Screenshot for a Fortnight: "BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID" (1969) (14-27 December 2020)

 

Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

I went by myself to the Warner Theatre in Huntington Park and saw this movie on New Year's Eve 1969.  I thought it was a great movie and I still do.  On a Saturday about a week and a half later I convinced a friend to go with me to see it.

The Warner Theatre on Pacific Avenue was an old movie palace with about 1,800 seats.  Two vomitoria provided entrance to the orchestra section, and the stairs to the balcony were in the lobby.  My friend and I chose seats in the right-center orchestra section on the vomitorium just a few rows from the back.

One day earlier I was walking in front of the Huntington Park High School gymnasium, headed home from my last home basketball game, when I felt a tap-tap-tap on my shoulder.  I turned around and saw a girl from my journalism class.  She said, "So what's this thing between us?"  A thing?  I barely knew her.  I shrugged my shoulders.  We chatted briefly before parting.  She walked back into the gym and I kept walking home.

I mention this because as my friend and I were awaiting the start of the movie, the girl came in with three other girls and walked toward the front of the seating.  She and her friends sat a few rows back from the screen in the right section but also on the vomitorium.  A few silent seconds passed and I said, "Let's go down there."

So we went down there and sat in the row directly in front of them, but I left the aisle seat empty.  Sure enough, a few minutes later the girl came up and sat next to me.  We held hands all through the double feature.  And nearly 52 years later, and 48 years of marriage, we're still holding hands.

We introduced Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to our two boys as soon as they were old enough.  It has been a family favorite for nearly 40 years.

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Conrad Hall was the director of photography on this film.  And for his work he won the Oscar for Best Cinematography.  He won 3 Oscars for Best Cinematography, the other 2 films being American Beauty (1999) and Road to Perdition (2002).  Among his other credits he has filmed Harper (1965), The Professionals (1966), Cool Hand Luke (1967), In Cold Blood (1967), Electra Glide in Blue (1973), The Day of the Locust (1975), Marathon Man (1976), Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), and A Civil Action (1998).  He died in 2003.

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Paul Newman was always on time.  Robert Redford was always late.  Newman insisted they rehearse.  Redford disagreed, liking the spontaneity of saying the lines fresh on film.  Newman had to fight to get Redford cast as The Sundance Kid.  Redford had plenty of acting experience, but he was still relatively unknown.  Newman was a superstar.

Director George Roy Hill was a gruff man.  He knew exactly where he wanted to go with this film and he knew how to get there and he didn't take suggestions well.  Newman had ideas.  They were shot down.  He had more ideas.  They were shot down too.

Newman and Redford drank a lot of beer after work.

William Goldman's script was funny.  Too funny for a western, Hill thought.  Newman didn't play comedy well, and nobody knew it better than Paul Newman.  Hill told him not to do comedy, just play it straight.  Hill told Goldman to cut some of the funny stuff.  He did.  In previews, audiences still laughed too much.  Goldman cut even more.

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The Sundance Film Festival began in summer 1978 in Salt Lake City as the Utah Film Festival.  (It moved to Park City and changed the dates from summer to winter in 1981. It officially changed its name to The Sundance Film Festival in 1991.)  Robert Redford's involvement has always been away from the spotlight.

Over the years it has become the largest independent film festival in the U.S., featuring some of the best never-before-seen American and international independent films.  Awards go to films in several categories.  Winners of the various awards can be found here.  They include The Times of Harvey Milk (1985); Stranger Than Paradise (1985); sex, lies & videotape (1989); Clerks (1994); Crumb (1995); Big Night (1996); Smoke Signals (1998); Secretary (2002); American Splendor (2003); Frozen River (2008); Winter's Bone (2010); and Whiplash (2014).

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Hole in the Wall Gang Camp was founded by Paul Newman in 1988.  It is a summer and fall camp and year-round service center for children aged 7-15 diagnosed with serious diseases and conditions.  Their parents and caregivers are also invited.  All services are provided free of charge.

Hole in the Wall Gang Camp performs outreach to hospitals and clinics throughout New England.  Camp staff make regular visits to children around the northeast.  The camp gets its funding from Newman's Own and from numerous organizations, including the International Longshoremen's Association Children's Fund and Newman's college fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau.

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BAFTA stands for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid holds the all-time record for most BAFTA awards for a single film—9.  It was nominated for 7 Oscars and won 4.

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Gene Siskel was the new film critic for the Chicago Tribune when the movie was released.  Roger Ebert was the slightly-less-new film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times.  One poor sonovabitch at each newspaper—among hundreds of staff, reporters, and editors—stood against the tidal wave of adoration and reverence for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Siskel and Ebert detested it.  Their reviews almost got them fired.

Screenshot for a Fortnight: "FROM HERE TO ETERNITY" (1953) (30 November-13 December 2020)

Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) and Sergeant Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster) in From Here to Eternity (1953).  DoP: Burnett Guffey.  D: Fred Zinnemann.

From Here to Eternity (1953) is the film adaptation of James Jones's sprawling 950-page novel of the same name.  Set on Oahu, Hawaii, in 1941, it tells the story of Robert E. Lee Prewitt, an Army soldier whose strange blend of individualism, a lofty moral code, and devotion to the Army leads him into one bind after another.  The novel, which I haven't read, is reputed to be borderline pornography, graphically depicting sex and violence while using all the swear words imaginable.  Screenwriter Daniel Taradash had the challenging job of bringing this novel to the screen.  Ironically, From Here to Eternity has been a favorite movie of mine since I was a kid.

The movie was filmed entirely on location on Oahu.

Before director Fred Zinnemann got hold of the project, no one in the film or book industries thought a film version of the novel could be made that would get past the censors.  Libraries around the country had banned the novel.  James Jones himself tried and failed to adapt it.  Because I haven't read the book, I don't know what the movie omitted.  I can testify, however, that I have seen the movie at least fifteen times.  It stands on its own and has no obvious holes in the plot nor in the development of any character.  It is a great movie.  Including Best Picture and Best Director, From Here to Eternity won 8 Oscars, equaling Gone with the Wind (1939) for the most Oscars won by any film up to that time.

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Burnett Guffey was the Director of Photography on this film.  He won one of its 8 Oscars, for Best Cinematography.  Before Guffey became a cinematographer and director of photography he was a long-time camera operator.  Though uncredited, he worked as a camera operator on John Ford's The Informer (1935), Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940), he helped photograph That Hamilton Woman (1941) with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh and Cover Girl (1944) with Rita Hayworth, among other films.

As a cinematographer or director of photography his credits include All the King's Men (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), From Here to Eternity (1953), Human Desire (1953), The Harder They Fall (1956), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), and Bonnie and Clyde (1967), for which he won his second Oscar for Best Cinematography.

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Once upon a time there was a great prejudice in Hollywood.  No, I don't mean any of the obvious ones.  They're too obvious and they're still there.  No, I mean prejudices like the prejudice that stage actors had against film-only actors and the one that film actors had against TV actors.  The prejudice at issue here was the one that traditional film and stage actors had against "the method" of the Actors Studio.

Montgomery Clift was a triple threat to Hollywood's leading men who played alongside him.  He was a great actor, already having a reputation for greatness and intensity on the set.  He was rumored to be gay (he was), which, in those bigoted close-minded times, would've freaked out the men he worked with who weren't gay.  And he was a "method" actor.

Burt Lancaster was so intimidated by Clift's reputation and presence on the set that in their first scene together, he was visibly shaking.  Years later, Clift also inadvertently intimidated Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe with his intensity and his acting ability during the filming of The Misfits (1961).  Oscar-winning co-star Donna Reed described Clift's concentration on the set of From Here to Eternity as "positively violent."   For their performances in this film, both Clift and Lancaster earned Oscar nominations for Best Actor.

If you've seen some of Lancaster's movies, you know that intensity is one of the hallmarks of his performances.  But all that intensity is consciously expressed as he pretends to be the character in the script.  In the "method," an actor doesn't pretend to be a character: he becomes the character, as though demonically possessed by it.  At which point, when delivering lines, he isn't pretending: he's being himself.  The transformation of an actor from a guy just doing a job to becoming a completely different person can be jolting.  Clift became so completely Prewitt that months after filming ended he confided in friends he was finding it impossible to let go of Prewitt and he still carried his bugle around and wore Aloha shirts. 

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Lancaster was a traditional actor and a "pro."  In acting-speak "pro" means—at the very least—the actor gets to the set on time, knows his or her lines (and maybe everybody else's), gives something a little different with every take, hits all marks, and is not disruptive in any way.

Lancaster never drank alcohol.  On the other hand, Frank Sinatra and Clift frequently went out drinking after work and would've been late to the set most days if Lancaster hadn't taken it upon himself to get those two to the set every morning, on time.  For years afterward, Sinatra—whose performance in this film earned him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor—sent Lancaster an annual Mother's Day card.

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Lancaster had been an acrobat before becoming an actor.  Most of his roles took some advantage of his athleticism, and he did all his own stunts well into his fifties.  He had a rope in his office, suspended straight down to the floor from some kind of steel housing bolted to the ceiling.  Every day, once a day, he would sit on the office floor with the end of the rope in front of him, and while remaining in a seated position pull himself up to the ceiling hand-over-hand and then let himself down to the floor the same way.

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Fred Zinnemann seems to have had two careers as a director, the first as a short film specialist and a second as a feature film director.  He was nominated for an Oscar as Best Director 8 times and won 3, one of them being From Here to Eternity. 

His list of credits, after he switched from shorts to features, is impressive, and includes, The Search (1948) with a young Montgomery Clift making his screen debut; The Men (1950) with a young Marlon Brando making his own screen debut; High Noon (1952) for which he should've won an Oscar; The Member of the Wedding (1952) with Julie Harris; From Here to Eternity, which earned him his first feature-film Oscar; Oklahoma! (1955) with Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones in her first feature film role; A Hatful of Rain (1957) with Eva Marie Saint; The Nun's Story (1959) with Audrey Hepburn; The Sundowners (1960) reuniting himself with Deborah Kerr; A Man for All Seasons (1966) with Paul Scofield and Robert Shaw, for which Zinnemann won a pair of Oscars, one for Best Director and one for Best Picture, which went to him as producer; and his edge-of-your-seat thriller, The Day of the Jackel (1968) with Edward Fox. 

Screenshot for the Week of 23 November 2020: "NORTH BY NORTHWEST" (1959)

Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Martin Landau in North By Northwest (1959).  C: Robert Burks.  D: Alfred Hitchcock.

Alfred Hitchcock is my favorite director, and North by Northwest is my favorite Hitchcock film.  It is #3 on my list of all-time favorite films, just behind Casablanca (1942) and Chinatown (1974).  Six of Hitchcock's films are in my top 101, and three are in my top 25.  (Rear Window [1954] is #8 and The 39 Steps [1935] is #18.)(Macreedy is my imdb handle.)

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Robert Burks photographed eleven of Hitchcock's films, beginning with Strangers on a Train (1951) and ending with The Birds (1963), although he didn't work on every Hitchcock film in that period.  While Hitchcock occasionally worked with other cinematographers, Burks worked with other directors as well.  He shot Hondo (1953) for John Farrow, The Vagabond King (1956) for Michael Curtiz, The Spirit of St. Louis (1957) for Billy Wilder, and The Music Man (1962) for Morton DaCosta.  Burks was nominated for an Oscar four times and won for To Catch a Thief (1955).

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Screenwriter Ernest Lehman is one of the greatest screenwriters almost no one has ever heard of.  But you've heard of the movies he has written or adapted for the screen: Sabrina (1954), The King and I (1956), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), North by Northwest, West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965), and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), among others.

Censors poured over North by Northwest, especially the script.  They forced a change in the dialogue in the scene on the train with Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) and Eve Kendell (Eva Marie Saint).  Kendell says in the original script, "I never make love on an empty stomach."  To appease censors, Lehman changed it to "I never discuss love on an empty stomach."  When you watch the movie, watch Eva Marie Saint's lips when she delivers her line.  Hitchcock simply looped her new line in and didn't reshoot the scene.  You can see her clearly say "make love" while you hear "discuss love."

The censors were hesitant to allow the character Leonard (Martin Landau) to even appear to be possibly gay, and they wouldn't allow the script to take it further.  During filming, however, Lehman added a line for Leonard that wasn't in the script censors reviewed: "Call it my woman's intuition."  It slipped through the censor's net.  And they didn't catch the symbolism of the train entering the tunnel at the end of the movie either.

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Cary Grant was the ideal actor to play Roger Thornhill.  William Holden was briefly considered but never offered the job.  If you think about it, had Grant not been available, Hitchcock could've made this movie with Holden as Thornhill and not lost much, if anything, in the characterization.

Hitchcock filmed one scene at the Plaza Hotel, the one where Thornhill walks into the hotel and down a corridor toward the "Oak Bar" (a common, unofficial nickname for the Oak Room).  They didn't film inside the Oak Room itself but at MGM Studios in Culver City where an exact replica of the Oak Room was painstakingly built.  In fact, all the shooting inside the Plaza Hotel was done with one take.  Grant walked into the hotel, down the corridor, turned the corner, and went straight to the room that MGM had provided him at the Plaza, which he had insisted on as part of his deal.  He was done for the day.

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Ambassador Hotel, Chicago

In North by Northwest, on the way to their destinies, Van Dam and company stay at the Ambassador East (now Ambassador Chicago), which opened in Chicago in 1926.

Ambassador, New York

The Ambassadors were a chain of luxury hotels, the first having been opened in Atlantic City in 1919.  The Ambassador New York on Park Avenue opened in 1921.  Like the other Ambassadors, it was a hotbed of top flight entertainment.

Ambassador Hotel (Los Angeles)

The Ambassador Hotel (Los Angeles), with over 1,000 guest rooms, opened at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 1921, occupying 23.7 acres on Wilshire Boulevard.  It was, until 1968, most famous for its Cocoanut Grove night club where for decades the biggest stars in show business performed—Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Martin & Lewis, Diana Ross & the Supremes, Barbra Streisand, Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, and many, many more.  And the biggest names in show business were in the audience, including Marilyn Monroe, Louis B. Mayer, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, and Carole Lombard.  Crawford and Lombard frequently competed (friendly competition?) in dancing the Charleston there.  And between 1930 and 1943, the Cocoanut Grove played host to six Academy Awards ceremonies.

But then on the night of June 5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York won the California primary election for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.  He gave his victory speech at the hotel, which everyone assumed was a dress rehearsal for what would be his nomination acceptance speech in August at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago.  Instead, while leaving the hotel through the kitchen, Senator Kennedy was shot and killed.

The hotel went into a slow decline and was finally demolished in 2006 after a lengthy legal bout with preservationists led by Diane Keaton.  The property is now part of the Los Angeles Unified School District.  The District built a spacious six-story building on the site with a design that pays tribute to the design of the Ambassador Hotel.  Six separate charter K-12 schools were installed there, one on each floor of the building, drawing students from within a 10-block radius of the campus. The schools were named the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools.

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North by Northwest was nominated for three Academy Awards and ranks at number 55 on the American Film Institute's and number 53 on the British Film Institute's lists of 100 greatest films.

C: Robert Burks   D: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenshot for the Week of 16 November 2020: "DOUBLE INDEMNITY" (1944)

Using Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and his apartment door, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) shields herself from the prying eyes of Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson)in Double Indemnity (1944).

[SPOILER ALERT!] The plot of Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) began life as a real murder plot in Queens New York in 1927.  The case inspired James M. Cain to write a short novel about a psychopathic housewife who lures an insurance salesman into a murder-for-insurance scheme.  They hope to collect, not the face value of the policy, but twice the amount—double indemnity, a freak insurance rider that pays double for deaths by certain freak accidents, accidents so rare they get special scrutiny by insurance investigators. [END SPOILER ALERT!]

It took eight years to bring the novel to the screen.  Time after time, teams of writers had their scripts rejected by the Hays Code office.  It took Billy Wilder and his co-writer, hardboiled novelist Raymond Chandler, to successfully translate the "gutter trash" (Chandler's phrase) story to the screen.

Cain watched the movie several times and was quite pleased with the changes Wilder and Chandler had made.  [SPOILER ALERT!] He was particularly impressed with the decision to have the insurance salesman deliver his confession to Keyes by way of a Dictaphone recording rather than by the uncinematic written statement Cain had chosen. [END SPOILER ALERT!] Cain's reaction to the Dictaphone usage: "I would have done it if I had thought of it."

He made a name for himself with his first novella, The Postman Always Rings Twice, published in 1935.  The speed at which Cain goes from the opening sentence to the first torrid brutal sex scene takes the reader's breath away.  Even more violent and racy than Double Indemnity, it took eleven years to get The Postman Always Rings Twice to the screen.

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John Seitz was an accomplished, respected, and ambitious cinematographer.  When he died he had 169 theatrical film credits to his name.  In addition to his film work he held eighteen patents for various photographic processes.  William Randolph Hearst personally selected Seitz to photograph The Patsy (1928), starring his mistress, Marion Davies.  At the time, he was the highest paid cinematographer in Hollywood.

Seitz's credits include the silent classics The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and The Patsy (1928), plus, interspersed among dozens of other films, he shot a string of Shirley Temple movies, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939), Sullivan's Travels (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), and Sunset Blvd. (1950).

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Barbara Stanwyck worked with Billy Wilder three years earlier in Howard Hawks's Ball of Fire (1941).  Wilder had co-written the screenplay.  Both Stanwyck and Wilder earned Oscar nominations for their work.  Neither won.

Lucille Ball was originally hired to play Sourpuss O'Shea.  But when producer Samuel Goldwyn learned Stanwyck was available, he fired Ball and hired Stanwyck.

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Charles Brackett was Wilder's writing partner from 1938 through 1950.  Brackett shared writing credit with Wilder on every one of Wilder's screenplays during that period, with one exception: Double Indemnity, which Brackett quit before the first word was typed because he found the material distasteful.  (Didn't everybody?)

Meanwhile, Brackett went on to write on his own after Sunset Blvd.  Among other projects, he wrote Titanic (1953), starring Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb, and Niagara (1953) starring Joseph Cotten and Marilyn Monroe.

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Billy Wilder only worked with Raymond Chandler once, on Double Indemnity.  They had a rocky relationship, probably because Chandler was a drunk, a mean drunk at that, and was under the influence of alcohol most of the time.  But his way with words, even while drunk, impressed both Wilder and producer Joseph Sistrom.  All of the dialogue changes from the book were more Chandler's than Wilder's.  And when Wilder and Chandler disagreed on just about any other artistic matter, Wilder invariably came to realize that Chandler had been right all along.

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Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray worked together once before, in the romantic-dramedy Remember the Night (1940).  When it had come time for the romantic scenes in that movie, MacMurray had prepared by pacing, crying, and throwing up, unpremeditatedly of course, but in that order.  He was petrified of love scenes.  He prepared for love scenes in Double Indemnity using the same involuntary techniques.  Stanwyck and MacMurray reprised their Double Indemnity roles in 1950 for Lux Radio Theatre.

C: John Seitz  D: Billy Wilder

Screenshot for the Week of 09 November 2020: "RED DUST" (1932)

Jean Harlow and Mary Astor in Red Dust (1932).  C: Harold Rosson.  D: Victor Fleming (uncredited).

In the early days of moviemaking, there were no standards for the content of films, no organized oversight body, only the individual movie producers and ultimately the moviegoing public.  Movies made in the 1910s, 1920s, and early 1930s were mostly family-friendly.  Many, however, included risqué sexual situations, overt sexual themes, scantily-clad or even nude women.  Some included themes involving drug use.  Some included brutal violence.

In reaction, Will Hays, the head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (forerunner of the Motion Picture Association of America [MPAA]), oversaw the adoption of a written censorship document in 1927, a checklist of movie dos and don'ts, that was officially known as the Motion Picture Production Code and unofficially known as the Hays Code.  After some revisions it was approved by the major studio heads in 1930.

Among many other things, the Hays Code forbade "Pointed profanity" such as the words "God, Lord, Jesus, Christ," unless used "reverently," "Hell, S.O.B., damn, Gawd …"; "Any licentious or suggestive nudity—in fact or in silhouette"; "White slavery"; "Any inference of sex perversion," which included homosexuality; and "Miscegenation."  "Virgin" was also forbidden.  Criminality and immorality could not be presented in a positive or neutral light.  Criminals could never "get away with it."  Fallen women paid for their immorality onscreen by getting sentenced to prison or by getting killed.  The inside of a woman's thigh could never be shown.  A kiss could not last more than three seconds.

The Hays Code began to be enforced in late 1933 and early 1934.  The enforcement took place during production, with censors reviewing scripts, costumes, and filmed scenes.  Enforcement during this early period was spotty and some movies slipped through the censors' nets.  Many producers and directors were quite clever in dodging the censors, chiefly through the use of innuendoes and double entendres.

Movies with forbidden scenes, themes, or dialogue that had been made and released before the Hays Code—now known as "pre-Code" movies—but which were later re-released, had to comply with the Code before returning to the theaters.  Movies like Frankenstein (1931), Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), and King Kong (1933) all were re-edited to remove parts that violated the Code.  Fortunately, the censored footage for these films has been restored for DVD, Blu-ray, and TCM.  For other formats and streaming services, caveat emptor: let the buyer beware.

After the slow demise of the old movie studios in Hollywood, enforcement of the Hays Code became lax and movie producers began pushing the bounds of what was acceptable.  Movies like The Killing of Sister George (1968), with its lengthy lesbian sex scene ending in orgasm, caused Jack Valenti, MPAA president, to usher in the first MPAA Rating System (G, GP, R, and X) to replace the old Hays Code.

Since the 1990s movie distributors have made a concerted effort to restore the edited footage from as many notorious pre-Code films as they can save and restore.  Red Dust is one of these.

The following are pre-Code films which I've seen and recommend (not an exhaustive list).[⭐ =  Essential pre-Code films]

For clarity, let me stress that when I recommend a movie, I'm recommending it only in its original theatrical release version—original aspect ratio, no ads, no editing for any purpose; or, if it had been a victim of the Hays Code, I recommend the restored edition, if there is one:

• Animal Crackers (1930)
• The Divorcée (1930)
• Morocco (1930)⭐
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)
• Frankenstein (1931)⭐
• A Free Soul (1931)
• M (1931)⭐
• The Miracle Woman (1931)
• Other Men's Women (1931)
• Platinum Blonde (1931)⭐
• Possessed (1931)
• The Public Enemy (1931)⭐
• Waterloo Bridge (1931) (starring Mae Clark; not to be confused with the Code-approved 1940 version starring Vivien Leigh)
• The Animal Kingdom (1932)
• Rain (1932)
• Red Dust (1932)⭐
• Red-Headed Woman (1932)
• Scarface (1932)⭐
• Three on a Match (1932)⭐
• Trouble in Paradise (1932)⭐
• 42nd Street (1933)⭐
• Baby Face (1933)⭐
• Flying Down to Rio (1933)
• Footlight Parade (1933)
• Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)⭐
• Hold Your Man (1933)
• I'm No Angel (1933)
• King Kong (1933)⭐
• Midnight Mary (1933)
• She Done Him Wrong (1933)
• When Lady's Meet (1933)
• It Happened One Night (1934)⭐
• Of Human Bondage (1934)

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Harold Rosson was one of the best and most respected cinematographers in the Golden Age of Hollywood.  Among his many credits, he photographed Tarzan the Ape Man (1932); five Jean Harlow movies, including Red Dust; Treasure Island (1934); The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934); Captains Courageous (1937); The Wizard of Oz (1939); Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944); Duel in the Sun (1946); On the Town (1949); The Asphalt Jungle (1950); Singin' in the Rain (1952); The Bad Seed (1956); No Time for Sergeants (1958); and Onionhead (1958).

Like many other cinematographers, Rosson did spot work and clean-up work for directors for which he received no screen credit.  For instance, Rosson received no credit for having shot the "burning-of-Atlanta" scene for Gone With the Wind (1939) nor for having shot the "trolly song" scene for Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).

Rosson was married to Jean Harlow for 2½ years between 1933 and 1936.  He was nominated for 5 Oscars in his career but never won.

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Harlean Harlow Carpenter was born on 3 March 1911 in Kansas City, Missouri.  She didn't have anything like the standard childhood for an actor—elementary school plays, dance class, "theatre" in high school, etc.  At age 12, however, she and her mother moved to Hollywood so Harlean could break into the movies.  Agents wouldn't take her on, studios wouldn't give her a chance: she was too old to start a career as a child actor.  She and her mother returned to Kansas City.

At age 17 she moved back to Hollywood and tried and failed repeatedly to get an acting job.  She changed her name to her mother's, Jean Harlow.  She spent months working as an extra while trying to land an acting job.  Eventually she was "discovered" by one of the stars of what would become the first of her breakout movies, Hells Angels (1930).  The studio behind the film was Caddo, run by Howard Hughes, who also produced and directed the film.  He signed her to a contract and put her in a featured role in Hells Angels, heavily promoting the movie by emphasizing Harlow's platinum blonde hair.  (The color was achieved with a mixture of ammonia, Clorox bleach, and Lux soap flakes, applied once a week.)  Hells Angels was a sensation, the highest-grossing movie in 1930, and made Harlow an international star.  But her career fizzled out almost immediately.  Nobody would hire her as an actor.  Critics said she couldn't act.  So did anyone who saw her try.

On looks alone, Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures (after gaining Hughes's permission) signed Harlow to a two-picture deal. The first was Platinum Blonde (1931) with Robert Williams and Loretta Young, and the second was Three Wise Girls (1932) with Mae Clark.

Platinum Blonde is one of my favorite pre-Code films and another movie that was marketed using Harlow's hair.  The campaign worked.  Girls began dying their hair as close to platinum as they could get it.  "Platinum Blonde" hair clubs sprang up across the country.  Platinum Blonde was Harlow's second breakout picture.

Meanwhile, Howard Hughes lost interest in Harlow.  He sold her contract to MGM.  And her career took off.

Harlow could pack in audiences.  Why not give her movie roles where she didn't have to act, she could just be herself, and prominently display that hair and her charms?  Irving Thalberg set Harlow up for success with a string of such movies, including starring roles in Red-Headed Woman (1932), the third of her breakout movies, where she showed she could act with the right material; Hold Your Man (1933); Bombshell (1933); The Girl From Missouri (1934);  China Seas (1935); Suzy (1936); and Saratoga (1937).  He also found featured roles for her in Dinner at Eight (1933), playing alongside Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, and Billy Burke, and stealing every scene she was in; Red Dust (1932) with Clark Gable and Mary Astor; Wife vs. Secretary (1936) with Gable, Myrna Loy, and May Robson, in which Harlow stretches her acting muscles to marvelous effect; and a leading role in what would become a comedy classic, Libeled Lady (1936) with Spencer Tracy, William Powell, and Loy.  She was paired with Gable six times and played to packed movie houses every time.  Howard Hughes didn't have a clue about how to make money with Harlow.  The boy genius, Irving Thalberg, did.

I've seen nearly all her movies.  My favorite is Wife vs. Secretary.  It isn't the best film she was in.  That honor goes to Dinner at Eight or possibly Platinum Blonde.  But the best movie for Harlow—the one that best showcases her talents—is Wife vs. Secretary.  Somebody took a chance that she'd be able to act and do so in an against-type role.  She more than carries her end in this movie.  A must-see.

Jean Harlow died in 1937 of uremic poisoning, allegedly caused by her hair dye.  At the time of her death she was engaged to William Powell.  Her final film, Saratoga (1937), was released six weeks after her death.

In her brief career she went from a shooting star, quietly forgotten, to immortal superstar, still wildly popular more than eighty years later and a favorite subject of image downloads, T-shirts, coffee mugs, lunch pails, and tchotchkes of all kinds.

The word "icon" gets thrown around too frequently.  And the entertainment world has its share of them.  But it applies here too.  As a legendary actor whose face and body of work still make profits for others, Jean Harlow was and remains a Hollywood icon.

Screenshot for a Fortnight: "IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT" (1934) (26 October-08 November 2020)

 

Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night (1934).  C: Joseph Walker.  D: Frank Capra.

Joseph Walker was one of the best and luckiest cinematographers in Hollywood history.  His list of credits would have been any cinematographer's dream, and they included Platinum Blonde (1931);  Lady for a Day (1933); It Happened One Night (1934); Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936); Lost Horizon (1937); The Awful Truth (1937); You Can't Take It With You (1938); Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); His Girl Friday (1940); Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941); It's a Wonderful Life (1946); The Lady from Shanghai (1947); and Born Yesterday (1950).  He was Frank Capra's favorite cameraman.  They worked together on eighteen films.

It Happened One Night showcases Walker's talent perfectly.  Watch his subtle camerawork in these scenes—at the bus stop on the road when Peter Warne (Clark Gable) chases a thief; Warne carrying Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) over a moving creek; at the haystacks; and at the wedding venue.  It is beautiful work that doesn't scream, "Look at me!  See what I can do with a camera!"

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Clark Gable worked on this movie as a punishment.  He was an up-and-coming matinee idol at MGM when he filmed Dancing Lady with Joan Crawford in 1933.  During filming he developed a life-threatening case of pyorrhea and was rushed to the hospital where he had all his teeth removed.  After surgery, he had to wait two weeks for his dentures to be made.  Instead of laying about Hollywood he took his wife on a two-week Alaskan cruise and did so without getting the approval of studio boss Louis B. Mayer nor of the head of production Irving Thalberg.

Filming of Dancing Lady continued in Gable's absence.  When he showed up on set again, Mayer docked him two weeks' salary.  But that wasn't punishment enough.  It was customary for Mayer to show his displeasure with an actor by lending him out to Columbia Pictures, one of the "poverty row" studios.  Everyone, including Gable, would know why he'd been temporarily demoted to "poverty row."  And everyone, including Gable, would read it as a career insult.  When he arrived on the set of It Happened One Night he said, "Let's get this over with."

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Paramount Pictures didn't lend Claudette Colbert to Columbia for punishment.  She had four weeks free between movies, and she became aware that Capra was making a movie during those weeks.  After a quick negotiation, Capra promised her work would be done in four weeks, and Harry Cohn offered her $50,000 for it, roughly $975,000 in today's money.

She complained every day of filming.  She didn't get along well with Gable.  She didn't get along with Capra at all.  After her last day on set  she told a friend, "I just finished making the worst movie I've ever made."

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It Happened One Night marked a major turning point in Hollywood.  It was the first romantic comedy to win the Oscar for Best Picture.  It singlehandedly lifted Columbia Pictures out of "poverty row."  It made major stars out of both Gable and Colbert.  (Gable and Colbert reprised their roles for Lux Radio Theatre in 1939).  And it became the first of only three movies to win all five of the top Oscars at the Academy Awards ceremony—Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay.  (The others were One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest [1975] and The Silence of the Lambs [1991].) 

Screenshot for the Week of 19 October 2020: "THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI" (1957)

 

Alec Guinness as Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).  C: Jack Hildyard.  D: David Lean.

[SPOILER ALERT!]  The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) has been a controversial film in the UK since its premiere.  British film critics and war veterans excoriated it for its portrayal of a British officer who collaborates with the enemy under the delusion he's actually advancing the British war effort.  British audiences, however, loved the film, making it the box-office winner in the UK in 1958.

The film was based on a French novel by Pierre Boulle and told a fictional version of the real-life wartime saga of British Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey and the forced construction of the Burma-Siam railway.  Survivors of the brutal project swore that any senior allied officer who behaved as Nicholson behaves in the film would have been "eliminated."  Toosey in fact made it his constant goal to sabotage the project, one way or another, even resorting to planting termites in the bridge stanchions. [END OF SPOLIER ALERT!]

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Jack Hildyard won the Oscar for Best Cinematography for his work on The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).  It was his only Oscar.  He had worked for director David Lean three times before, and I'm curious why the pair never made another movie together.  Lean's next three films won Oscars for his new cinematographer, Freddie Young—Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr. Zhivago (1965), and Ryan's Daughter (1970).

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Alec Guinness was reluctant to make this movie.  There are all sorts of stories out there that other actors had first been offered the role of Colonel Nicholson, including Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, and Orson Welles, all of whom turned it down before it was offered to Guinness.  But there's another story which I choose to believe, namely, that Guinness was always the first choice for the role of Colonel Nicholson, the role that earned Guinness his only Oscar (Actor in a Leading Role).

And Guinness himself initially turned it down.  He thought the French novel on which the film was based was anti-British, which by all accounts it was.  He also thought no one in their right mind would sit and watch a stiff-upper-lip British officer for 2½ hours.  Producer Sam Spiegel, a born salesman, took Guinness and David Lean to dinner, and by the end of the meal, Guinness was sold.

Even after filming began, however, Guinness continued to have doubts.  Lean invited Guinness and his family to watch some rough cuts of the early footage.  After having watched them, the group stood up and walked out of the screening room without saying a word.  Lean didn't know what to think.  Later, Guinness returned to Lean and told him that he and his family agreed Nicholson was the finest work he had ever done.

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William Holden was brought into the project to give it a solid box-office earning potential and to bring a little sex appeal to the film.  Holden was apparently the only person on the film shoot in Ceylon—cast, crew, extras—who got along with director David Lean.  And by Lean's own account, Holden was the only person there that he liked.

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Sessue Hayakawa was a legendary silent film star and producer, in America and Japan, before William Holden had been born and while Alec Guinness was still in nappies.  In fact he was one of the highest-paid film stars between 1910 and 1920.  In the early 1920s, with the rise of racism in Europe and the U.S., the flow of Hayakawa's career slowed to a trickle.  He went back to Japan for a several years, acting in and producing films and staging Japanese-language productions of Shakespeare's plays.  His career never again reached the heights of the period 1910-1920.

While filming that scene near the beginning of the movie, when Nicholson meets Colonel Saito and Saito strikes him with a pocket-size copy of the Geneva Convention,  Hayakawa did in fact accidentally strike Guinness and draw genuine blood.  Guinness never broke character, the camera kept rolling, and the footage stayed in the film.

C: Jack Hildyard   D: David Lean

Screenshot for the Week of 12 October 2020: "THE PHILADELPHIA STORY" (1940)

 

James Stewart and Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story (1940).  C: Joseph Ruttenberg  D: George Cukor

Question: What do The Women (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Mrs. Miniver (1942), Gaslight (1944), That Forsyte Woman (1949), Julius Caesar (1953), Brigadoon (1954), The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Gigi (1958), and BUtterfield 8 (1960) have in common?  Answer: They were all filmed by Joseph Ruttenberg, one of the greatest cinematographers of the Golden Age.  He was known for his black and white photography and for his talent with lighting.  Until the breakup of the old studio system, he worked his entire career at MGM.

Ruttenberg worked with the great directors and actors of the Golden Era—John Ford, Fritz Lang, William Wyler, George Stevens, George Cukor, Vincente Minnelli, plus Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, William Powell, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Ronald Colman, and many others.  He won four Oscars for his work, more than any other cinematographer.

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James Stewart won a Best Actor Oscar for his leading performance in this film.  Stewart had made twenty-five feature films before The Philadelphia Story (1940).  But only one of them allowed him to show his true talent: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), in which he gave a career-making performance as the junior Senator from Missouri, Jefferson Smith.

Stewart spent the World War 2 years as a flight instructor for the U.S. Army Air Corps, forerunner of the Air Force.  Afterward, he picked up where he left off in Hollywood and continued to ride high for the next twenty years, starring in films like It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Call Northside 777 (1948), Rope (1948), The Stratton Story (1949), Winchester '73 (1950), Harvey (1950), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), Rear Window (1954), Strategic Air Command (1955), The Man from Laramie (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), Vertigo (1958), Bell Book and Candle (1958), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), How the West Was Won (1963), and Shenandoah (1965).  

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The Oscar for Best Actress of 1940 went to Ginger Rogers for Kitty Foyle.  I would have given it to Katharine Hepburn.  But she had been labeled "box office poison" within the industry in 1938, despite three Oscar-nominated performances and one win for Morning Glory (1933).  She was a great actress whom the public hadn't warmed up to.

Her performance as Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story changed the public perception of her.  (Hepburn, Stewart, and Cary Grant reprised their roles in a radio play of The Philadelphia Story for Lux Radio Theatre in 1942.) Her popularity went up—it couldn't have gotten any lower—and then began to soar with  Woman of the Year (1942), playing opposite Spencer Tracy.

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George Cukor directed Hepburn in Woman of the Year.  He directed her in The Philadelphia Story.  He directed her in her debut film, Bill of Divorcement (1932).  In fact, he directed her ten times and was Hepburn's favorite director.  He directed the early Hepburn-Tracy films.  In addition to those, Cukor directed Dinner at Eight (1933), Little Women (1933), Holiday (1938) with Hepburn and Cary Grant, The Women (1939), Gaslight (1944), Born Yesterday (1950), A Star Is Born (1954), and My Fair Lady (1964).  Ten of his films were nominated for Best Picture Oscars.  And he was one of six directors to work on The Wizard of Oz (1939), five of whose work went uncredited, including his.

ANSWERS—DAY 8

 

I thank you all for playing these two weeks.  Congratulations to catbert and Fred for once again correctly identifying all 10 movies.  I hope all of you enjoyed the games because they will be back in January.

Here are the titles of yesterday's movies:

1.

Some Like It Hot (1959)

2.

Patton (1970)

3.

Rear Window (1954)

4.

Full Metal Jacket (1987)

5.

Let's Make Love (1960)

6.

All the President's Men (1976)

7.

Touch of Evil (1958)

8.

The Aviator (2004)

9.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

10.

To Catch a Thief (1955)

I'll see you around the forums

Thursday, 8 October 2020—DAY 8

 

Hello everyone.  Welcome to the finale, this second dreaded Thursday edition of Bookman's Movie Screenshot Game.  These two weeks have rocketed by.  Congratulations to catbert and Fred for getting all 10 movies again yesterday.  Great job!  And, by the way, here are those movies:

1.

Gypsy (1962)

2.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

3.

The Hustler (1961)

4.

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

5.

Kalifornia (1993)

6.

The Professionals (1966)

7.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993)

8.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

9.

Out of Sight (1998)

10.

The Americanization of Emily (1964)

And here are today's buffer images:

All right,

One last time,

Are you ready to play?

Then, let's play!

Good luck, and have fun!

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.