Even by dopey musical standards, “Broadway Melody of 1940” is bad beyond belief. Pauline Kael hated it so much, she was unwilling to admit that any of the dance numbers in it are any good. She was quite wrong about this. Here are two of the best.
“I’ve Got My Eyes on You” is an example of Fred Astaire doing his best at what he does best. He plays the piano, he sings, he tap dances, he does tricks with a few props . . . and he does it in six shots.
I’ve Got My Eyes on You
“Begin the Beguine,” which ends the picture, features what is almost universally considered to be the most extraordinary tap dance routine ever put on film. Astaire and Powell have no chemistry whatsoever, but it hardly matters — at least, not when they’re dancing. The art direction and cinematography, along with the number itself, all combine to make it the best advertisement I’ve ever seen for the luxurious pleasure and special chic of black and white cinematography. The mirrored dance floor alone is an amazing achievement; nothing like it had ever been manufactured before: it had to be invented — several thousand square feet of shatterproof, scratch resistant flooring strong enough to withstand a ten minute tap routine — and no glazier in the Los Angeles area was willing to try. Finally, the production team at Metro manufactured it right on the lot. The dancers were never allowed to rehearse on it. Astaire and Powell had to be so confident in their routine that they could execute it to perfection on the first take. The result is dazzling; the extended a capella tap cadenza at the climax goes beyond dazzling — it’s electrifying.
Begin the Beguine
“Begin the Beguine” was the swan song for the black and white Metro production number — and also its apotheosis. The set, including the mirrored floor, took eight weeks to construct. The backdrop was a vast, midnight blue* cyclorama. Ten thousand miniature lights were then embedded into it to create the night sky. Mirrors thirty feet tall were placed upstage of the main dance floor, to reflect the dancers. The palm trees and the curtains were made of cellophane. The mirrored floor covered 6,500 square feet, and was created by pouring molten glass into large wooden frames. At the time, the set for “Begin the Beguine” was the largest and most elaborate ever constructed for a Metro picture. The mastermind who designed and engineered it was Merrill Pye, whose brilliant work on “North by Northwest” (1960) brought him his only Oscar nomination. (He lost, as did every other nominee that year, to another Metro picture, “Ben-Hur.”) For “Broadway Melody of 1940,” Pye designed the sets for the musical numbers; Cedric Gibbons (Metro’s Art Department chief) did the rest, and took sole credit for art direction. Pye’s credit, “music presentation,” is misleading, to say the least. Production costs for the entire picture came to $1.1 million. Perhaps most astonishing of all is the production schedule. Shooting began on October 21, 1939 and wrapped a mere twenty-seven days later. “Begin the Beguine” was shot in four days. It’s almost beyond belief that a dance number of such length and fiendish complexity could be completed in two weeks, let alone four days. ______________ * In the 1920s, the very glamorous Prince of Wales, a clothes-horse of the first water, started a trend when he introduced evening wear made of midnight blue fabric, as an alternative to the traditional black. As the most photographed man in the world, His Royal Highness recognized the photogenic potential of midnight blue; in black and white photography, the color appeared as a slightly softer black, which showed off subtleties of the tailoring (lapels, pockets, buttons, etc.) to better advantage. This lesson could hardly have been lost on Hollywood designers, though I have no proof that this is the case. It’s regrettable that, by the time “Broadway Melody of 1940” was in the works, His Royal Highness, now styled the Duke of Windsor, had become the world’s best dressed Nazi sympathizer.
It’s Always Fair Weather
Original Poster.
“It’s Always Fair Weather” was originally conceived as a follow-up to “On the Town.” Halfway through the shooting schedule, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, who had successfully collaborated many times before (most notably on “Singin’ in the Rain”), were no longer speaking to each other. The picture was a nightmare to make. The story was more complicated and angst-ridden than audiences were prepared to accept from an MGM musical. It was also booked into some terrible places, including eleven drive-ins in Los Angeles, where it played as a second feature to “Bad Day at Black Rock.” This is not the picture to see at a drive-in. But leaving all that aside, it’s simply not much fun. The composer, André Previn, did his own orchestrations, which gave him more freedom than usual, but he confessed that he was so busy with the orchestrations that the tunes weren’t terribly good. He’s right. (Coincidentally, Previn also did the score for “Bad Day at Black Rock,” which is easily the best thing — perhaps the only good thing — in it.) Though it’s mostly all bummer, “It’s Always Fair Weather” does feature one song that I think stands as the best example of what MGM musicals were all about: it’s “I Like Myself,” Gene Kelly’s show-stopping number. Kelly’s solo routine for the title song in “Singin’ in the Rain” is generally regarded as the brightest jewel in the MGM crown, but I contend that “I Like Myself” is even more quintessentially Metro than “Singin’ in the Rain.” The super-wide CinemaScope format was never put to better use. The routine was shot on the perfectly level streets of the make-believe Manhattan Theatre District designed by Cedric Gibbons and Arthur Lonergan. Everything about the number is expensive, perfect, elaborate and artificial. Artificiality is the hallmark of the MGM style. When it doesn’t work it’s awful. But when it succeeds, as it does in “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Dancing in the Dark,” the ballet from “An American in Paris,” and “I Like Myself,” it’s thrilling. Kelly rehearsed this number for twelve days; it took four days to shoot. Total cost was $174,836, but it looks like a million.
It’s a shame that the rest of the picture doesn’t work. Cyd Charisse, as a sexier version of Dr. Joyce Brothers, is hopeless. Dolores Gray, as an unctuous television hostess, is too noisy, too knowing, too busy and not at all funny. Dan Dailey, as an alcoholic ad man, gets loaded at a formal affair and runs amok — it’s his big number. It’s supposed to be hilarious. It isn’t. Michael Kidd, whose big number was cut, can’t sing or act. He looks miserable.
I Like Myself
Macao
Original Poster.
“Macao” (RKO, 1952) is a mishmash of familiar situations from better pictures, but it has several things going for it. As you can see from the poster, Jane Russell sings three numbers. “One for My Baby” is the best song of the three, but she doesn’t bring much to it. Ida Lupino sings/croaks it to much better effect in a crummy noir called “Road House.” Russell fares better with “You Kill Me,” a nice tune by the redoubtable Jule Styne, with lyrics by Leo Robin.
Although “Macao” isn’t a good picture, Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum have good chemistry and the dialogue is pleasingly hard-berled. (He: Thanks for the flowers. She: I couldn’t afford a wreath.) Howard Hughes, who owned RKO at the time, fired director Josef von Sternberg about a third of the way into production and replaced him with (uncredited) Nicholas Ray. Ray was in the middle of divorce proceedings with Gloria Grahame, who offered to forego alimony if he could find a way to get her out of the picture — George Stevens tried to borrow her for “A Place in the Sun,” but Hughes wouldn’t hear of it. Grahame got revenge by giving an over-the-top ham performance. (That same year, she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her over-the-top ham performance in “The Bad and the Beautiful.”)
The Family Circle: George Brent, Olivia de Havilland, Frank Craven, Billie Burke and Bette Davis
It’s the only time John Huston worked with Davis. It’s an absurd melodrama, with Davis as a mean, mean, mean mantrap. Quite hilarious. That big piece of solid timber from Ireland known as George Brent is also in it.
Brent, de Havilland: On the bum.
Halfway through the picture, when Brent’s life is on the skids, he wears the most amusing greasepaint whiskers . . . I love that sort of stuff. And not in a cynical, sneering way: I genuinely like a certain amount of blatant artifice — it’s in keeping with the steamed-up nature of melodrama. Huston doesn’t hold back or go for realism — a whole lot of fur flies in this one. The last fifteen to twenty minutes are wonderfully over-the-top . . . and include one of the silliest car chase sequences I know — day for night shooting, which always looks phony; process shots, which look even phonier; and the speed of the cars has been increased by omitting every third or fourth frame, a technique that always makes me laugh.
About George Brent: except for his performance in “Jezebel,” when he played a charming bounder of the Old South, he was almost always stolid to the point of catatonia. Yet he came to America as a refugee from Ireland. He lammed it out of the Old Sod with a price on his head: he was a courier/hit man for the Sinn Fein when it was led by Michael Collins. A guy with that sort of past should have been a livelier actor, it seems to me.
There are a lot of good performances in this one. Frank Craven, who was the original Stage Manager in “Our Town” on Broadway, plays Davis and de Havilland’s put upon father. Charles Coburn plays a rapacious businessman who lusts after his febrile niece (Davis). Billie Burke, in a rare dramatic role, plays Lavinia, sister of Coburn and invalid mother to evil Bette and goody-two-shoes de Havilland. Burke gives a remarkable performance as a silly, selfish, sentimental neurasthenic. It’s essentially the same thing she always did, but this time, she’s pathetic and a little bit terrifying. Ernest Anderson makes an impressive debut as an ambitious, intelligent young black man, accused of a crime he didn’t commit. He conveys a beautiful combination of decency and shrewdness; when he finds himself in trouble, and understands that his innocence is meaningless in a Whites Only world, his despair is devastating. A wonderful performance — and no sentimentality in it. There’s a musical lilt to his speech that makes him a pleasure to listen to. He’s a very warm presence and he gives a seriousness to the melodrama that it would entirely lack without him. Hattie McDaniel plays his mother; she, too, is beyond reproach. Quite apart from the great moral authority and skill McDaniel brings to the role, it is a relief to see her play a role that gives her more to do than jumble her syntax and mispronounce big words to make white folks roar with laughter.
The commentary on the DVD is by Jeanine Basinger, who’s knowledgeable and straight-forward. She wrote a biography of Davis a few years ago. She reminds me of a younger, stouter Leonard Maltin, minus the beard — she gets her facts straight and she knows a lot, but her analysis rarely is very impressive. Still, she’s well-informed about the studio system, and appears to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the various sound stages on the Warner lot. That counts for a lot.
Davis didn’t want to play the bad girl; she wanted to play the sweet one, and argued that she was too old for the part. Then she hated the hair and the costumes (she took charge of both, and had her costumes redesigned by Orry-Kelly, her favorite designer, who did nearly all of her costumes while she was at Warners). She also thought the script was terrible, and an insult to the novel, which she said was “brilliant.” The author of the novel was equally appalled by the “phony” script. Moreover, during filming, Davis’ husband at the time was hospitalized in Minneapolis with pneumonia. Davis held up shooting by going to visit him (her friend, Howard Hughes, provided her with a private plane to take her there); shortly after she arrived, she received a cable from Jack Warner, ordering her to get her ass back to the lot. Between her concern for her husband and her fury at Warner, her own health suffered; her doctor ordered her to return by train (rather than air) and to get plenty of rest before returning to work. It was Davis who discovered Ernest Anderson. Huston couldn’t find a young black actor to play the role to his satisfaction, so Davis recommended Anderson. She had seen him waiting tables at the commissary and thought he had the right look for the part. That was about the only thing Davis liked about the whole picture. A few weeks before production wrapped, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Huston went off to war. Raoul Walsh finished the picture, but received no credit. He and Davis clashed immediately; she developed laryngitis from screaming at him, and in no time, refused to take any of his direction. The preview was a disaster. Audiences were in no mood for this sort of picture at the beginning of the war; the subplot that dealt with racial discrimination offended many people, and the picture was almost universally panned in the press.
Davis had a similarly low opinion of “Deception,” which is far from her best performance, but is one of my favorite pictures. She was a superb actress, but I find her opinions of her own work totally unreliable. She was hardly more reliable about other actors’ performances. She always insisted that Errol Flynn was no actor, and was furious when he was cast as her co-star in “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.” (That clumsy title was jury-rigged. Originally, it was to be called “Elizabeth the Queen,” after Maxwell Anderson’s play, but when Flynn was cast in it, his box-office power made him demand that the title be changed to include his character’s name.) If you ask me, Flynn not only holds his own against her in that picture, but he gives the better performance. He was also great in “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” No actor since has come close to matching his ease and grace in that part. He was terrific in many of the other swashbucklers (e.g., “Captain Blood,” “The Sea Hawk”). He makes it look so easy, but the artificial, bombastic dialogue takes a lot of skill to put across. Flynn spoke that sort of claptrap better than anyone else. He also turned in a nice performance in “Gentleman Jim.” His range was not terribly broad, but he was a fine leading man — a hell of a lot better than many with higher reputations. The drinking and hard living made him unreliable and wrecked his looks by the mid- to late-forties, but he was a much better actor than Davis (and many others) ever gave him credit for.
Bette Davis as high maintenance mantrap: Whooping it up all by herself. Walter Huston tends bar.
You shouldn’t read the rest of this if you haven’t already seen the picture and are planning to do so.
“In This Our Life” verges on camp — maybe even crosses the border in a few places, as, for example, Davis’ stolen interview with Charles Coburn before her final flight from justice: “You’re not even listening! You don’t care what happens to me any more than the others! You’d let me go to prison! All you’re thinking of is your own miserable life! Well, you can DIE for all I care! DIE!” It has all the makings of camp: both characters are irredeemably wicked and both are in extremis: he, under sentence of death from his doctor; she, trying to escape justice after killing a child in a hit and run accident (which she has, for good measure, pinned on their maid’s (Hattie McDaniel) virtuous son (Ernest Anderson)). The physical setting is extreme, as well: the room is a nightmarish clutter of late Victorian kitsch: hideous, elaborately carved furniture and massive display cabinets; heavy, excessive window treatments; busy wallpaper. And Huston stages the scene in front of a roaring hearth, which lends a ghost-story-by-campfire atmosphere to the scene, and an adumbration of the fires of Hell that await these two monsters. Yet it’s not camp. Both actors are totally committed to the material; Coburn is almost touching in his snivelling terror: his panic is completely believable; Davis gives a huge performance, with all cylinders firing, but what she does is not camp: for one thing, her choices are too specific — she plays each beat of the scene, each change of tactic, with great clarity and finesse, and she keeps building the emotional intensity so that she doesn’t peak until that final “DIE!” She gives a showy, out-sized performance, yet I wouldn’t call it hamming: the emotionalism is certainly extreme, but it’s too grounded in reality to be considered fake, and her absolute control over how much to give and when is so ideally suited to the dramatic structure (in this scene and throughout the rest of the picture) to be dismissed as ham acting.
Jezebel
Fay Bainter and Bette Davis “Julie, but you cain’t fight marriage!”
“Jezebel” was Bette Davis’ second Oscar win, but the only one (as far as she was concerned) that she earned fair and square. She won her first in 1936 for “Dangerous,” a dim-bulb soap in which she gives a rather silly histrionic performance (histrionics are what she did, but it wasn’t until a year or two later that she learnt how much is enough and how much is too much). At the time, it was widely thought that her Oscar win for “Dangerous” was a consolation prize for not having won the year before for another histrionic (but truer) performance as the slattern in “Of Human Bondage.” For that one, she wasn’t even nominated, yet she received so many write-in votes from Academy members that she very nearly won.
Fay Bainter, who plays her Aunt Belle in “Jezebel,” won the Best Supporting Actress for the role, and she gives one of her typically fine, subtle and nuanced performances. Nobody much remembers her today, but I hold her in almost as high esteem as I hold Claude Rains.
There are many things in “Jezebel” that are particularly fine: the staging of the fatal waltz is brilliant — the way all those white dresses sweep away from the encroachment of the red dress — like drops of oil flying away from the center when a drop of vinegar is dropped into their midst (I also love Steiner’s melody for the waltz). Also the staging of the scene with Fay Bainter, when she comes to the full realization of her niece’s wickedness . . . “I’m thinkin’ of a woman called Jezebel, who did evil in the sight of God.” How many actresses could resist the temptation to overplay that moment? Bainter is perfection itself in that scene, as she is when she is introduced to Amy Bradford (“Pres, your wife . . . My dear, Pres’ wife would naturally be welcome here . . . but you are for your own sake.”) But the greatest of the great is Davis’ apology followed by her own introduction to “Bradford . . . Amy Bradford . . . from New York . . . ” Never were those goggle eyes put to better use. And the way that Fay Bainter watches her receive the news as if she’s waiting for the dynamite to go off . . . ! Quite incredible. The whole sequence is so invisibly edited, for years, I imagined it was all done in a single take, but of course it’s not. There are lots of edits — more edits than Wyler usually allowed into a single sequence — but they’re all so ideally placed and the continuity is so seamless, you don’t notice them unless you’re looking for them — and even then, I find myself so caught up in the action that I forget to count how many there are. Henry Fonda’s not as good in his part as many of the others, but he’s perfect in that scene, because his natural diffidence and awkwardness are exactly what the scene demands.
Davis apologizes. “Pres, I’m kneelin’ to ya.”
Fay Bainter and Claude Rains starred together in one stupendously stupid picture, “White Banners” (1938, same year as “Jezebel”) — spiritually uplifting “pass-it-forward” treacle by Lloyd C. Douglas (who also wrote “Magnificent Obsession” — same theme as “White Banners” and for my money, the funniest camp picture ever). She and Rains are so fine in that otherwise execrable picture, I’m happy to endure (though not accept) Douglas’ creepy proto-Christian folderol. She was nominated for Best Actress in that one, making her the first actress to be nominated in both acting categories in the same year. Fay Bainter gave many excellent performances, and never a bad one. The trouble is, with the exception of “Jezebel,” she was nearly always in lousy pictures. Her last picture was “The Children’s Hour” (1961, directed by Wyler). Stupid picture, great performance — I may even say, quite awesome. When the vicious little schoolgirl whispers the libelous gossip into Bainter’s ear in the backseat of a taxicab, Bainter’s wordless reaction is stunning — you can see a lifetime of experience and know-how in that moment. Here was an actress who knew her job! In every bad picture Bainter was in, she was always worth watching. On Broadway, Bainter played Walter Huston’s straying wife, Fran, in “Dodsworth.” What a shame she didn’t play it in the picture! I’ve resigned myself to Ruth Chatterton’s fussy performance, which works in its way, but I can’t really admire it. Wyler tried to force Chatterton, over her strong objections, to play Fran as something more than a hateful bitch, but Chatterton outlasted him. (Even Bette Davis never got her way when Wyler objected!) Chatterton does Hateful Bitch to perfection, But is it Art? How I should have liked to see Fay Bainter in that part! (Incidentally, both Davis and Bainter were under contract to Warners at the time. Davis’ weekly salary was $650 when she starred in “Jezebel”; Bainter’s was $2,000.) Bainter’s last major stage role was as Mary Tyrone in the first national tour of “Long Day’s Journey.” What a performance that must have been. Throughout her career, she appears to have followed Huston’s sage advice to a young actor: “Son, give ’em a good show and always travel first class.”
Another unjustly forgotten character actress, Spring Byington, gives a witty performance in the small role of Mrs Kendrick in “Jezebel.” Mrs Kendrick is a foolish old busybody whose polite conversation consists entirely of platitudes and old saws, which she speaks as if she had freshly minted them (“Well, I always say, ‘Better late than never’ “; “I always say, ‘Spare the rod and you spoil the child!’ “; “I always say, ‘Punctuality is the politeness of kings!’ “; ” ‘Business before pleasure,’ I always say . . . “; “I always say, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’ “), while everything she says to her daughter is a reproof (“Stephanie, your manners!”; “Well, we still do [curtsy] in New Orleans: no call to take up with Yankee manners.”). Mrs Kendrick is a one-joke character, but Byington brings her fully to life. A sweet little gem of a performance. Byington is also in “Dodsworth,” by the way, and gives a beautiful performance. She and Bainter represent a type of supporting actress — solid, reliable, but totally individual — that barely exists anymore. Before the Method came along and shook all the refinement and grace out of American acting, such supporting actors and actresses were thick on the ground. They spoke well, looked well, moved well, and gave wonderfully detailed performances that supported the stars’ performances without calling attention to themselves. How I admire that old technique!
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