ANIMAL CRACKERS (...if that's your idea of a good time...)

Below I've posted something that will make you smile for days: three clips from the Marx Brothers second feature film, "Animal Crackers", shot in 1930 and taken from their hit play of the 1928-29 season (which they were performing at night while shooting "The Cocoanuts", their first feature, by day at the Paramount Long Island Studios).

When Marx Brothers movies are discussed, they are generally broken into two main categories--Paramount (the first five features up through "Duck Soup") and MGM ("A Night At the Opera" and the next--and increasingly less impressive--four movies). (The two worthless coda items, "A Night In Casablanca" and "Love Happy" rarely rate their own discussion group. Consider them post-Marxist.) The Paramount's and the MGM's are as different as night and day and tend to divide people up along the same lines that sepearate those who grew up watching Disney and those of us (me, for instance) that would have nothing to do with anything but Warner Brothers cartoons. The MGM user-friendly Marx Brothers movies haven't, to my eye, held up at all. Not only are the plotlines far too "developed" and boring, but the set-piece routines--with a couple of exceptions--are too self-consciously "zany" and simply not playing to the Marx's great strength--which was the idiosyncratic (and weirdly human) nature of each of the brothers brand of corruption. (For instance: though I laugh somewhat reluctantly at the "stateroom scene" in "A Night At The Opera", I don't think of packing too many people into a stateroom as necessarily a "Marx Brothers routine" as it has nothing to do with Groucho's bluster, Chico's seductive Ponzi-scheming machinations or Harpo's otherworldy pick-your-pocket-while-shaking-your-hand talents. You get my drift?) One way or the other, the Paramount films are what I think most of us mean when we think of these angels of our times (Kurt Vonnegut's phrase...for the Marx's or Laurel and Hardy?)

But I would add a sub-category to address the first two features, simply and austerely named "Stage Adaptations". For the Marx's were Broadway royalty of the 1920's and both "The Cocoanuts" and "Animal Crackers" allow us a glimpse of what seeing the Marx Brothers in the live theater might have felt like. The film of their show "The Cocoanuts" is, of course, a piece of real antiquity--as clumsy and remote an early talkie as you're likely to ever see. The photography is abysmal, the pace sluggish and the musical numbers wildly dated and ineptly shot. (This isn't to say I don't dearly love "The Cocoanuts"--I do...for all those very wrong reasons). But what is oddest about "The Cocoanuts" is pointed out by Joe Adamson in his book "Groucho, Harpo, Chico and sometimes Zeppo"--the best book written about the Marx's and one of my favorite of all books on film history. Adamson notes that in their first film, Groucho's "delivery can claim none of the power and urgency we've come to know him for...and Chico's lines don't sound funny when he says them: they just sound belligerent." He concludes that the lesson we might take from watching "The Cocoanuts" is that "at this point (the Marx's) feel very uncomfortable about playing to a silent house."

This is a major point and perhaps the fatal flaw of "The Cocoanuts" as a film--none of the brothers, save Harpo, seem to be quite sure if this movie-acting stuff is really right for their brand of high low-humor. There's a nose-holding quality to their participation--a kind of "what will the boys at the Algonquin Round Table say when they here what we've been up to" non-committal vibe that pervades the proceedings. Only a year later, though, all these problems appear to have been solved. Watching "Animal Crackers" we not only are in the presence of the Marx Brothers we know and love, we are even perhaps in a slightly edgier Marxian universe that belonged more to their Broadway personas than to their later film personalities. Indeed "Animal Crackers" is a transition film--bridging the gap between the "toast of Broadway" Marx's and the newly film-savvy Beverly Hills bound Brother's.

We are also, script-wise, in a world of surreal sophistication that they never again were quite able to match. Written for the stage by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind (also of "The Cocoanuts" and later at least partially responsible for the "Night At The Opera" script), "Animal Crackers" has become, over the years, the Marx Bros. movie that I'm always happiest to revisit--largely because I've never quite caught my breath and taken in the multitude of snappy one-liners, strange speeches, demented tangents and deeply weirdly philisophical byways and pursuits that the script provides the audience with.

"What do you think of the traffic problem? What do you think of the marriage problem? What do you think of when you go to bed at night, you beast!" This is very much the Broadway Groucho--not afraid to be harsh, unlikable, insulting and flirtatious all at the same time. (In several scenes he appears to be about to launch physically violent attacks on Margaret Dumont as well as on his brother Zeppo.) Whereas his progress through the later Paramount's ("Monkey Business", "Horse-Feathers" and "Duck Soup") gradually turns his madness into mere wackiness...and by the time he gets to MGM he's nothing more than a con-artist with a good heart underneath it all. "Animal Crackers" gives us Groucho as a walking id, a demanding, unstoppable and ferociously illogical tyrant of every situation he stumbles upon.

The first clip is his intro, the justly famous "Hello I Must Be Going"--which leads into "Hooray For Captain Spaulding". (How the hell does he do that dance, where he spins his leg in a circle? And while smoking a cigar yet...) Second is one of the best set-pieces Kaufman and Ryskind ever devised for Groucho, the "seven cent nickel" routine (his foil is Louis Sorin, twenty-five years before his appearence as Mr. Manicotti on "The Honeymooners"). "Think of it...a man could buy a three cent paper and get a nickel back. Why one seven cent nickel carefully used could last a man a lifetime!" Third I've posted Groucho's hilarious "Take a Letter Jamison" routine, where he dictates to his secretary (Zeppo, of course) a letter which sounds eerily like the kind of SPAM I so often find (and sometimes read for pleasure) in my inbox.

"Animal Crackers" was never a lost film, but for years it went unseen due to copyright issues. It re-emerged for a theatrical run in 1974 and I was at the Los Angeles premiere where, thanks to somebody whose name I can't remember, I was introduced to Groucho. He was sitting uneasily next to Erin Fleming, his infamously young girlfriend. A few seats down was the director of the film, Victor Heerman, who appeared to me--a ten year old boy--to be over one-hundred years old. (For the record, Heerman was a mere eighty-two). Upon shaking Groucho's hand I realized I had nothing to say to my hero...but I'd recently seen the musical of the Marx's life "Minnie's Boys" so I improvised and told him I'd just seen his life story on stage. "So that's what happened to it!" responded Groucho. Not knowing enough to exit on a laugh I added "Minnie was your mother, right?" Groucho stared levelly at me and answered: "She used to be".

GHOSTS OF THE GAY WHITE WAY: MARILYN MILLER

Of all forms of fame, theatrical fame is the most fleeting. The stars of yesteryear in film are still available for us to see and--in most cases--admirer. But the theater--which, through the twenties and much of the thirties, was considered several rungs above movies in terms of sophistication and seriousness--left little behind aside from the texts of the plays and some productions stills. One must trust the opinions of those who were there as to who were, in fact, the geniuses of the medium.

Broadway's most famous and beloved personality of the 1920's wasn't Al Jolson or Eddie Cantor or the Marx Brothers. It was a woman named Marilyn Miller and while it's possible to view her today--she made precisely three movies during the tumultuous transition from silents to sound--what's not possible is to comprehend the enormity of her popularity, her daunting and much beloved persona. For Miller, like Gertrude Lawrence a bit later, personified Broadway--she defined diva in her day and was stage glory incarnate. A child performer from the mid-west, she was originally spotted in London while in her teens by Lee Shubert, who brought her to New York and featured her in the "Passing Shows" of the late teens. But her true patron (and perhaps Svengali) was Florenz Ziegfield, who saw the tremendous energy and poise in the delicately beautiful young woman. Ziegfield also saw that Miller was a hell of a dancer and he "developed" her as his singing/dancing main attraction, building the show "Sally" (1920) around her. In this show she introduced Jerome Kern's "Look For The Silver Lining" and became the toast of Broadway as a result. (It's impossible, I find, when writing about this period not to slip into period metaphor and language...the "toast" of Broadway? Really now...). "Sally" was a monster hit--running two years--and Broadway shook from the impact. The New York stage world had never known a personality that was embraced by both the sophisticates and the masses--and the businessmen of Broadway had never dreamt of a show that seemed to be incapable of running out of audiences. (I think it must have been similar to Hollywood's stunning realization, around the time of "Star Wars" and "Jaws" that movies were capable of making THAT KIND OF MONEY).

Miller and Ziegfield were also personally involved--somewhat disastrously I take it--and she split from him in the mid twenties to star in "Peter Pan", produced by somebody who wasn't Ziegfield (Charles B. Dillingham for the record). Her immense popularity never waned, though she was back in the Ziegfield fold in the late twenties and appeared in the hit show "Sunny" and the Gershwin scored "Rosalie". With the advent of talkies, First National dusted off the by-now decade old "Sally" and made a movie of it. Miller starred, of course, and it remains the clearest record we have of this performer and her attributes. Below are two clips from "Sally"--both courtesy of the invaluble youtuber PerfectJazz78. First is "All I Want To Do Do Do Is Dance"--in which Miller performs a marvelously energetic and not at all dated quasi-tap dance. The fact that the number remains fresher than most from the period has much to do with the fact that Miller isn't a flapper/jazz-baby dancer; her style is all her own--which is to say Broadway-- and very nervy and polished.

Second is a big number, "I'm Just A Wild Rose", which plays out on a magnificent set of a Gatsby-esque Long Island estate and in which Miller tirelessly wears out a huge chorus of tuxedoed men who simply can't keep up with her (note how they start to fall behind the beat while singing and dancing--this was all recorded live, remember, pre playback). The movie was shot in two-strip technicolor but apparently survives mostly in black and white. The two-strip technicolor suddenly makes itself known a little ways into the number--and what a strage sight it is! For unlike the better known three-strip color systems, two-strip technicolor did not reproduce the full range of color. In particular they had a difficult time registering blue tints. (It's amazing, in retrospect, that there was as much experimentation with color film going on at the time as there was, given the intangibles involved with getting the sound issues stuff straightened out.) In any event, during the late twenties all color films used the two strip process which worked something like this:

Two negatives would be combined in a single strip of film--one being sensitive to the blue-green spectrum, the other to the red/orange. The camera was especially equipped with filters to break up the hues. Upon being projected, light shines through the strips combining the spectrums and resulting in color film. Imagine all that for trouble for a little color? Alas, the imperfections of two-strip were only aggravated by age and most two-strip prints now look rather green--a result of the original process overemphasizing the green and orange hues. Oddly, the green-ish tint gives the films a ghostly quality that I rather like. Who the hell knows what this stuff actually looked (and sounded like) when it was fresh out of the lab and being projected at the Loew's Orpheum?

While I usually carp about how poorly these routines were shot in the stone age that was early talking cinema, this one is an exception--not because it's especially well shot (it isn't) but because somehow you get the feeling of what it was like sitting in the theater watching Miller prance up and down the stage...and the director John Francis Dillon (a very obscure name--he was an actor first, then a director through the late twenties and early thirties and died in 1933 shortly after directing Clara Bow's swan song "Call Her Savage") manages, at the very end of the number, to turn around and give us an impressively non-proscenium bound view of another portion of the mansion set. This couldn't have been easy to achieve and allows us to speculate that "Sally" was, in all probability, a hugely expensive movie--and a bit ticket bet--for First National when they bit the bullet and decided to go ahead with it.

Though Marilyn Miller was only thirty when she appeared in the below clips, she was in the twilight of her career. Two more movies followed, but her alcohol dependence added weight--and the camera is always there to help put weight on you as well. Her last appearance, in 1931's "Her Majesty Love", with W.C Fields, was the finish of her in films. Two years later she had a remarkable stage comeback in the Moss Hart/Irving Berlin satirical revue "As Thousands Cheer". But her health was giving way and her sad personal life--three lousy marriages all of which cost her financially, physically and psychically--began to become the stuff of Broadway insider gossip. Her second husband was Jack Pickford, Mary's good-for-nothing actor/brother who was a famous addict/alcoholic and who reportedly died of syphillis. When Miller went down with what was described as a "nervous breakdown" in early 1936, the word on the street was that the real culprit was the disease that took Pickford out. She died a few months later, of a "brain infection following nasal surgery"...and a massive outpouring of affection was seen for this Broadway diva of an era already past. I've heard from a couple of different sources that a decaying statue of Miller is visible atop a building in the theater district, somewhere in the West Forties off of Broadway. (One source says it's on the roof of a building that now houses a Fridays restaurant). New York still has archeological moments like this--I'm pretty sure that if the decaying statue to this ghost of the great white way still is in its place, it's a result of its existence having been forgotten rather than of any act of preservation. Still I love the idea of that statue; theatrical fame--and Miller was a star of stars--eventually winds down to being represented by a forgotten statue atop a mediocre restaurant. And rests on the hope that the restaurant owners won't notice your likeness and will leave you alone for another seventy years.

HOLLYWOOD PARTY; AN MGM ANOMALY

anom·a·ly
Pronunciation:
\ə-ˈnä-mə-lē\
Function:
noun
Inflected Form(s):
plural anom·a·lies
Date:
1603
1 : the angular distance of a planet from its perihelion as seen from the sun
2 : deviation from the common rule : irregularity
3 : something anomalous : something different, abnormal, peculiar, or not easily classified

"Hollywood Party", a 1934 MGM "all-star" anomaly, features a large number of MGM's comedic roster of the period--most prominently Lupe Velez, Laurel and Hardy, Jack Pearl (radio's "Baron Munchausen"--and if that doesn't ring any bells for you sorry, you'll have to look into it on your own as Pearl and his at one time insanely famous creation are as dead as Greek and I can't begin to explain their one time popularity to myself much less to you) and even the Three Stooges--still yoked to Ted Healy.. Mickey Mouse somehow gets involved as well--though I don't understand what Walt Disney had to do with MGM--in this pastiche centering around Jimmy Durante and his efforts to throw a major shindig (he's a lion tamer or somesuch). Actually the frame work of the film is that Durante is Durante and he falls asleep and dreams the whole mess while his wife is getting dressed (played, post-modernistically, by Durante's real wife, Jeanne Olsen).

"Hollywood Party" was directed by at least six different men--among them Richard Boelslawski, Sam Wood, Allan Dwan, Edmund Goulding and George Stevens (I assume that Stevens did the Laurel and Hardy sequence since he'd worked with them at Hal Roach Studios since the late twenties--Stevens was originally a cameraman). I saw the film years ago--or more accurately snoozed through it. Like so many of these hodge-podge all-star fizzles, it promises much more than it delivers. Even the somewhat famous Laurel and Hardy sequence with Valez, in which they engage in an egg war, was done better in other L&H movies of the time. (Nonetheless, I've posted it second below. Why not? Even mediocre L&H is better than no L&H). "Hollywood Party" isn't a "revue" film, nor is there any real story. The pace lurches uncomfortably along (the result of six or more chefs in the kitchen?) and the overall effect is somewhat surreal and unsettling. Indeed, Allan Dwan--one of the film's many uncredited co-directors--describes his uncomfortable involvement in his long and indispensable interview with Peter Bogdanovich which can be found in PB's long and indispensable "Who The Devil Made It?". I'll quote a bit of it.

"Every star on the MGM lot was in this picture and every director on the lot had done a piece of it, but when they finally tried to put it together, it just wouldn't jell--it was nothing. So I was invited by (MGM executive) Eddie Mannix to look at it and see if I could do anything with it...finally it ended and they hadn't even turned the lights up when somebody beside me--who turned out to be Mannix--said "Well, what do you think of it?" And I said, "It's a nightmare." And from behind a pair of arms were thrown around my shoulders and a voice said, "A genius! At last, we've got a genius! Now we've got something." The lights went up and it was Louis B. Mayer..."That's just what it is--it's a nightmare--we make it a nightmare." He looked at me. "How are you going to do it?"

Naturally, being a man committed to only the highest aesthetic principals of cinema (as well as wishing to be led to the "elysian fields of popular entertainment"--Albert Lewin (("Picture Of Dorian Grey")) co-opting the Greek phrase for "final resting place of the Gods" in a pithy letter to Preston Sturges about "Remember The Night" ((Stanwyck, MacMurray, Mitchell Leisen, 1939)) as quoted by Brian Henderson in the notes on "The Lady Eve" ((Stanwyck, Sturges, Fonda, 1941)) in the long-winded Preston Sturges Scripts Series--Christ, STOP ME!)--Dwan figured out how to make the whole thing Durante's nightmare. Oy. Are you still reading this? What are you, stuck at an airport somewhere?

So why drag this particular movie out of the mothballs in which it currently resides? Well, click on the first clip posted below and find out. The movies theme song, by Rodgers and Hart, is sung by Miss Frances Williams (she was usually billed with that faux-uppity "Miss" in front of her otherwise ordinary monicker--done, I imagine, for ironic effect) who you might have seen in my previous post singing "Doing The Uptown Lowdown" (from "Broadway Through A Keyhole"). There she was garbed sapphically in white tie and tails. Here she's all Broadway brass--and showing more than a bit of leg--in what amounts to one of the era's best conceived, most inventively filmed nutty musical montage sequences. Every frame of the below number is suffused with sex and sexual symbols--one wonders why the recently installed Production Code let it slide--and the energy and inventiveness of the filmmaking is still a real pleasure to watch. I don't know who was truly behind its creation, but I don't think it's one of the non-credited directors; my guess is that it's the work of the highly inventive and generally completely overlooked choreographer Seymour Felix--who's one of several choreographers credited on the film and who often had a good deal more to do with his dance sequences than just staging the steps--check out his credits and some of his other work, which happily resides on youtube.

Who was Frances Williams? She was a singer and performer who, in the twenties, appeared in several editions of George White's Scandals and apparently co-starred with the Marx Brothers on Broadway in "The Cocoanuts" (in what role? Did she replace Mary Eaton? Or did she do the part Kay Francis does in the movie?) Beyone those now faded credits, though, I would say that Frances Williams was nothing more or less than the Leonard Zelig of Dame Broadway. For she Zelig-ishly introduced no less than two of the most momentous cultural events of the jazz age--without getting any credit whatsoever for having done so. First was the "Charleston", which she was apparently the first to perform on Broadway in one of the early editions of the "Scandals". Then, in 1932, she appeared in a show called "Everybody's Welcome", where she was the first to sing Herman Hupfeld's "As Time Goes By"--I don't need to tell you that it took another decade until that song became the anthem that it now is. Although she only made a handful of film appearences and recording sessions during the thirties, each one is a perfect gem--though none were truly hits or even all that noticed. By the mid-thirties the big band era had arrived and Miss Williams was not a band vocalist--she belonged to a style of songstress that evolved from the twenties Helen Morgan era and would be revived in the forties in the "intimate" clubs in which Mabel Mercer and her ilk performed. By then, though, Williams was finished--too old (and who knows what other problems there may have been) and never to be truly credited with having been a pioneer in this more personable, smart and intellecutally "inside" style of nightclub performing. (Typically, her appearance in "Hollywood Party" is kept a secret--she is unbilled.) I got turned on to Miss Williams as a result of contributing a pittance to the ever-worthy Vitaphone Project--if you contribute just a wee bit they'll send you some of the best home-grown CD's of period jazz-age music that you could ever hope to own, one of which is a "complete works" of Miss Williams. Here's a list of Miss Williams Broadway credits--her stage career stumbled along into the forties before expiring from lack of oxygen.

I know far too little about Frances Williams and would love to have my knowledge enhanced. According to the above Wikipedia entry she was married a five times-once to a man named Baron Miguel de Sousa, (a role that could only be portrayed by Akim Tamiroff) and apparently later to the actor Frank Lovejoy (who appears to have been a decade her junior). There are rumored television appearences from the fifties as well, though none as yet posted on youtube. After a long bout with cancer, she died in 1959, age fifty-eight, pretty much forgotten in spite of having introduced a song and a dance that everyone--whether or not interested in the twenties and thirties--to this day has probably heard of.

Nothing about "Hollywood Party" truly makes sense--not the plot, the mixture of stars, the way it was made. Its residual value as a cultural artifact may, indeed, reside solely in the below two clips. Or perhaps in the fact that, in the IMDB listing under "plot keywords", the categories named are "revue", "part-animated" and "inanimate object in cast credits". Who are they referring to with that last category? My best guess is Walt Disney, who is credited as the voice of Mickey Mouse. And who may indeed, in 1934, have already frozen himself...

"BROADWAY THROUGH A KEYHOLE": UN FILM DU TEXAS GUINAN

Before perversely re-entering the dark world of the prohibition era nightclubs on this sunny Saturday (at least in Hollywood, California) practically a century away, a couple of pressing tidbits. First a long overdue thank you to reader Vance Durgin for supplying me with the photo of the Movies 'Til Dawn logo (from the original KTLA airing) which you see at your right. Second, if you're interested in acquiring one or more of my two CD's of original music either click here or go to the right column and look for the new heading "Buy Raymond De Felitta's Music...Please". FYI--the first, titled "Movies 'Til Dawn" is all-original, all-swinging "new saloon" vocal/big band stuff that I composed and recorded in the mid 1990's. The second more recent CD, "Fatha Land", is a solo piano tribute by me honoring the great Earl "Fatha" Hines.

Next: if you're interested in credit sequences to films as I am (I wrote about two Saul Bass created Otto Preminger title sequences--see 11/26/07 in archives if you dare) then you must go to the always excellent Self Styled Siren for her very well written take on why credit sequences matter. In the interest of relentless self-promotion, it appears that I'm to be quoted in Marc Myers indispensible JazzWax tomorrow re: a meeting I had many years ago with the great pianist Jess Stacy. If you dig jazz you must visit Marc's extremely entertaining and handsomely mounted blog. Finally, if you're Jason, the goofy spammer who keeps sending me comments about your stupid site, I ask you: have you no sense of decency, sir? Please stop--because I'm too busy trying to live life, have a career in show-biz and write this blog to figure out how to block your sorry ass from my comments section. Enough said.

On the night of July 21, 1933, gossip columnist, man about Broadway and true, stone-hearted son-of-a-bitch Walter Winchell was knocked on his ass by singer, entertainer, blackface performer and exhaustingly self-consumed star of stage, screen and radio Al Jolson at the Hollywood American Legion stadium, where the fight matches were then held (boxing at that time occupying roughly the same place in Hollywood entertainment society that Lakers games do now). The reason? A film that had just been released which Winchell had provided the story line for called "Broadway Through A Keyhole" and which Jolson considered--not without valid reason--to be an invasion of privacy (and thus an attack) on him and his young wife Ruby Keeler.

The plot of the film--as authored by Winchell--revolves around a young nightclub singer, played by Constance Cummings, who is involved with the club's gangster owner Frank Rocci (played quite well by an actor named Paul Kelly about whom more needs to be known). But she falls in love with a singer--played by the increasingly fascinating (to me) Russ Columbo who finds himself facing down her gangster boss from the wrong end of a gun. I won't reveal the ending in part because I can't remember it--I haven't seen this movie in years but I remember enjoying it when I did. The point though is that this was precisely the story of Jolson and his wife Ruby Keeler, who began as a dancer in Texas Guinan's "Club 300" and with whom Jolson became smitten even though she was..."involved" with gangster Larry Fay at the time.

Who was Larry Fay? He was a seriously mobbed-up twenties gangland figure who seems to have been tight enough with the heat to keep his place, the El Fey Club, operating during the Prohibition era despite numerous raids--as well as allowing his chum Texas Guinan's "300 Club" to continue to operate after similar raids. Fay and Guinan were involved on a number of complicated levels and Fay certainly couldn't have been happy about Jolson--a mere song-and-dance man--horning in on Keeler, his barely legal action. Nonetheless the two men seemed to have ironed things out--I like to think that Texas' good-natured boozy earth mother act softened the blow to her sometime boyfriend Fay's ego and prevented Jolson from winding up in the East River. The story became Broadway lore--Fay being cast as a gangster with a heart of gold for letting young Ruby go off with her "true love" etc.--but for some reason Winchell's absorption and re-telling of it for the movies infuriated Jolson enough to hit him on that long-forgotten night at the American Legion Stadium. Why? Well, Jolson's ego--always massive and touchy--might be a good place to start. Having been famous for years for his stage and screen accomplishments, I would imagine that Jolie, by the mid-thirties, might have been sharp enough to see that the end of his prime celebrity years were now at hand; he had a young wife who was equally if not more popular than he at the time...he was more talked about for this lurid love triangle incident than for any of his recent movies...and damn it, if it was his life story up there on screen, why wasn't he credited? (Jolson put his name on any number of songs he didn't write but perhaps couldn't see the justice in having events of his own life credited to somebody else). And Walter Winchell was, let's face it, eminently punch-out-able.

Nor was this the only occasion on which this particular tale of Times Square After Dark--gangster spurned by girl he loves and comforted by boozy nightclub mistress--was fictionalized for the movies. In 1939, the tale was rehashed again in Raoul Walsh's very good "The Roaring Twenties"this time as seen from the point of view of the gangster, brilliantly played by James Cagney. Indeed, "The Roaring Twenties" provides something of a window on the relationship between Guinan and Fay--in the film the Texas character is played by Gladys George and called "Panama Smith" and the Ruby Keeler figure--the girl who Cagney loves but who can't love him in return--is portrayed by the treacly Priscilla Lane. Curiously, the author of the screen story (not the screenplay) of "The Roaring Twenties" was Mark Hellinger, a fellow Broadway columnist of the Winchell era who first resuscitated the Fay/Keeler/Joslon/Guinan tale for a short story he wrote called "The World Moves On", which he sold to Warner Brothers and which then became the basis for the script of "The Roaring Twenties". Did Jolson sock Hellinger too? Or did Winchell sock him first for ripping off "Broadway Through A Keyhole"?

So why have I given Texas Guinan, in my title for this post, the dubious distinction of being the toastmaster/auteur of this particular movie? Because it only could have come about due to the various intersections of people, places and events as provided by Guinan. BTAK is virtually a six-degrees-of-Texas Guinan event--her nightclub featured Keeler, her relationship with Fay brought him in to see her, her no doubt chumminess with Jolson opened that trap-door, her soothing words to Fay averted tragedy (although murdering Jolson might have made "The Jolson Story" a tad more interesting--it also would have kept Winchell from getting knocked on his ass) and her friendship and kinship with Broadway columnists Winchell and Hellinger insured that the story was properly aggrandized to the point of it being turned into two Hollywood movies--in one of which she appears as herself! Most importantly, BTAK features Texas in a screen performance--given in the last year of her life--that gives us the clearest look at this legendary figure and how she actually came off as a hostess; she's quite funny and salty and it's not hard, from this distance, to get a taste of the attutude that she purveyed that seemed to welcome everybody to the party at the same time as putting them all in their places.

Below are two superb clips from BTAK. Both contain songs by Mack Gordon and Harry Ravel (love that name--how about Eddie Shubert? Jack Chopin?), one of the hottest songwriting teams of the thirties. First up is "Doing The Uptown Lowdown", as sung by the fabulous Frances Williams, now mostly forgotten but in her heyday a very hip and sexy Broadway singer/showgirl (more about her soon in an upcoming post). You'll see Texas Guinan herself introduce the number--which Williams performs Marlene Dietrich-ishly clad in white tie and tails and accompanied by a decidedly sapphic all girl chorus. The second clip I've chosen because it features Russ Columbo doing two songs: "You're My Past Present and Future" which features a marvelously clever lyric by Gordon; and, after some by-play with Ruby Keeler--er--Constance Cummings--the charming duet "I Love You Pizicatto". (Both clips, by the way, are courtesy of the invaluble youtuber Stjn00 who appears to have cornered the market on "Broadway Through A Keyhole"). Columbo I've written about already--he deserves a real re-evaluation (but in lieu of that see my post of 1/13/08). The extremely appealing Constance Cummings was a young, singing Broadway star--originally from England--who Samuel Goldwyn brought to Hollywood at the dawn of sound and who was making a name for herself when, shortly after this movie, she decided that she didn't like Hollywood and went home to England. She's best remembered for her role as Ruth, the non-ghost wife, in David Lean's film of Noel Coward's "Blithe Spirit"--Coward, by the way, was of course "enchanted" by Guinan's club when he visited New York in the twenties. To round off the six-degrees-ness of it all, the actual script of BTAK was written by the team of Grahme Baker and Gene Towne--whose antic behavior (screenwriters as manic personalities?) inspired the play "Boy Meets Girl", which was filmed with Pat O'Brien and James Cagney playing the role the screenwriters of BTAK the year before Cagney was in Hellinger's "Roaring Twenties" which was based on what had originally been Winchell's screen story for...stop me, stop me, stop me!

TIMES SQUARE AFTER DARK: TEXAS GUINAN PART ONE

Returning to the obsessive and never to be quenched pursuit of what life was truly like in the twenties, let's begin with a quote from Ben Hecht, novelist, playwright, obscenely fast screenwriter and bon vivant. This is from his mammoth and quite interesting memoir "A Child Of The Century" published in 1953.

"New York in the twenties was a bold town with much the same attitude toward political reformers that the Far West once had toward cattle rustlers. It was devoted to pleasure, particularly to the pleasure of not giving a damn. Seriousness was an un-New Yorkish quality. it stamped the hinterland do-gooder, the rogue with a political ax to grind, the social wallflower and the aged. New York insisted that all its idols wear a grin. It regarded all foreign events, including the first World War, as entertainment. It believed that any war could be won by writing the right songs for it, and not losing your sense of humor. Its patriotism consisted of admiring itself ardently. It doted on its own charms--its chorus girls and Mad Hatters, its bootleggers its sports and its wags. A bon mot was the town's signature."

Of all the perennial 20's era figures who usually come to mind when pondering the decade (Fitzgerald, Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsy, Mayor James J. Walker) nobody, to me, quite sums up the spirit of the times--especially as drawn by Hecht in the above marvelous paragraph--more than Texas Guinan. Actress, hostess and nightclub impresario, Guinan was one of the first modern celebrities--famous for being famous rather than for any particular accomplishment. Born Mary Louise Guinan in--where else?--Texas (Waco no less) in 1884, Guinan was a turn of the century regional vaudeville circuit performer who, apparently, became well known for her snappy Texas "patter". She claimed to have grown up on a five thousand acre ranch (which has since been proven to be one of many tall tales the publicity loving Guinan put forth) and to have been the Sunday School teacher of future writer and broadcaster Lowell Thomas when he was just a boy. (This last boast is so strange that it could only be true--Thomas actually confirmed it and the two stayed friends throughout life.) She wound up in New York working as a chorus girl as early as 1906 before breaking through in big-time Vaudeville with her act.

In the late teens and early twenties, Guinan became a movie actress of some popularity--she starred in a pile of westerns with titles like "Girl Of The Border", "The Wildcat", "The Gun Woman" and "Girl of the Rancho". I've never seen any of these--obscure silent westerns not really being my thing, you dig--but I can only imagine their strangeness; Guinan seems about as western as West End Avenue. In any event neither her vaudeville act nor her westerns are what she's remembered for today. Guinan's real breakthrough came with the opening of the 300 Club, a speakeasy which she started in the mid 1920's and at which she presided as mistress of ceremonies--watching over her troupe of barely dressed, barely legal dancers. It was in this role that she came to personify New York nightlife--she was arrested numerous times for serving alcohol but somehow always managed to re-open. She always blithely claimed that she only served mixers and wasn't able to control if her customers snaked a flask in--a transparent lie. Most likely it was her deep underworld connections--specifically with gangster and clubowner Larry Fay-- that she exploited when she was under pressure. Her mixture of swagger, good hearted rough humor ("Hello Suckers" was her infamous catchphrase and she invented the term "butter and egg man") and her tough, "mobbed-up chick" persona earned her the admiration of the twenties elite. Her club was regularly packed with celebrities along the lines of Al Jolson, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, John Barrymore, Jeanne Eagels, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, etc. This mixture of high cuture and low fun was the true beginnings of what later became known as "Cafe Society" (see 1996 film directed by...me).

Unlike other celebrities of her ilk, her fame didn't die with her. Even though she left behind no work as an actress or singer that can be adequately judged as evidence of her talents, the legend of Texas Guinan lived on--in large part thanks to her friends Damon Runyon and Walter Winchell. Alas there isn't any way to recapture the spirit of the surroundings that she provided--what it was like, on those long forgotten Broadway nights, to be under the influence of bootleg hooch in Texas' club, mingling with the swells and watching the chorus girls. The best we can do is try to imagine utilizing the two pieces of film posted below. First is a trailer for a lost film that Guinan starred in in 1929 called "Queen Of The Nightclubs". Directed by the inept Bryan Foy (who also helmed the marvelously awful first 100% talkie "Lights Of New York"), this film couldn't have been terribly good...but oh what I'd give to see it! (Why is the world so stupid so as to lose things like this while carefully preserving the seasons of junk television that turn up on the abominable TVLand?) Second I've posted an excerpt from a short called "A Night In A Dormitory"from 1930 (but probably shot in '29). This is Thelma White singing--or rather trying to be heard--over a bevy of noisy tap-dancing vixens in a seemingly accurate (that is--too crowded) nightclub setting. The routine is so shabbily rehearsed, so barely up to the standard of professional dancing as we now know it that it has a kind of fascinating verite to it--it feels what late night in a twenties nightclub probably felt like given the circumstances and the drinks involved. Thelma White, by the way, later achieved dubious fame playing the role of pot-pusher Mae Coleman in "Reefer Madness". (Later she was an agent for a number of well known actors as well--not one of whose name I can think of at the moment).

Prohibition and the boom years of the twenties made Guinan a fortune, but with the depression her business began to fold. Guinan took her troop of dancers to Europe and offered a staged version of what a night in her club was like. Alas, after years of hard living she died of ameobic dystentary, aged forty eight, only one month before prohibition was repealed. (Is that a disease we still have? It sounds very third-world). After her death, Guinan--as much a product of her time as Winchell and Runyon--was mythologized in a number of books and memoirs--and even a movie, "Incendiary Blonde", with Betty Hutton (you should pardon the expression) playing Texas. This Paramount film from 1945 used to turn up regularly on the old KTLA 8PM movie show but hasn't been heard from, cable-wise, in a hell of a long time. Even Madonna announced a Texas Guinan project a couple of years ago, naturally called "Hello Suckers"--but cooler heads seem to have prevailed. None of the works extant about Texas pretend toward accuracy. Indeed the whole idea of an accurate biography of Texas Guinan misses the point of her boastful self-invented self. She epitomized a New York that was the capital of self-promotion during the age of self-invention. On her deathbed, she reputedly said: "I'd rather have a square inch of New York than the entire rest of the world." A lovely last line...if she really said it.

HOW TO MAKE A TALKIE: "SHOWGIRL IN HOLLYWOOD"

Here's a fascinating three minute clip from Mervyn LeRoy's 1930 talkie "Showgirl In Hollywood" starring the always strange Alice White. (Shamefully, I've yet to see this film--though it's happily extant and reputed to be quite good). It shows the making of an early musical number--complete with views of the cameras in booths, reverse shots of the crew, overhead angles that include glimpses of the on-set orchestra (playback had not yet been developed and musical numbers were recorded live, on camera, with the accompanying musicians standing off to the side and playing out of camera range). There are even shots taken from inside the booths that were then required to hold the cameramen and their cameras--the whirring sound of the cameras, which you will hear, necessitated the airless, sound-proof booths which commonly caused the cameramen to pass out from lack of oxygen. All in all, this is an invaluble, not to be missed piece of film history lore...one that I somehow managed to miss for thirty-some years despite my long obsession with the early sound years.

Who was Alice White? Ubiquitous for a few years during the early talkie transition, White was a local girl--she went to Hollywood High and began working in the industry as a secretary for Josef Von Sternberg. Despite having no real talent--her good looks aside she has the acting abilities of your pree-teen cousin's best friend--she wound up clawing her way up the First National ladder as a leading lady. And despite not being able to sing, she became one of the early talkie era's most employed singing stars. The role she played in "Showgirl In Hollywood", a chorine named Dixie Dugan, was further developed by the writer J.P McEvoy into a popular comic strip which used White as its model. From secretary to movie starlet to lead dancing and singing star to comic strip inspiration, you would have thought she had it made..and yet there was something about Alice White that seemed to seriously piss people off. Was it the talent-free perfomances? The blithe, devil-may-care persona? The boring name? Or was it something more sinister? Well, it seems that, in the mid-thirties, White was involved in a career-ending scandal involving her romances with two separate men--one of whom she later married.

One evening, in 1933, after leaving a party in Beverly Hills, White--who was engaged to a screenwriter named Sy Bartlett--was beaten up by another man she was romantically involved with, English actor John Warburton. The beating was so severe that White had to have corrective surgery to her nose and was rumored to be "unphotographic" as a result. This heinous event did not go uncorrected. Bartlett apprarently hired two men to supposedly "rob" Warburton but who, in fact, beat the crap out of him. Once the fighting was all over, White and Bartlett were on their way to matrimonial bliss...and White's career was effectively over. Scandals involving valuable stars were generally covered up (viz the murder of Ted Healy, reputedly at the hands of Wallace Beery who was immediately sent to Europe for a few months to recover from "exhaustion") but White had worn out her welcome with the studios and they flushed her away in yesterdays tabloids.

Presumably eager to stage a comeback, and having no real abilities to rely on, White hit the papers with another sex scandal in 1950. By then she was divorced from Bartlett and had married and divorced another man, the boringly named John Roberts. Roberts had stopped paying her alimony and she sued him. She was currently married to a man named William Hinshaw whose ex-wife, Barbara, was currently living with John Roberts. This strange scenario, with its sordid whiff of couple-swapping, didn't quite launch the comeback White was looking for. There's an excellent blog called immortalephemera which will tell you more than you need to know about Alice White--in case I haven't already. Meanwhile, click the above link to watch the "Showgirl In Hollywood" clip.

HOTSY-TOTSY'S OF THE BOOTLEG YEARS-JOAN CRAWFORD?

A specific line in one of Stephen Sondheim's greatest songs, "I'm Still Here" (from "Follies"-or did you already know that?) could only have been written while the author was pondering Joan Crawford (then still alive): "First you're another sloe-eyed vamp, then someone's mother, then you're camp..." For that matter, Sondheim's anthem--to a show-biz vet who is simply too shrewd, canny and tough to disappear--might well have been largely inspired by Crawford's life and career. At the time the song was written, Crawford was then into her "she married Pepsi-Cola" phase and not yet finished with personal appearences. So why did Yvonne DeCarlo introduce the song on Broadway instead of Crawford? Probably for the same reason that Mary Pickford turned down Billy Wilder's offer of the role of Norma Desmond in "Sunset Blvd." It was too damn close to the truth. And neither Mary Pickford nor Joan Crawford had much of a sense of humor about themselves.

I hesitated quite a bit before writing about Joan Crawford, because she's one those subjects--like gun control and abortion--which, once mentioned, can't be put to rest. Certainly I'm not going to chime in on the career appraisal, or the Mommy Dearest thing. Both subjects are exhausted and frankly never interested me that much. Indeed Joan herself was never my ideal movie star--too little mystery, too much gesturing etc. And since the gay-ification of Joan--the seizing of her identity and achievements by "Camp" Camp--she's long since disappeared from the real world, no longer retaining any sense of reality at all; she's turned into a shadow of a xerox of an icon. In a sense, Joan and Faye Dunaway have merged--disastrously for both of them. The considerable breaks Joan received in life have been largely undone since her death. Far from being a beloved well-remembered star, Joan Crawford is an easy to laugh at and hard to love name from the past. What a dreadful place for a public persona to wind up in.

So what is there to add to this already exhausted subject? Well, this: Crawford was a genuine hotsy-totsy of the bootleg years, with a wild and quite interesting dance style that was quite her own. This Joan--which I first saw in the interminable but indispensible "Hollywood Revue of 1929"--is much more human, much less polished than the later Joan and even offers occasionally glimpses into her real self that the later, highly polished, studio-crafted Joan never did. Indeed I have trouble associating the two Joan's--watching her in either of the below clips one can both see that it's her and also that it isn't the her we later come to know. (Not that much later: by the mid thirties the Art Deco Joan-- all sleek line-readings and poised poses--has officially replaced the slightly mad, on-edge flapper that was her first incarnation). There's something more human about the nutty, dance-crazy early Joan that I find much more inviting than her later self. She's closer to the girl from Texas that she was--a sexy, hungry chorine who made good at MGM in the silent years and quickly rose, in concert with the coming of sound to rival Norma Shearer as the Queen of the lot...but again, we are telling a story that's old. And I'm trying (in vain?) to find a fresh take on Crawford. Maybe Joan's dancing--very much of its time but still exciting, charmingly self-taught and winsome--is the story. She has rhythm. She's got guts. She wasn't afraid to put herself out there. That's what I see in these young "dancing Joan" clips that I find refreshing and personalizing.

Who can be bothered with more biography of this woman? Click here, if you must, to learn the story of Joan Crawford. See the later movies--"Torch Song", "Johnny Guitar"--to laugh cleverly at her camp persona. Dig "Mildred Pierce" or any of her late thirties MGM movies (the bizarre "A Woman's Face", directed by Cukor, is for me the best of them) to see what "Joan Crawford" (in quotes) was really about. But watch the below two clips--first is from HRO29 and the second from 1931's "Dance Fools Dance"--to get a gander at who she was when she started out.