Jane Randolph (1915 - 2009)

It's happened again: I have to say goodbye to a guest I had no idea was still at the party.

Jane Randolph died earlier this month at the age of ninety-three.

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If forties noir is your thing, no doubt titles like Jealousy (1945) and Railroaded (1947) will mean something to you, and will conjure up a bunch of memories, the majority of them probably visual, and doubtless Jane will be a part of that.

But if you're a slob like me, it's Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein you think of first, where Jane is the blonde good girl, the better to underline the foxy wickedness of Lenore Aubert, who you'll recall has cooked up a scheme with Dracula to put Lou Costello's brain in the skull of the Frankenstein Monster.

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Ordinarily, we can sit here for hours thinking about the moving candle, and the bit with the big pile of suitcases, or the bit where Lou mistakes the sound of the wolf man for that of someone gargling.

But our minds race further, because of course, Jane Randolph is more than just that... she's also sneaky Alice Moore in Cat People (1942) and Curse of the Cat People (1944), two very different masterpieces from producer Val Lewton making for one seriously weird double bill: indeed, quite possibly the most mismatched original and sequel ever. The first is a terrifying psychological horror film, one of the best and scariest ever made, the other a lyrical drama about the imagination of a child, and a beautiful film in its own right.

But why do I call Alice sneaky? I leave that to the judgement of the individual viewer. I'm still undecided how much is scripted, how much merely in the performance, and how much in my imagination. But I do know this: when you watch Cat People with girls, they have their claws out for Alice long before Simone Simon shows hers.

On the surface she's caring, dependable, decent and all that hooey, but she's manipulating Ollie, the big dumb lunk of a hero played by Kent Smith. She's taking him away from his wife, and to me at least she seems to be doing so quite calculatedly and deliberately. She wills poor Simone to madness and self-destruction.

But like so much else in the film, it's all under the surface.

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It's actually very good acting from Jane Randolph, who first got into the movies in the very early forties as uncredited secretaries and hat check girls at Warners, before being picked up by RKO in '42, following a stint as an ice skating model for the animators of Bambi (1942).

Universal borrowed her for Bud and Lou's great contribution to the art of cinema in '48, but it turned out to be her last movie (bar a walk-on in '55): she married, moved to Madrid and became a pillar of Spanish high society. She didn't really need the movies, and they didn't really need her.
Nonetheless, Randolph's image will endure forever, or at least for as long as the love of film endures. Her name may not mean a whole lot to most people, but there are worse things that can happen to a film star.

What Jane Randolph has is a pair of tickets to film immortality. One is for taking a walk in the night, and getting a bus, in one of the scariest mood sequences in horror film history.

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The other is for just possibly topping even that, by taking the movies' scariest ever swim.

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And both in the same film!

Every time you watch these amazing pieces of cinema, you may be thinking about Val Lewton, you may be thinking about Jacques Tourneur, you may even be thinking about Simone Simon. But you're watching Jane Randolph.

And with that, the image fades, and it's all over.
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Postscript (29/6/09): I've just seen Railroaded, and feel compelled to point out that not only is it excellent, but Randolph is absolutey superb in it; she plays not the heroine as I was expecting but as splendid a trampy, hard-boiled dame as was ever essayed by Gloria Grahame or Claire Trevor. A must-see, and further confirmation that Jane Randolph had what it takes.

180 Degrees of John Wayne

Noir Girl's Casey has tagged me, and charged me with the responsibility to "name an actor, actress or director that you started out despising (or just really not liking) but ended up loving. Or vice versa, someone you started out loving and ended up despising (or just really not liking) — and explain why."

(She went for Marilyn Monroe, who I've never really either loved or hated, just always liked a lot, while at the same time been mildly irritated by for reasons that are nothing to do with her so much as the industry that makes her the most boringly over-represented star in Hollywood history, and damns so many others to the shade. Read Casey on Marilyn here.)
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For me... Well, there are plenty of stars that I thought I disliked, from a position of ignorance, and grew to love the more I saw of them: Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Mae West, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable and Gary Cooper to name just a few.

Then there are those that I didn't like then and still don't like now: especially Marlon Brando, James Dean, and that one-woman chamber of horrors, Elizabeth Taylor.

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But stars for whom a positive dislike turned into a positive affection are rarer. In fact, I thought I wouldn't be able to think of any. But then it hit me. There is one. My grandfather's favourite actor: Big John Wayne.

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When I was young and just getting into films, I rejected Wayne for three reasons:
1. Because I simply didn't like westerns very much.

2. Because of his politics.

3. Because he genuinely seemed like a bad actor to me.
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Well, I'm still not a big fan of westerns. I can appreciate a good western, but it has to be a good western. I'll watch any old comedy. The only qualification that an old horror film needs to ensure my rapt attention is that it is, indeed, an old horror film. But westerns still have to be sold to me. It needn't take much. I watched Apache Drums and enjoyed it very much because it was produced by Val Lewton. (The siege at the end is unmistakably the work of old Mr Scary.) I watched Hannie Caulder because it had Christopher Lee in it. I watched The Outlaw for reasons you probably don't need me to explain to you.

My favourite westerns are usually not really westerns at all, but political parables (High Noon) or romantic comedies (Destry Rides Again) or vigilante thrillers (For a Few Dollars More). I’ve still never seen The Searchers or Rio Bravo or True Grit or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and while I would never look away should they come to me, I don't really see myself leaving the house to seek them out in any particular hurry. I saw Stagecoach in my youth; I’d appreciate that supporting cast even more now, though my tolerance for watching horses fall over remains easily exhausted.

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But Wayne I have made friends with. As an actor and as an icon. But really, they're the same thing when it comes to Wayne aren't they? The Mount Rushmore status is indivisibly part of the package, part of what makes him memorable in the first place. That's why it's so fascinating to see him pre-Stagecoach now, to see this obvious divine pretending to be a mere mortal, especially when he's trapped like some tethered ox in a tuxedo or business suit. Watch him in the cheapo romantic comedy His Private Secretary or halfway down the cast of Stanwyck's Baby Love: he looks like a man in hiding from something.

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His simplicity is his strength; it's the point of him. Where once I saw crashing lack of finesse I now see something of that granite-hewn integrity that places him in that select handful of old movie figures whose fame and appeal are effortlessly renewed with each generation.

And as with the man, so with his worldview. It's not so much that I've moved towards Wayne, more that I've moved away from my youthful idealism, and the default cynicism that characterises his detractors. Now I look at them and I see small fry. I imagine some great galvanising moment of major crisis, and I see them running for the windows and doors. What possible use Sean Penn would be on a desert island I dread to imagine. But the Dook would be putting up the bamboo shelters even before the last survivors had staggered ashore.
Jean Luc Godard, with that touching generosity of spirit so characteristic of Marxists, once said that he loathed Wayne for his right wing views but could forgive him anything for the last scene of The Searchers. (I'm the opposite: I find Wayne such an admirable figure it helps me sit through his westerns.) And Barry Norman never misses a chance to tell the stories of his two encounters with Wayne, both of which nearly ended with the Dook punching his blinkers out.

In the first (a press junket to promote True Grit) Norman decided to goad him into a political debate then feign outrage when he took the bait. In the second he made an insulting reference to McCarthy and thought it outrageous and hilarious that Wayne should defend one of his heroes, since the left are never fully able to believe that those with different opinions to theirs truly believe them. (Norman also insists on implicating McCarthy in the Hollywood blacklist; he was at it again in a recent issue of the Radio Times, telling us how McCarthy “presided over” the HUAC hearings. But McCarthy was a senator – ‘Senator McCarthy’, they used to call him – thus he had by definition nothing whatever to do with the HUAC. All McCarthy did was say that there were paid communist agents working for the US government, which there were.)

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Get off your horse, drink your milk, and spark up a Camel.

Get off your horse, drink your milk, and help yourself to a cookie. You can't get a cookie jar shaped like Sean Penn, you'll notice.
The famous scene from The Searchers in which Wayne is abducted by Apaches and dragged to their reservation. Or possibly Glenna Finney, a tour guide at the John Wayne birthplace museum, taking the old boy for his morning constitutional.
I thought it would be amusing to take a picture of Wayne and photoshop a funny hat and Fu Manchu moustache on him. But Howard Hughes saved me the bother.

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Louise Brooks thought Wayne the most beautiful man she had ever seen. They worked together on her last film, Overland Stage Raiders (1937), the last of the ‘Three Mesquiteers’ series of quickie B-westerns of which Wayne was one of the stars. (She’s very likeable with long hair and cheery demeanour – even in a film as throwaway as this we are reminded what a loss she was to American sound cinema.) Her description of him as an almost God-like vision of masculinity-in-perfection chimes more or less with his popular image in America. America loves Wayne, and I warm instinctively to any nation that warms instinctively to him. But I still prefer him out of his stetson and in less familiar environments.
My favourite John Wayne film is Big Jim McClain (1952), in which he plays an HUAC agent rounding up commies in Hawaii (I believe it’s George Clooney’s favourite, too) but I also like him in Dirty Harry mode in McQ (1974), and again in Brannigan (1975).

The latter, in which he is almost killed by a booby-trapped toilet, is set in an American tourist's fantasy of London, full of mindless civility and gentleman’s clubs, in which all the British players (headed by Richard Attenborough) cheerfully and shamelessly collude. Wayne is partnered by Judy Geeson as a WPC; by the end of the film we are asked to believe that she nurtures romantic feelings for him. It’s great fun for anyone, but sheer joy if you’re British.

And there's a wonderfully typical moment in The Longest Day (1962, in which Wayne triumphs during the Normandy landings despite having a broken foot before he even sets off): outlining the plans to a group of subordinates, he breaks off into a monologue and begins walking the length of the barracks as he talks, followed a pace behind by his junior staff. Occasionally he stops for dramatic effect and delivers a line or two without moving, then sets off again, his followers do likewise. Only Wayne could get away with this scene.

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The flops are often more fun than the classics. I always enjoy him winning the Second World War in Flying Leathernecks (1951) and the Vietnam War in The Green Berets (1968), one of the two films he directed. (The other was The Alamo in 1960.) Then, of course, there is The Conqueror (1955), one of the great Hollywood follies, the last and most expensive film personally produced by Howard Hughes for RKO, with Wayne as Genghis Khan. The Medved Brothers are scarcely the most reliable sources, but there are four anecdotes about this film in their 50 Worst Movies of All Time which I hope are true but are good enough to repeat even if not.
One is that Wayne told reporters before production “the way the screenplay reads, it is a cowboy picture and that is how I am going to play Genghis Khan. I see him as a gunfighter.”
The second is that Wayne wanted the film to be premiered in Moscow but after a special screening at the Russian Embassy in Washington the authorities not only vetoed the idea but also banned the film throughout the entire Soviet Union.
The third is that Howard Hughes so loved the finished result that he watched it, often alone, over and over again, right up until his death in the seventies.
The fourth is that Wayne posed for a tie-in campaign to promote road safety, in which his image was accompanied by the message “JOHN WAYNE – THE CONQUEROR – SAYS YOU CAN CONQUER AUTO-ACCIDENTS – BY DRIVING CAREFULLY.”

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The other thing I find fascinating about Wayne is that he has the world's oddest of all the world's odd ‘catchphrases they never uttered’. Bogart’s “Play it again, Sam”, Cagney’s “You dirty rat” and Sherlock Holmes’s “Elementary, my dear Watson” are all things they nearly said or might have said.

But in what possible circumstances could John Wayne have said, “Get off your horse and drink your milk”? Especially if he didn’t.

Your Own Frank Tuttle Film Festival

All the major studios had their own style in the early thirties: MGM had society opulence, Warners had urban authenticity... and Paramount had European sophistication.

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I like to think of the studio as an exclusive school: Paramount's early thirties school of European Style. Lubitsch was the headmaster, Mitchell Leisen the art teacher, Rouben Mamoulian the drama teacher (who also did the special effects for the school plays), Dorothy Arzner was the games mistress, DeMille the classics master, and Cukor the head boy.

But what of Frank Tuttle? Well, Frank Tuttle, perhaps, was the caretaker.

Actually, no, he was much more than that; though that, I suspect is as much as his reputation will allow him. David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film warns outright that "there is no reason to build him up as an important director," albeit in the same breath that it calls him"a sign of the quality of Paramount in the 1920s" and concedes to his work "a brisk, sophisticated eye for glamour".

Tuttle is one of those men (Norman Z. McLeod is another) invariably overshadowed by their stars and the efficiency of the formulae with which they worked, but whose individual contributions to the general pot always seem to stand out a little, leaving little recourse other than to say, 'well, maybe this boy really did have something going for him beyond competence...'

Tuttle simply made too many great films to allow to mere chance and the happy assembly of tested ingredients.

Yet he had come to the movies (first as writer, then soon graduating to direction) with altogether loftier ambitions. A Yale man, he co-founded The Film Guild in 1922, an organisation with aims to break the stranglehold of pappy, sappy romances and similar lowbrow entertainments in the movies and offer patrons more elevated work along the lines of New York's Theatre Guild.
It's possible that some of his earliest films have something of this earnestness of ambition, but fortunately he soon succumbed to the tinsel, and by the mid-twenties he was firmly ensconced at Paramount as one of their most reliable handlers of crowd-pleasing froth.
They most valued him, it would seem, as a developer of specific acting personalities, so that he swiftly acquired a reputation as 'the guy that does Clara Bow pictures', or 'that Bebe Daniels feller' or whatever, before being shunted on to the next star.
The choice of artistes is telling: a Dietrich needs a von Sternberg; Bing Crosby gets Frank Tuttle.
He directed Bebe four times in 1924 and 5, their collaborations marking a transitional phase between her established later persona and the image she had sustained somewhat improbably in DeMille's films as a flighty seductress. He also formed a brief alliance with her occasional DeMille antagonist Gloria Swanson, penning the screenplays for Her Love Story and Manhandled (both 1924) and directing The Untamed Lady in 1926. (His work with Swanson is especially interesting, because this is a woman who existed as a series of directorial allegiances, and posterity's take on her reputation comes to seem almost a punch-up between the versions chosen by each director: will she be remembered as Von Stroheim's drama queen, DeMille's glamourpuss, Sam Wood's thoroughly modern heroine? Ironically it is one-shot Wilder's Swanson that etched itself into history, with a kind of composite DeMille-Von Stroheim phantom, the one that Norma Desmond was rather than is, flitting between the lines. Tuttle chose characteristically to emphasise her comedic gifts, especially as a gum-chewing shop girl in Manhandled.)

The American Venus (1926) began a notable association with Louise Brooks. The film itself is tragically lost, but Brooks and Tuttle got on like a house on fire, and Louise seems to have been one of the few stars to have really rated him as a director.
"Frank Tuttle was a master of easy, perfectly timed comedy which demanded that kind of acting rather than the wildly energetic style popular in Hollywood," she wrote many years later. "An intelligent man, he never interfered with two classes of actors - great actors and non-actors. In the first class was Osgood Perkins, who needed no direction. In the second class was I, who, had he directed me to be funny, would have become an immobilized personality... I didn't even know I was playing comedy until I saw it with an audience. I played it perfectly straight, and that's the way he wanted it."
A fan of hers since her days with the Ziegfeld Follies, he nicknamed her 'babbling Brooks' and personally lobbied for her to get the part.

Tuttle's complicated working relationship with Brooks would stretch over four films. The second, and the first film in our Tuttle festival, was Love 'em and Leave 'em (1927), with Brooks in full flapper mode as Janie, feckless younger sister of respectable shop girl Mame, played by Evelyn Brent. While Mame is struggling to keep their heads above water in a one-bedroom apartment, Janie is out all night, winning male admirers and dolls in Charleston contests.
If the premise sounds familiar, that's because it was remade only two years later as one of the best Clara Bow talkies, The Saturday Night Kid, with Clara as Mame and a young and squeaky Jean Arthur as Janie. Oddly, Tuttle was not called back for the rematch, though he would be assigned Clara duties on her subsequent four films, and had already directed her twice in silents.
The two films make for interesting comparison pieces. Brooks is more kittenish and less bratty than Arthur, and she and Brent really do seem a generation apart, whereas in Kid we end up resenting Arthur much more because we can see that Clara is a young, fun-loving gal too, whose responsibilities won't permit her the freedoms her sister flaunts and takes for granted. Where Arthur's Janie is a sullen manipulator, Brooks - as usual - is the victim of forces beyond her control: "I can't help it, can I, if he likes me the best?" she asks after swiping her sister's boyfriend. (She plays it like Christina Ricci in The Opposite of Sex.)
As William K. Everson wrote: "What a marvelously exciting film it would have been had Clara and Louise been co-starred in the original version... One just can't blame the hero for straying from Evelyn to Louise - but having to choose between Clara and Louise would really provide food for thought."
"You may not be real bright, Jane, but you're some snappy dresser," the big sap tells her at one point, and Tuttle cuts to long-shot to show us Louise sashaying and turning like a catwalk model as she basks in this highest of praise. At the end we see her at the department store's annual fancy dress ball, wooing the big boss and dancing the Black Bottom. (As one contemporary reviewer put it, more than reasonably: "At the end of the film she goes to the store's masquerade ball sans skirt and does a Charleston: who could ask for anything more?")
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Never again would Tuttle and Louise work together in such joyous circumstances. It was Tuttle who directed the retakes and new scenes of The Canary Murder Case (1929), after it was decided to convert it from silent to talkie. Louise couldn't have hoped for a more sympathetic overseer of her first venture into talking cinema, but she petulantly withdrew from the project, and more or less killed her Hollywood career. (More on this film here.)
Nonetheless, Tuttle retained his admiration and affection for her, and when she was given a demeaning cameo in It Pays To Advertise (1931) in order to work out her Paramount contract, he ensured that she dominates what screen time she gets.
As showgirl Thelma Temple (of the Broadway revue Girlies Don't Tell), she is the star of the opening scene; she's funny, perky and gorgeous. In her one chance to shine in a film she will almost immediately exit we see her surrounded by a crowd of journalists ("just raise the skirt, just a trifle...") awash in adoration. She reduces the audience to the same degree of helpless rapture - and then she's gone.
It Pays to Advertise, however, remains another of the great, great Tuttle films, and I discuss it further here.

Another star that Paramount was somehow finding far more troublesome than was necessary or warranted was Clara Bow, and for a time, Tuttle became her regular director in talkies. My favourite of their collaborations is probably True To The Navy (1930), one of her lightest and most inconsequential confections, rushed into production to capitalise on the unexpectedly delighted public response to her song number I'm True to the Navy Now, directed by Tuttle for Paramount On Parade (1930).
Here she gets another song (There's Only One That Matters To Me: see her sing it here) and seems generally at her most relaxed and perky (the Tuttle factor again?) as an employee of Harry Green's drug store (she makes eyes at all the customers, he sells them out-of-date, rock hard marshmallows as presents for her; it's probably Green's funniest performance too.)
As opposed to the sailor with a girl in every port, Clara is the girl with a sailor on every ship, until, after much farce, she settles for Fredric March, also in lighter than usual mood, as the good-natured gob who falls hardest for her.
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As well as the full gamut of college film clichés, with which Horse Feathers had such sport, we have Jack Oakie rewriting the staid school song as a Jolson pastiche, Alma Mammy, and above all we have Helen Kane. And Helen Kane, what's more, at her most infantile and absurd (fellow Kane-worshippers will know that this is no small claim) as a pupil of 'Miss Twill's School For Girls', where the young ladies sit in rows of desks on the lawn saying things like "cream or lemon?" in unison. She sings Prep Step and He's So Unusual (here) and makes her entrance in the film falling out of a tree.
As well as the matchless majesty of Helen Kane, there's tons more about the big football game, and Nancy Carroll becoming president of the college, and more songs, and a major plot thread about Nancy's on-off romance with one of the freshmen, and a lively subplot about Stuart Erwin trying to pass an exam... and oh, you just wish it would never end.

Tuttle was briefly assigned to the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business in 1931 but lost out to Norman McLeod - the thought of this near-miss between the Tuttle and the Marxes is so much more frustrating than if their names had never been linked at all - but don't despair: the switch-over freed him to take on a run of wonderful pictures climaxing with perhaps my favourite of all Paramount society soufflés: a glorious thing called This Is The Night (1932).
As general familiarity with the Paramount house style recedes further into prehistory, the critical standing of this film sinks ever lower.
No mention of it fails to dismiss it as an imitation of Lubitsch, as if any Paramount film of this time was anything but! Yet even on these terms I find it every bit as good as the master's own work.
It is one of those infectiously delightful films (DeMille's Madam Satan, made in the Paramount style with MGM resources, is the other big example) that belie their low critical standing so obviously and all-encompassingly that to bother constructing a critical defence is pointless. All you have to do is watch the film. Far better simply to celebrate it, and let the naysayers catch up at their own pace.

Among other things, it was Cary Grant's first feature film, and he gives a very funny, totally untypical performance as an Olympic javelin-thrower who catches his wife - Thelma Todd! - in the act of planning a dirty weekend with her lover - Roland Young!!! - forcing Young to invent a fictitious wife whom he must then hire an actress to impersonate. Charlie Ruggles is around too, effortlessly hilarious as ever, Lily Damita is the hired wife, and the whole thing plays out as a series of beautiful farcical episodes in Venice and Paris.
As with Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight and several other Paramount films around this time there are some absolutely wonderful sequences in which characters drift in and out of song, songs are passed around from character to character and extra to extra, and ambient noise becomes subsumed within the music. Grant's first appearance as he catches Ruggles attempting to deliver the tickets for Thelma's tryst is played hilariously in part-spoken, part-sung dialogue and there is a glorious opening sequence where Todd's dress is caught in a taxi door, stripping her to her underwear, as the watching crowd launch into a jaunty number called Madame Has Lost Her Dress ("Whoops! In stepping from the car her dress caught / I only wish that I were Madame's escort!")
Obviously Lubitsch is the reference-point, obviously Trouble In Paradise and Love Me Tonight are being evoked... but obviously - this film is fantastic.
Variety, at least, got the hang of it, calling it a "smartly produced and directed Frenchy bedroom chase" even though in its "satirical application of music to comic situations and the tongue-in-cheek treatment from start to finish, Frank Tuttle's meg work cannot escape comparison with Lubitsch brand." The paper went on to note, in its own evocative vernacular, that "dialog on the whole is spicy for the screen, with a strip that's somewhat Minsky by Miss Damita, and some leg stuff for comedy and other purposes boosting the s. a. total... Thelma Todd is tall, blonde, stunning and perfect. It's hard to tell about Cary Grant in this talker due to limitations of his role, but he looks like a potential femme rave."

Through the thirties, Tuttle was Paramount's resident Mr Light and Frothy, always on call for a college film or a Big Broadcast, a Crosby picture or Charlie McCarthy, Detective (1939), a film that manages by no common alchemy to be even more enjoyable than it sounds. He corralled Eddie Cantor, Gloria Stuart and Ruth Etting in Roman Scandals (1933), and Martha Raye, Burns & Allen and a screenful of Paramount starlets in College Holiday (1936). The latter, some seventy-odd years after it was first seen, remains the funniest film ever made about eugenics.
As the shadows lengthened in the forties, he rounded out his career in thrillers, to which he was ill-suited, but which he always brought in professionally in the absence of more suitable assignments. (It wasn't so much that he was no longer being considered for the kind of films he did best, more that they just weren't making them any more.)
Still, one of this final batch, at least, is a bona fide classic, so we round out the festival with This Gun For Hire (1942), the first and best teaming of Lake and Ladd. It's fully as sharp and riveting as anything Warners were doing with Bogart at the same time, even though Ladd looks too delicate and baby-faced to be a tough guy, and at five-foot-five was even shorter than Bogart. Here, however, he cuts an impressively unsympathetic figure as Raven, a hired killer whose aims correspond with those of the American government when he goes after a double-crossing client attempting to frame him for robbery, who also just happens to work for a gang of fifth columnists. En route, his path crosses with Lake’s nightclub novelty chanteuse, acting undercover for the government and after the same man, whose policeman boyfriend is after Raven.
The whole film has a bleakness that makes it a most unusual product of the war years: the villains may be enemy agents, but good guys are in conspicuously short supply. Ladd’s Raven, though he does redeem himself to some extent, is a cold-blooded professional killer, pursuing the film’s main villain for reasons of purely personal revenge. We first see him at work in a chilling sequence in which he turns up at the apartment of his next hit to find the victim’s innocent girlfriend unexpectedly present, and mechanically murders both.
The real hero is Lake’s spunky Ellen; by no means merely decorative, she is intelligent, brave and resourceful (note how she creates a trail for the police to follow when Raven abducts her) and acting from selfless and honourable motives. And there are no prizes for guessing that she's Tuttle's favourite half of the partnership: the only time the film stops frowning is during her fabulously eccentric nightclub numbers (dubbed by singer Martha Mears): Now You See It, Now You Don’t, sung while she pulls cards, silk scarves and canaries from nowhere and appears and disappears impossibly with trick photography, and I’ve Got You, performed with a fishing rod, hat and heart-stopping black PVC outfit.
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To recap: my recommendations for a Frank Tuttle film festival are:
1. Love 'em and Leave 'em (1927)

2. Sweetie (1929)

3. True to the Navy (1930)

4. It Pays to Advertise (1931)

5. This Is The Night (1932)

6. This Gun For Hire (1942)

And if you only have time to see one: This Is The Night.

So here's to the great Frank Tuttle - have a big cream cake with Clara on me.

(Incidentally, I'm rather taken with this 'make your own film festival' idea, and may well do a few more, starting with a return trip to the Paramount school staff-room to bag Leisen and Arzner. If anyone else out there fancies having a go with their own choices - six or so films that best represent the various points of interest in a neglected or under-appreciated career behind or in front of the camera - I'd love to read them.)

Which Header - the results are in!

Thanks to everyone who voted!
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Allowing for multiple votes, the results are as follows...
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In last place, and the only one to not get a single mention:
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9. High Society

Sharing one vote each:

2. Witchy Samantha

3. Psycho

10. Glynis Johns

12. Fay

14. Drew

15. Bela

Several of my favourites there, reminding us that democracy can be overrated.

However, with two votes apiece:

1. Hopper (the original) 4. Paulette
7. Kay

8. Jimmy and Grace

All of which, then, take an early bath. (We pause here while I contemplate Drew and Fay taking an early bath.)

Now to the prize-winners. In joint third place with three tips of the hat:

6. Loretta
and 11. An assortment of twenties gals

Which means that the runner-up, taking the silver dish and the right to take over the winner's responsibilities should it prove unwilling or unable to carry them out....

13. Fay, with that "I'm about to scream" look on her face, and five votes.

But just pipping her to the post: the winner, with six votes...........

5. Louise
Louise would like to thank you all for voting for her, and promises not to do another Canary Murder Case and disappear without warning.