Category: Film

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Manus Manum . . . Love It: Lever Brothers Get Their Hands on Those Nine Out of Ten

“Ladies and gentlemen. We have grand news for you tonight, for the Lux Radio Theater has moved to Hollywood. And here we are in a theater of our very own. The Lux Radio Theater, Hollywood Boulevard, in the motion picture capital of the world. The curtain rises.”

Going up with great fanfare on this day, 1 June, in 1936, that curtain, made of words and music for the listening multitude in homes across the United States, revealed more than a stage.  It showed how an established if stuffy venue for the recycling of Broadway plays could be transformed into a spectacular new showcase for the allied talents at work in motion pictures, network radio, and advertisement.

Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable at the premiere of the revamped Lux Radio Theater program

“Frankly, I was skeptical when the announcement first reached this office,” Radio Guide’s executive vice-president and general manager Curtis Mitchell declared not long after the Hollywood premiere. The program was “an old production as radio shows go,” Mitchell remarked, one that was “rich with the respect and honors” it had garnered during its first two years on the air. Why meddle with an established formula?

Mitchell’s misgivings were soon allayed. The newly refurbished Lux Radio Theater had not been on the air for more than two weeks; and Radio Guide already rewarded it with a “Medal of Merit”—given, so the magazine argued, “because its sponsors had the courage to make a daring move” that, in turn, had “increased the enjoyment of radio listeners.” There’s nothing like a new wrinkle to shake the impression of starchiness.

“I cannot help but feel,” Mitchell continued, that the “two recent performances emanating from Hollywood have lifted it in a new elevation in public esteem. Personally, listening to these famous actors under the direction of Cecil De Mille, all of them broadcasting almost from their own front yards, gave me a new thrill.”

That DeMille had, in fact, no hand in the production did little to diminish the thrill. An open secret rather than a bald lie, the phony title was part of an elaborate illusion. The veteran producer-director brought prestige to the format, attracted an audience with promises of behind-the-scenes tidbits, and sold a lot of soap flakes throughout his tenure; and even if the act wouldn’t wash, he could always rely on the continuity writers to supply the hogwash.

As DeMille reminded listeners on that inaugural broadcast (and as I mentioned on a previous occasion), Lux had “been a household word in the DeMille family for 870 years,” his family crest bearing the motto “Lux tua vita mea.” Oh, Lever Brother!

Perhaps the motto should have been “Manus manum lavat.” After all, that is what the Lux Radio Theater demonstrated most forcibly. In the Lux Radio Theater, one hand washed the other, with a bar of toilet soap always within reach. As I put it in Etherised Victorians, my doctoral study on the subject of radio plays, it

was in its mediation between the ordinary and the supreme that a middlebrow program like Lux served to promote network programming as a commercially effective and culturally sophisticated hub for consumers, sponsors, and related entertainment industries.

With DeMille as nominal producer and Academy Award-winner Louis Silver as musical director, the new productions came at a considerable cost for the sponsor: some $300 a minute, as reported in another issue of Radio Guide for the week ending 1 August 1937. Of the $17,500 spent on “The Legionnaire and the Lady,” the first Hollywood production, $5000 went to Marlene Dietrich, while co-star Clark Gable received $3,500. Those were tidy sums back the, especially considering that the two leads had not even shown up for rehearsals.

The investment paid off; a single Monday night broadcast reportedly attracted as many listeners as flocked to America’s movie theaters on the remaining days of the week. As DeMille put it in his introduction to the first Hollywood broadcast, the audience of the Lux Radio Theater was “greater than any four walls could encompass.” Besides, the auditorium from which the broadcasts emanated was already crowded with luminaries.

“I see a lot of familiar faces,” DeMille was expected to convince those sitting at home: “There’s Joan Blondell, Gary Cooper (he stars in my next picture, The Plainsman), Stuart Erwin and his lovely wife June Collier.”

Also present were Al Jolson, Ruby Keeler, and Franchot Tone. “And I, I think I see Freddie March,” DeMille added in a rather unsuccessful attempt at faking an ad lib. While there is ample room for doubt that any “nine out of ten” of those stars named actually used Lux, as the slogan alleged, they sure made use of the Lux Radio Theater. It was an excellent promotional platform, a soapbox of giant proportions.

A visit to the Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight

As I was reminded on a trip to the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight last year, Lever Brothers had always been adroit at mixing their business with other people’s pleasure. Long before the Leverhulmes went west to hitch their wagon on one Hollywood star or another, they had disproved the Wildean maxim that the greatest art is to conceal art and that art, for art’s sake, must be useless.

It is owing to the advertising agents in charge of the Lever account that even the long frowned upon “commercial” did no longer seem quite such a dirty word.

Related recording

“The Legionnaire and the Lady,” Lux Radio Theater (1 June 1936)

Related blog entries

“Cleaning Up Her Act: Dietrich, Hollywood, and Lola Lola’s Laundry”

Tyrone Power Slips Out to War on a Bar of Soap”

“After Twenty Years of Pushing Stars and Peddling Soap, a Hollywood Institution Closes Down”

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The Dionne Quintuplets: The Cat’s Pajamas . . . or Katzenjammer?

“Name your favorite radio star of 1950!” an article in Radio Guide for the week ending 18 April 1936 appealed to its readership (reputedly some 400,000 strong). It wasn’t a challenge to the clairvoyant or a call for votes in one of the magazine’s popularity polls, as the implied answer stared you right in the face, a promise with five sets of peepers. “The chances are you won’t be far wrong if your list includes Cecile Dionne, or Yvonne or Annette or Emile or Marie.”  The famous Dionne Quintuplets, born on this day, 28 May, in 1934, were not yet two years old. No quintuplets before them had ever lived even that long; but their future in show business was already well mapped out for them, in contracts amounting to over half a million dollars.  Opposite screen veteran Jean Hersholt—the quintessence of Hippocratic fidelity—those essential quints had already starred in The Country Doctor, released in March 1936, to be followed up by Reunion later that year.

Quite a life for carpetful of rug rats once described as “bluish-black in color, with bulging foreheads, small faces, wrinkled skin, soft and enlarged tummies, flaccid muscles and spider-like limbs!” However fortunate to escape life as a sideshow attraction, the medical history makers could “hardly avoid” being turned into celebrities and groomed for stardom.

“Whether they like it or not,” as the Radio Guide put it, “whether their guardians decree it, whether their parents give their permission, those five famous tots in Callander, Ontario, are the little princesses of the entire world. As such, they are already in and must remain in the public eye as long as the world demands them.”

Sure, the “public eye” tears up at the sight of babies, bouncing or otherwise—but the public ear? Would audiences tune in to hear a quintet of babbling, bawling infants? And what of all those other noises, the blue notes producers did not dare to mention, let alone set free into the FCC-conditioned air? Publications like Radio Guide paid fifty bucks for a single photograph of the famous handful (even though various if not always authentic pieces of memorabilia could be had considerably more cheaply), and that at a time when you could get your hands on the President’s likeness for a mere five; but would a sponsor risk investing thousands in an act that could not hold a tune or stick to a script? As yet, there was no evidence that the media darlings could blossom into a veritable Baby Rose Marie garden.

Defending Radio Guide’s continued attention to the Dionnes, editor Curtis Mitchell declared that, while the phenomenon “had little to do with radio,” “all the great personalities of every walk of life and every continent” eventually stepped up to the microphone: “As entertainers they may not have the expertness of Eddie Cantor or Jack Benny but their gurgling and cooing will surely remind us of what a magnificent instrument for participating in the life about us young Guglielmo Marconi provided when he invented radio.”

Sure enough, radio kept the multitudes abreast of the Dionnes while gag writers worked their name into many an old routine. Baby Snooks could stay snug, though. The infantas of Quintland would not baby talk themselves into the hearts of American radio listeners. According to legend (as perpetuated by Simon Callow), it was Orson Welles whom producers called upon to supply the “gurgling and cooing” when the babies were featured on a March of Time broadcast.

Accompanied by their physician, guardian and manager, Dr. Dafoe, the Dionne girls would be paraded before the listening public on several occasions in the early 1940s, and were even heard singing on the air; but they never became the ultimate sister act that readers of Radio Guide, anno 1936, had been encouraged to anticipate. Seen rather than heard, they nonetheless remained a prominent feature on the advertising pages of the Guide and other radio-related publications. All those endorsement deals and money-making schemes make you wonder what the Million Dollar Babies might have said if only they had been permitted to get a word in . . .

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Never Mind "Local Color"—That’s a Bruise!

Last week, my best friend was in town for a visit. Ever since I left our native Germany some twenty years ago to live abroad (first in the US, now in the UK), our time together has been short and rare. I have learned to accept the brevity of our reunions; but treating them as special occasions has often bothered me. Not that it would be a waste of time just to flop and chat; then again, that is what we do apart almost daily while on the phone with each other. So, as if our get-togethers weren’t special enough, I somehow feel obliged to make my friend’s journeys here worthwhile by planning something out of the ordinary.

This time around, though, there was less time and still less money for the “special,” given that most of our hours and pounds are being spent on renovating our house in town. Okay, so I tried to pass off a seven-hour roundtrip in a van to pick up a bathtub as a sightseeing tour—but much of my German friend’s visit was passed in the appreciation of local color: the blue bells, the silvery sea, and the lush greenery of nearby Hafod, a Picturesque, man-made landscape that was an inspiration to Britain’s Romantic poets.

Then there was a hike up Constitution Hill just behind our future home to look through the lens of the camera obscura (pictured), presumably the biggest in the world. Yes, there is plenty to see in Aberystwyth. As one Victorian traveler expressed it, it is worthwhile coming here just to see the sunset.

So much for the daytime highlights. What about evening entertainment? How fortunate, I thought, that the local cinema was screening films of local interest—a Welsh-language picture about a 1970s comedy act that hit it big in the Valleys but dreamed of Vegas (Ryan a Ronnie) and a British biopic about Michael Peterson, a man born in this very town. Not a dignitary, mind, but a celebrity nonetheless—a nonentity of guy who, lacking all other ambitions, reinvented himself as Charles Bronson, thug.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson (2009) is not a traditional biography. It is no more a character study than Friday the 13th, even though it is more concerned with its own glamour than with the ugliness of its subject. The film does not attempt to debate whether nurture or nature (the radioactive Irish Sea, say) turned a boy into a beast, to explain what went wrong along the way to a maturity unreached.

Bronson makes no mention of Peterson’s birthplace, which, given the violent subject, must be a relief to those engaged in trying to sell the town as a seaside resort. Besides, the home Peterson made for himself is solitary confinement, in which he spent most of his life. Thirty years and counting—without a murder charge to his discredit.

The film’s homophobia aside—its muscular, naked, supposedly “unadulterated” violence comes across as less freakish than the cultured, artistic and presumably fey who seek to entrap, educate, or exploit Peterson—Bronson is most disturbing in its refusal either to accuse or excuse the man. It simply displays, thereby giving its yet living subject precisely what it—along with the public—appears to crave most: celebrity. It is a nightmarish picture of a good-for-nothing who achieves fame—like a roid-raging Paris Hilton (High-security Hilton?)—without doing anything deserving of our notice, let alone our praise.

Bronson is the anti-Elephant Man: “I am not a human being,” he seems to insist, “I am an animal.” He is a sideshow act entirely satisfied with his own conspicuous marginality.

If the film argues anything, it is that our inability to pin Peterson down is what terrifies us most, what compels us to watch and forces the authorities to keep him under lock and key. With this makeshift thesis, the shallow if stylistically intriguing Bronson, which favors art direction over the use of a moral compass, attempts to justify its approach, making a virtue out of its superficiality by denying us access into the mind it is incapable of penetrating.

I took my visitor to see Bronson in hopes of catching a glimpse of our little town and of learning something about its darker past. Instead of shades of local color, though, I was dealt a rather nasty shiner.

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All Coming Out in the Time Machine Wash

Staying out of touch has never been easier. We’ve all got our personal teleporters to spirit us away from the here and now. Technology is making it possible for us to remove ourselves from our communities, to stay at home not watching the world go by. Instead, we can revel in bygone worlds. Hundreds of satellite channels are serving up seconds. Before you know it, you quite forgot what time it is that you just passed. Isn’t it high time for Sally Jessy Raphaël to stop gabbing? Eight years ago she went off the air; but there she is, chatting away on British television, her owl glasses unscratched by the sand of time.

Keep your finger on the remote control long enough and you’ll come across The Lone Ranger pursuing evildoers in perpetuity as if his name really were the Long-ranger. And there, cigarette holder in hand as in days of smoke-shrouded yore, is glamorous Lana Turner in the cliffhanger of Falcon Crest‘s second season; and these days, the hiatus will only last a few hours. Breakfast time will tell who ended up in that coffin (after twenty-five years, it will be new to me all over again).

“I don’t ask you to prepare for a new world—because I realize that a new world is here now.” H. G. Wells said that during one of his 1940s radio addresses. I caught up with him listening to Philip Osment’s adaptation of The Time Machine, into which you might still enter online before that portal closes on 28 February. I have recorded it, for future listening. The new world here now is a world in which time is out of joint, as old Hamlet might have said. As a species, we might well be running out of time; but that only encourages us to amble in the continuum. We keep on moseying in the fourth dimension so as not to face the things to come. Such are the hazards of the Time Machine Age.

The Internet? It’s a regular world wide cobweb! A sticky tangle of threads from which it is difficult to extricate ourselves once we get caught. That, for the moment, must suffice to account for my spasmodic writings this month. I am spending a great deal of time flicking through magazines like Radio-Movie Guide, hundreds of which have been digitized and are being freely shared online.

From the above issue (24 February to 1 March 1940), for instance, I learned what Myrna Loy’s masseuse rushed home to before Loy bought a portable radio to find out for herself (I Love a Mystery), how the Pot o’ Gold became a matter for the Department of Justice, or what John Kieran let slip on Information Please (“I frequently carry books on my person in strange places”).

Yes, keeping up with the out-of-date has sure gotten easier. Getting back has not . . .

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Under That Hat: The Life and Breath of Carmen Miranda

So iconic is this technicolorful Latina that she might not strike you, on the face of it, as the ideal subject for a sound-only documentary; but there she is, the life of Russell Davies’s “Carmen Miranda: The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat.” Once you remove that hat, you will find much to tip yours to as you listen to Ruby Wax, assisted by biographers Helena Solberg and Martha Gil-Montero, unravel the story of Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha, born one hundred years ago in the small town of Marco de Canaveses, Portugal. As Carmen Miranda, she came to represent not just her non-native Brazil, to which her family emigrated, but the whole of Latin America; and while what she became was larger-than-life, the “Brazilian bombshell” was not quite so large as to cover—or level—quite so much ground. It is the leveling that those proud of their origins and culture resent—and Brazilians, in particular, came to dismiss Hollywood’s All South-American girl as inauthentic, irregular, and downright ignominious.

The United States, of course, was counting on what it hoped to be a Pan-American appeal; it is what made the former milliner’s apprentice such a sought-after commodity during the Second World War. At the end of the war, she was reputedly the highest paid woman in the United States.

A romance born of hardship and ingenuity, a glittering success tarnished by rejection, an identity challenged by dislocation and enfranchisement, a glamorous life culminating in early death, the one-of-a-kind yet kind of universal story of “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” is the stuff of legend. Sure enough, that is what, according to the Internet Movie Database is what is about to come out of Hollywood any day now: Maracas: The Carmen Miranda Story.

The samba-infused first installment of this three-parter makes ample use of original recordings to highlight the performer’s early musical career. Considering that the next chapter is going to transport listeners from Rio to Hollywood, I wonder whether it is going to draw on the one source that, aside from shellac, is best suited to the medium—the sounds of Carmen Miranda’s life on the air: her samba lesson for Orson Welles; her dramatic scenes with Charlie McCarthy, or her joking with Tallulah Bankhead, Judy Holliday and Rex Harrison on The Big Show. Never mind that hat. She was the Lady with the Tutti Frutti voice, which is why she had her own radio program down south.

Carmen Miranda died on 4 August 1955, within hours after suffering a heart attack while performing on Jimmy Durante’s live television program. Could it be that our demand for visuals, our insistence to be shown what can be heard and felt more keenly in darkness, is what caused Carmen Miranda’s heart to stop its rhythmic beatings? A program like “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” offers us a chance to bring her into our presence, take her in as the voice, the breath that gave her life. We only need to make the effort to be all ears . . .

Related recordings
Hello Americans (15 November 1942)
The Charlie McCarthy Show (23 November 1947)
The Big Show (25 March 1951)

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The Whole Ball of Wax: “Life With Lucy and Desi”

“She wasn’t the nicest person all the time,” biographer Tom Gilbert puts it mildly; but to say even that much apparently triggers complaints from many Lucy lovers, to whom journalist Mariella Frostrup apologizes in advance. Frostrup’s voice is enough to win anyone over, even though it might make at once forgive and forget what she is saying. Hers has been called the “sexiest female voice on [British] TV”—and the hot medium of radio only accentuates her seductive powers. So, where was I?

Right, “Life With Lucy and Desi.” It wasn’t all love and laughter—especially not for children. Actress Morgan Brittany recalls a scene on the set of Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) in which Ball lost her temper when one of the kids dared to laugh and ruin a difficult take. Native Americans in traditional garb and images of birds likewise irritated her, as did bodily contact. “She didn’t like people being near her,” Gilbert observes.

She wasn’t funny, and she wasn’t all that nice. That’s what those stepping behind the microphone for a new hour-long BBC radio documentary have to say about the “real” Lucille Ball, comedienne, businesswoman, and small-screen icon. Not exactly a revelation, to be sure; but you might expect less after reading the blurb on the BBC’s webpage for the program, which revises history by calling I Love Lucy “a zany television series which ran for twenty five years.” Well, let’s not heckle and jibe. The anecdotal impressions of those who can justly claim to have seen both sides of Ms. Ball make “Life With Lucy and Desi” a diverting biographical sketch, however moth-balled the gossip some twenty years after the actress’s death.

She seemed somewhat out of touch as well, even though she got to run the run-down RKO and signed off on Star Trek, a program she assumed, as Gilbert asserts, to be about performers entertaining the troops during the Second World War.

“Life” is further enlivened by numerous recordings from Ball’s career in television, film and radio. My Favorite Husband, I am pleased to note, has not been left out of this phono-biographic grab bag, even though the snippet from the radio forerunner to I Love Lucy airs without commentary; nor is it always clear what it is that we are hearing—no dates or episode titles are mentioned—the clip from My Favorite Husband, for instance, is not identified as being been taken from the 4 March 1949 episode—and the selections seem not merely random, but hardly representative of Ball’s finest moments in this or any medium. When you hear her sing “It’s Today” (from the stage hit turned film dud Mame), you’d wish someone would “strike the band up” to drown out the wrong notes.

The argument this documentary seems to make is that Lucy would not have been Lucy if Desi had not been Ricky. Ball had talent, Brittany concedes, but might have ended up like “Baby” June Havoc, whom Brittany portrayed in Gyspy—a fine performer who never quite reached stardom and who, though still living, is not nearly so well remembered today as to be celebrated—or critiqued—in a radio documentary of her own. She might just have remained the “Queen of the B’s.”

The inevitable Robert Osborne aside, the lineup of folks who knew or at any rate worked with Ball also includes “Little Ricky” Keith Thibodeaux, Peter Marshall (who walked out on a chance of working with Ball), Allan Rich (who played a Judge on Life with Lucy; not, as Frostrup has it, on the Lucy Show) and writer Madelyn Davis (formerly Pugh), who still gets fan mail for having created the durable caricatures that were “Lucy.”

No mention, of course, is made of Hoppla Lucy, viewings of which constitute my earliest television memories (Hoppla Lucy being the title of the German-dubbed Lucy Show). Long before I had breakfast with Lucy when truncated (make that mutilated) episode of her first and finest television series aired on New York’s Fox Five every weekday morning, a truncated version of myself sat down to watch Lucy bake a cake and making a mess of it. I haven’t watched it since, but can still tune in the laugh it produced. Who cares whether or not what I saw was the real Ball. I sure was having one.

Related recordings
My Favorite Husband (4 March 1949)

Related writing
“Havoc in ‘Subway’ Gives Commuters Ideas”
“‘But some people ain’t me!’: Arthur Laurents and ‘The Face’ Behind Gypsy

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“Here is your forfeit”: It’s Hopkins’s Night As Colbert Goes Private

“Our guest stars might well have been tailored for the celebrated parts of Peter and Ellie,” host Orson Welles remarked as he raised the curtain on the Campbell Playhouse production of “It Happened One Night,” heard on this day, 28 January, in 1940. Quite a bold bit of barking, that. After all, the pants once worn by bare-chested Clark Gable were handed down to William Powell, who was debonair rather than brawny. “Mr. William Powell surely needs no alteration at all,” Welles insisted, even though the material required considerable trimming. Meanwhile, the part of Ellie, the “spoiled and spirited heiress” whom Peter cuts down to size until he suits her, was inherited by Miriam Hopkins. It had “certainly never been more faultlessly imagined than tonight,” Welles declared. Indeed, as I was reminded by Andre Soares’s interview with biographer Allan Ellenberger on Alternative Film Guide, Hopkins numbered among the leading ladies who had turned down the role and, no doubt, came to regret it, given the critical and commercial success of It Happened, which earned Claudette Colbert an Academy Award.

Now, Welles was prone to hyperboles; but, in light of Colbert’s memorable performance, his claim that the part had “never been more faultlessly imagined”—in a radio adaptation, no less—sounds rather spurious. As it turns out, raspy-voiced Hopkins (whom last I saw in a BFI screening of Becky Sharp) does not give the spirited performance one might expect from the seasoned comedienne. Her timing is off, her emoting out of character, all of which conspires, along with the imposed acceleration of the script, to render disingenuous what is meant to be her character’s transformation from brat to bride; and while Powell, a few fluffed lines notwithstanding, does quite well as the cocky Peter Grant (it was “Warne” when those pants were worn by Gable), the only “spirited” performance is delivered by Bernard Herrmann, the composer of the lively score.

In short, there is little to justify Welles’s introductory boast. Was the Wunderkind getting back at Colbert for standing him up two months earlier, when Madeleine Carroll filled her place in “The Garden of Allah”? What’s more, Colbert appeared to have passed on the chance to reprise her Oscar-winning role for Campbell Playhouse, something she had previously done, opposite Gable in one of his rare radio engagements, for a Lux Radio Theater reworking of the old “Night Bus” story.

That same night, 28 January 1940, Colbert was heard instead on a Screen Guild broadcast in a production of “Private Worlds,” in a role for which she had received her second Academy Award nomination. During the curtain call, Colbert was obliged to “pay a forfeit” after incorrectly replying “The Jazz Singer” to the question “What was the first full-length all-talking picture to come out of Hollywood?” For this, she was ordered to recite a tongue twister; but it wasn’t much of a forfeit, compared to the sense of loss both Colbert and Hopkins must have felt whenever they misjudged the business by rejecting important roles or by risking their careers making questionable choices.

In The Smiling Lieutenant, the two had played rivals who ended their fight over the same man by comparing the state of their undies; now, Hopkins seemed to be rummaging in Colbert’s drawers for the parts she could have had but was not likely to be offered again. Well, however you want to spin it, radio sure was the place for makeshift redressing, for castoffs and knock-offs, for quick alterations and hasty refittings. It catered to the desire of actors and audiences alike to rewrite or at any rate tweak Hollywood history. Go ahead, try it on for size.

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Best in Show: Dean Spanley as Out-of-Homebody Experience

My records show that I watched some 250 films in 2008. They range from silent one-reelers to noisy epics, from British wartime propaganda to Third Reich comedy, from the obscure Lottery Man (1916), which I enjoyed, to the biggest blockbuster of the year (The Dark Knight), which I did not. For all this variety, the majority of the titles on my list (continued to the right of this journal entry) are Hollywood films of the studio era, many of them from the 1930s and 1940s. Conventional as I am in this, I concur with those who hold 1939 to be Hollywood’s best vintage.

Later decades, the present one excepted, are poorly represented in my annual account. There are two films from the 1990s (one of them a television movie about the inclusion of which the pedant in me had a long debate with myself); a lone film from the 1980s (the tonally misjudged if beautifully languid A Handful of Dust, based on one of my favorite novels of the 1930s); and less than a handful of 1970s pictures, two of them by one of the greatest directors of Hollywood’s golden age, Alfred Hitchcock. There is to me no surprise in these statistics; they are an adequate reflection of my cinematic tastes and predilections. Prejudices, you might say.

What distorts the picture are my travels. They broaden to the extent that, against the pertinacity I cannot bring myself to pass off as better judgment, something like Hulk (sat through in New York), The Day the Earth Stood Still (endured in London), or Midnight Meat Train (suffered in Riga) slips in. Still, if it weren’t for those bouts of wanderlust, I probably would not have had the pleasure of catching Guy Maddin’s hypnotic My Winnipeg, featuring noir dame Ann Savage, who passed away on Christmas day last year; nor would I have seen Tarsem Singh’s stunningly surreal The Fall or Toa Fraser’s quietly quirky Dean Spanley, a film I caught at the Little Theatre in Bath, England (pictured above).

Dean Spanley is based on a 1936 novella by Lord Dunsany, which has been republished with Alan Sharp’s screenplay and commentary. It is more accurate to say that the film is inspired by My Talks with Dean Spanley, a casual, witty discourse on reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. Inspired it certainly is.

As the title slyly suggests, the heart, soul and center of these talks is a clergyman who, in a former life, was what an intoxicated person afflicted with temporary dyslexia might call a “Spanley.” Without resorting to puns as crude as mine, the narrative plays with the idea that a man who wears a dog collar might have been barking at the moon before he learned to preach; that a clergyman may have had a past existence entirely at odds with his preachings about the afterlife; and that, in order to arrive at the secret of a dull, reserved, and abstemious man, one must drink him under the table to get him to reminisce about a time when he belonged there:

It was [the] remark about the woods and the night, and the eager way in which he spoke of the smells and the sounds, that first made me sure that the Dean was speaking from knowledge, and that he really had known another life in a strangely different body. Why these words made me sure I cannot say; I can only say that it is oddly often the case that some quite trivial remark in a man’s conversation will suddenly make you sure that he knows what he is talking about. A man will be talking perhaps about pictures, and all at once he will make you feel that Raphael, for instance, is real to him, and that he is not merely making conversation. In the same way I felt, I can hardly say why, that the woods were real to the Dean, and the work of a dog no less to him than an avocation.

The film much expands on the original material without evaporating any of its charm. Distilling its essence, screenwriter Alan Sharp turns the talks with the Dean (wonderfully portrayed by Sam Neill) into a story of self-discovery and healing in which the clergyman’s secret, arrived at by way of methodically yet unscrupulously administered Tokay, into the key to the troubled relationship of the narrator (Jeremy Northam) with his cantankerous father (played by Peter O’Toole). Rather than exploiting it strictly for laughs, Toa Fraser’s sensitive treatment of Lord Dunsany’s novella is a rare and winning—and so rarely winning—combination of wit and sentiment.

Yes, travel broadens. Coming back home, you might even look differently at your own dog as he gives you that “and-where-have-you-been look of mingled joy and reproach . . .

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Hollywood and the Three Rs (Romance, Realism, and Wrinkles)

A few months ago, I went to see a Broadway musical based on a television play by Paddy Chayefsky. Confronted with those keywords alone, I pretty much knew that A Catered Affair was not the kind of razzle-dazzler that makes me want to join a chorus line or find myself a chandelier to swing from. A Catered Affair is more Schlitz than champagne, more kitchen sink than swimming pool. Drab, stale, and too-understated-for-a-thousand-seater, it left me colder than yesterday’s toast (and I said as much then).

What made me want to attend the Affair was the chance to see three seasoned performers who, before being thus ill catered to, had been seen at grander and livelier dos: Faith Prince, Tom Wopat, and Harvey Fierstein, whose idea it was to revive and presumably update Chayefsky’s 1955 original. Last night, I caught up with the 1956 movie version as adapted for the screen by Gore Vidal. Similarly drab, but without the cliché-laden lyrics and with a more memorable score by André Previn; and starring Bette Davis, of course.

When we first see Davis’s middle-aged mother on the screen, she is performing her hausfrau chores listening to The Romance of Helen Trent, a radio soap opera that encouraged those tuning in to dream of love in “middle life and even beyond.” It was probably the quickest and most effective way of establishing the character and setting the mood. After all, Davis’s Aggie, whose own marriage is not the stuff of romance, is determined to throw her daughter the wedding that she, Aggie, never had. She is living by proxy, as through Trent’s loves and travails, a fictional character that makes it possible for Aggie to keep on dreaming.

Once again, I was thankful for my many excursions into the world of radio drama; but I also wondered whether the aging Ms. Davis and her far from youthful co-star, Ernest Borgnine, are giving me what Helen Trent promised its listeners back then: an assurance that life goes on past 35 (which, in today’s life expectancy math, translates into, say, 45).

I rarely watch or read anything with or by anyone yet living. It is not that I am morbid—it is because I prefer a certain kind of writing and movie-making. To me, whatever I read, see, or experience is living, insofar as my own mind and brain may be considered alive or capable of giving birth. So, when I followed up our small-screening of The Catered Affair by the requisite dipping into the Internet Movie Database, I was surprised to see that, aside from André Previn, three of its key players are not only alive but still active in show business.

The unsinkable Debbie Reynolds (no surprise there), the Time Machine tested Rod Taylor (next seen as Winston Churchill in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), and the indomitable Mr. Borgnine, who has five projects in various stages of production. Not even cats can count on Borgnine lives. To think that, having played a middle-aged working man some five decades ago and still going strong today is both inspiring and . . . exasperating.

Why exasperating? Well, the media contribute to or are responsible for the disappearing act of many an act over the age of, say, fifty (or anyone who looks what we think of as being past middle aged, no matter how far we manage to stretch our earthly existence or Botox our past out of existence these days). You might repeat or even believe the adage that forty is the new thirty, but in Hollywood, sixty is still the same-old ninety. Sure, there are grannios (cameos for the superannuated) and grampaparts in family mush or sitcoms; but few films explore life beyond fifty without rendering maturity all supernatural in a Joan Collins sort of way.

Helen Trent and the heroines of radio were allowed to get old because audiences did not have to look at—or past—the wrinkles and liver spots. High definition, I suspect, is only taking us further down the road of low fidelity, away from the age-old romance that is the reality of life.

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Nyuk, Nyuk! Who’s Not There?

“Ladies and gentlemen. We take you now to New York City for the annual tree lighting ceremony: Click.” Imagine the thrill of being presented with such a spectacle . . . on the radio. You might as well go fondle a rainbow or listen to a bar of chocolate. Even if it could be done, you know that you have not come to your senses in a way that gets you the sensation to be had. I pretty much had the same response when I read that BBC Radio 4 was going to air a documentary on the Three Stooges.

According to the Radio Times, “The Three Stooges: Movie Maniacs” (first aired on BBC Radio 4 on 4 December in 2008) promises a “detailed overview” of the career of the comedy trio and its six (that’s right, six) members (not counting Emil Sitka). That there were six Stooges is about the only revelation of this half-hour program, other than that attempting an audio documentary on this most visual of slapstick comics is almost as dumb (but not nearly as funny) as anything the Three Stooges might be seen doing, if only they were to be seen.

There is a lot that radio can do better than television or the movies; but bringing home the appeal of physical comedy is not one of them. Matters are not helped by historian Glenn Mitchell, who delivers what Radio Times‘s David Crawford calls a “rather dry analysis” in a flat, humorless voice that makes you reach for a jug of water or, alternatively, for the proverbial off button of whatever device you use to tune in these days. Pratfalls never sounded this dull.

“Their wild knockabout and lunatic spirit continued to endear [the Three Stooges] to fans worldwide,” Mitchell tells us, “albeit less so in Britain.” Why? “It may be that British tastes run less to the direct brand of slapstick that was their stock in trade,” Mitchell suggests, only to point out that “they were enormously popular” in Britain during the 1930s and ‘40s. This “lack of familiarity” Mitchell attributes to the fact that the Stooges were rarely seen in Britain thereafter, whereas they have been television stalwarts in the US since the late 1950s. Obviously, those guys have to be seen to be appreciated. Heck, they have to be seen to be loathed.

Comparative obscurity aside, their disappearance from British screens seems to have translated into a lack of funding for a television documentary that might have contributed to a reappraisal of their work. Without visuals, you end up with explanatory—and rhetorically slipshod—notes like this one: “It must be said that the Stooges films maintain a constant stream of slapping, eye-poking, and bashes over the head that some people find relentless to the point of irresponsibility.”

While clearly out of its element on the airwaves, “The Three Stooges: Movie Maniacs” is not an out-and-out dud. Tracing the comedians’ career from their vaudeville beginnings to their work in pictures, big and small, the lecture is enlivened by numerous sound bites from films and television interviews. Among the voices you’ll hear are those of Moe Howard, Larry Fine, Joe Besser, Curly Joe DeRita, and Lucille Ball.

For all its swift editing, the program still leaves you with that “you had to be there” feeling, the shrug that might have been a chuckle; and to take you there via radio takes consummate professionals like Edward R. Murrow or Ted Husing, or a Herbert “Oh, the humanity” Morrison describing the Hindenburg go down in flames. This one simply deflates before your very ears.