Tag Archives: Warner Baxter

‘The Velvet Touch’: Grande Dame Guignol

Original Poster.

Original Poster.

O Victory, Where Is Thy Death?

In the opening scene of “The Velvet Touch” (Independent Artists/RKO Radio Pictures, 1948), Rosalind Russell, as Broadway diva Valerie Stanton, ends a heated argument with her producer/lover Gordon Dunning (Leon Ames) by braining him with the first heavy object she can lay her velvet-gloved hand on. The irony is perfect, for the weapon is a theatrical trophy: it is the coveted Players Award, which Dunning won for Excellence in the Theatre; moreover, it is a statuette of Nike, Goddess of Victory, who bears aloft a wreath. The eminent actress has therefore crowned the eminent producer with his own laurels; the blow to his head has felled him for keeps: now needs must Gordon Dunning rest upon his laurels until the edge of doom. I find it all wonderfully funny. And after all, it’s Leon Ames: he had it coming. We’ll learn more about why as the picture progresses. Here’s a fraction of that opening scene.

Much of the rest of the picture is spent in flashback, à la Film Noir (though “The Velvet Touch” is too glossy and high-tone to be so categorized), by which means we learn how Leon and Roz arrived at this fatal contretemps. That he cannot bear the idea of being left for another man, Michael Morrell (played by Leo Genn, who murmurs drolly from the first reel to the last), is the most obvious explanation for his unbecoming conduct. But sexual jealousy is only at the surface: there’s a much deeper reason for his fury, and it stems from a classic case of one of Hollywood’s favorite fictional psychological disorders, which may fairly be called Svengali Syndrome.

Get Thee Behind Me, Svengali!

In Hollywood pictures about the theatre, directors are invariably Svengalis: Warner Baxter plucks Ruby Keeler from the chorus line in “42nd Street,” and, by dancing her off her feet for a day and a half, turns her into an overnight sensation. In “Twentieth Century,” Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore) makes a brilliant actress out of an awkward, infantile amateur named Mildred Plotka (Carole Lombard). Similarly, in “Maytime,” Barrymore (this time as the crackpot musical genius, Nicolai Nazaroff) turns Jeanette MacDonald into an international prima donna, then shames her into entering into a loveless marriage with him, and in the final reel, the enraged impresario aims a pistol at his rival, Nelson Eddy, and blows a hole through that worthy’s barrel chest. (Well, somebody had to do it.) Clark Gable transforms Jeanette from a hymn-singing ninny into the toast of the Barbary Coast in “San Francisco“: her swinging rendition of the title song apparently sets off the Frisco Quake of Aught-Six, which knocks the nobs off their hill and makes toast of the entire region. In “Lady with Red Hair,” the great Claude Rains, as David Belasco, turns the hopelessly inadequate Mrs Leslie Carter (Miriam Hopkins) into . . . Mrs Leslie Carter, who was known as “the American Sarah Bernhardt.” In “Hello, Frisco, Hello,” international songbird Alice Faye bends over backwards to rescue the scoundrel John Payne from ruin because she believes she owes her success entirely to him. In “All About Eve,” the aging star Margo Channing has a pretty shrewd estimation of her own gifts and self-sufficiency as an actress, yet when her understudy/rival, Eve Harrington, gives a sensational audition, Margo bitterly accuses her director/lover, Bill Sampson, of being responsible for the girl’s stunning performance, which was “carefully rehearsed I have no doubt, over and over, full of those Bill Sampson touches!” (When Eve goes on to win the Sarah Siddons Award for her performance, Eve herself clearly believes the director is responsible for her success.) Most miraculously of all, Dan O’Herlihy turns Lana Turner into the most scintillating actress on Broadway in “Imitation of Life.” We don’t see how he contrives to fashion a silk purse out of that sow’s ear, nor do we get a chance to judge his wizardry for ourselves: Douglas Sirk knew better than to show Lana giving what we’re expected to believe is a great theatrical performance.

Of all these pictures, only “Twentieth Century” and “Lady with Red Hair” offer some evidence of how these directors of genius transform amateurs into great ladies of the stage. (In the former, Barrymore jabs a pin into Lombard’s rump, which does the trick: for the rest of the funny picture, Lombard never stops shrieking. In the latter, Rains stands on an apple box and raises Hopkins’ pigtails over her head to make her stand up straight. Mission accomplished: for the rest of the picture, she’s lousy from a greater height.)

L: Barrymore instructs Lombard in the art of acting. R: Rains instructs Hopkins.

L: Barrymore instructs Lombard in the art of acting. R: Rains instructs Hopkins.

Prelude to a Kiss-Off

As we have seen, when “The Velvet Touch” begins, Rosalind Russell has grown a-weary of dancing on the ends of Leon Ames’ strings; she is determined to play Hedda Gabler in the upcoming season; she is newly in love with Leo Genn. She must therefore cut herself free from her puppet-master’s strings. But, in the great Svengali tradition, he would sooner ruin her than let her go, and sooner than ruin her, he would bring her to heel. So this native son of Portland, Indiana, brings out the big guns: “Yer not good enough fer heavy drammer.” Besides, he tells her, that sort of guff don’t go over with the “suckers,” as he calls the New York City audiences who have made him rich. He knows what slops to serve up to the moron millions, and, sister, Hedda Gabler ain’t no state fair attraction. He will not permit her to make a fool of herself . . . or him. To that end, he has leaked a story to the press that she has already signed on to do yet another frivolous romp in the Fall, and he’s willing to go very much further to keep her dancing to his tune and starring in his productions.

We get a clear sense of the sort of shows he produces from the framed posters on his office walls: “It’s a Gay Life,” “The Gay Lady,” “Scandalous” and the current season’s “Escapade.” He produces and directs these wafer-thin entertainments, yet his theatre and his offices, tricked out with ostentatious, ornamental Victorian kitsch, are more suited to a producer of the blood and thunder melodramas of Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou: his office is crowded with heavy, carved furniture. In the public spaces of his theatre, oil paintings in gilded rococo frames hang on walls that are covered in shimmering damask silk; fluted pillars and pilasters are topped by Corinthian capitals of exuberant gaudiness; heavy brocade draperies and swags trimmed in miles of fringe adorn every landing, niche, entrance; cut crystal chandeliers glitter overhead; there are Turkey carpets as far as the eye can see. It’s the vulgarian’s dream of high class. I imagine Boss Tweed must have looked on similar decor while being fellated at his favorite whorehouse, though he would not have seen a neon sign for the Cabana Café glaring through the bordello window. But if these trappings seem inappropriate for a producer of frolicsome romantic comedies, they are entirely correct for this Tosca-like opening and for the preposterous melodrama that follows.

Rosalind Russell, Leon Ames: Valerie Stanton and Gordon Dunning in happier times.

Rosalind Russell, Leon Ames: Valerie Stanton and Gordon Dunning in happier times.

And just to make it quite impossible to take any of this camp melodrama seriously, there is the stupendously misleading title song, sung in glee-club harmony by an all-male chorus. Written by Mort Greene (lyrics) and Leigh Harline (music), the tune’s jaunty breeziness and idiotic fills (doodle-oodle-oo), lead one to expect the picture will be one of those late-forties disposable situation comedies in which, say, Robert Cummings vies with Brian Aherne for the affections of Virginia Mayo, while Marjorie Main cracks wise, and eggs, in the kitchen. Instead you get Murder on the Main Stem — part Fannie Hurst, part Edna Ferber, part Walter Winchell, part Sardou, part Dostoyevsky — and it’s a whole lot funnier than most of the comedies of the era, but in a sneaky, subversive way (perfect for the McCarthy Era). That is, it is definitely played as high drama — Rosalind Russell and her co-stars (most of them) seem to take it all in deadly earnest, but unless I miss my bet, the screenwriter was having fun at their expense. Anyhow, if you look at it from this point of view, the picture is hilarious, sometimes almost awesomely so.

The picture was produced by Miss Russell’s husband, Frederick Brisson, and her great, elongated full-moon face is rarely out of the frame. Even so, Claire Trevor, as her bitter rival, acts her right off the screen.

Beedle Dee-Dee Dee-Dee, Two Ladies

Moments after Roz flees undetected from the scene of the crime, the body is discovered by Claire Trevor, who makes two serious blunders: (1) she picks up the weapon, and (2) she falls into an hysterical faint. This is a sticky wicket, for it appears to everyone, including (or so it would seem) NYPD Homicide Detective Sydney Greenstreet(!), that she — a woman scorned — must have fainted after having committed a crime passionnel. Meanwhile, Roz has her own fit of histrionics in the privacy of her home, where she sobs, “Oh why did this horrible thing have to happen? Why? Why? . . . Why?” Cue flashback.

First we see how Roz tried to patch things up with Claire a few days before the bludgeoning. Roz is unusually restrained. Claire is (ahem) less so. The result is a nice bit of camp: catfight lite.

Later in the picture, we learn that Claire has been hospitalized. Roz goes to visit her, amusingly attired as if she were a very chic nun in a satin and silk habit and wimple. She makes me think of Caitlyn Jenner as Father Christmas. Roz extends the olive branch, but Claire is having none of it. And to prove it, she speaks two of the greatest camp lines ever.

The screenplay is by Leo Rosten, who wrote the best-selling “The Joys of Yiddish.” I have to believe that Rosten was laughing his head off when he wrote, “Where did you get your luck, Valerie? Or does God pity the wicked?” and “If you had any decency, you’d face it yerself. But you haven’t: yer rotten! All the way through!” At any rate, the brilliantly funny author of “The Joys of Yiddish” simply couldn’t have taken any of this stuff seriously. Believe me, I’m not knocking it. I think it’s great. But it’s great because it’s so funny. Much of “The Velvet Touch” is as fabulously, deliriously foolish as the best parts of “Deception,” and almost as entertaining. It lacks a towering, unforgettable performance to match Claude Rains’ supremely witty sadist Alexander Hollenius, but there is more than enough mad, grandiloquent silliness in “The Velvet Touch” to make it a thoroughly entertaining picture. For fans of Rosalind Russell, Claire Trevor, Leo Genn, Sydney Greenstreet, or for that matter, Leo Rosten, it is not to be missed.

‘Gold Diggers of 1933’: Fast Talk and Hard Times

Original Poster.

Original Poster.

“Gold Diggers of 1933” is a terrific picture, the best of all the Warner Bros. backstage musicals. The screenplay is so witty and full of charm that the picture would be a pleasure even without the bizarre Busby Berkeley numbers. The cast is composed of the usual stock characters: the overnight sensation (Ruby Keeler), the incognito/slumming boy singer (Dick Powell), the wise-cracking matron (Aline MacMahon), the agitated producer (Ned Sparks), the theatre-hating bluebloods from out of town (Warren William and Guy Kibbee), the chippie with the heart of gold (Joan Blondell), the hoyden without a heart of gold (Ginger Rogers), etc., etc.; the plot is a compendium of The Show Must Go On clichés and conventions — there’s really nothing new about any of it — and yet, the picture is better than merely funny: it is also surprisingly moving. That it is funny is no surprise, but every time I see it, it’s funnier than I had remembered. Great lines keep whizzing by. Here are a few examples, taken at random:

Fay (Ginger Rogers): Aw, gee. I look much better in clothes than any of you. If Barney could see me in clothes . . .
Trixie (Aline MacMahon): . . . He wouldn’t recognize you.

*   *   *

Barney (Ned Sparks — asking about Brad (Dick Powell), a young composer): Yeah, what’s he done?
Polly (Ruby Keeler): Well, he hasn’t had a chance to do anything yet, Mr Hopkins, but he has genius.
Barney: Yeah? Well, the show business could stand a little genius .  .  .

*   *   *

Barney (trying to persuade Brad to be in the show): Now listen: you and Polly would make a swell team — like the Astaires! You’d be a knockout for the mush interest . . . !

*   *   *

Don Gordon (Clarence Nordstrom): Now let me tell you something: I’ve been a juvenile for eighteen years! And you’re gonna tell me how to sing a song?!

*   *   *

Barney: Listen, Brad, whyntcha do this juvenile part yerself? You’ve got it over Gordon like a tent!

*   *   *

Trixie (dancing with Guy Kibbee): You’re as light as a heifer . . . uh, feather.

When Metro tried to do this sort of musical, they always bollocksed it up with sentimentality. Take “Ziegfeld Girl,” for example: Judy Garland, in order to get her career on track, must break away from her excruciating has-been vaudevillian father, Charles Winninger; while Lana Turner, late of Flatbush, is unwilling to settle down with honest truck driver Jimmy Stewart and therefore (in typical Metro fashion) pays for her independence by dropping dead of an unspecified party-girl illness. In the backstage musicals over at Fox, too much emphasis was placed on dud romantic pairings. In “The Gang’s All Here,” the picture comes vividly alive when Alice Faye sings “No Love, No Nothin’,” but it dies a thousand deaths in the love-clinches. Nobody cares whether she ends up with that zero named James Ellison, who is her leading man. Six times she ended up with prissy, ruby-lipped Don Ameche: did anyone, other than Don Ameche, want to see her kissing Don Ameche? I know I don’t . . .

Ned Sparks, Ruby Keeler: 'The theatre could stand a little genius . . . '

Ned Sparks, Ruby Keeler: ‘The show business could stand a little genius . . . ‘

Love is always in the air in Warner Bros. backstage musicals, but nobody pretends it matters. It’s the gags, the snappy patter, the bare skin and the hallucinatory numbers that count. And the acting is always better in the Warners backstagers.

“Gold Diggers of 1933” is bracingly pre-code — it’s full of lewdness and casual criminality, the sort of stuff that widened the eyes of Joe Breen and made him foam at the mouth. Early in the picture, Aline MacMahon steals a bottle of milk from her neighbors and gets away with it. She makes a habit of stealing food from the neighbors. Nobody goes to prison for the theft; nobody feels guilty or even sorry about it. Over at Metro, Judge Hardy would probably have sent MacMahon to the chair for her incorrigible disregard of the law.

The Visionary

Every backstage musical has a hard-driven, hard-driving, fast-talking wizard who is the brains and imagination behind the hit show that has its premiere at the end of the picture. Sometimes he’s the director, other times he’s the producer; in these stories, the two are interchangeable. In “Gold Diggers of 1933,” he’s a producer/director of genius named Barney Hopkins. We see little of how Barney runs his rehearsals, but we get something rather more interesting and exciting: we see him at the exact moment of inspiration, when he suddenly sees every detail of his next hit show dancing before his eyes. And another interesting thing: he’s played by sourpuss character actor, Ned Sparks. In most other backstage musicals, the creative dynamo is a leading man part (e.g., Warner Baxter, Jimmy Cagney); he usually has some sort of conflicted love affair with his leading lady, and he nearly always has a grasping ex-wife who kicks up a financial rumpus at regular intervals, just to make sure the road to success is plenty bumpy. But Ned Sparks is not burdened with any emotional attachments or romantic entanglements: his Barney Hopkins lives to put on shows and nothing else. Sparks was an extremely popular supporting actor all through the thirties: the cartoonists at Warners made him a semi-regular character in their animated shorts (e.g., “The Coo-Coo Nut Grove“), but Disney’s animators also parodied him in their cartoons. Sparks was so famous for his sour expression, he took out a $10,000 insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London to protect his reputation from being damaged if ever a photographer took a picture of him while he was smiling. At times, he looks almost astonishingly similar to Steve Buscemi; Buscemi’s range as an actor may be broader, but Sparks is much funnier.

Caricature of Ned Sparks from 'The Coo-Coo Nut Grove.'

Caricature of Ned Sparks from ‘The Coo-Coo Nut Grove.’

The scene below comes just after Barney has overheard Brad Roberts (Dick Powell) play a tune in the apartment across the airshaft and orders him to come play for him. Barney is impressed with the young songwriter, and asks to hear another tune. Sparks goes in for broad effects, but he’s got the commitment and intensity to make them work. As Barney Hopkins, he’s a true visionary: the Artist as Hero; in this scene, we see him in the act of creation. Of course his acting style is artificial, theatrical and played to the last row of the second balcony, but his performance gives me goosebumps even while I laugh at it. I think it looks the way creativity feels — if you’re able to accept the artifice, the moment is thrilling.

So Brad goes back to his apartment on the other side of the airshaft and a few minutes later, this is what happens.

“Gee, don’t it getcha?” Well, it sure gets me.

The Foolish Old Moneybags

Guy Kibbee, who appeared in several of Warners’ backstage musicals, is a reliably funny actor, but I think he was never better than he is in this one. He plays a Boston moneybags named Faneuil H. Peabody, who gets taken to the cleaners by the gold digging Trixie (Aline MacMahon). In this clip, he reminisces about the last time he got involved with a chorus girl. That’s the light-loafered Eric Blore who stomps out at the end of the clip. This was one of his first Hollywood pictures. He’s so much younger than I’ve ever seen him before, that I didn’t recognize him at first. But that sibilant, silly ass British accent is unmistakable.


Later in the picture, we see Fuffy entirely under Trixie’s spell. In this scene, he has a low comedy bit with a dog. Kibbee’s such an old pro that he upstages the animal.

The Low Vaudeville Comedy

“Gold Diggers of 1933” also contains a peculiarly American brand of low comedy that was a staple of vaudeville: the dimwit immigrant comics with the silly foreign accents. This short clip makes me laugh out loud no matter how many times I see it. I love dialect comedy; the more outrageous it is, the better I like it — it’s just about the lowest comedy there is — but I love Ned Sparks’ irritable wise cracks even better. My personal hero, the great George S. Kaufman himself, would not have been ashamed to write these gags.

The Pep Talk

At some point in every backstage musical, we get the pep talk. The device was so common that there’s even a joke about it in one of the last of the backstage musicals, “The Band Wagon” (Metro, 1953). The most famous of them all is the one delivered by Warner Baxter to Ruby Keeler in “42nd Street” (Warner Bros., 1932). It is the template for all the others that followed.

Sawyer, you listen to me, and you listen hard. Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. It’s the lives of all these people who’ve worked with you. You’ve got to go on, and you’ve got to give and give and give. They’ve got to like you. Got to. Do you understand? You can’t fall down. You can’t because your future’s in it, my future and everything all of us have is staked on you. All right, now I’m through, but you keep your feet on the ground and your head on those shoulders of yours and go out, and Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster but you’ve got to come back a star!

Here’s Aline MacMahon giving the obligatory pep talk. You will see that she does it with supreme authority, at breakneck pace, yet with great specificity and attention to detail: MacMahon allows nothing to be vague or a generalized emotion. And she does it in a single take.

And yet, for all the low-down comedy and farcical elements, “Gold Diggers of 1933” is really very touching. These chorus girls — the gold diggers — are so resourceful and resilient, so good-natured, so lively and entertaining as they try to make careers for themselves in the bruising hurlyburly of the show business, and in the depths of the Great Depression, that they inspire genuine affection and sympathy. And they make you laugh. Not one of them has an ounce of self-pity — no complaint is ever unaccompanied by a gag — and not one of them would consider giving up on her dream of a successful theatrical career. When Trixie says of Brad, “He has nerve! He’s regular! He b’longs in the show business!” it’s the highest praise she can possibly give. The chorines’ devotion to their profession is evidence of their valor. In this picture, low-down variety artists are heroic figures, not phonies or dopes or egomaniacs — leave that to the swells. These chorus girls suffer set-backs far more often than they enjoy triumphs, but they rise above their disappointments and soldier on . . . and they never stop looking out for one another (even if they do swipe fresh bottles of milk from their neighbors’ window sills). I like the way the picture celebrates talent and commitment to one’s dreams; I’m touched by the way Barney Hopkins recognizes musical talent at once and hires it on the spot: “I’ll cancel my contract with Warren and Dubin: they’re out!” he exclaims after hearing only one and a half songs by Brad, who has not a single professional credit to his name. “I want you to write the music for this show and the lyrics!” (That’s an inside joke, of course: Warren and Dubin wrote the songs for the picture.)

‘Is Everybody Nutty?!’

On the other end of the spectrum from Brad, who heroically risks losing his inheritance by agreeing that The Show Must Go On, there is the arch-fiend, who tries to prevent the show from happening. No backstage musical is complete without the stock character of the skulking show-closer. He comes in many forms: the unpaid creditor, the blackmailing cop, the implacable sheriff, the bitter has-been, the pious busybody, the jilted boyfriend, etc., but whatever form he takes, he always appears just before the opening night curtain goes up. Take a look at this clip which comes right before the finale (“Remember My Forgotten Man”).

This phony “Detective” Jones (Fred Kelsey, who appeared in over 450 pictures and almost never got a credit) is the one true villain in the picture. It’s bad enough that he tries to close the show and throw the kids out of work, but he’s a veteran actor himself. In the theatrical world, an actor who doesn’t abide by the one unbreakable law, The Show Must Go On, is the lowest sort of scoundrel. Yet I find genuine pathos in his predicament: he’s as hard up as all the kids in the show, and this is the only acting work he has been able to find. It’s both funny and heartbreaking when he complains “That’s no way to speak of an artist! Why, I’ve played with Sir Henry Irving, George Arliss and David Warfield!” What an actor! Even when caught in his villainy, he can’t resist listing his credits! But Ned Sparks is having none of it.