Messala Takes Hollywood Without the Sandals

               The Oscar (1966, Russell Rouse) *

        Pure pulp all the way. Stephen Boyd plays a rough around the edges hardscrabble guy who makes his way in Hollywood (by way of peddling a strip tease act) stereotypically using and crushing everyone he meets until he gets all the way to the top and is nominated for an Oscar. The movie plays out in a series of flashbacks told by various characters the night of the Academy Awards. (Who can resist dialog like, “Man, he wanted to swallow Hollywood like a cat with a canary. And he did it! The parts got bigger, and Frankie was hooked! Like a junkie shooting pure quicksilver into his veins, Frankie got turned on by the wildest narcotic known to man: success! The parts got bigger and bigger... Frankie got hungrier and hungrier.) Will Stephen Boyd (Frank Fane is the name of his character, best line “When you tell it straight you don't do any polka, do you?) win the AA for Best Actor?.  A second tier star-studded cast abounds Jill St. John, Elke Sommer, Tony Bennett (in his one and only theatrical as Hymie Kelly), Milton Berle (plays his agent, all too chillingly), Eleanor Parker and Ernest Borgnine (none of whom are Oscar caliber here, but Ernie’s the best). A raft of guest stars in the character parts 

like Joseph Cotton, Ed Begly, Walter Brennan and Broadrick Crawford. The best is Peter Lawford who plays a actor much like he was in 1966; a guy who had been in pictures a long time and had lost the juice after his precieved  – his performance is eerily prescient. In Lawford's case he crossed Frank Sinatra (or at least Frank thought he did). And while fine actors all this is far from their best work.  As bad as it is, it passes the time and is fun as a ‘time capsule’.  Think of it as a poor man’s Valley of the Dolls; even soapier. (“You lie down with pigs you end up smelling like garbage.”) Stephen Boyd is as one-dimensional as he was as  Ben-Hur. It’s a long movie and the story is told in as  ‘ploddingly’ of fashion as a Harold Robbins novel.

The Girl in Black Stockings (1957, Howard Kotch) *1/2

    I was hoping for a gem of a B movie, when I  saw that it was “A Bel-Air Production”. A studio whose logo was vaguely reminiscent of a poverty row studio that was primarily responsible for movies for the Drive-In market of the 50's. This one comes with a stellar cast: Lex (Tarzan) Barker in the lead as an attorney on vacation who stumbles upon a horribly disfigured murder     victim. As these kinds of movies       have it he reports the murder and sticks       around to solve it. In this case  T.V. character actor superstar      John Dehner (12 “Gunsmoke” episodes alone) is       the dogged Sheriff in whose territory the victim is       found. Much of the rest   plays out in and around a       remote lodge where every guest is a suspect – but the  guy who runs it   (Ron Randell; also a      veteran of TV) is  the guy you want to watch.       Too slow to be really   effective as a thriller      but there is a nice assortment of actors to      watch as you     wind through the process of unraveling the mystery: Anne Bancroft       (outstanding as always she shines   through the production and makes    the other actors      work for it), Mamie Van Doren, Marie Windsor,     John Holland and Dan Blocker.  One more,      someone I was certain I had seen many      times named Gerald Frank – as it happens     he only has 2 film credits and 1 for TV. He plays Frankie of whom it is said, “poor (Frankie)     had all the big man scared out of him.” Lastly     it is eerily evocative (???) in its prediction of Hitchcock’s Psycho; in it’s straight-up presentation (not docudrama but not pulp either) and emotionless performances. But such a comparison is an anachronism as “Black Stockings” precedes Psycho as both a movie and novel. 

Star Wars, Trenchantly Served -- The End of Hollywood's Golden Age

Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962, Robert Aldrich) 

Bette Davis (Baby Jane Hudson) was 54 when she made Baby Jane and her motion picture career had pretty much ground to a halt (Frank Capra’s disappointed remake of his Lady For A Day – Pocket Full of Miracles being a rare exception) and was mostly doing guest shots on television. She even filled in for Raymond Burr on "Perry Mason" when he was having a dispute with CBS. Her nemesis (as Hollywood legend has it) Joan Crawford (Blanche Hudson) was 57 and pretty much suffering the same fate. Both Oscar winners, but no longer box-office draws took on what could have been a real freak show of a movie playing old time child starts who live alone in an old Hollywood mansion forgotten by their once adoring public; not exactly art imitating life, but not far from it. Bette Davis went on to win her last AA nomination and Crawford was not nominated, but she had the last laugh when Anne Bancroft won the Oscar that year (The Miracle Worker) and in her absence Joan accepted the award at the ceremony. The movie was an enormous success and ushered in a wave of old time movie stars making horror pictures (in fact Bette teamed with Aldrich two years later to make Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte along with Olivia de Havilland and Joseph Cotten). Crawford’s career basically consisted of horror fare going forward -- Strait-Jacket 1964, I Saw What You Did 1965 and Berserk 1967 to name a few. A relative newcomer, Victor Buono successfully chews the scenery with the two grand dames and even steals a few scenes as a creepy
conman after their money. Buono collected his single Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actor and the eye of Frank Sinatra. Frank saw the character Buono played, a creepy lug of a Baby Hughey man and cast him in all the parts that had been set for Peter Lawford in future Rat Pack movies (Robin and the Seven Hoods and Four For Texas). Something that no doubt rubbed salt in Peter’s wounds after his falling out with Frank. Robert Aldrich was also on the career skids compared to his glory in the mid 1950’s -- Vera Cruz (1954), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), The Big Knife (1955) and Autumn Leaves (1956) also with Crawford. Aldrich continues to be an underrated director, also helming The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) and The Dirty Dozen (1967), before trying to reinvent himself with The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968). What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? scared the hell out of me when I was a kid and today it still creeps me out. Curious fact: Barbara Merrill plays the daughter of the pesky woman who lives next door to the Hudson’s, in real life she was Bette’s daughter.

The Most Dangerous Game Runs For the Sun

Run From the Sun (1956, Roy Boulting) **1/2

Richard Widmark plays a Hemingwayesque writer, rogue and adventurer (with the requisite death wish, plane crashes and all) living in a self-imposed Central American exile; eating, drinking, fishing and whoring. Like Hemingway he suffers from writer’s block (he thinks all his current writing is “phony” – as opposed when he knew he could write because “he knew the truth, he lived it, he felt it.”) and too much booze. Jane Greer shows up looking for him (and trying not to be obvious; though as is later pointed out “she is trying to take him for a ride”); kind of a role reversal from her picture of ten years earlier (Out of the Past) when she was self-exiled in Mexico and Robert Mitchum is sent to look for her. But her character provides the grist for the story and aims to manipulate Widmark all the way. Despite it’s sun drenched Technicolor and widescreen presentation the movie (SuperScope 235), primarily due to its script, pales in comparison with Out of the Past. But then again this isn’t a noir thriller; it’s more of an adventure picture. While canoodling during a flying vacation Widmark and Greer crash land and find themselves houseguests of Trevor Howard (still a new face in Hollywood) in a scenario first seen in 1932 with The Most Dangerous Game the hunter and the prey and all of that + plus crypto-Nazis. That’s when the plot gets interesting and timely for it’s day. Saturday morning fun, but don’t expect anything more special than a “B-movie” with superior talent in front of the camera.  Best line “What do you know about truth or honesty, doing it the hard way without your big brown eyes to get ahead, well don’t give yourself too much credit anyone of those four eyed monsters from your nosy little magazine might have done just as well. I was ready. Do you do this for money or do you get a build out of prying into other people’s lives? The new kind of journalism, ‘let’s play peeping Tom’.” Saturday B-movie all the way, and I am loving it.

No second acts in American lives and this is a dress rehearsal at best.

Act One (1963, Dore Schary) *

Cardboard depiction of Moss Hart’s legendary Broadway backstage autobiography,

told didactically without heart (pun intended). As a biopic goes this stands with Night and Day as wooden, lacking insight into character, and being overly sentimental in its attempt at myth making. George Hamilton as Moss Hart is as good as he has ever been. Jason Robards is the bright spot as George S. Kaufman – not subtle but the one character you want to see more of in this half-baked “play”. Biggest curiosity factors: Bert Convy as Archie Leach. Dore Schary (who replaced Louis B. Mayer at his eponymous studio) made many great movies as producer. In his single outing as a director, not so good.

Guilty Pleasures – From Hamlet to Fatal Attraction, a femme fatal in gorgeous Technicolor

Leave Her To Heaven (1945, John M. Stahl) ****


“There's nothing wrong with Ellen. It's just that she loves too much.”


This is one of my favorite films from the 1940’s; made in sumptuous oversaturated three-strip Technicolor (Oscar for Cinematography) and a major film for 20th Century Fox. Far From Heaven opened on Christmas Day and Darryl F. Zanuck personally supervised the production. He paid a record price for the best selling novel. And for the lead, he chose a star he named, “the most beautiful woman in the movie industry", Gene Tierney. For Leave Her To Heaven she won her first and only Oscar nomination (Best Actress); she lost to Joan Crawford in her comeback role as Mildred Pierce.
As good as Gene Tierney had been in Otto Preminger’s Laura and continued to be until her last major staring role when she was teamed with Bogart in 1955’s The Left Hand of God (why is this not on DVD?), this was her best performance. I also have a fondness for her role in Tobacco Road.
Cornel Wilde serves as a strand-in for a movie star. No one is hurt or helped by his performance. I would have expected something more nuanced after his earlier release A Song to Remember – that earned a Best Actor nod. But we won’t concern ourselves with Wilde or his performance.
The film’s director, John Stahl is mostly known for making “women’s” pictures (like the original Back Street 1932, Imitation of Life 1934 and Magnificent Obsession 1935). But this is no “women’s picture” of 1945. And it’s not really Stahl’s either. Zanuck deserves much of the credit for the storytelling and getting the whole thing past the Breen Commission to secure a MPAA seal of approval.
Leave Her To Heaven belongs to Gene Tierney and the film’s cinematographer Leon Shamroy.

What makes Leave Her To Heaven fascinating (and problematic for many) is how difficult it is to classify. Like film noir a femme fatal drives the action. Foreshadowing is used throughout the narrative and the film employs the often-used “B-movie” conceit of essentially telling the entire story in an extended flashback. Conversely, the production is the stuff of gothic romance. Photographed in the luscious three-strip Technicolor process and in the style of ‘romantic realism’. That being better than reality; hence the over saturation of color; nearly all of the action takes place outdoors in broad daylight (often in and around water).


The story was unusual at the time. Rather than having a man obsessed with a woman, the story plays the other way around. Tierney’s character is a woman (with “father” issues), dangerously obsessed with her finance (later husband) played by Cornell Wilde. This was Tierney’s follow-up film to Laura from the previous year, where she played the object of Dana Andrews’s obsession. Here we see all of the characteristics of the femme fatal in broad daylight against the beautiful New Mexico desert and rural Maine in the summertime. Tierney as Ellen Berent Harland is cold as ice and as cunning as a trapped wild animal.
Leave Her To Heaven earned three other nominations: for art direction, sound and a win for Leon Shamroy’s cinematography. Shamroy was no stranger to the Academy having won twice before (The Black Swan 1942 and Wilson 1944). Leon enjoyed a lifetime total of 18 nominations in the category and four wins (last in 1964 for Cleopatra).

Shamroy’s use of three-strip Technicolor process gives the whole production a surreal and sensuous feel that rivals Powell & Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (Jack Cardiff won AA cinematography in 1948) as being one of the most innovative uses of the process for its day. Directors from Douglas Sirk to Martin Scorsese and Todd Haynes have talked about Shamroy’s influence of their work. The heavily saturated color illuminates the range of passions blazing beneath Gene Tierney’s character’s icy exterior.
The supporting cast features many of Fox’s best contract players of the day. They include Vincent Price giving his usual part of the day as the third wheel in romance. It’s interesting to note that he starred a year earlier with Tierney in Otto Preminger’s Laura playing a jilted lover as well. This was Price’s stock and trade before he made all of those he became the start of all those wonderful low-budget horror films for William Castle and Roger Coreman in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. Ray Collins (of Orson Welles Mercury Theater Group) plays the family friend and attorney. Gene Lockhart plays the family doctor (it amazing that his sequence got by the Breen Commission). Jeanne Crain plays Tierney’s stepsister and Mary Philips plays her mother. And Chill Wills basically plays himself.
But Darryl Hickman, as the vulnerable younger brother of Wilde, is the one you’ll remember. What happens to him plays out as one of the most terrifying scenes ever filmed in the movies. Hickman provides considerable insight into the film and working with Tierney in the commentary track (little is spared).

The film’s tagline, “Hers was the deadliest of the seven sins” couldn’t be more accurate.


Leave Her To Heaven was met with decidedly mixed reviews. Bosley Crowther at the New York Times wrote, “Miss Tierney's petulant performance of this vixenish character is about as analytical as a piece of pin-up poster art.” But the people crowed the theaters and it became the highest grossing film of the year and decade for Twentieth Century Fox. Zanuck knew how to make crowd pleasers.
The DVD (with it’s restored print) is a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Bob Hope & Lucille Ball "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" style

   Critic’s Choice (1963, Don Weis) **  

      A favorite from my childhood with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball in their fourth and final theatrical outing together. Based on the Broadway play by Ira Levin imagining the trouble real life critic Walter Kerr and his wife Jean Kerr (Please Don’t Eat the Daises and Mary, Mary) might have had if he had reviewed one of her plays.  On Broadway the cast had Henry Fonda playing opposite Georgann Johnson.  Obviously the comedy was punched up for Bob and Lucy (I’m thinking Bob’s drunk scene). What I remember most (and enjoyed most with this viewing) was the wonderful “Mad Men” like Manhattan with all of its stereotypes. I’ve said it here before, in the 50’s and 60’s the Manhattan of the movies plays out like Disneyland for adults, posh apartments, restaurants and nightclubs and an endless supply of taxicabs. Plus everyone dressed great – women in hats and men in dark suits with white shirts. The cast includes Jim Backus (in a very Jim Backus-like role) and the venerable Jessie Royce Landis playing Lucy’s mom, Rip Torn (in a rare early comedic performance) and Bob’s main squeeze in real life Marilyn Maxwell. How did Dolores Hope never find out? Don Weis was primarily a TV director and here he does his job strictly by the numbers. Which is too bad, this is one of the few films where Hope wanted to be seen as an actor (two others are Beau James (1957) and The Facts of Life (1960) – also with Lucy).  It’s too bad they didn’t hire a better director; this could have been something really special.  TCM’s website reports that the film was a box-office dud and after sitting on the shelf it was released to coincide with Lucy’ new television sitcom (The Lucy Show). Best line, Lucy says of Bob as a critic of her play, “Unselfish? He’s an opinionated sneak. I’m not shooting I’m leaving.” Apparently that’s what the audiences thought in 1963 when the film was released. The film failed at the box-office and with the critics, The New York Daily News noted, “Most of the picture’s running time is taken up with the couple’s quarrels and these are not conductive to laughter,” while The New York Times blamed director Don Weis, “[who] has tried to upholster the shaky plot with slapstick and broad burlesque. Both stars, old hands at this sort of thing, go through their paces with benign good humor, but their subtler comic talents remain untapped.” As it is, it’s a wonderful guilty pleasure and look at the NYC in the early 1960’s. For art direction alone it’s a must for the interested viewer.