And introducing… #3. Lee Tracy

Here's part three of the series. Previous instalments were about John Ford and Wendy Hiller. Some of the films dealt with below also feature in my two-part 'FDR's Hollywood' feature, looking at political cinema of the 1930s and '40s.

#3. Lee Tracy



Who?
The electrifying, motormouthed comedian whose career came to a sudden and dramatic halt in the mid-1930s.

How so?
He pissed on the Mexican Army.

He what now?
He (allegedly) relieved himself nakedly on a passing military parade during the location filming of MGM’s Viva Villa! in November 1933, and was thrown out of Mexico.

Well, if you’ve got to go...
Indeed – though for Tracy’s part, he denied it all. He was sacked by the studio anyway and spent the rest of his career at lesser studios, before a brief, remarkable comeback in the 1960s.



Was he any good?
The best. Tracy was an explosive, compelling performer: the living embodiment of the “pre-Code” movie – those do-anything, say-anything films that packed out cinemas in the early ‘30s, before the Hays Office went and spoiled everyone’s fun. The impending censorship clampdown of 1934 effectively put Tracy’s kind of movie out of business, which might have been why MGM weren’t too sorry to see him go.

Any trademarks?
Plenty. A wild-eyed delight at his amoral manoeuvring getting him on top once more. A twirling forefinger, a selection of distinctive vocal trills (“You’re thrrrrrough”) and an arsenal of singular gestures, from the way he appeared to be literally seizing control of a scene – bending forward, arms wide apart – to his deft, farewell flick of the hand.



Where do I start?
With Blessed Event, the 1932 Warner Bros comedy about an unscrupulous gossip columnist, which may just be the funniest movie ever made (watch the trailer here). Tracy’s Alvin Roberts, “that kid from advertising”, is allowed to look after the paper’s social section while the regular author is away, and proceeds to turn it into the most popular – and unpopular – column in the country, incurring the wrath of a gangster, and engaging in a gleeful tit-for-tat rivalry with eternally upbeat crooner Bunny Harmon (Dick Powell). Playing a character loosely based on Walter Winchell – then one of the most influential men in America, and the subject of a half-dozen semi-fictional films – Tracy is hysterically funny, spewing a constant stream of wisecracks, though the film’s centrepiece is a terrifying, perilously dark set-piece in which he talks mobster Allen Jenkins through a trip to the electric chair. He shoves a picture of noted victim Ruth Snyder in Jenkins’ face, before navigating the henchman through a florid, impossibly graphic description of state-sanctioned death, every part of his body seeming to contort as he dominates the screen. You would die with one finger twitching upwards, Tracy concludes with a shaking voice, “to where you’re... not... going”.

That sounds, err, fun?
It doesn’t, but somehow it’s exhilarating, because you’ve never seen anyone act like that before: it’s neither conventional, nor stagy, nor necessarily naturalistic, it’s just dynamic.



What else did Tracy do?
Having originated the role of Hildy Johnson in the legendary stage play, The Front Page (above), he had come to Hollywood in ’29. He appeared as a low-level criminal in Frank Borzage’s abysmal translation of Liliom (later musicalised as Carousel), and had a bit in John Ford's gangster flick, Born Reckless, but came to real prominence with three supporting roles in 1932: The Strange Love of Molly Louvain – a nasty, compelling Pre-Coder that spotlighted his singular, rapidly-quickening style of delivery – Love Is a Racket (a film he would have starred in just months later) and the near-legendary two-strip Technicolor horror-comedy, Doctor X, playing an endlessly quipping reporter – a market he had quickly cornered. After Blessed Event, he starred in a succession of tailor-made vehicles making use of the go-getter persona so beloved of Depression-era audiences, beginning with The Half-Naked Truth (which cast him as a promoter), Clear All Wires! (sending his journalist to Communist Russia), the classic romantic comedy The Nuisance (with Tracy as the last word in amoral shysters) and the fantasy masterpiece, Turn Back the Clock, in which his unsatisfied grocer has the chance to live his adulthood over. The final two were made at MGM, the world's biggest and most prestigious movie studio, which could scarcely miss the impact he had been having over at Warner Bros, and didn't hesitate in offering him a fat long-term contract.

Is that all?
Of course not! This was the early '30s, when actors were treated abysmally, so there are always tons of films to enjoy. Tracy had also appeared in Washington Merry-Go-Round, which anticipated Mr Smith Goes to Washington, and went on to deliver an unforgettable supporting performance as the agent to alcoholic actor John Barrymore in Dinner at Eight (perhaps the most prestigious MGM film of 1933), run rings round Jean Harlow’s diva in the superlative, lightning-paced comedy, Bombshell, and star in a bastardised version of Nathanael West’s 'Miss Lonelyhearts' called Advice to the Lovelorn (sound familiar?), designed to cash in on the success of Blessed Event. It was his 14th film in just two years. After that came Mexico. And the rest, as they say, is history.



I’m not sure it is. Please fill me in.
Tracy did the rounds, pitching up at Columbia, RKO and even the Poverty Row studio PRC, where – looking a bit more jowly than 10 years before – he rolled back the years, recapturing some of that old Blessed Event magic in a zingy film called The Pay-Off. His other post-MGM films are a mixed bag, though the mid-‘30s comedy-thrillers Wanted: Jane Turner and Behind the Headlines are pretty great for what they are, while I’ll Tell the World – which cast him opposite Old Rose from Titanic (Gloria Stuart) – is a charming movie in which his dogged, dynamic reporter falls in love with a European princess, without losing his passion for skulduggery and sarcasm.



Tell us about the ones that didn’t work.
It’s not that they don’t work, it’s that they don’t work fully, sometimes leaving Tracy high and dry as the films run out of momentum, or trade sardonism for sanctimony. He’s always worth watching, though, and endearing oddities during this period include a boxing comedy alongside Roscoe Karns (Two-Fisted), a weird comedy-weepie co-starring Jimmy Durante (Carnival), the Hollywood-on-film shenanigans of Crashing Hollywood, 1940’s gimmicky Millionaires in Prison (inevitably featuring Raymond Walburn as one such moneyman), and a variety of vehicles with Tracy in crooked attorney parts, such as Criminal Lawyer – uneven but great fun – and The Spellbinder, which like 1934’s You Belong to Me cast him as a dad, before degenerating quickly into soap operatics.

That doesn’t sound very good. His worst?
No, his worst is definitely The Power of the Press (1943), a hopeless, excruciating collision of small-town patriotic wisdom and WWII propaganda flick – based on a Sam Fuller story, wtf?! – in which folksy newspaper editor Guy Kibbee takes over a New York paper infested with fascist fifth columnists, including Hearst-like businessman Otto Kruger, who's in preposterous form. Tracy’s OK as a snappy but spineless, circulation-chasing editor, but it’s a profoundly depressing experience. He made three more films over the next four years, each more obscure than the last, and then disappeared from the big screen.



So what’s all this about a comeback?
Having made his way slowly down the ladder, and then crossed over to TV, Tracy returned to the stage in the early ‘60s, playing a former President – patterned after Harry Truman – in Gore Vidal’s vital, vivid political play, The Best Man. When it transferred to the screen, Tracy played the role again: a glorious, measured, nostalgic characterisation that showed a range largely untapped by a Hollywood system forever trading off familiar persona, finally allowed him to swear (he swears superbly), and landed him a well-deserved Oscar nomination. Sadly, talk of a comeback was scuppered by his faltering health – he died four years later – but as swansongs go, it was one of the finest.

A case of what might have been, perhaps, had he not made that ill-fated trip to a Mexican hotel balcony. He did, right?
Who knows? In his book, cinematographer Charles G. Clarke said he was standing outside during the parade, and the incident never happened. In his version of events, Tracy had responded to an obscene gesture on the street by making one of his own, but that after the papers got wind of his supposed insult to the nation, MGM had sacrificed Tracy in order to be allowed to continue filming there. Director Howard Hawks was also kicked off the picture for siding with Tracy.



What to say: “Blessed Event is the epitome of pre-Code filmmaking: daring, lightning-paced and furiously funny.”

What not to say: “Blessed Event is so good it makes me want to wee on soldiers.”

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Thanks for reading.

FDR's Hollywood – Part 1: Forgotten men (1932-3)

"They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for bread?"
– 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?' by Yip Harburg, 1930

This new two-part blog was inspired by reading Jean Edward Smith's excellent FDR biography. Before that, my knowledge of the 32nd POTUS had largely been filtered through the prism of cinema, so I thought it'd be fun to write about how FDR and his times were shown on screen as events happened. Part 1 features morphine addiction, a communist binman and a man being shot in the dick.

FDR'S HOLLYWOOD
PART 1: FORGOTTEN MEN (1932-3)



The 1930s was an incomparably fascinating and fertile time in movie-making. A period of upheaval and revelation, of strictures, compromises, and hedonistic last hurrahs, and of brilliant new voices. It was also a time of radical politics, economic collapse and societal rejuvenation, and, perhaps more than at any other time, America had a responsive cinema, in dialogue with its national identity. Sometimes, it even had a campaigning one. And it rarely shied away from depicting social unrest in a way that seems almost unthinkable in today's mainstream cinema.

That national identity was shaped by one man more than any other: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States, who on 4 March, 1933 inherited a country on its knees, and lifted it up by the force of his personality, and by a policy programme of unprecedented radicalism.

In this two-part blog, I’ll look at the way the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s New Deal and the president himself were depicted on screen. Won’t that be fun? (Yes.)

1. ‘It is not the object of the producers to take sides’


Joseph Breen, the reactionary, anti-Semitic Hollywood censor. He said of the studio moguls: “Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the scum of the earth.”

In 1927 the movies learned to talk, and by 1932 Hollywood had fully mastered the new medium, following a tricky transitional period (to my mind, there were no great ‘talkies’ until King Vidor’s Hallelujah! in 1929, and hardly a deluge after that). Two years later, the Hays Office, led by Nazi sympathiser and joyless prude Joseph Breen, began to properly enforce the ‘Production Code’ censorship restrictions it had drafted in 1930, after unbearable pressure from the Catholic League of Decency (bloody Catholics). That meant, infamously, that showing a “man and woman in bed together” was now forbidden, but it also ripped the teeth out of social justice filmmaking. Though there’s nothing in the rules permitting progressive narratives, aside from a reference to “special care” now having to be shown in dealing with national institutions, scripts had to be passed by Breen before production started, and he was not a liberal man (as I said, he was a Nazi sympathiser).

Before the establishment wrestled back control, though, was an explosive two-and-a-half years of “pre-Code” movies: both a last hurrah for the more sensual(/exploitative) elements of Hollywood, and a white-hot birth for a nascent, doomed movement of vital political cinema, inspired by the hunger and hopelessness of The Great Depression, and alive with the anger of the dispossessed.


Ring Lardner Jr., the communist screenwriter, who later refused to 'name names' to the HUAC during the red scare. "It was a question of choosing to be a 'hero', or a shit," he said memorably.

The lefties didn’t have it all their own way. While many of the most influential writers and directors were liberals, socialists (John Ford, Howard Koch, Lillian Hellman, Donald Ogden Stewart) or communists (John Howard Lawson, Ring Lardner Jr., Dalton Trumbo), the big studios were run by wealthy moguls who were invariably Conservative Republicans (the ‘progressive’ Republican wing did still exist, but not in Hollywood). The powerful producers were on the right too: tubthumping defends of capitalism like Irving Thalberg, the boy genius of MGM, and there was a cabal of leading actors and directors – including Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Adolphe Menjou, Sam Wood, Norman Taurog and Cecil B. DeMille – who later formed the backbone of the red-hunting Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA).

As a result, the overwhelming number of Hollywood movies were extremely safe, either explicitly championing reactionary values, embedding them into a palatable, escapist narrative or simply ignoring the political climate altogether (while Eddie Cantor’s musicals could occasionally engage with the national picture in their framing devices or glib asides, Fred and Ginger’s transcendent trifles were almost entirely oblivious). The exception, as always, was where money could be made.


Irving Thalberg, the literate, brilliant producer who in 1934 pioneered American 'fake news' to swing a gubernatorial election.

In 1932, the novel and play Cabin in the Cotton (October 1932) made it to the big screen. Though it ends with a workers’ co-operative being formed thanks to the oratory of cotton-pickers’ son Richard Barthelmess, it’s one of the cagiest movies you’ll ever see, stoutly arguing the case of Southern planters, immediately qualifying any radical statement, and explicitly saying in its prologue that it wouldn’t be taking sides (that's where the quote in the heading comes from). It took Roosevelt’s election a month later to convince Warner Bros – admittedly the most earthy, socially-conscious and immigrant-friendly of the big studios – that there was a new mood flooding the country, and that by riding that wave they could start raking in big box office receipts. But first, let me take you back to the dog days of 1929.

2. ‘The big parade of tears’: The Great Depression on film



On Tuesday, 29 October, 1929 – ‘Black Tuesday’ – the American stock market crashed, precipitating the sharpest and most ruinous Depression in its history. ‘Hoovervilles’ – temporary encampments of homeless people living in cardboard boxes and makeshift huts – had bred in all major cities, breadlines of starving citizens snaked around blocks outside ad-hoc soup kitchens, and the President had just called out the National Guard to shoot unarmed veterans pleading to receive their WWI bonus ahead of time. A quarter of American adults were out of work, and that atmosphere of hopelessness, of privation, of deprivation and desperation permeated the national consciousness. By 1932, the height of the Great Depression, it had also reached the screen.

The Roaring Twenties (1939), arguably the greatest of the ‘30s gangster classics, has two fantastic montages fusing newsreel and new footage (edited by Jack Killifer), which bring to life the boom and bust of the 1920s – culminating in the crash – like little else. They also include that footage of gangsters throwing two grenades through a shop window that is in every gangster montage of the 1930s. That punchy, dynamic epic summarised the period from 1918 to 1933 with a stunning verve, but did so in retrospect. There are innumerable fascinating and bizarre films that portrayed the Depression as it was happening.



Like the extraordinarily flavourful Union Depot (January 1932), above: a rich, tough tapestry of early '30s America, masquerading as a melodrama, in which down-on-her-luck dancer Joan Blondell is easy prey for a limping, porn-obsessed sexual maniac (George Rosener) until dirty-faced vagrant Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. arrives on the scene. This minor classic boils an entire era down to 66 mesmerising minutes.


"The weather's getting fine/The coffee tastes like wine/You happy hobo, sing/'Hallelujah, I'm a bum again!'"

Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (February 1933) is one of the period's great curios: a spectacularly misguided comedy-musical-cum-drama about supertramp Bumper (Al Jolson), who gives up his post as the “Mayor of Central Park” for the love of a good amnesiac (Madge Evans), while tangling with a communist binman called Egghead (played by former silent clown, Harry Langdon). Written by Ben Hecht and S. N. Behrman, with songs and rhyming dialogue by Rodgers and Hart, it was a notorious flop on release, as workers who were being laid off in their millions didn’t equate their homelessness and deprivation with freedom, though seen today it’s joyous, subversive and, ultimately, heartbreaking.



Herbert Hoover famously insisted that jobless men had taken to selling apples on the street because they’d decided it was a good career move, but Damon Runyon and Robert Riskin saw this burgeoning industry for what it was. In Frank Capra’s Lady for a Day (September 1933), written by the pair, May Robson plays Apple Annie (above), a downtrodden old woman who lives in a barely-lit flop house, drinks too much and sells fruit out of a basket to survive – at least until her daughter comes to stay, and she turns to benevolent gangster Warren William to help put up a front.

Capra's torn-from-the-headlines American Madness (August 1932) had been confrontational rather than whimsical, depicting a liberal bank president (Walter Huston, more of whom later!) who stands up for the little guy against corporate greed, only for a robbery – shot in eerie Expressionist style – to force a run on the bank (foreshadowing Capra's It’s a Wonderful Life), and his marriage to head for the rocks. It suffers slightly from a familiar problem with Riskin’s work: he sees himself as a liberal, but views ordinary people as stupid and easily manipulated, but it has a progressive view of both capitalism and convicts, and argues passionately that when financial institutions put profit before people, everything goes wrong.


Top: American Madness; bottom: Gold Diggers of 1933

Two brilliant ensemble dramas, spearheaded by Warren William as a rascally, amoral businessman, warned of the dangers of rapacious and unforgiving capitalism, if having rather too much fun doing it. In both Skyscraper Souls (July 1932) and Employees’ Entrance (January 1933), William relentlessly pursued virgins, lied as easily as breathing, and delighted in destroying his business rivals, as a sort of Jordan Belfort of the Hoover era. Proper radical heroes were a fixture throughout the decade, though: the near-mythic screwball comedy My Man Godfrey (1936) discovered its hero down and out in a Hooverville, before moving into a mansion to put a spoilt family in their place.


The 'urgent populism' of Heroes for Sale.

Heroes for Sale (June 1933), one of the most fiercely politicised films of the era, used its hero as an emblem of the Lost Generation. Tom Morris (Richard Barthelmess) misses out on war hero status, gets hooked on prescription morphine, loses his job to his own invention, is jailed for trying to stop a riot, and then gets tagged as a Red and run out of town. Its treatment of communism is pathetically shallow and trivial, but its sequences of drug addiction were the most harrowing put on screen until The Man with the Golden Arm in 1955, while the scenes of broken-down tramps squatting on parkland, eating anything they can lay their hands on, are as valuable and resonant as any depictions during this era.


Heroes for Sale referenced one of the defining photographs of the day (by WPA photographer John E. Allen) in this gut-punch of a sequence.

A less impressive addiction drama was The Wet Parade (March, 1932), a fundamentally confused treatise on Prohibition, though it works as an insightful picture of the national debate around this crucial issue, which threatened to define Roosevelt's first campaign, if not as a movie.


"This depression is so bad I want to have an affair with a murderous gorilla."

The most vivid depictions of the Depression are in two unlikely films: the groundbreaking monster movie, King Kong (March 1933) – in which penniless orphan Fay Wray is first glimpsed stealing food in a bid to not starve to death on the streets of New York, and agrees to the ill-fated trip out of desperation – and an apparently innocuous Busby Berkeley musical, Gold Diggers of 1933 (May 1933). I’ve written at length about how original, ambitious and jaw-droppingly daring its closing number is, but it’s worth restating. For most of its running time, Gold Diggers of 1933 is a standard crowd-pleaser. Though its first half has numerous wry references to poverty, it is primarily a light-hearted musical about having the chutzpah to ride out the Depression (Warner’s key leading men of the period. – William Powell, Lee Tracy and James Cagney – all played ‘go getters’ using their wiles to stay afloat in this crumbling world). And then:

with the daft plot neatly tied up, Berkeley suddenly drops the big one: a climactic number that runs for almost seven minutes and seems to encapsulate an entire generation's experiences ... Men on a downward spiral that begins at the front and ends at the soup kitchen; an army of heroes deserted by America.

‘Remember My Forgotten Man’ (envisioned as a 'Big parade of tears') borrowed the words of FDR’s great April 1932 speech, who had spoken of the need for America to put its faith in “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid”. Here was a crystallisation of the Depression experience, from parade to patrol to poverty to protest, the number’s finale becoming almost a religious spectacle (though one shot by Eisenstein), as Joan Blondell and the army of the dispossessed – arms to the Heavens – seem to glimpse some higher power coming to deliver them.



3. Visions of a new America



The previous year, Lee Tracy (above) – usually cast as a cynical, motor-mouthed go-getter – had starred in an early prototype for Frank Capra’s great piece of political wish-fulfilment, Mr Smith Goes to Washington. The film, Washington Merry-Go-Round (October 1932), was released a month before FDR's election and found Tracy’s idealistic yet jaundiced young senator pitching up in DC, where he is first suckered and then sickened by the festering corruption he sees all around him (epitomised, obviously, by Walter Connolly as a crooked politico in the pay of bootleggers). There was a transparent hunger for an administration that cared.

The form that administration should take, though, was still up for grabs, at least in some quarters. Gabriel Over the White House (March 1933), an absolutely batshit political fantasy financed by notorious media mogul William Randolph Hearst – the primary inspiration for Citizen Kane – but devised by maverick producer Walter Wanger (who later made a prison reform picture after being sent to jail for shooting a romantic rival in the dick), stated the case for benign dictatorship, or just fascism.

Played by Walter Huston, President Judson Hammond is a journeyman politician (patterned after Herbert Hoover) who has a car accident and awakens from his coma a changed man (thanks apparently to divine intervention), proceeding to purge his cabinet of business interests, nationalise beer production, cut unemployment and, oh yes, invoke martial law, before forging everlasting peace through a process of nuclear brinkmanship. Hearst was a registered Democrat (though he disliked FDR personally), but the film does look suspiciously like totalitarian propaganda.


The answer to a nation's prayers: Walter Huston with superpowers.

A more uplifting alternate vision of America was offered by Turn Back the Clock (August 1933), a virtually-unknown time-travel drama in which tobacconist Lee Tracy is allowed to relive 20 years of his life, rising to political prominence as he confronts the major social issues of the day:



Wild Boys of the Road (September 1933), directed by Heroes for Sale's William Wellman, is one of the last and loudest yells of the Depression era, but also one of the most hopeful. An angry, bristling and uncompromising portrait of teenagers brutalised by the Depression, hopping freight trains only to find yet more privation and suffering, it anticipates Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (and was used itself in an award-winning ‘90s documentary about Depression-era itineracy, Riding the Rails) in its portrayal of desperate people forced to wander aimlessly away from their homes and happiness in search of a living, and takes precisely no prisoners. In one scene, Frankie Darro and his mates engage in a pitched battle with police at a Hooverville. In another, they beat an attempted rapist to death, with the movie’s apparent blessing.



At the film's climax, they meet a sympathetic judge (Robert Barrat), who – just when the teenagers fear they will be jailed for miscreancy – instead advocates leniency and, pointing to the logo of a blue eagle on his wall, says: “Things are going to be better now... all over the country.” That eagle was the logo of Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, and the symbol of the New Deal.

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Coming up in Part 2: FDR-on-film, fake news and philosophy.

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Thanks for reading. I wrote about cinematic presentations of Abraham Lincoln here, incidentally. You'll find it a little narrower in focus and a bit more silly, but only a bit.

Patti Smith, Music for Chameleons, and Ghibli being all weird again – #Reviews 261

Here's a blog I wrote about getting to go behind-the-scenes at Brian Pern: A Tribute, one of this year's televisual triumphs.

And here are reviews of the other cultural things I've ingested recently: three books, a movie and a couple of TV series.

BOOKS



Just Kids by Patti Smith (2010) – At its best, Smith’s beautifully-titled memoir of her life with idiosyncratic, doomed artist Robert Mapplethorpe is uncommonly insightful, raw and moving, as a trio of fateful encounters blossom into romance, which in time becomes an epic love that endures even as their lives begin to diverge: Smith graduating from artist to poet to pioneering rock ‘n’ roll frontwoman, Mapplethorpe admitting his homosexuality to himself as he turns from a collagist and painter into one of the era’s defining photographers. The passages detailing his death and then flashing back to their early acquaintanceship and their construction and then abandonment of a self-contained world are extraordinarily powerful, shining a light into the corners of Smith’s soul and revealing the importance that her upbringing, her faith and her commitment to creativity and visionary artistry have played in dictating her life’s course.

And yet the book becomes decreasingly revelatory and compelling as it progresses, Smith traversing into pretension with increasing frequency and intensity, as well as boringly listing which thrift shops she visited, which trinkets people gave one another, which outfits she wore every day and what she had to eat. As a fashion icon, it seems obvious in retrospect that she must have spent time and energy crafting her visual identities, but it doesn’t make for great reading, that blissful middle-ground of relatability, frank emotion and economic but literate prose vacated entirely for long stretches, as we oscillate between posturing and pointlessness.

Even then, though, Smith has a way of snapping back to a truthfulness and precision that's immediately and startlingly effective, and while reading between the lines we can deduce that perhaps Robert wasn’t the saintly, selfless figure that his great defender contends, you would have to be a psychopath not to be moved by the pair’s deep, mutual and unstinting dependence, at times breathtakingly evoked by this flawed but distinctive and heartbreaking elegy – not just for an artist, but for a man, and for the heyday of the grungy, bohemian, dangerous, filthy, accepting, unforgiving and enrapturing New York City that was his. (3)

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Scandals of Classic Hollywood by Anne Helen Peterson (2014) – I don’t want you to develop any preconceptions about this book’s contents, based on this image: if only there were a saying that succinctly crystallised this thought.

Anne Helen Petersen’s book isn’t the tawdry, sensationalist rehashing of age-old scandals it appears from the cover, rather it seems that this is the only way you can get a book like hers published. Instead, it’s a collection of blogs from this ‘doctor of gossip’ (she has a PhD in the history of the industry, from the University of Texas) which examines Hollywood scandals or tragedies, how they were managed (or not) by the studios, and what the events, their handling and the fall-out tell us about American society. Each chapter is around 13 pages long (a couple are much longer), beginning with Mary Pickford’s affair with Douglas Fairbanks, closing with the hysteria around James Dean’s death, and in between looking at everything from the tragic lives of screen sex sirens Clara Bow and Jean Harlow to Bogie and Bacall’s romance, and Montgomery Clift’s ‘long suicide’.

The quoted sources are almost all gossip and fan magazines, a fascinating prism through which to view this history, but also somewhat limiting, if the sections on Bow and Harlow are representative of the whole. Though Petersen alludes to David Stenn’s book on Harlow, she either misinterprets or deviates from his impeccably well-sourced, well-argued narratives of both lives, with an alternate vision that seems myopic and incomplete, with no understanding of (or even reference to) Bow’s tortured upbringing. The contrary assertions it does make aren’t attributed to any sources and so seem more like supposition. Though most of the other essays crackle with energy, as we get a witty, accessible and cleverly contextualised whistle-stop tour of a star’s life, usually zoning in on a controversial, widely-covered scandal (Fatty Arbuckle) or tragedy (Carole Lombard), or – more often than not – the ongoing ‘scandal’ that was their self-destruction (in the case of Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando), or their side-lining by censorship (Mae West) or racism (Dorothy Dandridge), as a result I began to question their veracity of completeness. Doubtless some elements are difficult to fact-check through the fog of time and the smoke and mirrors of Hollywood publicity, but her constant get-out of “the accuracy of this claim matters less than…” is frustrating, and there are quite a few typos and errors (Carole Lombard dies in 1941, then signs up to do war work in 1942). That’s a shame, as the Arbuckle section is spot on, the Clift one is a decent effort, and the chapters on West, Dandridge and heroin-addicted silent star Wallace Reid are – at least on the surface – gripping and eye-opening pieces about stars I’ve seen a bit of, but knew little about beyond the headlines.

There’s also certainly no doubt that Peterson is an expert on fan magazines and studio publicity, and it’s a fascinating angle from which to approach these stories. Now and then she'll even turn something you thought you knew about – like Kazan's On the Waterfront, one of the first films I ever loved – so you see it as if for the first time, appreciating how Eva Marie Saint's transformation in the film is fundamentally achieved through Brando's reactions to her. On the other hand, Petersen is writing for an audience with little to no knowledge of these stars and their work, which means that if you’ve read Patricia Bosworth’s book on Clift, Stenn’s definitive works on Bow and Harlow, or even seen – say – Paul Merton’s documentary on Arbuckle, you’re having to sit through an awful lot of familiar (but simplified) material in order to get a little more insight. She’s also somewhat curbed the waspish, sweary tone of her earlier Hairpin articles, which is understandable (I sometimes soften my own writing depending on the audience), but a little disappointing.

It's not that I didn’t enjoy the book. It’s a lot of fun, and I learned quite a bit, but it left me a little unsatisfied. Perhaps I’m just spoiled by Karina Longworth’s superb You Must Remember This podcast, which covers these sorts of stories with such skill, insight and journalistic rigour – and at such length – that she leaves most other film historians trailing in her wake. (2.5)

With enduring thanks (and sincere apologies for my usual ungratefulness) to my friend Soph for sending me this one.

***



Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote (1980) – A book of extraordinary grace, incisiveness and honesty which further bolsters my impression that Capote remains one of the most important, original and underestimated writers of his era. Fuck his artificial image as a catty, trivial, morbid starfucker, and study the work: dark, devastating, morally decent work shot through with his actual character, the shadows of an encroaching darkness creeping across the sun-dappled idyll of his New Orleans childhood. Even fans tend to lean on a popular narrative – pushed in last decade’s cinematic biopics – that sees him in terminal decline after the trial of In Cold Blood, but while it’s true that he degenerated into substance abuse (an affliction dealt with in breathtaking fashion in the last of these 14 pieces), and that with it his work-rate slowed, this book may well be his creative zenith.

In Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, he explains (entirely preposterously) that in the late ‘80s he found a new way to sing: a mathematical formula that has enabled his voice to endure his Never Ending Tour (please post your punchlines below). Here, Capote does much the same, denigrating his entire back catalogue as he seeks to articulate exactly why, and how, he’s developed the new style premiered in this book. Unlike Dylan, who is talking through his silly cowboy hat, Capote is sincere. His style here is so clean, precise and economical, yet to formally inventive, that it takes the breath away. Every decision he makes, from delayed gratification, to leading with dialogue, to drifting into remembrance and reminiscence, seems right, and his evocation of emotion, of nature, and of character is remarkably specific and so uniquely powerful.

There are six short stories and seven conversational portraits, alongside a non-fiction (?) centrepiece about a serial killer, and each is remarkable in one way or another. Perhaps my favourite piece is Dazzle, a multi-layered story with a time-shifting perspective that’s about love, fear and guilt, as Capote relives the story of his paternal grandfather, a fortune teller and two terrible secrets: one comic, the other tragic. It is flecked with wonder, touched by horror, and redolent with an unstudied compassion for his younger self, before a climactic sucker-punch that knocked me sideways. But it’s just one masterpiece among many. The other short stories are rich in irony, but unwaveringly sincere, as they deal with self-loathing, denial and the secrets (or unspoken truths) that dominate the book, while his egalitarian ‘portraits’ take in a weed-smoking cleaner, Marilyn Monroe, pastoral novelist Willa Cather and amoral Manson acolyte Bobby Beausoleil: though you could class the first of those as ‘hilarious’ and the last as ‘chilling’, that’s to reduce them from the multi-faceted, playful, probing, touching, humane and sad works that they are. The only piece that doesn't quite work for me, at least not unequivocally, is Handcarved Coffins, the lengthy true crime chapter at the book's centre. It has passages of great insight – on sexuality, obsession, delusion – but at times its language is oddly forced, and ultimately I'm not sure exactly what the point is that Capote is constantly circling and yet never quite landing upon.

It makes sense, perhaps, that when the book does malfunction, it's in both style and content, for it's the balancing of form, viewpoint and revelation, both overt and within the reader, that is the book's great strength. Music for Chameleons is beautifully-written, but even Capote’s admirers often stop right there, and it’s much more than that. His swaggering, elegant, stylistic brilliance – even as a supposed has-been, with a pickled liver and a nose stuffed with coke – is really a way of packing as much wit, pathos and meaning into each line as possible. His style is not an end in itself, it's the way he carries truth to the reader. (4)

See also: I wrote about In Cold Blood here, and some earlier Capote works here.

***

FILM



Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) – It only took me 16 years to see Spirited Away, and what a wondrous, spectacularly odd film it is: Ghibli on an epic yet intimate scale, as a little girl named Chihiro gets waylaid while moving house, and Hayao Miyazaki’s imagination goes into overdrive.

We meet Chihiro just minutes after an emotional farewell to her old friends: she’s sitting in the backseat of her parents’ car, as they trail a moving van to their new home. The family stop to investigate what seems to be an abandoned theme park, and soon the parents have been turned into pigs, Chihiro’s life has been saved by a boy who it turns out is a dragon and also a god, and she’s been forced to find employment in a fully-functioning bathhouse populated by ghosts, assisted by a multi-armed man who lives by a furnace with his friends – sentient bits of soot – and under the cosh of giant-headed Thatcher-a-like Yubaba, whose beloved germaphobe baby is bigger than she is. That’s the first 20 minutes. It carries on in a similar vein from there, as you can see from this short paragraph lifted from Wikipedia:

While visiting her parents' pigpen, Sen finds a goodbye card addressed to Chihiro and realizes that she has already forgotten her name. Haku warns her that Yubaba controls people by taking their names and that if she forgets hers like he has forgotten his, she will not be able to leave the spirit world. While working, Sen invites a silent masked creature named No-Face inside, believing him to be a customer. A 'stink spirit' arrives as Sen's first customer. She discovers he is the spirit of a polluted river. In gratitude for cleaning him, he gives Sen a magic emetic dumpling. Meanwhile, No-Face tempts a worker with gold, then swallows him. He demands food and begins tipping extensively. As the workers swarm him hoping to be tipped, he swallows yet another two greedy workers.

The film takes a little while to begin to weave its magic, but without warning you find yourself enraptured, lost in its peerlessly weird universe, spellbound by its animation – by turns serene, frenetic, opulent, disorientating, immersive and repulsive – and touched by its understated but profound emotional core. Its characters are notable for their complexity, duality and depth – often achieved with minimal exertion – as well as for their malleability. Whether by witchcraft or kindness, they can be corrupted or reformed – these are not the one-trait ciphers often fed to animation audiences – and yet there’s a simplicity in the emotional exchanges that’s completely beguiling, and surprising for a film with such a complicated story, and such a wealth of subtext. Miyazaki’s nostalgic vision acts as a commentary on a modern Japan that has lost its way, betraying its national identity and its environmental responsibility with a greed that’s evoked with both subtlety and a crude, in-your-face literalism. This, it says, it what happens when you only have a yen for yen. On a surface level, it's also great to have this coming-of-age tale led by such a brave, forthright, decent, ass-kicking girl. There should be one in every story.

The film isn’t perfect: while transfixed and impressed by its balls-out, apparently authentic weirdness, I found it initially distancing, and there were times when the movie’s proliferation of oddball supporting characters, the scenes necessary to accommodate them and its general noisiness (compared to my favourites thus far, Totoro and Porco Rosso) began to tire. It always, though, came back to itself: to Miyazaki’s singular if somewhat unregulated imagination, to the sincerity and simplicity of the Chihiro-Haku relationship, and to the aesthetic analogue that is Spirited Away’s exquisite animation. (3.5)

The music's lovely too.

***

TV



The Nazis: A Warning from History (1997) – A topical rerun of this seminal series, 20 years on. It’s history as investigative journalism, shorn of all sensationalism and ghoulishness, which changes much of what you thought you knew about the Nazis, such as their bizarre, deeply dangerous power structure – competing, antagonistic department heads seeking to turn Hitler’s psychopathic monologues into policy – the role of voluntary, informal informants in making the Gestapo appear omniscient, and the self-justification of ‘ordinary’ Germans who enabled them to commit unprecedented horrors. From its striking credits to Samuel West’s crisp, authoritative voiceover, its unearthing (and understanding) of revelatory documents to its astonishing interviews with perpetrators and victims alike, it’s a class act, which manages to answer (or at least posit a compelling answer) to that eternal, chilling question: how could it happen? (4)

***



Spiral: Season 5 (2014) – For five episodes, this erratic but often exquisite French crime series appears to have given up the ghost. It’s tired, disjointed and – yes – even boring, as Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust), Gilou (Thierry Godard) and the rest return to solve a slow-moving murder case, a series of ATM ram raids and the mystery of what the hell’s happened to Spiral. Then suddenly, and almost without warning, it explodes into brilliance, its stories dovetailing – and then artfully unfolding – its human subplots becoming uncommonly compelling, and Proust, Godard and Audrey Fleurot (as complex, flamehaired, bad-ass shyster Josephine Karlsson) hitting devastating peak form. It turns out that it’s all about mothers and daughters, and that neither we nor Laure are allowed to have anything nice happen to us ever. It’s back later this year, apparently. I’m going to record them all and then binge. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Ten things I learned about Warren William

Sort of. It turns out that while William excelled playing a series of rogues throughout the Pre-Code era, away from the screen he was self-effacing to a fault, while devoting his time and energies to inventing and sailing. Sounds like a nice guy, but not perhaps the best subject for a biography, especially as most of the people who could fill in the rest have long since passed on. That makes Warren William: Magnificent Scoundrel of Pre-Code Hollywood (John Stangeland, 2010) an admirable attempt to plug a key gap in film history, but a less than gripping tome. It also means that I had to look beyond his life for 10 things truly worthy of your attention. If you do still want to take the plunge, you’ll find some rare candid shots, a few insights from William’s nieces and a biographer with a fair writing style and a decent grasp of cinema’s past.


Big floaty Warren William head.

1. Satan Met a Lady was named by an office boy. Despairing execs offered $25 to whoever could come up with a decent title for the 1935 screwball remake of The Maltese Falcon. The devilish moniker presumably came from author Dashiel Hammett’s description of his hero, Sam Spade, as “a blonde satan”.

2. William’s wife Helen was 17 years his senior. She claimed just seven. It’s unknown whether he ever found out.

3. Bette Davis may have been sacked from The Case of the Howling Dog – the first ever Perry Mason film – because of her boobs. “Be sure that Davis has her bulbs wrapped up. If she doesn’t do it we are either going to retake or put her out of the picture,” said a memo from studio head Jack Warner. She was replaced by Mary Astor shortly afterwards.

4. Davis, that big-eyed, multi-faceted walking argument, claimed that William repeatedly tried to seduce her. He doesn’t seem to have bothered with anyone else, aside from his wife.

5. In Smarty – an abysmal, appallingly sexist 1934 movie that majorly contributed to William’s slide out of the big time – the star was forced to hit co-star Joan Blondell. He described filming the sequence as “the most embarrassing moment of my life”.

6. The film was promoted by a pressbook in which exhibitors were encouraged to sponsor a local newspaper contest gathering stories about domestic abuse – “but make ‘em funny!”

7. In 1935, after William was passed over for the lead in Captain Blood (in favour of the guy who played a corpse opposite him earlier that year, Errol Flynn), the star wrote a furious missive to the studio lawyer, Roy Obringer, demanding to be released from his contract. He left the next year.

8. "They gave me a script; I told them it stank.” So said director Andre de Toth about Counter Espionage, the Lone Wolf series entry he had been assigned to direct. He asked for two weeks to shoot the movie – twice what had been approved – and was berated by Columbia chief Harry Cohn. If they removed the clause in his contract requiring him to produce films “to the best of his ability”, de Toth suggested, he’d be happy to go faster.

9. In 1942, Fox planned to mount an all-star mystery called The Four Star Murder Case, featuring Philo Vance (William), Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler), Mike Shayne (Lloyd Nolan) and Mr Moto (Peter Lorre), with the latter helping out from within an internment camp. I have a new favourite movie and it has never been made.

10. William’s tragic early death was due to multiple melanoma, probably caused by his relentless woodworking in confined spaces.

... and so as not to end on such a gloomy note, I loved Alexander Woollcott's magnificent dismissal of the 1926 Broadway show, Fanny: "written by Willard Mack and Mr Belasco and they both ought to be ashamed of themselves and each other."

Deanna Durbin RIP

Deanna Durbin, who has passed away aged 91, was a performer of almost supernatural talents.

Not just the voice - that voice - as beautiful an instrument as the movies have ever heard, but the dramatic chops that meant Renoir was desperate to work with her (and which led to some of the loveliest moments of the Golden Age), and that ever-underrated comic ability, incorporating a singular, faux-grown-up "lovestruck" mode, rolled out at regular intervals ("I know, David"), that remains one of the great joys of cinema.

Not all of her pictures were great - she thought the last four so poor that she quit movies and went to live in France - but she was an unfailingly magnificent screen presence, and, when the scripts were worthy of her gifts, the results were just spectacular. 100 Men and a Girl was Churchill's favourite movie (he used to watch it as a treat after major military victories) and the success of that and her other starring vehicles saved Universal studios. Without Durbin, no Destry Rides Again, Jaws, E.T., Back to the Future or Happy Gilmore (sorry about the last one).

Deanna had only pitched up at Universal after being snubbed by MGM. She'd appeared in a two-reeler with Judy Garland, intended as a glorified screen test. MGM could only take on one of them. "Get rid of the fat one," said studio head Louis B Mayer. They got rid of Durbin. He meant Garland. Nice guy.

Her mentor, Joe Pasternak, famously passed up any credit for spotting her talent, declaring: "Deanna's genius had to be unfolded, but it was hers and hers alone, always has been, always will be, and no one can take credit for discovering her."

And genius isn't too strong a word for what she had. When she broke into song, the other actors were usually required to just stare slack-jawed in amazement, or burst into tears. It can't have been hard: I'm usually doing the same thing. Not many comedians could elicit so many laughs from such erratic material, and only a handful of actresses could carry a movie on their shoulders like Durbin. But it's the voice - that voice - that deserves the final word. It's technically flawless but it's also wrenchingly powerful, thanks to the abundance of emotion she invests in everything she sings. Her heartbreaking balladeering on songs like Goin' Home and I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen destroys me. Precious few singers have ever moved me so deeply.

***

Here's a quick primer on one of the greatest talents ever to grace a cinema screen.

Six essential recordings:



My Own (from That Certain Age)
Ave Maria (from It's a Date)
There'll Always Be an England (from the British print of Nice Girl?, a sort of Easy A for the late '30s)
Goin' Home (from It Started with Eve, opposite the mighty Charles Laughton - sorry about the squashed image)
Nessun Dorma (from His Butler's Sister, which sounds like a made-up '40s movie, but really does exist)
I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen (from For the Love of Mary, an iffy romantic comedy about romantic complications at the White House)

***

Six essential films:



Three Smart Girls (Henry Koster, 1936)
A starmaking vehicle, model romantic-comedy and peerless helping of Depression-era escapism all in one, as Durbin - in her feature debut - appears as bright-eyed 14-year-old, Penny Marshall, who reunites her parents with the help of two older siblings. It's funny, moving and wonderfully uplifting, with great numbers and a notable early role for Ray Milland. Durbin is introduced bellowing My Heart Is Singing at the top of her lungs, as is only right. This box-office smash was followed by two sequels: the first is well-acted but overly glum, the second a bit of a slog.

Mad About Music (Norman Taurog, 1938)
Swiss-set boarding school shenanigans, with film star's daughter Durbin pretending her dad is a holidaying composer (Herbert Marshall). A particular treat for fans of people singing whilst riding around on bicycles, and a sweet, perfectly-formed little film.

That Certain Age (Edward Ludwig, 1938)
Deanna grows up, a little, in this completely charming age-gap rom-com, written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, falling for suave middle-aged man Melvyn Douglas, much to the disgust of her suitor, Jackie Cooper. It includes Durbin's spellbindingly beautiful rendition of My Own, which got a Best Song nom.



Spring Parade (Henry Koster, 1940)
The hardest to find of all Durbin's films - it was missing from the 19-disc DVD retrospective, along with It's a Date - but well worth the effort. Cleverly integrating romance, song and dance, it has a feel all its own, with a rich (Americanised) Viennese atmosphere fashioned on a Hollywood soundstage. Durbin's four songs are all sensational.

The Amazing Mrs Holliday (Bruce Manning, 1943)
This is easily the worst film on the list, but it's also perhaps the most interesting: a WWII drama, originally directed by Jean Renoir, that was bashed into the shape of a weak, family-orientated rom-com after Universal got cold feet over the rushes. Durbin gives a sensitive, beguiling dramatic performance - by far the best of her career - and her reading of Mighty Lak' a Rose is extraordinarily moving.

Lady on a Train (Charles David, 1944)
Back in the game! After a few misfires, Durbin came roaring back, her hair bleached blonde, with this Christmas-set fusion of comedy, whodunit and film noir. She's brilliant, leading man David Bruce is hilarious and there's a stunning supporting cast featuring Edward Everett Horton, Ralph Bellamy, Samuel Hinds, Allen Jenkins and Dan Duryea. The numbers include a lovely reading of Silent Night that's curiously imagined but exquisitely sung, the sultry Give Me a Little Kiss, and Cole Porter's Night and Day, cleverly staged and given a complex, tom tom-led arrangement. She appeared in one other noir, Christmas Holiday, directed by genre legend Robert Siodmak, and co-starring Gene Kelly. That's a muddled, overly melodramatic film, but her fascinating turn just about keeps it afloat.

***

If you get a chance to see a Durbin picture, don't pass it up. Perhaps the final few weren't so hot, but she was always incredible to watch, and her vocal numbers are unfailingly magnificent. She'll be much missed, but at least she lived a long and happy life, giving it all up to do what she really wanted. (Incidentally, the bit about her last four movies inspiring her retirement was an exaggeration, but there is some truth behind it. See her only post-retirement interview for more.)

RIP Deanna Durbin.