Tag Archives: Charles Busch

Robert Wagner: Rico Suave

Ahoy, there! Robert Wagner in 1956.

A few days ago, I came across the following exchange on YouTube — it’s from a video that features a Q&A session with Robert Wagner, during a TCM cruise. The clip begins with the off-screen voice of an elderly woman, identified as Aunt Helen, who is evidently in mid-sentence.

Aunt Helen: . . . well, number one . . .
Robert Wagner: Number One? I’m Number Two . . .
AH: Robert . . .
RW: Yes, dear.
AH: I fell in love with you when I was thirteen years old . . .
RW: What stateroom are you in?

Classic Robert Wagner — affable, polite, amused, likeable and slightly naughty.

Nobody can accuse Robert Wagner of having appeared in too many great pictures, but he has been in plenty of good ones; he’s unfailingly an agreeable presence, and he always, always holds his own against all comers. He’s often better than the material he appears in, and is never worse. Like many stars from the era that immediately preceded his own, his voice is immediately recognizable — it’s melodious and as easy on the ear as the rest of him is easy on the eye. Anyhow, I’ve always liked the guy: when he turns up in a picture, I’m always delighted to see him. He’s a first-rate light comedian — he’s one of the best and most graceful comic actors in the business — and he handles drama with considerable skill. But he’s best in sophisticated comedy. What’s not to like? He’s a dreamboat with a sunny disposition and a heart of gold.

In his early pictures at Twentieth Century-Fox, where he was first under contract, he was either getting killed in battle (e.g., “What Price Glory?”), or, at the very least, taking an awful beating, as in these two examples:

With a Song in My Heart

Original poster.

In “With a Song in My Heart,” from 1952, Wagner appears briefly as a sweet-faced soldier whom we meet only twice. First, we see him as a fresh recruit at a performance of the recently crippled pop singer, Jane Froman (Susan Hayward). In his memoir, “Pieces of My Heart,” Wagner points out that he hadn’t yet learnt to act, and that his reactions are genuine. Naturalness has always been the hallmark of Wagner’s style. His entire performance is contained in the next three clips; it’s the performance that started his whole career.

Embraceable You

It’s just possible that Susan Hayward is the biggest ham in pictures. Everything about her is phony. Here she is, painted like the Whore of Babylon, and lip-syncing to Jane Froman’s recording of “Embraceable You.” She sings/mouths much of it directly to the fantastically handsome Robert Wagner — and, ham that she is, instead of just having a good time, she “indicates” it — acts it out — like in a game of charades. Aw, fer Chrissakes, honey, stop acting! And yet, I can’t get mad at her: without her, there’d be no Charles Busch. Her brand of terrible doesn’t make me mad: it makes me laugh.

Those two gentlemen at the end of the clip are Rory Calhoun and David Wayne. Calhoun’s career was derailed by a scandal in the mid-fifties. Robert Wagner writes about it in his memoir, and in “You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age.” (Both books were co-authored by Scott Eyman; both are great fun to read.) According to Wagner, when “Confidential” (a fifties scandal magazine) was about to print a tell-all exposé of Rock Hudson’s private life, Hudson’s agent, Harry Willson, bought their silence by selling out one of his less popular clients: Rory Calhoun. Willson let them know that Calhoun had been busted on a robbery beef when he was a teenager. As Wagner puts it, “It was a simple calculation on Willson’s part — 10 percent of Rock’s salary meant a lot more than 10 percent of Calhoun’s.” The scandal ruined Calhoun’s career. Wagner also mentions that Willson died broke.

Tea for Two

Awww, he’s bashful . . . ! Look at this handsome bastard go into his innocent act. Great stuff.

“Joe . . . May we have a soft, soulful light, please?” God, look at that phony broad act . . . ! It’s remarkable how many different ways Susan Hayward finds to be artificial. Oh, I beg your pardon, this is supposed to be about Robert Wagner.

Every major studio during the fifties had a dozen or more handsome young contract players competing for the same small number of small parts, but Robert Wagner is the only real looker from that era who is still going strong. His contemporary, Tony Curtis, achieved major stardom more quickly and, at his peak, was a much bigger star than Wagner ever was, but Wagner’s career never took the nose-dives that Curtis’ did, nor did Wagner ever have to make a fool of himself in any sword and sandals epics. (“Prince Valiant” was a serious embarrassment early on, but the wig took most of blame for that one.) And Wagner is still alive and hard at it (except that he never allows it to look hard).

I’ll Walk Alone

Wagner shows up a little later in the picture, after the War has done terrible things to him. Just look at the Kabuki makeup they used to make him look ill and shell-shocked, and you know the poor boy is doomed. In those days, the more pancake makeup that was visible on an actor’s face, the closer his character was to death. In this clip, Wagner is clearly at the very gateway of the Great Divide, a victim of Hollywood’s favorite disease, pancake poisoning.

In “Pieces of My Heart,” Wagner writes:

I’m embarrassed to say that I read the script and didn’t see it. “This isn’t very much,” I told Darryl [Zanuck, head of the studio]. And with great patience, he told me, “This will be the biggest break you will have had in your career. You will be on the screen for three minutes. When people come out of the theater, they will want to know who you are.”

That was the last time I questioned Darryl Zanuck’s judgment about the movies. I was too young to realize that Darryl was placing me, sculpting moments for me that would compel the audience’s attention. He was taking very good care of me.

After “With a Song in My Heart” was released, Wagner began to receive thousands of fan letters a week and his career was on its way.

For the record, Wagner also has nothing but praise for Susan Hayward: he gives her most of the credit for his effectiveness in the scene. His loyalty to the actress does him credit, but still I beg to differ. His performance still looks real today; hers is one hundred percent baloney. (She was nominated for an Oscar, of course, but lost to Shirley Booth in “Come Back, Little Sheba.”)

Stars and Stripes Forever

Original Poster.

Prim, swishy, desiccated Clifton Webb was an early mentor to Wagner; characteristically, Wagner has only good things to say about him. They made two pictures together (“Titanic” was the other), but I find it especially funny to see Webb in his John Philip Sousa whiskers and suffering agonies of desire for Wagner in “Stars and Stripes Forever” (1952). Musical biopics are almost without exception spectacularly terrible, but “Stars and Stripes Forever” is among the worst of the lot; “bottom of the barrel” doesn’t begin to describe it: it’s the slime underneath the barrel. It is remarkably, hilariously, memorably bad. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Clifton Webb is less dreadful than usual (bad material agrees with him better than good stuff), but it’s Robert Wagner who really holds my interest. He is so outrageously handsome that every time he’s onscreen I begin to laugh: how can anyone look that good? Debra Paget is the sex-kitten, but Wagner’s a whole lot prettier than she is. The role he’s playing is impossible, but he’s funny and charming in it.

This clip should give you a fair idea of what the whole picture is like:

Well, you can see for yourself that the material is atrocious, but Wagner’s self-possession is pretty remarkable, considering his inexperience. And I enjoy watching poor old Clifton eating him with his eyes (this is more apparent in other scenes than in the clip above). Later on in the picture, Wagner’s character loses a leg — a rum go for a fellow whose chief desire is to be in a marching band. I’ve uploaded a longish clip of the last scene on YouTube (it’s called “Wagner lo Zoppo”), but I’ve decided not to offer it here. It really is too crummy, even for here, where lousiness has often been celebrated. But there are limits.

The Pink Panther

Re-release Poster. The artwork is by Mad Magazine cartoonist, Jack Rickard.

“The Pink Panther” (Mirisch Company, 1963) is the first Robert Wagner picture I ever saw. I was just a little kid at the time, but he made an indelible impression on me: I thought he was the swellest guy I’d ever seen. He doesn’t have to do much in this next clip except be debonair, get the lighter to work on the first try, and keep a straight face — he does each to perfection.

Meglio Stasera

He has even less to do in this clip. He only has to sit next to David Niven and listen to gorgeous Fran Jeffries sing “Meglio Stasera,” but I like how well he does it. He gives her his full attention and never takes his eyes off her. Peter Sellers never stops trying to steal scenes; he often succeeds, but not always — anyhow, as far as Sellers is concerned, every scene he’s in is about him. Wagner is content to put the focus where it belongs. Sellers is funny, all right, but I constantly find myself wishing he’d do less. I prefer Capucine and Wagner.

Shwing Time

I love this brief clip of Wagner and Capucine. She needs to find a way to make him keep his trap shut, so she uses the age-old, time-honored, sure-fire method of securing silence and cooperation: she gives him a boner.

In the Clink with Niven

Here he is near the end of the picture, completely holding his own in the presence of David Niven and Peter Sellers.

Harper

Original poster.

“Harper” (Warner Bros, 1966) has what is generally regarded as Wagner’s best performance. He rarely has had the opportunity to play so many different emotions as he does in this one.

Here’s how we first meet him. That’s Pamela Tiffin on the diving board. On William Goldman’s amusing, often cantankerous commentary track, the first sight of Miss Tiffin all but knocks the wind out of him: “Isn’t she gorgeous?!” he says almost incredulously. Yes she is.

How many actors are able to say “Top o’ the morning” and sound hip? Not even Paul Newman sounds right saying it. But Wagner . . . well, as Brando once said of John Gielgud, “That cat is down!”

Here he is in what is probably the most dramatic scene of his movie career. He’s perhaps a little bit of a lightweight for this sort of thing, but then again, Alan Taggart is supposed to be something of a lightweight. I don’t think anyone else could play it better than he does.

By the way, the girlfriend/singer in question, whom Newman calls “that Fraley broad,” is played by Julie Harris. Her singing must be heard to be believed: when Newman says she’s a no-talent, he’s not kidding. Lauren Bacall is also on hand in an amusing role — she’s the rich bitch who hires Newman to find her missing husband. We’re supposed to believe she’s paralyzed after a fall from a horse, but in one scene, we can see her easily move her fabulous legs. This would seem to be a clue to the mystery, but it turns out to be merely an error. But it’s never a mistake to have a good look at Bette Bacall’s sensational gams.

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

Poster for Italian release.

This essay began with a reference to Wagner’s comic turn as Dr Evil’s henchman, Number Two, and that is where I’ll end. Number Two is a role Wagner was born to play. Here is his first entrance.

You get the idea. In “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” (New Line, 1997) it’s a running gag to have the jokes go on far too long.

And here we see Number Two cheating at cards. You will note that the Soup Nazi (Larry Thomas) is the dealer — and he’s still in a bad mood.

A Scornful Pleasure: ‘Black Widow’

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Original poster for Belgian release. It’s funnier in French and Dutch — leave it to the Belgians to misspell Gene Tierney’s last name. And talk about false advertising: no character in the picture remotely resembles that blonde slut in the red dress.

I like plenty of crummy movies, but none of them are guilty pleasures: I don’t feel the least bit guilty about enjoying what isn’t first rate. If I cherished a secret fondness for something that I knew to be despicable — say, a racist comedy starring Stepin Fetchit — I’d call that a guilty pleasure. But that sort of thing gives me no pleasure at all: it only revolts and depresses me. In Preston Sturges’ otherwise excellent comedy, “The Palm Beach Story,” for example, there’s one scene on a train, in which the members of the Ale and Quail Club, for laughs, shoot up the clubcar and frighten the African-American barman (Fred “Snowflake” Toones) half out of his wits. This ugly episode strikes me as being rather worse than merely objectionable: it’s appalling and disgusting, especially coming from a man of Preston Sturges’ obvious sophistication and worldliness. It doesn’t come close to making me laugh: I only wonder where this totally insupportable, unprovoked hatefulness comes from . . . The rest of the picture is very funny, but just knowing that it contains this one scene makes me dislike it: it is guilty, but no pleasure.

Instead of guilty pleasures, I have what I call scornful pleasures — pictures that I enjoy in spite of, and in most cases, specifically because of, their inadequacies. To be a scornful pleasure, a picture has to have overt failings, but not all bad movies qualify as scornful pleasures, since few bad movies are genuinely pleasurable. If you have any self-respect, scornful pleasures should be mildly embarrassing — there’s no shame in enjoying a certain amount of crap, but I find that it is shameful to take pleasure in feeling superior to something that is plainly idiotic, preposterous, puerile, incompetent or a combination of all four. For me, most camp is too contemptible to qualify as a scornful pleasure. The only camp I tend to like is camp only by accident; with the notable exception of the brilliant Charles Busch, anyone who sets out to be camp is already out of bounds: self-regarding camp is almost guaranteed to exhaust my patience faster than any other form of lowbrow entertainment.

Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate, Patty Duke in ‘Valley of the Dolls’: Thank you, I’ll none.

About fifteen years ago, I attended a screening of “Valley of the Dolls” out at the Fire Island Pines Community Center. I had never seen it before, and it turned out to be one of the most insanely enjoyable pictures I ever saw. But there were two factors that made this so. First, I saw it in a room full of well-heeled, well-oiled gay men, most of whom knew every line of it and their running commentary made the picture riotously funny; and second, the distributor sent a 70mm print, which had to be shown on a 35mm projector, which made all the characters and objects expand and contract Slinky-like as they crossed the screen — a stretch limo, for example, when it crossed from left to right, began compressed into a clown-car, then expanded to twice too long in the center of the screen, and compressed again when it arrived on the right side of the screen. Similarly, the actors were beanpoles on the edges of the frame and fatsos in the center. Somehow, this demented visual joke never stopped being hilarious. I don’t know if I ever laughed so hard at anything else in my entire life. But when I bought the DVD a few years later, and watched it in the cool, dark fastness of my living room, I found the picture simply too swinish and incompetent to be enjoyable: taken in small doses, the camp elements are funny; taken as a whole, it’s beneath contempt. Susan Hayward’s turn as Helen Lawson is reasonably amusing; in a much better picture, or even out of context, she would be a scornful pleasure. But in that wretched piece of shit, she’s not funny enough to be madly enjoyable the way a scornful pleasure ought to be — she’s merely less exasperating than everything else.

“Valley of the Dolls” is camp, all right, but it fails to be a scornful pleasure because it aims too low and misses by a mile. As a rule, scornful pleasures aim a little bit higher and miss by a little bit less. And they have to miss the mark in a few, circumscribed ways (illogic and over-exuberance are two common failings that yield dependably amusing results), or they fail to be pleasurable. The movie version of “Peyton Place,” directed by Mark Robson (who also directed “Valley of the Dolls”), is a far likelier candidate for a scornful pleasure: it aims higher, it tackles serious issues timidly and idiotically and is full of the kind of earnest bad acting that I usually get a kick out of. The only trouble is that while “Peyton Place” is plenty lousy, it’s not bad enough to be funny; some of it is almost too good to be bad and all of it is too anemic to be entertaining. Now if Joan Crawford had played the Lana Turner role, it would probably be both camp and a scornful pleasure. Of course, there are no hard and fast rules about any of this, but generally speaking, I suppose it comes down to this: scornful pleasures are practically always infra dignitatum, but never sub contemptum.

“Black Widow” (20th Century-Fox, 1954) most definitely falls into the category of a scornful pleasure, with one major element of camp. It is preposterous in nearly every way I can think of, and almost all of them are scornful pleasures. Old reliables Reginald Gardiner and Otto Kruger are fairly droll, and there’s one tremendous performance by a terrific young actress named Hilda Simms in a small part; other than these three, it is bereft of good performances, but several actors are bad in ways that I enjoy (George Raft’s wooden performance, for example, is made of a timber I particularly like). Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay is very bad indeed and his direction is worse (I can’t think of another picture that has so many backs in the foreground); the soundstage depictions of Central Park West and South are ludicrous. Unsurprisingly, the one irredeemably camp performance (by Ginger Rogers) is what I find least amusing and interesting about “Black Widow.”

Here’s how the picture opens, immediately following the 20th Century-Fox fanfare. Leigh Harline wrote the ominous music; Van Heflin does the talking.

“Black Widow” is actually a wrong-headed title: the villainess in this story is the only person who turns up dead — and she does so in the second reel. (I think it’s fair to give this much away: the original posters carried the tagline: “Someone Will Kill This Girl Tonight!”) She’s a regular, right down bad’un, this girl, but she’s no black widow. Still, the opening gives a nice sense of the entertaining silliness to come. It’s based on Patrick Quentin’s novel, “Fatal Woman,” which title is only slightly closer to the truth.

Peggy Ann Garner as Nancy Ordway: Put yer pants on, Spartacus . . . !

Peggy Ann Garner shows her gams as Nancy Ordway: Put yer pants on, Spahtacus . . . !

The story is set in the theatre milieu, but it’s not so much a backstage drama as an off stage drama: except for a single scene at a stage door, we never see the inside of a theatre. Certainly we never see Ginger Rogers onstage, though we’re supposed to accept that she is Carlotta (Lottie) Marin, a Great Lady of the Legitimate Stage. Gene Tierney, who plays Van Heflin’s wife, is also a famous Broadway star, but she’s not even in a show when the story takes place. Instead, what we get is Ginger Rogers swanning about as Lottie the Diva, but she’s no Margo Channing — all talent and tempest — no, she’s merely a bully and a bitch. She camps it up, and has a high old time all by herself. Reportedly, she had a lot of fun making this picture. She was a lot better when she was having no fun with Fred Astaire and dancing till her feet bled. In this picture, she doesn’t act well; she doesn’t even move well, let alone give a credible impersonation of a great actress. Here’s how we first meet her: Van Heflin plays Peter Denver, the producer of Lottie’s current hit show, who attends a lavish party she’s throwing on her night off from the theatre. Peter lives in the apartment directly under hers, so he’s obliged to attend her “shambles” (as he calls it) against his will. (I love the cheesy way Heflin finds, in his opening voice-over, to express contempt for his leading lady’s shindig: “And so I went to Lottie’s . . . party.” It’s such a brainless, actorish way to read the line “interestingly.”) Notice how often the actors end up speaking with their backs to the camera . . .

At this same party, Peter meets an aspiring young writer, Nancy (“Nanny”) Ordway (Peggy Ann Garner), out on the soundstage terrace. The terrace set is one of the first things about “Black Widow” that attracted my interest. It’s totally artificial: the view is supposed to be from a penthouse at Fifth Avenue and 67th Street — I could be wrong, but except for the big red Essex House sign, the cityscape looks pretty inaccurate: even today, with many more tall buildings along Central Park West and Central Park South, the view isn’t as crowded and tall as the view on the Fox soundstage, but even so, I think this set is a thing of beauty — at least in the nighttime scenes. In the daytime scenes, it’s far less glamorous and impressive; in fact, in some shots, it looks suspiciously like a painting. (But of course that’s another scornful pleasure: besides, artificiality is a hallmark of this picture’s whole style.)

Poor Peggy Ann Garner! She won a special juvenile Oscar for her performance as Francie Nolan in Elia Kazan’s directorial debut, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (20th Century-Fox, 1945). Kazan called her performance “a miracle.” That’s a bit thick, but she’s good in that picture, even if she doesn’t sound remotely like a Brooklynite. Garner managed to keep working as an actress till her death in 1984 (she was only 52), but she never came close to matching her childhood success. After this first scene, she worms her way into Peter Denver’s life and cadges a few dinners from him. This next clip contains a very specific type of scornful pleasure for me: it always slays me to hear Van Heflin speak a foreign language with his Oklahoma accent. In this one, he recites from “Salome”: “. . . das Geheimnis der Liebe ist größer als das Geheimnis des Todes“; in “East Side, West Side,” he has a back-and-forth with Barbara Stanwyck in appalling Italian. I don’t know why, but it always “pleasures me” to hear Heflin speak in a foreign tongue.

I find this chick’s personality toxic. Besides, I’m so familiar with her as the adolescent Francie Nolan that I find it very off-putting to see her giving us cheesecake. When I see her legs, I’m reminded of what Jimmy Cagney said to Horst Buchholz in Billy Wilder’s “One, Two, Three”: “Put yer pants on, Spahtacus!”

Before the second reel is over, Miss Ordway is no more. For the rest of the picture, we’ll see her only in flashbacks. Here’s why:

Good riddance to bad rubbish. I love the way the elegant Gene Tierney recoils and rubs the grease off her fingers after she reads the label inside Miss Ordway’s coat. Her tragic pantomime in the bedroom doorway counts as a scornful pleasure: it’s an excellent example of what acting teachers call “indicating”: the representation of an emotion in an artificial manner that only happens onstage, but never in real life. The elevator man’s smiling for the newspaper cameras as they wheel the stiff into his car is a scornful pleasure. The awkward staging, with Lieutenant Bruce’s (George Raft) back to us when he speaks his very first line, is a scornful pleasure. Many directors in the fifties complained about the difficulty of staging scenes for CinemaScope, but most of them came up with novel solutions. Not Nunnally Johnson: it appears he never saw a back he didn’t want to photograph. The staging is awkward throughout, and as the picture progresses, the awkwardness and silliness begin to achieve a weird momentum. If you do decide to give the movie a try and don’t enjoy the first fifteen or twenty minutes, you might consider staying with it for a while longer: I think it takes a while for the fun to kick in. Mind you, it doesn’t get better as it goes along — that’s not what scornful pleasures do — it gets more diverting, which isn’t the same thing.

Raft as Detective Lt. Bruce is a both a genuine pleasure and a scornful one. By his own admission, he was no actor. But he’s such an imposing personality and figure that I love the guy. Twenty-two years prior to “Black Widow,” Raft appeared in “Scarface” with super-ham Paul Muni. After seeing the emotional wringer Muni put himself through, Raft said flatly, “If I hadda go through that to be an actuh, I’d quit.” Well, he gets my vote. Another Raft quote that makes me admire him goes like this: “I spent half my money on dames, dice and the ponies. The other half I wasted.” He’s no actor, but I certainly like the cut of his jib.

Many critics have compared “Nanny” Ordway to Eve Harrington in “All About Eve,” but I find the comparison inapposite. To be sure, both characters are not what they seem, and both are climbers, but Eve seems like a nice enough girl at first: when we learn what she’s up to, we’re supposed to feel conned by her goody-two-shoes act. Nancy Ordway, on the other hand, is a very strange bird from the outset: if I were in Van Heflin’s place, the very first doodle she sent to me would be sufficient to make me refuse to take her phone calls. And as evidenced in the clips above, her conversation is stultifying. It’s bad enough that she’s obviously deranged, but she’s also a bore, which is intolerable.

Here’s Hilda Simms’ only scene. What is particularly impressive is that her dialogue is entirely composed of exposition, yet she displays more personality in her one scene than the rest of the cast manage in much larger parts. Alas, she was blacklisted during the Communist witch hunt and never made another picture.

“I certainly don’t want to speak disrespectfully of the dead, but that Nanny was strictly a purpose girl.” That’s my favorite line in the picture. In the final reel, George Raft, who obviously didn’t hear Anne the hat-check girl use the expression, sums up Miss Ordway as “a purpose girl who lost her purpose.” “Purpose girl” is a term that I’ve never heard before; a Google search came up with a single hit: a French/English dictionary entry for the word “disrespectfully” quotes the line from “Black Widow”! When Anne uses the expression, I take it as an example of good writing; when Lt. Bruce uses it, I take it as evidence of bad writing: yet another a scornful pleasure.

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