Good News (1947)

Good News (1947) presents a 1920s college campus, taken from the 1927 Broadway musical and revived in this MGM treatment. One notable aspect to this film is that none of the featured players is able to sing on key.

In some perverse way, I find this endearing. June Allyson’s and Peter Lawford’s singing limitations are by now legendary, but I especially like Joan McCracken in the comic role of Babe Doolittle. Even her speaking voice is slightly off-key, and that is just cute.

The exception to this vocal limitation among the musical stars of Good News is Mel Torme, but The Velvet Fog’s role as one of the students is so minor that he can’t help them much.

Just when did “Babe”, as in Babe Ruth and Babe Didrikson stop being a popular nickname? Oliver Hardy’s nickname also was Babe. An innocent moniker that must belong to innocent times.

Cute as a button June Allyson is the corn-fed All-American Girl working her way through college in the campus library. Peter Lawford is the handsome Big Man on Campus, and we have our usual cast of brawny but dumb athletes, wealthy kids, poor kids, kids with witty sayings inked on sweatshirts, kids with witty sayings painted on jalopies, and kids with witty sayings on rain slickers.

The big number seems not to go to star June Allyson, but is thrown to Miss McCracken in a zippy rendition of “Pass That Peace Pipe,” where she dances up a storm to a faux-Indian war dance. Such a show-stopper, it is also featured in That’s Entertainment Part III (1994). Some of the tribes she rattles off so impressively are not the names of tribes, but rather are place names. One assumes these words are used to conveniently complete the rhymes, or perhaps the writers did not realize that American Indians had names for things other than themselves. A small point, but file this under my unfortunate fascination with the mundane. Nice touch that her dress, while, with its geometric pattern meant to invoke an American Indian motif and make her stand out from the rest of the dancers, still manages to look like a street dress and not a costume.

A note on the costuming and hair: only some of it seems to accurately depict 1920s styles. The rest is straight out of 1947.

Joan McCracken was featured in a Life magazine article of October 2, 1944, three years before this film was made. She had just made waves with a brief but featured role as a dancer in the enormous Broadway hit Oklahoma, and had captured the media’s attention. It was a breakout role for her, and Good News with her energetic dancing likewise could have been a breakout role for her. Unfortunately, it was to be her only film. With a handful of Broadway credits, and handful of television appearances, Joan McCracken died at 43 years old of heart disease related to diabetes.

Behind the college high jinks, we have a couple of other likewise more sober aspects to consider. First, is that Good News appears to be another in a string of “good old days” examinations of the 1920s that came out of Hollywood in the post-war era. Evidently the Depression, the war, and the new eerie landscape the Cold War was beginning to represent was enough to make the public (at least in Hollywood’s eyes) long for days of sweet innocence and unabashed craziness of a less lethal sort.

Singin' in the Rain (1952) was more successful at this, using parody to cozy up to a time long past, and even Sunset Blvd (1950) discussed with Singin' in the Rain here, though a dramatic turn, managed to cast a light on the supposed glamour of a bygone era a few decades ago.

The second aspect interesting to consider is that Good News would likely have had little appreciation among the modern college student of that time, many of whom were returning World War II veterans. These “kids” had already matriculated on Tarawa, the Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima, and all points in between. They were serious students such as college campuses had never seen before, and have not seen since. June Allyson singing “The Best Things in Life Are Free” is sweet, but likely none of these Big Men on Campus would have cared if Tait College won the football game or not.

This was a film for younger kids, high school kids probably, and older people, who were shying away from the more realistic films coming out of Hollywood, and looking for something akin to a family film. Good News, the Broadway play of 1927 might have been current events, but Good News the movie of twenty years later is fantasy, and its message, if it had any, like the singing, was slightly off-key.

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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.

Movie Locations

Author Tony Reeves’ “The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations” (A Cappella Books, Chicago, 2001) tell us that the lighthouse during the big gale in “Portrait of Jennie” (1948) which had tragic consequences for Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten was actually Graves End Light off Boston Harbor.

The book is filled with fascinating entries on the actual locations of movie shoots, though most movie buffs are aware that nearly all films in the Golden Age of Hollywood were shot right on the soundstage.

“Shadow of a Doubt” (1943) gives us a good hometown view of Santa Rosa, California where director Alfred Hitchcock used the train station, and an actual home on McDonald Avenue for the Newton residence.

“Stagecoach” (1939) gave us the first view in a western of the magnificent Monument Valley, which would figure in many westerns in years to come.

“Sunset Blvd.” (1950) of course gave us the glimpse of the iconic Paramount studio gates.

Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958) takes us to several spots around San Francisco, including Telegraph Hill, and the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Way Down East” (1920) D. W. Griffith makes famous Vermont’s White River Junction as the spot of the dangerous crossing on the ice floes.

Take a look at this book for more movie locations you can still visit, though most are from more modern films. The greatest fantasies of the Golden Age were the locations created purely from scratch. Those rain-washed city streets and quiet country lanes and fog enshrouded castles were all myth. They were believable only because we wanted to believe.

Close-up Madness

Gloria Swanson’s famous, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille,” in “Sunset Blvd.” (1950) gives us a slow, blurry and grotesque zoom-in on the tortured, dream-like expression of a woman gone mad. We already knew her trolley was a bit derailed early in the film when she is introduced as a lonely, self-important eccentric. The final close-up tells us nothing new about her, it just slashes away that discrete personal space between us and the unfortunate victim.

The extreme close-up to illustrate madness is also used very quickly, and most startlingly, in “The Most Dangerous Game” (1932) when we are forced almost literally down the evil Count Zaroff’s throat as we stand, with Fay Wray at the top of the stone staircase of his fog-enveloped castle on the uncharted island, a place where he hunts humans. She is going off to bed, while her drunken sot of brother, played comically by Robert Armstrong, assures her that their host will look after him, “The Count’ll take care of me all right.”

“Indeed I will,” the Count, played by Leslie Banks, replies heavily as the tracking shot zooms effortlessly down those stairs from Miss Wray’s vantage point, and ours, and smacks into Mr. Banks’ hollow gaze. It is our first clue of his madness. Until now we have no reason to believe he is, like Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond, nothing more than a colorful eccentric. A colorful character, but not a loony. This close-up tells us there is something more sinister and off balance to him, and removes our comfortable distance from him.

Another even more brief, but insightful close-up indicating emotional disturbance is used, unexpectedly, in the holiday family favorite, “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946). James Stewart, in deep trouble, wishes he was never born and Clarence the angel arranges it. Through a wild exploration of a hometown he no longer recognizes, confronting friends and family who no longer know him, we first have a hint that Stewart’s character George Bailey is losing it when he prays in the noisy bar and confesses to God, and to us, two important bits of information. One, he is “not a praying man” and two, “I’m at the end of my rope.”

Later, when his own mother, now a destitute and bitter widow in this bizarro world does not recognize him and refuses to shelter him, George runs away not more than a few steps down her sidewalk and runs smack into us. We do not come to him in his close-up, he comes to us, and stops, and slowly turns his head, searching from one direction to the other, and pauses a brief moment to look with horror into our faces. It is a personal moment for George, a Twilight Zone moment where his world is gone, and he is lost, and he is now a man on the very edge of sanity. His brings his horror to us, much as he has just brought it to the doorstep of his mother. She has sent him away, but what are we to do?

Unlike Count Zaroff and Norma Desmond, George Bailey’s madness is brief, a nightmare that clears and we have a happy ending. The rest of the film is long shots of George in his happy environment, his town’s streets, his big old house. He is always with other people, often a lot of them in each scene. The close-up he shares only with us.

Movie madness can often take the form of wild ranting and aggressive behavior, but it is ironically most chilling, and most personal, when it is still, silent, and very close.

This blog entry is part of The Eyes Have It Close-up Blog-a-Thon at The House Next Door. Have a look at this website for more interesting blogs on the art of the movie close-up.

Paramount Pictures

Paramount is 95 years old this year. It is the only motion picture studio from Hollywood’s “Golden Age” to remain in Hollywood after the many others closed, or moved to the suburbs. Its famous “Bronson gate,” a feature since the studio was built 1926-27, has been seen most notably in “Sunset Blvd.” (1950), and in publicity shots of the stars, and in the scrapbooks of the fans. Take the studio tour, and have someone take a picture of you by the gate. If it was good enough for Fred MacMurray, it’s good enough for you.

"Singin'" and "Sunset", Two Parodies of Silent Film

The film industry of the 1920s was parodied twice in the early 1950s with intelligence, wit, and great success. Each film, however, showed a different side to the irresistible mayhem of when sound came to screen. One, as shown in Singin' in the Rain (1952) was frothy, silly and fun, and the other, Sunset Blvd. (1950) was biting, cynical, and tragic. They are both masterfully told stories, and they are both true.

In Singin' in the Rain we have a scene which tells all the difficulties of the new sound technology when poor Jean Hagen is wired with a microphone in her costume bodice, which picks up her heartbeat. Her inability to remember to speak directly into the mic later has hysterical consequences for the movie she and Gene Kelly are desperately trying shoot. Conversely, in Sunset Blvd., Gloria Swanson sits for a moment in Cecil B. DeMille’s director’s chair, waiting to speak with him, and a mic on a boom trails lightly over her head as she visits his busy movie set. She looks up at it, first with wary curiosity, like a woman trying to avoid a large bee at a picnic, then her eyes focus in on the vile reminder of the death knell of her silent screen career. She looks at it with revulsion, and lightly pushes it away.

Singin' in the Rain, called by many the best musical ever made, picks up on the camp of a campy era and splashes us not only with the rain falling on Gene Kelly’s dance number, but a collage of 1920s era styles in clothing, slang, and movie business. The dance numbers are colorful and poke gentle fun at the speech coaches, the stunts, a montage of flappers, college boys, gossip columnists, and Hollywood parties. In one such party, a movie screen in the living room of a film mogul shows the astounded partygoers a demonstration of sound recorded on film. In Sunset Blvd., Gloria Swanson’s own ornate, decaying Hollywood mansion also has a movie screen in her living room where she views only her own silent pictures.

Sunset Blvd. is creepy where Singin' in the Rain is cute, and this is due is great part to Swanson’s riveting performance (receiving an Academy Award nomination), and mainly because it was herself she was boldly mocking. It gives us a feeling of discomfort that she is not merely parodying a long-ago era as Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds are doing, poking fun at experiences lived by other people. Swanson shows us her own youth, her own career down the tubes, the dark side of the bubbly era, and the fallout after the destruction. What is remarkable, too, is that 1950, when the film was made, was only twenty years after the end of the silent film era. Barely time for one new generation to take the reins in the entertainment industry and change it, only to look back with disdain and condescension on what came before. William Holden tells her it is no shame to be 50, unless she pretends to be 25. That is not quite true. As we see through repeated remarks of underlings at the studio, she is regarded as a dinosaur. Her crime really is just being 50 in an industry which will always prefer youth.

Singin' in the Rain is as giddy as a senior class play, and Sunset Blvd. is an obituary. Both these films are useful in examining the post-1920s view of the silent film era.

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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.