No Orchids for Miss Travers

She has a rather more exotic air than your average British actress: there's something of Cat People's Elizabeth Russell about her ("moia sestra?"); there may even be a trace of Gale Sondergaard there... It was obvious that a cinema as provincial, sober and pragmatic as Britain's would have trouble coming up with appropriate things for her to do.

So while she maintained a constant presence in British films for over ten years between the late thirties and the late forties, albeit usually in the second female lead, Linden Travers never quite achieved the stardom that was predicted for her.

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Indeed, it may well have been the very obvious streak of steel beneath the elegance that made her difficult to comfortably cast in a decade with far more use for English roses than wicked ladies.

For a time she almost looked set to make a career out of playing second fiddle to Margaret Lockwood, supporting her in four films, including the Gainsborough melodrama Jassy (1947, in which she also had to share the audience’s attention with Patricia Roc).

Perhaps most famous of their joint ventures, made when both were ingénues, is Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. Made in 1938, and the tenth of Linden’s two-dozen films, it showcases Lockwood as the perky, plucky heroine, but anyone who has seen the film will have no difficulty recalling Travers in the smaller but equally memorable role of ‘Mrs’ Todhunter, mistress of Cecil Parker’s incognito politician.

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Florence Lindon Travers was born in Durham in 1913. The talented child of a talented family (her younger brother was the British actor Bill Travers) she excelled in drama, painting and sketching and from an early age declared an interest in appearing on stage. Her debut was in rep in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1933 and within two years she had secured her first West End lead in Ivor Novello's Murder In Mayfair.
The same year she made her film debut halfway down the cast list of Children in the Fog (1935), and for a time alternated film and stage roles, often playing a mistress, femme fatale or ‘designing woman’, just as frequently ingénue roles in light comedies.
Carol Reed provided her first real chance to stand out on screen with a small but attention-getting role in Bank Holiday (1938). Her stint with Hitchcock followed, then another for Reed: The Stars Look Down (1939). In all three, Lockwood had taken the lead.
For some reason she then found herself as female lead in a succession of star vehicles for British comics: Tommy Trinder in Almost A Honeymoon (1938), George Formby in South American George (1941), and - wonderfully spooky - in Arthur Askey’s best film The Ghost Train (1941). Here, and briefly, we get a hint of how good she would have been in proper supernatural horror film... Though she's great fun in Edgar Wallace's The Terror, still it's such a shame she wasn't cast in Dead of Night.

. Though she made a number of impressive appearances in forties films, she was rarely given a solo chance to shine. She stood out, despite comparatively limited screen time, in Christopher Columbus (1949), as the all-too understandable reason why King Ferdinand is too busy to give Columbus an appointment, in one of the four stories making up Somerset Maugham’s Quartet (1948) and in The Bad Lord Byron (1948) as one of the poet’s many admirers.
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That same year, however, came her most important lead, one of her few true starring vehicles, and her own personal favourite.

She had, in fact, first played the role on the London stage in 1943 and so was a natural choice for the film version. The film was No Orchids For Miss Blandish, and it is, alas, not a title that means a hell of a lot to most people these days. In 1948, however, it was a sensation.

One review called it “the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever shown on a cinema screen.” According to the Observer, it had “all the morals of an alley cat and all the sweetness of a sewer”, while the Sunday Express reviewer hailed it simply “the worst film I have ever seen.”
Brief Encounter it most definitely is not, though probably the most shocking thing about it today is the fact that so controversial a production now merits nothing more prohibitive than a PG certificate on DVD.

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It was nothing new, either, being the same basic set-up as in Faulkner's novel Sanctuary, filmed sensationally (in both senses) with Miriam Hopkins in The Story of Temple Drake. But that had been pre-Code, of course - Hays had held sway for some time when Travers's little nasty showed up, and how it was that the supposedly genteel British cinema came to produce a thriller about a sadistic gangster who kidnaps an heiress for ransom, then forces his attentions on her until she responds by becoming his willing lover, demands some explaining!
Among many British cinemagoers enduring the hardships of the war, a certain cynicism had become fashionable in the movies, typified by the voguish, hard-bitten heroes of American noir. The harsh realities of the conflict had made the world suddenly seem a lot less innocent, and bred a desire for less innocent entertainment. As a result, the censor felt inclined to lower his guard and if necessary avert his eyes somewhat in the interests of morale. The Gainsborough melodramas, such as The Wicked Lady, are one obvious example of this new policy, aimed as they were at the newly emancipated female audience, and filled with sex, sadism and heaving bosoms.
At the end of the war, with servicemen returning home to everyday life, it was noted that the novel of No Orchids by James Hadley Chase, a typical sexy pulp thriller of the sort that had been produced in their millions during the war, had been by some margin the most popular book among members of the armed forces. A film version seemed an obvious money-spinner and, in a way, would serve almost as a reward to those coming home: something they certainly wouldn’t have seen before they left. The film, unsurprisingly, was a smash hit, despite the horrified objections of critics neither prepared for nor willing to overlook its unprecedented harshness and sexual frankness.

. With the shock and controversy now only a memory, the chief value of the film today is as a reminder of just how fine an actress Linden Travers was. Her performance, shading from fear, through revulsion and on to uninhibited desire, is unlike anything else in forties British cinema.
Sadly, this most promising portent of greater glories proved to be not only her last lead role but also one of her last screen appearances of any kind. After Don’t Ever Leave Me (1949), supporting Jimmy Hanley and Petula Clark in a partial spoof of Miss Blandish, she retired from full-time acting to devote herself to her family.
Though she did make a few subsequent appearances on television, she mainly devoted her creative energies to painting and drawing, opening the Travers Art Gallery in Kensington with her sisters Alice and Pearl in 1969. After the death of her husband she travelled the world for a time, spending many months in Africa and India before finally settling in St Ives, Cornwall, where she resumed her painting, studied psychology and psychotherapy, and became a qualified hypnotist. (She certainly had the eyes for it!)
It was in these idyllic surroundings that she died peacefully in 2001 at the age of 88.

Kreativ!

At last I have time to get around to thanking Lolita of Lolita's Classics for honouring Movietone News with the Kreativ Blogger Award.
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In fact, she gave us three: one for Movietone, one for The Marx Brothers Council of Britain and one for my horror movie blog Carfax Abbey.
According to Lolita, in accepting the award, one must list seven other blogs to receive the award, and 'seven things you don't know about me'.
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The latter could be tricky... I like to think of this site as searingly autobiographical, and I'm not sure there are any earth-shattering revelations left to be revealed. Already disclosed somewhere in the mass of postings below is the fact that I have never drunk tea, coffee, beer or water in my life, that I don't have a mobile phone or watch any television, that I once spent an afternoon in Michael Winner's living room listening to him as he sat next to me trying to operate his tv remote control in the dark, that I abhor Obama and his ghastly wife, that I've lost count of the number of times I've seen A Night at the Opera at the cinema, that I have a genuine regard for Sylvester Stallone and that I can be briefly glimpsed in the video for 'Going Out' by Supergrass.
So here, instead of any personal disclosures, are a few movie sevens, covering areas I rarely if ever touch upon under normal circumstances.
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Since this blog is concerned overwhelmingly with films I love, here are the seven films that I most hate:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Pleasantville, Apocalypse Now, A Clockwork Orange, Dr Strangelove, The Deer Hunter. (You may have noticed that this is only six films. That's because I have a space reserved for Fight Club: one day I'll confirm my instinctive hatred by actually watching it.)

And since the blog is concerned overwhelmingly with movies made in the golden age, here are my seven favourite films of the past 25 years:
Crimes and Misdemeanors, Ghost World, Funny Bones, The Straight Story, Cop Land, Blue Velvet, Marie Antoinette.

And lastly, since this blog is, obviously, about films I have seen with my own two orbs, here's seven that, somehow and to my considerable red-faced embarrassment, I've never got around to seeing:
Intolerance, Shadow of a Doubt, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Grapes of Wrath, La Regle du Jeu, Seven Samurai, The Long Weekend.
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Now to the blogs I wish to pass the Kreativ Blogger award on to. My initial criterion was that I shouldn't give it to any that I have passed awards on to before, or to any that were honoured by Lolita at the same time I was. (Otherwise: Kate, Casey, Mikal, Juliette etc etc... it goes without saying.)
This, of course, does not mean that somewheres back along the line my choices haven't already been tipped by someone else. So if you've already got one of these some time backaways... well, what are ya squawking about? Now you've got two. And anyway, only one of them came from me. So ditch the other one if it's like some big problem already.

They are:
The Crowd Roars
The Painted Woman
Time Machine to the Twenties
Behind the Couch
Kinetografo
Silver Screen Suppers
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Now to a little hypocrisy. I am aware that I am breaking my own rule by flinging my final gong in the direction of The Flapper's Personal Kinetoscope Parlour. I've just double-checked Lolita's list and it seems she beat me to it. But I have been enjoying this site so much lately that I must make an exception. Elizabeth's heroic resistance to modernity makes my own look positively half-hearted, and she only ever watches and writes about the coolest imaginable stuff. For her, even sitting through Gone With the Wind (and for the sake of a near-subliminal Cliff Edwards cameo, what's more) was a sacrifice of principles. Whereas as far as I'm concerned, I may talk big about losing interest after 1939, but the uncomfortable truth is that if it's got Keira Knightley or Drew Barrymore in it I'll happily trot along to any old horseshit.
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So thanks to all the above for being both creative and kreativ - often simultaneously - and for giving me so many hours of reading pleasure.

IT's Elinor Glyn's birthday!

Born today in 1864, she was an English Edwardian novelist, in her mid-fifties when the nineteen-twenties dawned, matronly of build and to the casual observer more Margaret Dumont than Clara Bow.

But Elinor Glyn was nonetheless as seminal an architect of the Jazz Age as Scott Fitzgerald.

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She was born of aristocratic stock in Jersey - that's old Jersey, over here, where the cows come from - and moved in distinctly high society circles. Unhappy in marriage, she wrote for something to do and latterly to maintain her standard of living; her colourful romances were published at the rate of one a year and scandalised her contemporaries. In Hollywood, they tallied exactly with the themes and attitudes of the contemporary sex-dramas that De Mille and others were pioneering, and she was happy to take up the offer to cross the pond and write scenarios.

It was she, of course, who coined the term 'it', not as a polite euphemism for sex appeal, as is often claimed, but to describe that more indefinable kind of attraction that rises from the unique chemical nature of certain individuals, and transcends mere personality, charm, sexual attractiveness and similarly measurable characteristics.

Inevitably she was asked just who, in the public eye, had It. Among men, she nominated Gary Cooper, and he was known briefly as the It Boy, but it didn't take. Her christening Clara Bow the It Girl, however, did - indeed it pretty much sealed up posterity for the both of them.

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Elinor Glyn is like a phantom hovering over twenties culture. Her work, swooningly idealistic and in many respects oddly out of step with the pace of the twenties, is far less obviously influential to its moment than that of Dorothy Parker, say, or Anita Loos. Her primary innovation was a discreetly heightened eroticism and, more importantly, an unvarnished frankness about her protagonists' desires and motivations. But from this she built a reputation as a kind of elder stateswoman and mascot of twenties emancipation (both female emancipation and youth emancipation). She also became a name to drop. In a delightful musical short called Office Blues Ginger Rogers plays a stenographer lamenting her inability to attract her dishy, brainy boss. The problem is incompatibility of interests and station, expressed in a couplet so joyous it deserves an on-screen round of applause:

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He is such a colour-blind bee and I'm a wasted flower,

I'm the type reads Elinor Glyn and he reads Schopenhauer.

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Yet it is of just such dilemmas that the typical Glyn romance was forged. Certainly the one about the working girl and the boss's son, that reappeared in Hollywood movies with such ritualistic frequency throughout the twenties and thirties, if not invented by her, was surely to some degree crystallised under her jurisdiction. It is also the basis of her most iconic monument, Bow's film It, only tangentially indebted to her work, but erected as a kind of monument to her, and in which she consents to make a suitably regal cameo appearance as herself.

She would have made a splendid addition to any Hollywood party, and served in just that function for many years, just as she does in The Cat's Meow, Peter Bogdanovich's generally excellent account of the death of Thomas Ince, where, in an inaccurate but charming portrayal by Joanna Lumley, she narrates as well as features in the unfolding mystery.

She died back in London in 1943, in a world that had outgrown hers in just about every conceivable sense.

But she takes a much deserved place in the Movietone News heroes' parade. Happy birthday, Elinor.

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Roman Polanski falls foul of law intended for ordinary people

Gotta love that petition doing the rounds, in which the great and the good of Hollywood (both terms here being used ironically) bemoan the recent arrest of Roman Polanski for some trivial offence he committed thirty years ago and bravely fled the consequences of.

"We are calling every filmmaker we can to help fix this terrible situation," says Harvey Weinstein, Miramax gargantuan and organiser of the petition. "Whatever you think about the so-called crime," claims Weinstein (a jolly, red-faced man who owns a production company that deliberately makes bad films), "Polanski has served his time. A deal was made with the judge, and the deal is not being honoured... This is the government of the United States not giving its word and recanting on a deal, and it is the government acting irresponsibly and criminally."

No, Polanksi hasn't spent the past thirty years inflicting crud like Bitter Moon on the world - you just dreamt that - instead he has - somehow - "served his time". And that's the important point, never mind what outdated, reactionary views you may cling to about "the so-called crime" of raping a kid. "Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion," Weinstein continued, presumably as a joke.

"Obviously, my sympathies are with Roman," said Robert Towne, obviously. World-famous international superstar Debra Winger says "the whole art world suffers" when the law deigns to treat their sainted number like mere mortals. Whoopi Goldberg, displaying a depth of perception so vast even Weinstein couldn't get it down in one gulp, assures us that the director didn't really commit rape. It was more, sort of, rape-ish. "I think he's sorry," she explained. "I think he knows it was wrong." Well... okay, Whoopi, so long as he knows it was wrong... I suppose it is a bit rich to expect him to make any further amends for drugging a thirteen year old girl and ignoring her when she asks him not to sodomise her.

Outside of the film industry the BS has been flowing just as freely: French culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand is "dumbfounded" by Polanski's "absolutely dreadful" treatment, relating as it does to "an ancient story". According to this chap, "there is a generous America that we love, and a certain America that frightens us. It's that America that has just shown its face." Yep, that frightening side of America that expects its citizens, wherever possible, not to drug and rape children.

Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times shrewdly notes that "at a time when California is shredding the safety net that protects the poor and the unemployed, not to mention the budget of the public school system, you'd hope that L.A. County prosecutors had better things to do" than persecute child-rapists. According to this gold-plated doofarooney, "Polanski has already paid a horrible, soul-wrenching price for the infamy surrounding his actions. The real tragedy is that he will always, till his death, be snubbed and stalked and confronted by people who think the price he has already paid isn't enough."

The real tragedy is not the forced sodomising of a thirteen year old girl, it's the notion that the assailant, after thirty years living the high life in Paris, should now be "snubbed" and even - imagine it if you can - "confronted" by people who think "the price he has already paid isn't enough."

You may be wondering what this "horrible, soul-wrenching price" - you remember: the one he has already paid - is, exactly. According to Goldstein: "Polanski's sins have not been forgotten. He has been barred from returning to the U.S. and prevented from traveling to other countries, including England, because of extradition issues. His career has clearly suffered from his inability to work in Hollywood..."

His career has suffered? Bad karma. Poor man.

And here's Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post (in an article titled "The Outrageous Arrest of Roman Polanksi"): "he has paid for the crime in many, many ways: In notoriety, in lawyers' fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar."

Okay, let's recap. He rapes a child, and pays the horrible, soul-wrenching price of notoriety, lawyers' fees, the professional stigma that has led every director in Hollywood to sign Harvey's petition, the inability to collect an Oscar in person, and the fact that Pirates was shit.

"He can be blamed, it is true, for his original, panicky decision to flee," cedes Applebaum magnanimously, but even here she can "see mitigating circumstances, not least an understandable fear of irrational punishment." Irrational, yes. Exactly the word I'd use. I mean, it wasn't like he raped a whole bunch of kids. It was only one. Some perspective here, please.

And why did he have an understandable fear of irrational punishment? "Polanski's mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto, and later emigrated from communist Poland. His pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered in 1969 by the followers of Charles Manson, though for a time Polanski himself was a suspect." Undoubtedly the prospect of facing some combination of these things was what was going through his mind when he took the decision to peg it out of America and live it up in France.

The tacit understanding seems to be: if you've had to endure that much horror in your life, the law should show a little more empathy when you start raping kids. There but for the grace of God go I. Who are we, who have never endured such appalling misfortune, to claim that we would be able to resist the urge to rape children, until we have actually walked in his shoes? This is certainly what Mitterrand has in mind when he says that he "strongly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already experienced so many of them."

And when exactly did Polanski become a great director anyway? Until everyone went crazy for The Pianist I always thought he was pretty much an anachronism, a figure with a reputation somewhat akin to Roger Vadim's, with 1960's sensibilities and a constant erection, whose films aspire to a bygone standard of Euro-sophistication somewhere between arthouse seriousness and box-office populism, achieving neither. Even his most celebrated work could have been anybody's. Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown are competent genre stuff if you're in the mood for something trivial, the former distinguished by a few clever ideas and a great cast, the latter saddled with a tv-movie sense of period and an ending so absurdly pessimistic it's like a fourteen year old boy wrote it. What else is there? Well, there's Knife in the Water, I suppose, and the two British ones, which are - what? Interesting is, I guess, the word. The rest is basically a lot of monkeying about by a film-maker with a certain style but nothing whatever to say. He's best by far when he tries least to be somebody: in Frantic, for instance, or Tess.

You can disagree with this, and it seems that many, suddenly, do. But why that means he shouldn't be treated like anyone else when he commits a crime is anybody's guess.

Doctor Blood's Cornwall

No holiday in Cornwall would be complete without a visit to Doctor Blood, who keeps a coffin there. Actually, he doesn't, but it's just one of the many delightful surprises of Doctor Blood's Coffin (1960) that it is the second part of the title that's hyperbole: he doesn't have a coffin, but the main character is called Dr Blood - Dr Peter Blood, to be precise.
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Like The Ghoul, it is one of my all-time favourite British horror films, and like The Ghoul no critic in the universe has anything but the most scornful things to say about it. However, unlike The Ghoul, the low critical standing of which is a complete and enduring mystery to me, I am prepared to accept that in this case my ratio of objective/defensible reasons for liking it to subjective/indefensible reasons for liking it is probably somewhere in the region of 70-30 in subjectivity's favour.
My own affection for the film is due at least in part to its familiar - to me - Cornish backgrounds (though the original script had in fact been set in Arizona). So over the past week or so, we've been tracking them down...
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Dr Blood's Village
What is referred to in the film as Porthcarron is in fact the village of Zennor. Here's the first post-credits shot of a car driving into the location, followed by the same road as it looks today.
.Doctor Blood's Local
The sign above right is for The Tinner's Arms, the village pub, which, unusually, is also the building used for the location of the pub in the film. The stone work has been rusticated since the film was made; personally I prefer the 1960 whitewash.
.Doctor Blood's Cottage
Ironically, one of the few buildings used in the film to have changed significantly is the main one: the terraced cottage which doubles as Doctor Blood's surgery and living accommodation. Over the past half-century it has lost its garden wall, most of its flower beds and its porch.
.The following shot of the cottage (on the right) and the white building next to the pub is still easy to locate, even though the latter has lost the blue painted window-frames and doors.
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Here we see the scene in which Hazel Court bends down to pick up the morning milk (bending correctly at the knees) being restaged by Angela Levin (who bends at the spine, proving she's no nurse).
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... and on up to the gates outside Hazel's house - try to forget the nasty-looking car, and note instead that the gates Angela is heading for are still the Hazel originals.
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.Doctor Blood's Pantry

The exterior of the mine where Blood keeps his paralysed, dead and revived bodies is Carn Galver Mine, West Penwith, still looking much as the good doctor left it. The interior is of course a studio set. Shortly after our photo was taken a busload of Germans arrived at the site, but not being able to speak the language we were unable to ascertain if they were touring Cornish landmarks or British Horror Film locations. Obviously I'd like to think it was the latter.
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Doctor Blood's Daytrip

Here we see Angela and myself, as Dr Blood, recreating the sequence in which the crazy quack takes a break from cutting out hearts to accompany Hazel to the seaside, and brag to her about when he was a Group Leader in the Cubs. The cliffs have fallen away somewhat since the film was shot, and the carefree manner in which Hazel skips back and forth over the wall would be virtually suicidal today. We were taking quite a risk, in fact, to provide you with the painstaking accuracy of the second shot, so please appreciate it.
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Doctor Blood's Little Stroll

Here we see Dr Blood taking a walk, passing G. F. Morton, the local funeral director, and on, past the church, to the village. The funeral parlour is really Zennor Village Hall. I was hoping to find the old G. F. Morton sign abandoned in a hedge or propping open a gate, but no such luck. In the reconstructions that follow the originals below, I will again be essaying the role of Dr Blood, while the character role of Morton will be taken by my father, Mr S. Coniam.
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Doctor Blood's Graveyard

In our reconstruction of the film's funeral scene, note that the fence leading into the churchyard is again the 1960 original. The grave that Hazel is looking at is a prop, but the large crosses in the background are unmistakable in both photos. Unfortunately, Equity rates being what they are, we couldn't afford any mourners, so you'll just have to use your imagination in the first one.
.And finally, at no extra cost, a delightfully-named nearby hostelry not featured in the film, but in which the Doc would no doubt have felt very much at home...
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You can find a longer version of this post, and a whole bunch of other peculiar stuff, at my horror movie blog Carfax Abbey.

The 1944-45 Motion Picture Almanac

Movietone News has just returned from its holiday with a copy of the 1944-45 Motion Picture Almanac tucked under its arm, found in a Cornish second-hand book shop and a snip at only a tenner.
It's an absolutely fascinating snapshot of the industry at a crucial, pivotal time in its life, celebrating fifty years of history, enjoying an upsurge of financial success and looking ahead to the mirage of endless long hot summers to come.
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Among the great stuff inside...
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Table upon table of fascinating statistical data:
Financial statements! Compare one studio's incomings and outgoings with another! I had no idea this kind of information was made generally available!Statistical breakdown of the average forties film budget: 25% to cast, 20% to director, 1.2% to crew and labour. 62, 000, 000 tickets a week - all this and World War Two!
And what are they going to see? Good-looking broads, some laughs and a song or two - same as always. Oh, and cowboys too, but they get their own list:
The British recipe for morale: George Formby, Arthur Askey, Old Mother Riley. And we prefer Gene Autry to Roy Rogers. Interesting to compare the rate and quality of output of the different studios over a specific two-year period: I do love Monogram...
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There's also some really interesting stuff about legislation and litigation, including a complete copy of the Production Code. I'd only seen extracts before. Some great rules I didn't know about. Here are some of the words and phrases that "must be omitted from all motion pictures before approval": "In your hat", Nerts, Nuts (except when meaning "crazy"), Goose (in a vulgar sense), "Hold your hat" or "hats", Hot (applied to a woman), Razzberry (the sound), "Bronx cheer" (the sound), Toilet gags, "Travelling salesman" and "Farmer's daughter" jokes. Apparently "shyster" is allowed in America but not England, "Stick 'em up" is not allowed in America or Canada, and American political censor boards "invariably" delete "specific names of poisons." Interesting to see that racial and national nicknames (including chink, hun, nigger and yid) are banned on the grounds that they are "obviously offensive to many patrons".
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Unsurprisingly, the book's editorial content focuses largely on two topics. The first is the war:
Rationing, it seems has hit the film business pretty hard:Those poor movie-makers, having to make do with black and white film! They should try queuing all day for powdered egg. I like this advert. It doesn't tell us how buying their product will hasten the end of the war, it just assures us it will...

The other big topic, is the fiftieth anniversary of the movies themselves. Naturally, the studios are queuing up to pat themselves on the back, each trying to top the other in bold claims for their future success. Universal reckons to know the winning formula:

According to the blurb elsewhere in their ad, "we at Universal don't think there's any mystery in developing a successful formula... it's based on integrity, efficiency and those most important elements of show business: Integrity and Creative Talent." And there's me thinking that Universal's continued existence, never mind success, in the early forties was pretty much down to these most important elements of show business:

Apart from stressing their own twentieth rather than the industry's fiftieth, there's a pleasant and surprising lack of pomposity about MGM's ad:

But who knows, maybe 1944 will be the year that PRC breaks into the big leagues?Sorry, boys. It'll take more than 24 features, two thirds of them oaters, to bust you out of poverty row. Neither, for the time being at least, do Bud and Lou have much to worry about from rival double-acts:

These personnel adverts are the most interesting part of the book. They are a varied and intriguing bunch. Some are straightforward plugs for would-be up and comers like the boys above, with studio, agent and film appearances all listed. Here's another, who's also, coincidentally, in Adventures of a Rookie - some kind of jinxed film, one assumes:Sorry, Lee. No matter how hard you try.
But most of the others are people in no need of special plugging, yet the selection is incredibly random:

Why on earth would Gabby Hayes, one of the most professionally secure and least ambitious actors on the planet, feel the need to take out a half-page ad with photo, unless planning an image change which, judging from the choice of photo, it's a pretty fair bet he isn't.
Likewise, the great Cecil Kellaway, one of Hollywood's best and busiest character actors, takes out a full page to let us know he plays "William" in Frenchman's Creek.
Others so pointedly do not need to take out an ad that taking out an ad is the whole point. How cocky is this? No studio, no agent, no films, no contact details, just the name - on a full page. Gregory Peck does the same. Jack Benny contents himself with half a page. So, inexplicably, does How to account for this? Delusions of grandeur? Maybe Preston Sturges took it out as a joke.
Another amusing variation, if you have a famous surname, is to just put the first names; the advert then says "you know who we are, and we know you know who we are..." In just a year or two, Robert Mitchum would be an obvious candidate for the name-only approach, but for now he's still just Robert "Bob" Mitchum, and the most he's got to brag about are eight Hopalong Cassidys and We've Never Been Licked:

There's a good game you can have with these ads. Imagine you're putting together a movie, and you want to choose who to hire for it. You can only pick the people who have taken out adverts. Here's some of my choices. For director: who else but the great Eddie Cline?For production manager, I'll go for Doc Merman. Not because I know who he is, but because he's the only production manager who felt the need to advertise in the book.For music, I'm bagging the guy that scored Cobra Woman and Gypsy Wildcat.And because it's my film and I can do what the hell I want, the lead role is going to the peerless Mantan Moreland.

Here are some of the other adverts that caught my eye...Greetings from the Harris Amusement Company, industry pioneers.Anybody know who this lot are?Now here's a little business with a solid, sunny future in post-war America.And would you look who we have here! It's Irving Klaw, Betty Page's mentor and smut-peddler to the sophisticates, in the earlier, more innocent guise of "The Pin-Up King".
But the most important advert, for me, is the following one. As we all know, the amazing prosperity and success that the film industry was celebrating in these years was a kind of illusion. The best days were already behind them, and the long decline was about to begin. But for now, blissful innocence reigns, even though the assassin is lurking right here, in the very same pages...

Back Soon

Movietone News is off on holiday, and as usual has left it too late to do its packing, and has to leave loads of things undone, including replies to a few emails... rest assured it will get back to you in a week and a bit... oh, and it's very sorry.
In the meantime, we'll leave you with a picture of Brenda Joyce.
When posh, pretty Maureen O'Sullivan announced she was hanging up her loincloths and giving up the role of Jane in the Tarzan series, men all over the world must have finally understood how all those women felt when Valentino died.
But then, just as they were reaching for the cut-throat razor, Brenda turned up, the sun came back out and the birds started singing again. Even Tarzan himself failed to notice the switch.
Plus she's in Pillow of Death (one of the great, great titles), Spider Woman Strikes Back and Abbott and Costello's Little Giant.
Brenda died on July 4th, aged 92.
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Two sisters tag

Elizabeth over at Oh By Jingo, Oh By Gee! has tagged me with the following questions, each one a bone of contention between her and her sister.
I wish I knew people I could have these kinds of debates with...
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1. Do you like Greta Garbo?

Yes, I do, but she's not in my top twenty stars, nor are any of her films to be found among my very favourites (except possibly Grand Hotel - and then mainly for the Crawford/Lionel Barrymore/Beery bits). It may be simply that I discovered Dietrich first. BBC-2 showed a very comprehensive Garbo season on Wednesday nights when I was about twelve, and I was impressed but not floored. Neither was my youthful ardour goaded over much - a far cry from Destry Rides Again!

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2. In Buster Keaton's MGM films, do his gestures and his plots resemble those of Harry Langdon?

Intriguing! My first answer would be no, which is only to say that the thought has never struck me independently before. But now you say it, do I think there's anything in what you say? - yes, possibly. Though I think your sister makes a good point that the performance inevitably changes when you switch from pantomime to dialogue acting. This got me thinking about some of the others. Even Stan Laurel's talkie persona is notably different from his more demonic silent self, and he was one of the least affected. Chaplin knew the change would be so fundamental it would be dangerous to even try. Harold Lloyd becomes more shrill, a little more irritating perhaps; his relentless go-getter energy seems more opposed to the society he is trying to infiltrate; he seems more of a pathetic character somehow.

So the characteristics of Buster that you identify as different could well be the inevitable result of trying to adapt to a new medium; and things like increased pathos and docility could just be the curse of MGM: the studio that hated great comedians so much they kept giving them contracts just so they could destroy their careers. Much as I like Langdon, I can't really see a performer of Buster's stature consciously finding inspiration in him. So, finally, I think I side with your sister after all.

As a side-note: I've never seen a Langdon talkie. What's he like?

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3. Who is your favorite director of silent dramas?

There aren't many of whom I have seen more than one film, so picking a favourite is perhaps unfair. Griffith is an exception, but I find his films more to be appreciated than enjoyed. I loved The Wedding March (guess why) but don't know any other Von Stroheims. So with The Crowd and The Big Parade under his belt, it has to be Vidor - unless the majority of DeMille's silents count as 'drama', in which case, obviously...

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4. Do Harold Lloyd's movies (movies, not shorts) drag along?

No! Well, maybe some do, but not the ones I've seen: they all zip by in my estimation. In fact, I always thought that Lloyd's work was distinguished in particular by its pace, far more than that of many another silent comic, in that it was essentially urban, and timed to the rhythms of the twenties, the department stores and the tram cars and all the other frenetic diversions of new-fangled city living, whereas Chaplin's and Keaton's films are much more bucolic and nostalgic. Even when Lloyd does rural - The Kid Brother, for instance - there's always a sense that the world depicted is one coming to an end, and that Lloyd's character, however gauche and ineffectual he may seem at first, is ultimately in his resourcefulness and energy an agent of that change. Chaplin is always an outsider, Keaton a supreme individualist, but Lloyd is the spirit of his age. This might to some degree account both for some of his great popularity, and for the cooling off in the public's esteem that saw him lose his hold in the thirties. The Freshman is one of my half-dozen favourite comedies of all-time. I vastly prefer his features to his shorts. I also love his talkies. And the fact that he had a lookalike brother called Gaylord.

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5. Who made better silent shorts, Mack Sennett or Hal Roach?

Don't know. I would say that, for me, they were much of a muchness as far as silent shorts go; perhaps I would lean slightly towards Roach, but only because his were on their way to finding those characteristics that become definitive of his sound shorts, which I vastly prefer to the silent work of either. I think both are fascinating, wonderful, essential chapters in American film history, but for laughs I'll head for Below Zero, or for that matter to Sennett's sound shorts with W.C. Fields - quite possibly the funniest films ever made.

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6. Is Al St. John a genuine heavy, or a baby heavy?

[Elizabeth explains: "This is based on the idea of the "Baby Vamp", which was the character of the girl who was vampish, but not a vamp. My sister doesn't really quite believe Al St. John is a genuine heavy because he doesn't have the crazy facial hair, and because he isn't quite so muscular as some of the other heavies (such as Noah Young or Eric Campbell). However, I'm firmly convinced that Al St. John is actually a heavy, moustache or no. He's too diabolical to not be one.]

Hmm. I'd hate mine to be the casting vote on this, because I'm not overly familiar with this chap. But from the brief acquaintance we have struck up here and there, I would lean strongly towards baby heavy. Unless I've seen an unrepresentative sample of work, Eric Campbell could kick his ass, no problem.

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7. Do you like 1920s musicals?

You mean there's some other kind? No, I do like musicals from other eras, but less and less the further away from the twenties you go. Twenties popular music is one of my absolute favourite sounds in the world, not just the songs and performers themselves but the actual noise of it, the exact nature of the instrumentation and recording. I like thirties music very much, forties a little less, fifties a lot less, sixties and onward not at all. So my taste in musicals inevitably marches in step with this prejudice. I mean, even Singin' in the Rain sounds compromised to me: I love it, of course, but if they are going to have a twenties setting and use vintage songs why not make them sound vintage?

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8. Do you like Al Jolson's movies?

If you mean: do the movies live up to the talents of the man, or are they a good substitute for seeing him on stage, I guess not really, but they'll certainly suffice until science comes up with an alternative. If you mean: do you like that man in those movies, do you like this man Jolson, then yes; he was the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century. I mean, who else comes close? Michael Jackson?

(By the way, anyone heard Mel Brooks's impression of Al Jolson making a phone call to Irving Berlin on his 2000-Year-Old-Man album Two Thousand and Thirteen? It's brilliant, and if you're in two minds about Brooks, it'll make you a fully paid-up convert.)

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9. Who is your favorite animal star? She says Asta from "The Thin Man" movies, but I like the monkey in "The Cameraman".

I have many. Mut in A Dog's Life gives one of the best all-round performances by an non-human animal, even though accounts in the Chaplin archives reveal that they got him drunk for one scene. But for comic ability, based on natural talent rather than artificial stimulants, I think the prize has to go to Charley Chase's dog in Mighty Like a Moose, specifically the moment in which, as the result of comic contrivance too convoluted to go through here, he ends up wearing Charley's false teeth.

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Thanks, Elizabeth, this was great fun!

Two new films in a week - somebody stop this man!

Ah, you know me and new films. Can't get enough of 'em. So in the past week I've seen two - count them - two films released this year.
Actually Pranzo di Ferragosto seems to have been released last year, but it's taken until now to reach East Finchley. I went to see it for a number of reasons.
Firstly, because it's Italian. Since we started regularly holidaying there a few years ago I have become totally obsessed with Italy. It's my favourite country by a mile, I love almost everything about it, and even the not so good bits are absolutely fascinating, and unique. So when an Italian film turns up at my local I'll always go and see it because even if it's nothing special it will be steeped in the atmosphere of my favourite country.
Second, it's only seventy-five minutes long. I have always maintained that no story cannot be told in ninety minutes (just one of many thousands of reasons why I'd rather chew my balls off than watch Inglourious Basterds - sorry, Lolita) but rarely since the thirties has anyone had the discipline and taste to let one clock in at 75. It's the perfect length - it doesn't feel long and it doesn't feel short.
Third, it has a U certificate, but it's not for kids. This is an insane novelty for us. Over here the U, equivalent of the American G, stands for Universal and basically means it's okay for anyone to watch it. It doesn't mean it's a kids film, but in practice the only films that ever get U certificates are kids films. Unless they're Italian it seems, where charm can still be bankrolled.
Even with all this going for it, however, I didn't actually know what I was going to get. It was impossible to guess what it was going to be like, because the British distributors have given it a bland title (Mid-August Lunch) and a poster that makes it look like that cinematic equivalent of slow death from disease: the quirky American indie breakthrough sleeper. Gianni di Gregorio looks like David Lynch on the poster. (The poster also warns us, despite that U certificate, that it contains scenes of people smoking. Tramp, tramp, tramp. Anyone hear jackboots?)
Even prepared, as I was, to get something out of this no matter what, I was not expecting seventy-five quite so perfect minutes of total and blissful vindication.
Basically, if you love that feel that Italian cinema has, the beautiful rise and fall of those voices, the architecture and the attitude, if you never tire of Visconti's Ossessione or or Fellini's Cabiria or Antonioni's L'Avventura or Argento's Profondo Rosso, drop whatever you're doing even if it involves the use of dangerous industrial machinery (sorry, I'm trying to get a job designing London theatre posters) and track down this glowing, beautiful thing.
Let me sell it some more.
There are five main characters in this film. One of them is a middle-aged man. The other four are women in their nineties. The supporting characters are a few more middle-aged men and the beautiful city of Rome. That's it.
It's about this guy who lives with his aged mother, and the relationship between them is beautifully realistic; no silly extremes, just real, day to day ups and downs. It's set mainly during the day Romans traditionally leave for the beach and the entire city closes down. Because of his mother he must stay in the city, and he is also left to care for the aged relatives of his landlord (he hasn't paid his rent) and doctor (he can't afford to pay for his consultations).
That's basically it, and it's the most engrossing and delightful thing you'll see this decade. Gianni di Gregorio, the lead actor, also wrote and directed it, and it was shot in the exact apartment he shared with his own mother. All of the old ladies are non-professionals, one is his aunt, one a family friend and the other two came from an old people's home. All four are sensationally good. The ending is so right, so real, and yet so triumphantly warm and hopeful I wanted to stand and cheer.
Not least because we had just endured the trailer for the latest identical to all the others piece of British horseshit, this time calling itself Fish Tank. What a contrast. ("Dark and gritty drama about a girl on a council estate trying to escape her loneliness through her love of streetdancing." Mmmm, yes please!) Nasty gobby people yelling at each other in depressing surroundings, with big heavyweight critical endorsements of course. Some ding-dong from Elle magazine calls it profound. You can always rely on Elle to know profundity when it sees it. They also call it 'uplifting', which is British film critic code for 'after ten minutes you'll want to cut your throat slowly'. What it actually is, of course, is despair-porn, the eroticisation of the underclass by the comfortable media class elite, a kind of patronising prurience which they think, by some impenetrable alchemy only they can rationalise, makes them worthy and useful. To hell with the lot of them. We love you, Italy! We love you, Italian cinema!
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Clips from one of my favourite Italian movies, Rosselini's Viaggo di Italia turn up in Broken Embraces.
Funny thing about Almodóvar. When he was in his prime and I went to see new films all the time I had no interest in him at all. Now that watchable films are rare, and his seem to be at least that, and my local cinema is only down the road, I wander along out of habit. The odd thing is that I still have no desire to seek out the back catalogue, so I have a very false picture of him. I've only seen three, all at the cinema and none more than once: Talk To Her, Volver and now Broken Embraces. As usual; pretty interesting, pretty engrossing, pretty pretty. Penélope Cruz, whom I have never sought out but seems nonetheless to be in every film I see at the cinema these days, grows on me a little more. Angela Molina from Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire is in it very briefly, to me at least almost unrecognisable.
It held my attention easily enough while it was on. Parts of it were striking, a lot of it was colourful, it was long, it moved at a uniform pace and it just sort of wandered by - like the circus leaving town.

June Duprez: Say a prayer for Dr Watson

I was watching The Brighton Strangler again the other day. (Once or twice a year I get the urge to re-acquaint myself with this peculiar little semi-classic; you know how it is, I'm sure.)
As always, I was struck by the fact that I knew virtually nothing about its beautiful, somewhat feline British star June Duprez, and by the fact that her career, which had seemed so promising, appeared to abruptly come to an end just as she was reaching her peak.
Did she die young, marry and retire, or what?
This time, I decided to find out...
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Born in 1918 (during an air raid), she was the daughter of Fred Duprez, an American vaudevillian who had made his professional home in Britain during the 1930's. (He played Groucho's role in the British stage run of The Cocoanuts and is very funny as the studio mogul in the Crazy Gang's Okay For Sound [1937]. The following year he accompanied Will Hay to America for his oddball co-production Hey! Hey! USA [1938], and suffered a fatal heart attack, at the age of fifty-four, on the ship coming back home.)
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June got her big break from Alexander Korda, who gave her four big roles between 1939 and 1940: The Four Feathers, The Spy In Black, The Lion Has Wings and The Thief of Bagdad. The latter production was moved to Hollywood after the outbreak of war, and gave June, who is photographed beautifully throughout in Technicolor, her first taste of the film capital. The film was a huge success and June opted to stay in America and give Hollywood a try.
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Why did her career not take off as expected? Not for want of anything in her performances or screen presence. Incredibly, her agent made the elementary mistake of setting her per-picture salary far too high for a largely untested actress, with the result that she received a fraction of the work she merited, and never made the impact on audiences that she she should have. And with that one simple, infuriating error of judgement an entire career was stalled.
According to this excellent Powell & Pressburger site "at one point she was so impoverished she nibbled on dog biscuits, which she covered with marmalade."
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"Whenever you see a Sherlock Holmes movie, say a prayer for Dr. Watson," June has been quoted as saying. "Because if it hadn't been for the kindness of Nigel Bruce and his wife, I just don't know what I'd have done in Hollywood. They kept me circulating socially when I was stagnating professionally. And the times they gave me dinner!
"But the very worst part was the men out there. I spent few minutes at a Barbara Hutton party talking with David O. Selznick. Later that same night he appeared at my door, and when I wouldn't let him in, he broke my window.
"Another time, on a warm day, I had my apartment door opened and in walked Harry Cohn - right into my house. I'd never met him. I didn't know who he was, even when he told me. When I told my agent that I nearly had him arrested, he told me that such a thing would have ruined me. Me! I had been assured that I was the prime contender for the lead in Sundown, the part that was to be the making of Gene Tierney, but after that horrible scene with Selznick, it was never again mentioned... Do you wonder why it's called a jungle?"
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She is worth looking out for in three Hollywood movies, however. Cary Grant and director Clifford Odets overrode studio objections to cast her in None But the Lonely Heart (1944); she considered the result her best movie appearance. She's also splendid as the female lead in Rene Clair's And Then There Were None (1945), one of the best and most under-rated Hollywood films of the forties, and by a million miles the best ever film of an Agatha Christie novel.
And then, of course, there is The Brighton Strangler (1945), a decidedly minor but still bafflingly little-known melodrama with a lovely Christmastime setting and a strange and rather splendid set-up: an actor who has been playing 'the Brighton Strangler' on the London stage is conked on the head when the theatre is hit during an air raid, loses his memory and comes to believe that he is the real strangler. So he travels to Brighton and begins murdering totally innocent strangers unfortunate enough to serve as surrogates for the characters in the play.
Because the murders are really not his fault the film has a somewhat black comic edge, never more pronounced than when he attempts to explain his motives to the people he is about to kill and they, naturally enough, don't have a clue what he's talking about.
June, in military uniform a lot of the time, is relaxed and charming, as is John Loder as the strangler, another jobbing Brit in Hollywood who turned up just about everywhere but never quite made it.
. June later moved to New York, where she appeared on Broadway, then to Rome for a time, before finally returning to London, where she died in her sleep on August 17, 1984.
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Polls Closed! Thinking Caps Quiz Results

Here is the positively final results rundown for the thinking caps quiz:

1. Favourite Humphrey Bogart film in which he doesn't play a gangster or a private eye: To Have and Have Not
2. Favourite appearance by a star in drag: Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby
3. Favourite Laurel & Hardy film: Sons of the Desert
4. Favourite appearance by one star in a role strongly associated with another star: No winner
5. Thirties or forties star or stars you most think you'd like, but have yet to really get to know: Jessie Matthews
6. Favourite pre-Petrified Forest Bette Davis film: Of Human Bondage
7. Favourite post-Mildred Pierce Joan Crawford film: Johnny Guitar
8. Favourite film that ends with the main character's death: Tie: Waterloo Bridge and King Kong
9. Favourite Chaplin talkie: Monsieur Verdoux
10. Favourite British actor and actress: Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr
11. Favourite post-1960 appearance by a 1930's star: Tie: Boris Karloff in Targets and Joan Blondell in Grease
12. Dietrich or Garbo?: Dietrich
13. Karloff or Lugosi?: Karloff
14. Chaplin or Keaton?: Keaton
15. Favourite star associated predominantly with the 1950's: Tie: James Dean and Montgomery Clift
16. Favourite Melvyn Douglas movie: Ninotchka
17. The box-office failure you most think should have been a success: It's a Wonderful Life
18. Favourite performance by an actor or actress playing drunk: James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story
19. Favourite last scene of any thirties movie: Tie: City Lights and King Kong
20. Favourite American non-comedy silent movie: Tie: Sunrise and The Big Parade
21. Favourite Jean Harlow performance: Dinner at 8
22. Favourite remake: No winner
23. Favourite Orson Welles performance in a film he did not direct, not including The Third Man: The Long Hot Summer
24. Favourite non-gangster or musical James Cagney film: One, Two, Three
25. Favourite Lubitsch movie: To Be Or Not To Be
26. Who would win in a fight: Miriam Hopkins or Barbara Stanwyck?: Barbara Stanwyck
27. The two stars you most regret never having appeared together: No winner
28. Favourite Lionel Barrymore performance: Tie: It's a Wonderful Life and You Can't Take It With You
29. Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard or Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour?: Lamour
30. Which one thirties film from each major studiowould you save from burning?
Paramount: Duck Soup
MGM: No winner
RKO: Top Hat
Columbia: Mr Smith Goes To Washington
Universal: Tie: Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein
Warners: Angels With Dirty Faces
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Thanks to the following for taking part:
Amanda at A Noodle in a Haystack
Angela at Golden Strands and Silver Strands
Elizabeth at Oh By Jingo! Oh By Gee! and Flapper Flicks
George
Hart Reaver
Ivan at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear
Juliette at Some Parade
Lolita at Lolita's Classics
Meredith at Or maybe Eisenstein Should Just Relax
Millie at Classic Forever
Mykal at Radiation Cinema!
Panavia 999 at Stuff
Thea at Kinetografo
Samuel Wilson at Mondo 70
Weepingsam at The Listening Ear

Thinking Caps Quiz: Statistical Breakdown (sort of)

So heartened was I by the response to my thinking cap quiz (see post below) that I decided to spend an indulgent hour idly collating the results, to see what interesting examples of convergence, divergence, passion, indifference and out on a limb eccentricity might emerge.
So far, the following fine folks have taken part:
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Amanda at A Noodle in a Haystack
Angela at Golden Strands and Silver Strands
Elizabeth at Oh By Jingo! Oh By Gee! and Flapper Flicks

George

Juliette at Some Parade

Lolita at Lolita's Classics

Meredith at Or maybe Eisenstein Should Just Relax
Millie at Classic Forever

Mykal at Radiation Cinema!

Panavia 999 at Stuff

Thea at Kinetografo

Samuel Wilson at Mondo 70
me
Don't worry if you'd like to do the quiz and still haven't: it will just give me another glorious excuse to draw up lists of the answers and monkey around with the results.
Anyway, here's what I found.
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Question 1:
Favourite non-private eye, gangster or Moroccan nightclub owner Bogart film was To Have and Have Not, with a late show of support from Amanda (joining Elizabeth and Millie) beating off its previous rival In A Lonely Place (Lolita and Mykal). Juliette later wished she'd gone for Lonely Place, but wish don't cut it. To Have and Have Not it is.
Question 2:
On the issue of stars in drag, nobody went for Jack or Tony in Some Like It Hot, perhaps from the fear (expressed by Millie) that it was too obvious an answer. So instead we have eleven different answers from eleven participants, with men dressed as women beating women dressed as men six to five. Juliette cheated by making up a fictitious actress ('June Preisser') in a fictitious film ('Sweater Girl'). (She also once tried to convince me there was a Liza Minnelli film called The Sterile Cuckoo. Yeah, right.) The judge's favourite was Elizabeth's - Roscoe Arbuckle in Coney Island (1917) - because I liked the confident way she wrote "How could it be anything else?" after it.
Question 3:
The Laurel & Hardy split did not fall neatly across the gender tracks as I anticipated, with Elizabeth in particular springing to their defence and Mykal in particular pulling the trap door by claiming to loathe all comedies. In the event, the ones I was expecting to sweep the board - Big Business (Samuel Wilson), Sons of the Desert (me) and The Music Box (Meredith) - showed up only once, Millie went for flat-out dislike, and Lolita nominated "their commercial for wooden products" (Tree in a Test-Tube). So the winner turned out to be the early sound short Men o'War, nominated by Angela and myself.
Question 4:
'Favourite star in a role strongly associated with another' proved another eleven-participants-eleven-answers question, but the judge wishes to single out for especial praise the chutzpah of George, who suggested Alan Arkin as Inspector Clouseau, and the innate good taste of Mykal, who opted for Zandor Vorkov as Dracula in Al Adamson's majestic Dracula vs Frankenstein..

An equally divergent crop for Question 5: the star you're least familiar with but think you'd like. Eleven participants racked up nineteen suggestions, but the only duplication was of Jessie Matthews by George and me, and then only because I read George's answers before doing mine.
Others that managed all or almost all different suggestions were Question 8 (favourite film that ends with the main character's death; though I suppose Waterloo Bridge has it: one of Juliette's three suggestions, it tallied with Angela, who quite frankly would watch a film of Vivien Leigh putting up wallpaper and not feel short-changed), Question 15 (favourite actor or actress most associated with the fifties; although Lolita's vote for James Dean tallies with one of Millie's three choices I'm disallowing it because he was a big girl, and my choice - Jane Russell - could have turned him into mashed potato with just one withering glance: sorry, the judge's decision is final), Question 19 (favourite last scene of a thirties film, with me and Elizabeth helping City Lights - the best last scene of any film ever - to a two-vote victory), Question 22 (favourite remake; no clear winner: King Kong got two votes but it was once for the '77 version from George and once for the 2005 from Mykal, however Meredith's vote for the 1998 version of The Parent Trap deserves at least acknowledgement), and Question 27 (most longed-for non-existent co-starring performers). The latter understandably brought forth eleven entirely separate answers, though it was interesting to note that while male-female combinations (Elizabeth, Millie and Angela) and male-male combinations (George, Samuel Wilson, Mykal) took three votes each, a slightly greater number voted for two girls (Amanda, me, Meredith, Juliette), which seems to me only right and proper. Lolita, true to form, offered up a threesome with Katherine Hepburn, Robert Montgomery and Kay Francis, under the indulgent directorial eye of George Cukor. Which would have been the judge's choice, but for the utterly charming suggestion from Elizabeth, via her mother: "Buster Keaton and Lillian Gish together, in which they do nothing but blink their great big cow eyes at each other."
Questions 6 & 7:
These, I have to say, surprised me. On the matter of pre-Petrified Forest Bette, Amanda abstained, Meredith went for Parachute Jumper "simply because her Alabama accent is absolutely adorable", George for Three On a Match because it was the only one he'd seen, ditto Mykal and Of Human Bondage ("and she was too cute by half"), Millie ("I'm not a huge Bette fan") chose 20,000 Years in Sing-Sing because she'd "always been fascinated by her hair in the trailer" and Elizabeth declared flatly "I don't like Bette" and didn't vote at all. In the final count, Mykal reluctantly helped Of Human Bondage to a three-vote win, but nobody who voted for it seemed that enthused: Lolita liked Bette's performance ("she's almost creepy, and yet sad, and yet... very creepy") but thought the film "wasn't great", while Samuel Wilson's vote was for "Of Human Bondage, I guess." Still, democracy's democracy, and three half-hearted votes for Of Human Bondage outweigh two certain ones for Ex-Lady (Angela and I).
Post-Mildred Joan Crawford proved equally unenthusing, with Meredith and George both going for Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? because it was the only one they'd seen, and Elizabeth ("I tend to avoid post-Mildred Pierce Joan Crawford; she got a little too weird for me") and Millie ("REALLY don't like Joan Crawford's acting") both opting out entirely. So again, despite a committed pair of votes for Johnny Guitar from Samuel Wilson and Juliette ("I just adore seeing gals in westerns"), Lolita's third vote for Baby Jane gets it the prize.
Question 9:
Mykal doubted the existence of any Chaplin talkies, Millie and Amanda didn't vote and George put an exclamation mark after suggesting A Countess From Hong Kong, but as expected, this settled down into a straight fight between The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight, with Verdoux winning, with three votes (Samuel Wilson, Juliette and Lolita) to its rivals' two apiece.

Question 10:
Favourite British actor and actress brought forth a record 25 votes, with the gongs going to Deborah Kerr for the ladies, who romped home with three votes (George, Samuel Wilson and Meredith), and for the chaps, with two votes each, a tie between wheezy Robert Donat (Juliette and Millie), Cary Grant (Amanda and Meredith) and Charles Laughton (me and Samuel Wilson). And Laughton wins because I voted for him and what I says goes. The judge also acknowledges the excellent taste of Millie (who included Dame May Whitty among her record eight choices) and Elizabeth (who plumped without rival or hesitation for George K. Arthur because of his "Gussie Fink-Nottle lisp").
Question 11:
Favourite thirties star in a post-sixties role was almost a three-way tie between Boris Karloff, Buster Keaton and Joan Blondell. But Keaton drops out because he was nominated for two different appearances: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by George and an episode of The Twilight Zone by Elizabeth. So that just leaves Karloff in Targets (me and Samuel Wilson) and Joanie in Grease (Angela and Lolita) duking it out... and I suppose this time I should let the ladies have it. The Good Taste Award to Meredith, however, who chose Barbara Stanwyck in The Thorn Birds.
Questions 12-14:
The either-ors generated less controversy than I expected. Dietrich took Garbo with a convincing seven vote victory (despite Elizabeth claiming to come from "a family of Dietrich-despisers", Lolita voting Garbo against her every instinct because she is "my country girl" and a disgruntled George at first opting for either Diebo or Garbrich, and only settling on Marlene after a coin-toss). Lugosi bested Karloff (and oh, how that would have pleased him) by the same margin (with Juliette giving her vote to Bela on the unusual grounds that he is the more debonair). Chaplin and Keaton went 50-50 (5 votes each and one abstention), but I suppose Stone Face has it, because while there was a general feeling of 'I love them both', Keaton got a "no hesitation" from George, and Lolita started off saying Chaplin but then panicked and refused to confirm it.

Level-pegging on Questions 16 and 17, with Ninotchka (Meredith, Lolita and George) sharing the favourite Melvyn Douglas film trophy with Mr Blandings (Amanda, Elizabeth and Millie) and seeing off The Old Dark House (Samuel Wilson and me), and Citizen Kane and It's a Wonderful Life arm-in-arming for best box-office failure, with a sneaky one vote each from Meredith, Angela going for the wonderful old Building and Loan and Millie for Rosebud.
Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story proved Question 18's most popular drunkard (with Lolita, Angela and George all offering to help keep him upright and get him home safely), though the judge is respectful of the fact that Juliette said the magic words Una Merkel, and Gig Young managed a vote each for two different films. I just can't believe nobody voted for Arthur Houseman.
Question 20, favourite non-comedy American silent was a walk in the park for The Big Parade (me, Angela and Elizabeth), with nothing else getting more than one vote other than Sadie Thompson, part of Lolita and Juliette's multiple answers.
But Question 21, favourite Jean Harlow performance, proved a tie between Red Dust (me and Meredith) and Dinner at Eight (Angela and Elizabeth), and with Mykal confessing to having never seen one and never intending to ("Hate the woman"). I suggest a look at Beast of the City (incidentally Juliette's choice), or failing that Red-Headed Woman (Lolita's) - we'll get that man converted.
Orson Welles picked up three actor-only votes for The Long Hot Summer in Question 23, though Millie hoped nobody was watching her at the time and Juliette split her vote with Three Cases of Murder, a British film that only she and I have seen since its release in 1955. Amanda deserves praise of some sort for choosing The Muppet Movie. But the judge's decision is final, and the winner is the pissed out of his skull Paul Masson champagne commercial voted for by Lolita, in which he begins each aborted take with the same guttural howl of existential despair, but then somehow segues it into a rambling speech about the merits of Californian champagne. This tops anything in Citizen Kane for me.
George and a shared vote from Millie helped One, Two, Three claw its way to a two-vote victory for a non-dancin', non-shootin' Cagney at Question 24. Angela, Amanda, Meredith and Elizabeth all declined this one, with Elizabeth adding the information that, as well as Dietrich despisers, her family is also "a society of Cagney haters", opining that his dancing "hurts to watch".
Question 25 split Lubitsch fans - formerly one, small happy family - into snarling factions of To Be Or Not To Be supporters (Meredith, George and Millie, the latter of whom reckons to have seen it 33,269 times: three times more than I've seen Abbott & Costello In The Foreign Legion), Ninotchka devotees (Elizabeth, Samuel Wilson and George again, a potentially useful peacemaker between the two camps), and rabid Trouble In Paradise obsessives (Mykal, Lolita and Juliette). Actually there was very little passion - I'm just trying to big it up - and Juliette's, like George's, was a split vote, so the judge gives it to To Be Or Not To Be on the grounds that Carole Lombard is foxier than Garbo. Though actually I voted for Design For Living with Miriam Hopkins ...
and that brings us to Question 26: The Big Fight
First, let the record show that as far as votes are concerned, Stanners KO's Miriam eight to three.

With one abstention (me: too close to call), Miriam picked up only two votes. (Elizabeth thought she "looks meaner".)
Just compare that to the confidence oozing from the Stanwyck camp:
Meredith - "Barbara Stanwyck hands down. Don't mess with Brooklyn, boys and girls. No one slaps her around unless she wants them to."
Juliette - "You kidding? Well, Bette shook Miriam around, and Barbara could totally take Bette, so it’s Barbara Stanwyck by a mile-- and she wouldn’t even break a sweat. She wouldn't have to put a doorknob in her glove for it, either..."
Samuel Wilson - "Don't know why Hopkins is even in competition."
But Mykal, the other Miriam supporter, is entirely confident he's backed the right mare:
"Stanwyck was all talk and no walk. Hopkins was the velvet hammer! For those answering Stanwyck – Pffft. Whatever."
My own feeling is that what we're seeing here is partly support for Stanners, rather than an impartial assessment of form, and partly a misjudging of Miriam based largely on mid-thirties and later performances, especially Old Acquaintance, in which Bette gives her a good hiding and she just stands there and takes it. Mykal, I suspect, is coming at Miriam from a pre-Code direction, and thinking of her spunky, feisty brawlers; her cockney prostitute in Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde and trampy nightclub chanteuse in 24 Hours. This was the Hopkins I had in mind, the one that Bette's biographer Charles Higham calls "a pretty, blonde, ruthless bitch: hard-bitten, mean-tempered... She would fling herself into a chair, spread her legs wide as a stevedore's and throw down martinis as though they were lemonades... She was jealous, consumed with hatred, petulant, self-pitying, coarse, bloody-minded."
Tell me that girl can't take on poochy little Ruby Stevens!

Questions 28 and 29: You Can't Take It With You wins the favourite Lionel Barrymore role title with a decisive four votes (Meredith, me, Juliette and Elizabeth), with Meredith calling his household "the greatest fictional family ever created" (technically true, since the family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was based partly on fact) and Dottie beating Paulette as best Bob Hope gal by a narrow five to four (despite George's assertion that "the correct answer is Jane Russell").
Which brings us - and not before time, you say - to the thirtieth and final question: which thirties film from each of the six majors would you save from the blazing inferno that consigns all else to non-existence.
No other question found the participants quite so blatant in their resorting to subterfuge. Mykal opted to save the entire Universal horror sequence and leave MGM, Paramount, Columbia, Warners and RKO to fend for themselves. (I do see where he's coming from, though.) Amanda left Paramount to the flames while she dashed back into RKO for some more Ginger Rogers. George claimed his tears would work as a sprinkler system. Angela thought she could get out of Warner Brothers with a Busby Berkeley box-set. Then there are those who refused even to try. I don't want to name names. Elizabeth. And Millie, who chose to daydream about being rescued by burly firemen while her country's cinematic heritage went up in choking black smoke. Tut-tut.
Nonetheless, a few patterns emerged from the inferno. Though no single film appeared more than once for Paramount, MGM or RKO, the Marx Brothers nonetheless figured thrice in the Paramount bag, with me retrieving Animal Crackers, Lolita braving the flames for Monkey Business and Meredith risking life and limb for the sake of Duck Soup. Likewise Ginger (with and without Fred) dominated the RKO haul, with The Gay Divorcee (me) and Top Hat (Amanda and Meredith), Stage Door (Juliette) and the illegal saving of Bachelor Mother and Vivacious Lady by Amanda when she should have been at Paramount. Cecil B. DeMille did well too, with me opting to let Madam Satan represent thirties MGM for all time, and Samuel Wilson granting The Sign of the Cross the same privillege at Paramount. But at Universal, Warners and Columbia a greater degree of consensus emerged, with me, Juliette and Lolita all choosing to save Lugosi's Dracula - a surprise victory over two-voters Frankenstein (Meredith and Samuel Wilson) and one-voter Bride of Frankenstein (Angela), while at WB both Lolita and Juliette emerged with blackened faces and Baby Face in their satchels. At Columbia, however, it was Save Frank Capra Day, with three votes for It Happened One Night (me, Lolita and Angela), one for Mr Deeds (Samuel Wilson), and one for Mr Smith (Meredith). Amanda rallied to the Howard Hawks cause with Only Angels Have Wings, and Juliette was still trying to choose between Mr Smith and His Girl Friday when she passed out with smoke inhalation. "Don't judge me," she begs. Shall we?

STOP PRESS! (12/8/9)
New entries from Thea and Panavia999!

To Have and Have Not consolidates its ascent of the Bogart pile thanks to a fourth vote from Thea; Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (Thea and Lolita) and William Powell in Love Crazy (Panavia and Meredith) now distinguish themselves among the stars in drag and raise the men-as-women to women-as-men ratio to eight to five; Thea gives Sons of the Desert an equal lead for Laurel & Hardy, added a fourth vote to Of Human Bondage for Bette and raised Johnny Guitar to joint-leader for Joan.
Thea's levelling vote for Limelight in the best Chaplin talkie was cancelled by Panavia's extra boost for Verdoux.
In the either-ors, both added knockout punches to Dietrich's and Keaton's victories, Thea added to Lugosi's - Panavia abstained but that didn't help Karloff any - and the Dottie-Paulette ratio was preserved by one vote each.
For Melvyn Douglas, Panavia's vote for The Old Dark House brought it level for a moment with Ninotchka and Mr Blandings, but Thea saw Ninotchka to unequivocal victory (and did likewise for Citizen Kane for favourite flop.)
Both voted for Dinner at Eight in the Harlow category, making it the clear winner. Thea's Cagney choice, Man of a Thousand Faces, coincides with mine and makes it joint-winner with One, Two, Three, and a vote each for To Be Or Not To Be and Trouble In Paradise turns the Lubitsch category into a two-horse race, consigning Ninotchka to the also-rans.
I've a feeling Thea's vote for It's a Wonderful Life gives it neck and neck status with You Can't Take It With You in the Barrymore category, and while Panavia - at last! - joined the Hopkins team for the big fight, Thea's siding with Babs did nothing to halt her lead in the polls.
Finally, in the last question, Thea went to RKO for King Kong rather than anything with Ginger Rogers in it, but both upped the Capra quota at Columbia (Mr Deeds for Thea, Miracle Woman for Panavia) and reduced Dracula's supremacy at Universal, with a levelling vote for Frankenstein (Thea) and Bride of Frankenstein (Panavia).
Panavia also pointed out, quite rightly, that I had callously let Fox go the wall when listing studios.
Special mention should be made of the fact that in the 'favourite film that ends with the main character's death' category, Thea went for King Kong, while Panavia provided separate answers for films in which the main characters are a man, a woman, a man and a woman, a man in a western, a child and a donkey.

Thinking caps on, please.

The questionnaire I got from Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule
via Allure has been tempting some of you but others have balked at all the corny, old-fashioned modern films included. I sympathise.
Here, then, is my brand spanking new self-devised classic questionnaire, devoted almost entirely to the thirties and forties.
I COMMAND everyone to have a go, either in my comments or in your own blogs and let me know...

The following have so far posted responses on their own blogs:
Meredith at Or maybe Eisenstein Should Just Relax
Elizabeth at Oh By Jingo! Oh By Gee!

Millie at Classic Forever

Lolita at Lolita's Classics

Juliette at Some Parade

Amanda at A Noodle in a Haystack

Panavia 999 at Stuff

So, thinking caps on (or ask Clara for a lend of hers if yours is at the cleaners) - here goes...
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1. Your favourite Humphrey Bogart film in which he doesn't play a gangster or a private eye. (Oh, and not including Casablanca either.)
2. Your favourite appearance by a star in drag (boy-girl or girl-boy).
3. Your favourite Laurel & Hardy film; short or feature, or one of each. (This will sort out the men from the boys - or perhaps the men from the girls.)
4. Your favourite appearance by one star in a role strongly associated with another star. (Eg: Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade, Grace Kelly as Tracy Lord, Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates...)
5. The thirties or forties star or stars you most think you'd like, but have yet to really get to know.
6. Your favourite pre-Petrified Forest Bette Davis film.
7. Your favourite post-Mildred Pierce Joan Crawford film.
8. Your favourite film that ends with the main character's death.
9. Your favourite Chaplin talkie.
10. Your favourite British actor and actress.
11. Your favourite post-1960 appearance by a 1930's star.
12. Dietrich or Garbo?
13. Karloff or Lugosi?
14. Chaplin or Keaton? (I know some of you will want to say both for all of the above. Me too. But you can't.)
15. Your favourite star associated predominantly with the 1950's.
16. Your favourite Melvyn Douglas movie.
17. The box-office failure you most think should have been a success.
18. Your favourite performance by an actor or actress playing drunk.
19. Your favourite last scene of any thirties movie.
20. Your favourite American non-comedy silent movie.
21. Your favourite Jean Harlow performance.
22. Your favourite remake. (Quizmaster's definition: second or later version of a work written as a movie, not a later adaptation of the same novel or play.)
23. Your favourite Orson Welles performance in a film he did not direct, not including The Third Man.
24. Your favourite non-gangster or musical James Cagney film or performance.
25. Your favourite Lubitsch movie.
26. Who would win in a fight: Miriam Hopkins or Barbara Stanwyck? (Both in their prime; say in 1934 or so.)
27. Name the two stars you most regret never having co-starred with each other, and - if you want - choose your dream scenario for them. (Quizmaster's qualification: they have to be sufficiently contemporary to make it possible. So, yes to Cary Grant and Lon Chaney Jr as two conmen in a Howard Hawks screwball; no to Clara Bow and Kirsten Dunst as twin sisters on the run from prohibition agents in twenties Chicago, much though that may entice.)
28. Your favourite Lionel Barrymore performance.
29. Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard or Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour? (See note on question 14.)
30. You won't want to answer this, but: there's been a terrible fire raging in the film libraries of all the major studios. It's far too late to save everything. All you can do is save as much as you can. You've been assigned the thirties. All you'll have time to drag from the obliterating inferno is one 1930's film each from Paramount, MGM, RKO, Columbia, Universal and Warners. Do you stomp around in a film buff's huff saying 'it's too hard, I can't choose just one' and watch them all go up in smoke? Or do you roll your sleeves up and start saving movies?
But if the latter: which ones...?

The Smoke Thickens ...

WARNING: This post includes photographs of people smoking, and should not be viewed by anyone under eighteen years of age.

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More interesting info has come to light relating to the decision made by somebody (or more likely some body) in Britain to change Audrey Tautou's cigarette into a pen in the poster for Coco Avant Chanel (see post below).

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First, it has been brought to my attention that the poster has been causing similar trouble - in France itself!

Though the ciggie image has been widely seen on cinema billboards, magazines and tv, it ran foul of the law on French public transport. Metrobus, which regulates advertising on Paris buses and trains is stretching the meaning of a law banning the “direct or indirect” promotion of smoking, intended purely to prevent tobacco advertising, and has insisted that the original image be replaced by a bland pic of Audrey stood next to the male lead. (At least they didn't use the pen.)

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But here is an even more shocking example of Metrobus madness.

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Kate at Silents & Talkies has alerted me to the above: Metrobus's crass defacement of Tati's pipe on the poster of a major exposition!

This, at least, has caused un petit furore, as reported by the Daily Telegraph's French correspondent Henry Samuel:

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The move was decried as ridiculous by both the health minister and Claude Evin, the man responsible for drawing up the tobacco advertising law. He said it shouldn’t be applied when it came to France’s “cultural heritage”...

Yet despite calls to reason from all sides, Metrobus doesn’t see what the fuss is all about and is sticking to its guns with just the sort of absurd administrative rigidity that Tati would have found hilarious...

(The newspaper) Liberation has been vocally lambasting the Tati airbrushing, mockingly wondering why the authorities didn’t take offence to the fact that he is not wearing a helmet, is riding an old-fashioned, polluting vehicle and that the small boy riding behind him is not seated securely.

”Why not go all the way?” it asked. It has a point.
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This is all running parallel with the incessant campaign in Britain to have smoking banned from movies themselves.

This is terrifying on two counts: because it would give our political masters explicit legal licence to inaccurately shape how reality is presented in movies, the kind of power we associate with totalitarian governments and one entirely incompatible with democracy, and because it could lead to the censoring or even banning of classic movies, in which all the lovely people pretty much smoked like trains.

There's also considerable irony here, too, because the campaign, like the existence of product placement, assumes unquestioningly that movies do have the power to influence their consumers and encourage imitative behaviours and acts - a notion vehemently denied when the time comes to face off those who object to the cinematic glamorisation of more trivial threats to public safety like murder, rape and torture. Suddenly, then, it is the gauchest and most naive notion imaginable.

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This came notably to a head earlier this month when the frankly risible idea of allowing a bunch of attention-seekers to occupy the vacant fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in rotation got off to a rousing start when it was hijacked by a protester. Protesting what, you may wonder? The ever-encroaching state and its fascistic intrusions into individual conscience and private life?

Nah. Try again.

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Leading the charge in Britain is a sinister organisation called Ash, dedicated to the complete criminalisation of all smoking everywhere.

Its creepy spokeswoman Amanda Sandford recently expressed her approval of an idea to have films in which characters smoke reclassified as 18, the equivalent of the American X certificate. “Where there is a lot of smoking in a film or where actors are making it look cool then I think there is a case for making it an 18,” she has said. (This will of course make Casablanca illegal for viewing by anyone under eighteen years of age. And that's just the first film that came into my head.)
When child wizard Daniel Radcliffe sparked up on stage during a production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus (which would already now be illegal under British law, along with any smoking in an enclosed public place) she warned: “It is regrettable that he is smoking, whatever the circumstances. He is a role model for young people and if he decided to take up smoking in real life that would be of great concern… Even though it is an act, nicotine is highly addictive and he could find himself hooked.”

Hands up anyone else who thinks it would be “of great concern” if Daniel Radcliffe started smoking in real life…
No?

Just you, then, Amanda.

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Terrifyingly, though, the idea is catching on.

From Metro, Monday March 17th, 2008:

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Films featuring smoking could be slapped with an 18 certificate to stop children being encouraged to take up the habit.
The ban could hit many children's favourites including Walt Disney's 101 Dalmatians, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Pinocchio. The call for the age limit to be raised has come from Liverpool City ­Council which is threatening to overrule the British Board of Film Classification.
It claims research shows that young people are heavily influenced by ­seeing smoking depicted on the big screen.

'The international evidence is that one in two children between 11 and 18 who witness smoking in movies actually experiment with – and therefore start – smoking,' said Andy Hull, of Liverpool council.
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As opposed to those hordes of children between 11 and 18 who don't witness smoking in movies. (They would be what scientists call a control group, essential for any such statistical inference to make any kind of sense.)

Incidentally, this is the same Andy Hull - Liverpool’s head of ‘public protection’ - who the year before last decided to tackle the problem of pigeons (Liverpool's second most pressing social menace after smoking) by using computer-controlled ‘robo-falcons.’ These are fibre glass birds of prey that slightly move and raise their wings every so often, and a bargain at just £1850 each, plus £80 for the mounting base and £95 for a ‘rotating arm’, or a mere £3450 for two of them on a 20 foot pneumatic pole.
They may seem expensive. But don't worry. According to Emma Haskell (director of PiCAS UK, an independent advisory body on the issue of bird control), they are also “completely ineffective”.

According to her, “The robotic hawks are almost laughable as a method of control and the cost associated with buying and installing the product...simply cannot be justified.”
So that’s Andy Hull, head of public protection at Liverpool City Council.

Strange days, my friends, strange days.

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.................................."Put it out or I'll shoot."

Why is Audrey Tautou smoking a fountain pen?

Here's Audrey Tautou in her pyjamas and drawing deep on a Gauloise, enticing pushovers like me to go and see Coco Avant Chanel. (I obeyed her doe-eyed command last night.)
And here she is again in the poster seen in British cinemas: same pose, same eyes, same pyjamas but instead of the fag, a preposterous pen.
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Perhaps she's taking a course in something... utopian-idealist censorship in cinema advertising, maybe.
What bothers me about this in particular is that I don't know exactly who has done it, or with how much authority.

For all I know, our beloved government, which seems to pride itself on inventing new laws even more quickly than it invents new offences, may have actually got this on the statute books; a sub-clause perhaps, in the law banning cigarette advertising. (In addition, cigarettes may not be featured in advertising...)

Far more likely, however, is that this is a voluntary gesture on the part of the film company, but in a way that's even more creepy. Because voluntary is not the same thing as unilateral, and it means that somewhere someone has exerted pressure. And I don't know who, or what form of pressure, or how much. The new-morality Kray twins have sent some of the boys round, it seems. (But all in a good cause so OBVIOUSLY THAT'S OKAY - right, everybody?)

Perhaps they should have cut their losses and gone with this weird and misleading American one, which has a kind of sixties, Warhol factory feel about it:

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The film itself is a respectable, unsurprising and unsurprisingly handsome trot through a not terribly interesting life-story; painless, very easy on the eyes and schematic to a fault: all it lacks is the cartoon light bulb appearing over her head every time she sees a bale of black cloth or gets her first glimpse of a Breton fisherman's striped shirt.
I was amused to see Benoît Poelvoorde, who had slipped from my consciousness entirely since his face, fifteen years younger and thinner, had adorned many an undergraduate wall back in my university days, pointing a gun at you on the poster for a ridiculous film called C'est arrivé près de chez vous (Man Bites Dog, 1993) which at the time had seemed sufficiently controversial to be mistaken for important, worthy and, if you were a student, cool. He's very good in this, however, so all is forgotten (again).

I haven't mentioned Audrey, but it would just be embarrassing blather with all critical sobriety switched off and the full compliment of hysterical adjectives, so I'll spare you.

Two great film reviews

The Times on Antichrist:

"Finally, two long months after its controversial Cannes Film Festival debut, during which time we’ve endured a near constant chorus of hysterical and mostly ill-informed media mewling, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist arrives in arthouse havens around the country this weekend. And with it comes the only question left unasked about a film that has been variously decried as hateful misogyny, celebrated as ironic torture-porn and derided as meaningless naval-gazing: is it worth the price of admission?
The answer, typically, is both yes and no. “No”, if you are of a nervous disposition and suspect that you might be psychologically traumatised by the sight, in momentary close-up, of an ersatz vulva being manhandled by the props department. But “yes” if you believe in the profound possibilities for personal expression that the medium can offer, or if you’ve ever sensed, however briefly, the eerie shadow of bestial individualism that haunts all human relationships."

That's all human relationships. Yours. Your mum and dad's.
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For this, essentially, is a snapshot of the Danish director’s Id taken, allegedly, during one of his darkest depressions. And as such it seems to offer the viewer a fundamental creative choice. We can scoff and dismiss it as the last gasp ravings of a deranged opportunist. Or we can look, unflinchingly, at Von Trier’s fantastically painful mirror and acknowledge the Id within us all. Now that is scary.

Ah, the British art scene. Where Freud never died, and if you're not a pervert there must be something wrong with you. Speak for yourself, you pompous fool.
This one's more fun. It's The Guardian on Bruno:

I've never felt more grateful for being working class than after watching Bruno...
In fact, his preoccupation with male genitalia and anal sex is so tedious, it makes you forget the real outrage: the inequality of the class system. If private schools and Oxbridge educations can have such an infantalising effect on people's imagination, the middle classes can keep them...
Bruno is simply smutty public-school trash, evidence of how deranged someone's sexual outlook becomes when straight-jacketed by bourgeois convention. It doesn't challenge any social prejudices; indeed, most of the explicitly tawdry scenes don't involve any unwitting homophobes. They are simply vehicles for Baron Cohen to express how hilarious he thinks it is for men to get sexually intimate. But as Freud knew all too well, our sense of humour gives away our repressed subconscious desires.

"His preoccupation with male genitalia and anal sex is so tedious, it makes you forget the real outrage: the inequality of the class system."!
"As Freud knew all too well..."!
Just priceless, priceless idiocy.

Piccadilly (1929): Pabst out-Pabsted... and a new old look for the Phoenix

London sucks, as everyone who lives here knows.
But at least my particular corner of it has more than its fair share of attached film history.
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Within walking distance was the home and studio of the great British pioneer R W Paul (1869-1943), who shot much of his work on the streets of my neighbourhood, and filmed re-enactments of the Boer War on nearby Muswell Hill golf course.
Just up the road from him, his colleague and rival Birt Acres (1854-1918) - the two made the first ever British film together but parted acrimoniously - gave the first ever public exhibition of projected film in Britain in 1896, one month before the Lumière Brothers.
Meanwhile, nearby Highgate Cemetery plays final host not only to creepy, crappy old Karl Marx but also to the far more worthy William Friese-Green.
There is a degree of controversy as to the true extent of Friese-Green's legacy, but he was certainly a hugely important figure, generally credited with inventing the cinematograph and being the first man to ever see moving pictures on a screen, as well as an innovator who contributed to the invention of colour and stereoscopic film. (Sadly, his inventions did not make his fortune: spiralling overheads plunged him into bankruptcy. After a spell in a debtor's prison he lived out his life in obscurity and poverty; he collapsed and died immediately after rising to his feet and spouting gibberish at a meeting of film entrepreneurs in London in 1921.)
What else? Well, from 1911 the production company The British and Colonial Kinematograph Company were based just around the corner from me, shooting their films in and around a customised house, somewhat in the manner of Hammer at Bray studios.
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Then, finally, there is my local cinema. The Phoenix, as it is now known, was built as the Premier Electric Theatre in 1910 and has been here ever since, making it Britain's oldest constantly-operational purpose-built cinema.
The only problem with the Phoenix is the bland, spit and hardboard foyer, and, by and large, the choice of films. There are some rep screenings, but an awful lot of new pseudo-arty/quasi-indie/would be-non-mainstream drek. Just the fact that it isn't Spiderman isn't enough to make it good, you know.
Ah, well. Whether this may change in the future is a moot question - partly because they have an audience suggestions book in which several people have requested more repertory (and one person repeatedly asks for Charles Bronson movies), and partly because it has just been awarded a grant to cover its full restoration to glowing thirties splendour.
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How often do you get the chance to see a silent film in an auditorium where it may well have been shown on its first run? For that I'll forgive the Phoenix anything, even its bizarre habit of inviting Ken Loach over for a Q&A session every time he's got some rotten new film to hawk. "Why are you such a humourless old fraud?", "If you could only obliterate Britain or America which would you choose and why?" and "Can you give me the address of your hairdresser?" are just some of the questions he doesn't get asked at these events.

Ah, but. Piccadilly. A revelation on the big screen, and a strong contender for my favourite silent film of all time, accompanied live, as usual, by Stephen Horne, the only man I've ever seen play a piano and a flute at the same time while watching a film in the dark.
Piccadilly is steeped in the atmosphere of twenties London - as charming and evocative as the American Jazz Age, but very different - and dazzlingly designed and photographed, mainly by imported co-production Germans. It is vivid, and intense, in a manner rarely associated with British films.
The closest comparison would be with Pabst: there is much of Pandora's Box here; but it's even better.
Anna May Wong as Shosho should be as iconic and widely-celebrated as Brooks's Lulu and I honestly don't know why she is not. She is as captivating as Louise, as luminously photographed, and fully as modern in her light, naturalistic acting style. (Also giving a quiet little lesson in screen acting is Charles Laughton, in a short featured cameo as a bad-tempered diner.)

It's a film that has to be seen on a big screen: the BFI's DVD is certainly gorgeous (but for Neil Brand's horrid new score), but the detail - especially of the Piccadilly Club itself - is lost on tv. This is a film that truly overwhelms you, in composition, lighting, performance, and in sheer style.

(Thanks to Silver Strands for the screen shots.)

Benny or Barrymore?

There's a great questionnaire over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, which I got to via Allure.
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Some are impossibly hard - I mean, do you have a favourite use of high-definition video on the big screen? - and some are just plain fiendish. But it certainly gets you thinking.
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Here are my answers, and I officially call on absolutely everyone to join in.
Happy head-scratching!
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1) Second-favorite Stanley Kubrick film.
Tricky. Hate so many, can stand so few. Of those that seem to me to be most tolerable, I suppose the second most tolerable (after Lolita) is The Shining.
2) Most significant/important/interesting trend in movies over the past decade, for good or evil.
Unsimulated sex in mainstream narrative cinema
3) Bronco Billy (Clint Eastwood) or Buffalo Bill Cody (Paul Newman)?
Clint. No question.
4) Best Film of 1949.
Abbott & Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff
5) Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) or Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore)?
Tough - but Oscar has it, just.
6) Has the hand-held shaky-cam directorial style become a visual cliché?
Is Bob Hope a Catholic?
7) What was the first foreign-language film you ever saw?
I can't remember. Another of the many advantages of growing up with BBC-2.
8) Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) or Mr. Moto (Peter Lorre)?
If only they were all this easy. Mr who?
9) Favorite World War II drama (1950-1970).
The Great Escape (1963)
10) Favorite animal movie star.
Mut (A Dog's Life [1918])
11) Who or whatever is to blame, name an irresponsible moment in cinema.
The Moon is Blue (1953)
12) Best Film of 1969.
Taste the Blood of Dracula
13) Name the last movie you saw theatrically, and also on DVD or Blu-ray.
Theatrically - Piccadilly (1929). (It was yesterday, by the way: I have been to the cinema since 1929, albeit only once or twice.) On DVD - The Tuxedo with Jackie Chan and Jennifer Love Hewitt in sexy specs.
14) Second-favorite Robert Altman film.
No answer possible. I don't have a second favourite disease either. Or a second favourite fascist.
15) What is your favorite independent outlet for reading about movies, either online or in print?
So many blogs.
16) Who wins? Angela Mao or Meiko Kaji?
Purely on the basis of a Google image search, I'd have to go with Meiko.
17) Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) or Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly)?
Jennifer Tilly, hands down.
18) Favorite movie that features a carnival setting or sequence.
Freaks (1932)
19) Best use of high-definition video on the big screen to date.
See question 14
20) Favorite movie that is equal parts genre film and a deconstruction or consideration of that same genre.
An American Werewolf In London (1981)
21) Best Film of 1979.
Moonraker
22) Most realistic and/or sincere depiction of small-town life in the movies.
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
23) Best horror movie creature (non-giant division).
George Zucco's Mexican Flying Serpent
24) Second-favorite Francis Ford Coppola film.
The Conversation is the only one I like. Of the rest, the only ones I can see anything in at all (ie: interesting visual style) are One From the Heart and Dracula, and of the two, the one with least else wrong with it is One From the Heart.
25) Name a one-off movie that could have produced a franchise you would have wanted to see.
Freddy Got Fingered
26) Favorite sequence from a Brian De Palma film.
The screen tests in The Black Dahlia. But everything else the man's ever done: just terrible.
27) Favorite moment in three-strip Technicolor.
Any moment in Singin' in the Rain. But two-strip is more fun.
28) Favorite Alan Smithee film.
The Birds 2: Land's End (1994)
29) Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) or Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau)?
No idea who either of these characters are, but it's a pretty fair bet the correct answer is Walter Matthau.
30) Best post-Crimes and Misdemeanors Woody Allen film.
Anything Else (2003)
31) Best Film of 1999.
Had no ready answer for this so did a net search - turns out it was probably the bleakest year for movies in the medium's history: American Beauty, Star Wars 4, Notting Hill, Being John Malkovich, The Mummy, The Spy Who Shagged Me, In Dreams, The Bone Collector... and I could go on. How did we get through it?
Yet, somehow, amidst all this madness and shallow ambition, they accidentally made the best film of the whole decade: The Straight Story.
32) Favorite movie tag line.
"The Hero Is A Berk." (Top Secret)
33) Favorite B-movie western.
Apache Drums (1951) - a great Val Lewton movie still awaiting its due.
34) Overall, the author best served by movie adaptations of his or her work.
W. Somerset Maugham
35) Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) or Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard)?
Oh Carole.
36) Favorite musical cameo in a non-musical movie.
The girl in the radiator in Eraserhead
37) Bruno (the character, if you haven’t seen the movie, or the film, if you have): subversive satire or purveyor of stereotyping?
Taking the question at face value: purveyor of stereotyping. Strange question though.
38) Five film folks, living or deceased, you would love to meet.
Charles Laughton, Fay Wray, Cecil B De Mille, Clara Bow, Robert Benchley. (Jennifer Love Hewitt came in sixth.)

Patricia Roc: Always the bridesmaid

Nearly three million British cinemagoers annually voted for their favourite British films and stars in the Daily Mail National Film Awards, inaugurated in 1945 to “acknowledge the new prestige of British films, won in the worst days of the war.”

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Margaret Lockwood held the title of top female star in the ’46, ’47 and ’48 polls, but in third, sixth and third place respectively was an actress whose name, perhaps, no longer comes readily to those recalling the great British stars of the forties: Patricia Roc.

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There's something about the British film industry - because it's small and insular, the pressure on the stars, and the relentlessness of the scrutiny to which they are subjected, tends to be much greater than in Hollywood, where it is more evenly spread over a vastly larger pool of talent. British star careers have a tendency towards rapid ascent and fall, as minor fluctuations in popularity and box-office returns are magnified beyond reason. F. Maurice Speed's Film Review Annual calls 1948 Patricia's comeback year, in that it saw her return to third place from her previous ranking of sixth: how ignominious to be the sixth most popular actress in the country!

And indeed, Lockwood's own descent after '48 was more or less instant. There's something ruthless about the British in this regard. They like clean starts. Nobody went to see George Formby in George In Civvy Street (1946), his big post-war picture, even though his jagged-toothed cheeriness helped them win it. He never made another movie. They kicked out Winnie and they kicked out George and they kicked out Margaret.

And Patricia, always hovering around the pinnacle of stardom and never quite hitting the gong, was never allowed to become the steadily-working, confident, popular actress she should have been. It's as if she was always auditioning, always under pressure.

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It’s a shame, because as well as being a great natural beauty, she appeared in several of the decade’s most successful and memorable films, and her cheery, peaches and cream demeanour enlivened many more. But then, perhaps that wholesome cheeriness is part of the problem.

Patricia Roc was the good girl of forties films, the alter ego, in a sense, of Lockwood, with whom she co-starred three times, and who had successfully changed her screen image during the war years from ingénues to bodice-bursting villainesses in a run of hugely successful melodramas for Gainsborough studios. With all eyes on Lockwood it was easy to overlook the contributions made by Roc.

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For instance, take The Wicked Lady (1945). It's their most famous collaboration and, for both of them now, probably their best-remembered film. Lockwood is the one who gallops through the film robbing stagecoaches, sneaking through secret passages, killing saintly old men with poisoned blackcurrant cordial, and getting raped by highwaymen who have just survived their own hanging. Meanwhile, Patricia, as Lockwood’s childhood friend, tiptoes about being pure and forgiving and good, standing nobly by as the wicked Lady Skelton callously steals both her fiancé and the audience’s attention.

Roc later admitted: “The character infuriated me. She was a saccharine-sweet little ninny who stood back and allowed another woman to snatch her lover. The only time I had any respect for her was when she lost her temper and walloped Margaret Lockwood across the face.”

It doesn't matter that Roc is fully the equal of Lockwood as a beauty, nor that her costumes proved equally troublesome to the Hays Office, who demanded costly, cleavage-concealing retakes before it could be passed for sensitive American eyes. She simply doesn't get a look-in.

With Lockwood cornering the market in Gainsborough's bad girls, Roc carved herself a niche as, in her own words, “the bouncy, sexy girl next door that mothers would like their sons to marry and the sons wouldn't have minded.”

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................ Patricia Roc: The sons wouldn't have minded

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Patricia Roc was born Felicia Herold in 1915 in Hampstead, the adopted daughter of a Dutch-Belgian father and a half-French mother.

She was educated at Francis Holland School, Regent's Park, in London and Bertram Gables Boarding School in Kent, before a spell at a Parisian finishing school and, finally, RADA. From here she made her stage debut in a 1938 London revue, and was instantly snapped up by Alexander Korda and then signed long-term by J. Arthur Rank, who called her "the archetypal British beauty."

Over the next few years she appeared in a number of popular films, attracting good reviews and appreciative audience response, but it was the war that pushed her to the forefront of screen stars.

Her fresh-faced beauty and healthy, optimistic demeanour seemed tailor-made for the times, and two films in particular capitalised on this quality magnificently. After a scene-stealing role in support of Vera Lynn in We'll Meet Again (1942), she was cast by producers Launder & Gilliatt in the episodic film Millions Like Us (1943), now recognised as a classic of British cinema for its affectionate but unsentimentalised portrait of the British home front. Roc’s performance as a factory worker who falls for a young airman subsequently killed in action was powerful and moving; in particular her character’s stoicism in the face of tragedy struck an understandable chord with contemporary audiences.

As a result, Roc’s screen image became emblematic of the best spirit of the ‘people’s war’, and Launder lost no time in recasting her alongside Phyllis Calvert in 2,000 Women (1944), as inmates of a French concentration camp giving covert assistance to the underground.

That same year, again with Calvert, she made her first foray into Gainsborough melodrama in Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944), and was then paired for the first time with Lockwood in the Cornish-set weepie Love Story, the everyday story of a rugged young man, slowly going blind, falling in love with a terminally-ill concert pianist.

The beautiful seaside settings, specially-composed Cornish Rhapsody and general air of romantic fatalism made it a huge hit, but the really big one was The Wicked Lady the following year, one of those films that drives a wedge of incomprehension and mistrust between critics - who loathed and mocked it - and audiences - who gobbled it down and begged for more. (And got it; in the form of Jassy (1947), with Lockwood as a gypsy girl with the gift of second sight, and Roc as the good girl again.)

In real life, Roc and Lockwood were firm friends, even though they were always cast as love-rivals, for Dermot Walsh in Jassy and Stewart Granger in Love Story (1944), though the latter at least gave Roc a chance to be the spiteful one, payback for "all those namby-pambies I played", as she once put it.

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Warning to American readers: DO NOT look at this woman's cleavage

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In 1946, she became the guinea-pig for a new exchange scheme engineered between Rank and America’s Universal Pictures, whereby each would loan a star to the other. Patricia was chosen to make the trip to Hollywood, where she starred in the western Canyon Passage, again as the losing corner of a love triangle (with Dana Andrews and Susan Hayward) though an off-screen romance with Ronald Reagan was reportedly more successful.

More roles in British films followed, and at last she seemed to be getting the chance to be passionate and uninhibited.

The Brothers (1947), her own favourite of her films, is fantastic, with Roc barefoot as a provocative orphan causing erotic consternation in a Scottish fishing village. The Perfect Woman (1949), a very silly but very funny farce, casts her as a glamour girl who substitutes for a robot look-alike created by her inventor uncle. But though she could not have known it at the time, her career was entering its final phase.

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In 1949 she married André Thomas, the French cinematographer of One Night With You (1948), her only musical. (She had married first in 1939, at the age of 24, to a Canadian osteopath twenty years her senior but the marriage was not a success and lasted only a few years.)

Following her marriage to Thomas she moved with him to Paris, and found work in French and Italian cinema. Thomas died in 1954, and in 1962 she married a third time, to businessman Walter Reif. Shortly after, she announced her retirement from acting, and the couple bought a house on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Switzerland. After his death in 1986, she lived here alone until she too passed away at the age of 88, a day before New Year’s Eve, 2003.

If she had thought herself forgotten, however, she would have been pleased at how the British obituaries reeled off her impressive list of credits and recalled her years spent among the most popular of all British stars.

One called her the epitome of the English rose, and several quoted her typically good-natured opinion of her years of stardom:

“I enjoyed making those films, and, as well as having no fault with the actors I worked with, I remember the make-up girls, the wardrobe people, all the crew members, with true affection.”

Happy 99th, Gloria Stuart!

The great Gloria Stuart, star of Roman Scandals, The Old Dark House and Gold Diggers of 1935, was 99 on July 4th, and while there's nothing much I can add beyond what I wrote here this time last year, I couldn't let the occasion pass without wishing many happy returns (albeit belatedly) to the world's most important living film star.

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Sadly, Dorothy Layton, co-star of a number of Laurel and Hardy shorts, died just two days earlier at the age of 96. This means that, in addition to their many other accomplishments, Gloria and Mary Carlisle are now the last of the 1932 WAMPAS Baby Stars.

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Alongside her many great movie credits, a poster on the IMDB listed the following reasons why Gloria should be treasured:
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She remembers the way California used to look even before the 1st World War; the beaches were covered in sea weed and the trees were only a foot high. From 1918-1924 she practiced dancing and spent hours listening to gramophone records which were brand new at the time, loved to watch silent movies... was a bad girl at school, always dressing like a flapper, smoking and sneaking into nightclubs; graduated in 1927; did theatre work, then became a journalist; met a sculptor in 1929 and became a nude model, they later married; became an actress then toured the world in 1939 watching the different countries prepare for war... did more theatre work; 1950's and onwards became a painter and writer. She still acts and is in good health.

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Here's to her hundredth!

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David Niven: “It’s my absolute duty to be chirpy”

David Niven was a greatly under-rated actor, especially by himself.
In his best selling autobiography The Moon’s a Balloon, he described himself as one who has had “the good fortune to parlay a minimal talent into a long career.”
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In truth, of course, it wasn't minimal at all, merely instinctive, which is something altogether different and much rarer.
It is too easy to forget, because circumstances conspired to ensure that he made surprisingly few great films, just how good he would have been in so many others.
He is one of the few actors, for instance, that you can imagine taking over a Cary Grant role. Very few actors could step into shoes tailored expressly for Grant - but imagine Niven in just about any Grant movie and don't you think he'd have gotten away with it? I can't think of many - perhaps any - others who could.
In particular, I think it's a terrible shame that Hitchcock never got his hands on him. He would have been ideally suited to something like North by Northwest or To Catch a Thief. I suppose The Pink Panther was about as close as he got.
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Throughout his life, Niven went to considerable lengths to maintain the illusion that he owed his fame and fortune to sheer luck, and certainly not to effort, and that his popular image as a good-natured and effortlessly sophisticated rogue was all there was to him.
Charlton Heston recalls a very funny story in his published diaries The Actor's Life, about the time that they appeared in the film 55 Days at Peking (1965):
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I remember sitting at one of the press parties we gave about this time, earnestly explaining the politics of the Boxer Rebellion at great length to some weary journalist. In one of the pauses, I overheard David at the next table talking to his journalist: "Of course, if we get involved in the politics, we're lost."
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But in reality his laid-back flippancy and happy-go-lucky demeanour veiled a man of great intelligence and integrity, who once told an interviewer: “life is really so bloody awful that I feel it’s my absolute duty to be chirpy and try and make everybody else happy too.”
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James David Graham Niven was born into a military family in Belgravia in 1910, the youngest of four children. When he was five, his father was killed at Gallipoli, and his mother re-married to a man who, it has recently been suggested, had been her lover for some time, and was probably Niven’s father. Whatever the truth, it is certain that there was no love lost between Niven and her new husband, and it was largely on account of mutual antagonism that he spent most of his childhood in a succession of boarding schools.
In time he was enrolled at Stowe, where he excelled at cricket, rugby, boxing and fencing, and from there to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, from which he graduated in 1930 as a second Lieutenant.
Posted to Malta with the Highland Light Infantry, however, Niven quickly became bored, and his frustration with the inactivity of peacetime army life brought out his rebellious streak.
One evening in 1933, he had made dinner plans with an attractive female acquaintance, only to find that he was required to attend a compulsory lecture on machine guns, given by a distinguished Major General. At the end of the tedious monologue, the speaker asked if there were any questions. Niven raised his hand. “Could you tell me the time, sir?” he asked, “I have to catch a train.”
As a result, he found himself arrested on a charge of insubordination. With the connivance of his guard he escaped from a first-floor window, took a ship to New York and resigned his commission by on-board telegram.
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After a few months of drifting, during which he tried his hand as a dealer in whisky and even a promoter for a horse rodeo, he found himself in Hollywood in 1934 where, having been told he would make a good actor, he signed on at Central Casting as ‘Anglo-Saxon Type No. 2008’.
A few small roles followed, but he made far more of a name for himself in Hollywood society than he did on screen, and it wasn’t long before producers were hearing of this dashing new British import. As a result, he was signed by producer Sam Goldwyn to a seven year contract.
In 1936 he co-starred with Errol Flynn in The Charge of the Light Brigade. Instantly recognising a kindred spirit in the notorious hellraiser, the two became close friends and eventually moved in together, in a house they nicknamed ‘Cirrhosis by the Sea’. Their escapades here - bawdy, boozy, foolhardy and sometimes not strictly legal - passed into Hollywood legend, and are lovingly recounted in Niven’s books The Moon’s a Balloon and Bring On the Empty Horses.
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By 1939 he was on the verge of stardom, with major roles in Wuthering Heights, The Prisoner of Zenda, Raffles and several others consolidating his growing popularity with international audiences. In particular, he proved the ideal combination of love interest and comic support in two delightfully eccentric romantic comedies: Bachelor Mother with Ginger Rogers, and Eternally Yours with Loretta Young.
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He joined the commandos, took part in the invasion of Normandy, and ended the war with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
Despite his subsequent reputation as one of the film world’s greatest raconteurs, however, he rarely spoke of his war experiences.
He once explained his reticence by recalling an occasion when two of his American friends had asked him to find the grave of their son in a military cemetery in the Ardennes. “I found it where they told me I would,” he explained, “but it was among 27,000 others, and I told myself that here, Niven, were 27,000 reasons why you should keep your mouth shut after the war.”
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Returning to Hollywood in 1946 (after giving one of his very best British performances in Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death, above) he found that he had to rebuild his career from scratch. But his professional difficulties were dwarfed by an appalling personal tragedy.
After a courtship of just two weeks, he had married Primula Susan Rollo, or Primmie as he called her, in England in 1940. They were blissfully happy, and had two sons.
Just six weeks after their return to Hollywood, the couple attended a party at the home of actor Tyrone Power. During a game of hide and seek, Primmie walked through what she had thought was the door of a cupboard, only to tumble down a stone staircase leading to the cellar. She was rushed to hospital with a fractured skull and underwent an emergency brain operation, but died the following day. She was just twenty-eight years old.
Niven recalled the months that followed as the worst of his life.
He attempted suicide, surviving only because his gun failed to fire properly.
Largely so that his sons should not be deprived of a mother he remarried in 1948, to Swedish model Hjordis Tersmeden, but though they never divorced, the marriage was not happy.

As his spirits gradually returned, so did the offers of film work, and he entered his most productive and popular years as an actor. As a virtual synonym for English charm and sophistication, he appeared through the fifties and sixties in such films as Around the World In Eighty Days (1957), The Guns of Navarone (1962) and The Pink Panther (1963) in which, it is often forgotten, his was the lead role. He also received an Oscar for his fine performance in Separate Tables (1957), and found huge new acclaim as an author and chat show guest.

In 1979 he boarded a plane to New York and found himself sat next to an American journalist called Tom Brokaw.
Brokaw later told Niven’s son that for most of the flight Niven had been the most sparkling and delightful company; witty, warm, friendly to all, and hilariously funny.
Then shortly before landing he suddenly said, “The most terrible thing happened to me today,” and went on to confide that he had just been diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease.
Brokaw asked what that meant, and Niven explained without the least self-pity that it was an incurable degenerative condition, that he would slowly lose the use of his limbs and his voice, and that he only had another year or so to live.

When he died, the outpouring of sadness and affection from colleagues, friends and fans was immense. Barry Norman wrote that, of all the film stars he profiled in his tv series The Hollywood Greats, Niven was unique in that not a single person he interviewed had anything but the warmest praise for him.
But perhaps the most telling epitaph came from the card attached to an enormous wreath sent to his funeral by the porters of Heathrow Airport. .
It read: “To the finest gentleman who ever walked through these halls. He made a porter feel like a king.”

Modern films? Thanks, but no thanks

In his essay The Decline and Fall of the Movie, Leslie Halliwell uses the following quote from Jonathan Swift to encapsulate his attitude to the cinema, and in particular to explain how his love of Hollywood's golden age could sit happily alongside an almost total disinterest in and disdain for its present:
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"I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth."
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It's an opinion I more or less share. I too have my Peters and Johns - off the top of my head: Jaws, The Fog, Ghost World and The Straight Story would top the list - but the overwhelming majority of post-sixties cinema leaves me cold.
In particular, I have a loathing for the supposedly great works of seventies Hollywood - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, that one in space with the laser swords and the little robots, forget the name of it for a minute - that verges on the certifiable.
Even films I saw ten years ago and liked rarely hold up for me once a little water has flowed between us. Titanic, for instance, I initially had pegged as a glorious, old-style tear-jerker: the petty resentments of stuck-up critics who mocked the script and performances, I confidently predicted, would come to look as transparent and silly as those few who tried to write off Gone With the Wind. I was amazed to watch it again recently and see that they were right: it's a terrible film. Even the effects no longer impress overmuch: what we took to be realistic was in fact merely state of the art, and the trickery already looks almost as distancing, and fully as much a product of its time, as that of a fifties sci-fi movie.
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Now, by and large, nobody gets uppity when I say that I hate the taste (and indeed the thought) of mushrooms. But for some reason I've often noticed people getting strangely resentful when I say that I don't watch new movies, listen to modern music or watch any television at all, as if I was expressing a judgement about their taste rather than mine.
Some of the more popular responses:
I'm being pretentious.
I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face.
It's a shame I'm so unyielding, because I don't know what I'm missing.

So when I read Kate's post on how she doesn't like new films I was waiting with baited breath to see what the fall-out would be.
Like me, she is a hardliner:

I know everyone around here is pretty obsessed with older films. But I'm not just pro-older films, I'm very anti-newer films. I usually get a very twisted, "you MUST be kidding me" look on my face when anyone, but anyone, asks me to go to see a new film in theaters. And no, renting it from Netflix won't mask the fact that it was made in 2004. It is still a new film, be it in a theater or at home. I'm prone to sulk in my bedroom when my family (who usually share my strict pre-1970 rule) cave in and rent something new.

The response was pretty supportive on the whole, but on other related posts dotted here and there we did begin to see some of that old annoyance rearing its head; in particular the objections that one is being merely 'silly', and also 'elitist'.
But what, on the face of it is so strange, or inconsistent, or hard to accept, about liking old movies and disliking new ones?
And what is elitist about having, and expressing, a preference?
That's the conundrum I intend getting to the bottom of here.

Firstly, though it baffles me personally, there is of course no a priori reason why a person cannot like both classic and modern cinema.
The thing that strikes me as odd is the almost automatic supposition that if one likes the former, one would, or should, like both.
It's a supposition that rarely works the other way round, I've noticed. I wouldn't expect anyone who rushed out to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ("screenplay by Ehren Kruger, based on Hasbro's Transformers action figures": now there's a credit to fill you with hope for the future of the medium) to enthuse about Monroe Owsley, have strong opinions about whether Charley Chase is better in silents or talkies, or feverishly collect Irene Ware films.
Yet when I, to whom all of the above applies, say that I'd rather spend a week underground with a mobile phone salesman than another minute looking at Will Ferrell's face... suddenly I'm the one with the big attitude.
I have known people laugh when I say I regularly watch black and white films, as if I'd said I liked reading Beowulf by candlelight in a Hebridean cave. Black and white! The idea! I've met people who thought I was joking when I said I liked silent films. (Often old people, dismayingly enough.)
Well, choosing to spend ninety minutes in the company of Tom Cruise, or Lars von Trier, or Ken Loach, or Wes Anderson strikes me as pretty wacko too.

But the much more important point is this.
Of course there are some modern films that I have enjoyed, especially from non-English-speaking Europe, where, for the moment at least, both depth and style remain fashionable, but even these do not strike me as examples of the same thing as the classic movies with which I am obsessed.
I mean, what do they really have in common?
Just this (and, increasingly, not even this): they are both forms of visual representation created by passing a beam of light through a strip of celluloid on which photographic impressions of human activity have been recorded.
That's it, ladies and gentlemen. That's the common factor. That's the obvious and vital link that makes Mr Deeds Goes To Town an example of the same thing as Being John Malkovich, and makes me a crank or curmudgeon for loving the one like a firstborn child and hating the other with the kind of passion I ordinarily reserve for religious fanatics and salad.
How dare I?

Yet as I understand it, if you love old Hollywood, not just the list of approved masterpieces but the whole world and scent and flavour of old Hollywood, then you are in love with something that simply does not exist anymore, regardless of how good the occasional half-watchable film may still be on its own terms.
Classic Hollywood cinema is - and I mean this not as a judgement but as a simple statement of fact - a unique phenomenon, product of a unique set of circumstances and individuals, operating in a unique way at a unique point in time.
The studio system, long gone, produced a body of work that is to cinema generally what an illuminated medieval manuscript is to books generally. Shot almost entirely in studios, by contract artists, operating under an imposed censorship system, so that each studio had its own instantly recognisable atmosphere, regular stable of players, and totally artificial style.
This is what I love.
When that changed, as first the studio system and then the Hays Code collapsed, a clear before and after line can be drawn in the product.
The stars migrate from studio to studio, individual studio styles disappear, real locations, widescreens and other forms of pseudo-realism replace the artistic creations of the old studio photographers and set designers with drab singularity, and uniformity of manner and message gives way to a thousand discordant voices all vying to see who can shout loudest for your dollar.
These things, that make the earlier films so fundamentally different from what followed, are the specific things that attract me to them.
I have no passion for modern cinema. Even among the films I admired, hardly any have added something to my life, or given me any strong desire to see them again. Whereas if you told me I had just watched The Old Dark House for the last time I'd cry and fall over. Films are an interest, old Hollywood is a passion.
That's the difference.


or...
It's a judgement call and I'm making it.

Now, this all seems so straightforward to me that I wonder if the problem isn't somewhere in the very terminology we use.
'Classic' is a slippery term. On the one hand it can be used as a judgement - to be deemed a classic is a marker of quality - on the other it is used as a description, to mean films of a certain age. (Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide covers all films pre-1960.)
For most people I think it means a combination of the two - a retrospective bestowing of approval on a film that has been around long enough to have stood the test of time, hence the tentative use of phrases like 'modern classic' or 'future classic' to refer to Fargo or American Beauty or Christ knows what other ordure happens to be flavour of the month this month.
I'd like to see these two meanings divorced, so that we can talk about classical and modern cinema just as we talk of classical and modern music. Yes, everyone knows classical music is better than modern music, especially those who claim otherwise, but that's not what the term means. It refers to a style only, and any related associations of higher quality spring incidentally from the terms of the drawn distinction itself.
So how about continuing to use 'classic' as a qualitative term to recognise individual quality, but 'classical' as a quantitative term to define that whole world, and way of doing things, that existed between the creation of American cinema and the collapse of the original structures and strictures, somewhere in the fifties.

One final point. I do realise I have spoken only about old and new mainstream Hollywood.
Many have written that yes, American pop cinema is a parched field of rotting weeds, but salvation is at hand in the great third way: avant-garde, art and independent cinema.
Personally, I find even less here to attract me than in the average Hollywood blockbuster. If classical Hollywood is Mozart - or at least Puccini - and modern Hollywood is Justin Timberlake, then this lot is Stockhausen. (I even saw Peter Greenaway's name come up - a sobering reminder that there are indeed corners of the world where this pompous buffoon retains the respect long withdrawn by those of us who have to share a country with him.)
I really don't mind whether I see Marley and Me again or not, but if you wanted me to sit through Broken Flowers a second time you'd have to nail me down.
More genuine creativity, inspiration, effort and love of cinema went into Police Academy 6 than Being John Malkovich.

New Blog!

Carfax Abbey is my new blog dealing specifically with horror films.

So if you are hopelessly enslaved to horror, if you can tell within seconds whether you're watching Monogram or PRC, Tigon or Tyburn... if like me you'll happily watch pretty much anything with a few bats and an old castle in it, then do please join me at Carfax Abbey - the locked room in the basement of Movietone News!

My heart belongs to Irene Ware

Sometimes, there's simply no reason at all why some people become stars and others do not.

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And of all the rungs on the Hollywood ladder to find oneself stalled on, it seems to me that 'almost made it' just has to be the loneliest.

The nobodies are anonymous.

Nobody bothers them, nobody points them out in restaurants or asks what ever happened to them, nobody is watching them, or waiting for them to fall.

An actor who's never going to get leads can remodel himself as a character actor. No problem. He may even get a longer career out of it than the stars he envies.

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But if you're a beautiful starlet, it's obvious you're not in the game from a desire to play small parts.

And you are going to get noticed; you'll get that first level of stardom handed to you; that tantalising, tormenting first rung... they'll know your name, they'll see your picture in all the magazines.

But when it comes to wanting to see movies with you in the lead...

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It is these nearly-made-it starlets that have the least armour.

Clearly, they live only to be the name above the title. And if they never make it, the wind must blow hard and cold around those swimsuits.

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I have many favourites among these also-rans, and in almost every case, there's really no good reason in the world why they didn't make that final leap into the vindication of unambiguous stardom.

Talent has very little to do with it: many a star made it without it, many a failure failed in spite of it.

What, I mean what that really mattered, did Marie Macdonald lack?

Just luck. Just the breaks.

And then there's this, from my Wonder Album of Filmland, a pictorial guide to the stars of 1932:

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It is, maybe, a little early to include a picture of JUNE VLASEK in such a gallery as this. Her film career has only just begun and the world has yet to see her real capabilities. But she deserves to appear in any film-land picture display because she really is admitted on all sides to be "the most beautiful girl in Hollywood." You do not need to look very hard to see why.

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And yet... not enough, June; not enough.

You see her here and there. She's in Chandu the Magician (1932), and Bonnie Scotland (1935) with Laurel and Hardy... she kept at it until 1947, did a bit of tv... died in 2005.

And yes, in those early thirties appearances, she really could be the most beautiful woman in Hollywood. But for June, for some reason... not enough.

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Also appearing in Chandu is the actress who is, for me, the undisputed queen of the very-nearlys.

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Irene Ware is most things a Hollywood goddess should be, so far as I am fit to judge.

She has that certain grace, and ease, and slightly aristocratic poise that unites women as different in every other way as Crawford and Colbert and Fay Wray and Kay Francis.

As an actress? Hard to say how good she is: from the little she is given the chance to show, she seems fine.

As a beauty: almost unrivalled.

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Why, then, was Irene Ware not a major Hollywood star of the thirties?

Because the whole thing's a lottery, that's why. Because the whole thing's a joke.

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The IMDB would have me believe that she was crowned Miss United States of 1926, at the age of sixteen. Quite the honour, but not apparently so: I am grateful to Allure, one of my favourite blogs, for this more accurate account:

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Irene Ahlberg was born November 6, 1910 in Pelham, NY. Several references state she was crowned Miss America of 1926. Not so, she was named Miss Greater NY in 1929, and then Miss United States for the Miss Universe competition.

However, this is not the Miss Universe you have come to know and love/hate. This "Miss Universe" was the Galveston, Tex., International Beauty Contest.

Virtually ignored by the U. S. press, the Galveston tournament was big news elsewhere in the world. In Paris, Madrid, Vienna, Rio de Janeiro, editors reported on just what Miss France, Miss Spain, Miss Austria, Miss Brazil were doing, wearing, saying at each instant of the final ceremony. For the record, Austria won and Irene took second, and it was reported as "Irene Ahlberg, a Manhattan stenographer, 18 and blond, won $1,000 and second honors".

I'm guessing she took that $1000 to help the move to show business. From late 1929 through early 1932 Irene appeared in several of Earl Carroll's Vanities broadway productions. Hollywood and a name change to Irene Ware came in 1932 when she signed a contract with Fox.

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The Fox contract brought her one juicy lead, at least, in Chandu, the delightful adaptation of the hit radio serial with Edmund Lowe somewhat stolid and draggy as the mysterious Chandu and Bela Lugosi on full battery as the

villain Roxor.

Irene, as the Princess Nadji, is everything anyone could have reasonably expected the Princess Nadji to be: likeable, attractive in states of peril, spectrally beautiful at all times.

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It led to very little, alas. The old story: she couldn't get out of support roles; always on trial, never given the big shot.

She's sixth-billed but the definite standout in Six Hours To Live (1932), second fiddle to Boots Mallory in Humanity (1933), looking for chances in the shadow of Carole Lombard in Brief Moment (1933) for Columbia.

Back at Fox she was sliding further and further down the cast roll: fourth-ranked female in the pre-Code musical My Weakness (1933), an uncredited showgirl in Moulin Rouge (1935), blink and you'll miss her in The Affairs of Cellini (1934), a film that also conspires to squander Fay Wray.

Presumably, from this rather pointless evidence, someone somewhere, sat behind a desk with gravy stains on his tie, decreed that Irene Ware didn't have what it takes to make it.

She went to other studios, doing the usual juggling act: leads for the fly-by-nights and in-and-outs for the majors. (Look sharp and you'll see her in Gold Diggers of 1937.)

The best news around this time came from Universal, who picked her up for a couple of good spots in Let's Talk It Over (1934) and Rendezvous at Midnight (1935) and gave her her best ever leading chance in The Raven (1935).

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The Raven (above) is the one that breaks your heart. The female lead, reunited with Lugosi, doing screaming in cellars and sophisticated banter with one of my favourite male nearlys - Lester Matthews, the nearly-Melvyn Douglas - she is stunning and she is delightful. If anyone has what it takes, she has what it takes!
Now, I'm not going to pretend that I have not seen this performance criticised, even condemned. The Midnight Marquee book Bitches, Bimbos and Virgins: Women in the Horror Film slams her; calls her "a doll in a silly wig, not a living, breathing person."

Well, there's room for all views, I have no doubt.

All I can say is I'm glad I've not seen that version of The Raven. I'll stick with the one I stayed up later than I'd ever stayed up before in my life - 1:35 am! - to see in the summer of 1983... the one where we first see her curled up on Lugosi's sofa in a shimmering satin dress, he sat at the organ playing Bach's Tocata and Fugue, the desert island disc of all movie mad scientists, she purring "You're almost not a man..."

The one where she dances 'The Spirit of Poe'.

The one where she is absolutely magnificent.

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Could Irene Ware dance? Or is one of the reasons why she wears a mask in this gorgeous scene from The Raven so as to disguise the presence of a dancing stand-in? None is credited...

Obviously, it helps not only that she is in so stylised a production - this is top of the range Universal horror - but also in so intense a drama.

The plot has Lugosi as a great surgeon and Poe-obsessed sadist who saves her life after a car crash and then becomes sexually obsessed with her. When she spurns his advances, he merrily invites her, her boyfriend and her father to his house for a weekend party so as to spend the night torturing them to death in his basement. Here he has built a variety of torture devices inspired by Poe's stories, including his razor-edged pendulum and "room where the walls come together"!

It's ghoulish stuff - Britain put a ban on imported horror films on account of it - and Irene, who could easily have been hopelessly inadequate as the object of murderous erotic obsession, breezes through the role with both a star's beauty and that star's confidence that counts for so much more.

The rest is mainly Poverty Row.

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Many of these thirties films are available on budget DVD: the romantic comedy False Pretenses (1935) and the thrillers Murder at Glen Athol and The Dark Hour (both 1936), in particular, are eminently worth your time and your small change. You can watch them, and almost pretend they were, say, big studio B's. Pretend she's the star she should have been.

Most fascinating of all is King Kelly of the USA (1934), a truly insane Monogram musical. Poverty Row is always compelling when it gets big ideas, and this piece, an absurdist Ruritarian farce with Edgar Kennedy, Franklin Pangborn and a bunch of songs, is strange and funny and consistently delightful, reminiscent of Duck Soup and Million Dollar Legs and suchlike oddities that proliferated around the same time.

Irene is Tania, princess of a fantasy kingdom dependent for its economy on the export of mops, now in dire straits following the invention of the vacuum cleaner. She has an animated love song performed in her honour. She slides down a banister. She is utterly adorable.

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Irene Ware ended her career trying to make a go of things in Britain. No dice. Her last film was Outside the Three-Mile Limit (1940), with Jack Holt doing likewise.

She didn't branch out into television in the fifties.

She died in March, 1993.

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Could she have been a big star? Yes, she could have been a big star.