Category: Film

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Mining Culture: The Welsh in Hollywood

It was too pleasant an afternoon not to be warming to it. The outdoors, I mean. Though all thumbs (and not one of them green), I nonetheless tried my hands at gardening again, transplanting English-grown Californian Lilac into Welsh soil. Unless deterred by the vagaries of what goes for “vernal” here in Wales, I shall probably spend more time tending to the plants than to this journal next week, when the storm-frayed and patched-up telephone lines to our house are scheduled to be cut down and replaced, a spring renewal of telecommunications during which service is likely to be suspended.

No internet, no landline, and no traffic along the already quiet lane leading to this hermitage I call home—it’s “a proper place for a murder.” That is how the setting of Night Must Fall was described when on this day, 27 March, in 1948, the famous and oft revived thriller by Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams was performed on the US radio thriller anthology Suspense.

Along with two members of the original (1935) London cast—Dame May Whitty (as Mrs. Bramson) and Matthew Boulton (as the inspector)—Robert Montgomery was heard in the role of Dan, the lady killer he had played in the 1937 film adaptation. As I realized after seeing it on stage, Night Must Fall is not your common crop of a crime melodrama. It goes beyond the question of whether or not the victim will die by asking us whether she ought to, by making us eager for the “must” of her demise and examine the decline and “fall” of our own civilized morality. As a psychological and ethical puzzler, it translates well into other languages and media.

Now, Night falls in Essex, England, rather than the wild west of Britain; but according to Williams’s stage directions, the character of “Baby-face” Dan “speaks with a rough accent” that, unlike Montgomery’s, is “more Welsh than anything else.” On Broadway as on the London stage, this “sort of Welsh” Dan (as his girlfriend describes him) was voiced by the very Welshman who created him.

In an acting career spanning six decades, Williams was a frequent player in (mainly British) film, on stage and television; on US radio, he was heard in one of Norman Corwin’s plays for the United Nations. I recently spotted him in The Citadel (1938), his voice lending authenticity to the depiction of life in a Welsh mining town rendered unconvincing by the casting of Hollywood productions like John Ford’s Academy Award-winning How Green Was My Valley (another cinema classic I caught up with this year) or The Corn Is Green. The latter is based on an autobiographical play by Williams; but with stars like Bette Davis (on screen) and Claudette Colbert (on radio, nearly a decade later) taking on the role of a Welsh schoolteacher, it is the audience who is expected to be green.

Having lived in this country for well over two years now, I am all ears for representations and representatives of Wales in popular culture, whether in British cinema or American radio drama. What remains of this country once its landscape, language, and lore are forced through the filter of the camera or microphone, once it is translated by a popular medium like film and transferred to an international audience? During the next few months, leading up to a Welsh film festival hosted by the National Screen and Sound Archive here in Aberystwyth, I am going to mull over such matters from time to time.

To be sure, the landscape and culture of Wales have changed considerably since A. J. Cronyn’s Citadel and Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley were bestsellers in the US back in 1937-38 and 1940, respectively. Prominently featured in 20th-century popular culture (including the previously discussed “Comedy of Danger,” reputedly the first play written for radio), the mines have been shut down years ago and wind farms have replaced collieries. Today, however, the BBC reported that coal mining is making a comeback here, as the first “deep mine” is set to open in over three decades. Could this mean that Ms. Zeta-Jones is going back to her Welsh roots for a Hollywood returns to the Citadel, the Valley or other recycled Corn?

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Acid Tongues in Wilted Cheeks: Hollywood and the "Older" Woman

Well, she’s being teased quite a bit this season about her obsolescence, about being too old for her former job, too old to start dating again after her marriage fell apart, too old for any excitement greater than awaiting the arrival of the latest issue of Cat Fancy. The superannuated one is Gabrielle Solis, one of those supposedly Desperate Housewives. She’s a mere 31, mind you; but that’s just about a quarter to finished on the watch of a supermodel. It’s Hollywood poking fun at its obsession with youth, an obsession I never shared even while I stilled possessed it. It is pointless to shout “Grow up!” these days, since that is exactly what is feared most.

If fifty is the new thirty, does it follow that thirty is the new pre-pubescence? Perhaps that is why Gabrielle is asked to prep hideous little Miss Sunshines for a short career of runway sashaying or paired with an even more hideous Ritchie Rich of a teenager who seriously undermines her chances of landing a man. Gabrielle is not so much robbing the cradle than sinking back into it.

Men like birthday boy William Shatner (born on this day in 1931) never had it quite as tough to stay employed, even though they might experience their own aging anxieties, drowned sorrows untraceable in their bloated or botoxed visages. If Desperate Housewives can be claimed to succeed in making mature women appear desirable it is only by making them look and act less than mature. At least they are spared for a while longer from the fate of being assigned nothing more glamorous or challenging than a low budget sequel to Trog.

Joan Crawford, who did exit with that movie on her resume, made a career out of playing formidable women past forty just until she passed fifty, at which untender moment the formidable was twisted into the berserk. According to Hollywood, the line between fierce and frantic is as thin as a wrinkle behind a layer of gauze; and even in the make-believe of radio, where no gauze is required to assist those incapable of suspending their disbelief at the sight of crow’s feet, Crawford was asked to walk and cross it.

In “Three Lethal Words”, a tongue in less-than-rosy cheek Suspense thriller that aired on this day, 22 March, back in 1951, Crawford is heard as Jane Winters (read: well past spring or about to enter the second childhood of a Jane Withers), a woman who confesses to being, gasp, 43! You know the old gal has a problem (according to Hollywood logic, that is) when she also confesses to having been “ill” and walks into a film studio with a bottle of nitric acid in her pocket.

“It’s amazingly powerful,” she tells her former colleague, now head of the studio’s story department, to whom she is trying to pitch a story of a woman not unlike herself. As it turns out, that is an understatement, considering that the parallels are melodramatically overstated by Ms. Winters choice of character: Sally Summers, a screenwriter who tries to make herself believe that “43 isn’t very old,” but who is constantly reminded of her relative antiquity by her marriage to an actor 19 years her junior, especially when that young man leaves her after being told to send his wife Mother’s Day cards and is teased about not only having seen Sunset Boulevard, but “living it”!

“Three Lethal Words” throws acid into the wrinkle-free face of Hollywood; but the woman who gets to do the throwing is not looking any better for having dreamed up the deed.

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It Happened Another Night: A Return Trip for Colbert and Gable

Well, you can’t go home again; but that sure doesn’t stop a lot of folks from getting a return ticket or from being taken for a ride in the same rickety vehicle. And with pleasure! Before I head out to the theater for another meeting with Moll Flanders, who’s been around the block plenty, I am going to hop on the old “Night Bus” that took Colbert and Gable places—and all the way to the Academy Awards besides.  On this day, 20 March, in 1939, the Depression era transport was fixed up for a Lux Radio Theater presentation of It Happened One Night. Whereas Orson Welles would try to shove Miriam Hopkins and William Powell into their seats for the Campbell Playhouse adaptation of Robert Riskin’s screenplay, Colbert and Gable (as Peter Warne) were brought back for Lux, reprising their Oscar-winning roles of runaway socialite Ellie Andrews and the reporter on her trail.

Also on board that night were Walter Connelly as Ellie’s father and, “believe you me,” Roscoe Karns as the fellow traveler Ellie can stand even less than the arrogant newshound—”Yessir. Shapeley’s the name, and that’s the way I like ’em.”

Of course, if you like ’em like Shapeley, George Wells’s rewrite of the Production-Coded tease that is It Happened One Night will be a disappointment. For starters, you won’t get to admire Colbert’s traffic-stopping gams or Gable’s retailer-headache of a bare chest. Capra’s down-to-earth comedy suffers badly from becoming airborne—if, indeed, it ever does.

On the airwaves, you won’t get to hear Ellie’s liberating plunge into the ocean; her story picks up at the bus terminal, with Peter getting fired while the “Extra, Extra” of a newsboy alerts him to the scoop that could revive his career. Before we quite get why Ellie is out of her element, Peter is already in his, as the elements of screwball are beaten to the pulp of romance.

The old bus sputters along as if someone had slashed its tires. Gone, too, are many of Riskin’s censors-defying innuendos. Still, if you got a mischievous mind, you can tear down the Walls of Jericho or any barrier that might keep you from imagining what is really happening between Ellie and Peter. “You haven’t got a trumpet by any chance, have you?” Luckily, I always carry a spare.

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Of “Past and Paste”: Rereading (Myself on) Mildred Pierce

The generally reliable and greatly appreciated Blogger has been given me quite a headache these past twenty-four hours. I was unable to upload any images; and although this journal is primarily concerned with the spoken word, I was irritated to the point of name-calling it a day. In the meantime, I dug up one of my undergraduate essays on Mildred Pierce, one of the movies (listed, right) I screened again recently. Say, how many motion pictures do you consume over a twelve-month period? That is the question I am posing in my current poll (a feature I resurrect herewith).

As if to account for time spent, whether well or otherwise, I try to keep track of what I experience, see or do. Sometimes, only the title of a movie remains; I remembered very little about Prick Up Your Ears, for instance, a copy of which I picked up a few weeks ago, some two decades after watching it during its initial release (in Germany, mind you). Back then, the fact that playwright Joe Orton, whose life is the subject of Frears’s biopic, began his short career by submitting a radio play to the BBC would not have meant much to me. About what the film did mean to me my diary is disappointingly mum, aside from the rather astonishing remark that I deemed it enjoyable. While I tend to summon up feelings far better than facts, my initial impressions were beyond recall.

Not so with Michael Curtiz’s crowd-pleasing gem, about which I once penned a trifle titled “The Loathsome Scent of Low Descent: Of Past and Paste in Mildred Pierce.” In it, I comment, without much originality, on the role of the “past, its influence and irrevocability,” in this shadow play of “a mother’s struggle to shed her past in order to secure the happiness of her daughter.” The opening credits, “washed ashore and wiped away by the surf,” suggest that the “past, though carefully concealed, may suddenly resurface, and that time itself, like the tides of the sea, is an element beyond our control.”

Since I require something more stimulating to enter into an argument with anyone, including myself, I pricked up my ears instead and took on the 24 June 1954 Lux Radio Theater adaptation starring Claire Trevor, in the title role originated by Joan Crawford, and Crawford’s co-star Zachary Scott as Monte. In an earlier Lux broadcast, Rosalind Russell had impersonated the fierce Mrs. Pierce, Academy Award-winning Ms. Crawford having been (as Louella Parsons reminded me) a less-than-confident radio performer (her notorious Christmas special notwithstanding).

The final screenplay for Mildred Pierce was written by one of radio’s better writers, Ranald MacDougall (previously mentioned here). Yet little of Curtiz’s noirish vision, James M. Cain’s rags-to-wretchedness design, or MacDougall’s smart revision remains in Sandy Barnett’s audio version, which not only cleans up Veda’s act (by refraining from mentioning her feigned pregnancy) but sidelines the central figure of her mother by opening with a dramatization of Wally’s arrest at the beach house rather than Monte’s call of “Mildred,” the dying word of a murder victim that implicates the named one from the get-go.

Since we are not encouraged to think of her as a suspect (her suicide attempt is not even mentioned), Mildred’s subsequent storytelling loses much of its ambiguity. From her reaction to the police inspector, the listener senses that she is uneasy about the fact that her first husband is the prime suspect; but it is unclear whether her narrative is designed to shelter him (or anyone else). Without those scenes at the beach house and the pier, there is little reason to distrust Mildred, who comes across here as a hard-working, suffering parent abandoned by her husband and stuck with an ungrateful child.

The radio adaptation seems determined to take literally the famous tagline of the movie—”don’t tell anyone what she did”—by keeping quiet about what Mildred might have done and suggesting that she didn’t do much at all aside from baking pies to do well by ne’er-do-well Veda. Lux sure got the stains out of Mildred’s past.

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What Those Who Remembered Forgot: Betty Hutton (1921-2007) on the Air

Well, I guess that, too, “Comes Natur’lly.” I just learned of the passing of singer-comedienne Betty Hutton. The star of Hollywood cinema classics like Preston Sturges’s wartime romp Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), the screen adaptation of Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1950) and Cecil B. DeMille’s Academy Award-winning Greatest Show on Earth (1952) died yesterday at the age of 86.

Like her sister Marion, with whom she performed before embarking on a film career with The Fleet’s In (1942) (for which this is a radio trailer featuring Hutton’s “Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry”), was often heard on radio variety programs, including the morale-boosting wartime shows Mail Call and Command Performance, belting out trademark numbers like “Murder, He Says.”

Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, the gal who couldn’t quite conquer television was also heard on most of US radio’s top-notch film and theater programs, including Theater Guild, the Lux Radio Theater and the Philip Morris Playhouse, performing in light comedies like “Page Miss Glory” (an old Marion Davies vehicle) or in adaptations of her own films, such as the Screen Guild‘s version of Stork Club or the Screen Directors Playhouse presentation of Incendiary Blonde.

Unfortunately, most of Hutton’s dramatic performances on radio have not been preserved. What can be appreciated online is the solidification of the Hutton image. She’s “like a dynamo . . . with a short circuit,” quipped ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy when, on 28 September 1947, Hutton was a guest on Edgar Bergen’s comedy program, singing “Poppa Don’t Preach to Me” from her latest movie, The Perils of Pauline. Rather than tampering with her successful tomboy persona, as attempted in Mitchell Leisen’s misguided box-office dud Dream Girl (1948), Hutton was given the opportunity to ridicule such efforts to make a lady out of her by agreeing and failing to act like someone “knee-deep” in culture (one of the “Boston” Huttons, a family “so old, it’s been condemned”). “Why,” she insisted, “I can be so refined, you wouldn’t even know it’s me.”

“She’s much too wild for you,” Bergen had warned his wayward puppet, complaining that there was “room for improvement” in Hutton’s conduct. “After all, girls are not boys.” Betty Hutton was the kind of “Incendiary Blonde” that could give a mischievous dummy like Charlie ideas without making a log fire of his wooden heart.

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Heavenly Days: What I Get to Watch When I’m Home Alone

Here I sit like a good egg given up for Lent. After having spent much of the week leading up to Ash Wednesday—a period celebrated as Karneval in my native Germany—entertaining two old (make that “longtime”) friends eager to get away from those festivities. The guests gone and my better half away in London, I now have the place pretty much to myself (the pleasant company of Montague excepting). Heavenly days? Not quite; but I did get to watch the movie. Heavenly Days, that is, a 1944 comedy based on the characters created by Don Quinn for his hugely popular US radio series Fibber McGee and Molly (many episodes of which are available online at the Internet Archive).

My web journal tells me that I recorded this film way back in November 2005, during a visit to New York City, my former home. So, it has taken me a while to catch up with Fibber McGee and Molly in their last major movie outing. It takes a day like this to do so without impunity, that is, without having to importune someone else who, despite having humored me by sitting through Look Who’s Laughing (1941) and much else besides, cannot be expected to share my enthusiasm for radio stars on celluloid. Who would?

That said, I have never been a friend of Fibber McGee and Molly; I much prefer the urbane wit of the aforementioned Halls of Ivy, a situation comedy conceived by the same writer, over the middle-America average-Joeness I have neither experienced nor longed for during my fifteen years in the United States. That did not stop me from picking up a copy of Charles Stumpf and Tim Price’s Heavenly Days at the Museum of Television and Radio while visiting Gotham in August 2006.

Messrs. Stumpf and Price point out that Heavenly Days, unlike the comedy team’s previous Look Who’s Laughing and its follow-up Here We Go Again, was not a commercial success. Yet whereas those earlier movies were rambling and largely inconsequential, Heavenly Days attempts to be earnest and socially relevant. Like the radio series, it is in the service of wartime propaganda, sending Fibber and his wife on an educational trip to Washington, from which they return with an awareness of their importance to the nation.

Heavenly Days is at once rebellious and (pardon the anachronism) politically correct. It seems determined to infuse the final months of the Second World War—a period in which fear and fervor made way for indifference and impatience—with the spirit of the New Deal, which, by 1944, was rather old hat. According to the peculiar logic of the sentimental comedy into which he is thrust, Fibber has to learn what it means to be “average,” a label all of the citizen he encounters vehemently reject; that it is neither a shame nor a statistical sham, but an honor and an obligation, considering that being average makes him a representative of the people who declare and elect him to be just that.

Of course, Fibber long had the vote of the people who, by tuning in to his weekly radio program, kept him in the office that was a prominent slot on the air—that realm of statistical averages and mediocrity. After the less than favorable reception of his Heavenly Capraescapades, that slot must have seemed a good place to come home to . . .

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Who Knows What Heart Lurks in the Evil of Men?

Driving Miss Daisy it ain’t.  The Last King of Scotland, I mean, with which I finally caught up last night at the local movie house. Like Downfall before it, this portrait of a dictator breaks with the conventions of Hollywood melodrama by challenging us to discard with the convenient absolutes of good and evil, the very binaries that clarify much but explain so little. Director Kevin Macdonald—whose next project, a documentary promisingly titled My Enemy’s Enemy, will deal with Nazi Germany and feature archival footage of Adolf Hitler—does not presume to judge his subject, Idi Amin, but to show or suggest the workings of his mind, his joys, sorrows, and fears.

In traditional Western storytelling, be it for stage or radio, for big screen or small, sketches of a certain enemy “other” are often crudely drawn for the sake of ready identification; the resulting picture is not that of an ostensibly evil person, but of evil personified. It is the very stuff of satire and sensational melodrama in which the alleged shortcomings of a dangerous individual may be exposed or playfully defused for the purpose of stirring an apathetic populace or boosting the morale of those stifled by terror. Historical portraits or caricatures of villainy rarely dare to encourage empathy and thus avoid to render their subjects human; they shun any approach suggestive of naturalism—the attempt at a serious and sincere depiction of what is.

Then again, what is? No matter how convinced I was by Forest Whitaker’s deservedly Oscar-nominated performance, I did not once think of The Last King as anything other than a work of fiction, a response largely owing to a lack of knowledge about the historical figure depicted, the culture represented, and the events on which it is based—the kind of ignorance I might pass off as skepticism if I were not hoping to achieve some semblance of naturalism in these soundings of my mind. Years of schooling and pop cultural exposure seem to have made it difficult for me to think of history as anything I sense to be reality. By virtue of seeming real, Whitaker’s Amin became a fiction to me.

My own reservations and prejudices aside, Macdonald’s film raises questions about what, beyond verifiable data, the records that have not been lost or suppressed, should make it into our histories, those stories we (or those acting on our or someone else’s behalf) construct out of scraps of documented facts upon which historians impose the comforting logic of causality. Like All the King’s Men, The Last King documents the corruption of power; yet it is also a corruption of documents. The figure of the young Scottish doctor, through the interaction with whom Amin’s personality is being revealed (for the cinema has to tell by showing), does much to render suspect the historicity of the drama, suspicions that even the facts and figures appended to the film after the conclusion of its narrative cannot lay to rest.

After all, how are we to know what heart lurks in the evil of men? What does it mean to accept that historical figures like Hitler or Idi Amin were thinking, feeling men rather than destructive forces? Perhaps we dread real people in our histories because they make us aware that, given human nature, no tools of social science can prevent us from repeating the horrors of the past.

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Beyond the Walk of Fame: A Monument for Madeleine Carroll

I don’t quite understand the concept; nor do I approve of such an abuse of the medium. The radio alarm clock, I mean. It accosts me with tunes and blather when I am least able or inclined to listen appreciatively. I much prefer being turned on by the radio rather than being roused by it to the point of turning it off or wishing it dead and getting on with the conscious side of life. This morning, however, BBC Radio 2—our daybreaker of choice—managed both to surprise and delight me with the following less-than-timely newsitem. Twenty years after her death, British-born Hollywood actress Madeleine Carroll (whose life and career are documented in this website maintained by her cousin) returns to the place of her birth as the English town of West Bromwich unveils a monument erected in her honor.

Film stars are perhaps least deserving of monuments—not merely because their off-screen antics rarely warrant praise, but because the celluloid on which their contributions to humanity are preserved are fitting enough testimonies to their achievements. Unless, that is, the achievements lie beyond those captured on film. In Carroll’s case, this translates into a return to Britain to serve as a Red Cross nurse during the Second World War.

The star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and Secret Agent put her film career on hold following the death of her sister during the London blitz in October 1940. Just days prior to this personal loss she had already signalled her intentions by contributing to a Canadian Red Cross Emergency Appeal, which aired on 29 September.

Subsequent parts in American radio dramas echoed her new career. In the late 1930s, Carroll had starred in frothy comedies and sensational melodramas produced by the Campbell Playhouse and the Lux Radio Theater; during the war, by comparison, she was most often heard in propaganda plays written for and produced by the aforementioned Cavalcade of America. On 5 October 1942, for instance, she played an army nurse in “I Was Married on Bataan,” scripted by reluctant radio playwright Arthur Miller. Two weeks later, on 19 October, she portrayed a pioneering female doctor in “That They Might Live”; and on 30 November 1942, she played the title character in “Sister Kenny.”

Unlike so many of her glamorous colleagues, Carroll truly inhabited these roles. It is her humanitarian work that is being remembered today.

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Dr. Mabuse, Terrorist

Now that Hannibal is rising again and even The Shadow is being cast anew in another attempt at translating radio’s invisible terrors to the big screen, I wonder how long it will take for Hollywood to rediscover Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, a pulp character combining the ruthlessness and intelligence of the former with the mental powers and omnipresence of the latter. In this age of urban terrorism and surveillance, of cynicism and weaponized paranoia, Mabuse would be just the figure to capture the Zeitgeist. A few days ago, I re-encountered him in the 4 ½ hour, two-part silent thriller Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) and its masterful talkie sequel Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933).

His genre-defying Testament having been banned by the Nazis, who read it as a comment on their hate-mongering and fear-founded regime, Lang later returned to West Germany to direct an Orwellean update titled Die Tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse (1960), which then metastasized into a spy and crime movie franchise akin to the lurid and hugely popular Edgar Wallace chillers that lured German teenagers, my father among them, to the movie houses.

I was about five years old when I first heard his name, by which time Mabuse had long ended his box-office reign of terror (sporadic resurfacings in movies and audio books notwithstanding). It was during a walk around the neighborhood of the bleak industrial satellite of a town I was obliged to call home, when my father pointed out a walled-in plot of ground and told me, with an air of mystery escaping his breath (which in later years would merely reek of distilled disillusionment), that that was the garden of Dr. Mabuse.

Ma-boo-ze. Now, there was no ready image of this figure in the inventory of my mind; but those three syllables alone were so rich in romance and intrigue that I could not wait to be lifted up to see just what was lurking behind that unassuming row of bricks and mortar.

Gnomes. A whole colony of them. Common enough in the horticulture of the petit bourgeois, these forms took on a magical, even sinister aspect. Had they been ordinary folks—small children, perhaps—petrified into subhumanity, the playthings of a scientist or some such latter-day sorcerer? Later, it occurred to me that my father might have confused the place with the Island of Dr. Moreau or the secluded playground of Dr. Cyclops, whose very different experiments I still associate with the mobsterism of Mabuse.

At any rate, I don’t even recall the story Papa had made up in an effort to make a dull walk in dispiriting surroundings seem like an adventure (eventually fading superheroic powers for which I loved him). All I remember is that, from that day on—until we finally moved to the alternate dread of middle-class suburbia—I always insisted on seeing those garden features whenever we passed that wall; and long before I spotted him on television, Mabuse was a prominent if indistinct figure in the imaginary landscape of the mind—which is precisely where he roamed after losing his own.

Based on a serialized magazine story by Norbert Jacques—as the documentary extras on the DVD release of the 1922 film will tell you—Mabuse continued to terrorize the world long after he had been locked up as a seemingly harmless imbecile. In the silent film, he is a man of many disguises; in the sequel, he inhabits the bodies of whomever he chooses as executors of his will. He was modernity’s first indiscriminal, a proto-fascist who sought to force the multitude into submission or blow them to bits, if necessary.

Operating his ministry of fear by giving orders both telephonically and telepathically, the all-seeing, all-knowing Mabuse was a shape-shifting Big Brother, The Thing with a method and a masterplan. His terrorist network is an ideal setup for an open-ended series of thrillers that can withstand the death of its central characters and the departure of its leads. Will Mabuse return? Or has he altogether demolished our shelters of fiction, free now to menace the streets of metropolis, the hallways of big business, and the corridors of political power? Perhaps, we all are gnomes in the penal complex of his walled-in garden.

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For the Love of Lana: Rains on a Snowy Evening

If I had to put it in a nutshell, I’d probably go anaphylaxic. Let’s just say that 2007 is not exactly shaping up to be My Favorite Year (even though it’s looking promising for Academy Award-nominated Peter O’Toole). Spent rurally secluded without phone and internet (still only tentatively restored), slipping off a ladder during an attempt at high-stalks gardening, and seeing my first teaching stint here in Wales come to an unceremonious if not altogether surprisingly abrupt end (considering that I started off well by forgetting to show up for my first class), the past three weeks had about as many highlights as Roy Orbison’s hair seen through a pair of his shades . . .

Speaking of hair (because I could not come up with a smoother transition and it sure is time to move on): today, 8 February, marks the birthday of one of the best-tressed stars of Hollywood’s studio era: Ms. Lana Turner (who died back in 1995). Now, Lana was truly an appalling actress; but that is just what makes star vehicles like Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) such fascinating studies of the Lana persona and the studio system in its declining years.

By that time, Lana had not only negotiated a flexible Universal International contract, giving her approval of script, co-star, and director, but set up her own production company, Lanturn (which produced a single film). As she (or someone writing on her behalf) expressed it in an issue of Britain’s New Film Show Annual, Lana experienced “freedom for the first time” since she started to work in motion pictures back in the 1930s and was looking forward to the joy of being her “own boss.”

Lana never came across as a career woman, even though she looked like a gal who could take care of herself. In Imitation, she succeeds in portraying a selfish, out-of-touch actress desperate to become a star precisely by failing to connect to any of her fellow actors, some of whom—Susan Kohner foremost—were moving toward the 1960s by challenging the conventions of earlier cinematic emoting with a realism of which Lana was incapable.

Playing for the camera rather than interacting with those who shared the screen with her, she was most convincing at playing self-centered and greedy broads, calculating characters toward whom the audience could rarely warm. In turn, this edge rendered her exciting even when her acting lacked the lustre of her bleached curls.

Not that her one-on-ones with the public were dramatically superior; on the radio, her shortcomings as an actress became particularly noticeable, the mike serving as a microscope under which the falsehood and superficiality of a performance are laid bare. Prime examples are Lana’s tepid line deliveries as the narrator of “Fear Paints a Picture” (3 May 1945) and “The Flame Blue Glove” (15 December 1949), plays produced by CBS radio’s award-winning thriller anthology Suspense.

Rather better is her performance in “Doughnut Girl” (4 December 1944), a bit of Cavalcade of America propaganda, in which a vain and spoiled young woman encounters the hardship of serving as Red Cross nurse in the war theater of New Guinea and the boys who act in it. I believed her to be vain and spoiled, but remain suspicious of her transformation.

Tonight, in anticipation of the slushy destiny of the snow presently coating most of Wales (an anomaly for this temperate region), I am making my pilgrimage to the TechnicoLourdes that is 1950s event cinema and commemorate Ms. Turner’s career by immersing myself in The Rains of Ranchipur (1955), a soggy rather than steamy romance-cum-disaster movie co-starring turban-topped Richard Burton, one of Tinseltown’s most memorable Welsh imports.

Once again, Lana is the pampered, self-absorbed anti-heroine whose chance at redemption is suggested rather than acted out. When her character makes her exit after having proven as devastating and fleeting as the titular weather phenomenon, Lana slightly adjusts her blonde coif, brushing aside any sense of character development with a single gesture.

Were I not experiencing a pop-cultural drought—or a tremendous thirst, at any rate—I might not have been caught in The Rains at all; these days, however, I don’t open the umbrella of distinction quite so readily, letting come down on me whatever UK television channels deign to pour out. I don’t mind such indiscriminate dousings, as long as I can take refuge now and again in the vault of our DVD library, which is more representative of my cinematic tastes.

To account for times thus passed (in the absence of any other prominent markers of distinction), I am now putting together a list of all the films I am watching this year (see right). Some of the titles, listed chronologically in the order of my viewings, will link to relevant pages on this site or those maintained by fellow web journalists.

In the days to come, I am going to share my thoughts on some of the films I have taken in—from Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse thrillers to Mitchell Leisen’s extravagant Lady in the Dark, with the obligatory references to old-time radio drama and the occasional connections to my private everyday and the world beyond.