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...