Tag: Lana Turner

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Blood, Sweater Girl, and Tears: “A Night with Johnny Stompanato”

I’ve just been tuning in to “A Night with Johnny Stompanato,” an original radio play by British director-playwright Jonathan Holloway, which you may access via BBC’s iPlayer until 18 July 2008. Based on “real events, newspaper reports, and FBI files from the years 1957 and 1958,” this hourlong docudrama recounts a sordid chapter in the life of screen legend Lana Turner, whose teenage daughter, Cheryl, stabbed to death the titular character, the star’s possessive mobster boyfriend. “Real events?” Turner purrs. “Yeah, I guess. Personally, I’ve rarely met a man who could tell the truth when a lie would do.” So, this time around, Lana gets to tell her own story. With us, the radio audience as jury, she is going to court for us—which is to say, she’s going to court us—all over again.

Can Turner give the performance of her life now that her own life is at stake? Let’s be frank, the former Sweater Girl was neither known for her realist acting nor for her vocal talents, as I previously remarked here. Tuning in to Turner is not likely to make you turn on to her. There wasn’t enough “It” in her timbre to make Lana’s figure appear before your mind’s eye as you listen to Suspense thrillers like “Fear Paints a Picture.” In this Imitation of Lana, Laurence Bouvard is ably substituting—and, I found, vocally improving on—the departed screen icon, who never sounded as confident behind the microphone as she looked in front of the camera. You might say that Bouvard sounds more convincing than Turner—even though, to me, “the real Lana” has an oxymoronic ring to it.

Now, my days of thrilling to trash like Hollywood Babylon are long gone, as are my experimentations in hairstyles inspired by Lana’s late 1950’s coiffure. Still, I was looking forward to this racy little number. Unfortunately, it turned out to be rather dull—which is quite a feat, considering the material.

On the face of it, “A Night with Johnny Stompanato” is not unlike one of those femme fatale yarns produced by Suspense, in which tough-talking dames give you the lowdown on a crime they were involved in, until the first-person narration makes way for a dramatization of past events. In short, the past becomes present at pivotal moments in the story. The same formula is used by Holloway, except that the playwright dramatizes the court scenes, which in themselves are retellings, with Turner commenting on the proceedings. In other words, he lets the leading lady attest too much, so that we are told what has happened rather than permitted to overhear it.

One of the most dramatic moments of “A Night with Johnny Stompanato” involves Turner, then shooting Another Time, Another Place in London, attempting to have her increasingly violent lover deported. From her dressing room at the studio, Turner calls Scotland Yard but, “as bad luck had it,” Stompanato was trying to reach her “at the same time.” Sorry, Wrong Number came to mind; but that was my mind, not the playwright’s. Instead of dramatizing this potentially thrilling call, Holloway has Turner recall it for us in retrospect:

The dumb English broad on the switchboard opened the line for him, and he listened in on everything I said to the police. The detective put down the phone, and John’s voice came straight out of the earpiece. I practically dropped dead on the spot.

The dropping dead, though, is acted out for us, with prolonged gurgling and some heavy breathing. Stompanato’s silencing comes as a relief. As impersonated—or caricatured—by John Guerrasio, he sounds about as charming and enigmatic as Allen Jenkins.

“You know,” Turner confides in us at the conclusion of her report,

the most amazing thing about the whole Johnny Stompanato business? That I didn’t learn from it. Just kept right on getting involved with men . . . and having a really bad time getting uninvolved. I never learned from my mistakes, which, I am told, is what makes us different from the animals. Nope. I just kept right on making them.

The same goes for radio playwrights, I suppose; “instead of being dramatic, with action in the now,” aforementioned writing instructor Luther Weaver complained about 1940s radio serials, their narration “offers a post-mortem on what already has happened.” Don’t get me wrong. I am grateful to the BBC for trying to keep radio drama alive (a new adaptation of Cheever’s short story “The Enormous Radio” is being broadcast on Wednesday); but, as “A Night with Johnny Stompanato” demonstrates, dialogue alone does not constitute drama. There’s more tension in one of Lana’s discarded sweaters.

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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.