Mary Astor and Melvyn Douglas

The Mary Astor film I’ve chosen to write about is And So They Were Married, a little-known romantic comedy from 1936, where she plays a divorced mother thrown together with widowed father Melvyn Douglas at a snowbound ski resort over Christmas and New Year. It’s not available on DVD, but can currently be seen on Youtube, and is also due to be shown on TCM in the US  at 11.15pm (ET) on Wednesday, July 3. While not a masterpiece, this is an enjoyable family film and could also be a fun alternative to better-known Christmas movies to bear in mind when the next festive season arrives.

The scenery, filmed on location at Donner Pass in California, is beautiful, and Astor and Douglas make a great couple, even if at times they could do with sharper dialogue. This will be a fairly short posting and this isn’t the sort of film where you need to worry about spoilers – though, in any case, as the New York Times review pointed out: “And So They Were Married gives away nearly all the story it has to offer in one titular burst of generosity.”

I knew that Mary Astor found herself pushed into mother roles later in her career, but I hadn’t realised she started to play this kind of part quite so young, while still at the height of her beauty. She was just 30 when And So They Were Married was released, and looks very young to be the mother of Edith Fellows, who was 13 (although her character is said to be nine). However, even if the casting is a slight stretch, Astor’s relationship with her screen daughter comes across as warm and natural, showing the way forward to her later mother roles in better-known films like Meet Me in St Louis.

The film begins with a touch of road rage, when Stephen Blake (Douglas) and Edith Farnham (Astor) object to one another’s driving in the snow on the way to Snowcrest Lodge, where each plans to spend the holiday season with their respective child. When they arrive, still fuming, the couple are dismayed to discover that they are the only guests there, due to the heavy snowfall.  This means they get the full attention of the hotel’s irritating hosts, Mr Snirley (Romaine Callender) and Miss Peabody (Dorothy Stickney) – whose stilted attempts at conversation provide some of the film’s quirkier humour. Soon Stephen and Edith are desperate to escape from the hotel staff, so they start to spend time together – and their hate at first sight begins to turn to romance.

Edith’s daughter, Brenda (Fellows) spends most of the first 20 minutes or so of the film in bed with a cold – while Stephen’s son, Tommy (Jackie Moran) hasn’t yet arrived from school, because of the blocked roads. Once Tommy does arrive, however, he and Brenda become instant enemies after he damages her “snow lady”. (She doesn’t hold with snowmen because she has a dim view of men in general after her parents’ divorce.)  They  pause their fighting long enough to agree that they definitely don’t want to land up as step-brother and sister, and so they should do everything they can to drive their parents apart. This leads to a lot of unlikely antics including a festive food fight – and a funny scene where Tommy’s pet dog runs amok with soap around its mouth, making the frantic hotel guests think it is a “mad dog”. (Unfortunately, in a puzzling loose end, the dog then runs outside and disappears for the rest of the film. I kept waiting for him to return and be reunited with the children, but no, he vanishes for good, with an odd explanation late in the film from Tommy that this sweet little lapdog has ‘gone back to being a wolf’! Some scenes were apparently chopped from this film, so maybe that is the real explanation.)

Mary Astor and Melvyn Douglas

At first, all the children’s stunts and plotting seem to have quite the opposite effect of the one they intended, and just convince their parents that they are striking up a great friendship. But in the end the children do manage to drive Stephen and Edith apart – and then, once home again after the holidays, start to regret their selfishness. So do they apologise to their parents? Well, no – this is a screwball comedy, after all, so instead they come up with yet another harebrained plot to throw Stephen and Edith back together, which leads to a host of madcap plot twists and ends up with the couple thrown in jail.

On the face of it, both Tommy and Brenda should seem like spoilt brats, as they insist that they don’t want to share their parents and calculate on what Christmas presents they are going to receive – but both the young actors are very likeable and natural and make the comic antics a lot more enjoyable on screen than they sound here. It’s just a pity that the youngsters get rather too much screen time at the expense of Astor and Douglas. (Like so many child stars, Edith Fellows had a troubled life, which was more dramatic than this movie – she was brought up by her domineering grandmother, who refused to let her make any friends, and her bank account was emptied by relations by the time she came of age, leaving her penniless. She also became addicted to drink and drugs,  but later in life she found a second career as an actress, and she lived until 2011. Her New York Times obituary tells of her ‘Dickensian’ life.)

All in all, I enjoyed this rather slight offering, based on the story Bless Their Hearts by author Sarah Addington. I felt that the chemistry between Astor and Douglas – who are both wonderfully dry – makes it work well.  I’ll admit I had been hoping for more given the fact that the director was Elliott Nugent, who also co-directed (with James Flood) the great pre-Code The Mouthpiece, starring Warren William as a lawyer in league with the mob. But although this film is nowhere near that standard, it’s quite entertaining in its own right. It was also quite refreshing to see a 1930s film with single parents as romantic leads, having to juggle their family responsibilities with finding love second time around. And, even in a mother role, Mary Astor looks extremely glamorous, especially when she wears a “gold dress” to a festive dinner at the hotel.

I must just add that Melvyn Douglas and Mary Astor worked together again a couple of years later in There’s Always a Woman. I’d love to see that one, as it is said to be similar to The Thin Man, which is a favourite of mine, with husband and wife detectives played by Douglas and Joan Blondell. Astor was third-billed. If anyone visiting my blog has seen it, I’d be interested to hear what you thought.

Mary Astor enjoying the festivities at the hotel

The two young stars, Edith Fellows and Jackie Moran, in an advertising picture

For the uninitiated, the film centres on supposedly retired private detective Nick Charles, who has given up the day job to concentrate on enjoying life with his rich wife. Or so he thinks – but, inevitably, when the couple leave their San Francisco home and visit his native New York to stay in a grand hotel suite there over Christmas, the festivities get mixed up with solving one last crime. Which will lead to plenty more “last crimes” in a series of sequels. There is a fine supporting cast, including Maureen O’Sullivan as a lovelorn young girl and Nat Pendleton as a comic  detective, and the murder mystery is well done in itself, leading up to a scene round the dinner table where Nick brings all the suspects together before revealing the killer. However,  it isn’t what anybody remembers the film for. Few people even remember that the phrase “The Thin Man” is actually supposed to refer to a character involved in the murder mystery, a complicated tangle about an eccentric scientist suspected of killing his ex-lover, and not to William Powell.

Myrna Loy and William Powell

Nick and Nora’s whole relationship is conjured up in their first scene together (not the opening of the film, as the mystery has already started). Nick is drinking lazily in a bar, demonstrating how to shake the perfect Martini, when Nora bursts in, dragged by Asta the dog on his lead, scattering packages from her Christmas shopping trip and landing up on the floor.  He introduces her: “Oh, it’s all right, Joe. It’s all right. It’s my dog. And, uh, my wife. ” Nora retorts: “Well, you might have mentioned me first on the billing. ” Their dry humour and enjoyment of one another’s quirks are all there in that moment. This scene also hints at the couple’s chalk-and-cheese quality – her rich background, his streetwise knowledge of the sleazier side of life. The Thin Man is regarded as one of the first screwball comedies, and you can imagine Nick and Nora as one of the unlikely couples thrown together by events in a film like Capra’s great  It Happened One Night, released the same year. The private eye and the heiress. However, where most romantic comedies up to this point had ended with the wedding, The Thin Man begins with the couple comfortably married – and no need for any unlikely comic misunderstandings, either. This couple understand each other perfectly.

The film is adapted from Dashiel Hammett’s hardboiled mystery novel – he is said to have based the central couple on his own on-off relationship with Lillian Hellman. However, the book and film have very different flavours. Hammett’s book was actually his last novel and there is a bitter flavour at times to his taut prose, especially in the final pages where his world-weary Nick explains that solving a case doesn’t really solve anything: “Murder doesn’t round out anybody’s life except the murdered’s and sometimes the murderer’s.” “That may be,” Nora said, “but it’s all pretty unsatisfactory.”

Nick practises shooting with his feet

Some of the seamier aspects of the novel’s plot are ironed out/skated over in the film, and, above all, Nick and Nora’s relationship is made steadier and sweeter. In the book, there are suggestions that Nick has a complicated sexual past and indeed it might even be impinging on the present. (Nora jokes about him going off with a redhead at a party the previous night.) In the film there is no glimpse of this – despite and above all the dry humour at one another’s expense, their marriage is rock-solid. Much of this is down to director WS “Woody” Van Dyke, who took the decision to concentrate on the Nick/Nora relationship rather than the mystery plot, and brought in husband-and-wife writers Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich to do so, instructing them to add in more comic scenes for the couple. They drew on their own married life to do so. (Van Dyke had already worked with the same writers on the previous year’s Penthouse, also starring Myrna Loy, which is a similar blend of detective story and comedy-romance and definitely worth a look for fans of The Thin Man films.)

Powell, Loy and Clay Clement

Van Dyke was also the one who decided to cast William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora – he had worked with the two on Manhattan Melodrama earlier in the year and had noticed that they had a great chemistry together and enjoyed a witty banter with one another in between takes. However, MGM bosses were not keen on this casting, and eventually only agreed to free Loy up for the part if the film was made in double-quick time (according to TCM’s article on the movie, in the end it is said to have taken between 12 and 18 days) so that she could go on to her next role. Fortunately, Van Dyke was known as “One-take” – pretty much the opposite of Wyler with all his famous retakes – and was able to complete the film within that tight framework. It’s said he felt actors often had greater freshness on the first take and on occasion he even printed a rehearsal if he felt the actor had got it right. Watching The Thin Man, you would never know that it was made at such speed. It’s all very stylish, with gorgeous black-and-white cinematography by James Wong Howe and art direction by Cedric Gibbons, and creates a world that you can easily dream of living in, leaning at the bar in one of those speakeasies and shaking up a cocktail.

Nick, Nora and Asta

Which brings me on to the drinking. In Hammett’s novel, Nick drinks in the style of other hardboiled detectives like Hammett’s own Sam Spade, and, however wittily the drinking bouts are portrayed, he is clearly an alcoholic, knocking back whisky for breakfast. Nick – and Nora too – also drink with abandon in the film, but you never feel there is a real problem; the free-flowing booze is all part of their seductive lifestyle and, coming soon after the repeal of Prohibition, one of the things which makes them modern and daring. What’s more, it helps to stop them being too perfect – a couple who knock back the Martinis like that can hardly fall into the trap of smugness.  As they are staying in a hotel and it is Christmas, there is no need really to worry about hangovers, addiction and everyday life; the couple and the audience can just enjoy it all.

WS Van Dyke directing Powell and Loy, with James Wong Howe behind the camera

The movie came out during the Great Depression, so there was a danger that people with no money could be turned off by this rich couple with their hotel suite and  Nora’s fur coat – but their dry humour, often at their own expense, guarded against this reaction and meant most people would end up loving  rather than envying them. OK, maybe a bit of both. One thing which many people did envy them was the dog, adorable wire-haired terrier Asta – who adds to the couple’s appeal  without giving them all the trappings of domesticity that go with children. (A child did come along in a later film, and slowed them down, but not yet.) The same pet went on to star in other films like The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby, and the terriers became highly popular pets in real life.  The classic final scene, with Nick and Nora on a long-distance train and Asta hiding his eyes on the top bunk, was so popular that it was reprised in the trailer for the second film, After the Thin Man, which started just where the first one left off. It was plain that the viewing public couldn’t get enough of Nick and Nora, and a whole series of films was born – as well as the seeds being sown for many more film and TV detective couples in the future.

This piece first appeared during the Comedy Countdown at the Wonders in the Dark website. Most of the pictures are gratefully taken from Doctor Macro.

James Stewart and Hedy Lamarr

The big drawback of this film is its awkward opening. It is rather slow to get going and I suspect many people might be put off by the first scenes, which feature not Stewart and Lamarr but a middle-aged couple whose life is anything but romantic. Ian Hunter stars as wealthy publisher Barton Kendrick, who is married to society hostess Diana (Verree Teasdale) – but, although the couple are charming to one another on the surface, it quickly becomes clear that they are leading an open marriage and both involved with other people. I’m quite surprised that director Clarence Brown managed to get away with all this sexual sophistication under the code – but then, nothing is spelt out in so many words. This plot set-up is reminiscent of a pre-Code and quite refreshingly realistic, but the problem really is that Barton and Diana make such an unprepossessing couple and it is hard to be interested in their lives.

Ian Hunter, Verree Teasdale and the other man

Diana goes off in a taxi on a date with a friend of Barton’s, while her husband calls round to see beautiful Austrian refugee “Johnny” Jones (Lamarr), who is clearly his mistress and living in a flat where he pays the bills. He presents her with a musical box featuring a ballerina, and the two of them dance to the music, having a stilted conversation where they say seem to say each other’s first names as much as possible – “Oh, Johnny!” “Yes, Barton?” etc. He tells her that he intends to divorce his wife and marry her and that she won’t be upset by that as their relationship is all very civilised. However, these plans come unstuck almost immediately when an immigration official calls round to tell Johnny she has outstayed her visitor’s visa and will be sent back to Nazi Austria unless she marries a US citizen within a week. I was taken aback by this storyline, in a film which was made in the middle of the Second World War, and couldn’t believe that a refugee like Johnny would really have been sent back, even though America was not at war yet. I certainly hope this would not have happened.  Anyway, including a plot twist like this in a romantic comedy would presumably have raised awareness of refugees’ plight, even if it seems rather too serious for its context.

The row in the restaurant

Fortunately, at this point, James Stewart enters the film and it immediately improves beyond recognition. He is very funny, awkward and poignant all at once as hungry, penniless writer Bill Smith (Stewart), who takes shelter from the rain with Johnny as she walks through the park and strikes up a conversation. Later, in a cheap restaurant, she meets up with Bill again – as she orders coffee and he tries to find something on the menu which he can buy with his last dime. Unfortunately, the waiter scoops up the dime and claims it as a tip,  leading to a row and the unlikely couple being thrown out of the restaurant. Johnny orders a taxi, goes back to Bill’s apartment and proposes that he should marry her in return for payment. Bill is an idealist and bargains her down rather than up, determined to take the minimum amount that he can possibly live on and pay it back – but he agrees to the deal, largely to help her and also so  that he can write without starving. There is a lot of warmth between Stewart and Lamarr in these scenes and plenty of quirky little moments, as he grandly plays host despite the fact that he has nothing in the way of food or drink to offer her. I have to say his poverty is comic rather than convincing, and the apartment looks perfectly respectable, but they make a great combination as two people who come from completely different worlds but still make a connection. And, of course, they start to fall for each other.

Soon, complications are abounding as Bill decides to write a novel about his marriage of convenience, and offers it to Barton’s firm – much to the fury of Barton, who has a different type of love story in mind with himself as hero. I won’t go all through the rest of the plot, but every time Stewart and Lamarr are on screen together it is a joy, especially when he whirls her off (initially he abducts her, but she soon has the opportunity to escape and decides not to) to visit his grandmother and see where he comes from, in the countryside.  At the end of the film the two of them sleep in a bedroom divided into two by a temporary barrier, with shades of the “walls of Jericho” in It Happened One Night – and this is the point where Bill recites Marlowe’s poem. Watching this scene, I feel as if I could spend hours listening to Stewart reciting poetry in that great voice, especially when he forgets a line and says “Something, something, something”! I must just add that Bill’s grandmother is played by the astonishing Adeline De Walt Reynolds, who started her acting career at the age of 78 – she carried on working until she was 98 and appeared in more than 35 films and TV productions.

The movie is available on DVD from Warner Archive in region 1 and will also be shown on the US TCM at 4.30pm (ET) on May 28, 2013. In the meantime, here is that scene with Stewart reciting poetry, plus a couple more stills:

Both James Cagney and director Raoul Walsh are best-known for their tough-guy dramas – and they made two great ones together, gangster classics The Roaring Twenties and White Heat. Yet this pair also teamed up to make one of the sweetest of romantic comedy-dramas, a period piece suffused with charm and nostalgia. With not one but two great leading ladies, Rita Hayworth and Olivia de Havilland, a sparkling script and an irresistible musical soundtrack,  The Strawberry Blonde is a film which deserves to be much better known. Sadly this title has never had a full DVD release, and old VHS videos  used to change hands at scarily high prices – but now it has been brought out on Warner Archive in region 1, and it has also been shown in a fine print on the UK TCM in the last few years.

Most of the film unfolds in flashback, so we know from the start that young dentist Biff Grimes (Cagney) has been disappointed in love and spent time in prison after somehow being framed by a friend. The film then shows how it all happened – before we finally discover whether Biff will be tempted to take his revenge on the friend in question, Hugo Barnstead (Jack Carson), when he finally turns up in his surgery as a patient.

James Cagney and Jack Carson

As with another film I reviewed here recently, little-known John Garfield movie Saturday’s Children, The Strawberry Blonde was based on a popular stage play, which was adapted for the screen numerous times. The play, One Sunday Afternoon by James Hagan, was first staged in 1933, and adapted as a film that same year, directed by Stephen Roberts and starring Gary Cooper and Fay Wray. I haven’t yet managed to see this version but have heard it is quite a bit darker than Walsh’s take on the story in The Strawberry Blonde. Later, in 1948, Walsh remade his own hit film, this time reverting to the title One Sunday Afternoon, as a musical starring Dennis Morgan and Dorothy Malone. There were also no less than five TV adaptations between 1949 and 1959.

However, there is no doubt at all about the most popular version of the tale – definitely the Cagney one. For this film, Hagan’s script was reworked by brothers Julius J and Philip G Epstein, so the dialogue has all the wit and delicacy that they always contributed. There is a small-town feel to the film, but, as a TCM article points out, it is actually set in New York City at the turn of the 20th century, a period which both writer Hagan and director Walsh would have remembered well. That vanished world is vividly evoked through a wealth of loving period detail, covering everything from dances and picnics in the park to the arrival of electric light, and new-fangled foreign dishes like spaghetti. Orry-Kelly’s breathtaking costumes add to the atmosphere, as does the use of period songs like The Band Played On, written in 1895, which provided the film with its title – from the line “Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde and the band played on.” Wikipedia’s article on the film suggests there were rows over  Walsh and cinematographer James Wong Howe’s use of close-ups, which producer Hal Wallis felt were obscuring the period backgrounds, but I don’t think there is any problem with this in the completed film. It all seems to work together seamlessly.

James Cagney and Alan Hale

In most of his films, whether Cagney is playing a nice guy or a villain, one thing is constant – his intelligence. He’s the fast-talking character who is always at least one step ahead of everyone else. However, in The Strawberry Blonde he is slightly cast against type, because for once he is not the clever one. Instead, his character, Biff, is a daydreamer, a sweet-natured character who allows himself to be exploited by others. In particular, he is exploited  by his so-called best friend, Hugo , who is always organising grand outings where somehow Biff ends up footing the bill. Biff is also ordered about by his father, shameless womaniser William (Alan Hale), who wants him to become a dentist, via correspondence courses, so that he can sort out his troublesome teeth. (It’s odd that apparently it was felt you didn’t have to be very intelligent to be a dentist – this view is also there in the great silent film Greed, which similarly features a character learning the trade by mail order.) The father and son have some great scenes together, allowing Cagney to send up his own image in one sequence where he is playing a pub bouncer and  has to throw out his father, who is clearly much more skilled in fighting than he is. (“I’m supposed to be a tough guy,” Biff laments.) Biff actually gets into quite a few fights in the course of the film, but loses them all, usually ending up with a black eye.

Rita Hayworth and James Cagney

Both Biff and Hugo fall under the spell of spoilt beauty Virginia Brush. It’s clear from the start that she is more attracted to the self-confident Hugo, but she enjoys dating a different man every night – and, when Biff finally gets his turn to take her out, he falls completely under her spell. He doesn’t even mind that she is spending his money just as recklessly as Hugo does. Ann Sheridan, who had starred with Cagney in two recent films, was originally lined up to play Virginia, but decided to opt out because of a contract dispute. Warner Brothers arranged to borrow Rita Hayworth from Columbia instead, in what proved to be a star-making role for her. Hayworth is perfect for the part, making Virginia selfish and demanding and yet so charming at the same time that you can see how she gets away with everything. (Jack Carson is also charming as conman Hugo – in fact you could say that charm is this film’s key quality.)

However, the real heroine of the film is Virginia’s friend, down-to-earth nurse Amy (de Havilland), who outrages Biff by her forthright views on everything from women’s suffrage to free love and smoking. When Hugo elopes with Virginia, a heartbroken Biff marries Amy on the rebound, but continues to carry a torch for his first love. However, he gradually learns to appreciate Amy after marriage, and the couple have some lovely scenes together – I especially like one where she asks him to give her one and a half kisses to celebrate their 18-month anniversary.

Olivia de Havilland and James Cagney

The plot moves from comedy to melodrama when Hugo persuades Biff to become his vice-chairman at a construction company, but it turns out his friend is once again being set up to foot the bill. This time it is a heavy one, as Biff is made to sign various incriminating documents, and, when his own father dies in an industrial accident, Biff is carted off to prison. Although casting Cagney as a ‘none-too bright’ character might be surprising, the fact that he plays a victim here isn’t. He was quite often cast as a victim in films at this period in his career, from the newspaperman who is wrongly imprisoned in Each Dawn I Die to the boxer forced into the ring once too often by his girlfriend in City For Conquest. The Strawberry Blonde is a much lighter film, but brings out the same sense of the character’s underlying vulnerability.

According to Wikipedia, Cagney was reluctant to act with Jack Carson because Carson was so much taller than him, and at one point the star nearly opted out of the production, with John Garfield being suggested as a replacement. I was quite surprised to read that Cagney had this objection, because if anything  the film emphasises his small stature – when he dances with Rita Hayworth, who was about the same height as him, she appears to be much taller – helping to give the feeling that the odds are stacked against him. I think it’s also true to say that there are elements of his ‘mama’s boy’ personality in this film, even though he doesn’t have a mother here. Wife Amy mothers him, pulling him back from fights and worrying that he is working too hard and isn’t getting enough sleep.

However, despite all the poignant moments and occasional outright sentimentality, the main mood of the film is one of sunshine and high spirits, and this is perfectly brought out at the end, when the lyrics of The Band Played On are put up on screen “by popular demand” and the audience is urged to sing along. I’m not sure if this was the first time this had been done, showing the way forward to modern singalong screenings of musicals, but, in any case, I would love to see the film on the big screen with an audience joining in.

Rita Hayworth turning heads

Cagney and de Havilland

Jack Carson and Rita Hayworth

]]> http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/the-strawberry-blonde-raoul-walsh-1941/feed/ 46 Judy strawberry blonde 14 James Cagney and Jack Carson James Cagney and Alan Hale Rita Hayworth and James Cagney Olivia de Havilland and James Cagney Rita Hayworth turning heads Cagney and de Havilland Jack Carson and Rita Hayworth http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/easter-parade-charles-walters-1948/ http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/easter-parade-charles-walters-1948/#comments Fri, 29 Mar 2013 20:20:42 +0000 Judy http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/?p=2827 ]]> It’s hard to imagine a sunnier musical than Easter Parade. Everything fits together perfectly, from the sublime song-and-dance pairing of Judy Garland and Fred Astaire to the score packed with great Irving Berlin standards. Yet this brightly-coloured holiday favourite was at first intended to be darker and sadder, and it almost came together in its final form by a series of accidents.

This backstage tale is set in the vaudeville days of 1912, centred around New York’s famous Easter Parade. It has a warm, nostalgic flavour to it, though the gorgeous costumes would have been fashionable in the 1940s as well as in the period being portrayed. There are plenty of lavishly produced musical numbers, including scenes from the Ziegfeld Follies, but there are also scenes of Garland singing in a dingy nightclub, and glimpses of quirky vaudeville attractions such as a number featuring performing dogs. There is very little dialogue between the songs by comparison with most musicals, but it doesn’t feel too sparse, because every line is made to count.

Fred Astaire and Judy Garland

Astaire plays a character similar to his roles in many other films, drawing on a version of his own personality. He is cast as Don Hewes, a driven, workaholic dancer whose idea of a relaxing date is to say: “I thought we could discuss some of my ideas for new dance steps over dinner.” At the start of the film, Don is in love with his dance partner, Nadine (Ann Miller), but she decides she wants to strike out on her own and is fed up with being just a “hoofer”. In a version of the Pygmalion myth, after a few drinks he bets a pal that he can turn any girl into a great dancer, and picks up the first chorus girl he comes across, Hannah (Garland).

One snatch of dialogue has a definite flavour of A Star Is Born (a tale which itself also draws on Pygmalion).

“What’s your name?” “Hannah Brown.” “I can fix that.”

Ann Miller

However, Hannah is not just any girl, and Don soon realises he is wrong to try to turn her into a clone of his former partner. Their early dance scenes together go hilariously wrong, including a dance where feathers from Hannah’s dress fly everywhere, as really happened when Astaire and Rogers performed their Cheek to Cheek dance in Top Hat. But, after these comic mishaps, Don starts adapting the couple’s stage act to her talents, and there are wonderful sequences where the two of them sing and dance together in a breathless succession of vaudeville scenes. The comedy song A Couple of Swells, with Astaire and Garland as a pair of boastful tramps dancing on a conveyor belt, is a definite standout – though Astaire still looks strangely elegant, even dressed as a human scarecrow!

But there are also many other great songs, including Drum Crazy, I Love A Piano, Snooky Ookums, Steppin’ Out With My Baby, Garland’s heartbroken torch song Better Luck Next Time … and so many more. Some of the songs were written specially for the film, while others, including the title song, were taken from Berlin’s rich back catalogue. The one weak singing performance comes from Rat Pack member Peter Lawford, as Don’s best friend Johnny, who forlornly pines after Hannah. He has the great song A Fella with an Umbrella, which was apparently Berlin’s own favourite in the movie, but at times he is out of tune, to my ears anyway! Strange that he wasn’t dubbed. Apparently this part was originally intended for Frank Sinatra, who would definitely have done a better job on the singing, though Lawford does bring an earnest sweetness to the role.

Replacing Sinatra with Lawford was by no means the only casting change. The film was originally lined up as a second chance for Garland to work together with Gene Kelly after The Pirate. However, just days before filming was due to start, Kelly broke his ankle playing football , and MGM wooed Astaire out of retirement to take his place. Cyd Charisse also had to leave the cast because of injury, and was replaced by Ann Miller. Miller herself was also carrying an injury and had to dance in a back brace, but you would never know it to see her dazzling tap performances.

Judy Garland and Peter Lawford

Director Vincente Minnelli was yet another to fall by the wayside, after Garland’s psychiatrist reportedly advised that it wouldn’t be a good idea for the husband and wife to work together again at this time. So Charles Walters stepped in to take his place. The script, too, mainly written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, was endlessly reworked, in particular changing the ending, which in the original script saw more confusion over who really loved whom… and a couple of musical numbers were removed altogether.

The result of all this chopping and changing could all too easily have been a muddle, but in fact it all worked out brilliantly, creating a musical which can be rewatched endlessly. I especially like the way the plot is kept simple, without too many far-fetched coincidences and misunderstandings. The problems between Hannah and Don stem from their working relationship and from her fears that he still loves Nadine, not from the sorts of strained and farcical plot twists you so often get in musicals. And the final scene manages to be happy without ever becoming cloying or over the top.

I’ll just add that I often find myself thinking of Easter Parade alongside Astaire’s follow-up film, The Barkleys of Broadway, his reunion with Ginger Rogers, which was also directed by Walters. I think it tends to be underrated and has a similar warmth to that of Easter Parade.

This piece first appeared during the musicals countdown at the Wonders in the Dark website.

Astaire and Garland as a couple of swells

Astaire and Miller

Astaire and Garland

The 1940 film starring Garfield, directed by Vincent Sherman, was the third screen adaptation of  Maxwell Anderson’s play. It is often described as a romantic comedy – but perhaps a more accurate description is that it’s a tragicomedy. The way it moves from sweet early scenes to increasingly painful/bitter ones, and eventually lurches into near-melodrama, reminded me of one of my favourite James Cagney films, The Strawberry Blonde, made the following year, which I will be writing about soon for the forthcoming James Cagney blogathon. Both films have scripts by Casablanca writers Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein, reworked from stage plays, and both see Warner Brothers ‘tough guys’ cast somewhat against type, in roles which bring out their more vulnerable qualities.

Anne Shirley and John Garfield

However, although Garfield gets top billing, the film really centres on the heroine, played by Anne Shirley (the former child actress took her screen name from the character she played in Anne of Green Gables.) I haven’t seen many of her roles but would like to see more, since she is very good in Saturday’s Children as young factory clerk Bobby Halevy. At the start of the film she begins work at the warehouse where her father, Henry (Claude Rains) is a loyal but still lowly employee. Her fellow-worker, the slangy, down-to-earth Gert (Dennie Moore) warns her that the work is boring, but Bobby gets through the piles of invoices with ease and enjoys working for her own living and contributing to the family budget.  The scenes of the two women working are well done and there is a convincing factory atmosphere, with a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. Also, Rains, who starred with John Garfield in several films, gives a great performance here as the weary middle-aged storeman who feels he has been overtaken by younger workers. I especially like some of the father-daughter scenes, but do feel it is a shame that Bobby’s mother, Myrtle (Elisabeth Risdon) is such a stereotyped figure, who seems to have no interests beyond cooking meals and knitting sweaters for everyone in sight.

After a trip to bowling with Gert, Bobby is soon falling for a colleague – you guessed it, Garfield’s character, Rims Rosson. Like Cagney in The Strawberry Blonde, Garfield here plays an innocent, longing for a career he seems unlikely to achieve. His character, Rims (it’s never made clear whether this is a nickname, perhaps deriving from his reading glasses)  hardly sees what is around him in the everyday world, as he dreams of making it as an inventor, turning hemp into artificial silk. Surprisingly, it looks as if Rims’ dream will come true when he is offered a job in Manila. However, his career is sidetracked at his leaving party when Bobby tricks him into proposing, by reciting a script written by her older and more cynical married sister, Florrie (Lee Patrick). Bobby pretends that another young man is keen to marry her, and an unsuspecting Rims speaks almost exactly the lines that Florrie predicted.  Unfortunately, when the young couple are living together, life soon turns out to be much harder and more expensive than they had expected, especially when Bobby is laid off from the factory. “Two can live as cheaply as one… if one don’t eat!” comments Florrie’s downtrodden husband, Willie (Roscoe Karns).

Here is a clip from the film, a scene where Bobby and Rims make a date, which gives the flavour of the humour and delicate romance of the early scenes:

The opening scenes certainly show the poverty of Bobby’s family, living in a cramped apartment where they can constantly hear the neighbours and time themselves by them. (One neighbour’s baby cries at 7am, while another couple always have their first fight of the day at 7.10am). However, this is all shown with a very light touch and the dialogue is so witty that it doesn’t seem too depressing. Later on, however, when Bobby and Rims are living in their own cramped apartment too near to a railway line, with a rent they can’t afford, the problems with noise stop being a joke. And the endless quarrels between Florrie and Willie, which at first seemed comic, take on a darker note, showing what will inevitably happen to Bobby and Rims once they, too, are forced to move in with her parents.

John Garfield, Claude Rains and Anne Shirley

I suppose the film’s turning point comes during the scene where Bobby, who has always prided herself on her honesty, is tempted into tricking Rims into marriage. This is initially  presented as a comic scene, but there is a disturbing note to it even as it plays out. And it becomes increasingly tragic in retrospect, as Bobby accuses herself of ruining both her own life and that of her husband. I did feel that the dice were weighed somewhat against women here, as a woman is shown sabotaging a man’s career – but, against that, there is also the scene where the boss lays Bobby off because, with orders declining, he feels it “only fair” to get rid of married women first. So the marriage ruins her career too – and, once she gets pregnant, she is even more trapped than Rims is. The film also makes it very clear how much pressure there is on Bobby at 22 to find a man and get married before she is “on the shelf” and doomed to plough through those invoices for evermore. “Women only have one weapon – marriage,” claims Florrie.

Anyway, I enjoyed this bitter-sweet film and especially liked the scenes between Garfield and Anne Shirley.  Both of them were actually drafted in quite late on – according to Robert Nott’s biography of Garfield, He Ran All the Way, James Stewart and Olivia de Havilland  were originally intended for the leads but both eventually opted out. The imdb says that de Havilland was put on suspension by Warner for her defiance. I don’t know why they decided against, though they must have had good reasons. The part of Rims seems perfect for Stewart, and de Havilland had already played Bobby in a radio version of the play, the Lux Radio Theater presentation in October 1936, opposite Robert Taylor. I hope to listen to this soon and will be interested to see how it compares.

Humphrey Bogart and Ruth Gordon in the stage version

So what about the other versions? The play certainly feels like a Great Depression tale, but it was actually written before that era and first staged on Broadway in 1927-8, with a young Humphrey Bogart playing opposite Ruth Gordon. The production was evidently very successful and was followed by a national tour. I’ve seen Bogart in a rather similar role as an idealistic young working-class aircraft engineer in the pre-Code drama Love Affair, so I can just imagine him as Rims. (It’s amazing how soft and gentle his voice is in that early role, except for the occasional angry line where you hear the rasp and remember it is him!)

However, Bogie, whose movie career was not yet under way, missed out on the part in the first film version, made in 1929 and directed by Gregory La Cava. Instead, Rims (re-christened Jim in this version) was played by Grant Withers, with silent film star Corinne Griffith as Bobby. I’d love to see how La Cava handled the story, but sadly it doesn’t look as if this film, which had some silent and some talkie sequences,  has survived. Although I haven’t come across any of Griffith’s films as yet, I know she has a devoted following. I have seen Withers in a couple of films where he co-stars with Cagney around this era and find him a rather patchy actor but would be interested to see him in this. Mordaunt Hall reviewed this version for the New York Times and it sounds as if it was a bit like the early talkies spoofed in Singin’ in the Rain – he comments:  “The screen translation of Maxwell Anderson’s prize play, “Saturday’s Children,” is interspersed with dialogue passages that occasionally boom in a disquieting fashion and others that subside into abashed tones so low that the words of the players cannot always be heard.”

Grant Withers and Corinne Griffith in the 1929 film ‘Saturday’s Children’

Gloria Stuart and Ross Alexander in ‘Maybe It’s Love’

The play was filmed again in 1935, under the title Maybe It’s Love (confusingly, this was also the title of a totally unrelated Wellman film released in 1930!), with future Titanic star Gloria Stuart as Bobby this time and the largely forgotten Ross Alexander, who tragically committed suicide less than two years later,  as Rims. This version isn’t on DVD, but – as with the 1940 film – I believe it is sometimes shown on the US TCM channel and there are a few clips of it available to see at the station’s website. It looks as if it is more frothy and comic than the Garfield/Shirley version, with the part of the brother-in-law, Willie, built up for Warner’s comedy favourite Frank McHugh. Also in this version there really is another man after Bobby. Here is a link to the trailer, and if you let it go on running afterwards it will play another clip.

Next of course came the Garfield version, and after that there were three TV adaptations – a Lux Video Theater version in 1950 with Joan Caulfield as Bobby and Dean Harens as Rims, a 1952 Celanese Theater episode with Mickey Rooney as Rims (the imdb doesn’t have details of who played Bobby in that one) and a 1962 Golden Showcase episode with a cast which would have graced a feature film – Ralph Bellamy as the father, Cliff Robertson as Rims, Lee Grant as Florrie and Inger Stevens as Bobby. I was occasionally reminded of 1960s kitchen-sink dramas by some of the more downbeat scenes in the 1940 film, so was interested to see that it was remade for television in that era.

Ralph Bellamy and Inger Stevens in the 1962 TV version

The play has since lapsed into obscurity, but I see from a bit of googling that it was staged at the University of Missouri in 2010 – more than 80 years after its first production.  A student newspaper report says : “Director Fonzie Geary said he chose this play because it is one of the lost treasures of the American theatre.”

Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse

There’s a Western musical number in one of Fred Astaire’s least-known films, Let’s Dance (1950), where a TV set is seen on the wall, showing a cowboy film. Astaire eyes it disbelievingly for a second – then whips out a gun and shoots the screen. A slightly less drastic method of getting rid of the competition is used at the start of another Fifties film musical, Young at Heart (1954.) Here, an elderly Ethel Barrymore is sitting watching a boxing match on television, but the commentary is deliberately drowned out by her musician brother (Robert Keith), until she switches off – and the message is driven home by a wry comment that he “won the fight”.

In real life, however, the fight wasn’t so easy to win.The audience was falling away to television, and the writing was on the wall for big-budget Technicolor musical extravaganzas. When The Band Wagon was released in 1953, MGM’s Arthur Freed unit, which had made so many great films, was facing a struggle for funding, and Astaire’s contract with the studio was coming to an end. It’s hardly surprising that, despite its lavish musical sequences, including Astaire and Cyd Charisse’s romantic Dancing in the Dark, the film at times has a sad, wistful feeling about it compared to the high spirits of Singin’ In The Rain the previous year.

These two movies are often compared, as both are backstage stories featuring great songbooks of musical standards. (The songs for The Band Wagon are all by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, and some had featured in Astaire’s 1931 Broadway musical with the same title, though the story is completely different). Also, both The Band Wagon and Singin’ in the Rain had scripts written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, loaded with many satirical references . However, as David Parkinson points out in The Rough Guide to Film Musicals: “Whereas Gene Kelly’s confident classic was an optimistic paean to talking pictures, Fred Astaire’s underrated homage to the stage was shrouded in a pessimism that implied that the days of old-time show business were numbered.”

At least it’s an amusing brand of pessimism. You get the flavour right at the start of the film, where Astaire’s character, song and dance man Tony Hunter, has to listen to people on the train discussing how out-of-date he is – and then, adding insult to injury, his top hat fails to draw any bidders at auction. “He wore it in his classic film Swinging Down to Panama – fifty cents, anyone?” (According to Liza Minnelli in the DVD commentary, director Vincente Minnelli persuaded Astaire to allow these in-jokes.) The mood cheers briefly when the press turns up to meet the train, but it turns out they want to see Ava Gardner , in an uncredited cameo, rather than Tony.

The veteran dancer is signed up to star in a new stage production, written by his old friends Lily and Lester (Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant, playing versions of Comden and Green), which sounds right up his street – a humorous musical about a bestselling writer. However, things start to go wrong when theatrical man of the moment Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan in pompous overdrive) is brought in to direct the play. He decides to make sweeping changes, turning the comedy into a pretentious reworking of the Faust legend.

Nanette Fabray in the’Louisiana Hayride’ number

Lily and Lester soon realise they are the ones selling their souls, or at least their show – and on opening night they quickly descend into a hell of bad reviews. Then Tony steps in to save the day, in the best spirit of “the show must go on” – and The Band Wagon is turned back into a song and dance spectacular, wowing audiences on a tour around the country. Meanwhile, a tentative romance is developing between Tony and ballerina Gaby (Charisse), but she is already involved with choreographer Paul (James Mitchell).

The rehearsal scenes show plenty of tensions between the characters, not all of which were invented. There were various personal problems in real life. Fred Astaire’s wife was dying, so he was obviously under great strain, although his daughter says in the DVD featurette that it helped him to keep working. Jack Buchanan had a lot of problems with his teeth and some scenes had to be arranged around his dentists’ appointments. Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant were only barely on speaking terms some of the time – and dancer James Mitchell said he was made to feel so unwelcome on set he decided never to see the finished film.

Astaire (who had very little self-confidence, according to an interview with Vincente Minnelli) was nervous about whether Charisse was too tall to dance with him, and whether their styles would meld . This is something the writers picked up on with a funny scene where he stands next to her on the stairs, trying to work out their respective heights. He was also genuinely nervous about working with choreographer Michael Kidd – just as his character worries about some of the dance numbers within the film. Kidd tells in the featurette how he found it very hard to work out the dances for the film, because, every time he suggested something, Astaire would reply “Oh, Mike, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that.”

The great dancer was more than able to do everything Kidd dreamed up for him, of course. The film is full of stunning song and dance numbers from Astaire, with my own favourite probably being the By Myself/Shine on Your Shoes sequence near the start of the movie, a breathtakingly inventive number at an amusement arcade bringing in assorted machines and attractions, while the crowd mills around. Leroy Daniels, the dancer who joins Astaire in the Shine on Your Shoes sequence, really was a shoeshine man who used to dance while he worked – Liza tells in the DVD commentary how she and dad Vincente spotted him at work and he was then included in the number. I also like I Love Louisa, a catchy song where we get a chance to hear Fred Astaire singing with an Austrian accent and including a string of German phrases. (His family was Austrian.)

At the end of the film there is a series of great numbers featured in the fictional show, including Girl Hunt, a brilliant ballet spoofing Mickey Spillane type hardboiled mysteries, Louisiana Hayride, sung by Nanette Fabray, which sounds like a number from Oklahoma!, and I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan, a wonderful soft-shoe dance for Astaire and Buchanan together. The only song I don’t like much is Triplets, a gimmicky number with Astaire, Buchanan and Fabray playing babies – apparently the three of them all had to take painkilling drugs so they could dance on their knees for this number. Nowadays it would probably be done with trick photography or CGI.

Probably the most famous song, though, is That’s Entertainment, the only newly-written number for the film – Schwartz and Dietz were asked to write something with a similar flavour to There’s No Business Like Showbusiness, which sounds like quite a daunting task, but they did just that, and wrote the song in just half an hour. It perfectly captures the spirit of the film, by celebrating entertainment in all its rich variety – the song mentions everything from Oedipus Rex to the early Astaire and Rogers musical The Gay Divorcee.

This musical gives Astaire one of his best roles, and Charisse’s dancing is wonderful even if her acting is occasionally a bit dodgy, as in the scene where she has to cry. Buchanan is also brilliantly funny as Cordova and very nearly steals the show – he had briefly been to Hollywood much earlier in his career to star in Lubitsch’s fine early musical Monte Carlo (1930), and he also had a highly successful long career in the UK, but this film, made just four years before he died, is the one he is best remembered for.

Really, I suppose, Buchanan dancing and acting with such panache almost at the end of his career sums up the feeling of the movie. The MGM musical era was nearly over, but the star-studded cast was driving the bandwagon right to the end of the road – and doing it in glamorous, colourful, over-the-top style.

This piece first appeared during the musicals countdown at the Wonders in the Dark website.

Humphrey Bogart and June Allyson

Nearly two decades before M.A.S.H., the Korean War romantic drama Battle Circus, starring Humphrey Bogart and June Allyson as a surgeon and nurse, covered much of the same territory. Indeed, the opening shots of a helicopter hovering above a landscape of tents looks uncannily familiar to any fan of the later film and TV series. This film was made while the war was still going on, and doesn’t quite have the sharp irreverence of the later takes on the conflict, but there are flashes of the same kind of black humour. (The wounded here are ‘incoming mail’.) It is also a lot more downbeat than some of the Second World War flag-wavers, which is perhaps inevitable in a film focusing not on soldiers, but on the army medics called to patch up the wounded and dying. I found the medical and military scenes powerful, but felt it a shame that so much screen time is spent on the rather unconvincing romance between Bogart and Allyson.

Bogart stars as Major Jed Webbe, a hard-bitten, weary surgeon with a gift for sarcastic one-liners, who shows the way forward to Hawkeye Pierce in M.A.S.H. Like Hawkeye, Jed is starting to show the strain of his daily struggle to save lives, and at one point is tempted to drown his sorrows with an illicit bottle of whisky. However, he is soon in trouble for this, even though he is off-duty at the time, as his commanding officer (Robert Keith) tersely points out that he must be sober and ready to work 24 hours a day, if required.

In another scene, after a young soldier has died on the operating table, Webbe briefly walks out of the room to cope with his emotions, and is followed by Lt Ruth McGara (Allyson), who tells him: “Don’t blame yourself for that man dying.” “It’s not just him,” he replies. “It’s all the others – all the young men, the futility of it all.” At another point he suggests that the Korean war will become the third world war in one lifetime – bringing out the fears of those living through it.

The film is really at its strongest in scenes like these, and also in all the haunting shots of the tents being taken down and pitched again as the camp follows the army (the reason for ‘circus’ in the title). These sequences reminded me of a Western, with the small band of exiles moving through the hostile landscape in a latter-day version of a wagon train. Then there is the relentless rain lashing everything in sight and, most of all, there are glimpses of the Korean refugees, marching for days on end. There is also a moving sequence where a little Korean boy (a very good young actor) is operated on by Webbe. As part of the recent John Garfield blogathon, Jeff Flugel discussed Howard Hawks’ 1943 film Air Force and the casually racist language in some Hollywood films of the time, which brings an audience up short now and would have done the same for some viewers at the time. I was interested to note the contrast in this film, made just 10 years on, where there is one chillingly casual usage of this type of language, clearly rooted in reality, but it is immediately slapped down by one of the medics. However, the fear and hostility between the two sides is not skated over, and in one of the film’s stand-out scenes a wounded and terrified Korean brandishes a live grenade, which is eventually coaxed away from him by Ruth.

According to TCM’s article on the film, it was partly filmed at Camp Pickett, where the MASH units trained, helping to give a feeling of authenticity. The film was directed and partly written by Richard Brooks, who also worked with Bogart on his previous film, Deadline USA, one that I haven’t caught up with as yet. Brooks went on to make some fine films, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry and Sweet Bird of Youth, but this was fairly early in his career as a director and it is rather uneven, with the romance scenes slowing it down and diluting the intensity.

The film was advertised with the tagline “MGM’s great drama of desire under fire”, and clearly aspires to be a tale of love and war, but it is no Casablanca. Bogart and Allyson have little chemistry, and their relationship is far more prosaic and everyday. Indeed, in almost their opening conversation, Bogart helpfully tells Allyson where the toilets are – useful, I’m sure, but hardly romantic. I did like the scene where Jed makes his opening pass at Ruth, in a practised, hard-boiled style – his arm slipping round her surreptitiously as he spins a well-worn line. She resists being just another conquest and demands to be treated as an equal and a colleague. After that he is forced to set aside his clichéd womanising and look at her as an individual, something which could have worked well – but somehow it never comes alive on screen. There is too much to-ing and fro-ing and agonising, and their love is too often spelt out in so many words rather than just being understood through the scenes of them working together.

June Allyson’s casting was criticised at the time and she does make a slightly incongruous combination with Bogart, but I rather liked her performance as a nurse. She is refreshingly unglamorous, understated and professional. She does have one scene where she breaks down under the strain, but then again so does Bogart – the difference being that she cries and he drinks. The comradeship between her and the other nurses is also convincing. There is a bit of predictable back-biting when one of the other nurses is jealous of her relationship with Jed, but this is quickly forgotten.

All in all, while this isn’t one of Bogart’s greatest roles, it is an interesting one and I’m glad to have seen it. Unfortunately, the print shown on TCM in the UK, which I watched, was of poor quality, with a washed-out grey picture which failed to do justice to John Alton’s black-and-white cinematography. (At one point, the picture was so fuzzy and had so many green shadows that I wondered if the tube of my TV was going!) However, there are two DVDs available, a Warner Archive release and a Spanish region 2 disc, so I would certainly hope the quality of those is better. I’d be interested to hear if anyone can confirm this, and also if TCM in the US has a better print.

John Garfield’s last film is one of his greatest – yet it tends to be known more for the shadows which were gathering around him in real life than for those on screen. It was made a year before he died, at a time when the actor was being pursued just as relentlessly as his character is in the film, and it is impossible not to think about the parallels as you watch. Indeed, the whole film carries echoes of the McCarthy witch-hunt and many of those involved with it, including director John Berry and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, were being persecuted along with Garfield. However, there is a lot more to this movie than its historical/biographical context and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who admires Garfield’s better-known films noir, such as Force of Evil and Body and Soul. Sadly it hasn’t as yet had a DVD release in region 1, but I can recommend the region 2 release from Optimum, which has fine picture quality, although there are no extras – not even a trailer. (You can also find the film in segments at Youtube, but I don’t know what the quality is like. )

This is a taut, disturbing noir, with superb camerawork by the great James Wong Howe – I’m including a link to a clip of the opening, on Youtube, to give a taste. It begins in the middle of a nightmare, as the camera slowly pans into a dark, untidy room, in a long shot which finds Garfield’s character, small-time criminal Nick Robey, lying in bed, sweating and shaking. Then his mother roughly wakes him and the two go straight into a row, which is just the start of a waking nightmare lasting for the rest of the film. The title is He Ran All the Way, but for most of the film Nick has nowhere to run.

Here’s a link to a brief clip of the film’s start:

John Garfield and Shelley Winters

After that fight with his alcoholic mother (Gladys George), Nick goes out and meets up with his only friend, Al (Norman Lloyd), who bullies him into taking part in a payroll robbery. The heist ends in disaster, as Al is killed and Nick shoots and fatally wounds a policeman. Terrified and alone, he impulsively goes to a public pool as a place to hide out, starts to chat to swimmer Peggy Dobbs (Shelley Winters), and accompanies her home. Once he is in her family’s apartment, he ends up taking her family hostage, and can’t bring himself to leave and face the streets again.  He hides and sweats, just as he lingered in bed in that opening shot. (As we mark John Garfield’s centenary, I must just mention here that Norman Lloyd, who went on to have a great career and starred in St Elsewhere, is now 98, and still working as an actor.)

He Ran All the Way is possibly the first of several films made around this period which centre on a criminal who holes up in an ordinary home and holds its family hostage, a theme which seems to encapsulate all the paranoia of the McCarthy era. The best-known of these is probably William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours (1955), with Humphrey Bogart as the central gangster, terrorising Frederic March and his wife and children. Another is Suddenly (1954), where Frank Sinatra plays one of a gang who trap a family in their home while plotting to assassinate the president. (There were also a number of less well-known films with similar storylines.) All these three feature a lead criminal played by an actor associated with more sympathetic parts, so that there could be a risk the audience’s sympathy will be torn – but the violence and bitterness of Bogart and Sinatra’s characters is such that this danger doesn’t really exist. The whole feeling of those films is on the side of the family, willing the intruders to leave before they cause even more pain and damage.

By contrast, Garfield’s character, Nick, is the focus of more sympathy, even though the film does not skate over his capacity for violence. One big difference between him and Bogart or Sinatra’s characters is that he is alone. Another is that we have seen his damaged background. Garfield was in his late 30s here – and occasionally looks his full age in a haggard close-up. Yet most of the time the character he is playing seems much younger, living at home with the mother who shouts at him and even at one point physically attacks him, giving a bleak glimpse of what his childhood must have been.

The swimming scene where Nick and Peggy meet

In some ways the part is a return to the boyish roles which came at the outset of Garfield’s career, like Mickey Borden in Four Daughters or the waif-like boxer Johnnie in They Made Me a Criminal, both characters in need of mothering. Despite his gangster swagger, the nervous Nick is just as lonely as they were, and just as desperate for someone to care about him. Typically, he clings to someone and then turns on them. Peggy complains  at the swimming pool that he is holding on to her too tightly, and then makes the same complaint when he dances with her to the radio in the family’s front room. He appeals for her sympathy by saying that he isn’t feeling well (is he the only movie gangster who has to go and lie down after shooting someone?), and then when she touches his forehead and tells him it feels hot, he grabs her hand and says “Oh, that feels nice”. A mother’s gesture – but his real mother slapped his face earlier instead of stroking it, and, when the cops are searching her home for clues to his whereabouts, she tells them to kill him.

Mothers often tend to get the blame in gangster films for the way their sons turned out, with the most famous example of this, of course, being Cagney’s Ma in White Heat. She loves him too much, and turns him bad, whereas in this film Nick’s mother doesn’t love him enough, or at all. I don’t think it is as simple as the mother being blamed for everything here – we don’t see enough of her for that – but her harshness does make a contrast with Peggy’s close-knit, working-class family. The film gives a strong portrayal of their domestic routines and the way they struggle to go on with them despite the intruder’s presence. Indeed the whole film seems to carry an echo of an everyday story that could have happened instead, if only the violence hadn’t broken in – for instance, with a little scene where Nick politely asks for more coffee at breakfast before leaving (though, inevitably, he then decides not to leave at all).

Garfield’s character constantly veers between the criminal he is and the nicer man he could have been. In one scene he cares for the mother (Selena Royle) when she collapses, and in another he briefly hugs the young son (Robert Hyatt). He always calls the father, Fred (Wallace Ford) “Pop”. Nick clearly longs to be part of the family he is hungrily watching from outside, and there is an astonishing scene where he tries to force members of the household to eat a turkey dinner which he has prepared. They refuse and instead eat a stew prepared by the mother – until Nick orders them to eat at gunpoint. This is one of the most memorable scenes in the film and must be one of the great bad meals in cinema, up there with the notorious grapefruit scene in The Public Enemy. Scenes like this one put across the contrast between Nick’s loneliness and the family he can’t have far better than the awkward scene where Wallace Ford suddenly delivers a stilted little sermon about the joys of family life.   

A staircase steeped in noir shadows

As with White Heat, the posters for this film suggest it is more conventional than it actually is, playing up the doomed romance element between Nick and Peggy. (I haven’t been able to find a trailer anywhere, but wonder if it was similarly misleading.) For most of the film Shelley Winters looks plain and even slightly dowdy – it is refreshing to see a fairly ordinary-looking woman as a heroine in a film like this. But there is a sequence late on where she wears a more glamorous dress and make-up.  And it is these scenes which were chosen for all the posters, with wildly misleading taglines such as “Dynamite hits the screen with their kind of love!” In fact Nick and Peggy’s relationship isn’t dynamic at all – they are two lonely people who could perhaps have found happiness together if it hadn’t all been spoilt from the outset. And heroine Peggy is no femme fatale, but a quiet, dutiful daughter working in a bakery. It is suggested she doesn’t have much experience with men, as there’s a glimpse of a bespectacled neighbour who wants to show her his new record of classical music, and a female colleague complains she has had a problem finding a date for her. “I was desperate, otherwise I wouldn’t look at you twice,” grunts Garfield in one scene.

I mention the ending of the film in this next bit.

But he does look twice – and so does she. In the scene where they first meet at the swimming pool, Nick persuades Peggy to relax and let herself be carried away, and later he tries to do the same in another context, asking her to run off with him. She is tempted, but there is always an ambiguity undercutting her actions. Does she love Nick, or is she just motivated by her love for her family, and her desire to save them from him?  This question builds up to the climax,  which is itself ambiguous. Peggy in the end chooses her family and shoots Nick down, but then, as he staggers along the gutter fatally wounded, the car she had bought pulls up, gleaming new, suggesting that she did love him after all. Or at least she thought she did for a minute.

John Garfield and Selena Royle

Hiding out at the swimming pool

]]> http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/he-ran-all-the-way-john-berry-1951/feed/ 20 Judy He Ran All the Way 2 John Garfield and Shelley Winters The swimming scene where Nick and Peggy meet A staircase steeped in noir shadows John Garfield and Selena Royle He Ran All the Way 6 http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/guys-and-dolls-joseph-l-mankiewicz-1955/ http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/guys-and-dolls-joseph-l-mankiewicz-1955/#comments Thu, 21 Feb 2013 10:45:33 +0000 Judy http://movieclassics.wordpress.com/?p=2701 ]]> Frank Loesser’s amazing score for Guys and Dolls has to be one of the greatest ever written, packed with unforgettable songs, from Fugue for Tinhorns to Luck, Be a Lady and Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat. Michael Kidd’s fast-moving choreography in the colourful street scenes, using Cinemascope to its full effect, adds to the atmosphere, while the dialogue is full of sharp one-liners. However, the film has had much adverse criticism over the years.

So what’s the reason for the widespread lack of enthusiasm? I think it might be mainly that the stage musical is so beloved and frequently revived, with the film coming off second-best by comparison . As with so many adaptations, a few of the songs from the stage show were jettisoned for the film, including such greats as I’ve Never Been in Love Before – Marlon Brando, controversially cast in a singing role, is said to have struggled with some of the notes. However, as compensation, Loesser wrote some new songs for the film, including A Woman in Love for Brando and Sinatra’s show-stopper Adelaide, which, going full circle, is now sometimes included in stage productions.

Jean Simmons and Marlon Brando

The musical is based on Damon Runyon’s early 1930s short stories and set in the back alleys of New York, among the gamblers, drinkers, small-time gangsters and dancing girls. In short, it is the world of a Warner Brothers pre-Code – but updated and turned into a 1950s musical spectacular. A wealth of minor characters, such as Harry the Horse, hapless gangster Big Jule, and, especially, Nicely Nicely Johnson (Stubby Kaye, who also starred in the original Broadway production), add to the street-smart atmosphere.

For anyone who doesn’t know the story, Sky Masterson, a professional gambler, is tricked into wooing Sergeant Sarah Brown of the Save a Soul Mission for a bet. He has to persuade her to go on a date to Havana. Meanwhile, Nathan Detroit, cash-strapped owner of “the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York”, has been engaged to singer/stripper Miss Adelaide for 14 years… but doesn’t want to set the wedding date just yet.

Gene Kelly was initially tipped to play the lead role of Sky, and, according to the Rough Guide to Film Musicals, once commented: “I was born to play Sky the way Gable was born to play Rhett Butler, but the bastards at MGM refused to loan me out.” (Ironically, MGM eventually distributed the movie, made by the Samuel Goldwyn Company.) When Kelly wasn’t made available, in the end the part went to Brando, hottest star of the moment. Talk about a long shot. He is said to have struggled with the singing and dancing, and some of his vocal performances had to be cobbled together from various takes – but he brings his trademark intensity to the role in the acting sequences. While he is clearly no Sinatra, I also rather like his singing voice, and the moment when he joins in with Jean Simmons, as Sarah, on I’ll Know,never fails to send shivers down my spine. Simmons, too, was known as a dramatic actress rather than a singer, but both she and Brando do their own singing throughout rather than being dubbed, and this means they can carry their acting characterisations over into the songs.

Frank Sinatra and Vivian Blaine

Frank Sinatra’s performance in this film is sometimes criticised, with claims that he is “dull” or “half-hearted” .  I can’t agree. He does seem slightly weary, and if anything looks older than his 40 years – but, surely, this is part of the character of Nathan, who has been knocking around those streets all his life and is still penniless. Sinatra (who was himself in the running to play Sky at one point) also has some great songs, performed as only he can, with Adelaide and Sue Me as highlights. However, my favourite performance is possibly given by Vivian Blaine, who also took the role of Miss Adelaide in the original Broadway production. Her character has some of the funniest musical numbers, including Take Back Your Mink and, of course, Adelaide’s Lament, her song about how her constantly-delayed wedding has left her with a permanent cold in the head. I do slightly regret that this song is performed in her dressing room, instead of getting the full stage treatment from Michael Kidd – but it’s still comic gold.

Here’s a clip of Brando singing Luck be a Lady – plus a live performance by Sinatra of the same song to compare. Not surprisingly, Frank wins hands down, in my book anyway. I hoped also to find Gene Kelly singing the same number, but haven’t had any luck on that so am not sure if he ever recorded it.

Just to add that there are several different DVDs available. I have a region 2 release included in a box set of great musicals, which is basically a bare-bones DVD except for the long original theatrical trailer, which is almost a featurette. There is also a region 1 “deluxe” edition, including a booklet and two documentaries and there has also been a region 1 blu-ray release – I’d be interested to hear what anyone who has either of these thinks of the quality of the print and the extras included.

This review first appeared as part of the musical countdown at the Wonders in the Dark website.

Sinatra and Blaine

Brando and Simmons

Brando rolls the dice

Brando and Simmons having a drink in Havana