I woke up this morning with the entire Looney Tunes cartoon, "Bully for Bugs" (1953) playing in my head. Probably because last night my son was being extra space-invasive and "Stop steaming up my tail!" is our running joke when one of us needs the other to back up a few spaces. 

It reminded me of a slideshow I put up a couple of years ago about studio cartoons, so I'm taking the opportunity to recycle it and add a few things. 

But watch this first:

*Originally posted on the original Mildred's Fatburger site, 2/24/2011

I'm not going to write a particularly detailed tribute to Ernst Lubitsch on this, the day after his birthday, because so many people have done it already and certainly better than I could. Like here on this excellent site: 

• The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch
  

Born in Berlin to an Ashkenazic tailor, Lubitsch started out in German silent films as an actor and director. He moved to Hollywood in 1922 and began making the kind of urbane romantic comedies that would later come to define his signature style -- witty, sophisticated, subtle, sexy, and beautifully crafted -- "The Lubitsch Touch."  Again, I point you elsewhere for biographical details and suggest you start watching any and all of the films listed below, which are all available streaming or on DVD. 

Let's just say the man knew how to use Edward Everett Horton.

A scene from Trouble in Paradise  (1932)

Here's another quickie from the same film:

("She hates him!" Hee hee.)

What a silly, silly movie this is. Imagine if Patty McCormack's Rhoda Penmark from The Bad Seed grew up, got married, and started missing that penmanship medal. Maybe I'd been spoiled by the three Mexican pictures at Noir City 12 last Saturday. Or perhaps it was the huge buildup about how herculean the effort was to restore this lost "masterpiece" (five years, crazy twists and turns; that's the picture I would rather have seen).

But Too Late for Tears has a lot going against it: nutty plot, wooden acting, major implausibilities, and (in my opinion) not enough slapping of Lizabeth Scott. Scott plays Jane Palmer, a neurotic housewife bored with and apparently annoyed by her husband Alan (it is Arthur Kennedy). By sheer coincidence, the unhappy couple is careening past a blackmail dropoff site and accidentally acquires a bag fulla money. Alan wants to hand it over to the police; Jane wants furs and fine things, so they stash it for a week to mull it over. Alan seems to be able to forget about it and Jane goes on a spending spree.

(The Palmers don't seem to know each other very well.)

Meanwhile, my favorite nogoodnik, Dan Duryea, the guy for whom the money was intended, turns up at the Palmers's place and starts getting tough with Jane, then kind of falls for her. She kills Alan kind of by accident and Duryea kind of helps her get away with it. Jane tells everyone Alan ran off with another woman, but his sister Kathy (Kristine Miller), who lives across the hall (weird), doesn't buy it. About this time, Don DeFore drops by to fall in love with Kathy and to help foil Jane. He's got ten years to kill before Hazel, so why not?

It was OK, not the lost classic I'd expected. Lizabeth Scott does nothing for me as an actress; no subtlety, no nuance, just a weird sudden rictus when she's turning on the charm. It's not even chilling. Naturally, Dan Duryea did his damnedest, which is always damned good, and the best scenes were his. So charming. Such a good conflicted drunk.

Sigh. You may as well see it.

But let's start with the Hollywood message picture about illegal trafficking in farm workers set in the border towns of Calexico and Mexicali. After the odd, public service-like prologue about the "army of farm workers from our neighbor to the south" needed to pick crops to put food on American tables, the film begins in a conference room where federal agents from the United States and Mexico are devising a way to infiltrate an illegal migrant worker smuggling ring.

I should mention that the working title for Border Incident was Wetbacks.

Agent Pablo Rodriguez (the impossibly handsome Ricardo Montalban) is to pose as a bracero fed up with waiting weeks with hundreds of others for legal permission to pick crops all day for crap pay and get himself smuggled in so he can work all day for half  the crap pay he'd get legally. Luckily, he finds the right bunch of guys. Of course, these are also the guys who ambush the workers when they cross back into Mexico with their hard-earned money, rob them, kill them, and dump their bodies in a handy patch of quicksand.

The American agent, Jack Bearnes (George Murphy ) is to pose as a wanted U.S. criminal who has acquired real work permits and wants to sell to the highest human trafficker, who turns out to be a quietly menacing rancher called Owen Parkson (Howard DaSilva).

There's a lot of iffy police work in this picture and one significant (and literally harrowing) "after-the-nick-of-time" moment, but all in all, an interesting movie with some very moving scenes shot in shadow and tight spaces. The bad guys are caught (it's an MGM film) at a cost, and as the epilogue implies, everything is super safe now for our migrant farm working friends from sunny Mexico.

Isn't that a relief?

Night, meet day. Day, night.

In the Palm of Your Hand is set among the wealthy elite of Mexico City, where charlatan astrologer, "Professor" Jaime Karin (the great Arturo de Cordova) charms and swindles wealthy matrons with the help of his wife, Clara Stein (Carmen Montejo: picture a Spanish-speaking Patty Andrews from the shtetl) who works at a swank beauty parlor and passes on the intimate secrets of these idle rich.

Enter beautiful and beguiling Ada Romano (Leticia Palma), the recent widow of millionaire Vittorio, whom Karin decides to bilk of her inherited fortune. Clara gets a funny feeling about all this and begs him not to run the con.

What could go wrong?

Turns out Ada and her lover, Leon (Ramon Gay, who looks a bit like John Waters) have murdered her husband (his uncle) and now Ada would like Karin to take care of Leon. The way things go bad for the otherwise canny Professor is expertly managed and executed; you never know quite how it'll all turn out. Will Ada win? Will Karin pull things off? I won't tell you.

The set design is outstanding and the photography exquisite. I recommend it highly if you ever get the opportunity.

I feel the way about Victims of Sin as I did when I saw my first Bollywood film: exhilarated, amazed, and in love. I am now in hot pursuit of more películas de cabareteras (cabaret dancer films); it's as though my eyes are finally open to an entirely new cinematic possibility.

The plot: Nightclub dancer, Violeta (Cuban dancer and actress, Ninon Sevilla) rescues the unwanted baby of a club prostitute from the garbage and decides to raise him as her own, at great cost to her reputation and safety. In fact, she is kicked out of the swanky Cabaret Chango and is forced to sell herself on the street.

The child's father is a zoot-suited, quasi-clownish pimp called Rodolfo (Rodolfo Acosta) who menaces Violeta until she is rescued by friendlier pimp/club owner, Don Santiago (Tito Junco), who you can always tell is coming, because he is followed everywhere by a band of mariachis.* Santiago's club, La Maquina Loca, may be (literally) on the wrong side of the tracks, but the whores are friendlier to one another and the johns are kindly beer-swilling stokers; not those stuck up martini-swilling, rumba-dancing, suit-wearing creeps uptown.

Do I really need to say more?

Well, try this on: There are at least three major Afro-Cuban dance numbers featuring the great Perez Prado and his orchestra; a tender ballad by Pedro Vargas, and a poorly translated but clearly hilarious song by Rita Montaner.  Plus Violeta does a beautiful, provocative dance number with an African bongo drummer.

And this: The film is shot by the incredible Gabriel Figueroa (student of Gregg Toland and cinematographer to Luis Bunuel and John Ford). There is one shot of thick, filthy smoke rising from train smokestacks that looks like the sky has bit lit on fire -- and it's a black and white film, mind you. Victims of Sin is also directed and written by Emilio Fernandez, acclaimed actor and director, but did you know he was also the model for the Academy Award statue?

Oh and: An alarming number of scenes in which fightin' mad whores descend on men, yelling, kicking, scratching, and punching, then dissolving into the background. Violeta herself comes flying through a window out of nowhere at one point to beat the crap out of a bunch of guys.

The best part of all is the horrendous literal translation in the subtitles. We all know enough Spanish to raise an eyebrow when the word cojones gets the silent treatment, but it makes you wonder what choice curse was written out for us as "knife face." My favorite word-for-word translation of all came when the prostitutes are admiring Violeta's baby and coo, "It is male and it is sleeping."

I'm not telling you everything that happens, because there's So Much More -- and because you just have to see it. And you can if you follow the YouTube link below.

You know what's wrong with kids today? They never get a chance to see a picture like this by accident on a Saturday afternoon or on a Late Late Show on a local UHF station. That's how I first saw Cry 'Havoc' , sometime in the mid-1970s, when there were still people in my family who had actual memories of World War II, either fighting in it or seeing movies like this in the theaters when they came out.

Except for a handful of atmospheric men and fewer barbs, this film is strangely like The Women. All the main characters are women: nurses and volunteers at a military hospital in Bataan, how they cope with each other, the wounded, their dwindling resources, and eventual surrender to the Japanese. Margaret Sullavan and Fay Bainter are two army nurses struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing stream of wounded. They recruit a handful of civilian women from among hundreds of refugees encamped not far away to help out: two students, a factory manager, a waitress (Ann Sothern), a Southern Belle (Diana Lewis, from Asbury Park, not Alabama, and soon-to-be Mrs. William Powell), a burlesque performer (Joan Blondell, who else?), and a fashion writer (Ella Raines).

The cast is kind of a cavalcade of Tier 2 and Tier 3 stars of the day (1943), except possibly for Margaret Sullavan, who may have been the biggest star in the cast and whom I've always loved in spite of those stupid bangs. Joan Blondell, who turns out to be adorable in work clothes, was not the draw she used to be by then, and Marsha Hunt (the sweet, skinny thing) was hitting her stride as a strong supporting actress.

Cry 'Havoc' was the film adaptation of an unsuccessful Broadway play called Proof Through the Night, starring Carol Channing (?!), that only ran for two months. I can imagine the play being fairly plodding without the benefit of close-ups and medium shots, or the occasional explosion. Many of the scenes in this movie are very stagey, in fact, with only the barracks, the communications hut, and kitchen serving as backdrop to the women's stories. There are a few outdoor shots of, well, havoc, but much of the real drama is indoors. There are friendships and rivalries and real conversations in this picture; Ann Sothern in particular is wonderfully cagey and natural.

It's a very affecting and effective movie that's well worth a look.

Interviewed in Growing Up on the Set,
By Tom Goldrup and Jim Goldrup, McFarland & Company, 2002

Who knows? If it weren't for Shirley Temple, Bonita Granville, or Jane Withers, Marcia Mae Jones might have been better known today or would at least have had meatier roles. She did seem to get the choice second part to a bigger box office child actor, however, and always turned in an admirable, and often excellent, performance.

I first came to know her as the mean Lavinia in The Little Princess (1939), and since (sorry) I'm not the biggest Shirley Temple fan, I was kind of rooting for the brat. By that time, 15-year-old Jones had already been in about 25 pictures, pushed into show business by one of those mothers, who pushed her siblings into movies as well, Like Baby Peggy, Marcia Mae Jones was the family breadwinner at an early age and also had to contend with the professional jealousies of her brothers and sister when her career outpaced theirs.

Perhaps her best and most famous performance was as the tormented Rosalie Wells in the 1936 adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play, "The Children's Hour." Retitled These Three, the film starred Merle Oberon, Joel MacCrea, and Miriam Hopkins, with Bonita Granville as the evil child, Mary. The film was remade in 1961 under the play's original title, with Veronica Cartwright (also excellent and not as famous as she should be) in the part played by Jones.

By the 1940s, Marcia Mae Jones had gone from playing decent secondary roles to kind of crummy teenage starring roles with titles like Lady in the Death House * (1944) and Street Corner **(1948). She made a number of appearances on television comedies and dramas throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s. She also had a part in the 1973 film The Way We Were, but I honestly can't remember her in it.

As an adult, Jones was plagued by personal and emotional problems, which she attributed in part to her stage mother. Her second husband, television writer Bill Davenport (Hogan's Heroes, I Dream of Jeannie, All in the Family, Maude), struggled with drugs and alcohol and eventually committed suicide. Jones herself fought alcohol addiction, overcoming her dependency later in life. 

She remained lifelong friends with Jane Withers since they appeared together in the film Gentle Julia (1936).

Marcia Mae Jones died September 2, 2007 of pneumonia at the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement community at the age of 83.

Cordially Yours, Ann Sothern,
By Colin Briggs, BearManor Media, 2007

Harriette Lake was born January 22, 1909, in North Dakota to  "traveling thespian" Walter and opera singer/diction coach Annette. Her father deserted the family when Ann was six and her mother took Ann and her two sisters to Iowa, then Minnesota, ultimately settling in southern California, where Annette became a vocal coach for the emerging talkies at Warner Bros. Studios. 

Sothern performed in a number of small parts for Warners and MGM, got tired of the smallness of them, and went on to perform in musicals on the New York stage, still using the name Harriette Lake. Tiring of that, she went back to Hollywood and signed with Columbia Studios, where she changed her name to Ann (for her mother) Sothern (for E.H. Sothern, a Shakespearean actor). At Columbia she met lifelong friend, Lucille Ball, and the two of them worked near or around each other in movies and television for the rest of their lives.

Even though it would be her only Academy Award nomination, I have absolutely no recollection of her in Whales of August, the much-hyped 1987 film starring Bette Davis looking older than Lillian Gish.

Sothern was a conservative Republican and devout anti-Communist who supported the activities of the Committe on House Un-American Activities (HUAC). Not sure why this doesn't surprise me, but it's not my favorite thing to know about her.  

I've always enjoyed her easy style and natural delivery. She gave one of my favorite performances in one of my favorite films of all time: A Letter to Three Wives.

Happy birthday, Ms. Sothern.

I'm not sure why I decided to look at this film again; didn't care for it the first time I saw it years ago, but thought maybe I was missing something. And since it is Moira Shearer's birthday today, I thought I'd give it another try. 


Turns out I was right the first time and am not at all on board with the recentish, mystifying opinion (imdb, Roger Ebert, Martin Scorsese) that the film was unjustly trashed when it came out and is, in fact, another masterpiece about the nature of film by Michael Powell.  It's just not.

I've decided to put most of the blame on Carl (Karlheinz) Boehm, the actor playing the homicidal weirdo. I get what the film is supposed to do -- challenge the audience to confront its own voyeurism by watching this thoroughly damaged cameraman murder women with a knife fixed to the end of the tripod holding the camera that is filming the murder. But what girl in post-war London wouldn't run far, far away from a blond guy with a camera and trench coat who talks like Peter Lorre (but really really slowly) and doesn't blink?

Mark Lewis, the killer Peeping Tom, is a shy, freaky young man who lives in and lets rooms in his childhood home, where his "scientist" father conducted psychosexual experiments on him and documented it all on film for posterity. Mark, all (well not all) grown up, films everything all the time — including the occasional hooker he's in the middle of murdering — and develops the footage in his rooms. Mark is befriended by one of his boarders, Helen (Anna Massey), a young children's book writer. Helen's blind and drunk mother (Maxine Audley), not being able to see, just knows there is something reaaaaallly wrong with Mark, because she hears him watching films night after night in his room (and the blind are magic). Mark has murdered (and filmed) a stand-in (Moira Shearer) at the movie studio he works in and Helen's mother confronts him while he's replaying the movie. Yet he doesn't kill her; there's no fun in filming someone who can't appreciate that you're murdering them at the time. She suggests he get some help.

Eventually, Helen also sees the movie (one of the best sequences, actually: Anna Massey reacting to what she's watching) and is surprised by Mark who admits what he is and what he's done. Blah blah, father tortured him, blah, police bang on door, blah, he kills himself with his own camera/weapon, blah blah.

Apart from a few really nicely framed scenes in Powell's trademark hyper-saturated color, this film isn't very good. Even otherwise fine actors come off cartoony or wooden. Most of the action is accompanied by the plink-plonk of some musician's idea of what "nuts" sounds like on a piano, which doesn't help at all. 

Ah well. Happy birthday, anyway, lovely Moira Shearer. Maybe this would have been better as a musical, like Tales of Hoffman.

The Children's Hour is a good film otherwise marred by an overwrought score, some jumbo scenery chewing by the young actress who plays the evil brat, and some surprisingly hack delivery by the usually serviceable James Garner.

The story: Karen Wright (Audrey Hepburn) and Martha Dobie (Shirley MacLaine) are founders and teachers of a posh girls' school where a horrible bully of a girl named Mary Tilford (Karen Balkin) tells a vicious lie implying that Wright and Dobie are lesbians. Tilford's grandmother (Fay Bainter) believes the lie and removes Mary from the school, telling all the other parents in the process, causing them to disenroll their girls, thereby ruining Karen and Martha's school and reputation.

William Wyler directed both this and the original film version of Lillian Hellman's play, "The Children's Hour." The first, released in 1938, was renamed These Three, and starred Merle Oberon as Martha, Miriam Hopkins as Karen, Joel McCrea as Joe, and the infinitely more evil Bonita Granville as Mary, the horrible horrible little girl. The earlier version couldn't address the lesbian theme of the original play, but chose instead to make the scandal one of general impropriety, the lie of the child carrying weight for being of sexual matters supposedly beyond her understanding. It totally works.

The second picture is heavier and more despairing for taking on the issue of "perversion" head on. And while it is not Garner's best work, the part of Karen's stalwart doctor boyfriend is pretty thankless -- look how teeny he is in the poster. Miriam Hopkins is excellent as the worthless wretch of an aunt who abandons niece Martha, skillfully played in turn by Shirley MacLaine -- until the end, of course, but that's not her fault.

I think we can all agree that Audrey Hepburn was an angel sent from heaven.

But the best performances in this picture are by Fay Bainter as the guilt-ridden grandmother and Veronica Cartwright, an underrated, natural young actress, as the tormented schoolmate of evil Mary.

I do wonder how the film might be made today. It was a tough picture to see when I was coming up and out, though to be honest, (before the last reel, of course) I thought, "Cool, there are lesbians who look like Shirley MacLaine!" -- and it's hard to watch still. One hopes that in this day and age, Martha's torment wouldn't be so thorough and tragic, but "Modern Family" notwithstanding, there's still a lot of loathing to go around.

The lesson: Never underestimate the meanness of a 12-year-old girl.

Moira Shearer was a contemporary of not-yet Dame Margot Fonteyn in the Sadler's Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet) from 1942 to 1952, While still a member of the company, she reluctantly accepted the starring role for which she is best remembered, Victoria Page, in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's classic, The Red Shoes.

Although most of us who've seen the film believe she made the right decision, Shearer regretted playing Vicky for the rest of her life, because it portrayed the life of a ballerina in such a negative light. Her appearance in the film also caused audiences and peers alike to take her less seriously as a dancer, the very concern she expressed when considering the role. But she was persuaded by the ballet company director that whatever fame she would get from the film would benefit the company, which turned out to be true. And we have the added benefit of getting to see Moira's Shearer's beautiful 22-year-old person and flaming red hair forever, whether she liked it or not.

Shearer left the ballet at the age of 27 and went on to make a handful of interesting films before retiring to raise the four children she had with Ludovic Kennedy, an investigative reporter and television journalist, whom she married in 1950, In the 1970s she was a member of various UK art councils (even hosting the 1972 wackathon that is The Eurovision Song Contest) and toured the United States giving lectures on the history of ballet. 

In her spare time, she wrote Balletmaster: A Dancer's View of George Ballanchine (1986) and wrote a regular book review column for The Daily Telegraph. 

I love ballet when I think of it, which means I'm not in any way a connoisseur, but what little I know of it and why it's important and why it makes me feel things, is because of Moira Shearer, Powell & Pressburger, and The Red Shoes. I saw the film when I was a little girl and it is probably the reason I didn't go kicking and screaming to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center to see the American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet when I was a tweeny brat. Thank god, because at the time, Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov were principals, and we didn't always just have lawn seats.

In addition to grace and beauty, Moira Shearer was a fine actress with subtle, sweet comic timing. I'm sorry she hated movies so much, because it would good to have a broader record of her talent.

Moira Shear died in January 2006, shortly after her 80th birthday with her husband of 56 years at her side.