Dreamboat - 1952

This week we have a couple of movies that illustrate that cusp of the television era, just before the so-called Golden Age of TV, when the new medium was searching for fodder to fill up the airways. Old movies filled the gap and made life easier for the network programmers. They were cheap, plentiful, and most had not been seen for a generation.

Today, we have “Dreamboat” (1952), in which Clifton Webb’s former past as a silent screen heartthrob comes back to haunt him. On Thursday, we’ll have a look at the “Hopalong Cassidy” phenomenon (through a generic replica, of course, copyrights being what they are), with “Callaway Went Thataway” (1951).

That these two films came one after the other, and dealing with the same subject matter, is some indication of the enormous impact TV was beginning to have, and how dependent it still was upon old movies to fill up hours of programming. Movies and TV have always been co-dependent. Most of us who are classic film buffs were introduced to these films on television, long before DVDs and video. We would not be film buffs without television. Evidently in the early 1950s, though Hollywood might have panicked about being challenged by television, there was still some sense of humor about their relationship with the new gadget.

“Dreamboat” is a romp, as outrageous a vehicle for Clifton Webb and Ginger Rogers as the campy silent film clips we see of them together in the typical 1920s scenarios: a Zorro-like hero, a World War I ace, a Valentino-like hero, all shown on commercial television, commercials being the operative word. Ginger, now a Hollywood has-been, has a new job hosting these old silent movies and pushing the product, which in this case is perfume.

Clifton Webb is a college professor, intelligent, severe, whose extreme dignity makes him the butt of the campus jokesters. Mr. Webb’s dignity was a tool he used, or was made use of by others, in just about any film he was in. It made him alternately pathetic, heroic, sinister, or just plain foolish. It’s amazing how much mileage he got in his career with a withering glance and a sarcastic reply.

His daughter, played by Anne Francis, who we last saw as a teenager in the last few minutes of “Portrait of Jennie” (1948), is, in attitude, nearly a carbon copy of dad, except there is an added bit of shrewish impatience which threatens to stamp out any likeability in her. But this only helps to set up her eventual conversion.

Both father and daughter set out on a quest, for vindication, and though they don’t yet know it, for conversion to adapting to the big wide world they both disdain. That world, in part, is represented by television, which Miss Francis calls the “idiot’s delight.” She is reluctantly brought to a college party where the gang gathers to watch that program hosted by Ginger Rogers showing those old movies of hers with her former co-star, Clifton Webb. And push perfume during the commercials. One of the perfumes is called “My Five Sins.”

“Five?” Clifton Webb later asks, astonished.

The gang knows this simpering, overacting, sword carrying hero with the overdose of Brilliantine on his hair is their hated college professor, and they throw this revelation in young Miss Francis’ astonished face.

Pop, who tried to hide his former career, is equally abashed, and decides to go to New York where the TV program is produced to demand they take it off the air. Not only his dignity, but his job is on the line. The board is uneasy with an English professor with this kind of unsavory background, which seems to make a mockery of their prestige. Only the college president, played by the wonderful Elsa Lanchester, is willing to give Clifton Webb a break. She is a fan, and makes several awkward and athletic attempts to seduce him.

She asks the age-old question, asked so often in melodramas, “Has it ever occurred to you I’m also a woman?”

Off father and daughter go to New York, where he meets up again with his old co-star, the now much older Ginger Rogers. Miss Rogers sinks her teeth into what must have been a fun role as an over-the-top, manipulative, self-involved, has-been, who clings ferociously to any thread of her former career as a matinee idol.

While Rogers and Webb tangle with network executives, lawyers, and their own uncomfortable partnership, which we are made to understand was never as romantic as it appeared on screen, Webb’s daughter is shown around town, and his apartment, by a network underling, a very handsome and affable Jeffrey Hunter. She begins to experience life outside of museums and lecture halls, and likes it. We know she has become a woman of the world when she takes off her glasses.

Clifton Webb has a fun scene where he gets into a bar fight. Helpless to defend himself, he sees one of his old movies on the TV above the bar which shows him vigorously fighting off a gang of ruffians. So, he watches himself, gets a few pointers, and once again, beats the bad guys. Unfortunately for him, Elsa Lanchester pursues him to New York and he has a tougher time shaking her.

The dramatic climax takes place in court, with our old friend Ray Collins as the attorney defending the TV network in its right to show these old movies. Clifton Webb dismisses his own theatric attorney with my favorite line, “You overdid it. I’m not an unwed mother lost in a snowstorm.”

A TV set is put on the stand so that Mr. Webb may demonstrate to the court that TV is not, as Ray Collins would have us believe, an instrument of education, but rather a haven of idiocy. A couple of commercials are shown, typical of the day, that parody both the disingenuous message of commercials (something which has not changed through the decades), but also frank stupidity of the audience which the makers of these commercial must assume. The hair tonic with “Penetroleum” with ingredients like “cosmotron” may get us to laugh, but compare this with the more subtly sinister commercials in “A Face In the Crowd” (1957). That is a more cynical film, but this one, for all its silliness, is hardly naïve. We may get the feeling we are sliding inexorably toward “A Face in the Crowd”.

Mr. Webb wins his case, proving that the films have been altered to make him look foolish, but loses his college professor job when he spurns the scorned Miss Lanchester. She fires him in retaliation. This was the day when sexual harassment was an accepted mode of employee relations and job security.

Left without a career, Webb is not too downhearted, for as he gloats to the now also out of work Ginger Rogers, that Hollywood has come calling back for him. We see him finally in a clip of a new movie, where his dignity is abused for laughs, and three small children throw food at him. It’s a living.

Come back Thursday for another look at the movies-cum-TV era with “Callaway Went Thataway,” with Dorothy McGuire, Fred MacMurray, and Howard Keel.

Portrait of Jennie (1948)

“Portrait of Jennie” (1948) has become a fantasy classic, but it did poorly at the box office in an era when more realistic films with grittier themes brought new style and energy to Hollywood filmmaking.

It is inevitably unfair to compare a movie with the novel on which it was based because films and novels are apples and oranges. They require different dynamics of storytelling. That being said, it is unfortunate that the depth and gentleness of author Robert Nathan’s prose was not captured in the screenplay for this film. It is also perhaps understandable why it could not.

The film has many attributes that recommend it, including an interesting use of color tinting at the climatic storm scene where with a sudden bolt of lightning, the night sky and the churning surf turn an eerie green and we are jolted from a black and white film to a surrealistic monochromatic color world. This loses some of its powerful effect when we see close-ups of Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten, their faces also tinted green, and the dramatic eeriness merely becomes grotesque and bizarre. At the very end of the film, we see the finished painting of Jennie in full Technicolor.

The location shooting in New York City with its many scenes set on city streets and in Central Park, and the overhead shots of Manhattan and the skyline are impressive, as well as the use of Graves End Light in Boston Harbor to stand in for the lighthouse where Eben and Jennie struggle against the tidal wave.

The cast of the film are superb, with the luminescent Jennifer Jones seemingly re-creating the unselfconscious innocence which won her the Academy Award in “Song of Bernadette” (1943) as she plays Jennie, who ages from a girl at the beginning of the film (with some costuming and trick photography), to a young woman by the end of the film. Joseph Cotten plays what is probably one of his last roles as a romantic lead, the down and out artist struggling to find his muse. The wonderful Ethel Barrymore has a pivotal role as Miss Spinney, the crusty art dealer who spurs Eben’s genius and changes his fortunes, and displays unaccustomed sympathy to a young artist who is clearly lost and heartsick.

Lillian Gish plays a small role as Jennie’s teacher, Mother Mary of Mercy with that famous silent movie expressive face. It is a shame that Miss Barrymore and Miss Gish have no scenes together. That would be something. It’s interesting that these two grand dames of theatre and the early days of film had so much history and experience behind them, and yet were nowhere near done with their working years. Miss Gish, in particular, kept working practically until she died at close to 100 years of age. It’s always great to see the very old partnered on screen with the very young.

David Wayne as Gus makes a strong film debut in this film, and at the very final scene we see three teenaged girls who all went on to careers in film, television, and the White House. They are Anne Francis, Nancy Olson, and Nancy Davis, who we last saw (see entry December 27, 2007) in “The Next Voice You Hear” (1950).

The film presents another rare example in Maude Simmons, playing an African-American character which is not stereotyped or demeaned. This was the second of only three film roles ever played by Miss Simmons, who is Clara, a former theatre wardrobe mistress who knew Jennie as a child, “She used to sit on my lap. I used to give her rock candy.” She helps Eben uncover clues about Jennie’s life. She is a stately, well-spoken, gentlewoman. Eben, and we ourselves, are led to her by former theatre backstage figure Pete played by Felix Bressart who directs Eben to Clara and remarks sympathetically, “Those colored people. Very wise people …They know what trouble is.” It is an unusual comment, out of context and having nothing to do with the story, and shows us, perhaps a bit self consciously, that Hollywood is starting to slide out of the era of ridiculous and insulting caricature.

The character of Gus, the taxi driver who befriends Eben and helps in his quest for Jennie, is however changed to a very stereotyped Irishman, with a brogue (who actually plays the harp in one scene) and a comic ethic chauvinism which gets Eben a job painting a mural in a local bar, of the Irish patriot Michael Collins. In the book, the mural is a pastoral scene enlivened by nude maidens in repose. Eben is urged by the skittish bar owner, and jokingly by Gus, to “keep it clean.”

Perhaps the shift to a fully clothed subject is for the benefit of film. However in the novel Gus is not Irish. He is Gus Meyer, a good natured working stiff who mentions his Jewish background, and with his own simple religious philosophizing, provides a springboard to Eben’s spiritual awakening. This spiritual awakening is where the film really differs from the novel.

As Eben considers how Jennie, who ages each time he meets her, could possibly be from another time and who is gradually catching up to him and his time, where she hopes they will eventually be the same age, he spends a great deal of effort rejecting, and then learning to accept the impossible. Author Robert Nathan writes lyrical passages on Eben’s stream-of-consciousness brooding on the unreality presented by Jennie’s existence in his life, and how time could possibly move not in a straight line, but in elliptical patterns. There is a great deal of ruminating on God’s place in this mystery of Jennie.

Mr. Nathan writes, “We think of God, we think of the mystery of the universe, but we do not think about it very much, and we do not really believe that it is a mystery, or that we could not understand it if it were explained to us. Perhaps that is because when all is said and done, we do not really believe in God. In our hearts, we are convinced that it is our world, not His.”

As Eben struggles with rationalizing Jennie’s existence in some sort of time warp, “One must sometimes believe what one cannot understand. That is the method of the scientist as well as the mystic; faced with a universe which must be endless and infinite, he accepts it, although he cannot really imagine it.”

And as Eben finally lets go of his doubt and simply believes for the sake of believing, he grows more confident in the frightening modern world around him and feels safer in it. “Once upon a time, not so very long ago, men thought that the earth was flat, and that where the earth and heaven met, the world ended. Yet when they finally set sail for that tremendous place, they sailed right through it, and found themselves back again where they had started from. It taught them only that the earth was round.

“It might have taught them more.”

Such passages made “Portrait of Jennie” an intriguing and beautifully written novel, and far more spiritual and philosophical than the film, but these are Eben’s thoughts and it is difficult to film first person narrative without clogging the story with a lot of voice over narration. A film cannot be passive; it must have action. This is where the film and the novel differ most. In the novel, Jennie is both Eben’s muse and a real person with whom he begins to fall in love, and she with him. In the movie, it is more of a mystery with Eben’s seeking to prove Jennie’s existence. Not how she could possibly come to him over the mists of time, but is she actually real, or just his imagination?

In the book, Gus actually meets Jennie, as does Eben’s unpleasant landlady, and Miss Spinney reads evidence of her existence from a newspaper report on her being a steamship passenger who was lost at sea. In the movie, nobody sees Jennie but Eben, and the other characters disbelieve him. In the book we also have the colorful character of Arne, Eben’s friend and fellow artist, but unfortunately he is not included in the film.

The great storm in the novel is likely inspired by the unusual Hurricane of 1938, which seemingly came out of nowhere and pummeled a New England unused to tropical storms. With no warning, it left several hundred dead. In the film, the storm is a fictional 1920s event that Eben tries to circumvent and prevent Jennie’s tragic death by putting himself at the place it happened on the date it happened. In the novel, the storm is not foreseen by anything other than a vague premonition by Jennie, because it is not yet part of history. At the end of the novel, both Jennie and Eben are finally together in the present.

This is too ethereal even for a fantasy film, so the film must have more action than the novel and becomes a last minute race to save Jennie and change the course of history.

The film gives us good performances, if a somewhat cumbersome production. Jennifer Jones’ actual portrait was painted for the film by artist Robert Brackman, and producer David O. Selznick, who was also Miss Jones' future husband, reportedly displayed the painting in his home afterwards. Jennifer Jones’ fey qualities and soft voice, and that slight speech impediment all helped to instill a childlike quality to her younger Jennie, who as she ages never loses that clean look of innocence. Mr. Matthews, Miss Spinney’s partner in the art dealership, comments that, “There ought to be something timeless about a woman.” There surely seems to be about Jennifer Jones.

“Portrait of Jennie” was her fourth and final pairing with Joseph Cotten. She was just about to enter her 30s and he was in his mid-40s, and time would not really stand still for either of them, nor their careers.