Movies Til Dawn

I mentioned the other day, while discussing Susan Hayward, Hollywood's brief foray into a sub-genre that I think of as "musical melodramas." These films are all post-war items--the era brought with it a frankness about human frailty, compulsions and violence that wasn't earlier considered appropriate for mass entertainment--and used period settings and songs to tell semi-factual stories, usually revolving around show-biz and gangsters. The musical numbers are strictly used in source settings--i.e. characters perform the songs in nightclubs rather than bursting into song at the drop of a hat because they just can't contain themselves. "I'll Cry Tomorrow", the story of singer Lillian Roth's downfall, certainly qualifies as one of these films. So, too, does the disappointing but still worth seeing "Young Man With A Horn", starring Kirk Douglas as a self-destructive trumpet player (based on a novel which was hazily inspired by the life of j...

Susan Hayward's portrayal of actress/singer/alcoholic Lillian Roth in the 1955 film "I'll Cry Tomorrow" was a harrowing portrait of a woman pushed into show business by a demanding mother (wonderfully played by Jo Van Fleet) who self-implodes at the moment when she should be enjoying the peak of her fame. The movie was based on Roth's memoir (same title) which was certainly one of the first--if not THE first--tell all show-biz/drug abuse books, a genre which might not have been invented if not for Roth's courageous telling of her tale. (Do we applaud her for this? Or blame her?) When Roth appeared on Ralph Edwards "This Is Your Life" in 1954 and talked openly of her struggle with the bottle and "cure" via Alcoholics Anonymous, the show received the largest amount of viewer mail in its history--the subject of addiction and treatment not yet having entered the national vocabulary. I've actually read Roth's book and its well written an...

Susan Hayward's portrayal of actress/singer/alcoholic Lillian Roth in the 1955 film "I'll Cry Tomorrow" was a harrowing portrait of a woman pushed into show business by a demanding mother (wonderfully played by Jo Van Fleet). The movie was based on Roth's memoir (same title) which was certainly one of the first--if not THE first--tell all show-biz and drug abuse books, a genre which might not have been invented if not for Roth's courageous telling of her tale. (Do we applaud her for this? Or blame her?) When Roth appeared on Ralph Edwards "This Is Your Life" in 1954 and talked openly of her struggle with the bottle and "cure" via Alcoholics Anonymous, the show received the largest amount of viewer mail in its history--the subject of addiction and treatment not yet having entered the national vocabulary. I've actually read Roth's book and its well written and terribly sad--I came across a dog-eared paperback in a house we were renti...

Way back at the end of the last already forgotten calendar year, I was all set to write about Susan Hayward when a fresh look at her filmography reminded me of the movie "Smash-Up; The Story Of A Woman"...which made me think of the lives of Bing Crosby and wife Dixie Lee (on which the story of "Smash-Up" was based--see 12/20 post)...which sent me into Bing and fellow crooners Russ Columbo and Rudy Vallee and...such is the way this weblog functions, as a sort of formalizing of my own attention deficit issues. So now, back to what was on my mind at the end of the year. Was five time Oscar nominated (and once winning) actress Susan Hayward a great actress? Or was she a basic studio starlet who evolved into a dark and expressive force that came to represent the dark side of the post war feminine cliche? If the definition of great screen acting is (to quote A.O Scott's New York Times appreciation of the sadly dead Heath Ledger) to indicate emotional states without ...

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day Weekend! What better way to celebrate this national holiday than with a series of posts featuring a great white chick tap-dancer? Below you will find one of the true delights of the MGM sausage factory. It's a "summation" number from "Broadway Melody of 1938", which attempts to recount the history of old Broadway and tie it to the new "modern" Broadway that all the hep-cats in the audience presumably knew about. The method deployed is simple and elegant: just use good old, fat old Sophie Tucker in the first half of the number to deliver a nostalgic tribute to the vanished world that she was part of--she mentions Marilyn Miller for Goddsakes and even in 1938 Marilyn Miller, freshly dead for two years, was as yesterday as they come. (I've been meaning to return to my mini-series "Hotsy-Totsy's Of the Bootleg Era" and Marilyn would be a good subject--not the least because of the lurid rumors surroundin...

Apropos of our quasi-in-depth treatment of "Singing In The Rain" (see posts from early January '08), I thought we'd look back at the movie that started it all--"Broadway Melody of 1929", the MGM all singing/dancing early talkie that won the first Best Picture Oscar. Then I noticed that depsite that films accessibility, nobody has bothered posting any clips from it on youtube. One can't blame them. Even as stiff early talkies go, "BMof29" is a hard sit--the leading man, Charles King, is charm and charisma free and none of the numbers really take off, unlike some of the previously posted "Hollywood Revue of 1929" material. And the story--good heavens! Did it ever make any sense? Hard now to imagine what exactly hard core pro's of the time were so impressed with that they accorded it the best picture statuette--King Vidor's "Hallelujah. Lubitsch's "Love Parade" and Mamoulian's "Applause", from the...

I wish I could say that my story of meeting Rudy Vallee ended with him giving me his megaphone. It didn't. But still it ended in a pleasant enough way to warrant this final Rudy posting. I did as Tommy, his friend/helper, suggested (see 1/11 post) and sent Rudy a thank you gift for letting me tour his house; a postcard, circa early 1930's, of the house itself, newly completed and advertised as the home of actress Ann Harding (she and her husband built the house and sold it to Vallee in the forties. I believe I found the postcard at Larry Edmunds on Hollywood Blvd.) Almost instantly I got a call from Tommy telling me that the boss liked the card very much. Just in case no further invitation was forthcoming I'd taken the precaution of also buying a few stills of Ann Harding showing off the house just after it had been built. I told Tommy about these as well. "Whyn't you bring 'em on by this Sunday?" he suggested, a bit conspiritorially. So my second invite t...

In a stunning display of no planning whatsoever leading to what might seem to be an inevitable destination, all the talk here in the past two weeks of crooners (Crosby and Vallee) has deposited us on the doorstep of the most mysterious of all cronner's birthday centennial. Russ Columbo would have turned one-hundred years old today, January 14, 2008 if he'd A) cut out the red meat, booze and cigarettes, B) had the genes required to live double the then-predicted life span and C) not screwed around with that gun that his friend Lansing Brown had in his house which accidently went off and shot him to death at the unbelivably tender age of twenty-six. (By the way, I discovered it was Columbo's centennial while listening last night to one of the best radio shows broadcast in these United States-- Rich Conaty's "Big Broadcast" , which emanates from Fordham University on WFUV but which can, of course, be found here on the internet. Conaty plays strictly period re...

So there I am, standing in my parents house with a letter addressed to me from Rudy Vallee. I recall my mother coming in the room and saying--as if nothing before in her life had ever been quite so strange--"Raymond...did you get a letter from Rudy Vallee?" I opened it, preparing for another cold blast of rejection in my face, perhaps this time adding a threat to unleash his lawyers on me if I ever bothered him again. Instead the handwritten note read in its entirety: "Dear Mr. De Felitta, Give me a call. Rudy." Then he printed his, as previously mentioned, already listed telephone number. I called and a woman answered this time, quite cheerily proclaiming: "Rudy Vallee's house!" (I believe this was his wife, Eleanor). I asked to speak to him and in short order there he was. I explained that I was the fellow who wrote to him about his house. Brusquely, but a bit more cordially this time, he said: "If you want to see the house come by Sunday, late ...

Does anyone remember the huge fuss made in newspapers around the world in the early 1970's when the scandal broke that a faded star of yesteryear-- singer Rudy Vallee --desired to change the name of the street he lived on (Pyramid Place in the Hollywood Hills) to Rue De Vallee? A Congressman or somesuch who was in hot water at the time sought to shift the focus away from his current misdeeds by vigorously claiming that Vallees' ego-driven desire to commemorate himself via a street being named after him would cost taxpayers millions of dollars. When the storm broke, poor Rudy Vallee got more press than he'd had in years--all of it negatively directed toward him. Alas Vallee's "karma", if you will, led him into this nest of snakes--he'd been difficult and testy and quite seriously rude to people for many years prior. Furthermore, Vallee had ambivalent feelings about his youthful fame and aging ignominy--I suspect more than a few people were confused by the ...

Obviously anyone reading this knows that "Singin' In The Rain"--the movie--is about the talking picture revolution that swept Hollywood in 1929. Furthermore I would bet that most of you reading are aware that the project came about as a result of producer Arthur Freed's desire to re-invigorate his old song catalogue--Freed was a popular tunesmith of the 1920's and early thirties along with his partner Nacio Herb Brown before becoming a producer at Metro. Betty Comden and Adolph Green's assignment was to simply cook up a way in which to jam ten or so Freed/Brown antiquities from twenty-five years earlier into a workable musical storyline. As they sardonically comment in an essay they wrote for the MGM Script Library introduction to the screenplay of "Singin' In The Rain" (and which is reprinted in the liner notes of the soundtrack CD) "...several possible stories suggested themselves. For instance, "The Wedding Of The Painted Doll" ...

The second most easily overlooked number in "Singin' In The Rain" is, without a doubt, the "Beautiful Girl" fashion show. Unlike "Moses Supposes", though, this number probably could actually be removed without any real damage to the film. Still, though, it has a charm of it's own--the fashion show is silly and the commentary is intentionally unwitty in a very clever Comden-Green take on how those badly written commentaries that thought they were being clever actually sounded. And it features the mysterious Jimmy Thompson as the Rudy Vallee-esque lead singer and fashion show commentator. Who the hell was/is Jimmy Thompson? His IMDB credits suggest some sort of relationship with Gene Kelly--his first credit is in the Kelly/Garland vehicle "Summer Stock" and, aside from "Singing In The Rain" his next biggest credit is in the deplorable Kelly/Minnelli version of "Brigadoon." He has a handful of other MGM credits which sug...

Allow me to plug a very nice CD of the soundtrack of the movie "Singin' In The Rain." It's nothing new--it was actually produced ten years ago--but I found it while on a buying spree at the Virgin Megastore in West Hollywood (everything is 30 percent off seeing how they "lost their lease" which is, I imagine, code for: "why rent space when we can sell all this crap on line?"). It contains not only all the musical numbers from the film but all (or most of) the background cues (with titles like: "Dignity" and "Have Lunch With Me"). Furthermore it has a few fascinating extras--an alternate main title theme (instead of using "You Are My Lucky Star" it concentrates on "Singing In The Rain" proper), a rehearsal version of "Beautiful Girl" being sung by Gene Kelly and Jimmie Thompson accompanied by Lennie (Mr. Lena Horne) Hayton on the piano...and finally, a complete version of Kelly singing "All I Do...

Happy New Year. As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted by the end of year holiday weekend: "King Of Jazz" , a Universal musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman's orchestra from 1930, has little to do with jazz but contains some remarkable imagery and a handful of gem-like musical performances (see the Crosby post 12/26 with the Rhythm Boys) and is, one way or another, essential viewing for anyone interested in what the state of the art of music and cinema was during the 1920's and early 30's. It might be viewed, in fact, as something of a companion piece to Paul Fejos' remarkable "Broadway" (see my 9/12 and 9/13 posts) shot earlier in 1929 (or perhaps late '28) and using some of the same over the top camera work, sets and effects. Some sources cite Fejos as an uncredited co-director on "King Of Jazz"--this could very well be the case as the credited director, the stage impresario John Murray Andersen, had never before made ...