A basket of "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggghhhh!!"

I didn't really know anything about Patty McCormack's post-Bad Seed work until just this morning, and I suppose that's how her life has been since she appeared as the junior sociopath, Rhoda Penmark, in that weird, creepy movie. And it's not that I haven't seen her in anything since, it's just that I didn't recognize her without the Heidi braids and the sinister glare.

But we've all seen her. Look:

• She played Pat Nixon in Frost/Nixon 
• She had a recurring role as Adriana's mom in The Sopranos
• She was Jeffrey Tambor's character's wife in The Ropers, a sad, sad spin off of Three's Company.
• She guest starred on just about every popular television show since its invention, from Playhouse 90 to Route 66 to Emergency! to Dallas to Murder, She Wrote, and then some.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, to former professional roller skater, Elizabeth, and fireman, Frank Russo, Patty started out as a child model. She first appeared on television at age seven and soon found roles on Broadway, including the original production of The Bad Seed. She worked steadily throughout her childhood -- in spite of being so closely associated with the character that made her famous -- and transitioned relatively smoothly into teenage and adult roles.

Hers is a solid success story, and more power to her. Patty McCormack has been working for more than five decades; I guess I just have to check the credits more closely!

Sorry, David Niven. 

It's impossible not to love William Powell. I don't care if you've never even seen him in a film -- just look at him. Doesn't he seem like a nice guy? A smart guy? A guy you want in your corner?

This is not always the case with an only child, which he was, born in Pittsburgh, PA, to Horatio Powell, an accountant, and Nettie Brady. His father wanted him to become a lawyer, but William was a sucker for theater from his boyhood. His mother claimed that William made speeches soon after he could talk and would imitate the performances he saw at Pittsburgh's Bijou Theater, which he went to with alarming frequency.

When he was a teenager, Powell moved with his family to Kansas City, MO, where he finished high school and attending the University of Kansas for about a week. He then took off to Manhattan to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. For the next decade or so, William Powell was a bit player in vaudeville, a featured player on the road in a melodrama, and a regular performer on the New York stage, appearing in about 200 plays.

He first appeared in film as the villain to John Barrymore's Sherlock Holmes in 1921, which set him up in silent pictures as the heavy or society scoundrel. The advent of sound diversified Powell's roles into more sympathetic and romantic leads. Thank goodness, because I don't think I could have done without any of the 14 pictures he made with Myrna Loy, the woman of my dreams. Well, maybe The Great Ziegfeld...

Powell was married three times and amicably divorced twice. The first time to actress Eileen Wilson (1915-1930), the mother of his only child, television writer, William David Powell*; the second, more famously and for a much shorter time, to Carole Lombard (1931-1933). That divorce went so well, he later starred with Lombard (at his insistence, in fact) in My Man Godfrey, a performance which earned the both of them Academy Award nominations. 

There's a joke in there somewhere.

Powell (also famously) dated Jean Harlow for two years and the couple were engaged at the time of her tragic death from kidney failure at age 26 in 1937. Powell had her interred in a multicolored marble mausoleum at Forest Lawn in Glendale, expecting to join her there. However, he met third wife, Diana Lewis (see Cry Havoc!) in 1940, married her three weeks later, and remained married to Lewis until his death in 1984. 

Powell was diagnosed in 1937 with rectal cancer, a secret he kept for many decades. At the time, it was said that his break from acting was due to a stomach ailment, but Powell was undergoing a new-ish radiation treatment, and made a complete recovery. He worked continuously until the mid-1950s, then gracefully retired to the desert with Diana Lewis. 

William Powell lived to the age of 91, by all accounts a happy man with many friends.

A Terrible Liar,
By Hume Cronyn, Key Porter Books, 1991

Born in London, Ontario, to a well-placed family in the city, Hume Cronyn was sent to boarding school at age six and ultimately studied law at McGill University in Montreal. Partway through college, he switched majors to drama and went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Oh, and he was a good enough featherweight boxer to become part of Canada's Olympic boxing team in 1932.

Cronyn was more of a stage guy than a film guy, but managed to rack up a pretty respectable list of character roles in pictures over the course of 50 years. Famously married to Jessica Tandy, with whom he equally famously worked on stage and screen for a half century until her death in 1994, Cronyn later married children's author Susan Cooper when he was in his mid-eighties; they were together for seven years until his death in 2003.

In pictures he was sweet, small, not great with accents, but sympathetic and compelling. He was also one of the very few famous people I've ever met in real life. I was working a fundraiser* in Manhattan for the nonprofit group spearheaded by Sister Helen Prejean, whose book, Dead Man Walking, had just been made into a film. Who should come in, but Hume Cronyn, wearing an enormous furry (possibly actual fur) coat, but it was winter, so that wasn't like an Edward Gorey thing. I actually got tongue-tied and sputtered something idiotic at him about Lifeboat, ignoring anything he might have done for the past 50 years. He was lovely and gracious, but quickly and rightly moved on.

Embarrassing.

Ah well. Happy birthday, Hume Cronyn, one day late. It's been a long time since I thought about The Parallax View, so that's what I'll probably watch today.

I believe I first saw this picture on a small black and white television, and it wasn't nearly the same experience as watching two angry women on different sides of 40 shoot daggers at each other in Trucolor. Johnny Guitar is a really good movie, don't get me wrong, but there is much hilarity to found a half century after its release.

First of all, "Vienna?" That's the Cher/Maddonna/Beyonce name of Joan Crawford's character in Johnny Guitar, the tough saloon owner embroiled in a standoff against intolerant small town burghers.She wants a railroad to come through, and with it, progress. Emma Small (the miscast Mercedes McCambridge) is a town princess whose brother has been killed, most likely by the man of her dreams, an outlaw called (seriously) "The Dancin' Kid" (Scott Brady). But the Dancin' Kid has the hots for Vienna, which makes Emma especially vindictive.

And shrill. Did I mention shrill? Mercedes McCambridge has never been my favorite actor, in large part because of her voice. Indeed, her Hamlet is truly as Pazuzu, the demon speaking through Linda Blair in The Exorcist. In Johnny Guitar, she plays Vienna's nemesis, a relentless, vindictive woman who (in my humble O) is clearly in love with her rival and furious about it. 

Meanwhile, Vienna has built her saloon and sad gambling den after five years of hard work, which clearly has involved some unpleasant sexual encounters. To defend it, she's hired a former beau, Albuquerque gunslinger Johnny Logan, who, unbeknownst to Vienna, has forgone gun fightin' for guitar pickin' and now calls himself "Johnny Guitar.' Johnny is played by Sterling Hayden, who many of you know is not my ideal of a leading man (I refer you to The Come On). But Hayden is quite excellent as the forgiving, relatively peace loving hero.

Vienna hooks up with Johnny again and while making a routine, expository transaction at the bank, is caught up in the robbery of said bank by her former boyfriend, the Dancin' Kid. Her proximity to this event is all Emma needs to launch an all out vigilante assault on Vienna, the Kid, and his compadres, who include Ernest Borgnine and character staple, Royal Dano.

Everyone is now on high alert and the scent of blood. Crazy-ass Emma is wild to avenge herself on Vienna for, I dunno, having sex, being successful, having the business savvy to push Emma's family out of power, having the better color wardrobe, and possibly for being the hottest roulette dealer in town (if you know what I mean).

Well, one group chases the other until the group in the wrong loses the most people, but not before Emma sets Vienna's place and some other stuff on fire.

The accidental hilarity in this picture is in the staging and casting. Joan Crawford is superbly accidentally jaw-droppingly funny and heroic when she stands down or faces off the opposition -- with blood-red lipstick and expressive black eyebrows. Even when she's dressed in a white dress, playing piano against the rock-hewn natural foundation of her saloon facing her detractors.

It's also (and mostly) in McCambridge's hysterical glee at the thought of seeing her girlfriend/rival swing from the nearest hickory tree. There are several close-ups of McCambridge in disturbing vengeful rictus; her shrill calls to "string her up;" her insane laughter. So funny. So disturbing.

But this remains an excellent movie, in spite of the many many yuks you'll get at the wardrobe, the dialog, the intensity of misdirected feeling, and most likely, Mercedes McCambridge in her best mentally unstable reading of Emma Small.

I do think Sterling Hayden is pretty nuanced and (dare I say) attractive in this role; the men are complicated and interesting for a Western -- the Dancin' Kid isn't a complete tool, and his henchmen have layers. Like onions. If only it were the same for the two female leads.

Hilarious.

I had never seen The Lost Patrol until the other day, when I was (belatedly) preparing for The John Ford Blogathon. Filmed in the Sonoran Desert in Imperial County, California, every long shot of this wartime drama is spectacular -- and very John Ford: a taut human conflict set against a stark, uncompromising landscape.

The picture opens with a small patrol of British soldiers riding on horseback in the Mesopotamian desert during World War I. Their new lieutenant is shot and killed by an unseen Arab sniper pretty much immediately, but as he is new, no one is particularly torn up about it until they realize that he died before telling them what their orders were or how to meet up with their brigade. The sergeant (Ford favorite, Victor McLaglen) is a veteran campaigner who quickly takes charge of the situation and leads his men northward in the hopes that they will find their larger outfit.

It's hot. It's sandy. They're lost. They know it. There are some green recruits in the company who aren't used to schlepping around foreign climates in full uniform. In spite of it all, the men are kind to each other and to the horses. There is a bit of a wet blanket in the form of a bible thumping, sad-faced man (Boris Karloff, the saddest face of all), who disapproves of the swearing and talk about drink and girls in various ports.

Max Steiner's score does rather pound these points home: the sand, the heat, the camaraderie, the disapproval, we get it, we get it. I know he was nominated for an Academy Award for this picture and everything, but if it were up to me, I'd have turned the volume down a bit in some sequences. As Bette Davis said famously during the making of Dark Victory, when her character was heading upstairs to die, "Either I'm going to climb those stairs or Max Steiner is going to climb those stairs, but I'll be god-damned if Max Steiner and I are going to climb those stairs together!" Truer words...

As luck would have it, the troop stumbles upon an oasis with date palms, fresh water, and a bit of shelter for the night. The plan is to head northward in the morning, but when they awaken, they find one sentry dead, the other mortally wounded, and all the horses gone. 

The rest of the film is pretty much a chronicle of how to die in the desert. At different times, different men say "I see something moving!" and head off into the dunes only to be shot and killed by a sniper. Two guys, one of whom is Alan Hale, are sent to try to find help, only to be returned, mutilated, on two of the stolen horses. One of 'em gets shot out of a date palm; another goes crazy from the heat; and Boris Karloff goes completely off his rocker, dresses himself up as a Babylonian with a cross for a staff and wanders into the desert and is, of course, cut down by enemy fire.

Oh yeah, an allied biplane flies over, giving the survivors a brief moment of hope, only to be shot and killed once he lands the plane, in spite of the remaining soldiers waving him back. Alas, eventually only the sergeant is left alive, and we finally see the enemy descending on him in the oasis. There are only a handful of Arabs, as he suspected all along, and he manages to cut them down as they approach.

It's a stark picture with breathtaking desert sequences. The acting is fine, if a little melodramatic, but whatever, it's 1934 and they're all on location in the Algodones Dunes. The pace is fast and engaging. If you haven't had a chance to see The Lost Patrol, it is available streaming on Vudu for a small rental fee, or available on DVD. I recommend it for trademark John Ford and a sturdy ensemble cast.

Please Don't Shoot My Dog 
By Jackie Cooper with Dick Kleiner, Morrow, 1981

Quite a lot has been written about Jackie Cooper -- not the least of which is his own memoir -- so I'm not going to beat (you should pardon the expression) a dead horse. For immediate gratification on that score, please visit Immortal Ephmera for an excellent article about the life of Mr. Cooper by Cliff Aliperti.

I've always like this guy, even though I was never much of an "Our Gang" fan and am loath to watch anything with Wallace Beery in it unless I absolutely have to. Cooper was a likable, believable, and competent actor, both as a child and an adult.

My earliest memory of him was in the first (first) Superman movie as Daily Planet editor, Perry White. I was informed at the time that Cooper had been the child star in Treasure Island  (1934), which I had only just the day before seen on television (even though it starred Wallace Beery) and enjoyed quite a lot. To be honest, up to that point I'd always confused him with Jackie Coogan, but what do you want, I was 13 and not paying that close attention. 

Much older and wiser now, I appreciate how Cooper was able to overcome his era's miserable treatment of young actors and the sad meme of bullying directors, an estranged parent, early fame and sudden public rejection with oncoming adolescence. He was sensible enough to work on television, both in front of and behind the camera, and by the mid-1960s was enjoying a solid career as vice president of program development for CBS.

As he approached 50, a whole new career as a character actor opened up for him on shows like McCloud, Ironside, Hawaii 5-0, Columbo, and one of my favorites, Circle of Fear. I don't know if he's a good guy, but I choose to think so. He married three times: two shorts and one really long, so maybe he found some personal as well as professional success.

His memoir is a pretty interesting if somewhat repetitive read, and now that it's beach season, not a bad choice if you can find it at a Goodwill somewhere.

Let that be a lesson to us all. 

All of you know Eugene Pallette, I'm certain of it, but you may not ever put the name to the face. Inevitably, he's in a movie with Franklin Pangborn or Edward Arnold, and if you're like me, you'll occasionally reach for his name and come up with one of theirs, knowing it's wrong. One guy's too skinny and the other too mean.

Just to be clear, Pallette is the large, deep-voiced uncle, father, friar, or corrupt politician in any one of roughly 240 motion pictures made between 1913 and 1946; the massive sweetheart of a guy who sounds like he's gargling rocks.

Pallette was born in Kansas and attended a military academy in Indiana. He spent six years in stock theater in the early years of the last century, then became a film actor in the fledgling moving picture industry in southern California. By the end of 1914, he had appeared in 50 short films (mostly Westerns) as a rangy second lead. As he gained more and more weight, his career shifted to comic character roles for the Hal Roach Studios, and with the advent of sound (and weighing in at roughly 300 pounds), Pallette's distinctive voice and comic timing propelled him into character actor stardom (if that's a thing).

Pallette worked steadily until the mid-1940s, when his right-wing paranoia over impending nuclear annihilation compelled him to set up a survivalist compound in rural Oregon. 

After a couple of years, however, and with no sign of Armageddon on the horizon, Pallette moved back to Hollywood, but did not return to films. Eugene Pallette died of cancer on September 3, 1954 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 65 years old.

The excellent Karen of shadowsandsatin and The Dark Pages, has nominated me for a Versatile Blogger Award, for which I am truly grateful and not a little bit shocked. For those of you unfamiliar with Karen's work, she is an expert in all things Noir and writes the funny, smart, and savvy blog, shadowsandsatin. Go there without delay.

I would love to meet this woman in person, as I have just learned (thanks to the terms of this award) that she has personally met Tito Jackson and has a shrine to Johnny Depp in her artisanally hand-painted home. Perhaps we'll run into each other at the World's Longest Yard Sale one day, because now that I know about it, there's no way I'm not going.

Here's what a person has to do to accept the nomination and be therafter known as a "Versatile Blogger":

1. Thank your nominator and link to his or her blog.
2. Nominate 15 versatile bloggers of your own and let them know they've been so nominated (see sidebar).
3. List seven interesting facts about yourself.

I'm just going to do this quick, so in no particular order:

1. I don't know why, but I have a deep, abiding interest in all things World War I. This being the centenary of the beginning of that conflict, I am currently everyone's least favorite party guest and will be until November 11, 2018. It's a Thing.
   
   
2. When I turned 40, I made a board game of my life up to that point. That was 10 years ago and it's still fun to play.
   
   
3. I got my first classic movie education from Looney Tunes cartoons. In my humble opinion, nothing beats the Warner Bros. animated shorts for teaching a kid about the elements of good filmmaking: writing, direction, cinematography, editing, and music. Plus mice with Brooklyn accents.
   
   
4. Ever since my son was a baby, I've been Photoshopping his cute little face into some classic holiday image -- the Grinch, Norman Rockwell, Bing Crosby records. I only mention this because this may be the last year I'll be allowed to do it, as he is 12 and becoming aware that the tradition could be embarrassing. Like, oh my god, mom, seriously embarrassing. Still. I haven't got to Miracle on 34th Street yet, so he may just have to cope.
   
   
5. I have an unfeasible number of jigsaw puzzles from the 30s and 40s with non-interlocking pieces that are infuriating to assemble, but enormously satisfying to complete. 
   
   
6. My friends and family have been instructed that on my deathbed, if at all possible, The Philadelphia Story should be playing on a loop. I'm going out on a high note.
   
   
7. I got a tattoo when I was plenty old enough to know better, even though I'm not really a tattoo-y kind of gal. At the time, the main criterion for going through with it was "will I still like this when I'm 50?"