King of Jazz (1930)

Make way for Universal and little Carl’s 1930 musical revue, King of Jazz. The title refers to the jovial bandleader Paul Whiteman, though the film offers nothing in the way of the biography you might expect. Instead, it’s essentially just a filmed vaudeville show — though arguably (with an gigantic two million dollar budget) the best one you’ve ever seen. The show actually opens with a cartoon — by Walter Lantz of Woody Woodpecker fame no less, and the first such animation to be filmed in Technicolor. King of Jazz is historically significant for that reason alone, but it also features a surprisingly good sequence of numbers featuring the stars of the day, including a youthful Bing Crosby and the “Rhythm Boys.” The young crooner struts his stuff in four or five separate numbers, with the bouncy Happy Feet the best of the bunch. Personally, my favorite number is a clichéd dance where Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls spring to life and put on an acrobatic ballet, featuring a female dancer who is almost more contortionist than anything else. Nonetheless, there’s something for everyone here — even today’s young people: an elastic tap dancer who does the earliest moonwalk I’ve ever seen, and a row of chorus girls who put on a step show that might merit a double take from the students at Howard.

Whiteman, who for decades was a star of the first order, doesn’t overexert himself. He pops in and out, most often for the sake of comic relief, though he gets the most out of the movie’s second biggest number: an homage to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, resplendent in the film’s finest production values (and that’s saying something). King of Jazz is a visual delight, with a dog and pony show of cutting edge art direction and set design. It’s interesting that such a film would come from Carl Laemmle and Universal rather than MGM, but the “major minor” was flush from their success with Best Picture Winner All Quiet on the Western Front and Laemmle never seemed to tire of attempting make-or-break forays into A level production. There are colossal Berkeley-esque set pieces and props, along with numerous chorus lines, lavish costumes, and offbeat camera angles — you’ll even find ample use of stop-motion animation. Designer Herman Rosse won the third annual Academy Award for Art Direction for his astonishing work on the film.

The meat of the thing is really split between the Gershwin number and the finale, which is another homage of sorts, this time to all of the immigrant musical styles that have come together to for the “American Musical Melting Pot” that everyone knows as “Jazz.” Unfortunately, the contribution of black Americans is sadly left out of the stew for the sake of safer fare such as Irish, Spanish, and Russian influences. This omission is King of Jazz’s biggest disappointment. In a film that happily avoids the racial stereotyping so often found in similar movies from the time — no minstrel numbers or blackface — it’s unfortunate that the film’s only African influence is a lone rhythmic dance number that open the Gershwin sequence. Nonetheless, what’s left over is entertaining, funny, occasionally risqué, and in glorious 1930 Technicolor.

King of Jazz (1930)

Directed by John Murray Anderson

Starring Paul Whiteman, Bing Crosby, and other performers

Released by Universal Pictures

Running time: 98 minutes

The Molly Maguires (1970)

If there’s a life-blood that courses through the veins of this country, it’s black. It always has been.

I was born in the center of West Virginia, to a railroad family. After college I hitched my car to a coal miner’s daughter from Wheeling, a decaying, once glorious city where the National Road crosses the Ohio River in the far northern part of the state. Now we find ourselves in Pennsylvania, in what’s called the Coal Region. I teach at one of the myriad small private liberal arts colleges that proliferate in Pennsylvania like no other state save Massachusetts. A few miles from here there’s a modern day ghost town — a curiosity called Centralia — claimed by eminent domain, condemned, and finally abandoned by its residents because of a uncontrollable mine fire that has been burning continually under its streets for fifty years.

The people here are fascinating. They have a culture all their own, a way about them that’s foreign to me even though I come from only a few hours south. Manhattan is three hours by car, but might as well be a million miles away. People here for the most part haven’t made the trip, and really don’t care to. Less easy going than folks in West Virginia, they are more gruff, not so quick to trust. The southern tendency towards public manners doesn’t extend this far north, as if the area’s hard winters somehow keep courtesy at bay. Don’t get me started on the Amish. People around here have an uneasy relationship, or rather an uncomfortable dependency, on the local colleges (every town’s got one), which since the waning of the coal industry have become the driving force behind the local economy. (Natural Gas has recently arrived like a Biblical whirlwind, but that’s another story.) Yet like West Virginians, Pennsylvanians have been defined in some way by coal. The history of the people around here and the black rock is long, very well documented, and bitter. It’s an immigrant history, an American one. It’s a story of the captains of industry, and the backs upon which this country was built. It’s a story of abuses, of resistance, of labor, of unions, and finally of progress.

It has largely been forgotten. Or ignored.

Yet it’s such an alluring story! Dappled as it is with secret societies and violent, sensational crimes. It’s often pure bedtime stuff, and it makes wonderful film fodder, as historians can’t seem to form any consensus as to the truth, or in some cases, even the existence of many of the historical players that populate this modern mythology. That brings us to the Molly Maguires, the subject of a 1970 film starring Sean Connery and Richard Harris. If you don’t know who the Molly Maguires are (I’ve got no perspective there, they are ingrained in the culture here) I encourage you to check out the Wikipedia article — surprisingly, it’s one of the most exhaustive (and fairest) I’ve read. In a nutshell, the Maguires were a secret society of Irish coal miners who violently resisted the working conditions in the Pennsylvania coal fields in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Events in Mollie history culminated in the 1870s, when a Pinkerton man infiltrated the group and brought about the arrests, convictions, and executions of numerous men accused of being Mollies. The film, The Molly Maguires, presents a dramatized version of these events.

Sean Connery plays the ringleader of the Mollies, while Richard Harris is the detective. In many ways Martin Ritt’s film follows typical Hollywood formula — sticking to the thirties gangster film tradition: infiltration – acceptance – betrayal – outrage – revenge. Yet the movie shines in its attention to detail. Too often we take for granted the toil that went into the things we see around us. Here’s a film that provides a fair depiction of what life in a mine was like for the men who descended into that unique hell each day of their lives, until the black dust ruined them. It shows us the dirt, the sweat, the blisters, and the constantly looming ceiling of rock, always a moment from crashing down. We see everything from the cruel ritual of payday to drinking company lager and shopping at the company store, but the film manages to never preach at us. Richard Harris plays a police officer that clearly empathizes with the men he suspects of murder, and time and again the script refuses to let us know with whom his loyalty truly lies. Harris’s struggle is the dramatic thrust of the film, yet he’s not engaged enough with his part to make us truly care which way he’ll go in the end. Even Connery seems subdued, as if his efforts to create a “hard man” stifled his ability to show us what’s happening beneath the surface. Director Martin Ritt refuses to take sides, and in his effort to avoid preaching at the audience, he leaves us with a film that feels more like a detached action picture than an emotional human drama.

After watching a movie with such a “can’t miss” pedigree, it isn’t surprising to see how it only scored an Oscar nomination in the set decoration category. As I watched I kept wishing for the passion of Paul Muni in 1935’s similarly themed Black Fury, everyone here just seems to be going through the motions. Such a powerful, yet unknown chapter in American history deserves better treatment than this. 

Golden Girl (1951) and Les Girls (1957)

Mitzi Gaynor is a recent re-discovery for me, having never been a fan of South Pacific, which I saw once eons ago and promptly moved on from. I just watched a much younger Mitzi in 1951’s Golden Girl, and found something in her first featured performance quite endearing. The forgotten film casts Mitzi as Gold Rush honey Lotta Crabtree, making her name as a performer in the mining camps throughout California during the Civil War period. There’s not much to speak for Golden Girl beyond Gaynor — the songs aren’t memorable and the romance with a dashing southern spy / officer (TV Western star Dale Robertson) who robs Union payrolls feels dated and a little uncomfortable. The climax finds Gaynor bleating a tearful rendition of Dixie in a high-falootin’ San Francisco auditorium just as news of the surrender at Appomattox has made its way west. Golden Girl has never been released on DVD (or VHS?), and the print showing on Turner Classic Movies is so poor as to not bode well for its future. On a side note, the poster for Golden Girl is simply one of the most awful I’ve ever seen.

And then there’s Les Girls. If it were not for Mitzi, whose part is too small for my tastes, I would have liked it a great deal less. If you are a fan of MGM musicals however, Les Girls is available everywhere and is a film that you simply have to see, even if I say that in a somewhat weary, obligatory tone of voice (being a completist has its downside). The production values are as sumptuous and as artistic as anything else Metro did during the period — particularly in Mitzi’s big number towards the end of the film. (The film was an Oscar winner for its costumes.) The narrative gets a little tedious though: the story is centers around a London courtroom libel suit that finds two of Gene Kelly’s former troupers — Les Girls — at each others throats over a tell-all book one has just written. The same set of events are related three times, each time through the eyes of a different character, and before long we see way in which all the strings are going to tie neatly together.

In addition to Gaynor and Gene Kelly, the film casts lanky Brit Kay Kendall as the author of the tell-all, and sexy Finn Taina Elg as the libeled lady. Elg was certainly a stunner, but she never really caught on with American audiences, while Kendall had all the talent in the world yet never had a fighting chance to use it — she would succumb to leukemia two short years later, in 1959. While each of the girls brings something worthwhile to the film, they never quite gel on screen together in the way they do with their male costars, and the movie suffers a little for it.

The biggest drawback for me is that this is yet another late-cycle musical that fails to properly integrate the musical numbers into the story. As so often became the case as the fifties grew tired, the musical interludes show up like television commercial breaks — here in the form of the Les Girls nightclub acts, each one a little more artsy-fartsy and self indulgent than the last. (And don’t get me wrong either, I think An American in Paris is great stuff!) This is not a bad film by any means, but it is rather soul-less and clearly shows that the musical was running on fumes in 1957, and desperately needed the shot in the arm that West Side Story was stirring up on Broadway at the time, and would in a few years give the motion picture musical.

At almost 80, Mitzi is still out there somewhere, though her motion picture career was too damn short: eighteen credits, and no big screen work after 1963. She did a number of TV specials in the seventies, but they are nowhere to be found. It’s too bad, Gaynor had a look, style, and screen presence that doesn’t translate to photography — you’ve gotta see her in films.

Golden Girl (1951)

Directed by Lloyd Bacon

Starring Mitzi Gaynor, Dale Robertson, and Una Merkel

Released by Twentieth Century Fox

Running time: 108 minutes.

Availability: Has aired on TCM

Les Girls (1957)

Directed by George Cukor

Starring Mitzi Gaynor, Gene Kelly, Kay Kendall, and Taina Elg

Released by MGM

Running time: 114 minutes.

Availability: Widely on DVD, airs on TCM

Arabian Nights (1942)

Arabian Nights is a first-rate Saturday afternoon matinee released in 1942 by Universal. It’s one of the many recent classic DVD releases that Netflix has not chosen to add to their library. I’ve had it in my queue since the DVD debuted in 2007, and I finally gave up and requested a copy via interlibrary loan. The exclusion by Netflix is particularly disappointing considering that this is a relevant film that earned an impressive four 1942 Academy Award nominations. I’ll be the first to admit that Oscar nods don’t guarantee quality and rentals, but

Arabian Nights is a safe bet. It has top production values, including fantastic costumes and some of the most vivid Technicolor photography you’ll ever see — accentuated by the pristine DVD transfer. This is all especially surprising considering the film was made at Universal; and falls outside of the constantly struggling studio’s big four proven cornerstones: horror, Deanna Durbin, Sherlock Holmes, and Abbott and Costello. The story of how this came about is an interesting one.

Maverick producer Walter Wanger had just been released from a long-term contract with United Artists before coming to Universal in 1941. Wanger was a proven commodity in Hollywood, and his deal with UA had been a rich one that offered the filmmaker a great deal of latitude in the production of prestige products. Under the deal Wanger developed Algiers with Charles Boyer and the John Ford / John Wayne classic (6 Oscar nominations) The Long Voyage Home. The relationship with UA went sour after a few box office disappointments, including (surprisingly) Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, which led Wanger to shop his in-development projects around Hollywood — Universal took the bait. Wanger signed on to produce films for Universal on a picture-by-picture basis, the first of which was Arabian Nights. The film would be Universal's first three-color Technicolor production, and the studio was willing to risk the colossal sum (for them) of $900,000 on the budget. Although Wanger himself dismissed the film as merely an exercise in “tits and sand,” the movie paid big dividends ($4,000,000 gross) for all involved and cemented the producer-studio relationship for the next few years and six more pictures.*

The business model at Universal, more than any other studio, relied on turning successful projects into drums that could be beaten again and again, until the public grew tired of the tune. Yet during the war audiences were hungry for the most lavish and exotic escapist fare possible, and the stars of Arabian Nights caught the public interest at exactly the right moment. Jon Hall, Maria Montez, and Jungle Book star Sabu would appear together regularly in a succession of lower-and-lower budgeted features that nevertheless raked in the wartime dollars for the studio. Sabu, the unlikely teen superstar, would receive top billing in most of the features, with Hall second and Montez third. Hall was the good-looking star of numerous B projects at Universal, he enjoyed modest success in Hollywood but never achieved the big time. Much the same can be said of Montez, though in her case it’s surprising. She was truly a stunning woman — bearing a vague resemblance to Gloria Grahame, only with a better figure — it’s difficult to take your eyes off her.

On a morbid note, each of the film’s three stars died tragically: Hall, wrecked with cancer, shot himself at 64, while Sabu died of a heart attack at age 39, and Montez drowned (due to a heart attack) in her Paris bathtub at only 34.

Arabian Nights is a winner. It’s easy to see why wartime audiences responded so well — the film couldn't get much lighter. We expect these things to be special-effects bonanzas, but there’s not much too see here beyond a parade of girls and marvelous costumes. All the genies have been replaced with light comedy, and supporting characters merely named Sinbad (Shemp Howard!) and Aladdin will have to placate those looking for faithful literary adaption.

* Thanks to Thomas Schatz and his wonderfully instructive book, The Genius of the System for the assist on the facts and figures.

Arabian Nights (1942)

Directed by John Rawlins

Starring Sabu, Jon Hall, Maria Montez

Released by Universal Studios

Running time: 93 minutes

Availability: DVD, but no Netflix.

Pal Joey (1957)

Damn you, Kim Novak, why can't I make up my mind about you? If ever there was a woman — an astonishingly beautiful woman at that — who photographed better than she filmed it was Kim Novak. There are photographs of Kim that stagger the mind, that grab you and force you to admit that this was one of the world's great faces. Those eyes framed with the too-thick painted on brows, lips always parted, and the platinum hair swept back from her face — If Monroe's approachable sexuality begged the photographer to step back and take her all in, Novak's did just the opposite, asking us to look closer, to zoom in, to try to unravel the mystery. It was a quality almost entirely lost in motion pictures — only Hitchcock truly understood how to use her.

Her first name was (I mean, is … Kim is still with us) Marilyn, but that couldn't be used for obvious reasons, so Columbia boss Harry Cohn landed on Kim. The studio brought her along slowly with the idea that eventually she'd replace Rita Hayworth as Columbia's resident "Queen of the Lot." Pal Joey, which is one of those movies that has backstories related to everything from the source material to each of the stars was meant to be the moment where Rita more or less passes the torch to the younger star. And while that seems to take place, the movie rests firmly on the narrow shoulders of Frank Sinatra.

I don't like Kim here. Pal Joey was her second film with Frank Sinatra after their success three years earlier in The Man with the Golden Arm. The role is simply too straight, and calls for an actress with more a more deft comedic touch than Novak had at that time, or ever. It's easy to criticize Hayworth as an actress, but, had she been younger she would have hit a home run in Novak's role. Kim is simply too much woman for the diminutive Sinatra, too sultry for her good-girl character, and she looks uncomfortable in almost every scene. Her very next film would be her most famous, and it's easy to understand what doesn't work about her and Frank together in Pal Joey by looking at what does work between her and James Stewart in Vertigo. The Hitchcockian restraint, the mystery, the elegance, and even the leading man suit her better.

Sinatra lovers rejoice, he's at the top of his game. (I know, you've seen this many times already.) And I don't mean as an actor, or as somebody hitting his marks and speaking the lines — it always seems to me that Sinatra mailed it in in that regard. I'm thinking of the musical numbers, especially the ones in which he appears on the nightclub stage. The guy really comes to life under the hot lights. He works the audience and looks like a man who knows what he's doing and loves it. Of all Sinatra's pictures I think this one gives the best impression of how he must have appeared on stage in one of his Vegas shows — albeit in a much smaller way. Watch Pal Joey and think swagger, without the bullshit rat packers hanging on his pant legs.

There's a melancholy feeling that one gets watching Rita Hayworth in this film. Although out of respect Sinatra conceded top billing to her, she has the smallest and least affable part of the three leads. She's the older woman — a gold digger who scored to boot — who plays sugar daddy to Sinatra's dream of owning his own club and consequently keeps him away from Novak, the girl he really belongs with. Rita loses out in the end, but she does it with class. There's one great moment early on when we are reminded of her signature number in Gilda, but it's fleeting. Instead we are left with the impression that this is an actress getting put out to pasture, and there's something in the pursing of her lips that lets us know she doesn't quite like it. She's as beautiful and talented as ever, but Hollywood was even more fickle in those days than it is now and the parts just weren't made with her in mind anymore. Like Kim, Rita's next film was a heavyweight, though admittedly Separate Tables is an ensemble film, and Rita would never again appear in a production of this magnitude.

Pal Joey doesn't add up to the sum of its parts, but it's an enjoyable musical and something of a minor essential.

Pal Joey (1957)

Grade B

Directed by George Sidney

Starring Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, and Kim Novak

Released by Columbia Pictures

Running time: 111 minutes

Availabilty: Widely on DVD.

THE OSCAR (1966), Frank Capra, and It’s a Wonderful Life

Frank Capra, a brilliant a determined man who enjoyed everything Hollywood has to offer, learned a hard lesson over the course of his career — a mean sonofabitch of a lesson that Hollywood has taught to thousands and thousands over the decades: there’s no such thing as absolute control in the movie business. Picture making is a collaborative process — whether you like it or not — and everyone from the extras crowded around the hospitality table to Louis B. Mayer himself answers to somebody. This is why I, as well as every screen writer and cinematographer in the world, chuckle at author-theory people. Frankie Fane, the rotten protagonist of The Oscar, learns this too.

What’s Capra got to do with it though?

Here’s an oft-told Oscar tale: in 1934 the race for Best Director was contested among three nominees: Capra for Lady for a Day, George Cukor for Little Women, and Frank Lloyd for Best Picture winner Cavalcade. The presenter that year was humorist and film comedian Will Rogers — probably the sharpest, make that wickedest, man in the room. He declared the winner by jovially announcing, “Well, well, well. What do you know. I’ve watched this young man for a long time. Saw him come up from the bottom, and I mean the bottom. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Come on up and get it, Frank!” At this, Capra stood and wound his way through the tables toward the stage. He looked over and saw a jubilant Frank Lloyd, — the real winner — also coming up from his left. After a moment’s confusion Capra returned to his seat, humiliated, in what he would later describe as the “longest walk of his life.”

Capra was a filmmaker who greatly valued the creative aspects of his work and desperately wanted to win an Academy Award. He felt the accompanying recognition would give him enough juice to exert more and more control over his pictures. The irony here is that although he would shortly become one of the most recognized directors in film history, capturing the Oscar the following year for his own Best Picture, It Happened One Night, and winning it an astonishing two more times before the decade was out; he would never get the control he wanted — nobody ever does. Following his return from the war he even formed his own independent production company, Liberty Films, in an effort to gain more authority over his work. (Though it certainly fair to suggest that he had another reason: to pay less in taxes.) Liberty produced only two pictures — one of which was It’s a Wonderful Life.

Irony: Although Capra finally had a measure of the control he desired, It’s a Wonderful Life was a flop with post-war audiences — meaning that for their part the studio people were right. It failed to recoup its production costs and consequently drove Liberty into foreclosure and Capra back to the studio shuck-and-jive. More irony: in the decades since its release It’s a Wonderful Life has become one of the most adored films in history — a bona fide American classic — proving that for his part Capra was right. Even more irony: Lovers of this film often cite the source of their affection as the movie’s sweet Christmas message, though this shocks me. I believe what they are actually drawn to is the nostalgia of the film’s Americana, combined with its proliferation on television. My friends, It’s a Wonderful Life is a dark, forbidding, and troubling film.

Why the story? I was aware of the 1934 Oscar debacle’s connection to The Oscar and Capra was constantly in my thoughts as I watched. When one considers all the possibilities of a movie bearing this most lofty of titles it’s surprising — and something of a let-down — to witness the results — though Harlan Ellison was probably thinking of Capra when he had the “What if?” moment that probably got the this screenplay off the ground. The film itself has nothing to do with Capra and everything to do with an actor learning that old Hollywood lesson.

The Oscar stars Irishman Stephen Boyd (who most viewers will remember as Charlton Heston’s rival in 1959 Best Picture Ben-Hur) as Frankie Fane, a opportunistic heel who grinds his way through Hollywood, stepping on or over everyone who gets in his path. Fane is gifted with good looks and talent, but he’s so pathologically despicable that even shallow Hollywood types can’t stand him. The desperate and terrified actor’s career has finally hit the skids when he receives what amounts to a gift from the heavens: an Academy Award nomination for best actor. Yet the revivification certain to accompany the nod isn’t enough for Fane, he’s looking to hedge his bets — and in the end he pays a terrible price.

The supporting cast of The Oscar is noteworthy for being … noteworthy. This is one of those pictures about pictures that was able to recruit a boatload of high profile guest stars: Milton Berle plays Boyd’s agent while Joe Cotten is his studio boss. The film’s women are played by Elke Sommer, Eleanor Parker, Edie Adams, and Jill St. John. Ernest Borgnine is featured as a sleazy private eye; Brod Crawford, Walter Brennan, Peter Lawford, and Ed Begley do bits; and crooner Tony Bennett turns in his one and only (not too bad either) performance as a dramatic actor in the second lead. Bennett plays Hymie, Frank’s right hand man, conscience, and stooge. There are cameos galore, with Edith Head, Hedda Hopper, Frank Sinatra, Merle Oberon, and Bob Hope showing up as themselves.

The Oscar is both a morality story about the high cost of low morals and a trashy melodrama about life in the picture business. Whether it succeeds or fails on either count is up to the individual viewer, but the movie is stylish as can be (Oscar nods for Art Direction and Costume Design) and one hell of a ride — in a Jacqueline Susann kind of way.

The Oscar (1966)

Grade: C-

Directed by Russell Rouse

Starring Stephen Boyd, Elke Sommer, Tony Bennett, Milton Berle, and many more.

Released by Embassy Pictures

Running time: 119 minutes

Availability: Airs on TCM, rarely.