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Ear-Way Innay the UNNY-May

4/3/2015

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Gold Diggers of 1933
It's the Depression: Let's put on a show!

Featuring

  • Ginger Rogers' Pig Latin
  • Aline MacMahon's delivery
  • Ned Sparks' enthusiasm
  • Busby Berkeley's bird's eye view
  • Warren William's drunken snob
  • Joan Blondell's big, blue, righteously angry eyes
Joan Blondell, My Forgotten Man
So. Good.

Gold Diggers of 1933

I have no such thing as "favorite old movie," so when asked what mine is, I either deflect or go on too long in too many directions.

However
. Among the handful of pictures I can see any time in (almost) any mood, Gold Diggers of 1933 is high on that list. It's got everything: snappy dialog expertly delivered; beautiful girls in great clothes; weird Dr. Seussian musical numbers; and an adorably silly self-awareness that brings me joy every time.

The gold diggers in question are a group of girls trying to make a living in the show business: ingenue Polly Parke
r (Ruby Keeler), comedienne Trixie Lorraine (Aline MacMahon), torch singer Carol King (Joan Blondell), and hoofer Fay Fortune (Ginger Rogers). The film opens on Fay in dress rehearsal for a big musical number backed by a bunch of chorines dressed in nothing but their Sheer Energies and some strategically placed cardboard coins, singing "We're in the Money." Right in the middle of the number, a bunch of goons barge in and start breaking down sets and gathering coins, claiming the creditors are closing the show due to lack of payment.

This throws producer Barney Hopkins
(Ned Sparks) into a rage and the girls out of work -- again -- this unnamed show being the latest in a series of productions they've rehearsed for but never opened in. Some weeks later, there is a rumor that Barney is casting for a new show! Great news for the girls and for Polly's crush across the way, a young composer and crooner called Brad Roberts (Dick Powell). Barney tells the girls all about this great new show. It's about the Depression, see, with men marching marching marching, can't you hear it? Brad starts playing a doleful march; Barney loves it. Polly thinks Barney should use Brad's music. Barney thinks so too, and Brad will do it if Barney gives Polly a feature role. There are parts for everyone, especially the comedienne, because it's a show about the Depression and it's going to go on for six months, easy!

That is, as soon as Barney gets the money.

Not to worry, Brad says, he can get them the $15,000 they need, no problem, as long as he doesn't have to appear on stage. The girls, presuming him to be just as poor as they are, think he's making a cruel joke. Everybody is annoyed and saddened, but when Brad shows up at Barney's office the next day with stacks of cash, all is forgiven. But the girls (especially Polly) fear that Brad is in trouble with the law or the mob or something: where else would anyone get that kind of money, and in such neat little piles, and why won't he appear in public?

Because Brad Roberts is in reality, Robert Bradford, the youngest son in a wealthy family whose fortune is held in trust by Brad's elder brother, Lawrence (
Warren William), that's why. Brad/Robert wants to make it in the musical theater, a profession disdained by his class, and is living incognito on the poor side of town. So the show goes on, with Brad at the piano, Polly in the lead, and Busby Berkeley at the drawing board. On opening night, however, the "juvenile" lead gets an attack of lumbago (he's been a juvenile for 18 years) and Brad MUST go on in his stead, which he does. The show is a SENSATION but Brad is immediately recognized by a society reporter (Charles Lane), who rats him out in the newspaper the next day. Enter angry brother Lawrence and family lawyer, Faneul Peabody (Guy Kibbee), who insert themselves into Brad's happy life.

Now that we've met all the principal girls and boys, the rest of the film is about how each of them wind up with each other. Lawrence mistakes Carol for Polly, falls in love with her (Carol, not Polly); Trixie latches onto Faneul (who's an established big, fat sucker for showgirls) beating off Fay once or twice in the process; and the real Polly and Brad, already in love anyway, wait for all the dust to settle.

Along the way there are three more spectacular, bizarre musical numbers: "Petting in the Park," an irritating if catchy tune about furtive groping through all four seasons; "Waltz of the Shadows," an unmemorable love song accompanied by girls in white dresses making jaw-dropping, kaleidoscopic formations while playing neon violins; and the closer of all closers, "Remember My Forgotten Man," a ginormous blues extravaganza that explicates the plight of the Bonus Army in just under eight minutes.

If ever I taught a course on the Depression, I'd anchor it with this picture. It pulls you in with such affable, toe-tapping irony and shows you the door with another: the rousing dirge, a call to action that gives you hope and purpose. So entertaining, so silly, and so much to think about.


In God We Trust


Picture
This post is another contribution to The Pre-Code Blogathon, hosted by Shadows and Satin and Pre-Code.com. Read 'em all, why doncha?

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Worthwhile Cringefest

3/12/2014

2 Comments

 
Imitation of life movie poster
Visit www.separatecinema.com

Imitation of Life  (1934)

 You know, this version of Imitation of Life  isn't as hard to watch as I remembered it being when I was in my huffy, politically-hypersensitive twenties. It's slightly more nuanced than the Douglas Sirk technicolor, soapy remake in 1959, but there does seem to be real friendship and regard -- inasmuch as one was possible -- between the white businesswoman, Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert), and the black maid, Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers).

The story is of two widows struggling to raise their young daughters during the Great Depression. Bea has taken over her late husband's sales route selling maple syrup door-to-door (so that's a thing). Delilah, who has no doubt always worked, meets Bea by accident her way to a job prospect and the two decide to combine resources, with Delilah working below scale as Bea's maid for room and board. Bea's daughter, Jessie (Rochelle Hudson), is a friendly if not very bright kid; Delilah's child, Peola (Fredi Washington), is a smart, sad girl who, being very light-skinned, is constantly torn by the access her lightness affords her in white society and the fact that her actual blackness forbids her that access.

One morning over Delilah's fabulous pancakes, Bea gets the idea to set up a pancake house using Delilah's secret recipe, so she can (1) stop schlepping cans of maple syrup around town and (2) cash in on the serendipity. Somehow Bea cons a lease out of a store owner, furnishes the place without paying for it, and becomes an instant success. She offers Delilah a (low) percentage of the business and lets her cook the pancakes. Also to keep cleaning the house. In spite of the imbalance in their relationship, the two women share easy conversation about men and the difficulties of raising children alone, particularly when one isn't very sharp and the other is tormented by racial prejudice.

Enter Elmer Smith (Ned Sparks), cigar-chewing businessman, who also knows a good thing when he sees one, who convinces Bea to expand "Aunt Delilah's Pancake House" into an "Aunt Delilah's Pancake Flour" empire. Well, that makes everybody rich and happy. Except Peola, who has been passing for white at every opportunity only to be thwarted when her mother comes to visit and confuses everyone when she calls People her baby. Bea is forever shocked at how mean Peola is to her mother. I'm not the biggest Claudette Colbert fan, but I really like the way she delivers on sticking up for Delilah in this picture.

Now happily rich and successful, Bea meets handsome playboy ichthyologist Stephen Archer (Warren William), a friend of Elmer's, who is a huge step up from syrup salesman. The two fall in love and decide to marry, but first he must meet Jessie, who happens to be home from college and who is unaware of their plans. Jessie promptly falls in love with Steve (because, Warren William) which makes Bea break off their engagement to spare Jessie's feelings. 

Meanwhile, Peola has left the negro college and plans to live as a white person, telling her mother that she must let her go and never acknowledge her. This, of course, finally breaks Delilah's heart and she takes to her bed, calling for Peola as she eventually dies in despair. The money Delilah eschewed from the business to buy her own house is spent on the biggest funeral in Harlem, where Peola shows up sobbing and begging forgiveness.

Outcome: Peola goes back to the negro college and Bea makes sure that Steve knows that eventually Jessie will get over him and they can't pick up where they left off. So, that's those problems of vastly different orders of magnitude solved.

There's a lot in this version of Imitation of Life  about class, race, gender, and relationships than perhaps the film originally meant to say. For one thing, Fredi Washington was actually a mixed-race actress, not a white one playing mulatto as was the custom. And for another, the kinds of things the two widows talk about -- love, kids, work -- ring very true of things women in their circumstances would discuss. It's very worth seeing if you haven't in a long while.
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Birthday of the Week: Lyle Talbot

2/3/2014

4 Comments

 
Lyle Talbot
Born Lisle Henderson in Pittsburgh, PA, February 8, 1902

Biography

The Entertainer, Lyle Talbot, Margaret TalbotRead it.
The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century, 
By Margaret Talbot
Riverhead, 2012

Beautiful Rogue

Turns out I have seen a surprising number of films that star or feature Lyle Talbot. Perhaps this isn't such a huge surprise, as I am crazy for pre-Code pictures, and having been one of the original horses in the Warner Bros. stable, the man made about 8-12 films a year for that outfit. Talbot could play sniveling, smoldering, or sophisticated, or all of the above all at once, with a dash of dastardly.

Talbot began a career in theater as a magician's assistant, carny, and performer in traveling tent shows throughout the Midwest while still a teenager. He learned to act on the road and eventually wound up in Hollywood, where handsome young men with theater experience could work in talking pictures. Talbot signed with Warner Bros., with other regulars, Joan Blondell, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Ann Dvorak, and Warren William, and churned out (as noted) a lot of movies every year.

Perhaps because of this, Talbot was one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild, a labor union formed to protect actors from the hard hours, grueling production schedules, and multi-year contracts with invasive terms fostered by the major studios. Warner Bros. in particular (and ironically, given the "every man" theme of so many of their stories) was one of the most notoriously exploitative places to work.

Although he never quite reached star status, Lyle Talbot worked steadily in motion pictures throughout the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, then made a successful transition to television, appearing in everything from The Life of Riley  to Who's the Boss?, with a long, recurring role on about 70 of the 50,000 episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The man worked and worked.

He also married a lot and drank a lot, and yes, he was in a bunch of Ed Wood, Jr. movies. 

Last year, the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland ran a mini-festival of Talbot's early films to celebrate the publication of Margaret Talbot’s book, The Entertainer, which is part memoir, part biography of her father's life and career. Having just bought the book and devoured it, I went to listen to Margaret Talbot talk and to see one of my favorite pictures, Three on a Match, which I'd never seen on the big screen.  As I wrote at the time, her book is a real page-turner. It covers the entire landscape of American popular entertainment of the 20th century — her father’s century — with a journalist’s detail and a child’s affection. 

His is a fascinating story...and now it's available in paperback. Buy it for his birthday.

Favorite Five

  • No More Orchids  (1932)
  • Three on a Match  (1932)
  • Ladies They Talk About  (1933)
  • 20,000 Years in Sing Sing  (1933)
  • Heat Lightning  (1934)
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