My Wild Irish Rose - 1947

My Wild Irish Rose (1947) is an example of post-World War II Hollywood nostalgia for simpler times, a rambling, ambitious entry in what I always felt should be its own separate genre—the musical about music composers.  It is artificial in the sense that it is cardboard cutout simplistic, yet beloved for its artifice, and is an unrelenting cutesy salute to the Irish. 

It is, in true Hollywood fashion, nothing more than a caricature of Irish Americans (Irish from Ireland, in some respects, have always felt that the Irish Americans were an odd caricature anyway), but that is just what Irish Americans are comfortable with, and so they seem happy enough with the garish cartoon.  Because this is a movie I recall from many a St. Patrick’s Day of my childhood, it carries, if not authenticity, then at least familiarity. I believe familiarity was all that the studios were aiming for when they made such movies, as homey as a hand-stitched sampler.

This is our first entry into a brief exploration over the next few weeks of that “genre”:  the musical about composers. 

Oddly enough, though My Wild Irish Rose purports to be a biography of composer and lyricist Chauncey Olcott, there is no recognition of his participation in the creation of many American pop songs of musical theatre in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and depicts him only as a singer/actor.  His partnership with composers Ernest Ball and George Graff are left out of the film.  Though star Dennis Morgan sings snippets of many songs associated with Olcott: “My Wild Irish Rose,” “Mother Machree,” “TooRa Loo Ra Loo Ral,” and “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” the movie does not inform us that Chauncey  Olcott had a hand in creating and publishing these songs.  Olcott has been elected into the American Composers Hall of Fame, but you’d never know it from this movie.  Upon his death, one of his pallbearers was the great man of Broadway himself, and in many respects his “American” counterpart, George M. Cohan.

Just what the movie does accomplish is a little hard to say, except for an historically accurate representation of the 19^th century minstrel show (scenes which may cause acute disgust and embarrassment today, though I feel any such scene is valuable if historically accurate), and for showcasing Dennis Morgan’s lovely tenor singing voice.

But not everybody was charmed, even in 1947.  What we may have forgiven over the years, what the critics of the day were less likely to overlook. This is from The New York Times of December 25, 1947:

“To say that My Wild Irish Rose tells a story is a gross overstatement, and, even in this season of extraordinary benevolence, one cannot truthfully say that there is a recommendable spirit to the interminable song, dance and specialty interludes that fill out this picture.  As an Irish tenor, Mr. Morgan's singing will hold best with the tone-deaf, and that brogue he affects, and let's not overlook Alan Hale either in this regard, is—just call it murderous.  Indeed, the whole atmosphere of the film is so patronizing and professionally Irish in sentiment that it is downright embarrassing.”

Did the reviewer not find the minstrel affectations embarrassing?  Hmm.

I give the movie full marks if only for casting William Frawley as William J. Scanlan, the grand old man of nineteenth century Irish-themed operettas whom Chauncey Olcott was fated to replace.

And for giving our old friend Grady Sutton a brief role (we discussed Grady in this previous post).  And for casting dear Sara Allgood as Chauncey’s mother.  Trivia buffs may also note that Ruby Dandridge, the mother of Dorothy Dandridge, plays the maid of famed musical theatre star Lillian Russell; and little Kristen Morgan, Dennis Morgan’s real-life daughter, makes a brief appearance as a little girl to whom he sings on stage. 

We won’t discover too much about Chauncey Olcott’s life from this movie, but that should cease to be a surprise about any Hollywood biography.  What we have is John Chancellor Olcott of Buffalo, New York, who runs away from home and a job on a tug boat to make his fortune on the stage; gets involved with a traveling minstrel show; meets Andrea King, who plays Lillian Russell; falls in love with Arlene Dahl, whose da, Alan Hale, thinks he’s not good enough for his little girl.  George Tobias plays a Greek businessman who trails Dennis Morgan throughout the movie with malapropos babble.  George O’Brien is his body builder pal who beats up people who are mean to Dennis, and Ben Blue is his bumbling misfit pal.

Chauncey gets to New York, charms the Tenderloin, replaces the sickly William Frawley with an Irish accent even phonier than Frawley’s (which the movie notes with wry humor and is therefore the most honest thing about the tale).

We may smile over a scene set at Delmonico’s, and at Ruby Dandridge’s wondering how flowers can be “wired” to arrive at a dressing room “how  do they send flowers over telegraph wires?” and Lillian Russell doesn’t know, either.  I love all scenes set in theaters, the plush atmosphere, the palace-like settings, the communal nature from the box to the balcony.

Olcott’s great influence on American pop music before World War I would have made a better movie, and though the story is supposedly based on a book his widow wrote of his life, the thin romance spread across too many years and miles with Arlene Dahl (in her first featured movie role) is a weak story thread; he always seems to spend more time with George O’Brien and Ben Blue.  Dennis Morgan plays a man driven to sing, yet we rarely hear him finish a song in the endless array of montages.

It’s a Technicolor movie, but the predominant shade is green.  Irish-American green, as cartoonish as a box of Lucky Charms.  But that’s all it’s supposed to be.  That is what Americans have created of St. Patrick’s Day.

What should also be noted is the camaraderie, the blending of ethnic groups, the mutual kidding, even the foolish minstrelsy, displays a younger

America more comfortable with itself, more frankly acknowledging of its melting pot.  To be American was to be hyphenated because all save the descendants of native tribes were products of immigrant families.   It was okay to be an immigrant; it was worn like a badge of honor.  The point was they chose to be Americans, and in doing so, honoring we who were born here.

Chauncey Olcott and friend

You can have a listen to this rare audio of the real Chauncey here on YouTube.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all who celebrate it.

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My scheduled talk at the Agawam Historical Association on Wednesday was changed to tonight at 7 p.m., due to the blizzard.

- I'll be speaking about my book on the Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Mass. and its importance during the Civil War for the Agawam Historical Association, at the Captain Leonard House, 663 Main Street, Agawam, Mass.  Free and open to the public, the time is 7 p.m.
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Saturday, March 18, 2017 - I'll be speaking about Comedy and Tragedy on the Mountain at Blue Umbrella Books, 2 Main Street, Westfield, Mass., free and open to the public, 3 p.m.

The time:  1895 to 1965

Setting:  A wooden, barn-like summer playhouse…in an amusement park…on the top of a mountain…in a New England factory town

It was as unlikely a place as you will find for stage plays, but as much a part of the community as the stores and businesses and the red brick maze of factories and canals down below the mountain in the so-called “Flats” by the Connecticut River.  The place was Holyoke, Massachusetts.  For some seventy years live theatre created magic on the mountain above the city.

Though a small theater may seem like a world unto itself, it is not; not entirely.  It reflects its era and its location, that larger world outside its wooden walls; therefore this story is as much about Holyoke, the tri-city area of Holyoke-Chicopee-Springfield, and the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, because this was the audience for the little playhouse on Mt. Tom.  If you are familiar with these towns, then you will find much in this book to jog your memories, for this is your story.

Comedy and Tragedy on the Mountain covers seventy years of live theatre on Mt. Tom, from vaudeville, operetta, WPA-sponsored shows in the Great Depression, and its heyday from 1941 to 1962 with a resident repertory company called The Valley Players.  In the early 1960s, two new incarnations: The Casino-in-the-Park, and finally, the Mt. Tom Playhouse with touring packaged shows featuring well-known stars from television and movies.  Many stars of stage and screen, and many newcomers who would one day become stars, performed over several decades on Mt. Tom.  Through interviews, newspaper reviews, and many photographs, you will relive their performances, and go backstage for personal experiences that were both comic and tragic, and enjoy again the excitement of opening night.

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Speaking of opening nights, I'd like to extend best wishes to the two theatre companies that will be performing my play Sketching the Soul this month.  The first is the Hummingbird Theatre Company of Rochester, New York.  They open tonight, Thursday the 16th:

Hummingbird Theatre Company (formerly BART Productions) presents: Sketching the Soul

by Jacqueline Lynch 

Directed by Donald B. Bartalo

Thur. March 16th - 7:30pm

Fri. March 17th - 7:30pm
Sat. March 18th - 7:30pm
Sun. March 19th - 2:00pm
Thur. March 23rd - 7:30pm
Fri. March 24th - 7:30pm
Sat. March 25th - 7:30pm

Chelsea Logan is an artist struggling with the conflict between her growing celebrity and her Amish upbringing, which she left behind to pursue her ambition, and which she neglected to mention to Mike (her boyfriend), new friends and colleagues.

The past and present, celebrity and spiritually come to a head one frenetic weekend when her younger sister Sarah arrives unexpectedly. Chelsea must explain her sister, and the lifestyle she kept a secret, to Mike, an attorney struggling with his own ethical priorities, and to Maureen Nash an aggressive journalist who arrives with a photographer for an interview (during which Chelsea, with a rather un-Amish-like attitude, pummels the photographer into surrendering the film he has shot of Sarah!) Sarah and Mike together help Chelsea to accept and acknowledge the power of her Amish heritage and to move toward a future she had not expected.

CAST

CHELSEA LOGAN…………….……………Sara Bickweat Penner

MIKE GRIMALDI…………………………..Brian Tan

SARAH RICHTER………………………….Laura Thompson Pratt

NANCY………………………………………….Stephanie Sheak

MAUREEN NASH…………………………..Denise Bartalo

ARTHUR COAKLEY……………………….Joseph Barcia

Tickets are $12 in advance and $15.00 at the door. 

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The second group to perform this same play will be the Belhaven University Theatre Department in Jackson, Mississippi.  They run March 30th to April 1st, directed by Dr. Elissa Sartwell.

Cast
JAMES KENYON as Mike Grimaldi
LECI GRAY as Chelsea Logan
OLIVIA SIMMS as Nancy
RILEY PLEASANTS as Sarah Richter
RACHEL BROOME as Maureen Nash
MAC MITCHELL as Arthur Coakley

Production Staff & Crew
Director: Dr. Elissa Sartwell
Stage Manager: Frannie Maas
Scenic Design: Hannah Kenyon
Technical Director/Lighting Design: Michael Tobin
Costume & Hair/Makeup Design: Alice Bryant
Sound Design: Brittany Lyday
Props Master: Laina Faul
Dresser/Run Crew: Grace Reeves

Admission $10; Seniors/Students $5; Complimentary admission for Belhaven students, faculty, staff and their immediate families. Doors open 30 minutes prior to each performance. We hope that you will join us at the theatre! To reserve tickets for any Belhaven Theatre production, please call 601-965-7026 or email your request to boxoffice@belhaven.edu. Tickets may be purchased with cash or check.

My thanks and very best wishes to both companies.  Break a leg!

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”.