On YouTube - David Hare excavates the title song and dance of LES GIRLS (George Cukor, USA, 1957)

In advance of attempting a critique of Cukor’s 1960 HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS here’s the “Les Girls” number from LES GIRLS three years prior.

The choreography isn’t really choreography, it’s movement around and up and over a set designed to articulate the cinemascope frame, while the camera barely ceases moving. Genius that he was, George Hoyningen-Huene does the entire wardrobe in black and white defiantly challenging color to make a return. It does, only later in the reds of the lining from the three principal actress's gowns who sing and dance what is in essence the title song.

The movie abounds in sequences like these, pure mise-en scène both punctuating the narrative action and continually looking back on the three disparate directions of Kelly’s attention. It’s a miraculous film of many parts, and in a sense defiantly NOT a musical.

So indeed is HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS, a movie I’ve always asociated in concert with Renoir’s 1953 THE GOLDEN COACH in which art and performance and life and action and comedy and tragedy are knitted together defiantly in a purely cinematic form. I cannot help but cite Cukor as Renoir’s equal in so many ways when they both come to directing the theatre as life. And life as performance.

On Blu-ray - David Hare finally comes round to appreciating TEA AND SYMPATHY (Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1956)

Below are four screen shots from the sublime "Shadowy glade" climax of Minnelli's 1956 adaptation of the Robert Anderson play, Tea and Sympathy. It's both this sequence and the extraordinary colour photography by John Alton, one of several pictures he shot for Vincente Minnelli during the fifties, that finally won me over, especially in this new 4K scan and Blu-ray from Warner Archive.

In fact it's taken me literally sixty years to finally come around to any sort of appreciation for the movie, so long has it has been a subject of disdain for me, perhaps thanks to skewed perspective.

Alton's single light source setups and Minnelli's Scope staging emphasize shadow, background and peripheral enclosure as much as they do the players. In this sequence it finally dawned on me that the subject of the movie is not only, as I always persisted in thinking, John Kerr's character Tom's "closeting and/or guilt resulting from the social constrictions of 50's America. In fact the substantially larger and ultimately more tragic core of the drama is Deborah Kerr's superb Laura, clad throughout the picture in shades of burnt orange, ginger and rustic warmth, a futile beacon of affirmative life against the grey and white suburban drudgery and conformity of 50s bourgeois America. Indeed the colour play in these Minnelli melodramas is easily the equal of Sirk's at Universal, although Sirk often extends the colour play to sets, decor and staging with coloured lights much as post expressionist painting.

If there's a real cry for acknowledgment and passion from a stranded soul buried in the daily inertia of suburban college town 50's America, it's not only John Kerr's Tom, with his affection for the classics and the piano and the light touch of his loafers. But also from the figure of Laura, left unsatisfied at the end. This penultimate sequence really delivers what must have been profoundly personal material for Minnelli himself, given his own bi- (or more majorly gay) sexuality and the trajectory of his professional life before and after Garland.

The new Warner Archive derived from a 4K scan and regrade is predictably a thing of staggering Eastman (via proprietorial "Metrocolor") beauty.

The Current Cinema - A film of the musical of KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN (Bill Condon, USA, 2025)

 

Aurora (Jennifer Lopez), Kiss of the Spiderwoman

 Someday we’ll be free

I promise you we’ll be free

If not tomorrow

Then the Day After That

 

One of the most electric moments ever in a theatre, at least for me, was the moment in the Kander and Ebb Broadway musical Kiss of the Spiderwoman, when the political prisoner Valentin unleashes an anthem to revolutionary struggle. You can listen to the performance by Anthony Crivello and the chorus which I heard back in 1993 (the year the Toronto Blue Jays last won the World Series with a Joe Carter walk off three run homer), the other equal greatest memorable moment on my only visit to New York.

Kiss of the Spiderwoman started out back in 1976 as a novel by Manuel Puig.  Valentin is in in the same cell as Molina, a gay window dresser jailed for indecency offences. Molina entertains Valentin by recounting the plots of classic movies. In the novel it’s fairly clear that among the films being drawn upon by Molina are such noir classics as Cat People  and  I Walked with a Zombie. Wikipedia adds in a couple more titles – The Enchanted Cottage  and Paris Underground. 

Since the novel was published it has undergone almost as many iterations as The Talented Mr Ripley.  (In fact though Ripley hasn’t been turned into a musical, about the last thing left for it.)

Aurora (Jennifer Lopez), Molina (Tonatiuh)  

Spiderwoman was turned into a play by Puig himself and then into a very good film by Héctor Babenco. William Hurt won an Oscar for his performance as Valentin but the surprise standout was Sônia Braga as the spiderwoman. Braga had already had a long career in her native Brazil but this was the first time most of us had seen her. The film reduced the content of Molina’s film fantasy down to a single title being told throughout.

This was the basic element picked up by John Kander, Fred Ebb and Terence McNally for their musical show which premiered in Toronto in 1992 before going out on Broadway in 1993 directed by Hal Prince and choreographed by Susan Stroman. The only Sydney production I’ve ever been aware of was at the now Hayes Theatre in Potts Point where an amateur cast struggled throughout. Some years ago the Melbourne Theatre Company did it, not very well, but with a full professional cast and elaborate staging reminiscent of Prince’s Broadway show.

Now there is a movie of it which opened last week and, after a desultory week, will be either off or down to single morning sessions wherever it’s on. It didn’t get reviewed by either The Sydney Morning Herald or The Australian, at least not on their websites. 

The movie is in the hands of Bill Condon who gets the “Written and Directed by” credit. (The end credits note that McNally, Ebb and Chita Rivera who starred in the Broadway production have all died.) It has its moments. Jennifer Lopez, mostly as a blonde, stars in the very elaborate musical sequences.  In one sense Condon opens up the film references to full on re-creations and goes back to the multiple movie sources that featured in Puig's novel.There are reminders of the ballets in things like Les Girls, a colorful port sequence that brings back the The Pirate, nods to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes  and Cyd Charisse in The Bandwagon gangster ballet. The colours here are those of Metro in the 40s and 50s, the choreography OK - better in some sequences than overs – and one interpolation, when the love match is resolved near the end, looks rather like a splendid homage to Douglas Sirk melodrama with colour, bright lighting, costume  and subsequent back projection something akin to those in Written on the Wind. But...but....that might just be a bit too esoteric and certainly not something that will sell tickets

Armando (Diego Luna), Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez)

The spiderwoman’s signature song is done in a setting so elaborate when I was expecting noir murkiness. Instead there’s this whole set with greenery and ground fog.

Condon leaves out the line "There are no girls, mama" when Molina, perhaps for the first time tells his mother he's gay. He also made the decision to leave out quite a few songs. Odd lines from them are scattered into the script. I do wonder why you would leave out the aforementioned showstopper “The Day After That”, the best sung song in the show by far. I mused to myself whether any one of the couple of dozen people who get a credit as some sort of ‘producer’ said “Hey Bill, you sure about that?” Reminds me of the decision of the idiot producer of the film adaptation of Kurt Weill & Ogden Nash's One Touch of Venus who decided to drop most of Weill's music and replace it with compositions by his wife. The omissions included one of the greatest songs ever written for the Broadway stage "I'm a Stranger Here Myself".

On Blu-ray - David Hare looks over the 'staggering three strip restoration' of WORDS AND MUSIC (Norman Taurog, USA, 1948)

The screens are from Warner Archive's new Blu-ray of the Norman Taurog 1948 Words and Music.

ThIs is a very late entry in the Musical composer and lyricist bio pic sub genre from the Freed Unit although it has the impossible task of carrying as big a story as RIchard Rodgers and Larry Hart.

While Mickey Rooney's drunk scenes (above) give us a pretty blunt feel for Hart's alcoholism, the screenplay can do no more than barely blink at Larry's deeply closeted queerness, thanks to the Breen Office. And the momma's boy presentation is frankly confounded by too sympathetic an Oedipal figure in the form of Jeanette Nolan, fresh from her Lady Macbeth for Orson Welles, but now niced-up for la Hart mére..

So Taurog, ever the faithful Metro hack delivers relatively static and proscenium based iterations of some of the great Rogers and Hart numbers, even a knockout Lena Horne in "Lady is a Tramp" in which he actually resorts to a crane shot to give the number some basic animation. But the movie is a slog, for all that and for the many, many artists paraded through it

Finally, the movie is rescued by two completely unexpected and extraordinary sequences which knock your socks off: One the staging of "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" with Gene Kelly and Vera Ellen (above) which rocks with Kelly's very obviously self-imposed staging and mise-en-scene. Not to mention the big brass arrangements by orchestrator Conrad Salinger.

And the second, most intriguing of all is a sequence after a big party has ended and Larry, now drunk and morose, asks Mel Torme (below) to sing him "Blue Moon.". I don't know how the gods of intervention suddenly stepped in on behalf of the ever-turgid Taurog but the sequence fixes itself into two setups, one tight CU of Torme, apparently singing the number to Hart, and a reverse medium with a track into medium close to a completely floored Hart who seems to be lapping up the moment at the most intense personal level. The number plays like a breakthrough scene for putting Harts homosexuality out there, and I for one lapped it up, like who knows how many young queer kids in the audience sitting in the dark when the movie first played who felt the same way. 

There we were, Mickey Rooney of all people playing Larry Hart, of all people, and staging the sequence to play as a love song from one man to the other. God only knows this could not in a million years have come out of the mind of Norman Taurog, but somehow it did.

If you need another reason to check it out, the three strip restoration is, once again staggering.

On the centenary of Judy Garland's birth - David Hare pays tribute to a great artist

 Given June is the birth month for La Gumm, why resist any longer.

Here’s one of my favorite challenge dances from Chuck Walters’ 1950 Summer Stock, with Gene Kelly partnering Judy.

 

If truth be told it was Kelly, along with Walters who rescued Garland from a final all-out ban of Garland by Mayer, Metro and even Freed, after the catastrophe of Annie Get Your Gun.

 

To get Summer Stock moving, Kelly and Walters engaged Joe Pasternak as producer and Kelly maintained the fight to keep Judy on target to finish the picture

 

In a sense Kelly was, with this enormous effort, returning a favor to Judy which she had granted him a mere eight years earlier when she eased him into his first part as “Harry” in his first picture, For Me and My Gal in 1942. Great artists never forget their mentors.

 

Here’s another tribute…

 

This is, I think Cole Porter’s most beautiful ballad, and it barely survived being cut from The Pirate after filming was completed in 1947.

 

Not only was it disliked by Mayer, after he’d also ordered the removal of the Voodoo number, but Kelly broke his ankle earlier in the week filming the Mack the Black number and would be laid up for weeks but, undaunted, Minnelli and Garland staged the number to one verse with Kelly here supine for a single take. 

 

In less than two minutes Garland’s range and incredible technique is in full, glorious display.

 

I just watched the film again, at 1 am when I couldn't sleep. Needless to say I saw the whole thing. I was amazed once again by the limpidity and sublimity of the Warner Archive Blu-ray. 

 

Every three strip disc of theirs that comes down the pike these days--THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX, IVANHOE, CAPTAINS OF THE CLOUDS--I think, "this is far better than the one before". But THE PIRATE is by far the greatest three-strip the Warner Archive has released so far, and the quality of it necessitates a complete reappraisal of the film. 

 

Happy 100th Dorothy.

 

 

Streaming on Kanopy - Rediscovering Mark Rappaport - A twisty tale that ends with almost like being in love

Mark Rappaport (above) was someone I met once, at Edinburgh in 1980, when I invited him to send his film Imposters  to the 1981 Melbourne Film Festival. Too late.  He had already agreed to send it out to Claudine Thoridnet’s Adelaide Film Festival and in those days, and I’m not going into any further detail, the Melbourne and Sydney Film Festivals got very sniffy about films that had already played somewhere else, especially like Adelaide or Perth, in the wide brown land. 

So that’s out of the way. 

 

But my big Mark Rappaport comeback started a little while ago when the Munich Film Museum put up an online exhibition of Rappaport’s films. Way back in 1980 he was already a major figure in US indie cinema and the Munich exhibition reminded us that he has remained so for more than four decades. Among the titles in the Munich online show were items that went back decades. I posted a blog item about this early effort to overcome the lockdown blues that were worldwide at the time. 

 

Since then I have become interested in the major turn that Rappaport has taken and continues to take in producing what I guess are now called audio-visual essays. He is not alone in exploring the field. It has become cinephilia on steroids, a crowded area where the quality Blu-ray, DVD and streaming services regard it as a serious selling point to have major critics doing intros and associated material about newly-released titles. It gives those editions some cache. Even the local distributor ViaVision on its Imprint Label has taken to beefing up its releases with some superb ancillary material, none more so than Tony Rayns straight to camera intro on the recent superb edition of Howard Hawks’ Scarface  a tour de force of informative background about Hawks and Ben Hecht, production conditions, gossip and enlightened commentary on a landmark film in the director’s career.

 

Rayns has also contributed a piece to the latest issue of Sight & Sound, newly revamped, which devotes itself to the most recent phase of Rappaport’s  film-making, the period from 2014 when “he switched to digital tech and reinvented himself as a video essayist, most of the time exploring byways of film history: overlooked and forgotten careers, narrative strategies, suppressed identities, hidden meanings.”

 

Two for the Opera House

By chance I was just presented with copies of three of Rappaport’s most recent essays, all up an hour of film. L’Année Dernière à Dachau, The Stendhal Syndrome or My Dinner with Turhan Bey  and Two for the Opera Box. They have a range.  The last mentioned is cinephilia rampant, an appreciation of the efficiency of the studio system via an examination of MGM’s permanent set of a theatre/opera house that Rappaport’s eagle eye spots being used and re-used in The Bad and The Beautiful, Two Weeks in Another Town, The Bandwagon, Scaramouche, Give a Girl a Break, Deep in My Heart, The Barkleys of Broadway, Interrupted Melody, Kiss Me Kate  and Torch Song. Put your hand up if you noticed. Put it up again if you noticed the same Chinese screen used in both The Cobweb  and The Opposite Sex. Rappaport did.

 

L’Année Dernière à Dachau is a meditation on memory and the past and the cinephiliac impulse is strong. Rappaport reveals that the chateau where Marienbad  was made is the same location that Stanley Kubrick used for his exteriors in Paths of Glory. He cleverly connects the two films by elisions and montages joining Kirk Douglas and Delphine Seyrig (below). But the crux of this exploration is the re-use of footage which connects Resnais’s film to his earlier Night and Fog. The location for Marienbad turns out to be just 8 kms from Dachau. So we have a film that utilises 8mm  footage shot by the bit player actress Francoise Spira, footage previously assembled by film-maker Volker Schlondorff, comparative sequences between the Resnais and Kubrick films, and an homage to Delphine Seyrig’s career and her politics as she employed them in  selecting her roles. It’s a heady mix that makes a half hour rocket by.

 

The Stendhal Syndrome or My Dinner with Turhan Bey, rescues from obscurity a handsome actor with an exotic face who spent most of his life playing slick second level characters. They tanned him up on more than a few occasions to play an oriental or as they say a person of Middle Eastern appearance. Rappaport had a crush on him and yet again he selects a panoply of sequences, some of them photoshopped, if that’s the word, to make the insight more telling. It did remind me just how much I had enjoyed one of Bey’s meatier parts in The Amazing Mr X Bernard Vorhaus’s slick thriller about a fake medium. 

 

Turhan Bey

So…What followed after the hour long viewing was completed. By the time of Two for the Opera Box I was making lists of the films. That one heavily featured the work of Vincente Minnelli. A quick check of the shelves revealed that most of any we have are far away. What popped out were Lust for Life and Brigadoon. No opera boxes or scenes set in the permanent theatre set in either of those. But Brigadoon does have one of Gene Kelly’s greatest songs…(and Cyd Charisse singing The Heather on the Hill). You can check out Kelly's number if you click on this YouTube link. You may already be one of more than 400,000 people who have viewed it but look again for the sheer simplicity of the sequence. Superb song, one of Kelly’s trademark solo dances and the whole thing, lasting 4’22”, done in seven shots.

Streaming and on DVD - John Baxter revives memories of KEEPER OF THE FLAME (Dir: George Cukor, Sc:Donald Ogden Stewart, USA 1942)

       

Donald Ogden Stewart

      When people talk about films starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, they seldom mean the 1942 Keeper of the Flame. One might think that its stars, with George Cukor as director and screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart of Philadelphia Story fame, would rate at least a small measure of respect. So complete has been its eclipse, however, that not even the most engagé Australian critics have risen to the fact that Ida Alexa Ross Wylie, author of the original novel, was Melbourne-born, and enjoyed a prominent public profile as both lesbian and suffragette. 

          The message of Keeper of the Flame was timely. In June 1941, twenty thousand people assembled at the Hollywood Bowl to hear isolationist Charles Lindbergh urge that America keep out of the war. Don Stewart, then president of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the American League of Writers and the Anti-Franco League (“I loved being president,” he confessed once, with one of his cat-like smiles),was easily persuaded to join closet leftists Tracy and Hepburn in suggesting that a heroic figure like Lucky Lindy might become the figurehead of a Fascist takeover of the United States. In December of that year, Pearl Harbor rendered the argument irrelevant but in certain quarters commitment to the war remained grudging.

Katharine Hepburn

Wealthy, feted, the epitome of trivial humour, Stewart made an improbable leftist. He dated his transformation from 1936. That spring, he came, as usual, to London to refresh his wardrobe. He also did a little work. “I was writing a play and it had a Communist in it,” he said. “I didn’t have any idea of how tall Communists were, so I asked the doorman at Claridge’s, where we were staying, if he knew anything about Communism. He said ‘No, sir,’ but directed me to a book shop. I bought John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power and read it going back on the boat. It was a revelation to me. When I got back to America, I started boring friends about Socialism. I knew I was boring them because I didn’t get invited to as many parties as I once had.”

At Hawes and Curtis, London’s best formal-wear shop, he had bought a dozen stiff shirts, a dozen soft evening shirts, and six black bow ties, in expectation of a lively season. “You know,” he told me, a little forlornly (and without, I’m sure, a grain of truth) “I still have a few of those shirts? They’re a bit yellow, but mostly unworn.”  

         The premiere of Keeper of the Flame at New York’s Radio City Music Hall didn’t go well. “I’m told Louis B. Mayer stormed out,” Stewart said. “I certainly hope it’s true.” Those who stayed were troubled by a niggling sense of déjà vu. After a newsreel documenting the death of a significant figure in American public life, reporters gather for the funeral at his grim walled estate, while a lone journalist sets out to investigate his secret life. Hadn’t they seen all this before?  For once, Hedda Hopper seemed to have got it right when she called it “Citizen Kane with all the art scraped off." 

         There’s still plenty of art to go around, though not of the Wellesian variety. Cinematographer William Daniels shuns the flamboyance of Gregg Toland, opting for the high-key formalism he did so much to perfect in his films for Garbo. Shot entirely on interiors, Keeper of the Flame is MGM precision incarnate, investing its characters with the same immobility as the furniture that fills the mansion’s vast rooms. 

Spencer Tracy

         Tracy as the reporter, Hepburn as the widow and Richard Whorf as the dead man’s secretary navigate the decor as formally as chess pieces, with Hepburn, often dressed in soft draped white, as the omnipotent queen.  If she’s the queen, the treacherous Whorf, oleaginous and peremptory by turns, is a side-sliding bishop, while Tracy, hat brim so sharply turned down as to resemble a visor, and tending always to the awkward and oblique move, must be the knight.  In that capacity, he woos the widow into a confession that she let her husband drive over a demolished bridge rather than let him take the first steps in a coup d’etat.    

Richard Whorf, Katharine Hepburn  

         Cukor directs in Gaslight mode, but rather than Charles Boyer lowering over a shuddering Ingrid Bergman, Tracy, soft-eyed and low-voiced, sits at the knee of Hepburn as she stares over his head, eyes glowing with the receding glory of her dead hero. Bronislau Kaper’s discreet score is no match for such images. They demand Wagner. 

          RKO owned the novel first, and planned a modest thriller more in keeping with its discreet political subtext; something for Robert Mitchum or Joel McCrea perhaps, and Laraine Day. With memories, however, of Citizen Kane, the rock that sank the regime of George Schaefer, they willingly relinquished it to MGM, where folie de grandeur stalked the halls. Producer Victor Saville, recently arrived from Britain, had less to do with the film than Tracy, Hepburn and Stewart, who seized the reins and confidently directed it to the left.  

         Cukor didn’t argue. The film was made, he said later, "during a period of undercover Fascism in the country. Certain things were in the air but hadn’t come out into the open. I suppose, to draw attention to them, we exaggerated." He, like Tracy and Hepburn, could afford to, since his value to MGM rendered him fireproof, but Stewart’s career never recovered. In 1950, he fled, blacklisted, to England – “not caught,” he said with rueful precision, “but caught up with.” Among his numerous credits, this was the one of which he was most proud. A keeper of the flame to the last.         

On Blu-ray - David Hare is enthralled all over again by Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell in BROADWAY MELODY OF 1940

The screen above is from the opening of the six minute Cole Porter "Begin the Beguine" sequence, one of several breathtaking numbers in Broadway Melody of 1940. (Youtube links below).

Here Eleanor Powell heads the figurative mass blocking of white in the frame, with chorus and giant stage, until she dances backwards adagio tempo towards the dim figure of Fred Astaire, immersed in black, then the image shifts from white, to black, day to night, solo to duet. After the first three minutes of lyrics sung and tapped by Powell and chromatic tonality the number shifts from the giant sets into a dazzling tap duet from the two. It’s a great shame this was the only movie to pair Astaire with Powell.

In creative visual response to Porter's great tune, and the Alfred Newman scoring I think the principle genius behind the staging and imagination for all these amazing production numbers essentially goes to Metro Production Design king, Cedric Gibbons. There's really no credit for choreography, and one suspects the hand of Berkeley if only for the mass chorus, and hallucinatory travelling shots with cross cutting. But the only dance credit recorded is Bobby Connolly. The problem always arises in dissecting who's done what in any picture directed by a Metro hack like Norman Taurog. I suspect some credit for the shape and feel of these dance sequences might go to editor Blanche Sewell, and Adrian for possibly more than gowns, as well as Gibbons’ underling, Edwin Willis.

In any case the movie is all about the dances and their flights into delirium with a killer Cole Porter repertoire.

This is the sort of glory you get from an industry in which a nobody (in terms of talent) officially directs the picture but the machinery behind the credits (and sometimes on the credits as it was later with the Freed Unit) delivers these masterpieces. Cocteau surely pinched the mirrors and black/white duality of Orphee from this number which he would only have been able to see after the war and the occupation of course. Watch the second half in which Powell and Astaire riff a long duet including the most subtle "challenge tap" in the history of the musical. She was a flawless dancer on her own and with him she's his equal. Everything she is in worth watching.

The picture has been released from a new 4K scan of some parlous quality elements from Warner Archive Blu-ray. It looks and sounds glorious, once again. Jo Ruttenberg's glistening photography with crane and track is to die for.

 CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE FIRST PART of this magnificent sequence.When Powell steps into the blackness with the camera floating up with her, you’re in a Cocteau Dream. Then Astaire comes towards her but it’s his reflection in another wall of mirrors, and he enters the frame from the left! It’s completely dazzling.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE SECOND PART

Streaming - John Baxter resurrects Peter Lorre's American debut MAD LOVE (Karl Freund, MGM, USA, 1935)

Peter Lorre, from the trailer for
Mad Love

BOILED EGGS IN THE BEDROOM. 

             Before directing Gremlins, Piranha and The Howling, Joe Dante comprised, with Allan Arkush, the entire publicity staff of bargain basement producer Roger Corman. “We cut the trailers,” reminisced Dante. “We wrote the copy. We did the advertising. We sold the hell out of those films."  Slogans he invented for T.N.T Jackson, a piece of Filipino chopsocky, included "T.N.T Jackson - She'll Put You In Traction", "This Hit Lady's Charms Will Break Both Your Arms" and "With That Dynamite Bod, She's A Jet Black Hit Squad."  Among "Seat-Selling Slants" for cinema managers, the press book advised "Blow up local power stations, and leave a note saying 'T.N.T Jackson was here'."

            In 2007, Dante celebrated the uncredited expertise of movie publicists by launching Trailers From Hell  a website that invited friends and colleagues to add amusing and instructive commentaries to vintage previews, many of them for Dante’s special enthusiasms, science fiction and horror films.  Now available on YouTube, these three-minute snippets exhumed many rightly forgotten turkeys and a few neglected gems.

Rick Baker

            The decision of creature creator Rick Baker to resurrect the trailer for the 1935 Mad Love, the first American film of Peter Lorre,  provides a high point in the series.  Driven out of Germany by the Nazi edict against Jewish artists, Lorre moved to London for The Man Who Knew Too Much with Hitchcock,then to Hollywood, where he hoped to interest Harry Cohn at Columbia in an updated Crime and Punishment, with himself as Raskolnikov. 

             Forewarned by Brave New World  author and sometime screenwriter Aldous Huxley, who compared movie producers to chimpanzees, “agitated and infinitely distractable,”  Lorre arrived with a simplified synopsis of the book, to which Cohn, who had heard of neither the novel nor Dostoievsky,  paid little attention  - until Lorre mentioned that it was out of copyright.  With no need to bargain with a greedy author or agent, Cohn signed Lorre to a one-film deal, gave the project to director Josef von Sternberg, and, rather than have the actor twiddling his thumbs during pre-production, loaned him to MGM for a film to be directed by fellow refugee Karl Freund.  

Karl Freund shooting The Mummy

            At Universal, Freund’s stately version of The Mummy with Boris Karloff had won praise for the  cinematographer turned director, but status-conscious Louis B. Mayer was unimpressed. MGM didn’t make horror films – unless, that is, they fell into the category of Literature.   

            Among thousands of books and plays in MGM’s story department was The Hands of Orlac, by French writer Maurice Renard. Inspired by developments in psychoanalysis, it followed the fate of concert pianist Steven Orlac,whose hands are mangled in a train accident.  Thanks to a brilliant surgeon, Doctor Gogol,  he acquires the extremities of an executed criminal  -  with, he comes to believe, their former owner’s homicidal urges. Reality or delusion? We’re never entirely sure. 

Frances Drake in the Grand Guignol.

             Not counting Renard, seven writers laboured to transform this sow’s ear into a silk purse for Lorre. They spiked his dialogue with quotes from Oscar Wilde and Robert Browning, and references to the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea.  Banishing the self-pitying Orlac to the wings, they turned the spotlight onto his actress wife Yvonne, who metamorphosed into a star of Paris’s Théâtre des Horreurs, inspired by the Théâtre du Grand Guignol.  (Brainchild of a retired police prosecutor-turned-pulp writer,  the tiny Grand Guignol presented only plays celebrating torture and violent death. Eyes were gouged out, faces pressed to red-hot stoves. Opened in 1897, it only closed in 1962, its imagined horrors no match for the headlines.)

             Gogol, obscenely obsessed by Yvonne, attends every one of her performances. Alone in a private box, half his face in shadow, he all but salivates as she is tortured on the medieval rack.  She begs medical help for her husband and he falls over himself to assist, using spare parts provided by Rollo, a notorious knife murderer, recently guillotined. Gogol gambles that gratitude will mellow into love, but when he steals a kiss at a backstage end-of-run party (its centerpiece, a large cake, is decorated with a model guillotine) Yvonne can’t hide her disgust. “I have conquered science,” wails Gogol in a cry familiar to nerds everywhere. “Why can't I conquer love?" 

            Orlac, crazed by the alien urges of his new hands, tries to investigates their donor, and the doctor sees a way to remove his competition. He laces himself into a grotesque costume that encloses him from neck to waist and, claiming to be Rollo, informs the traumatised musician that, in return for taking his hands, Gogol restored his severed head. 

"...But Gogol sewed them back on again..."

            Lorre’s immoderate exhibition of expressionist acting, imported from the Berlin of Jessner, Piscator, Leni and Weine, had no parallel in the Hollywood of the day.  The trailer for Mad Love  reflects MGM’s  awe and respect. It opens with a simple quote from Charlie Chaplin . He calls Lorre “the greatest living actor.”  After that, we discover Lorre draped over an armchair, book and cigarette in hand (see picture at top), a Central Casting Great Dane crouched alertly at his side.  Languidly he accepts a telephone call from a glamorous starlet who compliments him on his forthcoming debut as what the trailer calls “a new, a strange, a gifted personality.” 

            Sadly for Lorre, audiences found his baleful presence a little too new and strange.   His appearance startled even Andre Sennwald, the normally unflappable critic of the New York Times.  “Perhaps you have not yet made the acquaintance of Mr. Lorre.” he wrote. “Squat, moon-faced, with gross lips, serrated teeth and enormous round eyes which seem to hang out on his cheeks like eggs when he is gripped in his characteristic mood of wistful frustration. As if these striking natural endowments were not enough, his head has been shaved clean for the occasion, and his skull becomes an additional omen of evil in the morose shadows evoked for the photo-play.”  

Lorre's eyes like eggs

            Mad Love was in trouble from the start. Freund, unable to relinquish the camera to cinematographer Greg Toland, later to shoot Citizen Kane, meddled in the lighting, to the exasperation of the studio producer. He would remain an important artisan in Hollywood but never direct another film.  

            Next to Lorre’s grandstand performance, his co-stars withered.  Shots of Frances Drake as Yvonne standing next to the 160cm Lorre suggest she was chosen because, unlike most MGM actresses, she didn’t tower over him. The trailer assigns Colin Clive a single puzzled close-up as Orlac, and a reference to his role in Frankenstein,the most likely reason for his casting. Clive was an alcoholic in the last stages of tuberculosis. He barely needed to act, so convincing was his despair and desperation. At his funeral two years later, Lorre was a pallbearer.

Peter Lorre and Frances Drake

             

            Back at Columbia, Lorre completed a worthy but unremarkable Crime and Punishment with von Sternberg, but by then Mad Love, released first, had done its damage. Whatever MGM’s ambitions, it was still regarded as a horror film, and Lorre banished to the ghetto that housed all B-movie players.  Despite roles as the effeminate Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon and doomed intriguer Ugarte in Casablanca, not to mention a series as Japanese detective Mr. Moto, he would never become a leading man. The pattern was already established that led inexorably to him dressed in a crow costume, obese and morphine-addicted, stooging for Vincent Price in Roger Corman’s The Raven. Of the downward spiral in his fortunes, Lorre joked  morosely “All that anyone needs to imitate me is two soft-boiled eggs and a bedroom voice.” For his monument, look no further than Trailers From Hell.

 

            Rick Baker’s on Mad Love can be seen here. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mad+love+trailers+from+hell

An excellent copy of the feature can be seen here.

https://ok.ru/video/1272642865904