Pride of the Bowery - 1940

In “Pride of the Bowery” (1940), Leo Gorcey and the so-called East Side Kids ( aka Dead End Kids, aka Bowery Boys) in their fourth film leave the urban jungle for a different sort of rough-and-ready experience in a CCC camp.

When we discussed in this post about the seeming lack of coverage in films of the day about the Civilian Conservation Corps, blog reader Tony saved the day with an update that proves the CCC was not entirely ignored by Hollywood. Here is the link Tony provided to “Pride of the Bowery” now in public domain and free for viewing at the Internet Archive website.

This B-movie, only about an hour long, takes the boys out of the city into the rugged wilderness and the rough-hewn CCC camp as more of an escapade than a struggle to find employment. Gorcey plays Muggs, a Golden Gloves boxing hopeful, who gets unwittingly enrolled in the CCC by his pals to provide him with his much desired outdoor boxing training camp, like the pros have.

It’s a difficult adjustment for the bombastic showoff when he must submit to military-style discipline and hard work. We get pick and shovel scenes, and crystal mountain lakes, the regimentation of the mess hall and saluting the flag at sundown.

Surprisingly, but probably fortunately, the film avoids too much cheerleading about the virtues of the CCC and manages to fill the time with subplots of stolen money, revenge in the camp boxing ring against a rival, played by Kenneth Howell, and a day of freedom with a pass into town. At one point Leo Gorcey pushes Howell out of harm’s way when the boy is about to be crushed by a falling tree. The camp’s Captain approvingly remarks,

“I think this camp is going to be the means of you finding yourself.” Which is only about as much CCC propaganda as the film contains, but its enough, along with the occasional reminders that their folks are getting $22 a month, to remind the audience in this seventh year of the CCC’s existence that it was still kicking and still saving boys and their families from starvation.

One boy is pleased to be accepted into the cooks training program, and others are told they will be qualified for jobs in the U.S. Forestry Service when their hitch is up. At the time this film was made, the CCC did not need to be described or explained to the general audience. It would only exist about another year or so, when our entry into World War II provided young men with far more urgent duties.

The camp is given a fictional name, but though we only see sections of the camp, I have to wonder if this was just a set or if it was really filmed at an actual CCC camp? There is an authentic look about it. I haven’t been able to find any information on that yet, and I hope some of you who might know will help clarify that.

Meanwhile, Back At The Blog...

Many of us read many different blogs, and with a crowded blogosphere, it’s easy to miss interesting posts. Here are a few of late that I’ve really liked. I hope you do, too.

David Fiore joins the analysis of “Vertigo” with a terrific essay.

Over at Carole & Company, our intrepid chronicler of all things Carole Lombard leads off with a great discussion of anachronisms in films, and caps with a jaw-dropping clip of Carole Lombard and George Raft doing a tango to Ravel’s Bolero.

Jonas Nordin over at “All Talking! All Singing!” provides his usual impressive research on the early days of sound film with the post “Colleen Bobs Her Hair” about Colleen Moore, which seems as equally touching as it is fascinating. Here again another great clip, of Moore’s terrific comedic talent.

Over at Caftan Woman, a bit of haiku dedicated to Charlie Chan that is just so simple and right it just cracks me up.

Finally, a reminder that next week over at Frankensteinia, the Boris Karloff Blogathon kicks off. Lots and lots of blogs have signed up for this extravaganza. If you’re a Karloff fan or just enjoy spending time with the undead, I hope you can visit some of them.

This is the Army - 1943

“This is the Army” (1943) is considered not quite as timeless for modern day audiences in comparison to other World War II-era films, like maybe “Casablanca”, made in the same year. In some spots you could say it’s a sticky mess. It has a single one-note message of cheerleading. However, this film contains an array of ironic images and symbols to consider.

It is also valuable for demonstrating that irresistible urge for nostalgia we sometimes have that only glosses over what really was, and turning the previous era into a cartoon, further diminishing our ability to really empathize with it. In “This is the Army” this happens with the characters’ (and director’s and producers’) bemused attitudes toward World War I, which is treated as something quaint. The message of tragedy in earlier films like “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930) is diminished with an almost “those were the good old days” attitude. Watching the film with today’s perspective, this bemused nostalgia repeats itself with our similar attitude toward World War II and the generation that made this film.

We mark yesterday’s observance of Veteran’s Day with this film because like Veteran’s Day, “This is the Army” tends to make opaque our view of World War I, just as Veteran’s Day has supplanted Armistice Day. There was even a move some years ago promoting shifting Veteran’s Day to a Monday holiday in the tradition of our other Monday holidays, but protest prevented this, and this day that recalls the end of World War I remains as it has always symbolically been, on the 11th day of the 11th month, when at the 11th hour in 1918, the War to End All War ended. Even if it did not end war.

“This is the Army” is a musical review, a biography not of a person, but of a play, of a unique theatrical experience. In World War I, songwriter Irving Berlin produced a camp show fundraiser for Camp Upton in Yaphank, New York, a village on Long Island. The entertainers in the show were all soldiers, and this musical variety hodgepodge of singers, dancer, comics, and various novelty acts went on to the Great White Way. After that, it was on to Europe. When the war ended, the show, called “Yip, Yip, Yaphank” would have remained nothing more than a footnote in theatrical history, except that it was revived, in a huge way, for World War II.

Irving Berlin was also involved in this new production, pulled out his old songs, gathered some new ones, and some new soldiers, and put on the new Broadway show, “This is the Army” at the Alvin Theater (now the Neil Simon Theater). After touring, the idea, and much of the cast, went on to Hollywood.


Hollywood required a bit more than a song and dance review, so these numbers were strung together by a thin plot. George Murphy is a hoofer who gets drafted into World War I. George Murphy played another hoofer who was a doughboy in World War I in “For Me and My Gal” (1942), seen in this post. He just had that kind of face, I guess, that belonged to Tin Pan Alley and the trenches. George Tobias (you might remember him better as the long-suffering neighbor Abner Kravitz on the television show “Bewitched”), and bugler Charles Butterworth, are a couple of his pals who all perform in the show “Yip, Yip, Yaphank.”

Fast forward to World War II. Ronald Reagan is George Murphy’s son, who is sweet on Joan Leslie, Charles Butterworth’s daughter, but Reagan is hesitant to marry her because he has been drafted and does not want to leave her a war widow. She spends the rest of the movie trying to change his mind. The old-timers set up a new show, the Army approves, yanks men out from various units, and they put together a new Broadway review called “This is the Army,” stage-managed by Reagan.

The movie is like a crazy quilt of images, but no coherent message except one of patriotism, and one of unintentional irony.


The World War I segment of the film shows us an immigrant neighborhood with hurdy-gurdy music and fruit stands, a cliché of a simpler world. It depicts that dramatic real-life moment when the men ended the stage show “Yip, Yip, Yaphank” one night by filing out of the theater and marching directly onto the troop ships when they received the call to go overseas.

“That’s not the way they rehearsed it!” Rosemary DeCamp cries, “It’s real! They’re going!”

Then we follow the boys to that mysterious location always called in movies “Somewhere in France”, where back lot trenches are exploded, and after George Murphy’s leg is permanently injured, the Armistice is signed, the world now safe for democracy.

Then the World War stopped being that penultimate and almost holy experience when it stopped being the World War and became World War I by default.

This movie, made in the troubled year of 1943 when the Allies had not made much headway to defeating the enemy, treats the current war as the penultimate experience, where sacrifices are honorable, and the ecstasy of duty in the young ones is observed with sad knowledge by the old-timers.

The only bridge between the two eras we are given is the bombastic Alan Hale as a drill sergeant in both wars, who provides stern warnings and comic relief. He is as stalwart as the Republic he serves, and just as horrified by change. But he changes. He goes along with the tide because it is for the greater good. Including dressing like a portly maiden in a chorus number.


Frances Langford stops by for a song. Some of the film’s striking images include Kate Smith singing, “God Bless America”, which Irving Berlin threw out of “Yip, Yip Yaphank” 25 years earlier and revived for this show. It became Miss Smith’s signature tune.

Irving Berlin himself sings “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” in a WWI uniform and his thin, raspy voice. This beloved little man who took Tin Pan Alley lyrics and molded love songs to his adopted nation brings tears to one’s eyes at the very sight of the fragile little guy.

The juxtaposition of the minstrel show scene and the scene by African-American soldiers performing a song called “What the Well-Dressed Man in Harlem Will Wear” is a strange but telling segment in the film.

First, it could be noted here that the men who performed in this stage show that came to Hollywood were all active servicemen. Most were uncredited in the film, but we know that future stars Private Gary Merrill, and Richard Farnsworth were among them. The black performers, including Sgt. Joe Louis (who, as the World Heavyweight Boxing champion was the leading celebrity of the group and the most famous cast member black or white) were also all soldiers. This stage show, made into a movie featuring a cast of actual servicemen, was technically the only de-segregated unit of the Armed Forces during World War II.

The minstrel segment was a part of the original “Yip, Yip, Yaphank” and Irving Berlin wanted it kept for the new show, despite attempts to persuade him that such entertainment was passé. The “Mandy” number performed by white men in blackface could have been performed without the minstrel makeup (as it was in "White Christmas" 1954). Performed with pretend glamor like something from a Ziegfeld show-stopper, it seems less exaggerated than the buffoonery of this scene in “Holiday Inn” discussed in this post.

When the men rush offstage, a pleased George Murphy says, “And you kids were worried about a minstrel number being too old fashioned. Why, it went just as well tonight as it did in the old show.” The words sound a bit hollow. This line might have been thrown in to appease Mr. Berlin, but the following number shows that if the minstrel scene wasn’t as painful to watch as the one in “Holiday Inn”, it was certainly made irrelevant by what followed.


The black soldiers come on next with the swing rendition of “What the Well-Dressed Man in Harlem Will Wear” referring to Joe Louis punching the bag in his Army uniform. It is a patriotic offering, (Joe says, “I’m in Uncle Sam Army, and we on God’s side.”) and the men dance and sing in their uniforms, all with great energy and soldierly precision. These men are not goofing around, they mean business, and that is their message.

A later number set in a stage door canteen appears to be the only scene in which the white soldiers and the black soldiers appear together. That their musical numbers are separate through most of the show may have a message, too.

Another curious image is of the soldiers performing dressed as women. For practical purposes, the men, just as in Shakespeare’s day, had to perform women’s roles because women were not part of these all-male units. If the armed services were segregated by race, they were also separated by gender.

In some numbers the “women” are buffoonish, intended for comedy, and in other numbers they are meant only to represent females. One of the old-timers in the audience remarks to an officer sitting near him, “That’s my son, the fourth from the left.”

The officer replies affably, without a trace of sarcasm, “Very pretty, isn’t he?”

He is quite pretty.

In the number performed by the African-American soldiers, one man likewise plays a woman, jitterbugging with another soldier. Then we see him rush off to wings, where he hurriedly strips off his dress and returns in uniform, completing the row of soldiers tap dancing in unison, as if to reassure us this business of dressing as women is all a matter of course.



The most startling scene of cross dressing comes when two men impersonate the stage actresses/divas Jane Cowl (for more on Jane Cowl’s run-in with James Stewart in Boston, see my post at Tragedy and Comedy in New England), and Lynn Fontanne.



These two men are not just putting on dresses and clowning around. They are female impersonators, and they are very good. In a movie that is otherwise rather naïve and simplistic, this is a stunning bit of sophistication, one most of us might not expect from films of this era.

Back to the raspy-voiced Irving Berlin, of whom it was famously said, “Irving Berlin IS American music.” Is the movie valid for purposes of our study today as an expression of patriotism during World War II? It evidently was considered so once, as this was the highest grossing film of 1943, extremely popular despite quickly becoming a museum piece. It moved people to do great things at the time.

Joan Leslie gets The Speech about what we’re fighting for at the end of the movie, still haranguing Ronald Reagan (actually reserve officer Lieutenant Ronald Reagan in real life) to marry her, telling him that his fear of leaving her a widow is not a reason not to live the life they have together now,

“Why do you act like we’ve lost the war?” Such a horrific slap in the face back in the day.

Perhaps the film’s most ironic image is its finale, where row upon row of soldiers sing with heroic determination that “this time is the last time”, a reference to the Armistice of 1918 that didn’t stick, and that they would remedy, “So we won’t have to do it again.”

They could not have known there would be an armistice for the Korean War ten years later, and a withdrawal from Vietnam, and other geopolitical compromises necessary to fighting so-called “limited” wars of the future.

If it was a “last time” for anything, it was the last time for segregated armed services.

“Then we’ll never have to do it again” they sing lustily as they march off stage.

They seem to make invalid the World War by their bold declaration, relegating the World War to clichés and a scrapbook of silly songs about the Kaiser, men in old fashioned uniforms, and the assumption of a generation’s naiveté. Like the double image of Veteran’s Day over Armistice Day.

But, what goes around comes around. When today’s young people were interviewed about what they knew of World War II at the time Ken Burns’ documentary series premiered on public television (see my post on Burns’ The War here), they demonstrated a condescending dismissal over what they viewed as that generation’s naiveté.

One of the most striking elements of Ken Burns’ documentary series on World War II is the absence of the use familiar popular images we have of the war, which mostly come from the movies. Perhaps the movies of that era are what give today’s younger generations the impression of a more simplistic, naïve people. Hopefully, watching Burns’ excellent series taught them better.

“This is the Army” is not meant to objectively document an era; it is pure cheerleading. Despite this, it does manage to document quite a lot, and one may wonder about how Irving Berlin could have thought “God Bless America” a dud of a song in 1917? It sprouted wings during World War II. It enjoyed an emotional revival after 9/11.

One may wonder about the desegregated entertainment unit in a segregated Army.

One may wonder about the distant shot of an actor playing President Franklin Roosevelt in the theater balcony box (after a stirring rendition of “Hail to the Chief” at his entrance), who is shown being able to stand and sit easily. This was not something FDR could ever do without help, and demonstrates that in 1943, the extent of his paralysis was not known to the general public.

One might consider that Irving Berlin was awarded the Army’s Medal of Merit by General George C. Marshall at the direction of President Harry Truman in 1945 for “This is the Army.” He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Gerald Ford in 1977 for “God Bless America.”

Kate Smith was awarded this same honor for her rendition of “God Bless America” in 1982 by her former cast member in “This is the Army”, now President Ronald Reagan.

Many of the men who performed in this unit gathered for reunions over the years, the last was for their 50th reunion in 1992 in New York’s theater district. How valid was this movie to them?


Seventeen years after that last reunion, another November 11th goes by, for another generation of veterans, who in yet another generation’s time may suffer the humiliation of being regarded as quaint.

For more on the story of this Army unit that performed around the country and around the world during World War II, have a look at this excellent four-part article at the National Archives website by Lawrence Bergreen, who uncovered a great wealth of detail on this unit when writing a book on Irving Berlin.

Waste Not, Want Not

If the ballroom on board ship in “A Blueprint for Murder” (1953), covered here last month, looks familiar, perhaps you remember it from another movie released earlier that year, “Titanic” (1953). Here, Brian Aherne holds court at the Captain’s table on the Titanic.

Where Joseph Cotten and Jean Peters met towards the movie’s end for romantic subterfuge and a potentially fatal showdown, Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck met to condemn a failed marriage. Coincidentally, both men were to have sneaked onto the ship at the last minute to surprise their ladies. It’s interesting to look at the set from different angles.

Joseph Cotten in “A Blueprint for Murder” ballroom.











Jean Peters approaches Joseph’s Cotten’s table.











A similar vantage point in “Titanic”.







Clifton Webb greets his son in “Titanic.”











Reportedly, this set was also used for shipboard scenes in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “Dangerous Crossing”, both of which were released in 1953. Quite the year for going on a cruise.

The Singing Cowboy - 1936

“The Singing Cowboy” (1936) didn’t exactly invent the genre, if we can call it that, of the singing cowboy kind of B-westerns, but it certainly cemented it.

Gene Autry, ever afterwards called The Singing Cowboy, starred as himself. Like Roy Rogers a few years later, Gene almost always played a character called Gene Autry, though unlike King of the Cowboys, Mr. Rogers, Autry was really his last name. I suppose if you just always play you in the script, you don’t have the aggravation of trying to remember your character name.

This is a Republic B-western in the grand old sense, meaning rustlers, happy-go-lucky ranch hands, a hero, a stupid sidekick, the hero’s horse who is smarter than the stupid sidekick, a certain amount of lassoing, shooting of cap pistols, and saving pouty virginal ingénues on runaway horses. You can’t beat that for entertainment. At least not for 10 cents at a matinee.


Gene and his stupid sidekick Smiley Burnette, who co-wrote the songs in this movie, live with a bunch of happy-go-lucky and very musical ranch hands. Their boss’s daughter, a moppet who adores Gene is something of a cross between Jane Withers and Jane Withers, only played by Ann Gilles (also billed as Gillis). We see a cathedral-style radio in the bunkhouse, which seems quaint when we consider the more futuristic technology to come later on in the plot.


The ranch boss has a partner, played by Lon Chaney, Jr. who is the villain of the piece. Mr. Chaney, Jr. will have a better break in his career playing the sadly tormented wolfman in a few years, and the tragic Lennie in “Of Mice and Men.” Right now, he doesn’t have too much to do. Except steal horses from his partner. It’s the Great Depression and Lon, Jr. has to pay his bills.

The boss catches him, and throws us a heap ‘o plot exposition with the line, “So, it’s my old partner who’s been stealing the stock! Figure you could bankrupt me, make me sell off my share of the ranch to you! Is that it?”

Yeah, that’s it. This is one of the fun things about B-westerns. We don’t have to wait too long for the plot to unfold. They just spill it in first few minutes, like an ansty little kid bursting with a secret.


There is a fight. (“You’re nothing but a double-crossing skunk!”) The boss gets shot (dies in Gene’s arms and gives him guardianship of the moppet). A fire starts in the barn. The moppet runs inside to save kittens, and gets trampled by panicked horses.

So, let’s see. In the first ten minutes you’ve got a villain out to get the ranch, a murder, arson, and a moppet totally paralyzed from the neck down (except when she forgets and moves her arms), who needs a $10,000 operation. YE GADS! And the healthcare bill is still being debated in Congress!

But in lieu of national healthcare, Gene has another idea. He and the ranch hands are going on the radio and get rich and famous!

It doesn’t work. Radio doesn’t want them. They start on Plan B. Television.

Keeping in mind this is a 1936 movie, it’s really quite charming to see what they imagined television would be, if were there such a crazy thing. In some ways their idea of the future medium was really remarkably…stupid. Like the broadcast station inside the chuck wagon they haul from town to town. There are a couple of antenna on the floppy canvas chuck wagon roof that look like either leftovers from some Crash Corrigan serial, or maybe some old Christmas decorations. You could do better with aluminum foil and a wire coat hanger.

The other really interesting, really stupid, aspect is the apparent fact that you do not need television cameras to broadcast on television. There are never any cameras on Gene and his singing ranch hands while they perform their shows everywhere the broadcast chuck wagon stops. They just magically appear on television screens. Nor does television apparently require electricity.


The screens, large flat things mounted on the walls of everywhere, from the sponsor’s office (Chuck Wagon Coffee), to the moppet’s hospital room, look almost like our flat screens today. Well, they got something right, anyway.




Their sponsor (another thing they got right about future television), has a runaway daughter, played by Lois Wilde, who wants to be a singer. She is the pouty virginal ingénue whom Gene saves from a runaway horse. She joins the troupe of contestants on the amateur hour TV show on which Gene stars. Another group trying out for the show is a trio of black cowboys headed by Fred “Snowflake” Toones. Though they are as silly and cartoonish as everybody else on this TV show, it is one of the few times during this era where African-American performers are not demeaned, though there is some coy banter about referring to these cowpokes as being very sunburned. “Snowflake” gets to be a musical cowboy in this movie. In just about all his other many films, he was a porter or a bootblack.

Speaking of complexions, one can’t help but notice that Gene Autry’s lip makeup is just a tad too heavy. In some scenes he could give Pola Negri a run for her money.

In one funny scene, the ingénue is hiding from her rich daddy’s henchmen who want to bring her back so she can marry a drip. Gene helps her hide. She dons cowboy clothes and starts smearing shaving cream all over her face, pretending to be one of the boys shaving when they interrogate Gene. Hiding in plain sight is always a good gag. After they leave she of course exclaims in relief,

“Gee, that was the closest shave I ever had!”

Yes, I laughed, and I’m not ashamed.

Gene also makes a funny remark when he fails to earn enough for the moppet’s operation and doubts he can borrow it, “Banks don’t loan money on bad risks.” Sure they don’t.


Lon Chaney, Jr. pops back around with his mean hombres to sabotage the show, but Gene performs various acts of courage, like leaping off his horse, Champion (who gets his own screen credit), onto moving autos, driving the runaway broadcast chuck wagon over treacherous mountain roads, and a dangerous amount of yodeling.

This being a move about The Singing Cowboy, Gene or somebody else bursts into song about every minute and a half. By the end of the hour, he saves the ingénue (not only from bad guys, but from her drippy fiancé and mostly from herself), gets the cash for the moppet’s operation, and sings another song.


One aspect of this movie, and movies like it, is the fond familiarity with the kind of dialogue used. You’ve heard it before. Remember where? It sounds like the kind of dialogue we used as children when mimicking these scenarios. It was always “they got me!”, “reach for the sky,” or “say your prayers” (which Yosemite Sam also used to warn Bug Bunny he was about to shoot him).

I can recall rather elaborate backyard plots of make believe mayhem, complicated by sudden and previously unknown patches of quicksand at the bottom of the back stairs, or interrupted by kid brothers who didn’t die like they were supposed to (or forgot to count to 10 before getting up), the dog who ran away with somebody’s red felt cowboy hat in his mouth, or mom hollering for us at suppertime.

I’ve watched children play these days with various space toys, like the light sabers from the Star Wars franchise, and mostly what they do is slash at each other and run around, laughing and running, and whacking each other. There is very little dialogue. I can remember seeing some kid with a Harry Potter getup, carrying a wand and I thought, ah, now we’re going to see some real daytime drama. But no. All he did was run up to the other kids and whack them on the head with the wand, and run away, laughing.

Our games, back in the day, were so drawn out (sometimes over the course of an afternoon, sometimes over the course of the summer), because we had so much dialogue we had to make up. (“No, you don’t say that! I say that! You fall down! Then you take Joey to jail!”)

There was a protocol to those B-movie or television serial pantomimes that required justice being somehow served, and there was a solemnity to the proceedings. We carried this playacting to the very edges of what we knew as reality, like pet funerals. I don’t think there was anything more solemn as a child-orchestrated pet funeral. Especially the part where the guests step up to “say a few words” as Henry Fonda put it in “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939) when they buried Charley Grapewin on the side of Route 66.

(Boy takes off his ball cap, puts it over his heart. “He was a good turtle….”) and then perhaps a sloppy and off-key rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” or humming “Taps” through kazoos.

Maybe those silly B-westerns taught us the protocol of consequence. “The Singing Cowboy” was slim on plot, but had bucketsful of consequences. For every action, good or bad, there was an almost immediate consequence.

That Gene Autry actually would get his own real television show in the early 1950s, and sell a prodigious amount of merchandise to kids, may or may not have been coincidental. I don’t think even Gene, as canny as he was, could have predicted that in 1936. But he made a huge impact on kids, and maybe the money he made off them evened everything out.

Consider that in response to children who were his biggest fans, Gene Autry took the rather kindly responsibility to draw up a code of conduct for them, if they really wanted to be his special hombres. It was called The Cowboy Code:

The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage.

He must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him.

He must always tell the truth.

He must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals.

He must not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas.

He must help people in distress.

He must be a good worker.

He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action, and personal habits.

He must respect women, parents, and his nation's laws.

The Cowboy is a patriot.

Gene joked about himself, that he was not the best singer, or a very good actor or even horse rider. Some movie stars take themselves way too seriously. Some, like Gene, take their stardom seriously.

Mohawk Theater - North Adams, Mass.

On November 5, 1938, some 71 years ago, the Mohawk Theater opened in the small western Massachusetts town of North Adams. These days, the community is anticipating, and actively involved, in its future re-opening.

Once part of the E.M. Loew chain in New England, the Art Deco movie house was the third theater in North Adams, and the only one that remains today. It is a downtown icon there on Main Street, one of the few remaining late Art Deco style movie theaters in the U.S. Originally a single balcony theater with a capacity of 1,200, the Mohawk operated until the mid-1980s.

For a few years after 1987 it was owned by a private investor who occasionally screened films or opened the theater to concerts, but it closed again in 1991.

It would likely have been demolished or transformed into retail space, just as the two other movie theaters in town had by this time, but for the community that decided to step in and save it.


That process, of getting funds and all the construction logistics in place to enable the theater’s restoration is continuing. It is hoped to reopen the Mohawk again to its Saturday afternoon matinee audience, as well as to enable live plays, concerts, and recitals, as well as other community events to be staged here.

For more on the Mohawk, have a look at this website.

The Roaring Twenties - 1939

“The Roaring Twenties” (1939) may have even more resonance today than it did when it was produced. The year it premiered was only ten years after the 1929 Stock Market Crash, and the world had entered a new era in 1939 with a vengeance. This end of the Depression look back at how-we-got-to-where-we-are is certainly nostalgic, but it was also a critical success and should be regarded as one of the champion movies in that champion movie year of 1939.

“The Roaring Twenties”, fast-paced and well directed by Raoul Walsh, is remarkable for all the things it attempts to be and succeeds. It is a docu-drama as much as a melodrama. It is a gangster film, but there are so many musical numbers you could as easily call it a musical. It has some outrageously funny lines, but it contains scenes so heartbreakingly pathetic.

Most especially, it looks back on an era still so recent in 1939 and yet from such a remarkably distant perspective, the way we might pack for college and discover with condescending amusement some old souvenir from grammar school. It is a mere ten years from eight years old to adulthood. It also feels like a lifetime.

The film begins with a rolling title prologue that speaks to us today in our present economic crisis: “It may come to pass that, at some distant date, we will be confronted with another period similar to the one depicted in this photoplay. If that happens, I pray that events as dramatized here, will be remembered.” It is signed Mark Hellinger, the writer of the script, who took the stories of real people and real incidents as a basis for the film.

Then the stern voice of John Deering, the narrator, takes over and through a montage of images, the clock is turned back, year by year, to 1918, the last year of the Great War.

“What’s past is prologue” Shakespeare wrote in “The Tempest”, and as such it is appropriate to begin a story that concludes with the Crash at a point in time when the seeds for that event were sewn. Perhaps too often we look at a moment in time as if it really stands apart from other moments, but it does not. It cannot.


James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Jeffrey Lynn are doughboys in France. Cagney is the rough and ready average Joe. Jeffrey Lynn is the sensitive college boy who struggles with right and wrong. Bogart is the thug. It would be one of Humphrey Bogart’s last thug roles before he moved on to being the reluctant hero in 1940s films. He’s looking hale and hearty here, fit and much younger than he did even four years later in “Casablanca.”

In one scene, his thuggishness borders on the psychotic, when Jeffrey Lynn hesitates to shoot a German soldier because he looks only about 15 years old. Bogart plugs him with relish. He loves his gun.

The war ends, and Cagney straggles back home to New York to try to get his old mechanic’s job back, but his job has been given to someone else in the meantime, and he can’t find another one in the post-war recession. This is rather like a foreshadowing of Dana Andrews’ inability to fit in and find a place for himself after World War II in “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946). (It was in reaction to such conditions that the government mandated during World War II that returning veterans be guaranteed a job with their former employers.)

One very brief, but funny scene if you catch it, is when Cagney gives his old pal, Frank McHugh, a souvenir from the war. It is a German helmet, and McHugh hides it from would-be thieves by shoving it under his bed. Cagney wordlessly motions McHugh to turn the helmet over, because the way he placed it under his bed looks like a chamber pot.



The narrator comes back with more March of Time stuff about bobbed hair, shorter skirts, and the power that drives the rest of the film, Prohibition. Cagney, working as a cab driver, innocently delivers some bootleg liquor to Gladys George, who plays a gal-who’s-seen-it-all and runs a speakeasy. Cagney gets nabbed, takes the fall for Miss George, who later gets him out of jail and becomes his partner in the bootlegging business.

James Cagney spends the rest of the decade getting richer and richer, and more deeply involved in bootlegging, corruption, and gangland murders. Eventually, Priscilla Lane shows up to expose Cagney’s softer side. She had written him pen-pal letters during the war, but when he returned, he dismissed her as a schoolgirl when he had mistakenly thought she was much older. Reunited when she is a struggling dancer in the chorus, Cagney promotes her career in Gladys George’s speakeasy as a singer.

Priscilla Lane actually shares top billing with James Cagney in this movie, and would continue to have a successful year with “Four Daughters” where she was reunited in the first of several more films with Jeffrey Lynn. Here, likewise, Lane and Lynn fall for each other. Cagney falls for Lane. Gladys George falls for Cagney. It is an inextricable web of unrequited love.



Jeffrey Lynn, now a lawyer, helps Cagney with the legal aspects of his business empire and rather hypocritically tries to overlook the illegal. Eventually, Humphrey Bogart joins the business, and the intense scenes between Bogart and Cagney trying to assert their power over each other are something terrific.



If you have ever seen the Carol Burnett parody of this film with Carol as Gladys George, Steve Lawrence as Cagney, Harvey Korman as Jeffrey Lynn, and Sally Struthers as Priscilla Lane, then perhaps, like me, you are reminded of it all through watching this movie. Thanks a whole lot, Carol.

Gladys George, who played the world weary dame with the heart of gold better than anyone (and speaking of “The Best Years of Our Lives” pulled off the same magic there in a minor role), has some great lines and delivers them with deadpan humor. She is most effective silently pining after James Cagney. In the scene where Cagney brings Priscilla Lane to audition for Miss George, he fidgets with the excitement of a schoolboy crush, and he absently grips Gladys George’s hand as he listens to Priscilla Lane sing.

Gladys George seems to feel an electric current at Cagney’s touch, and sadly watches his enchantment for another, much younger, much prettier woman. Another actress might have shown a cliché tinge of jealously or resentment in her reaction, but Gladys George plays it inwardly, almost with shyness.


“What a load of ice!” she blurts when he shows her the diamond rings he has bought for Priscilla Lane. We know her heart is breaking, and we know that Cagney’s will, too, when he discovers Priscilla does not love him, despite the fact that he also bought her a new fangled crystal set radio which she and Cagney listen to on headphones.

Speaking of 1920s paraphernalia, look at the scenes of Cagney and others handling money. The paper bills are much larger and wider than we have today. The government changed to the size bills we use today in July 1929, ostensibly to save paper. As a result, wallet manufacturers had to come up with new, slimmer, models.

We see the crystal sets, the bathtub gin, the rum runners, the Tommy guns, the gangsters, the cops on the make, but the film manages to give us a tour of the Roaring Twenties with only a little feeling of parody. Most of it is a survey class in what can happen when lives are lived to excess, without a thought of tomorrow.

On this 80th anniversary of the Crash of 1929, we may look for parallels between this time and our own. There are inevitably some parallels, but nothing so neat and clear. Time isn’t a blueprint for us to follow. We still have to make up much of it as we go along.

Perhaps at this anniversary, we may watch this movie with something more than just nostalgia. Perhaps we might even be moved to empathy as we understand a bit more about excess and failure with the economy of the last few years.

There are no films of “the Crash”. Newsreel cameras cranked out footage of panicked crowds at Wall Street this day 80 years ago, but that was rather like today when the news media shifts (and wastes) its enormous resources not to cover an event but to cover the public opinion poll about the event. Perhaps filming panicked crowds is more exciting than filming numbers on a chalk board being erased and written over.

This movie covers the Crash by framing it in the context of this whole era, from the end of World War I, through the Noble Experiment, from Main Street to Wall Street, and the resulting Great Depression. In the study of any historic event, it is the months and years preceding the event that really tell us all about the event. We might say our current economic challenges have their roots as far back as the 1980s. We do know, in hindsight, that the 1929 Crash devastated a generation, and forever colored the world of that generation’s children, the ones who would spend their childhoods during the Great Depression, would grow up to fight World War II.

For a long time after this movie, after that generation grew up, the perspective of this 1929 nightmare was growing dim and made somehow quaint by nostalgia crazes. Eighty years on, we might be in perfect position, the first audience for this film in generations, to really identify with the suckers and the straight arrows, the crooks and the gangsters, and the average Joes, and maybe even the omniscient narrator, the whole menagerie that make up “The Roaring Twenties.”

When this film was released in 1939, though it was a success, the world was moving at breakneck speed into another, even more sinister era. It was as if this film was a last look back at the life they knew before they became engulfed in the complete unknown.


James Cagney loses his shirt in the Crash, and loses much of his business to Bogart. Cagney is on the skids, but he has Gladys George to keep him company, now singing herself (“A Shanty in Old Shantytown” no less) in a cheap saloon. Prohibition is over.

“The days of the rackets are over,” Jeffrey Lynn tells Cagney, but he answers with more truthfulness than even the writer of the script probably knew,

“Don’t kid yourself about that.”

Cagney has one last, very violent, power play with Bogart, and in the memorable final scene on the snow-covered church steps, only Gladys George is left to comfort a dying Cagney. When a cop asks who the bum on the steps is, she replies, “He used to be a big shot.”

It might be a pronouncement upon that whole careless era, or on any Ponzi schemer, unscrupulous investment manager, or average chump who lost a good chunk of his retirement in ours.

The RMS Berengaria and the Crash

We’re continuing our Halloween fright fest with something truly scary: the economy. This week marks the 80th anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash whose repercussions changed this country and a good part of the world. The above famous headline in Variety, devoted to stage and film, put the matter succinctly and with typical panache. Other papers were grappling with 72-point type headlines that attempted to dramatize numbers of shares sold, points in decline, value lost. Variety summed up the whole nightmare in show-biz terms.

What makes this anniversary special is the similarities people, and pundits, may choose to draw between our current economic challenges and those of eight decades ago. It makes the anniversary more dramatic, to be sure, but perhaps it will give us something more than entertaining intrigue. Possibly, it might give us more understanding about the whole grisly matter, and more empathy for a generation that lost everything.

On Thursday we’ll mark the finale of the fiasco, the so-called “Black Tuesday” event (There was, you’ll remember, Black Thursday, Black Friday, Black Monday, and Black Tuesday) with a look at “The Roaring Twenties” (1939), a fascinating and well-made film that attempts to look back on the event with an objective if nostalgic eye. We may have even better perspective now.

Today, let’s have a brief look at one episode of the 1929 stock market crash that says something about the quirkiness of the Roaring Twenties, and maybe the inevitability of paying the piper, or judgment day, or just the party being over.

In the musical “Funny Girl” (1967), Barbra Streisand, playing the popular comedienne Fanny Brice, goes along with her lover, played by Omar Sharif, on a ship to Europe. He is a professional gambler and intends to ply his trade among the well-to-do on the ship. The ship they travel on is the grand Cunard ocean liner, the RMS Berengaria.

“You are going to Europe so you can play cards on the boat?!” Miss Streisand asks incredulously. A little card playing was the least of a life of excess at sea.

The Berengaria began its life a product of Imperial Germany as the Imperator, but was turned over to Great Britain after World War I for reparations, where it was renamed and reborn as a favorite among wealthy travelers taking the trans-Atlantic route between Britain and the U.S.

F. Scott Fitzgerald noted in the final pages of his 1922 novel “The Beautiful and the Damned”, where his dissipated Lost Generation poster children, Anthony and Gloria Patch, newly wealthy but their souls destroyed, wander the decks of the Berengaria, “That exquisite heavenly irony which has tabulated the demise of so many generations of sparrows doubtless records verbal inflections of the passengers of such ships as The Berengaria.”

Other passengers, like Vanderbilt, DuPont, Astor, and J. P. Morgan may not have wandered the decks in dissipation, but certainly had a reason for choosing the Berengaria over other ships. In August of 1929, a couple of months before the Crash, the Berengaria instituted a new service. A salon on the promenade deck would become a stock brokerage linked by wireless to Wall Street. No more would bored millionaires struggle to amuse themselves with shuffleboard on the crossing. Now, they could continue to trade stocks during the voyage.

I suppose it was a 1920s version of people who just cannot put down the cell phone or BlackBerry.

During the week of the Crash, the Berengaria had left Europe and was heading to New York. When news of the stocks falling spread across the ship, the brokerage room was barraged by the passengers, all trying to get more information, all trying to sell. Helena Rubinstein, the cosmetics manufacturer, sat in a front row leather armchair to watch the prices continuously chalked on the board, and continuously falling. She lost a million dollars in a couple of hours.

Other millionaires on board that trip docked in New York penniless. A kind of voyage of the damned. They were no less helpless than the people who sweated it out in the nervous crowds gathering in front of the New York Stock Exchange, but they had a better view; if they bothered to leave the brokerage salon and take a stroll on the promenade deck.

It makes a dramatic allegory to the Crash of 1929, including the aftermath. The Berengaria’s fortunes faltered during the Great Depression, was referred to as “Bargain Area” and used for cheap cruises to the Caribbean and Bermuda, but failed to turn a profit. By the end of the 1930s, she was retired and eventually scrapped in the mid-1940s.

A poem parodying the outlandish idea of having a brokerage a ship was published in the Spokane Spokesman-Review, and later the Literary Digest August 31, 1929. It is eerily prescient:

We were crowded in the cabin
Watching figures on the Board;
It was midnight on the ocean
And a tempest loudly roared.

We were watching the quotations
With a certain sad appeal:
Some were short in General Motors,
Some were long on U.S. Steel.

And, timidly a tourist
Took a chance on twenty shares --
"We are lost!" the Captain shouted,
As he staggered down the stairs.

"I've got a tip," he faltered,
"Straight by wireless from the aunt
Of a fellow who's related
To a cousin of Durant."

At these awful words we shuddered,
And the stoutest bull grew sick
While the brokers cried, "More margin!"
And the ticker ceased to tick.

But the captain's little daughter
Said, "I do not understand --
Isn't Morgan on the ocean
Just the same as on the land?"

Even the film industry, which ironically did very well during the Depression and proved to be one of the few recession-proof industries (dimes stores was another), suffered a foreboding incident that frightening autumn.

In September 1929 “His Glorious Night” with John Gilbert was released to not only criticism, but howls. The silent-screen lover lost his macho mystique when the audience heard his high, thin voice for the first time. It was indeed an era of new beginnings, new technological marvels, and disastrous endings.

But Mr. Gilbert’s misfortune was Gene Kelly’s gain when the seed was planted for “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952).

By the time that parody was released, the stock market had mostly recovered. It took a couple of decades for those who lost money on their stocks but held onto them to break even. The stock market finally regained its pre-1929 Crash highest level in November 1954 amid a booming economy fueled by consumerism, where the 1929 Crash was starting to fade in memory and fear of it was replaced by either scornful amusement, or total ignorance, for another couple of generations.

“What’s past is prologue” Shakespeare said in “The Tempest.” Come back Thursday for “The Roaring Twenties”. Until then, have a look below at a montage of The Berengaria and the Crash.

Bell, Book, and Candle - 1958

“Bell, Book & Candle” (1958) begins its story on Christmas Eve, carries the plot a few months into the spring, and never really mentions Halloween, but since the story is about a witch, Halloween is never far from our minds.

Kim Novak plays the anthropology major-turned-dealer in native art who lives behind her shop in Greenwich Village. She is the witch, and James Stewart is the publisher she bewitches. Elsa Lanchester, as always, is hysterical as her mischievous and somewhat childlike aunt, also a witch. Jack Lemmon is her mischievous and somewhat sophomoric brother, a warlock. They gather occasionally at a seedy local nightclub to enjoy the company of other witches who are all living a kind of underground life, on the fringes of respectable society, never daring expose who they really are.

Another important supporting role goes to Pyewacket, Miss Novak’s cat. Particularly charming is the bond the two seem to have had. She looks quite comfortable handling him. He sprawls and hangs like a limp towel on her shoulder (mentioned in this previous post on other cat actors), and the way he stretches himself against her body, he certainly seems comfortable with her.

Kim Novak may have taken him for a model for her role, with her slow, feline, graceful, deliberate movements, her penetrating gaze, her casual, low, lazy speech. She does not appear emotionally brittle as she does in her previous films mentioned here, “Picnic” and “Strangers When We Meet”, or “Vertigo”, in which she also started with James Stewart. Here, though her character is complicated and mysterious, she comes off as a much stronger, focused person.


But she is not without her troubles. Miss Novak is bored with her life, and wistfully wonders what it would be like not to be a witch. We are told that witches cannot blush, or cry, or fall in love, and that if they ever did fall in love, they would lose their powers. Novak wonders what it would be like to be in love.

On Christmas Eve at the local witch dive, she confesses her Christmas depression (which might make her more human after all), and ruminates, “Don’t you ever wish we weren’t what we are -- that you could spend Christmas Eve in a little church listening to carols instead of bongo drums?”


She takes a fancy to upstairs neighbor James Stewart, and when she discovers that his fiancée is her old college nemesis, played razor sharp and elegant by Janice Rule, the kind of girl who led the clique and ostracized the losers, Miss Novak decides all’s fair in love and war. She goes after him.


As part of her plan, she casts a spell on an author that publisher Stewart wants to meet. That author, a charlatan investigating witchcraft, is played by the one-of-a-kind Ernie Kovacs, with his customary dizzy alcoholic logic. She casts a spell on Stewart, and one of the most memorable scenes is their Christmas morning adventure on the top of New York’s Flatiron Building. When he tosses his hat off the roof of the building, we watch is sublimely sail several stories until it slaps into the slush on 5th Avenue.


Complications ensue when her brother Jack Lemmon decides he’s tired of being poor and starts to feed real information on witchcraft to Ernie Kovacs to cash in on his book that Stewart will publish. Novak nixes this project as too dangerous to their community, and Lemmon gets his revenge when Novak is forced to confess to Stewart that she is a witch and that she had cast a spell on him.



It takes a little convincing, but eventually the light dawns and Jimmy is horrified, angry, and humiliated (his reactions are very funny). He seeks a counter spell from another local witch, played with glorious self importance by Hermione Gingold.

But we have our happy ending when Kim Novak, in spite of herself, really has fallen in love and as a result, blushes, cries, and loses her powers. And her cat. Stewart decides he really is in love too, without the spell.

Taken from John van Druten’s stage play, much of the playful language teases us with the bewitching power of sex. Novak scolds Elsa Lanchester for the pranks she plays and forbids her to use her witchcraft because she cannot be “discreet.”

Jack Lemmon, she tells Stewart, uses his powers to enhance his love life. Elsa Lanchester tells Stewart that witches cannot fall in love, “Love is quite impossible. Not hot blood, though. Hot blood is quite allowed, but of course,” she lowers her eyes, “you know all about that.”


There are other playful remarks that gesture to the history of witchcraft (or rather, suspicion of witchcraft) in America. Elsa Lanchester confides to Stewart that both Novak and Lemmon were witch prodigies as children, “We lived in Massachusetts.”

And, when Stewart, seeing that she has a confession to make and teasing her to just come out with it says, “Have you been engaging in un-American activities or something?”

To which Novak grimly replies, “No, I’d say very American. Early American.”

Obviously, this film was a huge inspiration for the successful television sitcom “Bewitched” which followed in the 1960s and early ‘70s. (Speaking of which, have a look here at this post on the Samantha statue in Salem, Mass. on my New England Travels blog.)

It’s interesting how many words we have to denote love that come from a mystical lexicon: bewitching, enchantment, magical, casting spells. Perhaps Stewart is right when he says, embracing Novak at last, “Who’s to say what magic is?”

Boris Karloff

We’re going to start the Halloween celebration this week with a not-so-scary look at a monster and a witch. Next week we’ll get into the scary stuff, which, ironically, has nothing to do with monsters or witches, but with the economy.

Above we have the Hollywood Walk of Fame star for Boris Karloff, one of two which honors the iconic actor. This one, you can see by the little TV below his name, is for his career in television. He did quite a few guest appearances on shows through the 1950s and ‘60s, and hosted the “Thriller” anthology. Perhaps his biggest claim to fame in this period is voicing The Grinch.

The Grinch wasn’t exactly a cuddly person, but he found redemption through being nice and returning the roast beast, cans of Who Hash, etc. Boris Karloff went through several phases in his real life as well, but he was always a much sweeter and gentler man than his monstrous characters.

Karloff’s real name was William Henry Pratt, who left his home in England to tour Canada and the USA in theatrical groups, filling in the lean times with manual labor. He took some minor roles in silent films to make ends meet, and was all of 44 years old before his big break came, “Frankenstein” in 1931.

After that enormous hit, it was hard for some to picture Mr. Karloff as anything else, but some who celebrate his famous horror film appearances may forget he was nominated for a Tony Award for his Broadway role in “The Lark”, a drama about Joan of Arc, with Julie Harris. Or, they may be unaware entirely that Karloff won a Grammy Award for his spoken record of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”. Karloff made other records as well, for children, reading fairy tales with his unique (but not very sinister this time) lisp.

There’s a story about Karloff recounted on the IDMb website where the crew of “Frankenstein” were concerned about the little girl in that famous scene would be terrified of Karloff when she first saw him in full makeup. No worries. She happily ran right up to her new buddy. Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster had something special that elicited our sympathy. Maybe it was something “human” about him.

Old Acquaintance (1943)

“Old Acquaintance” (1943) is a tour de force for both stars Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a film could be this good with two terrific actresses and a witty, literate script by John Van Druten. Somehow, though, the movie can still astonish, in large part because much of it seems like a lighthearted romp, even though we get splashed with soap opera elements and Miriam’s personality disorder that hammers us like a hangover.

Perhaps because it flows something like a concerto with different movements. The soap opera quality to the plot involves the complicated relationship between two old friends who face, together and separately, the “passing parade of years” (which should be a movie genre unto itself), but there are also elements of screwball comedy, and social commentary.

The film, something in the manner of the play on which it is based, is presented in three acts. First, we come upon a young and triumphant first-time author, Bette Davis, returning to her hometown. It is 1924, and she arrives as the guest of her girlhood chum, Miriam Hopkins, now a housewife expecting a baby.

Davis breezes into town, spirited, somewhat hoydenish, exuding good-natured self effacing humor, when she is carried away by a flock of serious co-eds who make her their heroine. Davis laughs off their attention, but Miriam Hopkins is furious when her plans to lead the welcoming committee are derailed. Miss Hopkins gets into a minor car accident with a farmer’s truck loaded with cages of chickens. Seems to be a mainstay of old movies, doesn’t it? Car crashes with chicken cages. You don’t hear things like that happening these days, but apparently in the 1930s you couldn’t back out of your own driveway without smashing eggs, or plowing into squawking chickens.


Miss Davis meets Hopkins’ good-natured husband, played by John Loder, and they become fast pals. Look for Roscoe Karns as the annoying local newspaper editor. We saw him as the annoying traveling salesman in “It Happened One Night.” If only we could all make a living just being annoying, what a wonderful world it would be.

Miss Hopkins returns, furious at her grand welcome being foiled, especially since she is chafing in the mundane life of the housewife. She envies Davis’ fame. She confides to Davis that she herself has literary ambitions and has written a romance novel. We have a few flippant, but spot on, observations on the monetary success of genre fiction as opposed to what is called literary fiction, the kind that Davis writes that gets applause from the critics but that doesn’t sell well. Not much has changed in the publishing world, though it would be interesting to see what the future has in store for “ebooks” and the literary market.


Getting ready for bed, Miss Davis shocks Miss Hopkins by appearing in only the pajama top and not the bottoms, exposing her legs to us as she strolls to her bed. Even before he says goodnight to her, we see that swell guy husband John Loder is charmed by Bette Davis, a hint for what will follow.

This first “act”, so to speak, is screwball comedy, but the tone changes in the next act when we find ourselves in the mid-1930s. Davis, who plods carefully along in her writing, still critically successful but still not rich, is nervously preparing for the opening night of her first play. Meanwhile Hopkins, ever confident and prolific, has by this time dashed off one potboiler after another, making buckets of money.

Miss Hopkins is no longer the homey housewife, but has morphed into a career woman with all the charm of a steamroller. Society columnist Anne Revere has come to interview her in her New York City hotel digs. Anne Revere as a gussied up Manhattan sophisticate is treat, a 180-degree turn from her usual earth mother type roles. Perc Westmore must have slapped the pancake makeup on with a trowel to cover up those peasant freckles of hers.

Miss Revere asks about the progress of Bette Davis’ new novel, to which Davis modestly replies, “Well, I write and re-write, and I still don’t like it.”

Revere encouragingly replies, “Well, at least when you do turn one out it’s a gem. None of this grinding them out like sausage.” Miss Revere suddenly realizes the indirect insult to romance novelist Hopkins and offers, “I suppose I could cut my throat.”

“There’s a knife on the table,” Hopkins replies.

We see by now that Miss Hopkins’ swell guy husband is still full of comic asides, but there is a note of sarcasm now. He drinks a good deal, is neglected by his wife for the sake of her career, just as she neglects their young daughter. He puts up with it gallantly, without seeming jealousy for her success, but becomes angry only when Hopkins flings one too many cruel barbs at her old pal Davis. Hopkins’ irritation has grown with her income. No matter how successful she has become, she is still insecure and jealous over Davis. Davis, perhaps because of her quiet seriousness about her work, appears to have grown more introverted in contrast to her friend’s more explosive personality. Davis also chain smokes through the movie, and I lost count after a while.

John Loder’s fondness for Davis has evolved into infatuation, which Davis will not return, holding him off out of loyalty for Hopkins. She recounts for him her lonely childhood when Hopkins was her only friend. When she was orphaned, Hopkins’ parents took her in. Another actress could take the speech and make it maudlin, but Bette Davis has that quality of hard unblinking honesty that makes it work. This section of the movie has become a soap opera, but the pace is not slowed. There is poignancy to the growing resignation and sadness of the Bette Davis character, after having appeared so resilient and devil-may-care in the preceding act when she was a younger woman.

At the end of this “act”, John Loder gets fed up with walking the tightrope of Miriam Hopkins’ moods, and leaves her.

Act three brings us to the 1940s and the solemn urgency of wartime. Davis, appearing in a Red Cross volunteer’s uniform, makes a plea for support during a radio broadcast rally. We see she has entered middle age by the heavy glasses she wears to read her script, and that artistic streak of gray in her hair that, like driving your car into a chicken-filled truck, was a movie cliché.


Miriam Hopkins’ daughter is now grown up, dating a gigolo, and Bette Davis is dating Gig Young, a man ten years her junior. She is sensitive about this, and hesitant to marry him because of it. Now, nearly 20 years after we first met her, she is bedeviled with insecurities and regrets, but still steadfast in her loyalty to Hopkins, and by extension, to Hopkins’ daughter.


She is also, delightfully, still wearing only pajama tops and still giving us a glimpse of her legs as she strides across her bedroom. We see that despite the gray streak in her hair, despite the fear of aging alone, she still has a tiny bit of that careless young Jazz Age writer in her. It’s a nice bit of continuity.

We have a bit more soap opera with the reappearance of John Loder, a fuming Hopkins who seems to destroy Davis’ one last chance at happiness, and the romantic troubles of the daughter, but here again, the pace never slows. This act contains one of the funniest Bette Davis scenes ever, where she finally gets fed up with Hopkins, shakes her nearly to death, shoves her on the couch, and mutters a perfunctory, “Sorry.” We are back to screwball comedy.

Other nice touches that reflect the war period are the way when Davis, needing time to think, tells the cab driver to just drive around and he replies he is not allowed to because of gas rationing. Also, John Loder, now in uniform, appears to have something of a military haircut, which is realistic detail we don’t often see in Hollywood films of this period, despite their intention to reflect what was happening in the country at this time.

Miriam Hopkins is the engine that drives much of the conflict, and though one might accuse her of overacting, I would guess many of us actually know people like this character she plays, over-sensitive, quick to accuse, where almost any conversation turns into high melodrama.

The film’s final moments with Davis and Hopkins drinking flat champagne in a tribute to their cockeyed friendship, and especially to the passing parade of years, is another astonishing scene, made so by the unexpected sudden camera pan back from behind and above them. It seems they will age together, as their characters did in their previous film “The Old Maid” (1939). In films of later decades, two women aging without romantic partners might be depicted either as a sad failure, or else not depicted at all. Here, there is almost a note of triumph that they have weathered the years and the ups and downs of their relationship.

Inevitably, one of the guilty pleasures of watching the film is doing so with the knowledge that Hopkins and Davis disliked each other in real life. You don’t see it in this film, where both actresses are deeply engaged in the dynamics of their characters’ relationship, like two old warhorses charging out of the gate.

Well, maybe you see that dislike in one scene. Have a look at the famous shaking scene from “Old Acquaintance.”

Hollywood Steps Out (1941)

“Hollywood Steps Out” (1941), directed by Tex Avery, takes us to Ciro’s and give us one last, highly caricatured glimpse at frivolous Hollywood glamour before the dark war years. How many stars can you name?