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<\/a>‘I’ll be a son of a bitch.’ You said it, buster.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n The last picture they made together — “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” — is so stupendously terrible that I sometimes find it hard to dial away from it when it’s on TCM — its dreadfulness creates something like a magnetic force field or an electrical charge, rather like the shock you can expect if you take a shortcut while monkeying with an electrical circuit. \u00a0It hurts like hell while it’s got you, and you know the ominous current will kill you, but it’s hard to pull free.\u00a0 Hepburn’s especially terrible in the performances for which she won her four Academy Awards.\u00a0 “On Golden Pond,” for example, is unwatchable.\u00a0 I can’t think of it without shuddering.\u00a0 Jane Fonda told a funny story about it. \u00a0Both she and Hepburn were nominated for Best Actress that year. \u00a0Hepburn already had three Oscars; Fonda had two. \u00a0And one of Hepburn’s was a tie (with Barbra Streisand). \u00a0So when Hepburn got the Oscar for “On Golden Pond,” she rang Fonda the next day and crowed, “You’ll nevah<\/em> catch up to me now<\/em>!”<\/p>\n Robert Bice, Katharine Hepburn: Me no rikee.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n A friend lent me his DVD of the expensive MGM 1944 epic “Dragon Seed,” based on the best selling novel by that Great Lady of China, Pearl S. Buck, and for my sins, I watched it. \u00a0It’s as bad as, perhaps even worse than, “The Good Earth,” the other lavish Chinese epic with no Chinese actors in major roles. \u00a0James Agee’s original assessment of “Dragon Seed” was\u00a0 a\u00a0<\/em>b\u00a0<\/em>s\u00a0<\/em>o\u00a0<\/em>l\u00a0<\/em>u\u00a0<\/em>t\u00a0<\/em>e\u00a0<\/em>l\u00a0<\/em>y<\/em>\u00a0 correct.\u00a0 He wrote that it was an “unimaginably bad movie,”\u00a0 full of “such distinguished Chinese as Katharine Hepburn, Akim Tamiroff, etc.” all performing in Chinaman drag against “unearthly, sepia-tinted landscapes, speaking their inhuman language.”\u00a0 (The prosthetic epicanthus folds over Hepburn’s eyes make her look like the Cowardly Lioness.)\u00a0 Agee continued with a litany of complaint about how every last detail was wrong, including the shape of Miss Hepburn’s eyelids, and finished by observing, “Indeed, I’ve never seen another picture so full of wrong slants.”\u00a0 He was a very funny writer, but not as funny as the authors of “Dragon Seed.” \u00a0Two screenwriters are credited: \u00a0Marguerite Roberts, who later wrote the screenplay for 1968’s “True Grit,” and Jane Murfin, who, after a long, prolific career (“Lilac Time,” “Smilin’ Through,” “Roberta,” “The Women,” to name but four of her 66 titles), never wrote another screenplay after this one, though she lived another eleven years.<\/p>\n Walter Huston, Frances Rafferty, Robert Bice: Huston said, ‘I’m paid to make to make the bad lines sound good.’ Not this time . . .<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n Agee is right about the “inhuman language” spoken in “Dragon Seed.” \u00a0The dialogue in this wretched picture is terrible beyond belief . . . every minute there’s a new outrage.\u00a0 For instance, in one scene Turhan Bey (a\/k\/a “the Turkish Delight”) looks upon a long parade of refugees and says, “We are an island in a river of fleeing people!”\u00a0 And a minute later, comes the following bit of turgidity, with nary a syllable of overlapping dialogue (for these were the good old days when everyone politely waited his turn to speak, no matter how overwrought):\u00a0 Henry (Clarence Oddbody, AS2) Travers, as Wise Old Chinaman No. Two (Wise Old Chinaman No. One is Walter Huston),\u00a0 watches an endless line of coolies hauling heavy machinery on shoulder-borne litters across a rugged terrain, and asks Turhan Bey: \u00a0“Cousin, what are these?\u00a0 They carry different burdens!”\u00a0 Bey says noisily to the passing parade, “Only a fool would carry iron on his back when sacks of rice are so much lighter!”\u00a0 An anonymous coolie on the line responds with considerable spirit, “This is not iron, but a factory, that we carry on our backs!\u00a0 Behind us follows a whole city!”\u00a0 Bey and Travers shake their heads in bewilderment.\u00a0 Only Katharine Hepburn, with an inverted basket on her head, fully understands the social change that is taking place.\u00a0 Out of the corner of her mouth, like a gangster, Miss Hepburn observes, sotto voce<\/em>, “These are not as the others were . . . They seem to have a\u00a0plan<\/em>!”\u00a0 Viva Hollywood!\u00a0 Those big studios really knew how to make a stinker.\u00a0 I laughed and laughed.<\/p>\n When the picture was made (1944), there were more than a half billion Chinese on the planet, yet to look at the credits, no more than a half dozen were in Hollywood. \u00a0There are four Wongs in uncredited roles (as Japanese soldiers), \u00a0Four Wongs don’t make it right.<\/p>\n Several years ago, Renee Fleming was TCM’s guest programmer on Monday night and for the second movie of the night, she chose the 1947 MGM biopic of Clara Wieck and Robert Schumann called “Song of Love.”\u00a0Katharine Hepburn plays Clara and Paul Henreid plays poor doomed Prof. Schumann.\u00a0 I’d seen about ten minutes of it two or three years earlier and was appalled by what I saw, but when it was on again I happened to be in the mood for it — probably because of the bludgeoning my senses took from watching “The Great Waltz,”\u00a0which was Miss Fleming’s first pick for the night. \u00a0Miss Fleming has a beautiful voice, but it appears that all her taste is in her mouth.<\/span><\/p>\n Song of Love: Awful Wieck stuff.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n “Song of Love” is every bit as bad as I had remembered, but I couldn’t stop watching it.\u00a0 Brahms is played by Robert Walker, who gulps and stammers so much, you’d think he was playing Bashful the Dwarf.<\/p>\n Kitten on the keys.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n The script was written by the doyenne of the Classical Music Cinema, Irmgard von Cube, who also wrote “They Shall Have Music,” which was one of the few times Heifetz ever appeared in a Hollywood picture. \u00a0Apparently, Miss von Cube was besotted with music, but her imagination was so trivial and vulgar that she turned the story of these great artists into one of suffocating, sit-com domesticity.\u00a0 The story of Herr and Frau Schumann and their complicated friendship with Johannes Brahms unfolds as a series of silly little housekeeping turmoils, hardly worthy of “The Brady Bunch”:\u00a0 how will the Schumanns get their important dinner party on after their maid walks out two hours before the guests arrive?\u00a0 Clara is too featherbrained to have mastered any of the domestic arts, so Johannes and Robert agree to cook the meal themselves . . . if they can work up the nerve to kill the clucking chicken.\u00a0 “Comedy” ensues.\u00a0 Honestly, it was a scene straight out of “Ich Liebe Lucy,”\u00a0minus the laugh track.<\/p>\n That ubiquitous Nellie from the forties, Henry Daniell, in an unbecoming Prince Valiant wig, is on hand as Franz Liszt, glowering over the keys and banging with all his might.\u00a0 In one scene, he bangs away so hard that the strings snap as he plays, whereupon he moves to a second piano, stage left, and proceeds to bang even harder on that one.\u00a0 (As a matter of fact, this is quite accurate: \u00a0before their plates were made of cast iron, pianos literally used to fall apart under Liszt’s hands in the middle of his concerts, as in a Warner Bros. cartoon.)<\/p>\nDragon Seed<\/h1>\n
<\/a><\/a>\u00a0Song of Love<\/h1>\n
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