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.

• Ron’s Nifty Fifty/Classics • Curiosities/Time Capsules

The Pawnbroker (1965, Sidney Lumet) *****

“I’m not particularly concerned with the future."

Director, Sidney Lumet, the consummate live television director of the 1950’s ("The Alcoa Hour", "You Are There", "Kraft Theatre", etc.) enjoyed an incredible feature film debut (12 Angry Men, 1957) and was coming into his creative stride with Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962). Then he made the first really break through movie of the 1960’s, The Pawnbroker. Simply put it made everything that came after it in American Cinema possible. Lumet continued his streak and made three minor classic Fail-Safe (1964), The Hill (1965) and The Deadly Affair (1966) following The Pawnbroker. He didn’t reach these creative heights again until Dog Day Afternoon (1975). And hasn’t since.

With The Pawnbroker Lumet made his best film and exposed American audiences to techniques from the French new wave (with the fast inter-cutting of scenes, both backward and forward in time), and the first nudity (albeit from the waist-up) in a film rated by the MPAA. American audiences had not seen anything like it. As a movie it tapped into our changing society with all of its warts and blemishes and dangerous elements.

Most American movies of the day reinforced the idea of how people saw themselves or escapist fare. The big money makers of the year were Mary Poppins, Goldfinger and Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines. But with The Pawnbroker the viewer experienced their darkest fears and failings, a new and uncomfortable experience.

I first became aware of The Pawnbroker from my mother. She had seen it during a movie night out with the girls at the Fox Redlands. She came away enthralled, amazed, shocked and frankly impressed with what she had seen on the screen. And she could not stop talking about it. It wasn’t until seeing it at the Fox Venice while a student at UCLA that I finally saw the movie.

Despite the many accolades The Pawnbroker received - the New York Film Critics award for Best Film and Director, the Golden Globe for Best Actor, the Silver Bear (Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival), among others - it only garnered one Oscar® nomination - for Best Actor. And much to Steiger's surprise he didn’t win. I heard him say in an interview that runs as a short on TCM from time to time, how he shifted in his seat at the ceremony an nearly ran up to the stage before he realized he hadn’t won. For the record the winner was Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou.

Rod Steiger, one of the greatest to come out the school of “method acting”, got his stripes in live television dramas with his major theatrical break playing opposite Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1954), earning an Oscar nomination for the trouble. He followed it with the neo-noir The Big Knife (1955) and then played  Al Capone . He even made a musical Oklahoma and he was part of Darryl F. Zanuck’s star studded (albeit second tier player) The Longest Day (1962). But in the main Rod Steiger had been sidelined for over a decade in Hollywood.

The Pawnbroker was the role that reignited his career (back to the level coming out of his Oscar® nomination for Best Supporting Actor in On the Waterfront, 1954). Despite its unsuccessful Oscar nomination The Pawnbroker earned him international critical acclaim and launched his career as an A-list actor in major films (Doctor Zhivago and The Loved One). And the following year he did win the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1967’s Best Picture, In the Heat of the Night.

Rod Steiger was barely forty when he played Sol Nazerman. But he immersed himself so deeply in the character that it's hard to believe he's not a sixty-year-old man. Sol is a holocaust survivor living on Long Island with his sister’s family. She is interested in advancing her husband’s civil service career as a teacher by making a family trip to Europe where they could see the old cities and reconnect with the charm and ways of the old-world. She has a nostalgia for the “the old country” of her youth saying, “You can almost smell the difference …” trailing off before Sol makes his nonchalant response, “It’s something of a stink, if I remember.”

His “business partner” in the pawnshop is the kingpin of the local underworld played Brock Peters; who two years before had played the wrongly convicted black man in To Kill A Mockingbird. (In an interesting coincidence, toward the end of the movie we see Sol running along Park Avenue past a movie theater with the marquee displaying The L-Shaped Room, staring Leslie Caron and Brock Peters.)

Sol’s time is primarily occupied with his remembrance of the 25th anniversary of seeing his family degraded and slaughtered by the Nazi’s in a concentration camp. If it didn’t sound so cruel one might almost call it nostalgia after getting to know Sol better and his tendency toward masochism. Now Sol is completely detached from the rest of the world; he has cut himself off from human emotion and feels only shame and the guilt of a wrongful survivor, as he sleepwalks through life.

Steiger summed up his character like this, "I explained that this solitary Jew could not rise to heights of emotion; he had been hammered by life and by people. The faith he had to find was in other people, because God had betrayed him." (From Rod Steiger: Memoirs of a Friendship by Tom Hutchinson).
Upon meeting a community organizer (of the day) Sol tries to rebuff her by saying, “Sell your sorrow someplace else Mrs. Burchfield.”

While Sol is confined into spending a lunch with the social worker he announces with conviction, “You have made the afternoon very tedious with your constant search for an answer. And one more thing: please, stay out of my life.” This is Sol’s mantra.

Spanish Harlem of the day was both exotic and scary as hell to someone from Redlands California. The New York City we were accustomed to seeing in the movies was the stuff of Doris Day in That Touch of Mink or Audrey Hepburn’s world in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.

At one point in the pawnshop he apprises a young woman’s engagement ring as being glass to her complete disappointment, this is inter-cut with a flashback of the concentration camp where the prisoners are made to raise their hands to allow the soldiers access to their rings and jewelry.

The scenes in the concentration camps production values are too high. The choice at first seems like rubbing one’s nose in the Nazi horror, but on reflection it might have been made to show-off the improved film making from a production values POV in the mid-1960. It would have been more powerful had Lumet used a documentary technique for those portions of his film.

The only human connection Sol seems to have is his assistant in the pawnshop, Jesus Ortiz, whom he tries to “teach the business.” But even this pedagogic impulse is ephemeral and he often loses patience with his pupil.

Early on Jesus asks, “Say, how come you people come to business so naturally?”

Sol answers, “You people? Oh, let's see. Yeah. I see. I see, you... you want to learn the secret of our success, is that right? All right I'll teach you. First of all you start off with a period of several thousand years, during which you have nothing to sustain you but a great bearded legend. Oh my friend you have no land to call your own, to grow food on or to hunt. You have nothing. You're never in one place long enough to have a geography or an army or a land myth. All you have is a little brain. A little brain and a great bearded legend to sustain you and convince you that you are special, even in poverty. But this little brain, that's the real key you see. With this little brain you go out and you buy a piece of cloth and you cut that cloth in two and you go and sell it for a penny more than you paid for it. Then you run right out and buy another piece of cloth, cut it into three pieces and sell it for three pennies profit. But, my friend, during that time you must never succumb to buying an extra piece of bread for the table or a toy for a child, no. You must immediately run out and get yourself a still larger piece cloth and so you repeat this process over and over and suddenly you discover something. You have no longer any desire, any temptation to dig into the Earth to grow food or to gaze at a limitless land and call it your own, no, no. You just go on and on and on repeating this process over the centuries over and over and suddenly you make a grand discovery. You have a mercantile heritage! You are a merchant. You are known as a usurer, a man with secret resources, a witch, a pawnbroker, a sheenie, and a kike!”

The Pawnbroker is an amazing movie. It broke new ground in its day and is just as fresh and engaging today. The performances that seem effortless and feel uncomfortably real, are at times it’s hard to watch, but you can’t look away.

Comfort Food & Guilty Pleasures: Mickey Rooney plays the drums and the ponies

The Strip (1951, László Kardos) **

Light weight  “B-Movie” noir with Mickey Rooney as a veteran who comes to LA to strike it big in the local music scene as a drummer. Through a confluence of events he meets up with a mobster (James Craig) and goes to work running a betting parlor until he meets a dancer and is talked into replacing the drummer in the band at Fluffy’s on the Sunset Strip. The joint is owned by William Demarest who plays “Fluff” the avuncular impresario; he even composes a song and sings it with Mickey (nominated for an AA) “A Kiss To Build A Dream On”. The house band is a “dream team” with Louis Armstrong and his band along with Jack Teagarden (as themselves). We also get to hear Louis do it (presumably for the first time). Mickey Rooney actually plays the drums in the movie, but he fails to impress as a tough guy. Nice location shots of the Sunset Strip and Hollywood nightspots of the day. This was definitely made as the bottom half of a double bill as poor Mickey was on the shady side of his career in 1951 after having been one of MGM’s biggest moneymakers a decade earlier. Sally Forrest shares top billing, playing the dancer who was the object of Mickey’s affection.  Sally’s career never really took off, even though she did some interesting work with Ida Lupino in Never Fear (1949) also playing a dancer in a much better film noir. For me the highlight of the movie is when given the choice of betting parlors to manage Rooney picks the Playa del Rey location (“Give me the beach, I like the fog”).

The American Myth: Eisenhower’s America, when our lives had three acts.

The Lusty Men (1952, Nicholas Ray) ****
“There never was a bronco that couldn't be rode, there was never a cowboy that couldn't be throwed. Guys like me last forever.”

So says Robert Mitchum as “retired” rodeo rider Jeff McCloud (due to an injured leg and heart condition), in this early Nicholas Ray picture about men trying to prove their masculinity by riding in rodeos. Arthur Kennedy (who made a remarkably good cowboy) plays a man fascinated by the rodeo and hopes to use it as a shortcut to earn the money to buy a ranch with his wife played by Susan Hayward in the type of role that made her the model of strong female characters in the 1950’s. An American dream rodeo-style.

I first became aware of this movie reading The Devil Thumbs A Ride by Barry Gilford, a wonderful book about movies that in its description provides a “… perfect companion for the tour of the mood, ominous, violent underbelly of American movie making.” Who could ask for anything more? Gifford’s interest in The Lusty Men comes from his appreciation of Nicholas Ray and the films he made. This alone made it a must see for me and I finally caught up with it on TCM a short while ago.

Before he made Rebel Without A Cause (1955) and after he made In A Lonely Place (with Bogart, 1950) and under contract to RKO, Nick Ray made this remarkable present day western about rodeo cowboys. Top billed was RKO studio player Robert Mitchum as Jeff McCloud. Mitchum was coming into his stardom after the success of the noir-ish Macao previously (not to mention a number of successful loan-outs to other studios).

Hollywood legend has it that Mitchum got director Josef von Sternberg fired off Macao as the two men constantly clashed and Nicholas Ray was brought in to finish the picture. Perhaps that’s how Ray got attached to The Lusty Men.

In The Lusty Men Mitchum gives one of his finest and most nuanced performances. He is absolutely effortless as he alternates charisma with menace as the trainer and mentor with that of enabler and rival. But this is the stuff of Nick Ray’s cinema, variegated characters constantly changing and surprising the audience.

Dennis Hopper said of Ray, “… (he) painted on a smokescreen canvass the lonely, restless and haunted outsiders of life. Nick Ray followed the beautiful losers against the society that dismissed them.” Apparently in the same way that Hollywood ultimately dismissed him.

But Mitchum as the enabler is the catalyst and not the driving force of the story for the film’s exposition where a man bent on pursuing his narcissistic fantasy of rodeo fame and riches. And it’s that man, in the form of Arthur Kennedy who steals the show.

David Thompson wrote of Arthur Kennedy, “is one of the subtlest American supporting actors, never more so than when revealing the malice or weakness in an ostensibly friendly man.” Kennedy already won two (of five) Oscar nominations (Champion 1949 and Bright Victory 1951) before taking the role of Wes Merritt.

I’ll never forget reading that toward the end of his life he was located living on a houseboat in Arkansas when he was needed to record some dialog for the restoration of Lawrence of Arabia.

Arthur Kennedy was a marvelous actor, who excelled in westerns. Of particular note are the Anthony Mann westerns Bend of the River and The Man from Laramie and Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious.

As Wes Merritt, Kennedy effortlessly morphs from a regular cowhand with a dream of owning his own place to a maniacal man in a race to fame and riches and the fast life of a rodeo star. Had the film been allowed to have a “true” ending, Kennedy may have made off with another Oscar nod for his transformational performance.

It’s clear why Susan Hayward was such a big box office draw in the 1950’s. She brilliantly plays Wes Merritt’s dutiful wife, but not in ‘50’s stereotype. Hayward plays Louise Merritt as a woman of character, able to navigate through any situation with grace and determination. She is a woman who knows what she wants and how to keep it and what she wants is her man.

A full quartet of stars receive name of above the title status. Arthur Hunnicutt completes the group playing a freakishly fascinating rodeo clown Booker Davis – eerily like a ghost of things to come for anyone who hangs on long enough in rodeo riding.

As a bonus we get Jimmie Dodd in one of this most developed film roles – you’ll remember Jimmie from “The Mickey Mouse Club” with his famous line closing each show, “Why? Because we like you!” And he favors us with a tune or two.

Unfortunately The Lusty Men was a studio film, albeit from RKO (a studio owned by Howard Hughes, an ardent champion of Eisenhower’s America). In a reach for old time movie sentimentality what Nick Ray had so carefully weaved into a tale of constantly changing character’s desires.

I can’t believe that a film with Nick Ray in control would ever have had such a pat and sentimental ending after having crafted such an intricate and nuanced tale of loyalty and desire. But even with an ending that rings false, the movie is a minor masterpiece of character development and storytelling, brilliantly photographed.

Ray wrote his own epitaph and assessment when talking about his films to an adoring critic, “You like these films, but you can't imagine how often they represent only fifty percent of what I wanted to do. You have no idea how I had to fight to achieve even that fifty percent.” Ray felt he made no really good movies.

The Lusty Men is nowhere near ‘half bad’; it’s truly a minor masterpiece like many of Ray’s films. I haven't come across one yet that wasn’t worth watching.

Curiosities/Time Capsules -- 1960’s Sex Pre-Psychedelic Style

Sex and the Single Girl (1964, Richard Quine) **

“They want me to turn that dirty rag into the most influential news magazine in the whole world.”

The bestseller and iconoclastic book, by Helen Gurley Brown, screen rights were purchased by Warner Brothers for the unheard of sum of $200,000; not for the content -- but for the title alone. The review in Time magazine described it this way, “Since the book is plotless, a collection of jiffy food recipes pressed between pages of instant indiscretion, the film makers fabricated this silly little comedy starring Natalie Wood and other celebrities old enough to know better.”

On so many ways we want this middling mid-sixties comedy to succeed. But alas despite the A-list cast, it fails as comedy on so many levels. But in a weird way the movie makes up for its shortcoming as a time capsule (& curiosity).

In retrospect the movie; Sex and the Single Girl was at the nexus of many of the major players in mythical community of Hollywood and American popular culture in its day.

In the mid-1960’s, before the “summer of love”, America was still trying to shake-off the boring lifestyle and conformity of the Eisenhower post war years. Movies like this played into the imaginary notion of “sexual liberation” (a term not yet invented). 

Sex and the Single Girl as a movie came wrapped in the most seductive package of all – it was recommended for Adults Only and it opened on Christmas Day.  “Adults Only” was the consummate label of the era intended to create interest and excite the imagination of the “adult” film going public and guarantee box-office; odd for a Christmas movie – talk about counter-programming.

Adult moviegoers were promised they were going to see something, “dirty”.  Because “sex” was dirty in 1964.

“Sex comedies” were nothing new; either as a genre or as films directed by Richard Quine (who made a bundle making them). The notion of using double- entendre to “say more than you’re saying” had been popular in movies since silents (no pun intended) and in the theater since, well how long do you want to go back? Let’s face it, sex sells and it always will.

Other bright spots in Quine’s sex comedy career extend to How To Murder Your Wife (from the same year) and The Notorious Landlady two years earlier (1962).  Additionally he also acquitted himself very well with the “woman’s weeper” in 1960 with Strangers When We Meet and the stylish production of the Broadway hit Bell Book and Candle (1958). It made Manhattan look so inviting, almost like a “Disneyland for adults”. 

A key ingredient of the genre, and for all practical purposes a character in its own right, is “booze”. The primary component for the loosening of inhibitions and likely to make the female of the species susceptible to seduction and of course sex, often adulterous and always outside of marriage.

“How about a drink?”

 “I don’t drink.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

Booze was a big part of things.

“Is there any more of this?”

“Are you kidding?”

In Sex and the Single Girl we have two generations of super-star couples; Wood & Curtis and Fonda & Bacall. Natalie Wood plays Helen Gurley Brown. But in this incarnation it’s Dr. Brown, a psychologist specializing in marital issues (short hand in those days for “sexual relations”).

Curtis edits a salacious magazine about sex and gossip  – always dressed to the nines in solid dark suits and fashionable “sports” clothes. This was the early 1960’s, people still dressed up.

Sex and the Single Girl demonstrates the top of Curtis’ star power – he is able to claim top-billing in the movie version of the #1 Best Seller of the decade and have his character fashioned into the lead (vs. Wood’s character who plays the book’s author).

Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda are too old for rock and roll but too young for America’s songbook – this generation of stars had to pretend to be infinitely contemporary and not be thought of as “classic film stars”.

Henry Fonda (his third film in ’64 along with Fail Safe and The Best Man) plays a married man who owns a hosiery company (who is obviously fascinated with women’s legs) and lives in constant fear of (Lauren Becall) his wife’s routine eruptions of jealous rage.

What now might be construed as a fantasy sequence is played straight, as a musical number with Count Basie and his Orchestra in a nightclub.  This was a time in movies when musical popular culture straddled the great divide between top 40 music and adult contemporary. It had to “swing” but not be traditional big band or popular rock – music that everyone thought was “listenable”. Unfortunately in nearly every outing this philosophy of movie music ran a ground and appealed to nobody.

Lauren Bacall, a creation of Howard Hawks (in the manner of Slim Keith) and the widow of Humphrey Bogart, made a handful of undistinguished films in the intervening years after his death. The only arguable exception is Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956). Bacall made only one more film before going back to New York and reinvented herself on Broadway. In Harper she played a wronged wife and femme fatal, against the inquiring PI played by Paul Newman. (Watch out, this is one of my favorite movies so it will no doubt wind-up in a future post.) Remember, Betty is not back on the screen until 1976 when she appears in Don Siegel’s western, The Shootist.

For the record: Slim Keith was her own recreation  – with embellishments from Howard Hawks and Leland Hayward and much later Truman Capote, said in her memoirs, more on this in a later post). "God blessed me with a happy spirit and many other gifts. What I was not blessed with I went out and got. Sometimes the price was too high, but I've never been much of a bargain hunter." from Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life (1991).

Fonda and Curtis made two movies together, this one and in 196x The Boston Strangler – the last good movie Curtis made.

Jack Lemmon and his work in Some Like It Hot (with Tony Curtis) is lampooned throughout the movie. It was five years after Wilder’s film and it was still considered topical. “He’s young and handsome and charming, he looks like Jack Lemmon.” Curtis’ character is called Mr. Lemmon once while wearing a woman’s nightgown.

“Go to Vegas kid you can make a bundle!”

Curtis and Wood had made Kings Go Forth (with Frank Sinatra) in the late 50’s, and went on to make The Great Race (with Jack Lemmon) before both of their careers disintegrated when the 1960’s commenced in full force with Easy Rider. And the “super-star system” became undone.

An incredible cast of supporting players include (our favorite best pal from all the Fred & Ginger pairing in the 1930’s) Edward Everett Horton, Mel Ferrer (at the time married to Audrey Hepburn), Stubby Kaye after Li'l Abner (1959) and before Cat Ballou (1965) and the indomitable Otto Knuger.

Knuger in his last role plays the head of the psychology practice where Wood works. He made his film debut in 1923, but it was in the 1930s that Kruger's polished, urbane characterizations came into full swing. Although he occasionally played a hero, as in Corregidor (1943), he was often cast as the amoral villain (in Hitchcock’s 1947 Saboteur) or a charming but corrupt businessman (usually a banker), a task at which he excelled. Kruger was one of the industry's busiest character actors until a series of strokes brought about his retirement in the mid-1960s.

Another fascinating artifact about this movie is that its screenwriter was Joseph Heller screenwriter – it was ’64 when his 1961 novel Catch-22 was optioned by a studio, his other screenwriting credit is Dirty Dingus McGee easily the worst movie Frank Sinatra made after we first saw him act in From Here To Eternity.

Our movie ends in a manic car chase (foreshadowing things to come in movies and in real life Los Angeles). Los Angeles’ freeways are just as barren and unattractive today as they are in second-unit footage for this film. It’s important to note that nowhere in the film is its locale identified; either by name or iconography until the madcap freeway chase.   Hollywood’s idea of the 1960’s was as over-the-top in concept as it was in execution.

The finale at the new Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), with its icon the Theme Building in full view portends a look at America’s future.  Next stop the “swinging sixties” and most definitely in La La Land.