Young at Heart at the beach

Young at Heart (1954) gives us a glimpse of an idyllic beach scene on the Connecticut shore in the 1950s.  To be sure, it is mostly of Hollywood origin, or at least, California, but if the beach is not in the right location, the warm and lovely nostalgia of the beach is genuine.

This is my entry to the Fun in the Sun Blogathon, hosted by the Classic Movie Blog Association.  Have a look at some great posts on this topic here.

The movie Young at Heart is a remake of Four Daughters (1938), which we covered previously in this post.  In that original story, widowed Claude Rains heads a family of four girls, played by the Lane sisters plus Gail Page, and all are musicians.  May Robson plays the auntie matriarch who lives with them.  The girls’ suitors have picked out their choices among the daughters, but all the young beaus have competition with the newcomer: handsome and happy-go-lucky Jeffrey Lynn.  But an even newer newcomer, a dour, sarcastic and self-pitying John Garfield swoops in to really disrupt things and his love for Priscilla Lane nearly tears the family apart.

We see the beginnings of the rift and a change from a lighthearted first part of the movie to a more serious and even tragic second part at a family picnic in a secluded country glen.  Here we see the sisters are really all interested in the same man. 

In Young at Heart, this scene is transported to the beach.  Robert Keith plays the Claude Rains role of the dad, Ethel Barrymore in a charming mixture of regal and down to earth plays the May Robson role.  Here the sisters number only three instead of four: Elisabeth Fraser, Dorothy Malone, and Doris Day.  Doris plays the lead Priscilla Lane role.  The boyfriends are with the family at the beach, and the heartthrob who will cause unspoken jealousy among the sisters is played by Gig Young in the Jeffrey Lynn role.

Frank Sinatra plays the John Garfield role in this movie, but this scene is just before he makes his first entrance in the film, so we don’t know yet how he’s going to upend the family.  Even without him, the seeds of discontent are already sown, making the day at the beach bittersweet.

With an almost nuclear-powered sunny disposition, Doris Day is the most lighthearted of the group and fails to see her sisters’ yearning for the man she playfully cavorts with in the surf.  Doris gets to sing two songs during this nearly 10-minute beach sequence. 

For those of us who live close enough to a coast to have spent pleasant days on the beach, the movie image of sand and sea, of wave-kissed rocks and sunshine reflecting off the constantly moving ocean is familiar and almost personal, like someone with a movie camera somehow entering our brains and capturing a memory.  Some sensations experienced going to the beach are really timeless and there is a distinct and powerful comfort about that.

But we may sense that some aspects of this scene are not timeless, and that perhaps going to the beach in the 1950s was a little more do-it-yourself, simple, and perhaps with a slower pace of life.   Yes and no.  We don’t see any arcades or water parks or concessions, or even bathhouses with facilities on this beach, but there were beaches back then and even before – though not all – with plenty of tourist amenities. 

That this beach is not crowded and there is plenty of space between the actors and the extras in the background should not be taken that beaches were not crowded in the 1950s.  Of course, they were.  But not all were, and even in these modern times, I have been to New England beaches that were just as unspoiled and unpopulated as this one in the movie seems to be.

So that is not quite it, either.  There must be something else that evokes the strong feeling of nostalgia for a 1950s beach in this film.  Is it because there are no loud radios playing?  Maybe, but we see Doris singing along to a portable record player.  We don’t see too many record players at the beach these days.  

Is it because nobody’s in a bathing suit and they come lounging on the sand in their clothes?  Maybe.  No sunscreen?  Maybe.  

It could just be that the clam digging and the large pots with New England clambake accoutrements – corn on the cob, potatoes, etc., are not seen quite as much now as in the old days, or campfires on the beach, or gathering driftwood to fuel the fires.

There is a noticeable lack of people taking selfies or scarfing packaged junk food snacks.  No one is being divebombed by seagulls for a few Cheetos. 

I get a kick out of Alan Hale, Jr., who plays the suitor of Dorothy Malone, talking about his sudden idea of what a great thing it would be “buying this strip of beach, tearing down all the bungalows on the highway and putting up some hotels, a whole string of them.” 

She responds, “Whoever heard of a string of hotels along the beach in Connecticut?”

There are some hotels here and there on the Connecticut coast, and were, too, in the 1950s, but not enough perhaps to make Alan Hale, Jr.’s dream come true.  Instead of hotels today there are more likely to be a few condominiums, but the geography doesn’t always allow for development.  Working harbors, saltwater marshes here there, and far more protected areas than there used to be.  Thank heaven.

I think what I really like about this beach sequence is the work of the sound technicians.  Behind all the dialogue, behind Doris’s songs and the “orchestration” that seems to bloom from her portable record player, is the omnipresent, lazy, rhythmic sound of the waves rushing to the shore.  The seacoast is not a quiet place.  The sound of the surf is eternal.

The bright, almost blinding daylight of the first part of the sequence becomes a peaceful twilight with the family around the campfire, and Doris still singing, toasting marshmallows.  The large beach umbrella that sheltered Ethel Barrymore earlier in the day has been folded up.  You can almost feel the refreshing cooler breeze off the ocean, almost feel chilled by it.  It is an idyllic ending to the sequence, a calm before the storm.  A day at the beach is a respite, time to enjoy, to reflect, and to make a memory that will last through days to come.  A beach memory may mark epochs in our lives, just as it does in the movie.

Visit the CMBA website here for more Fun in the Sun Blogathon.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.  Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.

That's All There Is. There isn't any more. -- The Barrymores as Pop Culture Icons

 Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, 

[reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-54231] , 1937

Ethel Barrymore appeared as a guest on Bing Crosby’s radio show on December 21, 1949.  It was his annual Christmas show, usually devoted to the singing of carols.  Miss Barrymore joined him for amusing patter about the new artificial Christmas trees that came in white and in pink, and they spoke wistfully of all the Christmases Barrymore spent on the road with her children as she played in theaters across the country.  

Announcer Ken Carpenter teased Bing on his wearing a suit and tie, getting all spruced up in honor of their esteemed guest, whom Bing respectfully addressed as “Miss Barrymore.”

They might speak with equanimity on baseball (she was a fan), but there was no chumminess with this famous guest, yet Ethel Barrymore deigned to do something the dignified thespian never would in her younger days: she parodied herself.

When Bing asked her opinion of his pseudo-rival Bob Hope, she replied, “Well, there’s his childlike simplicity.”

“And?”

She answered, “That’s all there is.   There isn’t anymore.”  

She hardly got the line out before cracking up, and the audience roared with laughter also.  It was a line from a play she had done almost fifty years earlier – a line that made her famous.

This post is part of The Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood.  Please have a look at the other participating blogs for some terrific posts.

The “trilogy” in this case, of course, comes from the dynamic trio of siblings who dominated theatre in the early decades of the twentieth century, and came to have a prominent place in film—most especially becoming icons of pop culture in a way entertainers had never been before, or perhaps since.

We have a great book on the trio by theatre critic Hollis Alpert, The Barrymores (NY: The Dial Press, 1964), which dramatically demonstrates the siblings’ dominance of art and culture in the U.S. with an introduction that drops us down on Broadway in the first week of March 1920.

There, at the Plymouth Theatre, John Barrymore, the youngest of the trio at about 37, made his Shakespearian debut in Richard III.

Ethel, the middle child and the reigning grand dame of theatre at 40 years old played over at the Empire in the smash hit, Déclasée.

Lionel, the eldest at 41, known for being a versatile character actor, played at the Criterion in The Letter of the Law. 

These three siblings were stars on Broadway at the same time.  The media took note and around about this time began to refer to the Barrymores as “the royal family of theatre.”

The Barrymore boys have facing pages in 
Stars of the Photoplay, 1930

They became so well known by this moniker that when playwrights George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber wrote their comedy, and rather wicked parody, of the Barrymores, they titled it The Royal Family.  It opened at the Selwyn Theatre in 1927.  It poked fun particularly at John, known as a heavy-drinking womanizer; and Ethel, for being a prima donna of the stage.  John saw it when it played in Los Angeles (Fredric March played the character Tony, which was based on John, and March also appeared in the film version in 1930) and reportedly thought it was funny, but Ethel was not happy.  She had yet to learn to laugh at herself or shrug off the innumerable imitators of herself and her brothers.

Library of Congress

One of the first instances of being imitated occurred in 1904 over her famous “There isn’t anymore” line.  She was playing in a comedy called Sunday on Broadway where her role was a young orphaned woman raised by rough miners in the West, who comes to London to meet her aunts.  Charles Frohman, famous theatrical producer of the day, sat in on the rehearsal.  In a pivotal scene, she is supposed to read aloud a letter from her rough miner guardians to her genteel aunts, but she stops herself because there is a part that is too personal for them to hear.  She just runs offstage.

Ethel suggested to producer Mr. Frohman that it would make more sense for her to say something, in an awkward and embarrassed manner, before she runs off.  He asked what, not given to interference by young ingénues.  

She is reported to have said, “Oh, maybe something like, ‘That’s all there is.  There isn’t anymore.'”

He left it in.  She said it on stage, and because of situation in the plot, and undoubtedly her delivery, it brought the house down.  Author Mr. Alpert notes, “…that line of added dialogue became virtually her trademark—to a degree that annoyed her.” (p.111)

She began to be imitated by comics on the vaudeville stage with this line.

However, though she had a brief foray into silent films in the teens, she preferred the theatre, where she remained, for the most part, until the late 1940s and a string of films, one of which earning her an Academy Award.  We covered her work in The Spiral Staircase (1945) here and Portrait of Jennie (1948) here.  She and her brothers all appeared in Rasputin and the Empress in 1933, which we discussed in this previous post.

Library of Congress

Her brothers took to film early and remained there, Lionel as a character man who appeared in over 200 movies, including his long gig in the Dr. Kildare series.  As versatile in real life as he was in acting, Lionel was also an artist, a composer, a director, and a novelist.  He is also reported to have claimed to have invented the microphone boom for the movies when he suggested a mic be put on a pole above the actors when sound issues were a major problem in the early days of the talkies.

Lionel also was known to a generation for playing Mr. Scrooge on the radio every Christmas in A Christmas Carol.  And like Ethel, he was also parodied in pop culture.   According to author Mr. Alpert, “So familiar was his drawling voice that an imitation of it turned up every other week on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour.”  He is also lampooned in cartoons and the movies, including by his fellow MGM star, Mickey Rooney.

John, of course, was The Great Profile, who played romantic leads until his own dissipated lifestyle and his casual attitude toward his work led him to parody himself far more effectively than another comic probably could.  We discussed his Twentieth Century (1934) here.  He starred in The Great Profile (1940) as a famous actor who drinks heavily.  Two years later, John Barrymore was dead.

They were descended from a long line of actors on both their paternal and maternal sides of their family, the Drews,  and as children they watched the great Edwin Booth and Helen Modjeska and Fanny Davenport on stage in the theater in Philadelphia that their grandmother ran.   None of the trio were ambitious for theatrical careers despite this, but it pulled them in by circumstance and there they outshone all their contemporaries and their famous thespian ancestors.   John did not take his work seriously.  Lionel had other interests as compelling for him.  Ethel had no desire as a child to be on stage, and indeed, spent every opening night of her life nearly paralyzed with stage fright, and yet by the end of her career, her life, she was the most beloved actress the theatre had never known. 

Library of Congress

In 1901, she was appearing at the Garrick Theatre on Broadway in Captain Jinks, and staying at Mrs. Wilson’s boarding house on 36^th Street, in walking distance.  She was about 22 years old.  Her brother John came to escort her to the theater that evening, and when they came in sight of it, she gasped at the her name lit up in the new-fangled electric lights.  She cried.  It became more than the family trade to fall back on then, it was something personal. When she died in 1959, the last of her siblings, the lights dimmed on the marquee and inside the house of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.  She had appeared there when it opened in 1928, as the first leading lady on that stage.

The children of these Barrymores enjoyed varying degrees of success in their own acting careers (or not).  It seemed serendipitous for John’s granddaughter to be named Drew Barrymore after both sides of the acting family.   Though she has climbed the ladder of fame in a way her preceding generation did not,  it is unlikely that anyone in any acting family will achieve the kind of critical respect, and also pop culture fame of John, Lionel, and Ethel Barrymore. Today, we have celebrity, which is not the same thing. Those three were truly greats, we can neither replicate their brand of greatness or the times in which it shone.  Because...

That’s all there is.  There isn’t anymore.

Kindly have a look at the other posts on The Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon hosted by In the Good Old Days of Hollywood.

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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.

The eBook and paperback are available from Amazon and CreateSpace, which is the printer.  You can also order it from my Etsy shop. It is also available at the Broadside Bookshop, 247 Main Street, Northampton, Massachusetts.

If you wish a signed copy, then email me at JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com and I'll get back to you with the details.

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My new syndicated column on classic film is up at http://www.go60.us/govoice/advice-and-more/item/2025-ccc-movie-fan, or check with your local paper.

Paramount Theater - Rutland, Vermont

The Paramount Theater of Rutland, Vermont is another of those splendid resurrections we are fortunate to observe, preserving that great era of theaters. A couple of weeks ago on my Tragedy and Comedy in New England blog, I referred to a recent staged reading of a play of mine by the Vermont Actors’ Repertory Theatre, which uses the Black Box Theater that is part of the Paramount Theater building.

It was once called The Playhouse Theatre, completed in 1913 and opening in 1914. The exterior, as its website notes, is an example of the classic “City Beautiful” movement of the day, and the interior was all lush Victorian opera house, with seating for 1,000 in the orchestra, balcony, and six boxes.

Ethel Barrymore performed on stage here, and Sarah Bernhardt, along with vaudeville acts. Later, it was “talking pictures”, and in 1931, the theater was renamed The Paramount. During World War II, war bond rallies were staged here. But what happened to a lot of theaters in the 1970s happened to The Paramount: their facilities decayed, reflecting perhaps the decline of the film industry. It closed in 1975.

It was empty for a generation. In 1999 restoration began. Theaters were once the heart of communities large and small, and Rutland has proven to have a lot of heart. The Paramount reopened in 2000, due to the hard work and efforts of many contributors.

Today, live stage shows are produced here. Ethel Barrymore and Sarah Bernhardt, and all those vaudeville acts, might nod in appreciation. We can only smile, and cheer.

For more on The Paramount Theater of Rutland, Vermont, have a look at this website.

Tragedy and Comedy in New England

Henry Fonda and James Stewart found acting work early in their careers in summer stock on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Both worked with the University Players in Falmouth. Fonda also worked with the Cape Playhouse down the road in Dennis, where a young Bette Davis was an usher, soon to get her own chance to perform onstage under Laura Hope Crews. Robert Montgomery, Constance Collier, Frances Farmer, and Lloyd Nolan all appeared here in their apprentice years. Other movie stars who performed here were Humphrey Bogart, Lana Turner, and Ginger Rogers.

Later on, Fonda, still scrounging for work on the New England summer theater circuit, would do odd jobs at the summer theater in Surrey, Maine, where he chauffeured and picked up guest actor Joseph Cotten’s trunk at the railroad depot.

Humphrey Bogart appeared a little further south in Maine at the Lakewood Theater in Skowhegan.

Jane Wyatt got her start with the Berkshire Playhouse in Stockbridge, Mass., where Mary Wickes also played.

Summer stock and road shows were not only for the novice actors. Ethel Barrymore, Basil Rathbone, Cornelia Otis Skinner, and Judith Anderson regularly trod the boards of rather humble New England playhouses, long after they had achieved their fame.

This post is actually to introduce a new blog of mine (Yeah, I know. The Internet really needs another blog) on theatre in New England, past and present. It’s called Tragedy and Comedy in New England, and I hope you can stop by for a visit.

The Spiral Staircase ( 1945)

“The Spiral Staircase” (1945) gives us a suspense story with the archetypal “dark and stormy night”. Many suspense films since have taken a leaf out of the book of director Robert Siodmak and especially cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, and used the devices they did, which now may seem almost cliché. Here every shadow and sinister nuance is fresh, and new, and like nothing that ever came before.

Dorothy McGuire is a servant in a New England household in the early 1900s, headed by a feisty invalid matriarch played by Ethel Barrymore. Miss Barrymore lives with her grown son, Gordon Oliver, and stepson, played by George Brent.

The film opens in a curtained-off room of a small village hotel where a silent movie is being shown. The determined matronly pianist grimly follows the action on screen with musical accompaniment. The camera pans to a rapt audience, no one more rapt than Dorothy McGuire, who is clearly deeply involved in the silent movie, clutching her hanky and suffering agonies with the heroine.

The camera leaves the audience and pans to an upstairs room in the hotel. A woman is spied upon from the dark recesses of her closet by a figure unseen except for the menacing gaze of one frightening eye. Next we see the woman as a victim from the perspective of this hidden killer. We still hear the accompanist’s piano rumbling ominous chords from the floor below. When the killer strangles the girl, the movie below concludes, and it is “the end” indeed.

We discover this is one of a string of murders, and that the victims are all young women with various afflictions.

When Miss McGuire walks back in the darkness to the enormous Victorian home where she works as a maid, the wind and rain kick up, and she hears the sound of footsteps following her. This, and when she fumbles with her house key and drops it in the mud are only two instances where suspense rises, even if nothing is really wrong. The idea of imminent danger is kept moving briskly along, like kids kicking a can down the street. We are continually tricked. There are even comic moments which continue the suspense, such as when the family cook played with humorous brandy-swilling buffoonery by sly Elsa Lanchester, tumbles in the dim hall. At first we are led to believe she may have been attacked, as Lanchester accuses with an outraged, “It was him!”

We see she has only tripped over the ever-recumbent bulldog, Carlton.

Another instance is at the entrance of Lanchester’s husband, handyman Rhys Williams, who enters from the storm suddenly when a door is opened for a guest to leave, and he is unexpectedly standing there on the porch, rain soaked and sinister-looking. Apparently, it is only another false alarm, this time. Maybe.

Williams later comforts McGuire during a cozy visit in the kitchen that being murdered is as rare as winning the lottery. “It’s never me. It’s never you. It’s always somebody else.” The director cleverly plays us between scenes where something could happen but doesn’t, and scenes where something happens before we realize the danger. Maybe it’s the lottery and maybe it’s more like roulette.

Dorothy McGuire’s character is repeatedly warned by others to be careful, as she is labeled, perhaps by them more than by herself, to be a prime candidate for the killer’s next victim, because the killer targets handicapped young women. McGuire is mute, the victim of past emotional trauma, rather than from a physical impairment. Her muteness makes the opening scene watching the silent movie especially poignant, where the pantomime on screen foreshadows McGuire’s world of pantomime to communicate.

The local young doctor, played by Kent Smith wants to help her recover her speech and pushes her to help herself, to get her to replay the trauma that left her mute, but she cannot face painful memories.

McGuire has a special, even occasionally playful, relationship with Ethel Barrymore, who prefers McGuire’s ministrations rather than the severe and much put upon nurse, played by Sara Allgood. Bullying Barrymore’s room is cluttered with hunting trophies. The feisty widow was a crack shot in her day, and she repeatedly warns McGuire to leave the house for her own safety, or else stay with her and sleep in her room, even at one point urging McGuire to hide under Miss Barrymore’s bed. As sick as this old lady with the frequent spells is, she feels quite capable of defending a much younger, stronger woman. We see that Miss McGuire, and her muteness, inspires protective feelings in most people, but apparent disgust in a killer who murders young women with imperfections.

Miss Barrymore’s concern is made greater, as we eventually come to realize, because she believes the killer is not only lurking in the neighborhood, but is actually in the house. We are given several broad hints that her charmingly insolent, gallivanting son Gordon Oliver has dubious morals and weaknesses that may include murder. He confesses that he likes to see women cry.

Stepson Mr. Brent, a workaholic professor, who keeps his secretary Rhonda Fleming busy typing on a clunky old typewriter the size of a Buick, seems to share his stepmother’s suspicions. At this point, with as many red herrings as suspicions, the foreshadowing warns us to be wary of everybody, from the pistol-packing constable to the pistol-packing Miss Barrymore, to Carlton the recumbent bulldog. As George Brent tells McGuire, “Don’t trust anyone.”

Central to the story is the house. The excellent ensemble cast seems to give us a tour of the house, breaking up into pairs for hushed discussions, and impatient lovers’ rendezvous, and bitter arguments in various different rooms, always interrupted at a scene’s climax by unwanted intruders.

A magnificent set, it has many levels and the camera follows McGuire, taking us the audience from room to room, almost like the eye of the killer. The spiral staircase of the title is an iron circular stairway, ugly utilitarian back stairs meant for servants, quite unlike the imposing staircase with the carved wooden banister in the front hall. The spiral staircase leads from the main floor of the house down to the kitchen, and then continues down to a lower cellar level, which is very creepy. People lose their candles down there and get lost in the dark.

Even just the hollow plunking sound of the actors ascending and descending the iron steps echoing in the bare, unadorned stairwell is evocative, as lonely and creepy a sound as the wind and rain outside.

The house is heavily ornamented with Victorian drapery, dark wainscoting, parquet wood floors, elaborate gaslight sconces, elegant chandeliers and miles of carpeting. The walls stretching to high ceilings close in on us with busy wallpaper and dour portraits. Dramatic for its overwhelming sense of a grand age in decline, it is as if the house represents the moral decay of the dwindling dysfunctional family limping along into the decadent present.

We see an interesting contrast in the daydream McGuire imagines of her wedding to the young doctor, which occurs, of course, in the house, the central place to the story. In her daydream sequence the house seems alive again, swarming with guests, and vibrant, lighter, and there are baskets of flowers festooning every corner. One might imagine this is how the house appeared in earlier times, before the old widow lost her husband and her enthusiasm for life, before her son and stepson became the kind of weak men she despises.

A large full-length mirror on the landing of the front stairs gives Dorothy McGuire an opportunity to appraise herself, to see herself as others see her. She silently moves her lips, works her jaw in a pose to see how she would look if she spoke as effortlessly as others do, all the people she envies for their eloquence. Suddenly we are aware through a subtle shift in the camera perspective that she is being watched. In another instant, it is apparent to us that it is the killer who is watching her, that we are looking over the killer’s shoulder, who is looking over hers. So smoothly do these moments of tension occur that they are upon us before we realize.

The last half hour of the film is the most suspenseful. The killer is loose in house and aggressively stalks her. The constable shows up unexpectedly but leaves before she can alert him. Her desperate attempts to attract his attention from an upper floor window bring the film to a dramatic crescendo, and when her last hope for aid is gone, we see there is nothing to stop the killer from getting her.

Now she charges all through the house, upstairs and downstairs, like an Olympic sprinter. The final showdown happens on the spiral staircase, and we learn that neither the mute Miss McGuire, nor the invalid Miss Barrymore, is as helpless as they seem.

Dorothy McGuire does recover her voice, first with a scream, and then with a choking call for help on that new-fangled telephone box. How nice for her that she gets to talk to an operator who is a real person, and not a recorded voice message telling her to press certain buttons for more options. That always makes me want to murder somebody.

An interesting version of this film was produced on radio by Screen Director’s Playhouse with Dorothy McGuire reprising her role. Of course, since this was radio, a mute actress will not do, so McGuire was allowed to speak the private thoughts of her character. This actually worked out pretty well, giving us deeper knowledge of her feelings and her past. The childhood trauma that left her mute was also devastatingly dramatized, and with radio word-pictures we are allowed to imagine an horrific scene fully played out. Her trauma is only briefly discussed in the film.

Also added to the radio version was the Bible passage from the Song of Solomon which McGuire’s character relates to the exquisite beauty of speech and how being able to speak to the doctor, whom she loves, would allow her to express not only her desire for him, but convey her deep wish to be desired, and not just pitied.

“My beloved spoke and said unto me
Arise my love, my fair one
And come away with me.
For lo, the winter is past
The rain is over and gone…
… let me hear thy voice,
for sweet is thy voice….”

This is not included in the film. The radio version also reminds us of the irony that an actress with such a lovely speaking voice is playing a mute.

We don’t get quite as much insight into McGuire’s psyche in the film as we do in the radio version, despite her engaging movie portrayal of the mute young woman. We do get that beautiful house, though. You can’t duplicate Musuraca’s cinematography, and that nightmare labyrinth house, on radio. It is one of those instances where the house becomes like another character in the movie.

Have a listen here for the Screen Director’s Playhouse version of “The Spiral Staircase”.

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.

Walter Hampden

Walter Hampden has a great role in “Sabrina” (1954) as the exasperated father of the Larrabee brothers. The scene where he struggles to get an olive out of a jar is pure screwball comedy, and not something you’d expect from someone who played “Hamlet” three times on Broadway.

Mr. Hampden was in his 70s when “Sabrina” was shot, and he came to the movies late in his career, and played only character parts. He was the longwinded master of ceremonies at the beginning and end of “All about Eve” (1950), which poked fun at his own historic place in American theatre, and he played the Archdeacon in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1939).

He took on a few television roles (nominated for an Emmy), but most of his career was spent on the boards where he played the classics, including heralded stints as Cyrano de Bergerac, Hamlet (once with Ethel Barrymore as Ophelia), and even founded the American Repertory Theatre. His last stage role was in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”

Twenty-one years old at the turn of the 20th century, Mr. Hampden could not then have envisioned sound film let alone television, where he played Hamlet for the last time.

Capping off his film career as Louis XVI of France in “The Vagabond King,” Mr. Hampden was one of those superlative stage actors who proves, and evidently must have felt, that all the world’s a stage.

Rasputin and the Empress (1932)

Rasputin and the Empress (1932) is a watershed film in a couple of different respects. First, it unites on film for the only time all three of the Barrymores. Secondly, due to Hollywood’s (or, at least in this case, producer Irving Thalberg’s) penchant for changing history in a movie about a historical subject to suit the needs of script, a lawsuit gave us the immortal movie words, “All the characters in this film are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental,” or words to that effect.

In the first case, bringing all three famous Barrymore siblings together in a film was a treat for filmgoers of the day and a gift to posterity. Before their film careers, they represented the next generation in America’s pre-eminent theatrical family. A dynamic, tempestuous, and talented generation it was. Since this blog is about the history of film and not theatre, it is enough perhaps to say that the names above the title of Rasputin and the Empress were listed simply, and boldly, as:

John - Ethel - Lionel
BARRYMORE

The audience needed no explanation. This was an all-star lineup, the dream team.

Younger son John, the longtime matinee idol, played Prince Paul Chegodieff, friend of the royal Romanov family. Middle girl Ethel plays the Czarina Alexandra, and oldest child Lionel plays the monk Rasputin, a rapacious and slovenly mystic whose ambition leads him into hypnotizing members of the royal family when he is not engaging in debauchery. Ethel is the heartsick mother of little Czarevitch Alexis, who suffers from hemophilia. Rasputin’s influence over the mother as he works, so he says, miracles with the son will bring down the Russian nobility.

The performances, particularly Ethel’s, are theatrical, and there is quite a bit of newsreel footage of czarist peasants and soldiers to attempt a documentary feel despite obvious errors in the telling of the story. Czar Nicholas’ autocratic administration of his country is glossed over, and this instead becomes the story of how John as Prince Paul, a good guy, has to get rid of his brother Lionel, the mad monk in whom his sister Ethel has so much faith.

The siblings’ scenes together are fun to watch, as they are clearly masters at stagecraft and that is what we are seeing here more than scene stealing. In a scene with John and Lionel, as their characters spar psychologically, Lionel as Rasputin declaring, “I will be Russia!” while John listens thoughtfully, his back turned to him, playing with a rapier. Both brothers are strong actors, neither giving an inch, but also respectful of each others talents.

“There’s something clammy about him,” John says of Rasputin, and describes him, “Like a man-eating shark with a Bible under his fin.”

Lionel does some impressive just-short-of-scenery-chewing here. He clearly has the meatiest role. He is disgusting and creepy. There is a particularly unsettling scene where he forces the young czarevitch, played by Tad Alexander, to watch an ant and a fly at combat under a microscope. The audience is forced to watch as well with intense close-ups as the ant attacks and eats the fly, which Rasputin uses as a teaching tool for political theory.

Another creepy scene is when he gets one of the royal daughters aside and places a locket on her, touching her, like a molesting uncle, and she squirms with discomfort but utter helplessness. Like the cavalry, the lady in waiting played by Diana Wynyard comes to her rescue. An early fan of Rasputin, she begins to change her opinion of him and chases him away from the daughters, when he also tries to hypnotize her so that he may have his way with her.

This, evidently, was the sticking point for the lawsuit against the film. A scene, removed later, suggesting she is raped by Rasputin was decried as false by the real-life counterparts of Prince Paul and her character, who was his wife. He sued; he won, and now we are told that the movie we are watching is fictional. Even if all the names and places and events are real, it’s still fictional, that way we can still make up stuff.

An impressive and realistic fight scene between John and brother Lionel illustrates the death of Rasputin by gunshot, poisoning, beating, and finally drowning. Rasputin was like the Energizer Bunny, but he finally succumbed, and John is the only Barrymore sibling to survive the Russian Revolution, as sister Ethel is massacred with the rest of the Romanovs.

There are a lot of character actors to pick out, and many were uncredited in the film, including Anne Shirley as Princess Anastasia, who later came to life as Ingrid Berman in another film, and Mischa Auer as a waiter. Movies depicting historical events and real people always seem to walk a fine line between creativity and accuracy, but this film that gives us the three Barrymores together is a historical document all by itself.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.