrobe” (ILL S3;E10) the gang is heading to the movies to see “That picture we’ve been trying to get to for weeks with Marilyn Monroe.” The movie is likely Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which premiered in New York City in July 1953. On November 5, 1953, the same day the episode was filmed, Monroe’s new film How to Marry a Millionaire was released in the US. 
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The November 1953 cover of TV and Movie Screen Magazine saw Lucy (in “The Camping Trip”) and Marilyn wearing the dress she wore on the May 1953 cover of Life Magazine promoting Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. 
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Also on November 5, 1953, the town of Monroe, New York (60 miles from New York City) was temporarily renamed Marilyn Monroe.
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The film later inspired much of the plot of “Second Honeymoon” (S5;E14), Lucy’s failed attempt to make their transatlantic crossing to Europe more than just a working vacation.    
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Monroe’s dinner companion turns out to be a seven year-old boy, just like Lucy’s ping pong partner turns out to be young Kenneth Hamilton (Harvey Grant). 
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Lucy gets stuck in a porthole just as Monroe did, also draping a blanket around her shoulders so passersby wouldn’t know what was really going on.
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The idea for the burlap potato sack dresses in “Lucy Wants A Paris Gown” (ILL S5;E20) comes from Monroe’s real life. 
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In 1951 Marilyn Monroe took a series of high fashion photographs wearing a potato sack as a response to a journalist who said that she might look sexier in a burlap sack than her usual fashion choices. 
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Lucy first wore burlap at the end of “Mr. and Mrs. TV Show” (ILL S4;E24) as her scary version of a Phipps make-over.
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In “Ricky’s Movie Offer” (ILL S4;E5) Lucy and Ethel argue about who looks more like Marilyn Monroe. 
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While Lucy has the facial features, Ethel has the blonde hair. 
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Fred (hilariously) settles the argument!  
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In “Ricky’s Screen Test” (ILL S4;E7) a long list of Hollywood names are dropped in anticipation of hobnobbing with celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe. 
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In “Lucy and Harpo Marx” (ILL S4;E28) Lucy wonders if Ethel might pass for Monroe to a near-sighted Carolyn Appleby. After Ethel tries to walk like Marilyn Monroe, Lucy decides that “nobody is that near-sighted!” Fred says that he looks more like Marilyn than either of them! 
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In “Lucy and Superman” (ILL S6;E13), the Appleby’s come over for a social evening that Ethel calls “the bore war” because the couples only talk about their children. As the scene opens, Caroline is in mid-sentence talking about a Marilyn Monroe film.
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CAROLINE: “...and he picked up Marilyn Monroe, slung her over his shoulder and carried her off!”
Although the title is never mentioned, the film they are discussing is Bus Stop, starring Marilyn Monroe and Don Murray. It was released in August 1956, two and a half months before this episode was filmed.
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When “Lucy Does the Tango” (ILL S6;E20), she stuffs eggs down her blouse and Ethel stashes a some in her back pockets. Lucy tells her, “Whatever you do don’t try to walk like Marilyn Monroe,” but the ‘yolk’ is on Ethel when Fred suddenly enters through the kitchen door! 
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In “Lucy the Gun Moll” (TLS S4;E25), Lucy plays Lucy Carmichael and Rusty Martin. The name Rusty Martin was probably derived from Lucy’s hair color and the surname of Mary Martin, who introduced the song “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” (music and lyrics by Cole Porter) in the 1938 Broadway musical Leave It to Me. Marilyn Monroe sang it in the 1960 film Let’s Make Love.  In that same film, Harry Cheshire, who played Sam Johnson in “Oil Wells” (ILL S3;E18), played Monroe’s father. Jerry Hausner (Jerry, Ricky’s Agent) and Joan Banks (Reporter Eleanor Harris in “Fan Magazine Interview”) played uncredited supporting roles. 
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Lucy and Marilyn shared a leading man in handsome Keith Andes. Andes was Lucy’s male lead in Wildcat on Broadway, and later played was featured on three episodes of “The Lucy Show.”  
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In 1952, he played opposite Marilyn in Clash By Night, an RKO picture. 
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In “Lucy Gets Ricky on the Radio” (1952), the June 3, 1952 of Look Magazine actually had Lucille Ball and Marilyn Monroe on the cover!  Monroe was promoting Clash by Night, and Desi had written a feature on his wife for the magazine. So Marilyn actually did appear on “I Love Lucy” - if only in a still photo. 
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Some Like It Hot (1959) is arguably one of Marilyn Monroe’s most popular films. What does it have in common with Lucille Ball? In 1958, both Lucy and Monroe were depicted at San Diego’s famous Del Coronado Hotel. It is the hotel that the Ricardo’s and Mertzes stay at in “Lucy Goes to Mexico” (LDCH S2;E1) as well as the backdrop for much of the film. Although Desilu filmed establishing footage of the hotel, the cast stayed in Hollywood, while Monroe went on location (as seen above). In “Lucy Goes to a Hollywood Premiere” (TLS S4;E20), Mr. Mooney says he wouldn’t buy a second hand nightie if it had been worn by Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot.
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The Irving Berlin song “There’s No Business Like Show Business” was sung on “I Love Lucy” and “The Lucy Show.”  Although it was originally from the Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun (1946), it also served as the title and was performed (by Merman) in the Marilyn Monroe film There’s No Business Like Show Business in 1955. 
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In 1952, Marilyn co-starred by Richard Widmark (”The Tour” ILL S4;E30) in the film noir drama Don’t Bother To Knock. The film also featured “Lucy” players Lurene Tuttle (Fine Arts League President), Verna Felton (Mrs. Porter), Gloria Blondell (Grace Foster), as well as Harry Bartell, Olan Soule, Robert Foulke, and Bess Flowers.
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That same year, Monroe starred in We’re Not Married! opposite Lucy’s friend and former co-star Ginger Rogers, as well as Eve Arden (”Hollywood at Last!”), Paul Douglas (”Lucy Wants a Career”) and Eddie Bracken (Too Many Girls). 
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One of Monroe’s most iconic moments came in March 1962 when she sang “Happy Birthday” as a birthday present to President John F. Kennedy in a public birthday celebration also attended by Lucy’s friends and co-stars Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante, Henry Fonda, Danny Kaye, Shirley MacLaine and Elliott Reid. A year later, Lucy Carmichael also gave Kennedy a present, a sugar cube replica of the White House on “The Lucy Show” with Elliott Reid doing Kennedy’s offstage voice as well as playing a small on-camera role! 
"I never quite understood it, this sex symbol. I always thought symbols were those things you clash together! That's the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing. But if I'm going to be a symbol of something I'd rather have it sex than some other things they've got symbols of." ~ Marilyn Monroe, 1962
Monroe was married (and divorced) three times: 
James Dougherty, Merchant Marine & Policeman (1942-46) 
Joe DiMaggio, Baseball Player (1954-55)
Arthur Miller, Playwright (1956-61)
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In “Lucy is Enceinte” (ILL S2;E10), Fred gives Lucy a signed baseball for his future 'godson’. When he asks Lucy to read out the signature, she at first says “Spalding,” the ball’s brand name, but then finds it is signed by Joe DiMaggio.
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In “Ragtime Band” (ILL S6;E21), Little Ricky asks his Uncle Fred: 
LITTLE RICKY: “Who’s Joe 'Maggio?” FRED: “'Who’s Joe 'Maggio?’ You talk more like your father everyday.”
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In “Sales Resistance” (ILL S2;E17), Lucy compares herself to Willy Loman, the title character in Death of a Salesman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Arthur Miller first produced on Broadway in 1949 and made into an Oscar-nominated film in 1951.  
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Speaking of husbands, Desi Arnaz has something in common with Marilyn Monroe, too. Both of their souses were accused of being Communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s. Both Lucille and Arthur Miller were cleared of charges and their careers continued, although that was not true for many celebrities of the time. 
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Monroe died on August 4, 1962. The toxicology report showed that the cause of death was acute barbiturate poisoning. Empty medicine bottles were found next to her bed. The possibility that Monroe had accidentally overdosed was ruled out because the dosages found in her body were several times over the lethal limit.
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The character of Ginger, the movie star castaway on “Gilligan’s Island” (1964-67) was described during casting as a combination of Lucille Ball and Marilyn Monroe. Tina Louise had Lucy’s red (ginger) hair and Monroe’s shapely physique. The series also featured Natalie Schafer (Phoebe Emerson) as Mrs. Howell, and Alan Hale Jr. as the Skipper. Hale performed on “The Lucy Show” and “Here’s Lucy”. Series creator Sherwood Schwartz was a Lucy fan. His brother Elroy Schwartz actually wrote scripts for Lucille Ball. 
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In the 2013 web-series “Ryan & Ruby” both Lucille Ball and Marilyn Monroe are given special thanks for their inspiration. The last name of star and creator Ryan Burton's character is "Carmichael", the same as Ball's character on the "The Lucy Show". In Ryan’s kitchen there are fridge magnets with photos of both Lucy and Marilyn.  
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Lucy and Marilyn are street characters at Universal Studios theme parks, their iconic hair and costumes making them instantly recognizable.
The same day Marilyn Monroe was born in 1926, another Hollywood icon with connections to Lucille Ball was also born, Andy Griffith.  To read his birthday blog, click here! 
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londontheatre · 7 years
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The Make A Difference Trust is delighted to announce that following two triumphant years, Graham Norton will return as host of this year’s WEST END BARES: RUBY STRIPPERS at the Novello Theatre on Sunday 29 October at 7.00pm and 9.30pm.
The Make A Difference Trust is also thrilled to announce the first of Graham’s star co-hosts; Adam Garcia (The Exorcist, Murder on the Orient Express [2017], Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Tap Dogs, Saturday Night Fever, Coyote Ugly); Summer Strallen (Young Frankenstein, Love Never Dies, The Sound of Music, Hollyoaks); Dianne Pilkington (Young Frankenstein, Mamma Mia!, Wicked, Taboo); Tom Allen (Live At The Apollo, 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, Just A Minute); Celinde Schoenmaker (The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables) and Oliver Savile (Wicked, The Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables, Mamma Mia!). More celebrity guest hosts and West End stars to be announced soon.
[See image gallery at http://ift.tt/1FpwFUw]
  They will join the previously announced Olivier Award winning Rebecca Trehearn (Showboat, City of Angels, Ghost), who will open the show with a performance of an exclusive track especially written for the occasion by Mark Anderson (The Book Of Mormon, Legally Blonde) and Luke di Somma (That Bloody Woman [composer], 21 Chump Street).
Join the much-loved characters of Oz for an extraordinary night at WEST END BARES: RUBY STRIPPERS, which will see over 100 of the hottest performers from the West End stage take to the stage to combine the naughtiness of burlesque with the magic of the West End. All of the money raised will go to The Make A Difference Trust to fund HIV and AIDS projects that raise awareness, educate and provide care and support in the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Directed by David Grewcock with choreography from Fletcher Dobinson (Cats; West Side Story), Jaye Elster (Singin’ In The Rain; Half A Sixpence), Matt Gillett (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; Singin’ In The Rain; Jersey Boys; Top Hat), Tom Jackson Greaves (Nutcracker, Early Adventures and Sleeping Beauty with New Adventures; Secret Cinema; Kneehigh Theatre), Ashley Jordan-Packer (Cats; Thriller Live), Will Lucas (Cats; Wicked), Simone Mistry-Palmer (Motown; Dirty Dancing), Ashley Nottingham (Thoroughly Modern Millie; Dance Mums; Disaster!), Racky Plews (American Idiot; Footloose; Heaven on Earth), Aaron Renfree (X Factor; The Saturdays), Chris Whittaker (Blondel; Judy!), and James Wilson (Strictly Come Dancing; The Voice).
The Make A Difference Trust is a UK based charity with a vision of a world free from HIV and AIDS. Building on the legacy of 25 years of fundraising by the Theatre industry, they continue to make the vision a reality having distributed over £1.6million in grants to support individuals experiencing hardship across the UK as well as over £1million to support projects with their UK and international partners. For further information about the Make A Difference Trust please visit www.madtrust.org.uk
Tickets for WEST END BARES are now on sale and are priced at £15 – £100. Tickets are available from http://ift.tt/Oxronw or the DMT WEST END BARES booking line 0844 482 5172 and in person at the Novello Theatre Box Office. Booking fees apply and calls to Delfont Mackintosh Theatres 0844 numbers cost 7 pence per minute plus your phone company’s access charge.
West End Bares 2017: RUBY STRIPPERS!
WEST END BARES are proud to be partnering with 100 Wardour St for this year’s exclusive After Party where you can continue to celebrate with the cast of the show. Tickets cost £10 and are only available when you buy a ticket for the 7pm or 9.30pm show. Once again, there is limited availability for the After Party and when the tickets are gone, they’re gone – so don’t miss out! 100 Wardour St is split between a laid-back Bar & Lounge and chic Restaurant & Club, offering great food from midday right through until 2am with classic and contemporary cocktails. As befits the venues history as the site of London’s iconic Marquee Club where artists like David Bowie and The Rolling Stones performed, there are DJ’s and live music five nights a week.
Please note: All artists appear subject to availability.
http://ift.tt/VMg84P LondonTheatre1.com
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chiseler · 4 years
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JOAN BLONDELL: The Honest Con
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Every carny is the same: the same hicks milling around in overalls and print dresses, as trusting as cows; the same stalls and banners emblazoned with fat ladies and fire-eaters; the same bored cooch dancers listlessly gyrating their hips; the same pickpockets working the packed, sweaty crowd; the same atmosphere of hucksterism pervading everything as thickly as the smells of grease and popcorn and sawdust and cotton candy. The cacophony of spielers: Step right up! Move in closer, folks. The show is about to begin! Try your luck. Everybody wins a prize. Only a dime, ten cents, the tenth part of a dollar…
Every movie set in a carny opens the same way, with the camera elbowing through the midway, taking in the sights with a knowing eye. Sinner’s Holiday (1930), Joan Blondell’s first feature film, began this way, and so does the masterpiece of her later years, Nightmare Alley (1947). Here the camera glides over the crowd to find Blondell standing in the shadows at the back of her booth, surveying the scene. Her flowing robe, poised stillness and grave expression give her a hieratic air. Her eye is fixed on a handsome young roustabout in his undershirt, but her look is pensive rather than lustful. The wary, contained way she observes the world, and her calm unmannered presence, were with her from the beginning of her career, but here they have aged and deepened and mellowed like spirits.
She’s come a long way from Myrtle, the brassy photographer’s model of Sinner’s Holiday. Now she’s Zeena, a mind-reader, “the miracle woman of the ages” as her barker tells the gullible throng. Zeena’s act is pure hokum (she gathers questions from the audience, pretends to destroy them, and reads cues supplied by a hidden accomplice), presented with good-natured flim-flam that would fool only the most naïve. Off-stage, though, Zeena is a true believer in the Tarot, a woman of much deeper intuition and understanding than her gimcrack act suggests. Here Joan Blondell pulls off the same paradox that defined her greatest early roles in Blonde Crazy (1931) and Blondie Johnson (1932): in all these films she’s a con artist who makes her living off scams of one kind of another, yet who somehow remains fundamentally decent and even honest.
One of the links between pre-Code and film noir is their mutual obsession with dividing the world into chiselers and suckers, the wised-up and the chumps. Pre-Code movies, made at a time of mass disillusionment courtesy of the Depression, reveled in the exploits of con men, sharpies, hustlers, and maestros of ballyhoo. Films like the exhilarating James Cagney vehicle Hard to Handle (1933) depict a country where everyone is either on the make or being taken. “The public is like a cow, bellowing, bellowing to be milked,” Cagney declares, echoing his speech to Blondell in Blonde Crazy about the “age of chiselry” in which “everyone has larceny in his heart.” In the first scene of Nightmare Alley, Blondell’s Zeena listens to Stan Carlisle (Tyrone Power) as he explains why he loves the carny racket: how looking at the rubes out there gives him a feeling of superiority, a sense of being in the know, being on the inside while they’re on the outside.
She’s heard it all before. At 41, Blondell is seasoned and wise, yet still vulnerable and open-hearted—just like she was at 25. What she brought to all these movies about rackets, about schemers and saps, was the ability to put over a con and let us enjoy her triumph, yet also to express, without sanctimony, the melancholy weight of too much knowledge. As she listens to Power’s speech, all this is in her eyes and in her silence. The oily Stan is an homme fatale who shamelessly uses his wiles on the older woman, making love to her because he wants her to reveal the secret of a verbal code she and her former partner used in a successful vaudeville act. Blondell’s role could easily have been a humiliating one—as soon as Stan gets what he wants from Zeena, he cheats on her with the pretty, innocent young Molly (Colleen Gray)—but Blondell makes Zeena’s susceptibility appealing rather than pathetic. When Stan tells her she’s a “real woman” (praising her generosity to her washed-up, alcoholic partner Pete), it’s with his usual slick insincerity, but she can turn this smarmy compliment into simple truth. Zeena blames herself for her Pete’s drinking, since he hit the bottle after she cheated on him. It was Pete who said she had a heart like an artichoke, “with a leaf for everybody.” She ruefully quotes this to Stan as they drive through the night with Pete sleeping drunkenly in the back of the truck.
Wanting to pick Pete’s brains about his past success, Stan plies him with liquor, but what he learns is that even he can be suckered by a spiel. Gazing into the bottle of moonshine as though it were a crystal ball, Pete summons a vision of a barefoot boy running through rolling green hills, a dog at his side. “Yes, his name was Gyp!” Stan eagerly confirms, at which Pete reveals that it’s a stock reading that fits anyone. “Every boy has a dog!” he laughs. Much later, when Stan has followed in Pete’s alcoholic footsteps, he pulls the same trick on his fellow bums in a hobo jungle. The mind-reading racket depends on the fact that people’s memories and feelings are all pretty much the same, and nothing is more universal than the belief that one is unique.
In pre-Code, con games exploit the simplest appetites—chiefly greed—and their elaborate mechanisms rely on no profound psychology. In Nightmare Alley, Stan plays with more volatile elements: with people’s insecurities, guilt, regrets, memories, and desires. The film lays bare the irony of the mind-reading scam, in which the appearance of uncanny sympathetic understanding, a luminous glimpse into the human heart, is just a ruse to bilk money out of suckers. Stan eventually teams up with a cruel, manipulative psychiatrist, who practices the same sort of racket under the cover of science. In the book by William Lindsay Gresham from which the film was adapted, the key to Stan’s character turns out to be a textbook Freudian revelation, his sexual desire for his mother. Forced by the Production Code to drop this, the film actually improves matters by replacing it with an account of his childhood in orphanages, during which he learned to cynically manipulate authority by feigning conversion and repentance. All this pretense of empathy and communication only accentuates the alienation at the heart of the story: Stan’s destiny is to become a geek, an isolated freak who has traded his humanity for a bottle a day.
The movie’s tacked-on, studio-imposed ending not only rescues Stan from his proper fate as a geek, but adds a pat moral to the story: he fell so low, a carny-owner opines, because he reached too high. What really happened was that Stan finally encountered someone who was even more skilled and ruthless than he as a manipulator of minds. But although it’s trite, the moral accords with noir’s foundational pessimism: an un-American distrust of ambition, a certainty that those who crave more, who want to make it to the “top of the world” are courting failure, destruction and death. When Zeena reads Stan’s fortune with the Tarot, his card is the Hanged Man, a figure derived from Odin, who hung upside-down from the world-tree and sacrificed an eye to gain knowledge that would make him supreme.
Movie stars are, by and large, people driven by the burning need to be “somebody,” the same drive that Robert Warshow pinpointed in “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”: to be separate from the crowd, to be “way up high where it’s always balmy,” as Sidney Falco says in Sweet Smell of Success. One reason, perhaps, why Hollywood was so good at making movies about confidence tricksters is that so many of its great stars were self-invented, bearing names that weren’t their own, inhabiting personas that were nothing like their real selves. Joan Blondell belonged to a smaller group of stars whose air of authenticity was not an act; and that burning drive to get ahead and be the best that defined the personae of actresses like Crawford and Stanwyck was not part of her make-up. Her screen persona (like the off-screen Joan) knows poverty and will do what it takes to stay off the pavements, but she’s not naturally aggressive or afflicted by restless hunger. She is, for this reason, not really a noir type, and Nightmare Alley proved to be her only stroll down noir’s dark alleys.
It’s part of Blondell’s mystery that she is compelling on-screen despite lacking that fierce need to be the center of attention. How many genuine movie stars could be plausible in the role of a stand-in, as Blondell is in Stand-in (1937)? One of the better offerings from the mass of her post-Code films, this is an off-beat movie about Hollywood that focuses on the “little people” who labor in the film industry. In the title role, Blondell plays former child-star Lester Plum (she had, in real life, started in vaudeville as Baby Rosebud), and performs a hilarious, squeaky-voiced impersonation of Shirley Temple singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Having failed to establish herself as a grown-up star, Lester uncomplainingly does the standing around and sweating for a bitchy, temperamental actress, and lives in a boarding house inhabited by trained seals, their keepers, and other show-biz oddities. Her task in the film is to awaken the heart and humanity of an Asperger’s-stricken mathematician played by Leslie Howard, who has been sent west by the New York money men to assess the financial viability of the studio where she works. Directed by the underrated Tay Garnett, the film features an array of eccentric character turns, including Humphrey Bogart as a director who goes through the film toting a Scottie dog under one arm.
It’s a cut above most of her post-Code films, which took on a drearily routine quality. The problem with the movies she cranked out during the remainder of the thirties is their relentless lightweightness. They try for the dizzy comic tone of her pre-Code films, but have none of the edge or the ballast, the dark shadows under their eyes that gave those early-thirties gems their bite. The pre-Code films had a delirious exhaustion that made them tremble on the verge of hysterical laughter or sobs; the post-Code B comedies merely feel tired. In movies like Topper Returns, or her many pairings with the deliciously acerbic Glenda Farrell, Blondell is all round eyes and pearly teeth, but the scripts deny her the wounded reserve that was, paradoxically, essential to her comic presence. There’s often plenty to enjoy, and the constant stream of wisecracks in Kansas City Princess (“Your grammar ain’t fit to eat!”) is almost enough to disguise its basic insubstantiality. But something was lost, as it was for other stars like Warren William and Mae Clarke whose careers declined after the Code sanded off their edges.
Blondell struggled to find work in her middle years, partly due to her age and partly to the personal turmoil of her third marriage to Mike Todd. Strangely, she never got many of the mother roles that subsumed actresses like Mary Astor (though off-screen she was the devoted mother of two children.) Her best-known later part was as the free-spirited, scandalous Aunt Sissy in Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). Rather than matrons she tended to play older, single working women: she was Jayne Mansfield’s secretary in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), and in Desk Set (1957) she shares a surprising rapport with Katharine Hepburn, who never seemed more relaxed or likeable than when she and Blondell get drunk on champagne together at an office Christmas party. A work-horse to the end, Blondell put in a lot of time on television and returned to the stage, often in stock. In 1972 she published an autobiographical novel, Center Door Fancy, about her life in show business.
She had that brand of level-headedness that seems common to people who started in show biz as children, those lifers who see through every illusion yet understand better than anyone the value of illusions. Throughout her career, Blondell exemplified one definition of what good acting is: an honest con.
by Imogen Sara Smith
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papermoonloveslucy · 3 years
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WILDCAT
December 17, 1960
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Wildcat is a musical comedy about Wildcat Jackson and her sister who come to oil country in 1912 to strike it rich. She runs into the prowess of Joe Dynamite, and a battle of the sexes and the oil tycoons ensues. 
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Wildcat wasn’t written with the 48 year-old queen of comedy in mind so when she showed interest, the script by N. Richard Nash had to be radically re-written.
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At the start of the 1960’s Ball’s career was taking a new direction. She was leaving her TV personae Lucy Ricardo (as well as her real-life husband Desi Arnaz) behind for newer horizons. It was their company Desilu that would produce Wildcat with Lucy having say over who would be cast as her co-star. After several of her first choices proved not available (including Clint Eastwood), she settled on Keith Andes.
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Although Ball was not known for her singing (a fact she traded on in “I Love Lucy”) or her dancing (which she was far better at), she had the determination of Wildcat Jackson to attempt it eight times a week. 
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Director and choreographer Michael Kidd – known for his athletic dances – would put Ball through her paces. The score was by Cy Coleman with lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, giving Ball the rousing anthem “Hey, Look Me Over!” and the tuneful “What Takes My Fancy.” 
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The out-of-town critics were mixed, but obviously adored the red-headed star. The show was headed up the New Jersey Turnpike in trucks headed for Broadway when a serious blizzard stranded the caravan, causing the opening night to be delayed. 
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With just two previews under their belt, the show opened at the Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon) on December 17, 1960. Box office sales were buoyed by audiences expecting to see Lucy Ricardo, not Lucille Ball as Wildy Jackson, so eventually Ball interpolated more and more of her trademark comic inflections into her character. 
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Then Ball took ill. She left the show for a bit with the idea to return and continue the run. But upon her return she collapsed on stage. Producers decided to close the show for as long as it took her to recover and resume when her strength and health had returned. But the musicians union insisted upon payment during the hiatus, which made the wait financially unfeasible. 
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All in all, Wildcat lasted 171 performances. It wasn’t Ball’s only musical, however. In 1974 she took on the title role in the film of Mame with mixed to poor critical reactions.
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"Then I go to New York with the two children, my mother and two maids. We have a seven-room apartment on 69th Street at Lexington. I’ll start rehearsals right away for a Broadway show, 'Wildcat.’ It’s a comedy with music, not a musical comedy, but the music is important. I play a girl wildcatter in the Southwestern oil fields around the turn of the century. It was written by N. Richard Nash, who wrote 'The Rainmaker.’ He is co-producer with Michael Kidd, the director. We’re still looking for a leading man. I want an unknown. He has to be big, husky, around 40. He has to be able to throw me around, and I’m a pretty big girl. He has to be able to sing, at least a little. I have to sing, too. It’s pretty bad. When I practice, I hold my hands over my ears. We open out of town - I don’t know where - and come to New York in December.”  ~ Lucille Ball,  TV Guide, July 16, 1960
THE SCORE
Lyrics by Carolyn Leigh and Music by Cy Coleman
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Act I
I Hear - Townspeople
Hey, Look Me Over - Wildy and Jane
Wildcat* - Wildy and Townspeople
You've Come Home - Joe
That's What I Want for Janie* - Wildy
What Takes My Fancy - Wildy and Sookie
You're a Liar - Wildy and Joe
One Day We Dance - Hank and Jane
Give a Little Whistle and I'll Be There - Wildy, Joe, The Crew
Tall Hope - Tattoo, Oney, Sadie, Matt and Crew
Act II
Tippy Tippy Toes - Wildy and Countess
El Sombrero
Corduroy Road
You've Come Home (Reprise) - Joe
(*) Songs cut sometime after opening night.
THE CAST
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Lucille Ball (Wildcat Jackson) was born on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York. She began her screen career in 1933 and was known in Hollywood as ‘Queen of the B’s’ due to her many appearances in ‘B’ movies. With Richard Denning, she starred in a radio program titled “My Favorite Husband” which eventually led to the creation of “I Love Lucy,” a television situation comedy in which she co-starred with her real-life husband, Latin bandleader Desi Arnaz. The program was phenomenally successful, allowing the couple to purchase what was once RKO Studios, re-naming it Desilu. When the show ended in 1960 (in an hour-long format known as “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour”) so did Lucy and Desi’s marriage. In 1962, hoping to keep Desilu financially solvent, Lucy returned to the sitcom format with “The Lucy Show,” which lasted six seasons. She followed that with a similar sitcom “Here’s Lucy” co-starring with her real-life children, Lucie and Desi Jr., as well as Gale Gordon, who had joined the cast of “The Lucy Show” during season two. Before her death in 1989, Lucy made one more attempt at a sitcom with “Life With Lucy,” also with Gordon, which was not a success and was canceled after just 13 episodes. 
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Keith Andes (Joe Dynamite) was born John Charles Andes in Ocean City, New Jersey, in 1920. Andes played Lucy Carmichael’s boyfriend Bill King on “The Lucy Show” in “Lucy Goes Duck Hunting” (TLS S2;E6) and “Lucy and the Winter Sports” (TLS S3;E3) and played Brad Collins in “Lucy and Joan” (S4;E4) co-starring Joan Blondell.  Andes took his own life in 2005 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Valerie Harper (Dancer, right) became one of television’s most recognizable stars as “Rhoda” (1974-78) a spin-off of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” She appeared in  at “Kennedy Center Presents” honoring Lucy in 1986. She died in August 2019 after a long battle with brain cancer.
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Paula Stewart (Janie) appears in the fourth of her six Broadway musicals between 1951 and 1965.  Her only series television appearance opposite Lucille Ball was in “Lucy and Harry’s Tonsils” (HL S2;E5) in 1969. In 2017, she published a memoir titled Lucy Loved Me, about her friendship with Lucille Ball.
Hal Linden (Matt, replacement) became one of television’s most recognizable stars as “Barney Miller” (1974-82). He appeared at an “All-Star Party for Lucille Ball” in 1984 and at “Kennedy Center Presents” honoring Lucy in 1986. 
Howard Fischer (Sheriff Sam Gore)  
Ken Ayers (Barney)
Anthony Saverino (Luke)
Edith King (Countess Emily O'Brien)
Clifford David (Hank)
HF Green (Miguel)
Don Tomkins (Sookie)
Charles Braswell (Matt)
Bill Linton (Corky)
Swen Swenson (Oney)
Ray Mason (Sandy)
Bill Walker (Tattoo)
Al Lanti (Cisco)
Bill Richards (Postman)
Marsha Wagner (Inez)
Wendy Nickerson (Blonde)
Betty Jane Watson (Wildy Understudy)
Dancers: Barbara Beck, Robert Bakanic, Mel Davidson, Penny Ann Green, Lucia Lambert, Ronald Lee, Jacqueline Maria, Frank Pietrie, Adriane Rogers, John Sharpe, Gerald Tiejelo
Singers: Lee Green, Jan Leighton, Urylee Leonardos, Virginia Oswald, Jeanne Steele, Gene Varrone
MRS. MORTON 
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Lucy met Gary Morton while doing Wildcat on Broadway. She put off their first date due to her rigorous performance schedule. Eventually, he showed up with a pizza just when Lucy was craving one. They married on November 19, 1961.
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Comic Jack Carter served as best man at Lucy and Gary’s wedding in 1961.  A few weeks later he married Paula Stewart, who played Lucy’s sister Janie in Wildcat. He acted in “Lucy Sues Mooney” (TLS S6;E12).
“HEY LOOK ME OVER!”
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On June 4, 1976 Lucille is joined by Valerie Harper and Dinah Shore on “Dinah!” to sing her signature song from Wildcat, “Hey, Look Me Over.”
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When Lucille Ball was celebrated at “The Kennedy Center Honors” in December 1986, Valerie Harper, Beatrice Arthur, and Pam Dawber sang a song parody of the “I Love Lucy” theme expressing their affection for Lucy. The medley ends with a specially-tailored “Hey Look Me Over”. 
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In “Lucy and Carol Burnett: Part 2″ (TLS S6;E15) on December 11, 1967, Lucy, Carol, and the ensemble perform “Hey, Look Me Over” with specially written lyrics to suit the episode’s theme of air travel.  
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In “Lucy Meets Danny Kaye” (TLS S3;E15) on December 28, 1964, the opening of “The Danny Kaye Show” is underscored with the music to “Hey, Look Me Over.”
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While David Frost is trying to sleep during a transatlantic flight, Lucy wears her headset and hums along to “Hey Look Me Over” while tapping it out on the glasses with her cutlery.  The scene is from “Lucy Helps David Frost Go Night-Night” (HL S4;E12) aired on November 12, 1971.
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In “Lucy and Petula Clark” (HL S5;E8) in 1972, Lucy Carter leaves the office singing “Hey Look Me Over.”
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On “Life With Lucy,” Lucy’s grandson Kevin plays on the YMCA soccer team The Wildcats. The name of the team is probably a reference to Lucille Ball’s only Broadway show.
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In the second scene of “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” (1986), an un-aired episode of “Life With Lucy”, Lucy comes down the stairs of the living room singing “Hey Look Me Over.” 
WILDCAT WILDCARDS
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In April 1961, Lucille Ball played softball in Central Park for the Broadway Show League when she was appearing in Wildcat. Julie Andrews (starring in Camelot) was the catcher!  The catcher was Joe E. Brown. 
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In the play Love! Valour! Compassion! Buzz, a gay musical theater aficionado (Nathan Lane on Broadway) breaks the fourth wall (a common conceit of the play) to tell the audience something personal about himself. 
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The song title was also the title of a 2018 revue about rarely produced musicals at City Center in New York City.  Performer Carolee Carmello called it her “hair homage to Lucille Ball.” 
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~ From the memoir Under the Radar by Clifford David, who played Hal in Wildcat
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