Youth Runs Wild (1944) and Youth in Crisis (1943)

Youth Runs Wild (1944) and Youth in Crisis (1943) show us American teens led into juvenile delinquency during World War II.  For children on the home front, the war means neglect – and danger.

This is the third post in our series on how Hollywood depicted the experiences of children during World War II.  Have a look at The Piped Piper (1942) here, and On the Sunny Side (1942) and You, John Jones! (1943) here.

Youth Runs Wild, directed by Mark Robson, features Glen Vernon and Tessa Brind as star-crossed pair of teens successfully navigating their awkward years and the nation at war. They are left behind and left out.

We are shown even in the film’s first moments the message that, in the wartime emergency, we are not taking proper care of our children.  Jean Brooks walks down a city street with her three-year-old son, while a truck plows over a sign cautioning drivers about children at play.  As she proceeds through a working-class neighborhood, she stops at one rundown workers’ row house. Her parents live here with her fifteen-year-old brother.  Miss Brooks is returning home to live with them while her soldier husband is away.

Art Smith and Mary Servoss are her folks, who both work the night shift at the local war plant and sleep during the day. Their son, played by Glen (or Glenn) Vernon, is in trouble at school, skipping class to work in a local garage to earn money for a present for his girl.

Tessa Brind, literally the girl next door, is the oldest of three daughters of a couple who also work at the war plant. Her parents are even more neglectful, they go out to bars after work, or bring friends home to play cards (one friend openly leers at their teenage daughter) leaving the housework and the care of their younger daughters to Tessa. (Using her birth name of Smylla Brind, she was Ann Blyth’s understudy in the Broadway drama Watch on the Rhine in 1941, and went on to play the role of Babette in a touring company.  A writer and an artist as well, Brind would later take the name of Vanessa Brown in her acting career.)

Glen and Tessa have a sweet, rather innocent relationship, a stark contrast to their rough surroundings and rougher companions. Interestingly, they carry the story, unlike more established stars playing supporting roles including Kent Smith, who plays the soldier husband of Jean Brooks, discharged from the military hospital; Lawrence Tierney, a shady guy (he’s Lawrence Tierney, what else?); and Bonita Granville, who is a smart-talking tough moll for Tierney.  She provides the only gloss for this B-movie.

The neglected teens – seemingly thrown under the bus by their parents – will have unlikely support from Kent Smith, Tierney, and Granville, adults on the periphery of their lives and with no responsibility toward them, but who actually help them turn their lives around. Tierney, at first leading Tessa Brind astray, helps Glen get away from the cops when he and his buddies (including Dickie Moore) are committing a crime.  He regularly sends kids to the war plant at night to steal tires off the cars in the parking lot to sell on the black market in his garage.  Tires of course were rationed during the war.  This time, he doesn’t want Glen involved because he’s such a nice kid from a nice family.  (The car the boys are robbing has a toddler in the back seat crying.  This is probably the most heart-wrenching scene of the movie, but it actually happened that parents busy in war plants locked their children in their cars, having no other place to put them and no babysitters. There are no comments made about the baby in the car, we just see it and so the effect and our shock is far more profound.)

Bonita Granville takes Tessa under her wing when her folks kick her out of the house and she gets her a job in a dive. Ultimately, it is up to Kent Smith to put things right, taking Tessa to his in-laws house to live where she will be safe and protected; taking the boys under his wing and being responsible for them when they are paroled for stealing the tires; and helping his wife run a daycare in the small backyard of the company row house.

Things we may wonder about but which are never discussed in this movie: fifteen-year-old Frankie smoking openly in front of the grown-ups and no one seems to mind (cigarettes were rationed too.  Where did he get them?) And the fact that Kent Smith never gets to have a reunion scene with his wife and baby.  It’s all about the teens.

Not every kid can count on a Kent Smith in his life and so the message of Youth in Crisis (1943), an Academy Award-nominated March of Time short subject is quite important in wartime.  More terse and blunt, this interesting documentary carries the same message about the tension and anxiety of children during war and the teens going astray.  We begin with a line of young men stripped to their shorts undergoing examination at the Army induction center.  Most of them look no older than teens themselves.  We are told that many men are being rejected because of mental and emotional problems and the documentary explores what could be long-lasting effects on our society from these young people who are so troubled during the war years.

Teens without supervision are shown flaunting authority, getting in trouble, smoking marijuana, and the girls are portrayed as being the easy prey of servicemen on leave.  There is a mixture of frankness and delicacy in the delivery of the message of sexually transmitted disease and the alarming statistics of the sharp rise in crime since 1941 in burglary, rape, and prostitution.  Crime rates had actually dropped during the Depression.

Latchkey kids are seeing coming home to a house of dirty dishes and no mom.  Women are seen at war plants.  As a remedy, we are shown teen clubs and with a positive message and image of an articulate African-American youth speaking his mind in front of a group of white peers, and a roster of boys letting out their pent-up energy in the gym with the names showing variety of ethnicities.  There’s a lot packed into this short documentary: toddlers needing daycare, rising prices, rationing, race riots, and teens growing up too fast.

What happened to this generation of wartime excitement and angst?  They began smoking early, drinking early, and suffered growing pains like perhaps no other generation before.  Not old enough to fight in the military, they still felt the fallout of the world at war.  They were told they had to do their bit for the war effort, but there was apparently no assigned role, or not enough for them to do.

The documentary, though showing parents at the war factories, particularly women, does not indicate that women workers are to be blamed for the delinquency of the children.  It was still 1943 and moms were still needed the war plant.  But one wonders if, upon the end of the war, when so many women were let go from the factories, even ones who wanted to keep their jobs, their being forced out of the factories was a result of messages in such films as Youth Runs Wild, and Youth in Crisis?  Teens developing too much autonomy for good or ill was a concern during wartime, but it was a necessary evil when our hands were tied fighting a bigger evil.  The 1950s would see a return to what was considered a woman’s traditional place in the home. But the teens?

That did not stop the teenager from becoming a new force in society.  The genie was already out of the bottle and there was no putting it back.  We’ll take up that topic in a future March of Time documentary.

Come back next Thursday when we take up the plight of a child concentration camp survivor in post-war Berlin with Montgomery Clift in The Search (1948).

*********************
The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon, CreateSpace, and my Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing.

Brute Force - 1947

Brute Force (1947) remains a giant among prison movies.  Visually stunning, it has a noir foundation on which is hung an unusually sensitive (for noir) study of men trapped by their circumstances, their sins, their weaknesses, their fears, their anger, and even by their ability, those that still have it, to feel the pain of those around them.

Burt Lancaster heads a sterling cast, even the most minor character is vivid and memorable in this film.  That’s what happens when you have a crisp, literate, and biting script, and most especially, a director and cinematographer who freely turn what could have been a stiff sort of docudrama, or clichéd melodrama—how most prison stories tend to be filmed—into unabashed art.  We are treated to a generous array of stunning close-ups and interestingly framed shots that tell us volumes about the men, especially since they are in a setting where they are close-mouthed, unlikely to tell us everything that’s going on inside them.

Expository dialogue goes to the administrators in the prison.  We have Richard Gaines, so dependable in officious roles as the severe, pompous superintendent, always pressuring the anxious, ineffectual warden, played by Roman Bohnen.  The warden complains of cutbacks in funding, that the prison is overcrowded, that the men need job training…all of which the superintendent balks at, saying what the men need is more discipline. 

The soft voice of the head of the prison security force, played by Hume Cronyn, belies his sadistic nature.  The little man enjoys the fear he excites in the hardened men, most of them much larger and physically imposing—but Cronyn wields power he’s swiped in a vacuum of leadership, tortures them physically and psychologically, and he has Ray Teal following behind him with a billy club like a human swagger stick.

The cast is a feast of favorite character actors, like Sam Levene, and Charles McGraw in one of many uncredited roles that filled the first several years of his film career. 

The wonderful Charles Bickford is the level-headed old timer, who breaks up fights in the prison among the other cons, and bides his time until his hoped-for parole.

Sir Lancelot sings calypso rhymes he makes up on the spot to narrate what he sees, as either a funny jest, or a warning, or a requiem for yet another dead prisoner.

There’s Jack Overman as one of the cellmates, an easygoing, simpleton ex-fighter.  One of my favorites, he has a bigger role here for once.  We’ve seen him in a non-speaking minor role in Once More, My Darling (1949) here, and also in Swell Guy (1946) here.  Sadly, Mr. Overman died in late 1949 at only 32 years old.

His cellmates include Whit Bissell, as a small-time embezzler, a sad, brittle fellow who, obsessed his shallow wife, played by Ella Raines in a flashback segment, fearing losing her love, steals from his employer to buy her a mink coat. 

John Hoyt is a stylish grifter, mainly in phoney stocks, a man-about-town with a charming easy-come, easy-go attitude.  I love his line, “I wonder who Flossie’s fleecing now?”

Howard Duff, in his first film, is a former soldier who took the rap for Yvonne De Carlo, an Italian woman he falls in love with during the war.  She has murdered her father to save Duff, but though he takes the blame to save her, I don’t believe his current imprisonment is for that crime.  He remarks about always wanting to get back to Italy to see her, but “one rap led to another.”

The best lines, and probably the best role of the film happily goes to Art Smith, who plays the prison doctor.  He’s just as fatalistic as the cons, and drinks heavily to dull the pain of this miserable place.  It's a terrific performance.   

But unlike the weak warden Roman Bohnen, who gives in to the bullying Richard Gaines and the devious machinations of Hume Cronyn, Mr. Smith is still a man of strong conscience.  He gets into shouting matches with them all, gets right in their faces and bleeds his anger and sarcasm all over them.  Again and again, they slap him down.

Burt Lancaster, whose character as the leader of his cell, and one of the most respected by the other prisoners for his toughness, is beautifully lit, if you can call his deadly cold glare and vicious snarl beautiful. 

We first see him standing in the prison yard in the pouring rain, but with his soaking wet shirt tucked neatly into his soaking wet prison trousers, he strides back to his cell, his shoulders straight, his head held high with an air of nobility.  Though he has just come out of solitary confinement, he is not broken.  He is angrier, and more charismatic to us and to the other prisoners, than ever.  The other men light his cigarettes as a mark of his leadership.  The only one who ranks him is Charles Bickford, who freely reaches into Lancaster’s prison jacket in another scene and swipes a match from Burt’s shirt pocket to light his own cigarette.  Burt lets him, hardly noticing, as if the older man could be his father and is allowed such liberties.

Because this is a setting of confinement, much of the film has the feeling of theatre, and the action that takes place is muted and judicious, until the very end of the film when we have the attempted prison break.  Director Jules Dassin and writer Richard Brooks have the perfect marriage of script and cinematography, where each supports the other, and the pace of the movie flows beautifully, building tension, and then releasing it a bit at a time in unexpected moments of black humor, and when, where the men watch the 1947 comedy The Egg and I starring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert, it seems surreal.

Ann Blyth, like the few other women in the cast, save for the officious and severe secretary of the warden, is shown in flashback.  The women on “the outside” show us what the men’s lives were like before they went to prison.  There has always been a debate as to whether the flashback scenes with the women are necessary to the film.  Some critics and viewers feel they are fitting to the story, and others feel they slow the story down and detract from the intensity of the prison scenes. 

Even director Jules Dassin apparently did not want to use the flashback device.  Author Alan K. Rode in his biography of Charles McGraw, Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy, reveals that Dassin gave in to producer Mark Hellinger and the studio brass to include the four flashback scenes that show women who have influenced the lives of some of the men in the cell.  He quotes Dassin:

“Truly, the film is demeaned by the inclusion of ‘the women.’  I had to choose between not making the film and yielding to having the women nonsense.  Many years later when I looked at the film…I do not forgive myself.”

I don’t know how screenwriter Richard Brooks felt about the women scenes, but I’m inclined to think Mr. Dassin’s dislike of them might be, in part, a director’s usual, and quite understandable, bristling at having to shoot the film to someone else’s vision.

On another note, Mark Hellinger had to fight toe-to-toe with the Breen office because the MPAA wanted to censor many of the films violent scenes, a reference to marijuana, and even to exclude the word “cancer” when referring to Ann Blyth’s diagnosis because the very word was upsetting to the public.  Perhaps Hellinger threw Breen a bone when he has the doctor, Art Smith, reassure Burt Lancaster that, “These days, cancer doesn’t have to mean death at all.”

That’s another reason why Burt has to bust out of prison.  There’s a time element to Ann’s needed operation.

Others have suggested that the flashbacks represent a societal misogyny, or some statement to the effect that these are regular Joes who’ve been led astray by dames.  Again, here I disagree.  They show the men, more than the women, to be flawed.  Though John Hoyt has his car, his gun, and his gambling winnings stolen by a floozy, he was obviously willingly, knowingly taking chances in an underworld game of roulette, and the odds were against him this time.  He shrugs it off, amused and unrepentant.

Whit Bissell’s wife’s cooling ardor for him, and her greed for the mink coat which she clearly treasures more than her husband, leads to his downfall, but she did not force him to embezzle, had no idea he was doing it.  Bissell was not led astray, he was a fool who turned to thievery, and his obsession with his wife was such that it leads to his suicide when Hume Cronyn tells him (whether true or not) that his wife is divorcing him.  “I get quite a kick out of censoring the mail.”

Howard Duff’s taking the rap for Yvonne De Carlo does not make her a villain, her act of love is to protect him; his was to protect her.  But thinking this paints Duff as a hero wrongly placed in prison is also erroneous.  He is not in prison for assuming the guilt for her murder of her father; he plainly tells us he’s had other “raps” since.  Besides, he would have been incarcerated in a military prison were that so.  Look at the scene where he, John Hoyt and Jeff Corey go after a “stoolpigeon” prisoner with blowtorches, forcing him to be crushed in a stamping machine.  Look at their expressionless faces.  These regular Joes are killers. 

We could probably dispense with their flashback scenes (indeed, Anita Colby as Hoyt's floozy girlfriend never even gets any lines), but the one with Burt Lancaster and Ann Blyth I think is important to the film.  We don’t know if Lancaster has committed murder on the outside, but we see he is tied in with a gang he gives orders to, and probably is involved in something more like bank robbery.  Just before he leaves on another “job,” he stops by the house where Ann Blyth lives, an invalid in a wheelchair.  Lancaster hands a caregiver an envelope with money, “See that she doesn’t need anything.”

Ann is at first asleep, then he wakes her, and in their tender scene shows us that Lancaster is tired of running, that this will be his last job, and then he will come back to her for good.  He tells her that when he met her, he was a guy who “found the first important thing in his life.”  She doesn’t know what racket he’s in, but she senses he is troubled.  She wants to help him, wishes she weren’t sick so that she could help him.

“There are all kinds of sick people, Ruth.  Maybe we could help each other.”  The scene is gentle, affectionate, somewhat sad.  Ann’s character is not a gun moll, she’s a sweet, decent girl who trusts him.  This is important because it bolsters the visual image we already have of Burt Lancaster in the film as more a wounded animal than a psychopath.  

Indeed, at the very end of the movie when he is shot in the prison escape, he rears back with a single roar of pain and rage, like an animal in a trap, cut short as he fires several rounds into the guard who wounded him.  Bookending his cold expression of anger through most of the film is the softened, relaxed look of tenderness on his face when he sees her sleeping, and at the very desperate end when he sees that the escape plan has failed, and he looks for a moment like he could cry.

We need this scene with Ann Blyth, maybe all of “the women” scenes, not to remind us that the men are human, but because we are.  We can’t root for criminals to break free from jail, not unless we have some emotional stake in their success.  Without emotion, it becomes as academic as a watching the outcome of a dog race, and without the betting.

Interestingly, their scene ends with the camera remaining focused on Ann after Burt has left the room, tears welling in her eyes, heartbroken, frustrated, and fearful.  Dassin's touch, or Hellinger's?

One wonders what private demons she might have faced in the brief scene.  She was eighteen years old.  In the previous two years she had spent several months really in a wheelchair as a result of her spine injury, and her mother really died of cancer, both discussed in our intro post to this series.  Life's coincidences are occasionally macabre.

Producer Mark Hellinger may have had yet another reason for putting Ann Blyth and Burt Lancaster together.  He had hired her for Swell Guy (1947), and him for The Killers (1946).  They were two of Universal’s most talented up and coming stars, and he may have wanted to turn them into a team.  According to syndicated gossip columnist Dorothy Manners who wrote this in May 1946:

Mark Hellinger, always good for a bright idea, said to me, “Where are those swell romantic teams that used to make the fans goggle-eyed over their love scenes…It’s time the love team is revived on screen,” and Mark is the boy who is going to do it with his two young stars, Ann Blyth and Burt Lancaster…he wants to make three or four with Ann and Burt.  This Blyth girl is the real star stuff—young, tempestuous and definitely a screen personality.  If you saw her as Mildred Pierce’s daughter, you know what I mean.

Having played in her previous two films as young women of dubious, or downright evil, character, her role as the kindly, gentle Ruth in Brute Force would be the first important break in a string of roles that could have left her typecast, and farther away from ever doing the musicals she hoped to make.  But Ann Blyth was not done with bad girls yet: A Woman’s Vengeance (1948), discussed here, and Another Part of the Forest (1948), discussed here, were on the horizon.  She’s in Brute Force all of only about three or four minutes, but her scene is indelible, and does more for Burt Lancaster’s character than the awe the other prisoners show for him.

Their romantic team never did materialize.  Both went on to other films, and Mark Hellinger, who might have made a pet project of bringing them together again on screen, tragically died about six months after Brute Force was released.

For more on Mark Hellinger’s career, have a look at this excellent post by your friend and mine, Moira Finnie over at her blog, The Skeins.

Brute Force is available on DVD from the Criterion Collection.

Come back next week to Katie Did It (1951), a movie I can’t find, and a few thoughts about that and on Ann’s career as we round the corner and head for the home stretch on this series.

*************************

Milwaukee Sentinel, May 31, 1946, syndicated column by Dorothy Manners, p. 4.

Rode, Alan K.  Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy, (McFarland, 2007), p. 32.

****************************
As  most of you probably know by now, this year's TCM Classic Cruise will set sail (proverbially) in October, and one of the celebrity guests is Ann Blyth.

Ann will be doing a couple hour-long conversation sessions, and will also be on hand for a screening of Mildred Pierce.

Have a look here for the rest of the schedule and events with the other celebrity guests. Unfortunately, the cruise is booked, so if' you're late, you can try for the waiting list.

I, sadly, am unable to attend this cruise, but if any reader is going,  I invite you (beg you) to share your experiences and/or photos relating to Miss Blyth on this blog as part of our year-long series on her career.  I'd really appreciate your perspective on the event, to be our eyes and ears.  Thanks.
****************************

 THANK YOU....to the following folks whose aid in gathering material for this series has been invaluable:  EBH; Kevin Deany of Kevin's Movie Corner; Gerry Szymski of Westmont Movie Classics, Westmont, Illinois; and Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear.  And thanks to all those who signed on as backers to my recent Kickstarter campaign.  The effort failed to raise the funding needed, but I'll always remember your kind support.

***************************

TRIVIA QUESTION:  I've recently been contacted by someone who wants to know if the piano player in Dillinger (1945-see post here) is the boogie-woogie artist Albert Ammons. Please leave comment or drop me a line if you know.

****************************
UPDATE:  This series on Ann Blyth is now a book - ANN BLYTH: ACTRESS. SINGER. STAR. -

*********************
The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon, CreateSpace, and my Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing.

 "Lynch’s book is organized and well-written – and has plenty of amusing observations – but when it comes to describing Blyth’s movies, Lynch’s writing sparkles." - Ruth Kerr, Silver Screenings

"Jacqueline T. Lynch creates a poignant and thoroughly-researched mosaic of memories of a fine, upstanding human being who also happens to be a legendary entertainer." - Deborah Thomas, Java's Journey

"One of the great strengths of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is that Lynch not only gives an excellent overview of Blyth's career -- she offers detailed analyses of each of Blyth's roles -- but she puts them in the context of the larger issues of the day."- Amanda Garrett, Old Hollywood Films

"Jacqueline's book will hopefully cause many more people to take a look at this multitalented woman whose career encompassed just about every possible aspect of 20th Century entertainment." - Laura Grieve, Laura's Miscellaneous Musings''

"Jacqueline T. Lynch’s Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is an extremely well researched undertaking that is a must for all Blyth fans." - Annette Bochenek, Hometowns to Hollywood

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. 
by Jacqueline T. Lynch

The first book on the career of actress Ann Blyth. Multitalented and remarkably versatile, Blyth began on radio as a child, appeared on Broadway at the age of twelve in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine, and enjoyed a long and diverse career in films, theatre, television, and concerts. A sensitive dramatic actress, the youngest at the time to be nominated for her role in Mildred Pierce (1945), she also displayed a gift for comedy, and was especially endeared to fans for her expressive and exquisite lyric soprano, which was showcased in many film and stage musicals. Still a popular guest at film festivals, lovely Ms. Blyth remains a treasure of the Hollywood's golden age.

***************************

A new collection of essays, some old, some new, from this blog titled Movies in Our Time: Hollywood Mimics and Mirrors the 20th Century is now out in eBook, and in paperback here.

Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid - 1948

Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948) is a whimsical tale of true love, wherever you happen to find it—in a fantasy, or your wife.  Or both.

Another long post.  Go long.  I'll hit you in the end zone.

Ann Blyth was still in production on Another Part of the Forest (1948) –which we’ll discuss in a later post—when she was given over to the mad scientist ministrations of makeup genius Bud Westmore to attach a four-foot long mermaid’s tail to her lower body. 

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/8893

These were very busy and prolific years for her, from 1948 to 1952.  Half the 32 films she made in her entire career were in just this four-year period, when one production rolled right on into the next.  After Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, that summer she was slated for location shooting in Utah for her first western, Red Canyon (1949).  Her career was thriving, with what must have been a gratifying variety of roles to display her freshness and versatility.

Ann was 19 years old when the film was made, and William Powell was 55, but the 36-year difference between them did not really make for any awkwardness in the crush the mermaid and the man had for each other on screen, mainly because the crush was so innocent and so was the mermaid. 

For his part, William Powell strolled through his character’s screen midlife crisis with the panache and bemused sophistication of The Thin Man, with that sly humor that uses discretion as a springboard to irony.  He’s perfect in the role.

And in real life, Mr. Powell’s wife, former actress Diana Lewis, who we saw here in Cry Havoc (1944), was 27 years his junior.  So much for impossible age differences.

As for any possible off-screen awkwardness, that was apparently dispelled by the good humor of both leads.  An article by Sheilah Graham in 1949, in a half-mocking, half-admiring tone, noted that Ann Blyth “a devout churchgoer with an innocent smile, peach blossom skin and a wolf-whistle figure” was known at this stage of her career for being shy about kissing too passionately onscreen, or at least, “refuses point blank to go all-out.” 

Mr. Powell, as discreet as his character, Mr. Peabody, apparently handled her discomfort as well any of his own, by remembering first and foremost that they were making a comedy.

Ann said in the interview, “He was kidding all of the time.  I was always afraid he was going to make me laugh as he started to kiss me.  It was such whimsical make-believe that I wasn’t embarrassed when I had to kiss him.”

Mr. Powell’s problems about their age difference ultimately had more to do with his age than hers; he had to carry the mermaid around a lot, which was a remarkable, and exhausting, feat for a man of his years.

The Montreal Gazette felt that William Powell was good but should have been better, but thought Ann “…wears the fishtail as if born to it, gives the just the right suggestion of an untutored but not unknowing denizen of the deep.  It’s her best performance.”  I think they were wrong about Mr. Powell, but Miss Blyth earned the praise.  It’s interesting reading the different reviews how critics seemed not to know how to take this movie.  It was such an offbeat charmer that I don’t think they could categorize it into any familiar pigeonhole.

The New York Times, however, (in a review NOT written by the easily irritated Bosley Crowther) called Mr. Powell’s work “an engaging and highly polished performance” and noted of Ann, “Her costuming places her beyond criticism.”  It’s signed T.F.B., and whoever he was, that’s as stylish a piece of leering as I’ve ever read.

Now, about that costuming.  The effort it took to make the film is as delightfully whimsical as the story.  William Powell may have caught his mermaid fishing, but makeup man Bud Westmore had to create her from scratch.

Photo credit unknown at this time.  I think that's Bud Westmore.

First, you need a young woman, about 5’2”, who doesn’t weigh very much because everybody, not just William Powell, is going to have to carry her around a lot when she’s wearing the tail.  Just as fish are immobile when they are “beached”, so is Ann Blyth when she’s wearing her fish tail—which, despite its inconveniences, she apparently didn’t mind too much.  She recalled in a 2006 interview with Eddie Muller (referred to in our intro post here):

“The good part about that was that I got to be carried around all day long.  Everyone was so good to me on that movie.”

You drop the cooperative girl on a table and get your mad scientist buddies to make a mold of her body by smooshing clay or Play-Doh or Silly Putty, or whatever you have in the junk drawer, from her torso to her toes. 

Photo credit unknown at this time.

Once you’ve got that done, you start covering her with plaster.  

Thus is an actress turned into an arts and crafts project. 

According to an article by Gene Handsaker in the Milwaukee Journal, the fish tail cost $23,000 to make.  (Life magazine says $18,000.)  “Ann lay on a sort of operating table for three hours while being molded in clay and plaster for the four foot mermaid tail of sponge rubber, she told me on the set of Another Part of the Forest.

“To each scale of Ann’s tail will be sewn a glass jewel for further sparkle—some 4,000 jewels in all…The upper part of this, the biggest rubber ‘appliance’ ever made for a movie, will blend into her torso in a chaste, piscatorial nude effect—if U-I can get that past the Johnston office.”

This “piscatorial nude effect” has to do with the fact—if you can call it a “fact” when we’re talking about a mythical creature—that a mermaid’s upper body is that of a human woman, so there’s a running gag in the movie about covering the mermaid’s naked breasts. 

State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/8894

But teasing the censors is the last thing on the agenda.   First, we still have to finish our mermaid.  Once you have the sponge rubber tail, then you’ve got to wrestle it onto the cooperative young woman.  Can’t have been easy to slide into. 

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/149884

You need help.  A team of three is good.  Hoist the girl in the air between you and yank that tail onto her.  This pit crew is also available for hire.  Can’t get into those tight jeans anymore?  These boys are professionals.  They know what they’re doing.  Having trouble wrestling your wiggling five-year-old child into a snowsuit?  Just give them a call. 

Ed and Whitey McMahan carry M'lady to the set.

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/8892

Then, as we mentioned, the young woman can’t walk in this thing, so she has to be carried like Cleopatra by obliging handsome slave boys to her watery home.  Where she is unceremoniously dumped in the drink.  This is likely not a good time to tell people you have to go to the bathroom.

One more thing.  Lead weights were placed in the bottom of the tail by her feet, some references say 30 pounds, some say 50 pounds—to keep the rubber tail, and the person wearing it, from floating to the surface of the water.  Sounds as ominous as stories of mobsters fitting their victims with “cement shoes”. 

Here are more photos from Life magazine, February 1948.

Newt Perry and Ann

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/149882

Once the actress looks like a mermaid, she’s got to be trained to swim like one.  Here’s where Newt Perry and the team from Weeki Wachee Springs in New Port Richey, Florida, come in.  Weeki Wachee Springs was one of those roadside tourist attractions long before we had fast food chains lining every stretch of highway, before expensive theme parks and innumerable corporate-owned enterprises were devised to part you from your money.

Established in the fall of 1947 by Newt Perry, it wasn’t long before Universal-International came in December to build a special set onto Perry’s showcase of “mermaids.”  They were just local high school girls—not in mermaid costumes—frolicking under the water doing tricks and demonstrating scenes of, as the book Weecki Wachee Springs by Maryann Pelland and Dan Pelland notes, “eating, drinking, and even typing underwater.”  Perry devised a system for the beauties to remain under water for longer periods by sneaking breaths of compressed air through rubber hoses.

Newt Perry and Ann

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/149879

Most of these photos are from the State Archives of Florida as displayed on the FloridaMemory.com site.  Newt Perry also trained Navy frogmen, helped out on several Tarzan films, and taught his nephew to swim—who was Don Schollander, 1964 and 1968 Olympic Gold Medalist.  A champion swimmer himself, Mr. Perry knew his stuff.

According to author Tim Hollis in Glass Bottom Boats & Mermaid Tails:Florida’s Tourist Springs, “Perry coached Ann Blyth in the proper techniques of underwater breathing, and according to all reports, she was a quick study and a natural athlete.  Though she performed the necessary water close-ups, her acrobatic swimming in most of the long shots was done by the Weekiwachee regulars, primarily Nancy Tribble.”

Mermaid doubles Nancy Tribble and Flo Wilkinson with Ann.

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/149877

According to gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, “Between scenes she swam and dived just for the heck of it, while Powell, fully dressed, clung to a rope and shivered.” 

Ann does her own swimming here.

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/8897

The cast of Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid arrived in February 1948, and filmed some of the underwater scenes here, and some back at Universal in a water tank.  Andrea King, who played the rival for the affections of Mr. Powell—a rival, as it turns out, for his wife and his mermaid—is quoted on a website devoted to her career as recalling the weather in Florida that February to be cold and rainy, and much of the cast fell ill, including trouper William Powell, though, “you never would have known it.”

Back at Universal to finish up some water scenes between her and Ann Blyth—including a spectacular fight scene we’ll discuss below—Miss King recalled that though the tank was supposed to be heated, the water heater malfunctioned and the water was quite cold in the tank.  “So we tried anyway for about half an hour, but Annie and I just went numb.  I think she got terribly sick after that.”

 State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/149881

And now, the movie…

Directed by Irving Pichel, written by Nunnally Johnson, adapted from the novel Mr. Peabody and his Mermaid.  I lead off with the title card here because this graphic of a mermaid, so coyly curled up with the credits, is the only time you will really ever see a mermaid naked from the waist up in this movie.  Ann Blyth is artfully covered by the edge of a pool and a fortunate camera angle, by a robe, by seaweed, by her flowing curly blonde hair, by a bubble bath, and by her own expressive arms.

William Powell plays Arthur Peabody, a man about to turn 50 years old, a fact which surprises him and depresses him.  He is also just recovering from a long bout of flu, so he and his wife have taken off to restore his health at a Caribbean paradise where it’s warm.

Irene Hervey is his wife, wry and understanding, and we can see from the outset that theirs is a good marriage, with comfortable bantering. 

She is no shrew from whom he is trying to escape, indeed, the only “other woman” he leers at in this entire movie is her, when she is partially hidden from view and he does not at first realize the legs he’s ogling are his wife’s.  She looks good in a bathing suit.  His demonstrated attraction to his wife also takes the smarmy edge of his “romance” with the much younger mermaid.

Andrea King is a visitor to the vacation villa, a singer and performer who blatantly chases after Powell with la-de-da joie de vivre, perhaps with no real design on him except for the fact she’s bored and there apparently seems to be a lack of other men.  And he really is charming.

Clinton Sundberg, who we’ve all seen in minor kindly “everyman” roles—I think my favorite is Judy Garland’s bartender pal in Easter Parade—here gets a larger role as a publicity man for the villa, one of the few Americans on this British protectorate, who is cynical, funny, and even surprisingly a little sinister.  There’s a running gag about his doctor forbidding him to drink or smoke anymore, and how miserably Mr. Sundberg copes with this.

Art Smith, seen at the beginning and the end of the movie, is the psychiatrist to whom Irene Hervey takes Mr. Powell to get him over this mermaid fantasy.  Mr. Smith is an especially understanding fellow, who, like Powell, also likes to fish and is amazed he could have caught a mermaid on a 12-thread line.  A wonderful old character actor (though actually younger than William Powell), he was one of the unfortunate victims of the infamous blacklisting in the 1950s when Elia Kazan threw him to the wolves. 

I won’t go play-by-play with the plot, but here are some delightful scenes to mention: At the beginning of the film when William Powell sits in the waiting room of the psychiatrist’s office and a small boy stares at him, asking his mother, “What’s the matter with him, Mommy?  Is he crazy?”

I like that it’s snowing outside in the city, which gives a great contrast to the sunny paradise he retreats to, representing a rebirth of spirit.  It would have been lovely to have the film in color, but it still manages to take us away to tropical splendor without it. 

Almost the moment he arrives, he hears a musical trilling from some far distance—he alone hears it and we presume it is the fabled siren’s call—but he suspects no mermaid, even when he takes a sailboat to a deserted rocky key and finds an ornamental hair comb.  We will soon see it belongs to the mermaid, whom he hooks on his fishing line.

The fishing scene is good; it takes time and plays out nicely, building suspense.  He hooks the tail of what he presumes to be a large sport fish.  From what we see of the tail, it could be a marlin or a swordfish, or a tuna.  Even in just these scenes of exploring, sailing, fishing—indeed, struggling to land a big fish—William Powell is already exorcising the demons of turning 50.  He’s already proving to himself that life is still exciting and he’s still man enough with strength and vigor to enjoy it.

He manages to pull the fish close enough to grasp its tail and flip it into the boat.  He’s won the fight.  Hemingway would be proud.

Then he is astonished to discover at its other end is a pretty young woman.

No more astonished than the dazed mermaid is to discover herself in a boat with a strange two-legged creature.

At first, the mermaid is only a fishing prize to him, and he gleefully carries her into the rented vacation villa as a specimen he hopes to produce before scientists.  She’s a bit faint and peaked lying on his bed, then he realizes this creature needs to be in water, so he fills the tub, while she looks around his room with the wonder of someone who’d never been on land before.  Right at this moment to us, Ann Blyth as the mermaid stops being a myth or a plot contrivance, but a person with whom we can identify, and that goes a long way towards our caring about the relationship between her and Mr. Powell.  Moreover, she is mute, so our compassion rises for this lost soul in a strange place.

At first, Powell has no romantic notions about her, though he warms from regarding her as a fishing trophy to referring to himself as “your old Uncle Arthur” when he swiftly becomes her caretaker.  He is giddy not with love (even when his robe slips from her bare shoulders when she slides into the tub and grins at him from under the water), but in anticipation of the fame and notoriety his accomplishment in landing her will bring—and in a celebratory mood gets a bit tipsy by the time his wife comes home.

Irene Hervey, though she has teased her husband about turning 50, nevertheless is jealous over his attention to Andrea King at the party the night before.  She suspects the splashing she hears in her tub is Miss King, but when she opens the door to confront the other woman, all she sees is an enormous fish tail protruding from a bubble bath.  It seems the mermaid, with childish curiosity, gotten into the toiletries.

Miss Hervey thinks her drunken husband has played a joke on her, and she wants that fish out of her tub.  I like the scene when she’s on the phone talking to a man she’s met at the party (she’s been making friends too) while William Powell carries the mermaid down the stairs.  He’s had a little too much to drink and, in the doghouse with his wife, so he carries the mermaid outside intending to release her back into the ocean. 

But he gets tired hefting her.  “You’re no guppy.”  (One of my favorite lines.)  He sits on the edge of the enormous ornamental fishpond to rest, with the mermaid in his lap, and finally takes a long look at her.  His fishing trophy, his scientific discovery are only a popped balloon—popped by his wife—and he now regards the mermaid in a second look, a second chance at a first crush.

“You don’t want to go back in the sea, do you?  It’s so big, and you’re so pretty.” 

He lightly kisses her, off to the side of her mouth, and the astonished mermaid, uncomprehending eyes wide open, is gobsmacked.  Trying to figure this out, she parts and closes her lips as if to taste the kiss he’s left there.  She likes the sensation and wants to kiss again.

He leaves her in the fishpond, half-pet, half-mistress.

William Powell is so entertaining and so sweet in his role, which is basically comic, but lends it such skillful depth and poignancy. 

Ann Blyth’s work here is luminous and captivating.  It is a non-speaking role, but there is remarkable and touching eloquence in the way her eyes roam over his face, as if trying to read him, trying to understand his words and his facial expression.  Middle-aged Mr. Peabody is wondrous and fascinating to her, and her unlikely crush for him alone adds another level to the comedy, and the poignancy.  We can see why he might take a fancy to her, but her radiant and achingly silent adoration of him is charming.

The funniest scene in the movie is when Mr. Powell heads to a women’s clothing store in town to purchase some sort of top for his mermaid.  His befuddled awkwardness sets the stage for a terrific scene, and he plays the straight man for Mary Field, whom you’ve probably seen uncredited in a zillion movie walk-on parts.  Here she gets a good role as the primly officious clerk, who delights in her soliloquy sales pitches to the uncomfortable Mr. Powell.  She sounds like a Banana Republic or J Peterman catalog description gone amuck. 

She displays a sweater, “Light as a whisper, gay as a sunbeam, wearing it will be an emotional adventure spangled with the moon glow of twilight.”  (I swear, if just one sales clerk ever spoke to me that way, I’d buy everything in the store.  I am so heartily sick of, “How you guys doin’?” when I am not a guy, and they never know the answer when I ask a question and too lazy to find out.  They discuss their personal lives in grating voices with coworkers and I am just a shadow who hands them money when they've paused to notice me.  Oh, for the days of professional sales help.  Call me ma’am, just once, please.)

Miss Field continues her merry prattle, “A gay spectrum of springtime hues—fuchsia, purple almond, banana, marshmallow, peach dream and licorice!”

Mr. Powell replies, “Would you be good enough to tell me something?”

Miss Field: “Enchanted.”  (I love her over-the-top playfulness with proper speech.)

Mr. Powell: “Whatever became of blue?”

She finds he is going to be trouble, especially when he wants to know if someone can swim in her sweaters.

“May I ask is the young lady’s prejudice against swimming in a swimming suit quite deep-seated?”  (One of my all-time favorite lines.  I just love her.  In a way, her intonation and enunciation reminds me of a reformed Eliza Doolittle when she is carefully trying to explain to Freddy Eynsford-Hill that, “Them she lived with would have killed her for a hat-pin, let alone a hat.”  Her careful stroking of the difficult language as if to tame it.)

Mr. Powell just realizes he could buy his mermaid a two-piece swimsuit instead of a sweater and she could just wear the top part.  But Miss Field, Saleswoman of the Year, insists they do not sell half of a bathing suit.  She holds one up, “The diaper model.  Provocative, n'est–ce pas?”  (She’s straight-faced, slam-dunk hysterical.)

Nobody in the movie calls these two-piece suits a bikini, but the name, as well as the design, was still quite new.  They arrived in 1946, about a year and a half before this movie went into production, and were named by the designer for the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, where the U.S. conducted its first peacetime nuclear test explosions.  He wanted the swimsuit to similarly bear (or is that bare?) the reputation of an intense "reaction".

Mr. Powell buys three bikinis, and next we see him sitting by the fishpond, separating the panties from the bras with delicate thoroughness as the mermaid solemnly watches. 

He gently begins his lecture: “Darling, I don’t want to offend you, but you’re not dressed for company.”  (Another favorite line.)  He tries to explain modesty to her, but she is uncomprehending. 

She plucks one of the bras he has displayed on the edge of the pond for her perusal, and she places it on top of her head.  She has no idea what to do with it.

He stretches a bra across his own chest to demonstrate, but she’s not interested.  She wants attention.  She wants him to kiss her again, but he won’t and gently remonstrates her, too, that she must also stop eating the expensive rare tropical fish in the fishpond.  The camera cuts over to a neat lineup of fish skeletal remains on the side of the pool.  He wants her to eat canned sardines instead.

She is upset and starts to tear up (and for me, as silly as this scene is, it’s as heartbreaking as when you see a toddler’s face fall when he is told “no”).  She just wants to be loved.  She just wants this wonderful male two-legged creature to talk sweetly to her again and leave soft kisses on the side of her mouth.

He comforts her and is amazed by her.  “My age means nothing to you, does it?”  She explores his face with her adoring eyes, and now he’s a goner, pleasantly lost in the first flush of his second spring.

But the mermaid can also be quick to anger.  She does not like Andrea King messing with her male two-legged creature.  She hisses when Mr. Powell talks about Miss King.  Here Ann Blyth is dubbed (not for the last time in her career—but we’ll get to The Helen Morgan Story eventually).  According to a syndicated article in the St. Petersburg Times, Gene Fowler, Jr., assistant producer, could not find a suitable sound for a mermaid snarl, so they took a crew to the San Diego Zoo and found the sound they wanted from an irritable ocelot.  They recorded him on tape, and the sound of the ocelot snarl, played backwards, is apparently what we hear on screen.

When Andrea King stops by, the mermaid spies on her overt flirtation with Mr. Powell and becomes jealous.  When Miss King teasingly strips off her evening gown and dives into the fishpond in her unmentionables, the mermaid sneaks up on her in the murky depths of the pool, and grabs her.  There’s a vigorous fight underwater between them, no doubles here—it’s really Ann and Andrea in an oxygen-deprived soggy girl fight—and the mermaid bites her leg.  Andrea can kick her way to the surface, but Ann’s got 30 to 50 pounds of lead weights in her tail keeping her nicely submerged.

In the middle of the night, Powell hears the mermaid’s trilling, and sneaks out to the pond to find her sitting on the edge of the pool in Miss King’s gown as a trophy (Miss King, terrified, has run off without it), which she wears like a debutante to impress him.  With great tact and understanding, he compliments her appearance, and she clings to his hand, kissing it.

But his wife is fed up with him, sure that he’s carrying on with Miss King, so she leaves him.  When she disappears, the local authorities think he murdered her, and now poor Mr. Powell has to get the mermaid back to the ocean and get back his wife.

A nice shot here when the mermaid overhears Powell telling the sardonic Clinton Sundberg that he’s in love with a mermaid, and she responds silently with a brilliant, ecstatic smile.  The only thing better than your male two-legged creature telling you he loves you, is hearing him talk about how much he loves you to somebody else.

Ann Blyth has some clever and remarkable stunts to perform underwater, most especially the fight scene, but also a bit where she swims around an enormous castle-like structure, where she cries underwater into a handkerchief and blows her nose, and gathers up her comb collection when Mr. Powell tells her they have to leave this place.

Their adventure culminates on a rock at sea, with the British authorities after them.  It is a tragic moment when he sees he cannot stay with the mermaid, and must let himself be taken back to the land.  He reunites with his wife, and gives her a present: one of the mermaid’s ornamental combs.

I think the above–mentioned New York Times reviewer hit the nail on the head when it comes to the ending of this movie: “Mermaids are not good subjects for cinematic comedy, since they just can’t settle down and live happily ever after.”

True, for though we may be happy for the Peabodys’ reunion, there is a sense of sadness that we don’t know what happened to the mermaid, and wonder if she will ever find another male two-legged creature to love her.

Ann Blyth and William Powell parted with a happier mood.  In the 2006 interview with Eddie Muller, referred to in our intro piece and posted on The Evening Class blog transcript of the event, she recalled of Powell:

He was so dear, tender…I had asked him for a picture at the end of the movie and he took several lines from the movie and wrote them on the picture.  Actually he taped it to the picture and said, "I like you.  I like you very much."

You can watch Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid currently here at YouTube.

Come back next Thursday when we jump eleven years later to 1959 and a new medium—television—for Ann Blyth’s first of five appearances on the western Wagon Train.  It’s The Jenny Tannen Story, where she has a dual role of a cold, bitter woman, and the young daughter who travels across the continent to see her.  This one’s dedicated to your friend and mine, the Caftan Woman, for her particular fondness for this episode.  It was during the filming of this episode that Ann was surprised by Ralph Edwards on This Is Your Life.  We'll talk about that too.

____________________________

Andrea King website 

Evening Class blog, July 28,2007, transcribed interview of Eddie Muller with Ann Blyth at the Castro Theatre, San Francisco, July 2006.

FloridaMemory.com website, Florida Photographic Collection of the State Archives of Florida.

Hollis, Tim.  Glass Bottom Boats & Mermaid Tails: Florida’s Tourist Springs, (Mechanicsburg, PA, 2006) p. 99.

Life magazine, February 9, 1948, pp. 91-94.

The Milwaukee Journal, article by Gene Handsaker, December 18, 1947; article by Sheilah Graham, August 22, 1949, p. GS1.

The Montreal Gazette, October 23, 1948, p. 21.

The New York Times, review by T.F.B., August 14, 1948, p. 6.

Ocala (Florida) Star Banner, April 14, 1981, p. 10A

Pelland, Maryann and Dan Pelland.  Weecki Wachee Springs (Charleston, SC., Chicago, Portsmouth, NH, San Francisco, 2006), p.7

St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, December 10, 1947, p. 14; April 4, 1948, p. 34

Youngstown (Ohio) Vindicator, syndicated article by Hedda Hopper, March 8, 1948, p. 16.

 UPDATE:  This series on Ann Blyth is now a book - ANN BLYTH: ACTRESS. SINGER. STAR. -

*********************
The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon, CreateSpace, and my Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing.

 "Lynch’s book is organized and well-written – and has plenty of amusing observations – but when it comes to describing Blyth’s movies, Lynch’s writing sparkles." - Ruth Kerr, Silver Screenings

"Jacqueline T. Lynch creates a poignant and thoroughly-researched mosaic of memories of a fine, upstanding human being who also happens to be a legendary entertainer." - Deborah Thomas, Java's Journey

"One of the great strengths of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is that Lynch not only gives an excellent overview of Blyth's career -- she offers detailed analyses of each of Blyth's roles -- but she puts them in the context of the larger issues of the day."- Amanda Garrett, Old Hollywood Films

"Jacqueline's book will hopefully cause many more people to take a look at this multitalented woman whose career encompassed just about every possible aspect of 20th Century entertainment." - Laura Grieve, Laura's Miscellaneous Musings''

"Jacqueline T. Lynch’s Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is an extremely well researched undertaking that is a must for all Blyth fans." - Annette Bochenek, Hometowns to Hollywood

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. 
by Jacqueline T. Lynch

The first book on the career of actress Ann Blyth. Multitalented and remarkably versatile, Blyth began on radio as a child, appeared on Broadway at the age of twelve in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine, and enjoyed a long and diverse career in films, theatre, television, and concerts. A sensitive dramatic actress, the youngest at the time to be nominated for her role in Mildred Pierce (1945), she also displayed a gift for comedy, and was especially endeared to fans for her expressive and exquisite lyric soprano, which was showcased in many film and stage musicals. Still a popular guest at film festivals, lovely Ms. Blyth remains a treasure of the Hollywood's golden age.