Tag: Bette Davis

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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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“. . . originally written for Bette Davis”: Arch Oboler’s “Alter Ego”

Get ready for a few bumpy nights. As anyone watching Turner Classic Movies UK is aware, Bette Davis is currently “on tour.” The expired thespian is even scheduled to make appearances at our local Arts Centre here in Wales, albeit not to account for her assault on Welsh culture in The Corn Is Green.

Apparently, the announcement of a retrospective of her films, reels now making the rounds in Britain, did not strike promoters as being sensational enough to herald the coming-to-town of one of filmdom’s most celebrated emoters. Even with their eyes shut and her trademark peepers out of the picture, Davis still managed to wow them on the radio, inspiring the medium’s foremost melodramatist, Arch Oboler, to write plays especially for her. One such author-artist collaboration, “An American Is Born,” I have already discussed here.

A still greater tour-de-force was “Alter Ego,” a psychological thriller inspired, no less, by a study published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. The play was first produced by the Texaco Star Theater and broadcast on 5 October 1938 with Davis in the role of a young woman compelled by an inner voice to kill her lover.

Retitled “Another World,” the psychodrama was subsequently presented on Arch Oboler’s Plays (28 July 1939), with character actress Betty Garde in the lead.

On this day, 22 April, in 1945, “Alter Ego” was once again sound-staged under its original title, in a production that was part of the anthology series Your Radio Hall of Fame (which, at the time of this writing, was made available by Jerry Haendiges on his website Same Time, Same Station).

The play was introduced by its grandiloquent author, Arch Oboler, whose ego was big enough for any number of alters. Oboler was quick to point out that “Alter Ego” was “originally written for Bette Davis”; but since the Radio Hall of Fame paid “tribute to radiO” and was no doubt on a tight budget, the play was performed on that the occasion with “two of radio’s outstanding actresses”: Ann Shepard and Mercedes McCambridge (pictured above and previously commemorated here).

It is “definitely a play indigenous to the radio form,” Oboler commented on the published script. “In no other medium could the ‘two mind systems’ existing in the same body be portrayed as effectively.” That did not stop him from adapting “Alter Ego” for the movies, as was dutifully pointed out by Your Radio Hall of Fame host Clifton Fadiman. The Oboler-directed Bewitched (1945), in theaters at the time of the broadcast, starred Phyllis Thaxter in the role of the tormented Joan, with Audrey Totter lending her voice but not appearing onscreen as Joan’s alter ego, Carmen.

“Alter Ego” is a sensational play that, according to one contemporary critic, has all the subtlety of a sparring match. Before the duel can commence, playwright Oboler sets the scene: a cell in a state penitentiary, where Joan is awaiting her execution. Having no one to talk to about the inner voices that haunt her, Joan addresses her dead mother, promising to tell her “everything that happened.”

Joan’s ordeal started with the “boy next door,” Bob. Soon after her father announced their engagement, Joan (Shepard) is being possessed by a voice (McCambridge) commanding her to leave her husband-to-be and to stop fighting her impulses: “Give it up to me—your body, your mind. You must, you will. I won’t go back in the dark. I’ll live, I’ll live!”

Joan is at a loss to communicate even—or least of all—to Bob the strange urgings that she herself does not comprehend. When Bob refuses to let go of Joan, Carmen forces Joan to stab him to death with a pair of scissors by dictating the movements of the body she longs to possess.

Joan is tried for murder. About to be acquitted, she confesses to the crime of which she believes herself to be innocent. Knowing no other way out, she determines to conquer the voice within by giving up the body they both inhabited. Joan faces the gallows. After the trap is sprung, a soft-voiced Joan triumphs from the beyond: “You were wrong, Carmen—evil one—you were wrong. . . . Now there is peace.”

Apparently, Oboler deems the morose Joan—or any woman talking to an inner twin or a mother in the imagined hereafter rather than confide in a man to whom she is supposed to give her hotly contested body, a body altogether past cure, if indeed the desire to escape a sanctioned union is in need of one.

Advocating suicide in lieu of therapy, let alone a reform of the patriarchal system, the master of pop-psychology schlock shuts Joan up so as to keep her from speaking the mind she is argued to have been out of. I am surprised Ms. Davis did not take those scissors and, at the very least, cut the script to pieces.

Then again, unlike the actresses who followed her, she did get to take on a dual role, duel with a certain Joan, and rise to the challenge of upstaging herself.

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Du a Gwyn: Shades and Shadows of Life in Wales

Well, I am used to it. That is, I used to be. Seeing images of my surroundings on the big screen is rather a common experience if you live in the cinematographically well-mapped center of New York City. Moving from Gotham to Cymru (that is, Wales) seemed to push my life effectively off the map I had gone by in the shaping of my existence ever since I first set eyes on the Big Apple. I have been reluctant to discard the old plan in exchange for a new atlas, one that matches my present environs, one that might help me to position instead of dislocating myself. This journal has been largely a mode of escape, a vehicle of expression designed to transport me from a place in which I have not yet found a voice. Just from what am I trying to get away, though? And how much longer can I get away with using a chart of my own making, drawn, as it were, with my eyes closed to the world?

You might say that moving from and vowing never to return to what is supposedly my home (my native Germany), whether to Manhattan (where I lived for about fifteen years) or to Wales (where I have been residing nearly three years now), is a continual rehearsal of my sense of displacement as a gay person, as someone not quite at home in any society, as someone suspicious of the very concept of home. As an expatriate, I have made the experience of being born an outsider a matter of choice.

I have been reminded of my estrangement—and the unease of longing and not belonging—while attending Fflics, the aforementioned festival of classic films representing Welsh life or a Wales imagined elsewhere. How queer, for instance, to feel alienated by The Corn Is Green (1945), a Hollywood movie based on a play by gay actor-dramatist Emlyn Williams and starring gay icon Bette Davis. Here is a studio version of Wales that bears little resemblance to any Cymru past or present, a film that now strikes me as disingenuous and calculating as the strumpet portrayed by Joan Lorring.

Three years ago, I would not have been able to tell that the accents in Corn are as phony as the painted backdrops. However willing I am to suspend disbelief, I cannot go so far as to suppress my new knowledge and experience for the sake of entering into a world that commercially exploits foreignness without embracing it. Williams’s own struggle to come to terms with his marginality is deproblematized, his secret code obliterated. What remains is the missionary message that it takes someone ignorant of your origins to assist in what amounts to a purge, to prompt and prod you into becoming someone you ought to be according to superimposed standards.

An extreme form of such reconditioning is presented in The Silent Village (1943), a propagandist documentary imagining the invasion of a Welsh (and linguistically entirely non-English) community by the Nazis, whose first act is to prohibit the use of the Welsh language. Meeting with silent resistance, then active revolt, the fascist invaders effectively take the town off the map, killing its men and razing its homes in retaliation of the assassination of a high-ranking Nazi official.

It is a remarkably restrained, unsentimental and unhysterical recreation of the Lidice massacre, acted out by ordinary folk in a Welsh mining town not unlike Lidice. While the town of Cwmgiedd was being turned into a symbol, it lost none of its character during or as a result of the location shoot, the iconography of its everyday being carefully rendered. Verisimilitude turned to reality, pastness to present, when one of the Welsh villagers, a schoolboy back in 1943, spoke after the screening of the film about the town’s non-hostile takeover by the British film crew.

Utter hokum by comparison is Graham Cutts’s The Rat (1925), a pseudo-Parisian melodrama reveling in its own irrelevance. Gay Welsh matinee idol Ivor Novello plays a tormented object of heterosexual desire, an apache who comes to value the love of his gal pal over the glamorous world that enslaves him even as he seeks to conquer it. Penned by Novello himself (under the telling pseudonym “David L’Estrange”), The Rat invites decoding; but even if the code can be cracked, the film remains impersonal, sheltered as it is by its own artifice.

Rather more personally relevant to my experience is the image of the stranger in Proud Valley (1940) starring Paul Robeson as a black American introducing himself into a Welsh coal-mining community. “Why, damn and blast it,” one of the miners protests, “aren’t we all black down it that pit?”

As I learned reading Cadewch i Paul Robeson Ganu!, a fascinating account of Robeson’s ties to Wales, the actor-singer-activist found here a “cymuned o’r un anian,” a kindred community. “There is no place in the world I like more than Wales,” he once exclaimed. He expressed his solidarity with the Welsh miners, whom he first encountered and aided in 1929, singing for them (via transatlantic exchange) even when he was barred from international travel after his passport was confiscated by the US government.

It is a “kindred community” like this to which I have yet to gain access; it is this sense of being embraced and found valuable that I have yet to experience here. I realize that, for this to happen, Wales and Welsh have to become a more integral part of my existence as I am sharing it in this journal. So, after following a haunted and hunting Ivor Novello (as a suspicious foreigner and loner) into the London fog shrouding The Phantom Fiend (1932), the underappreciated talkie take on Hitchcock’s Lodger, I am discovering the actor anew in a Welsh setting established in speech and song by Cliff Gordon’s radio comedy “Choir Practice: A Storm in a Welsh Teacup” (produced in 1946) and subsequently adapted for the screen as Valley of Song (1953), another one of the films shown as part of the Fflics festival. Here, at least, the idiom rings true . . .

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The Confidante Game: Trading on That Old Acquaintance

Well, here’s an acquaintance worth making. Old Acquaintance, that is, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of which is currently in previews at the American Airlines Theatre. Judging from the walkers and hearing aids on display at last Tuesday’s performance—not to mention the gas passed noisily in the lobby—I suspect that quite a few of the folks in attendance that evening got to see John Van Druten’s comedy during its original run back in 1940-41, while some of the friends of Dorothy’s we passed in the aisle were most likely on intimate terms with the 1943 film adaptation starring Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, two leading ladies on less than friendly terms.

Whether or not you (think you) are familiar with this story of a longtime rivalry redefined as friendship, the Roundabout production is likely to teach you a lesson or two about the nature of that least clearly defined of social compacts and about Hollywood’s (s)elective affinities with Broadway.

I caught up with Vincent Sherman’s soon-to-be-remade melodrama (and one of its radio versions) only after seeing the play, which made me appreciate the stage version’s maturity all the more. Van Druten, who was involved in the screen adaptation of Old Acquaintance, sure learned how to compromise in order to make it in Tinseltown. That he turned his sparkling comedy into an even larger crowd-pleasing sentimental melodrama is all the more remarkable considering that the English playwright’s first drama, Young Woodley (1925), had initially been banned in Britain for its treatment of sexual awakening. Production code conformity in the case of Old Acquaintance—as in most cases—meant turning mature women with careers as well as sex lives into silly girls or stoic old maids.

The silly girl in the Hollywood version is Miriam Hopkins, whose Millie is so envious of the publicity enjoyed her novelist friend Kit that she, however ill equipped for literary fame, turns to the writing of romances. The old maid is Bette Davis, whose romantically luckless Kit is willing to hand down her much younger lover to Millie’s daughter, Deidre, for which sacrifice she is duly rewarded with a cup of human kindness, shared with a remorseful Millie by the fire that warms them when the heat of passion is no longer in the Hallmark cards.

All this bears little resemblance to Van Druten’s original three-act play, a witty, tightly constructed comedy of manners. As one astute online reviewer of the movie points out, it becomes difficult to understand why Kit and Mollie became such old acquaintances once their careers are pushed into the background. In the stage play, it is Millie who, though a trash novelist herself, enjoys Kit’s respect as a keen and candid editor of Kit’s ponderous, overly analytic storytelling. However different in temperament, Kit and Mollie come across as equals, which explains at once their closeness and their rivalry.

On stage, Old Acquaintance echoes La Rochefoucauld’s maxims that friendship is “nothing but a transaction from which the self always means to gain something” and that in the “misfortunes of our friends we always find something that isn’t displeasing to us.” Concurring with the latter, satirist Jonathan Swift remarked about his relationship with fellow authors:

To all my Foes, dear Fortune, send
Thy Gifts, but never to my Friend:
I tamely can endure the first,
But, this with Envy makes me burst.

In the 2007 Broadway revival, Margaret Colin’s Kit is less pathetic than Davis’s, while Harris’s portrayal of Mollie is more sympathetic than that of Hopkins (who reprised her role, opposite miscast Alexis Smith, in the 29 May 1944 Lux Radio Theatre production). If not nearly as assured and brilliant in her comic timing or line reading as Rosalind Russell, with whom in mind the rights to Old Acquaintance were secured by Warner Brothers, Colin is both real and regal. Davis, who was asked to drop her pajamas to expose her less-than-glamorous legs, is matronly by comparison, suggesting that she sacrificed her juvenile beau to play surrogate mother to her best friend’s daughter.

The marvellous Harriet Harris, in turn, hands Millie back her brains. Whereas Hopkins’s character comes across as an impulsive, overgrown schoolgirl, spiteful and pouting, Harris’s Millie is calculating, smart, and rather dangerous (not unlike her Tony Award winning Mrs. Meers, in Thoroughly Modern Millie and her scheming Felicia Tilman in Desperate Housewives). Not content to see her best friend succeed, Millie intends to succeed her in fame and fortune. Her dramatic outbursts are an expression of her frustration when she realizes that the unmarried and childless Kit is not only a better mother to her daughter, but that she might also have been a better, and more desirable wife to her former husband.

If you prefer expensive theatre seats to cheap Hollywood sentiment, the revival of Old Acquaintance is your ticket.

[At the time of writing this I was as yet unaware that, before becoming a playwright, John Van Druten taught in Aberystwyth, the Welsh town to which I relocated from New York City in 2004.]

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On This Day in 1942: Bette Davis Gives Birth to Arch Oboler’s “American”

The retrograde activity of keeping up with the out-of-date seems generally ill-suited to blogging. I doubt whether to keep looking back—and looking forward to doing so as I do—is such a forward-looking thing to do. A blog signifies little to most readers if it cannot bring them up-to-date on its declared subject matter, be it popular culture, politics, or fly-fishing. I have often felt compelled—and more often been compelled by others—to defend my engagement with the outmoded; indeed, the first comment left for me in the Blog Explosion directory was a terse “why?”

The answer, if I felt obliged to dignify such a monosyllabic and misologic remark with a reply, is this: I enjoy the challenge of discovering the relevance of a cultural artefact or an obscure piece of writing not created with me or my present in mind, and debating to what degree my thinking and being might be indebted to the attitudes reflected in such products. Besides, not being able to relate or connect to the supposed bygone is a personal loss, and, given the potential of history repeating itself, often a dangerous one at that.

Now, it would require some degree of mental obduracy or lack of imagination not to be able to relate to “An American Is Born,” a play that aired on US radio on this day, 19 January, in 1942. After all, “An American Is Born” deals with persecution and immigration in wartime, which makes it eminently topical. It is also a deliberate and unabashed work of propaganda, composed at a time when the word did not yet carry quite as negative a connotation as is attached to it these days.

Just how accepting would today’s audiences be of a play like “An American Is Born”? How likely would they find it produced and disseminated by the mass media?

“An American Is Born” was adapted by radio playwright Arch Oboler from a novella by Peter Jefferson Packer and Fanya Lawrence Foss. Written when the US had not yet entered World War II, and first sound-staged in late 1940 with Elisabeth Bergner in the lead, it was again produced a little over a year later for the Cavalcade of America program, with Bette Davis heading the cast. Clearly, this “American” was reborn to be recruited for home front duty.

In the 1942 production, Davis, who was one of Oboler’s favorite leading ladies, played opposite the versatile radio actor Raymond Edward Johnson. Johnson and Davis took on the roles of Czech immigrants Karl Kroft and his pregnant wife Marta. Their US visa having expired, the young couple cross the border to Mexico, where they wait for their quota numbers to come up. “With the left foot first,” Marta insists as they touch Mexican soil. “That means we’ll be back soon.”

Marta, whose father fought for democracy in her native Prague, desires nothing more than for her child to “be an American from his first cry.” In a “world gone mad with the ravings of little men, he should be born in a country that remains sane and firm. A country that believes that man, as an individual, has certain inalienable rights.”

Initially as idealistic and hopeful as the speech Oboler puts in her mouth, Marta is confident that their stay will only last a few days; but she is soon undeceived about the process of immigration. For those waiting, the weeks and months across the border are filled with uncertainties, threatened by corruption, extortion, and political persecution.

When a fellow European offers to assist the young couple, Marta little suspects that he is a member of the Gestapo. She is unaware as well that her openness about her father’s political convictions endangers the lives of her parent and her unborn child.

Another immigrant who is thus intimidated commits suicide, but not before doing away with the enemy in their midst. At the risk of her own life and that of her unborn child, Marta manages to convince Karl to make a run for it. As the title suggests, the two find their way across the border to the US, where their child takes the first breath of freedom as an American citizen.

When was it that such an overtly propagandistic melodrama last reached a large American audience? The 1991 movie adaptation of the Reagan-era bestseller Not Without My Daughter comes to mind, a film in which even a Coca-Cola sign in a Turkish bordertown was greeted as a herald of US American freedom. Seeing it as an international student living in New York City, I thought the film distressingly simplistic, shamelessly manipulative and, in the context of the Gulf War, rather nauseating at the time.

Are narratives like “An American Is Born” rarer now because Americans have less to be proud of as a nation or because today’s purveyors of popular culture, with an international market in mind, doubt that the brand of one-message-suits-all patriotism can still reach a sizeable enough audience to make it pay off.

US network radio did much to hold a nation together, both during the Depression and the Second World War. I suspect, especially on the subject of immigration, this is no longer a role the media are ready, willing, or even able to play.