Greenbriar Weekend Marquee

Just how did those fabulous Warner Bros. sets come to be? So many visuals come to mind --- Svengali, Captain Blood, Mildred Pierce, others. The designer’s art that created miracles on the sound stage had to begin on a smaller scale, and usually it was models such as these that led to the creation of full-scale backdrops, both in the studio and on location. Here we see an example of the latter, as Errol Flynn inspects the model blueprint for one of the forts that will be constructed at Agoura (Lasky Mesa), west of the San Fernando Valley, for the 1936 Charge Of The Light Brigade. That edifice would be re-used the following year in Warner’s Another Dawn, and would even turn up in a Technicolor Sybil Jason short that was featured by Warners as a DVD extra.

Legendary art director Anton Grot is shown above with director William Dieterle (left) and Max Reinhardt (center) as they inspect a throne room miniature that Grot has assembled for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was Grot who gave so many Warner features that distinctive look we associate with the studio, having spent over twenty years there between the late silent period and the beginning of the fifties. One of his early assignments was one in which Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. put him in charge of the poster campaign for The Thief Of Bagdad in 1924. Those incredible one-sheets, based on original paintings by Anton Grot, are among the most collectable of movie posters. Here’s a rare shot of Grot putting the finishing touches on the twenty-four sheet for Thief.

That’s director Raoul Walsh inspecting a miniature for one of his They Drive By Night sets in 1940. Note foliage and the little swimming pool. This would eventually became the home of Ida Lupino and ill-fated husband Alan Hale in the film, an impressive set to have been built wholly within the confines of a soundstage at Warners. Excellent movie too, and it’s on DVD. What became of these wonderful models after production was finished? Did the artists and/or builders get to take them home? Maybe for their kids? You’d hate to think they were junked, but I’ve never run across any in my travels. Has anyone? They’d sure make nice conversation pieces …

Funny Face and Fashion At Fifty

People are aware again of Funny Face not so much as a result of Paramount’s recent reissue of the DVD as its extended appearance in a widely shown GAP commercial in which Audrey Hepburn dances on behalf of the newly revived skinny black pant. Thanks to digital wizardry, something (fifty years) old looks new again, as Hepburn defines fashion for women several generations behind her own. Ask most college girls and they’ll identify this actress first among vintage stars otherwise unknown to them. Marilyn Monroe’s popular too, but in more of a campy, retro way. Audrey’s the one they’d like to be. Her appeal is of a right now sort. The movies can date, but she somehow doesn’t. Young women speak of the ick factor when they observe all those elderly leading men, but they’d never hold that against Hepburn. This girl’s a role model that transcends her era, and for Funny Face’s occasional politically incorrect misdeeds, she will be forgiven. Read, if you don’t already, imdb comments on this and other classic films. These are fans and casual viewers who write from the heart as opposed to wearisome critics and analysts (not excluding yours truly) who long ago lost perspective on what really makes these audience pleasers tick. The older Funny Face gets, the more mixed feelings it’s likely to arouse, but for three things they’ll say it gets wrong, there’ll be one that redeems all of that, for this is a musical filled with moments still hypnotic and evocative of the fifties in ways few others are.

The fashion industry takes it on the chin in Funny Face. Satire of its disordered personalities replaces efficiency shown by magazine executives in 1944’s Cover Girl. Consider Otto Kruger as Rita Hayworth’s mentor in that earlier musical (both shown here). Competent and avuncular, you might find him chairing the board of directors at a steel mill or auto manufacturer. He’s assisted by models well adjusted and competent. Anita Colby was credited as technical advisor on Cover Girl. She and real life top mannequin Jinx Falkenburg are active participants in the fictional Vanity magazine’s search for a new face. Models in Funny Face don’t speak other than to suggest utter vacuity or outright idiocy. Dovima is said to have been the highest paid cover girl in Manhattan during the fifties. Her character (shown here with Astaire) looks like Vampira and does little credit to a presumably glamorous profession. So when did notions of freaks and eccentrics staffing Vogue come into vogue? Was the post-war "New Look" responsible for newly jaundiced views of fashion and its arbiters? Kay Thompson plays martinet and runs roughshod over robotic girl assistants neither modeling nor typing for her. Just what is their function? Cover Girl reflects a healthier environment for the creation of beauty. Funny Face suggests poverty of ideas and a last possible resort that brings Audrey Hepburn into its decaying fashion orbit. She’s right to run away and fast.

You must come from the stone age, says Audrey to Fred, and if appearance (in comparison to her) is any indication, indeed he must. These two together, let alone romantically linked, is incredulity itself. His talent was undiminished, but Astaire’s wardrobe (his selection?) looks fey as do fussy gestures not befitting romantic partners for a twenty-seven year old leading lady (Hepburn’s age). Had Kay Thompson’s role been more attractively conceived (and cast), maybe this character could have been paired with Astaire for a romantic fade. As it is, Thompson was herself nine years his junior. Fred’s game enough for a kiss when he and Hepburn first meet, though it’s startling still to see a figure more appropriately paternal suddenly moving in for the smooch. Astaire had three show-biz decades on Hepburn when they made this. He jumped at working with her, as did she with him. You Make Me Feel So Young might well have been a theme song for the dancing veteran by this time down to his last musicals. I’m doubting he argued when they told him she’d get first billing. Debates over wizened leading men are ongoing among Audrey Hepburn’s fans, so who instigated all these mismatches? She was at least complicit. It was as though this actress was on an endless quest for onscreen father figures. Where before they were clever and individual clothing accessories, Astaire’s white socks, ascots, and ribbon tied belts seem now like old man’s accoutrements. When Audrey in wedding gown dances with Fred in cardigan buttoned once in the middle, you wonder if she’ll soon be waltzing him into assisted living. It was admittedly hard letting go of Astaire as a romantic partner on ballroom floors. Too many fond memories and much reluctance to turning him loose. It’s not as though this man had successors. If Hepburn couldn't dance with Astaire, why make Funny Face at all? I’ve tried imagining alternate casting. Cyd Charisse as Maggie Prescott, with she and Fred in fadeout clinch? Rita Hayworth would have worked. Ginger Rogers sounds ideal, but where would that leave Hepburn? Would she dance with Anthony Perkins, John Kerr, John Derek? There are good reasons why she gravitated to older leading men. The foregoing are three of them. Commercial realities in 1957 dictated that Astaire dance with a younger woman. But for their cross-generational teaming, Funny Face with its $3.164 million negative cost would never have seen the light of day.

Empathicalism was a word invented for the purpose of sending up intellectual phonies and beat generation predators that get in the way of Audrey Hepburn’s modeling career in Funny Face. They sustain a worse drubbing than the fashion industry itself. Others have pointed out an anti-intellectual current running through this musical. Well, the fact it is a musical automatically places Funny Face at odds with any sort of sedentary or cerebral expression. Thinkers here are subdued and seldom on their feet, making them natural opponents to Fred Astaire’s philosophy of movement and physicality. The audience enjoys his ridiculing them because it is Fred who’s providing the entertainment while these leeches cadge drinks off impressionable Audrey. The issue for modern viewers comes when Astaire extends his commentary to include Hepburn’s character. He’s about as interested in your intellect as I am!, he shouts, when they argue over her apparent dalliance with French philosopher Flostre (who naturally turns out to be a rotter and would-be seducer). The fact that Audrey reads automatically makes her a figure of fun. Oh, one of those, Fred says. Astaire and Kay Thompson perform a wicked beatnik spoof to set things right, but did it? I wonder if 1957 audiences weren’t drifting toward an embrace of the longhair’s mindset, with increasingly educated post-war women becoming more resistant to Astaire’s seeming condescension toward them. It’s surely an aspect of Funny Face that gets the goat of femme viewers today. If not for all the dancing and fashion trappings, I wonder if this movie might have fallen off their popularity charts altogether, for much of its social politics is decidedly incorrect.

What if Audrey Hepburn had taken up modeling in the wake of doing so in Funny Face? What kind of revenue could she have generated? The top cover girl of that period was Suzy Parker. She appears in the Think Pink montage. Parker is said to have been the first model to receive one hundred dollars a day (but wait, some sources credit Anita Colby with having accomplished that in the forties). The aforementioned Dovima made her way up to seventy-five per day by the late fifties. It was possible to parlay posing into a hundred grand a year, as Parker eventually did. Of course, these were so many nickels and dimes to movie stars with Audrey Hepburn’s earning power, but what price might she have commanded had Hepburn divided her post-Funny Face working hours between soundstage and runway? You could say that (most) movie stars were really just glorified models to begin with, but look what happened when members of the latter sorority tried their hands at acting. Suzy Parker was Fox’s effort toward animating beautiful (but hitherto motionless) images. She co-starrred with Cary Grant in Kiss Them For Me (he was sufficiently infatuated as to do the screen tests with her) and Gary Cooper in Ten North Frederick. There was a showy part in The Best Of Everything, then mostly television. Today she’s a name primarily recalled by fashion buffs (Vanity Fair did an excellent recap of her life a few years ago). Parker is credited by some as having provided inspiration for Audrey Hepburn’s character in Funny Face. Models often provided offscreen cues for neophyte actresses. Anita Colby (known as The Face) taught style and deportment to David O. Selznick’s contract youngsters, including Jennifer Jones. She’s a poised and assured presence (as herself) in Cover Girl, though little acting followed. Jinx Falkenburg came closest to stardom of a sort, making "B" musicals and comedies for Columbia before (and following) her appearance in Cover Girl (as shown here).

Radio City Music Hall bookings were more about prestige than money. Out of eleven pictures that played there in 1957, six eventually went into the red. Four were musicals. Silk Stockings, The Pajama Game, and Les Girls followed Funny Face into Radio City that year. All but Warner’s Doris Day show lost dollars. Numbers we have on Funny Face indicate a similar fate. The $3.164 million it cost was not recovered in domestic rentals of $2.235. Expensive mainstream releases out of major studios had to open in big ways. Trade advertising craved long lines in front of the Music Hall. Again, it was all about perception. No one wrote or published figures on high allowances Paramount had to make for Radio City’s house expense, astronomical at the least and all the more so by 1957. Funny Face would have to gross a certain (high) amount before film rental kicked in, and worse yet, Paramount was obliged to pay for most of the advertising. Getting into the Music Hall meant clearing the entire New York territory, including all five boroughs. Runs were exclusive there, and for four or more precious weeks, Radio City was the only place NYC audiences could see Funny Face, its massive house nut meanwhile eating up Paramount’s returns. Studio musicals were beginning to look like elephants marching toward the ivory preserves. Faster profits were being realized off millions of kids dropping their allowance on saturation bookings of rock and roll features, most profitably those with Elvis Presley. Hal Wallis produced Loving You for Paramount release on a budget of $1.295 million, less than half the cost of Funny Face. Its domestic rentals of $3.3 million left little doubt as to directions in which musicals were headed. MGM’s Jailhouse Rock was marketed toward youngsters who could ride their bikes to neighborhood theatres. Opening week for this Elvis vehicle found it playing multiple engagements in most territories, including New York as shown here. Saturation made it possible for everyone to buy a ticket while the product was hot, and Jailhouse Rock, produced at a negative cost of $1.1 million, brought back $3.3 in domestic rentals and eventual profits of $1.6 million. Funny Face was caught between modest films like this and roadshow blockbusters that could take their time getting investments back. With the sixties coming on, stuck in the middle musicals were about to be squeezed out.

Greenbriar Weekend Marquee


Modern enthusiasts see (and prefer) film noir in starkest black-and-white. Stills reproduced in books and online are consistent with dark looks the films maintained. Even poster art with generally subdued colors upheld the integrity of noir as we define it. What’s been forgotten are all those fan magazines of the day wherein everything was viewed through singularly rose tinted glasses. Film noir was not yet a recognized genre and rulebooks had not yet gone to press. If love finds Dick Powell on the set of ultra-gritty Cornered, fan scribes and shutterbugs would be there to record it, no matter the disorienting effect such photos would have sixty years later. Readers in 1945 were a lot more interested in Dick and June’s romantic prospects than yet another RKO crime meller, even one as accomplished as Cornered. The issue was not whether Powell would unmask Nazi war criminals that killed his screen wife. What readers wanted was a wedding date for he and Allyson. Would Metro boss Louis Mayer intervene and separate the lovebirds? Apparently not for long, for shown here is the nuptial event seen by a lot more people via wire service than ever caught Cornered, which itself gathered a nice (for RKO) $413,000 in profits against negative costs of $728,000 (domestic rentals were 1.3 million with foreign $480,000). Dick Powell took his Murder, My Sweet image transformation a considerable step further in Cornered. This is one of the moodiest and most truculent performances a leading man ever gave. The arresting head scar colorfully highlighted here was great visual punctuation to his character’s surly outlook throughout a particularly nasty noir, and by the way, how many Code heroes got to fade out on having beaten the villain to death in a climactic confrontation?

So who remembers when there were no cartoons on television --- or, for that matter, no television at all? When animation was the exclusive province of theatres, I’d imagine it was something really special. Instead of a dozen or so Popeyes spread over a year, my generation got twice that over a week’s worth of afternoon programming. Were we overfed? At least through the fifties, exhibitors ran cartoon shows to fill holiday mornings, such as the one below for a School’s Out Matinee. This ad dates around 1957. Television was not yet so inundated with animation, but floodgates were opening. AAP had packaged and was selling pre-48 Warners and Popeyes in mass quantity. Prior to this, cartoons were delivered via small distributors and by stealth out of major companies. You could see Ub Iwerks subjects by courtesy of Commonwealth Pictures, Van Beuren shorts from Unity Films, and as early as 1950, the Official Films library of cartoons. Farmer Alfalfa had his own show. His primitive stuff made cave drawings look like IMAX. Kids really were better off waiting for their neighborhood house to book another morning special. At least those were in color. Good cartoons were tough to come by on early television. Wary exhibitors laid in wait for studios to unleash libraries for home viewing. One that did was Warner Brothers, disguising their output behind logos replaced by handlers who’d leased their backlog. How do you conceal something so distinctive as a Warners cartoon? Sunset Productions grafted new openings for Porky, Bosko, and Buddy shorts, then adorned end titles with A Guild Films Presentation. Theatre showmen cried foul over the subterfuge, obvious to anyone with minimal exposure to Warner output. The Sunset-Guild package was limited to black-and-white subjects; all were Looney Tunes of pre-1943 vintage. For 16mm collectors, these were the rarest and most sought after cartoons, as most disappeared from the airwaves once AAP dumped later (and more desirable) titles onto the market. After Warners developed their own prime-time Bugs Bunny Show on ABC (utilizing the post-48 subjects), Bosko and Buddy joined missing person ranks. Independent 35mm distributors utilized a device possibly inspired by the TV packagers. They’d clip tunnel openings from pilfered Warner cartoons and rent them to theatres, bypassing rentals otherwise payable to WB. My collecting mentor Moon Mullins gave me a number of these --- all in Technicolor and excellent shape, but for those missing tunnels. It was years before a Charlotte depot man set me straight as to the insidious reason these were clipped.

Knickers and overalls might distinguish this anxious crowd from modern youth awaiting another Spiderman installment, but I wonder if kids get half so much fun out of corporatized movie-going as children here adorned with "third eyes" passed among them in front of Omaha’s Muse Theatre as they await entry to see Chapter One of the appropriately named chapter thriller. Alas, these youngsters are mostly gone and I’m guessing the serial’s lost as well. Management pasted bonus eyes just above the bridge of noses sniffing out free admission they got for wearing said appendage whilst standing on line. You can barely see the adornment even looking closely at this yellowed photo of a stunt dating back eighty-seven years (August 1920), and, yes, I'm beginning to sound like one of Robert Youngson’s narrators, aren't I? Being summertime, one might sweat off gummed paper, warned then-showmen, so in a pinch, feel free to go out and draw the eyes on each child with black grease paint (!). They say the only kids in Omaha without three eyes that day were home sick in bed. We’ve forgotten what events serials were during that era, but this display, and the long line approaching, tells its own story. Chapter-plays lasting fifteen weeks (sometimes longer for silent ones!) were not easily forgotten, no matter the passage of years. My father was still able to recall, in the sixties, seeing The Perils Of Pauline first-run in 1914.

TCM ran this week, without fanfare, Columbia’s 1951 Valentino, a biopic of the silent screen’s great lover. Everyone from producer Edward Small down to its going-through-motions cast must have known this was a botch, and I’d imagine Columbia only made it with hopes of approaching Jolson Story business. Domestic rentals were $1.5 million, actually one of the company’s better earners for that year, which gives some idea of the lower grossing rungs Columbia clung to even in the early fifties. Cautious measures applied with Jolson were taken as well with Valentino’s story. No actual names other than his own are in evidence. I checked and both Rudy’s wives were still alive in 1951, so I assume neither would give clearance. They probably weren’t even approached. Luckless Columbia still got sued by silent actress Alice Terry, Valentino’s co-star in The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, who claimed that one of the characters was impliedly based on her. That would be Eleanor Parker as a standard issue (and wholly fictional) leading lady with whom Rudy spends an entire career hopelessly in love. No one was fact-checking Hollywood biographies in those days. If Technicolored bunk about the silent era made good melodrama, why not call it Valentino? The only things they get right are titles of films he made. Many are recreated in short bursts of action and/or love clinches. Most had been out of circulation long enough for people to have forgotten how they actually played. The truly remarkable thing about Valentino is Anthony Dexter. He’s an absolute dead ringer. The man looks more like Valentino than Valentino did. He’s reason enough to watch this. Columbia put out stories of Dexter having worked on a farm with no prior experience acting. Actually, he’d had plenty. This guy was too much the spitting image for his own good. After Valentino, producer Edward Small put Dexter into roles Rudy might have played had he lived long enough to skid into Poverty Row. The unkindest cut of all was Fire Maidens From Outer Space, a sci-fi so miserable even cultists blanch at the sight of it. Dexter ended up teaching high school. He died in 2001.