Going When Movies Mattered Most

Where did it all begin for those consumed by the moviegoing experience? I mean consumption not limited to mere watching, but of anticipating weeks or months ahead, then reading magazine reviews and pondering ads from larger towns opening the film ahead of your own. My immersion by 1968 was near complete, one-sheet designs being stamped upon consciousness from first lobby sightings and never to be forgotten after. What recess of the brain makes such things vital to us but inconsequential for casual watchers? The Thomas Crown Affair was a big deal for me at fourteen. It was Suggested For Mature Audiences and I was particularly ripe for those. Everything this show did was hip and cool and modern. It forecast possibilities of adult living that suited me fine. Might any boy evolve into Steve McQueen? I saw The Thomas Crown Affair twice and wondered. Here was a virtual how-to manual for man-woman relations, with Steve holding all the trumps. He calls a girl early in the film, saying only 9:00 when she answers, that being the time he’ll pick her up … all it takes for him to get the date, and of course she’s gorgeous in that perpetual state of readiness women maintained when cast opposite Steve McQueen. If this was life as experienced by Mature Audiences, by all means cut me off a slice. To be McQueen was to be laconic. Girls came first to those who cared less, but would that work in real life? I’d be years getting a resounding no to that, but for the meantime, Thomas Crown raised hopes if not possibilities. Among these: Cigars in bed as post-coital ritual. Really? Maybe it got by in a few 1968 cribs … there’d likely be none such in 2009. Steve disdains protective helmets except for polo, which reminded me of one theory as to what killed him later, the asbestos in his racing headgear for Le Mans. There’s also belief he was doomed from early on thanks to toxic exposure during youth, which makes The Thomas Crown Affair all the queasier for seeing an expiration date stamped upon McQueen’s otherwise vital presence.

Now Thomas Crown’s another sixties antique that youngsters either laugh at or are bored by. I didn’t dream of such happening when it was new … evidence again of how passing years date us and shows we liked. I’m defensive of Crown and certain others though, for attacking such a relic reflects upon tastes I thought sophisticated, if not rarified, at the time. Steve McQueen’s appreciation for Mustangs and motorcycles holds up better than his movies, it seems. They're still using him to sell both, plus watches, sport pants, etc. He’s sacred object to men of a certain age who wish they could jump barbed wire on two-wheels. You Tube demonstrates modern uses Steve’s image serves. I’ve read that his is the most lucrative. Sheryl Crow sings about McQueen, but her video had no clips. Clearance problems maybe? There’s a snippet from a modern TV program where a veteran fireman slaps a rookie for not knowing who Steve McQueen is/was. You wouldn’t think anyone would be unfamiliar with him, but assuming such just shows how removed I am from today's mainstream. Everyone gets forgotten eventually, and McQueen’s been gone for nearly thirty years. Well, The Thomas Crown Affair is itself just past forty now, and viewing it again revealed at the least how bulky life was in days before life went digital. Clunky might be the better word. There are noisy computers more primitive looking than ones Spencer Tracy consulted in 1957’s Desk Set, while Faye Dunaway brandishes a movie camera (hand-held by design) that looks like something you could shoot 70mm with today. All this made me recall what effort our long ago miracles of technology required and patience it took to get reel-to-reel tape, television antennas, phonographs, and cameras (especially sticky Polaroids) to work. I might comment on how things have improved but for fear my computer will freeze up or break down in retaliation. The Thomas Crown Affair calls up much unexpected nostalgia beyond the obvious clothes and cars. Men still wore hats in 1968. They wouldn’t much longer, more’s the pity (I still do). Faye uses mascara that looks to have been dipped in chocolate syrup. The chess-playing scene was something a lot of people talked about then. To have missed The Thomas Crown Affair first-run is to never know how such a moment could define this movie for its public. The shock for me was less suggestiveness than robust open-mouthed kissing the sequence leads up to. Again I wondered if McQueen’s ardent slurping might be a technique worth emulating. Possibly no, as I’ve (thankfully) not witnessed screen osculation quite like his since.

Certainly by the late sixties, it was enough to oppose "the system" and what villainy that implied. Being no longer necessary to identify corrupt elements within that system, the thing itself was regarded as sufficiently corrupt and beyond redemption. Formerly anti-social behavior such as bank robbing became righteous means of sticking it to the Establishment. Bonnie and Clyde had made crime chic a year before, even if those two didn’t get away with it as Thomas Crown would. McQueen makes larceny a glamorous enterprise. He and this movie would have been the recently discarded Production Code’s worst nightmare. We could laugh off an opening heist easier but for a guy who’s shot in the leg and writhes painfully on the floor (that portion plays especially quaint beside hold-ups elaborately staged in the later Heat and recent The Dark Knight). Thomas Crown is smug and modern reviewers find him unsympathetic (I suspect 1968’ers dug his sensibilities more). Moral issues arising out of what he does are not even addressed. It’s understood that Faye Dunaway’s a chump for not helping him steal more money and running away with him. I wish I could remember better what I thought about all this back then (would a younger kid conclude stealing was OK?), but chances are it was that chess game distracting me most. This and such attractive leads do make crime seem to pay. McQueen was trying something new for an image and played elegant for the first time. Toward charting said horizons, he breaks into startling guffaws (often) that I must assume someone (Norman Jewison?) talked him into (ill-advisedly). Dunaway anticipates Network and on-set tantrums we’d hear about with readings unusually strident for an actress just getting a start in major leads, a plus she always had over conventional actresses. I don’t wonder that Dunaway and McQueen never got close. The picture mopes along as they loll about beaches and steam rooms, a complaint again filed by youngsters not around in 1968 who couldn’t know that at that time, these were enough. Multiple split screens borrowed from Expos and World’s Fairgrounds were new to movies then, as was Michel LeGrand music that probably had as much to do with the film’s success as its stars. The Thomas Crown Affair earned domestic rentals of $6.2 million and $5.3 foreign. Interestingly, United Artists’ bigger hit of that year would be an ultra-square Establishment comedy, Yours, Mine, and Ours, which did a whopping $11.6 million in domestic rentals, but lost ground with a far lesser $1.9 foreign.

Awards Weekend at Greenbriar

I don’t know where The Dardos Awards began, but Greenbriar Picture Shows has recently won three of them from fellow bloggers and is most pleased and proud. According to what I’m told, The Dardos Award is given for recognition of cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing. The object is to promote fraternization between bloggers (and) gratitude for work that adds value to the Web. I’m all for open lines among bloggers. A lot of them have been kind and helpful to me by way of links and favorable mentions. None of us get read lest someone spreads the word, and I’m grateful to those who’ve plugged Greenbriar at their own fine sites, many of which I check daily and much enjoy. Winning a Dardos means spreading the award to favorites of your own, per these rules: 1) Accept the award by posting it on your blog along with the name of the person that has granted the award and a link to his/her blog.

Greenbriar’s awards came from three varied locales who’ve served the blogging community with perceptive writings and arresting imagery. All are experts in their respective fields of interest and I admire (and envy) their knowledge and erudition:

1): Frankensteinia … is just what the name implies. A history and ongoing celebration of all things Frankenstein, and goodness knows how Pierre Fournier comes up with such rarities! He recently found a comic book Son Of Frankenstein (published 1939) that I never knew existed and followed that with a thoughtful career overview of main man for many of us, Colin Clive. I love his site’s design and presentation as well.

2): Operator 99’s blog is dedicated to The Screen Stars Of The Twenties and Thirties and Their Alluring Images. In fact, his banner reads simply Allure, and is surely that for me and all fans of a great era in movie history. He writes about people I like (especially precode ones!) and has an unerring eye for gorgeous photos culled from magazine covers and collectibles of the day. I’ve saved lots of Allure from this wonderful site --- in hopes perhaps that some of it may rub off on me?

3): One Way Street is Alan Rode’s Sporadic Takes on Film Noir and Other Aspects of Pop Culture, but there’s nothing sporadic about Alan’s talent for ferreting out jewels concealed along darkened byways of Noir. His favorites are mine as well, and what a gift he has for appreciating them! Alan’s writings are second to none, as witness a recent biography of actor Charles McGraw that is a must for all students of Noir. Oh, and he recently interviewed Ernest Borginine … and paid tribute to Ricardo Montalban … and … well, just go there!!

OK, back to The Dardos Rules:

2) Pass the award to another five blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgement, remembering to contact each of them to let them know they have been selected for this award. I’m going to bend policy here by naming sites a bit outside the strict blog category, but ones I find invaluable and clearly products of intensive effort and enthusiasm on the part of those who administer them. I’ll try contacting who I can, even as identities among some winners remain a mystery while others are products of group effort. Anyway, here goes my five:

1): The Classic Horror Film Board: This is the Miracle Mile of online discussion groups. Sometimes I'll go down that rabbit hole and not come out for hours. It’s like stumbling across a thousand issues of Castle Of Frankenstein you never knew existed. All the big name monster experts are here. I learn lots from them every time I visit, often emerging bleary-eyed from spirited debates as to who actually wore the Gill-man suit for underwater as opposed to dry land sequences in Universal’s three Creature (From The Black Lagoon) features, or say, why was there cardboard on that lamp shade during a bedroom scene in Dracula? Some might think we're plain nuts to care. Those who understand are likely reading the CHFB at this moment. Bravo to them and this paradise for monster mavens!

2): Nitrateville: Bless you, Mike Gebert, for giving silent and early sound enthusiasts such a warm place to hang their coats. I feel positively Lilliputian beside the assemblage of masterminds who contribute here. Where did they learn all this stuff? Yesterday, I got immersed in speculation over something Norma Talmadge might have said to a fan outside a restaurant back in 1934. You see, this is just the sort of thing my girlfriend’s been complaining about! Someone might better do a Nitrateville intervention on me, but in the meantime, and after the fashion of Will Hays at the Don Juan premiere, I offer my felicitations and sincerest appreciation to the silent era’s most generous and accomplished latter-day friend.

3): Silent Comedians. Com: Here is comedy’s glorious counterpart to Nitrateville. I go here for any and all questions about the greats of voiceless clowning. These people always have the answers. For those who’d claim knowledge of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, etc., it’s a mightily humbling address, but they don’t call (most of) this crowd The Silent Comedy Mafia for nothing. Just mention one of Buster’s leading ladies you thought everyone had forgotten and an hour later one of these folks will have produced her birth certificate (if not dental records!). There’s no richer soil to till than that of a slapstick era a lot of us grew up collecting. Here is its clubhouse we always dreamed of joining.

4): Those Who Toil At The IMDB: Well, maybe toil is a misnomer. These people, and I don’t know who they are, clearly love to write and are often brilliant at it. Some post multiple comments throughout a day, with inspired observation seeming to roll off tips of their quills … dispensing insight while a schlub like me barely manages once a week appearances. Their identities are perhaps as guarded as that of masked heroes at Republic, but I salute them and you might too upon introduction to such prodigious output: ecarle, telegonous, majikstl, swanstep, and artihcus022 are just a few voices amidst the IMDB universe. There are undoubtedly lots of others, maybe some (lots?) as good as these, but where does one get the time to keep up (hundreds contribute at IMDB)? Suffice to say they write for the joy of expression and I’m always happy to revisit them.

5): DVD Savant: F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that not a half dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads. Well, here’s one DVD reviewer who can and does. Glenn Erickson’s twice weekly coverage of disc releases (mostly vintage ones) is always original, sometimes provocative, and never less than the best of any and all DVD critiquing on the Web. I go to Savant's archive to get his slant on whatever pic I’ve just watched, and never come away shy of insight I’d not considered. He’s prolific and been at it a long time, thus a mile-high backlog with just about all the essential titles. You never get the sense of his having to look things up. He just knows. Not many have that depth of knowledge nor ability to mine background and context so adroitly. Savant should write a book (wait a minute, he has --- and it’s terrific).

Numerology and bouquet tosses behind me, I’d now submit images shown here which have turned up since earlier postings on various features, some dating back a year or two, and others more recently. Do click on these titles in case you missed the past stories, and consider what’s here as supplement … footnote … whatever.

1): Psycho: This is the New York first-run ad I hoped I’d come across eventually. Notice Hitchcock’s personalized policy statement for these two Manhattan venues. This was a make-or-break engagement for the great gamble of AH's career up to that time. You really get a sense of his showman’s genius here, and one can imagine newspaper readers’ excited response upon checking this out in June 1960.

2): The Maltese Falcon: This was a splashy first-run at the famed (and still there) Chicago Theatre. Did (undoubted) throngs crowd in to see Bogart, or live wire on-stage Martha Raye? Note the Cappy Barra Boys also billed. They were a harmonica act that earlier did a specialty in 1938’s Mad About Music with Deanna Durbin. One of them actually called me years ago in response to an ad I ran in the old Film Collector’s World paper (he bought my 16mm film and assured me that Deanna was a sweetheart).

3): Dr. No: These are the ads for New York’s Premiere Showcase opening and subsequent wide saturation that I referred to in recent James Bond posts. This was how the city first came to know 007 on movie screens (and yes, ads for Irma La Douce were lots bigger).

4): The Marx Brothers: Here’s an article you must click and enhance. It’s news coverage about material for Go West being tested on patrons at the Chicago Theatre in May 1940. The Marxes did a seventy-minute act for those coming to see Warners’ It All Came True. I’d heard Go West was road-tested prior to production. Here is confirmation.

The remaining stills are various Academy Award recipients you’ll recognize. Laurel and Hardy are holding an Honorable Mention certificate from the Academy for The Music Box, which I don’t quite get, as I’d always understood it won for Best Short Subject that year (1932). This photo of them is one I’ve not seen before and came from a British publication of the time. Kirk Douglas receiving his award is actually a scene deleted from The Bad and The Beautiful prior to release in 1952.

Watched At Random for January 2009

I really like Charlie Chan, but confess to getting mixed-up as to who’s who and which of them might be the killer and why. The mystery always engages me less than ancillary matters like old dark houses and (good or bad) comic relief. There are surely reasons for filling crossword puzzles other than completing the thing itself. I’ll usually try following a Chan plot for about ten minutes and then give up. What made these work so well for so many years? Fox made profits on every one they did! I think it was those distractions from the mystery that pleased best. Chans are family comedies in a detective’s disguise. Low-key Charlie in frustrated by-play with exuberant sons assure lightness of touch missing from whodunits too absorbed in … well, who done it. The one I got out was Charlie Chan At Treasure Island, which fans consider the best of those with Sidney Toler. I’m not as deep into the Chan life as others, but certain tricks of the mystery trade are recognizable for years of (occasionally) watching these things. One device they played me here was that of a character receiving superficial injuries supposedly inflicted by the killer being sought. Said character will always turn out to be the killer! A lot of you more expert will say Duh, but I was quite pleased with myself for guessing correctly. Charlie Chan At Treasure Island looks like an expensive picture. Dress extras mill about at leisure. Sets glisten and are sumptuous. I was amazed to learn it had a negative cost of only $199,000. Yes, that’s a "B" budget (only Jane Withers, The Jones Family, and Mr. Moto worked as cheap), but talk about putting all your money on the screen! Another thing about Charlie Chan At Treasure Island was how creepy parts of it were, more so than most horror pictures being done at the time and as handsomely mounted as any of them. There was $280,000 in domestic rentals and $138,000 foreign for $72,000 in final profits. Fox could probably estimate Chan revenue to a near penny during the heyday. Costs and returns didn’t vary a lot for as long as they produced the series. Bigger markets used them in support of "A" features, but many small towns played Chans as singles. Returns diminished somewhat for Sidney Toler taking over from Warner Oland, but how do you follow an act as good as the latter’s? I’m glad these are all available now (well, other than some Monograms and the lost ones), and relieved that Fox found good elements on most. Someone told me that overseas sales on the Chans were what assured release for the entire (existing) Fox group on DVD.

Why remake Libeled Lady, nearly scene-for-scene, a mere ten years after a well received (and doubtlessly remembered so) original? Was Metro’s poverty of ideas by 1946 so acute as their seeming inability to launch stars of a quality equal to pre-war manufacture? Here are the substitutions: Van Johnson for William Powell. Esther Williams in Myrna Loy’s part. Lucille Ball as Jean Harlow, with braying Keenan Wynn an update of Spencer Tracy. The bringing along of personalities was by now so streamlined as to permit slides into home for talent (or lack of it) that a decade before would have stalled in auditions. Metro covered such deficits by way of free spending that a wartime attendance boom made possible. Libeled Lady had cost $603,000. Easy To Wed’s negative ran to $1.6 million. The mentality afoot required Something For Everyone in such entertainments; thus outsized musical numbers intrude upon an already sluggish narrative. I found myself in anxious anticipation of Ethel Smith’s upcoming organ recital (being a fan and proud possessor of her "Best Of …" CD). She’s a welcome respite in a final third by which I’d lost all interest in labored attempts at comedy by players with too little aptitude for it. Easy To Wed represents old Hollywood as derided by those who’d tar all studio product with a formula brush. It’s a beached whale of a musical/comedy/romance that was a dream factory’s occasional nightmare. Hard enough core students of the era will yet find aspects beguiling. I’d have wondered all my life why Keenan Wynn was promoted to such (near) leads but for Scott Eyman’s explanation in his Lion Of Hollywood bio of Louis Mayer. That very practical reason as put forth by Eyman is a compelling one for watching Easy To Wed, as Van Johnson figured in an offscreen drama that provided for me a subtext irresistible (let’s just say that Van needed a beard and Wynn’s wife supplied it). Had 1946 audiences but known of such extraordinary measures taken to protect fragile star images! Lucille Ball previews the sort of bull in a china shop persona she’d adopt for her vid series a few years later. Stations with the pre-48 MGM package likely advertised Easy To Wed as vehicle for her during the run of I Love Lucy, even if Wed's part is a shrill and unattractive one (Harlow was as well the least appealing of the four-cornered leads in Libeled Lady). Van Johnson is cruelly assigned dialogue beautifully spoken by William Powell a decade previous. You’d have to assume Van’s bobby-sox followers had either short memories or tin ears for comic timing. Metro signed contractees while stronger names were off to war and set youngsters upon on-the-job training that made or broke most within short periods. Such cynical enterprise got lightweight talent in over heads and out the gates before skills could develop. Johnson was good (and persistent) enough to survive in eventual character work. His recent obituaries failed to emphasize what an enormous draw Van was at the peak of Easy To Wed and fluff-shows like it. Four million in domestic rentals and $1.6 more from foreign brought this one to an eventual $1.7 million in profits. That’s a lot of seats filled for something very nearly forgotten today.

I was almost surprised to find that Phone Call From A Stranger made money ($254,000 profit in fact). For a straight drama with no gunplay or violent element, and in black-and-white, you’d think viewers could get as much for free at home. Television dealt heavily in playlets themed on forgiveness and personal accountability. Such could be made economically on single sets and arouse no viewer objection. Producer/writer Nunnally Johnson was a mainstay at Fox whose scruples clashed with in vogue Joseph Mankiewicz, to whose (commercial) success this film aspired, but Johnson wouldn’t let characters off the hook with glib dialogue and pat resolutions. His narrative follows through on responsibility characters bear and mistakes they must answer for, with Phone Call From A Stranger mirroring a value system largely gone out of movies and television since. Film Noir is as much about these things, but more palatable to modern viewers thanks to crime and suspense supplying fun this frankly drab picture lacks (and kudos to Fox for not trying to sell Phone Call as Noir). A problem with three part stories is that one of them will likely be more engaging than the other two, while representing only a third of the total. That had been the case with A Letter To Three Wives, the previous Fox hit referenced in Phone Call’s trailer. You get a sense of marketing desperation from previews like this. Lines out of context suggest sexual liberties not taken in the feature, and Shelly Winter’s role as a strip-tease artist (emphasis on that in narration) is hammered beyond its importance to the plot. Imagine a sales division handed a finished movie with little that’s provocative and struggling for crumbs suggesting that it is. Hollywood by 1952 was at a point where every feature had to make its own argument for a patron’s dollar. People just weren’t going to theatres as a matter of course anymore. Small black-and-white dramas like Phone Call From A Stranger (negative cost $801,000) would be ushered out with Cinemascope’s arrival and availability of better anthology programs on television. Fox remade the story for its own dramatic series in 1956, using a combination of actors recreating their roles and footage borrowed from the feature.

I watched Birdman Of Alcatraz on NBC Saturday Night At The Movies in 1968 and wondered why they hadn’t let such a nice man go free after those books he'd written and a prison riot he quelled. Come to find that real-life Robert Stroud was pricklier (read psychopathic, according to prison records) and not near the benign figure (even in old age) as played by Burt Lancaster. When you’re fourteen (as I was for that telecast), rights and wrongs are simpler and notions of fair play easier arrived at. To me it seemed Stroud got a raw deal and a crawl at the end informing me of his death five years before (1963) while still in custody made it tough getting to sleep that night. Most of us recall first exposure to adult movies (not just ones with nudity or "R" ratings, though I certainly haven’t forgotten those either!). I’m thinking more of ones that made me listen to dialogue and ponder interaction among characters as opposed to waiting for the next saucer landing or colossal man to come my way. 1968 was the year I finally sat still for things like The Caine Mutiny, Tunes of Glory, and Birdman Of Alcatraz, pathways to filmic adulthood and each putting me wise to nuance they explored. The three are still favorites and not just for being rites of passage. Birdman takes its time, being that’s what it’s all about --- there’s a feeling of incarceration you get for sharing Stroud’s eternity behind bars. Some say the picture dawdles. John Frankenheimer gets close on a bird egg that takes several minutes to hatch and there’s no reactions or cutaway, a sort of directoral audacity we’d see more of through the sixties. Prison life as experienced by Stroud/Lancaster is more detention than hellish reality of systems (still) in place and doubtlessly worse in that convict’s time. Audiences can bear only so much infliction upon movie stars locked up, thus Burt’s spared beatings, drug use (which figured heavily into Stroud’s own experience), and sexual abuses endemic to real-life stir. Such restraint would be applied as well on Clint Eastwood’s behalf in the later (1979) Escape From Alcatraz, itself clearly modeled on much of Birdman Of Alcatraz. Those who knew Stroud said Birdman was purest fantasy, but much of his life is presented as it happened, even if this drama stops short of indicting the system he exposed in a book suppressed during the prisoner’s lifetime.