Warner Archive Pick --- Somewhere I'll Find You

Certain star images conferred foresight with regards World War Two that make you wish they’d been in charge around Washington rather than having such clairvoyant talents go to waste in Hollywood. These guys knew all along we couldn’t trust the Japanese. Assurances of peace out of Tokyo were the bunk. Clark Gable says as much in opening scenes of Somewhere I’ll Find You, the latter taking place during weeks preceding Pearl Harbor. His assurance of Nippon perfidy makes chumps of those who’d censor Gable’s news dispatches out of China, here depicted as just another backdrop for soldiering of fortune and incidental fortune telling re America’s naivete. When Gable says Wake Up, we best call off peace conferences and prepare immediately for combat. Somewhere I’ll Find You was one of those with a script near dry before bombs dropped on December 7, so rewriters got hasty putting Gable’s hero wise before that surprise attack. The pic began shooting January 15, 1942. Events made it timely and far more than a kissing marathon’s encore (Gable/Lana Turner) to Honky Tonk of the previous year. Gable’s image gained stature for parallels it drew with Rhett Butler and that character’s pre- (Civil) War awareness of battlefield realities. There was a sense of his knowing our enemy long before we woke up to recognition of same. What opportunity Gable (and we) missed for the star’s enlistment in the wake of wife Carole Lombard’s death in an air crash the same month (in fact, the very day after SIFY got started). Combat actioners with him through this war would have been a rewarding lot for credibility Gable accumulated over ten years of onscreen leadership. Maturity attained through that would have made him an ideal man at the head of a (fictional) fighting column. Roosevelt’s advice and a studio’s plea should have been honored. Stay home and do battle where civilian’s morale and potential recruits could best use it. To put an aging Gable (41 and having smoked/drank to the brim of it) in Army uniform and behind a machine gun was waste of a resource far more needed in theatres. Somewhere I’ll Find You shows promise unfulfilled of what a next three years might have offered toward better winning a war on Metro soundstages.

The pre and post Pearl Harbor elements of Somewhere I’ll Find You make for a kooky mix. Here’s a story that needed more revision than they evidently had time for. Its hot off the presses advantage mitigates lumpiness of a narrative that began as mere parlor setting for innumerable clinches with Gable and Lana Turner. They were The Team That Generates Steam and no war, not even a world-encompassing one, was going to get in the way of that. Was MGM aware of the serious conflict we’d gotten into, or did they figure their public wasn’t? Kissing scenes were permissible (only just) as sex stimulus for Code-shackled audiences. Close-up smooching timed on a stopwatch was socially accepted pornography for folks denied (or ashamed to go out in pursuit of) the real thing. Women in trade ads shown here weren’t fantasy. Millions lined up to see Lana crushed in Gable’s arms. No telling how many Honky Tonk babies were conceived in 1941, and more would go into pipelines thanks to Somewhere I’ll Find You. Sex figures like Gable and Turner generated manpower production for future wars and did so with probable greater efficiency than those working swing shifts at ball-bearing plants. They were, for good or ill, a then-patron’s most accessible models for lovemaking and courtship ritual. When Gable and his women collided, Metro cameras rolled up to facing profiles so close we risked getting sprayed (and said formatting rule was inflexible --- even John Ford was obliged to assume the position in Mogambo). Imagine such three-ways in theatres with the voyeur’s object(s) blown forty feet high. Such erotica could be but fully absorbed in a dark auditorium with overpowering images, that shared blackness concealing ragged breathing and beads of sweat forming on viewers drawn into shared embrace with idols they could nearly touch. And don’t ignore the yawning chasm between generations removed DVD’s and glistening nitrate 35mm prints these folks reveled in. Based on ways Gable and Turner go at it in Somewhere I’ll Find You, I wonder how patron couples delayed their own consummations till at least getting out to parked cars.

At a halfway point where story gears shift abruptly (right after Pearl Harbor?), Lana Turner and Gable decamp to a soundstage labeled "Indo-China," mostly Tarzan foliage with dry ice fog. Phony sets patently enough so always suit me better than actual locations, sort of like models and miniatures standing in for bridges and trains. Movies are most magical when they’re confined to facilities close at hand where artisans improvise with what they’ve got. Metro often went with layers of process screening to make you think 3-D’s come early to features. Gable, clad in suit and tie (but loosened slightly) searches an easily penetrable jungle only briefly before greeting Lana Turner’s picturesque arrival in what looks like a Chinese touring gondola. It’s just outrageously silly enough to be completely endearing, the sort of experience you might have if folks at Disney World let you romp through backstage Frontierland. People nowadays (condescendingly) imagine that 1942 onlookers were childish enough to take all this for the truth of foreign climes and conditions. I don’t think for a minute they did. Somewhere I’ll Find You makes winning this war look so easy that you’d wonder why we weren’t all back home before the picture could be released. There’s a climactic battle sequence almost balletic in its absurdity. Japanese invaders appear like insects at a distance toward which flit bombs are tossed with stunning accuracy. They blow up and/or are buried alive by MGM juveniles hopeful of a wartime contract and paying off for Pearl (starting out Van Johnson is among them, as is Keenan Wynn). Did boys turning eighteen or just out of high school watch this and make for recruiting stations? I wonder how much enlistment could be traced to 1942’s first brace of war-themed shows girding our loins for a fight. No one took polls measuring the true influence of movies during those years. How could they? --- but I’d venture this one had affects we’d not dream of for watching it so casually after these many years.

Pictures like Somewhere I’ll Find You had directors. It just didn’t matter so much who they were. MGM would run a man in and out for days here and there, then replace him with scant regard to signature styles other companies might value more. Wesley Ruggles was credited on this occasion, but who’s to know if Clarence Brown or Jack Conway didn’t come in some mornings to pinch-hit? Metro’s house organ The Lion’s Roar (so elaborate a publication that I hesitate calling it that) profiled Ruggles for a SIFY cover story. He was by this account efficient and unassuming. They said he kept a pad by his bed so as to write down ideas that came during the night, but would a rigid Metro mill have let him implement them the following day? Ruggles once directed Cimarron and that won Best Picture in earlier talkie days. He was what kinder modern scribes call a journeyman. Those with less tact would leave it at hack. He was another that died before people cared much about vintage movies, let alone factory marshmallows like Somewhere I’ll Find You. The real drama connected with SIFY, and the one for which it’s remembered, if at all, is the industry (and Gable’s) loss of Carole Lombard going in. There’s been lots written about how he finished the picture in mourning. In fact, it was almost all shot after her death (Somewhere I’ll Find You wouldn’t wrap until April 22). By then, Gable had made up his mind to enlist (Send me where the going’s roughest), so maybe by chance but likelier intent, his concluding scene in SIFY plays like a valedictory not unlike Joel McCrea’s close to 1940’s Foreign Correspondent. Gable’s monologue, dictated to furiously typing Lana Turner, is in effect telling us he’ll be gone for the next few years, but to keep lamps burning and maintain the fight. It’s one of the actor’s all-time blockbusting scenes. No wonder they missed him so much afterward. Somewhere I’ll Find You stayed in circulation longer than most off MGM’s fast assembly line. Our Liberty Theatre brought it back after a (first) year of Gable deprivation. Audience hunger was such as to allow even Fox to cash its own ration ticket by reissuing Call Of The Wild to $730,000 in fresh domestic rentals (for eventual profits of $502,000). Somewhere I’ll Find You, released September 1942, scored $2.8 million in domestic rentals (with $1.1 foreign) and ended with profits of $1.7 million. It would be February 1946 before Clark Gable would return with Adventure.

At Last In Command of The Command

Here’s another reason I’m high on the Warner Archive Collection. They’re putting out early Scope features that haven’t been available as such since many were first-run, including several (so far) that I’ve avoided on television in hopes they’d someday be viewable in proper ratio. Now they are, and from what I’ve seen and heard, these WB wide DVD’s are delivering the goods. Wichita, The Adventures Of Quentin Durward, and today’s subject The Command, were among my initial Archives order, and all looked fine. Friends tell me The Big Circus is terrific as well, and the good word is out about sixties titles The Money Trap, My Blood Runs Cold, and A Distant Trumpet, among others. I’m assuming much of this Scope material was more recently remastered and that’s why they’re uniformly better. Either way, it’s great having them available at last. These are strong arguments in favor of forward projection and a wide screen at home. Merits of the features themselves is never the point with early Cinemascope. I watch them for a residual rush of something that was innovative and exciting during the fifties when showmanship had perhaps its last great roar. The Zen state has its cinematic equivalent when watching vintage scope. Mine was achieved with The Command by way of contemplating this premiere night photo taken at NYC’s Paramount Theatre in January 1954, along with trade ads also shown here. From there, it was just a matter of transporting myself via Warner’s just arrived DVD. It didn’t actually relocate me to that historic night, but sure came closer than conventional viewing could have over these past fifty-five years. The fact I was born a month after The Command's premiere helped. A Warner-phonic soundtrack provided further enhancement to my hyper-screening, as directional stereo effects at one point had me pausing action in the belief that someone was coming in off the porch outside. Moments like these are where you connect with sensations 1954 crowds felt, and provide at last a vivid explanation of why audiences surged upon theatres running a western we’d considered ordinary for not having been among The Command's initial throngs.

The Command was Warner’s first Cinemascope release. Actually, that’s an error, and not the first I’d make in any detailed exploration of widescreen history. There are experts who lay in wait on various forums as those of us less informed posit reckless guessing as to intended ratios for features circa 1953-54, years convulsed by amended screen shapes rendering an earlier transition to sound pallid by comparison. I’ll go a safer route by not asserting any fact as absolute, merely possibilities for further discussion, and likelier, correction by more knowledgeable readers. What I said about The Command being WB’s first in Cinemascope was wrong to the extent of their lens being something other than ones used by Fox to shoot their trademarked wide programs. Jack Warner preferred a system of his own and deplored licensing fees payable to Zanuck for use of the quickly accepted brand name Cinemascope was. Steps toward that avoidance included purchase of competing anamorphic lens from the Zeiss Optical Company in Germany. Seems the Europeans were leagues ahead of us in developing wide technology, as it was a French inventor that developed Fox’s Cinemascope. Tardy delivery of the Zeiss system resulted in The Command (initially titled Rear Guard) being shot using a process called Vistarama. WB yielded cash to Fox for lens they’d not use on The Command, but what else to do when your public’s drunk on Cinemascope and disinclined to embrace untried copycat systems? That swooping trademark was more vital to a showman than names on his marquee, particularly as these included lusterless Guy Madison, lately of second-tier westerns, and Joan Weldon, a WB contractee of uncertain prospects. You could put The Command on widened screens in January 1954 and be assured of patrons lured by a novelty while it was still that. A mere four months had passed since The Robe’s premiere, and many smaller houses were waiting yet for installation of Cinemascope (our Liberty and Allen Theatres would see March before getting theirs, and a neighboring town was into August 1954 when River Of No Return finally debuted the system there).

It’s no good pretending that The Command is an outstanding western, but it was the first outdoor actioner shot for a wide canvas (excepting 1930’s The Big Trail, of course). They could have staged most of The Command flat for all the advantage that’s taken of scope. There was a climactic indian chase and battle that excited patrons for being a first glimpse of what running inserts could look like on an expanded screen. Locations and sets otherwise had an undernourished look typical of barely-A westerns WB was wont to do. We made it very, very cheaply, recalled director David Butler, the picture reflecting that and rushed efforts to get a finished show into theatres while screen novelties were still hot (the negative cost was $1.331 million). I use a plural there because Warners actually filmed The Command in 3-D as well as Vistarama, but released it minus Naturalvision effects (there was also a standard ratio version available). Using scope and 3-D meant every scene had to be staged differently, according to Butler. We would wind up with two pictures. The astonisher here lies in the fact that WB still has The Command’s 3-D elements in usable condition. Will we ever see them? Maybe when technology allows for viable 3-D on home video, which would enable any number of Warner properties to come to us in depth. Guy Madison was never a big screen name of consequence, but there was major advantage for attaching him to a western likely to attract kids who’d watched their small screen favorite on The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok since its TV debut in 1951 (Madison’s role modeling was emphasized in safety tie-ups such as one shown here). Music scoring enthusiasts might profitably regard The Command as a Dimitri Tiomkin concert with pictures, for his is the dominant sound lending epic stature upon a venture otherwise devoid of same. Tiomkin was one of my main reasons for wanting to see the picture, and he doesn’t disappoint. Warners saw profits of $1.528 million from domestic rentals of $2.158 and foreign rentals of $2.054, a more than respectable payday, but far below what Fox and Metro recovered from their introductions to Cinemascope. Pictures like The Command please today for expectations we don’t bring to them, with discovery and surprise often the happy result. I’m looking forward to the Warner Archive’s further scope mining, with Green Fire, The Cobweb, I Died A Thousand Times, The Warriors, The Burning Hills, The Last Hunt, The Opposite Sex, Tea and Sympathy, and Tribute To A Bad Man being ones high on my want list.

The David Butler quotes came from an outstanding book length interview conducted by Irene Kahn Atkins for the DGA. It's a Scarecrow edition long out of print, but some used copies are available from Amazon.

Digging The Warner Archive (And I Do!)

Transition has long been a way of life in home viewing. For we who take video seriously, tumult might be a better word. I’m a slave to the next big thing and have been since 8mm entered my life forty-five years ago. Remember when laser discs were the living end? They ended alright, as most might be better employed for serving finger sandwiches or sausage balls (there’s an idea --- I might try it over Easter). To collect on DVD, DVR, etc. is to go dizzy whilst emptying your purse. Resourceful Warners found a new means for getting at mine, and again I’m their willing supplicant. WB’s Archive Collection is up, operative (sometimes barely, as the site can be sluggish), and visiting havoc upon collector VISAS nationwide (but not beyond as yet, their discs being unavailable overseas). As this thing’s gone on barely ten days, most reaction has been anecdotal and limited to forums and discussion groups. I’m sounding off on five that reached my door yesterday, having watched three so far. There's a $20 tag hanging off 150 titles presently available, but a coupon code saved me 25% and made my splurge easier to abide. By way of confession, I did use Ann’s name to order an additional five at the discount. That worked, but further attempts in the names of Mortimer Snerd, Rollo Treadway, and the Baron Meinster have been rebuffed (the coupon expired last night in any case). I'm confident that newly christened Warners Archive will work through its growing pains. Good (no, great!) is the fact they're giving us shows unreleased (and less likely to be) otherwise. What’s to become of conventional DVD and box packaging with retailers either closing or clearing shelves of this stuff? It won’t be long I’ll wager before all the companies are selling oldies Warner’s way. You order and they print. Yes, Warners is indeed using DVD-R for transfers, but mine played just fine yesterday, so maybe that technology has come to acceptable term of late. As to further confession, I’d emphasize here my near-total ignorance of disc authoring and wizardry applied to bit rates, progressive blah-blah, and single vs. double layering. Don’t bother trying to teach me either, because it’s hopeless (I wasn’t welcome at school science fairs even as a spectator).

Yes there are kinks, but I’m betting Warners will iron them out. Word is that’s already in progress. Quality thus far seems to be running hot and cold, according to customers who’ve posted about the Net. These DVD’s are pigs in pokes, but I’ve been lucky, for mine are tasty spare ribs worth the fifteen dollars I sprung for each. Rival companies must be observing closely. Sony is rumored to be preparing a similar service. I’d heard their entire library was transferred to HD format, so quality would likely be excellent. Certainly the Columbias they’ve leased for TCM broadcast look good. Burning-on-demand appears to be a wave of every distributor's future, but how many short seasons will pass before even that disappears in the wake of yet another mode of delivery? Why spend cash for what’s clearly a planned obsolescence? Warners will continue transferring to HD for television broadcasting if nothing else, and those will eventually be available for storage on our DVR’s (I’ve already grabbed a number of HD Warner features off Cinemax and HD Net Movies). Well, maybe WB knows, just as I know, that life is hardly worth living without The D.I. on my shelf and at the playing ready. What sense does it make for me to have bought Strange Interlude when I can be fairly certain of seeing it in high-definition within another five or so years --- but will I live that long? Collecting is all about that need for gratification right now. Remember when the Stooges were plunging downward in a plane and Joe Besser cried, I can’t die now --- I haven’t seen "The Eddy Duchin Story"! There’s as neat a summation of Warner’s customer base, for if we’ll traverse lakes of broken glass to get titles we want, surely we’ll empty bank accounts to custom order ones we’ve waited for longest, and with thousands of features (not to mention shorts) in the WB library, the sky itself is no limit. Here’s an idea for marketers, and speaking as a compulsive consumer badly in need of forcible intervention, I guarantee it will work. Offer subscriptions with discounts for minimum monthly buys. Since you’re planning to add (at least) twenty new titles every four weeks, give us a break in exchange for income we’d otherwise squander roofing our homes or keeping babies in milk. Hey, it’s worth that for cash off and The Adventures Of Quentin Durward!

My first screening out of the box was The D.I. Well, of course. That’s been a favorite since discovering it syndicated around 1972. I’d just turned eighteen, and could observe miseries among recruits on Parris Island without fear of being drafted to some such place myself, the Viet Nam threat having subsided enough by then to remove threats of conscription. Jack Webb’s mode of verbal attack briefly became my own. Well, pardon me while I jump up and click my heels was among sarcasm applied on freshman halls just prior to being tossed clothed into showers in retaliation for same. It’s amazing how many classmates were familiar with location and burial of a sand flea as depicted in this timeless 1957 classic. The D.I. delivers just for letting us hear Jack Webb bark out dialogue. A Dead Marine Is Never Sorry --- A Dead Marine Is Just Dead! Do they actually teach that in the Corps, or was it merely Jack’s philosophy? He’s fabulous in this, and might rightfully have sued Stanley Kubrick had he lived long enough to see how that director pillaged The D.I. for Full Metal Jacket’s opening hour. Webb had Marine cooperation for filming (note honorary Corps membership he’s receiving here), though most of The D.I. got done on sound stages in that stripped-down way he’d perfected with Dragnet. There’s a dress shop set so austere as to have come out of a quick assembly kit, yet somehow all this befits Warner’s no-frills DVD packaging (there was a wonderful trailer Webb appeared in and narrated, unfortunately not included). Quality is OK on their widescreen presentation (the pic was originally 1.85 --- seeing it that way was a first for me). Contrasts are grayish at times, which took me back to a few 16mm television prints in collecting past, but overall I was satisfied. When would anyone get round to remastering, let alone restoring, such a minor titles as The D.I.? It’s been off TCM along with many other post-48 Warners for having been long-term leased to satellite stations no longer interested in running it. For all that latter-day invisibility, The D.I. was a profit-getter in 1957 with negative costs of just $628,000 and domestic rentals topping $2.4 million (foreign was a much lower $200,000 --- this wasn’t their armed forces after all). Profits were $1.3 million, the last real hit Webb had as a producer/director (1959’s --30 — ended with minimal profit of just $13,750). There’s much more about The D.I. and how it came to be in Michael Hayde’s excellent My Name’s Friday, which covers Jack Webb’s life/career and is essential reading.

Next was Strange Interlude (excellent DVD quality here). This was long reputed to have bombed when released in 1932. Actually it made profits of $90,000, less than usual for stars Norma Shearer and Clark Gable (the Grauman’s Chinese opening was accompanied by Disney’s short subject premiere of his first Technicolor cartoon, Flowers and Trees). Strange Interlude enjoyed prestige via Eugene O’Neill having written the source play, which used soliloquies to let us know what characters were thinking as opposed to what they were saying. It may have worked onstage, but with actors here registering expressions to reflect those thoughts, the whole thing smacks of broad silent era gesturing made to compensate for lack of spoken dialogue. To have employed such technique in a modern play was boldly experimental. Transporting it to movies was ill advised. We examine screen actors too closely for them to get away with mugging in sync to words read off-camera. Groucho Marx might have put MGM on notice (had they chosen to listen) spoofing Strange Interlude two years prior in 1930’s Animal Crackers, wherein he confided nonsense thoughts to the movie’s audience and credited O’Neill’s play for giving him impetus to do so. The casting’s a little whacked in Strange Interlude, with Clark Gable misapplied to a passive part unbecoming a he-man image in emergence, leaving Norma Shearer in firm control of the narrative and assorted weakling males in her character’s orbit. The film does take precode initiative by dealing with a subject far more taboo in today’s sensitized filmmaking. The notion of inherited insanity is one seldom addressed anymore. Maybe that’s why Strange Interlude fascinates me so. Families keeping one of their own locked upstairs and fearing possibilities of recurrence should sane members procreate is a topic few movies go near (King’s Row and various Jane Eyres come to mind among later tries). With social/political Production Codes so strictly (if unofficially) enforced today, it’s unlikely we’ll see another like Strange Interlude.

The Adventures Of Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward has a title unwieldy enough to have likely sunk the enterprise in 1955 (mostly it was shortened to simply Quentin Durward), or maybe patrons were tired of Robert Taylor in period costume. Either way, there was $908,000 lost against dreadful domestic rentals of just $693,000 (foreign had come to a partial rescue with $2.1 million). After profits taken by Ivanhoe ($3.3 million) and Knights Of The Round Table ($2.4), this was a shocking indication of changed (and suddenly so) audience tastes. Was tide so quickly going out on swashbuckling adaptation of Sir Walter and kindred scribes? His name was prominent on Durward ads, probably as much for his (and Metro’s) previous Ivanhoe hit. All three Taylor pageants (and I don’t include Quo Vadis among these) were directed by Richard Thorpe, enough in itself to consign them to critical non-personage, as Thorpe remains MGM’s staff director least likely to be rehabilitated (I even mistakenly typed his name in lower case just now --- or was it mistakenly?). It seemed enough in the fifties to shoot these in Cinemascope and use real European castles for backdrops. MGM was selling travel exotica at least as much as costumes and literary pedigree. Handsome presentation was first and surely foremost. A Richard Thorpe could at least deliver that and maybe the rest would sort itself out. I shouldn’t enjoy such stolid things, yet I do. Robert Taylor impresses me for punching his MGM clock and playing costume heroes straight (though not without humor). He’ll not rob us of what little romance was still possible by the mid-fifties in pictures already looked upon as old-fashioned, and won’t play down to the material the way other late term swordsmen often did. Quentin Durward does acknowledge a cynicism gnawing away at noble gesturing and Taylor’s positioned as out-of-touch with changing Middle Ages. The actor and his studio were themselves of a vanishing mindset by 1955 when Quentin Durward tanked. There’s wistfulness and onscreen regret for passing ways soon to disappear forever (and an especially nice bonus of Taylor briefly playing opposite Ernest Thesiger). Warner’s Archive Collection DVD of The Adventures Of Quentin Durward is outstanding, with first-rate picture and directional stereo sound.

All told, I’m happy with my Warner Archive purchases and will doubtlessly buy more. I have a feeling this concept will work and that Warners will be responsive to consumer’s suggestions and concerns. Selling movies on demand is the likely future of (vintage) DVD, and it looks to be a bright one. Thanks Warners.