One scene in our look at "The Unfaithful" (1947) last week here--really delighted me and I thought I'd save that for this week. It's this view of a funicular railway in downtown Los Angeles. We see Marta Mitrovich, who plays the widow of Ann Sheridan's attacker, traveling home to her working-class neighborhood on this railway car, when she reads the news of her husband's death in the newspaper.
I don't suppose there's any reason to have this scene on this funicular, it has nothing to do with the plot, but it makes for a nice foray into Los Angeles sights, and "The Unfaithful" is full of them. I remembered seeing this same funicular in "The Turning Point" (1952) -- a movie we'll have to discuss sometime or other.
In that movie, we see William Holden and Alexis Smith riding the steep railway as they ferret out a mystery.
The funicular is called Angel's Flight Railway, and was built in the Bunker Hill area of downtown L.A. in 1901. I understand it has been filmed in a handful of movies,
Another shot from "The Turning Point"
The original Angel's Flight was dismantled in 1969 when the area underwent an extensive urban renewal project, and a lot of the, now rundown, but historically significant buildings in the neighborhood were demolished.
Here in "The Turning Point" the camera pans out the window and we can see an example of what the neighborhood looked like before it was demolished.
The funicular is only about two blocks long. It was built at a time when the Bunker Hill area was fashionable. It continued to be used as daily transportation by working-class people when the neighborhood demographics changed, and finally, torn down when the promise of the future came, as it did to so many cities, in the form of really ugly 1970s steel-and-concrete urban renewal projects.
Funny, though, that our wish to be modern fights our wish to be nostalgic. Giving in, perhaps, to this secondary urge, as well as the desire to turn any attribute into a tourist attraction, the Angel's Flight was re-created a little bit south of where the original stood.
The Long Beach Airport in Long Beach, California, specifically its Art Deco style terminal building, has been used in a number of movies over the decades. Among the films with scenes shot here are “The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer” (1947), “Executive Suite” (1954), which we’ll discuss in more depth down the road, and “Key to the City” (1950). I believe some modern TV shows have also used this location.
I stumbled on this airport film history accidentally while watching “A Stolen Life” (1946), discussed in this recent post. When Bette Davis was striding through an airport terminal, I suddenly noticed markings on the floor that looked familiar. They turned out to be that map of the world with lines drawn connecting airline destinations we see in the opening scenes of “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946), when Dana Andrews lugs his overstuffed suitcase across the terminal, looking for a flight home. Aha, same airport terminal, confirmed by our friends at the IMDb website.
I don’t suppose that shot is discussed that often as a “message image” in this landmark film on the homecoming of three servicemen after World War II, but for me this view of Dana Andrews walking, encumbered with his bag, across the map of the earth in his weary journey home is iconic.
I don’t know if director William Wyler thought of the image that way, but Dana walking across the map seems to set up the stories of these three men arriving from all corners of the earth to get home, and getting stuck, for the moment, at a modern civilian airport that can’t get them where they want to go. It will service the businessman with his golf clubs, but Fred, Homer, and Al must trudge to the Air Transport Command in a ramshackle hangar across the field.
In “A Stolen Life” there is no such greater meaning to the airport terminal, except that Bette Davis is meeting her cousin here while she is pretending to be her twin sister. It is a place of meeting and greeting and new beginnings overshadowed with foreboding.
In “Executive Suite” there is also intrigue in the form of a corporate takeover and executive businessmen jockeying for position in a faltering company. We see Paul Douglas being tailed by Fredric March here, and William Holden and Walter Pidgeon conferring on strategy. All their comings and goings center on business trips. Here the airport backdrop is a place of hustle and urgency. We don’t get to see a shot of the floor in this one, and I’d love to know if that old map is still there.
The Long Beach Airport was built in the late 20s, and commercial aviation began at least by the mid-1930s. The Art Deco style terminal building was constructed in 1941.
(Above have a look at the trailer, and also a newsreel of the Hollywood premiere.)
The movie “Peyton Place” (1957) opens with the joyous sound of church carillon chimes and stunning shots of New England pastoral scenes. The opening shots and score exude a sense of triumph and soulful beauty. A remarkable, clever, and somewhat astounding introduction to a story that had been up to that time one of the most controversial novels ever written, banned in most states and some countries for obscenity. Even today, the phrase “Peyton Place” carries the meaning of a morally corrupt community, a den of secrets, a bastion of promiscuity. You’d never know it by the inspiring travelogue over the opening credits.
The first few minutes of the film are really quite magnificent for establishing the setting, and the premise of the story. An outsider to this New England small town, who will be its new high school principal, drives through the countryside on his way to Peyton Place. Passing farms and fields, he arrives at a train crossing and must wait for the train to pass. He glances over to the dilapidated shacks by the tracks, and sees the downtrodden Cross family, whose story is to figure prominently in the film. He drives on, and we are left for the moment with Betty Field, the careworn mother trying to persuade her grown son not to run away from his violent, drunken stepfather, played by the wonderful Arthur Kennedy. We meet her lovely teenaged daughter Selena, played by Hope Lange, and when the slobbering Arthur Kennedy places a heavy hand on Miss Lange’s shoulder for a moment and she shudders, we have a premonition as to how things are going to play out for this wretched family.
We rejoin the new high school principal Mr. Rossi, played by Lee Philips, in his car again as he drives the rain-washed streets of the proper little town, passing the house of Lloyd Nolan, who plays the town doctor, as he comes out in his bathrobe to pick up his morning newspaper. The Doc shows us the headline about US neutrality threatened by Hitler, and we know we are in the early 1940s, just before America’s entry into World War II.
It is as perfect an opening five minutes a movie can get for immersing the audience in the place, the time, and the mood, setting us up for what’s going to happen as the film unfolds.
I would imagine, though, that most people going to see this movie when it was released in 1957 actually did know what was going to happen in the story; or at least thought they did. So many read the book.
There probably had never been up until that time a novel more vigorously criticized and yet more familiar to the public which avowed disgust for it, and claimed disinterest in it on moral grounds. Many called it a “dirty” book, but others evidently found it irresistible. The build-up for the book and the movie were tremendous.
Grace Metalious, the young author of “Peyton Place” was called the Pandora in Blue Jeans in the flood of publicity surrounding the publication of her novel because of her habit of dressing in jeans and flannel shirts, her hair tied back in a ponytail. It added to her intrigue, because she did not look like a glamorous all-knowing town gossip, yet gossip, some of it actually true, was what she peddled in her novel of seamy goings on in a New England mill town.
Her first published novel, the book came out when she was 33 years old. It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for several months. It made her famous. It made her wealthy, for a time. In the wake of her success, however, there came a degree of pressure that she was perhaps unable to bear. Always a mercurial personality, somewhat self-pitying, obsessive and undisciplined, she died of alcoholism before she was 40. Part of the strain of her success was the ostracism by her community of Gilmanton, New Hampshire for their representation in “Peyton Place,” as much as for the lurid content of her book.
She didn’t help matters when publicizing her novel. In an interview with syndicated columnist Hal Boyle, she noted of Gilmanton, “To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture…but if you go beneath that picture, it’s like turning over a rock with your foot -- all kinds of strange things crawl out.”
This is an intriguing statement to make in view of the film’s beautiful postcard shots of an idyllic New England. We have the voiceover narration by the character of Allison MacKenzie, played very well with a great deal of natural talent by newcomer Diane Varsi, “Time was told not by the clock or the calendar, but by the seasons.” Anyone who has ever lived in New England knows how true this is. Varsi continues to speak in poetic terms of the seasons, and then adds, “There was a fifth season of love, and only the wise or the lucky ones knew where to find it.”
Compare this with how the book actually begins, “Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle…”
The lyrical narration of the film stands apart from the earthy language of the book, and there are so many other differences that illustrate a lot about what film was willing to accept at that time. The anxious, shy boy Norman Page, played by Russ Tamblyn in the film, is made miserable by his possessive mother. His mother’s relationship with Norman in the book is much more twisted and more explicitly so. In the novel, sexual assignations are obviously more frank. It has been suggested by present-day writers, including biographer Emily Toth in her “Inside Peyton Place” (Doubleday & Co., NY 1981) that Grace Metalious represents a beginning to the feminist movement, in part because of her willingness to address mature themes in a frank manner.
There may certainly be some element of that in the legacy of her novel, but I’m not sure I would go so far as to call Metalious a feminist herself. She boastfully admitted a dependence on husbands and lovers, and even bitterly referred to herself as having lost her womanhood when she underwent an hysterectomy. I think in Grace Metalious we have a writer who was not particularly crusading in terms of feminism, or class tension, or gutsy in depicting sex, but simply a woman who unselfconsciously wrote about what interested her, in the everyday speech she used herself. One of the strengths of her novel is its unselfconsciousness.
The film is the opposite in this respect, it is quite obviously self conscious and needs to toe the mark to acceptable social standards in the way the book does not. (Though even Metalious was reined in by her publishers and agent when they changed a key element in the first draft of her novel. She had originally written Selena Cross as getting raped by her biological father, Lucas Cross. To Ms. Metalious’ dismay, though the rape was allowed to be left in, they insisted that Lucas Cross be changed to her stepfather, rather than her father. Rape of a teenaged girl by a male guardian may be ugly, but by a father was evidently unacceptable. It did not seem to matter that this was one of a few episodes in the book that Metalious based on an actual event and real people.)
Other elements in the story, pregnancy by rape, abortion, suicide, murder were either diminished or attempted to be treated tastefully in the film. The shock of Allison MacKenzie on the discovery that her deceased father and her mother were never married remains, but the film’s manner of revealing this scandal later on in the story I think is more effective than it coming out early in the novel.
One thing the novel loses in the translation to film is the undercurrent of ethnic and class tension. The town’s largest employer, the textile mill owned by Leon Ames, whose spoiled son cavorts with the high school trollop, is represented as a backdrop to the story, showing us this is a mill town, but we get very little of the labor versus management, rich people versus poor people in the film than we do in the novel.
Grace Metalious said of the film that she was “pleasantly surprised, but I thought it was too sugar coated.” Well, yeah. It seems with a beguiling innocence Ms. Metalious thought her novel, which echoed and taught an entire generation of teenagers about sexual awakening, would be transferred to the screen literally.
Instead, producer Jerry Wald and director Mark Robson created something that was a hybrid of the novel, but that stood apart on its own, was its own creation.
When selecting a filming location, the town of Gilmanton, New Hampshire adamantly refused to have anything to do with the movie, because it felt that the book had already given the town a bad name. However, though some characters and some incidents told in the novel came from local town stories that Metalious had heard, Metalious admitted that probably 75% of the book was written before she’d ever moved to Gilmanton. Originally she came from the much larger industrial city of Manchester, New Hampshire, and the book depicts a composite of a New England mill town. She actually set the fictional Peyton Place along the Connecticut River, nowhere near Gilmanton.
Where then, is Peyton Place? It’s not Woodstock, Vermont either, a town farther up the Connecticut River that resembled what Metalious described, but refused to let Hollywood film, and brand, their town. Finally, Camden, Maine, a seaside village with no resemblance to Peyton Place in the novel, was chosen not only for its quintessential New England beauty, but its willingness (along with Rockland, and Belfast) to be portrayed as the sinful town.
Over 1,700 locals signed up to be extras in the film. So much for scandal.
One opening overhead shot here looks a lot to me like Boothbay Harbor, Maine, but I can’t find any mention that any shots of Boothbay Harbor were used in the film. Maybe some of our readers can clarify that.
Here is the famous scene of Norman and Allison on the hill overlooking Peyton Place. It is actually Mount Battie in Camden. Here is my photo as it looks today, and from the film. It is truly one of the most lovely sights, and if you ever find yourself in Down East Maine, take a side trip up the auto road and treat yourself to a picnic in paradise.
Speaking of picnics, the film’s Labor Day picnic gives us a cheerful glimpse of small-town togetherness, (barbershop quartets and gluttonous little boys eating more than they should) glossing over the undercurrent of tension, underscoring the importance of the town’s apparently only mill to the local economy, and sets us up for more crisis and conflict.
The film deftly covers, if less frank and in less detail than the novel, a stream of subtle realities about conformity and the consequences of stepping outside what is acceptable. Though the younger actors, particularly Hope Lange, who is touching as the vulnerable Selena, have the weight of society on them, the older generations have an equal part in suffering the consequences of scandal. The small, but moving side story of spinster teacher Mildred Dunnock (last seen here in “I Want You” - 1951) getting cheated on her promotion to principal is one of the film’s many important subplots that are handled well and tell us much about the community with a light touch.
Interestingly, this movie made in 1957 about the early 1940s carries the veneer of nostalgia to it. A cozy, but not condescending, nostalgia. Mostly accurate, there are only a few costume choices which look more like 1957 than 1940. When we see the high school senior dance at the gym, with a banner lauding the class of 1941, we may well cringe with foreboding (as we did not in “Life Begins for Andy Hardy” in this post), that in six months the U.S. will be at war and some of these characters may be war casualties.
A lot happens in the film, but it flows so well, and so remarkably gently, that it remains entertaining throughout and one may actually forget the novel’s lurid reputation because the film is a thing apart. It’s fun to recognize individuals in the large cast, like Lorne Greene as the snide prosecuting attorney, and teen heartthrob David Nelson fresh from TV’s “Ozzie and Harriet” to play Hope Lange’s boyfriend.
Is the film the real Peyton Place? It was very well received, and made the novel perhaps more respectable, therefore making it more popular. Grace Metalious, though she wanted to move on to other projects, went back to the well and wrote a sequel, which was made into another movie (other TV incarnations followed), but this project she frankly admitted was only for the money. She could never really get away from her creation.
But perhaps her creation stopped being hers once it got into the hands of those teenagers and housewives, and all the readers who made it second to “Gone With the Wind” in books sold. Today, few have read the novel and many, thanks to TV, have seen the movie.
Gilmanton, New Hampshire probably need not have worried about “Peyton Place” ruining their town’s reputation, since Peyton Place quickly morphed into Everytown, USA. The film often diligently reminds us it is set in New England with the actors using a light New England-sounding long “ah” sound to vowels that is, if not totally accurate, is certainly enough. Norman is called Naahman by everybody.
It’s probably best when films suggest an accent rather than to try to completely replicate it, because our regional accents are so diverse, that audiences in another part of the country might not catch what is said. In the opening moments of the film when the new principal drives through the countryside and asks a farmer driving a horse-drawn plow for directions, listen to the farmer’s response in his authentic Yankee accent. Could you listen to that for two and a half hours? Particularly if you were from St. Louis, Tallahassee, or Cheyenne? I think not.
The only locals who seem not to use a New England accent are factory owner Leon Ames, who sounds southern, and Lana Turner as Allison MacKenzie’s mother Constance, who makes no attempt and also seems rather more glamorous than the average citizen of Peyton Place. Another actress might have added more depth to the role, though Miss Turner was big name whose stardom, and tragically coincidental real-life scandal, likely added welcome publicity for the film. Lana Turner, unlike many of the principle actors, never traveled to Camden, Maine to film her scenes. We see her strolling a lot past rear-screen projection.
The film ends with its own courtroom drama, with Selena on trial for the murder of her stepfather. Lloyd Nolan defends Selena by accusing the town of neglect, “She couldn’t trust us with the truth.”
“We’re all prisoners of each other’s gossip.”
“Our best young people leave as soon as they’re old enough to pay for the price of a bus ticket.”
“We’re a small town but a prosperous one, and yet we allow tar paper shacks to stand.”
He laments the community’s failure to look after its own. The film ends with another idyllic shot of a tree-covered street lined by houses and white picket fences, two kids lazily bicycling by, with another voiceover by Allison MacKenzie “We finally discovered that season of love. It is only found in someone else’s heart. Right now someone you know is looking everywhere for it, and it’s in you.”
A sweet and gentle way to end a movie based on a novel banned as obscene in several states and some countries. Where is Peyton Place, really? Somewhere back in the 1950s, when things were changing, and we knew even then nothing would be the same?
You might look for it in the “Peyton Place Archives” of the Camden Public Library.
Grace Metalious is buried in a far corner of a Gilmanton, New Hampshire cemetery. For all her resentment of small town oppression, she said in a 1961 interview, “I live there because I couldn’t stand to live anywhere else…in Gilmanton I don’t have to be part of the town.”
Incongruous? There’s a lot of that going around. Come back next Monday when the town picnic moves to the Midwest. Until then, below we have the idyllic ending to “Peyton Place”.
The novel explores the aspect of economics in the story more fully than this film does. A young Englishwoman is the heir to a relative’s fortune, which he acquired in Australia, exploiting some that country’s mineral worth and taking it back to the UK (or Pommyland, as the case may be). Because of the prejudice this chap had for what he felt were the limited abilities of women, insisting that “a lassie is at the mercy of her sex”, this money was left to his female heir only at the discretion of a male solicitor, who was in charge of how she could spend it. When the solicitor informs Jean Paget of her legacy, she informs him she wants to go to Malaya and dig a well for some poor villagers. Then she tells him why, and here we have the unfolding of the story.
The Australian-produced TV version, as is typical with a mini-series, had the luxury of time to spread the novel out over several hours in several episodes. This 1956 British-made film is a more capsulated version, and ends before the story really carries us to Australia. Despite that, it is striking for showing the consequences of the 1941 Japanese invasion of the far-flung British Empire as it was in Malaya, and filmed only a little over a decade after the setting of the story. This is what gives this version a kind of authenticity. No matter how good or realistic a film is made today about a past event, it always carries a telescoping view of it.
Virginia McKenna is radiant as Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman working in an office in Malaya before the outbreak of war. Peter Finch plays the Australian soldier Joe Harman, whom she meets when they are both prisoners of the Japanese.
Much of the film is devoted to the scramble of the English in their self-made British colony to escape the advance of the invading Japanese, and then how they make do as prisoners once they are caught. We are shown how the women, separated from the men, are forced marched for several hundred miles, crisscrossing the Malay Peninsula because the Japanese Army has no camps for them and no one wants to take responsibility for them.
We are shown how these women, who in peacetime were separated into class divisions by wealth and pedigree, are now thrown together with no class distinction, how they must cooperate or die. We see how former relations with the Malays, whom they once regarded as their social inferiors, are now humbly appealed to for help. Jean is the most successful at this, as she appears to be a woman who, more than level-headed and resourceful, is also gracious and courteous. Her humility might have once made her a wallflower at a governor’s dance at Singapore’s old Raffles Hotel, but now it makes her a successful prisoner and admired among the native population who want to help her. This is truly a case of where the last shall be first.
This is also the story of the peculiar strength of women which springs from their empathy for one another. As some of the women die, the others assume responsibility for the orphaned children, just as Jean has taken on three of them. The women comfort each other, and even take care of their Japanese guard when he falls ill. A Malay woman bullies her merchant husband into giving Jean precious cans of condensed milk for the baby Jean lugs on her hip. We are shown the female bond is stronger than class distinction, nationality, or war. Their capacity for nurturing saves them.
I find amusing one scene this film which bears (or bares) I think an ironically Victorian outlook, and that is the representation of the women as they stumble upon an abandoned complex in which there is running water. So joyous are they to be able to bathe after weeks of marching through swamps and jungle that they strip and succumb to the comfort of showers, while carefully placed camera shots infer that they are naked. We are shown legs and underarms without body hair. As illogical as this is, evidently, the producers feel impelled to try and shock us with the brutality of a prison camp, but seem to think body hair would somehow offend us. It is not to be shown. We could chalk it up to being a 1956 film, except that I’ve seen this same thing in some other present-day made dramas about similar experiences of World War II female prisoners of war. There might be something here about a preference for idealizing women protagonists with flattering photography. There is more than one way to “sanitize” a story. Maybe you have some ideas on this.
Having lost all their belongings, including razors, the ladies remain sweaty, but hairless. Mrs. Frith, played here by Nora Nicholson, is a hypochondriac who proves to be more physically fit than anybody. Another lady, aghast at Jean’s wearing a sarong, scoffs at the notion of an English lady letting down her standards. She is aped by little Malay boys who laugh at her in her proper suit and hat, carrying her luggage. The musical score playfully launches into a bit of “Rule Britannia” to underscore the lady’s foolishness and the irrelevance of her self superiority.
Perhaps no other culture can top the English for their admirable ability to make fun of themselves, particularly at a period when the sun did not set on the British Empire. We Americans do not like to think of ourselves as empirical and are sometimes annoyed when others do consider us an empire. Invariably, we are better at laughing among ourselves at ourselves, than laughing when other nations laugh at us.
Another part of the British Empire comes to the rescue of these women, when a couple of Australian soldiers, also prisoners, pull tricks to get them some food and medicines. Joe Harman, played by handsome and charming Peter Finch, is immediately taken with Jean, and goes out on a limb to get her more supplies. The chemistry between Mr. Finch and Miss McKenna is something terrific, and when they sit quietly in the dark, after the standard erotic lighting of her cigarette scene, he tells her of his home deep in the Outback, in the middle of Australia, on a cattle station near a town called Alice Springs. Her eyes are riveted on him as he speaks. Her cupping of his hands as he lights her cigarette is the only physical contact, but the scene is intense.
Though they sit together and whisper in the dark, there are still walls between them. They are prisoners, their moments together are stolen. They are of different nationalities and likely would never have met but for their subjugation by the Japanese. He also believes she is married, because she always carries a baby. When he talks of Alice Springs, it sets them both free from all that for a moment. They are free among the red earth of the mythical Outback.
Ultimately, Mr. Finch pulls one hat trick too many for Miss McKenna’s behalf, gets caught, and is tortured by crucifixion. The women are whisked away on another march, and their guard, now in disgrace, an outcast among his fellow soldiers for innocently eating chicken stolen for the women, is left by himself to shepherd them to nowhere. Played by Kenji Takaki in this 1956 film, the guard is shown to have helped the women, to have watched over their children, and mourned with them. Had this film been made during the war, we would have seen a wicked caricature instead of a human being.
Even Jean, with her graciousness and humility, succumbs to hatred for the kind guard after the torture of Joe, panicking when he goes near her baby, and calls him a Jap.
But when he dies, the women find themselves in an even more precarious state. Jean appeals to the headman of a village, asking that the English women be allowed to work in their rice fields in exchange for a place to stay until the war is over. She approaches him respectfully, and asks permission to speak with him as woman on behalf of women, since their guard is dead and they have no man to speak for them. She squats in the dirt as they do, a little away from them to emphasize her unworthiness, and the village elder considers her outlandish request.
She adds, cleverly quoting from the Koran since he and most of the Malay people are Muslim, “Is it not also written that ‘if ye be kind to women, God is well acquainted with what you do’?”
“Are you of the faith?” he asks, amazed.
“No, but wise words are well in any faith.”
We see that Jean is a survivor, not the kind that clings and scratches, but one who makes a gift of her dignity and kindness, and thereby survives with her humanity intact. One day the village elder will refer to Jean fondly as “Daughter.” Again Nevil Shute examines the inconvenience of being a woman and turns it into strength, displaying his own remarkable empathy. This novel could not be more understanding of a woman’s place and prospects in that era if it had been written by a woman.
The war ends, and Jean must hand the baby, now a four-year old, back to a father he does not remember. And she discovers by accident that Joe Harman had survived his torture. She thought he had died. She asks for her lawyer’s permission for more money to go to Australia to find him. In the meantime, Joe has won a lottery, uses the money to travel to England and is in her lawyer’s office seeking her. Surely a twist on the interdependent relationship between love and money.
It makes a wonderfully ironic finale, and when they reunite in Alice Springs, this is where the film ends. There is a tentative, shy hesitation, and then a breathless hug as the old walls between them crumble. It’s a romantic ending, but leaves the novel truncated. In the novel, and in the 1981 miniseries, the story continues in Australia, as Jean aids the lonely dying outback town which is losing men because there are few women, by establishing a business, and then another, giving jobs to women. Again, women are the focus as they achieve financial independence and empowerment, and nurture the community into thriving.
Through her enterprise, she has revived the town, which brings the story full circle. Her relative who left her the legacy took wealth from Australia, and in her way, she returns it.
There is a shot in this 1956 film from what would appear to be the top of Anzac Hill in Alice Springs. It shows the distant
McDonnell Ranges, and below the grid of three or four streets which make up the town. What struck me upon seeing this film was how familiar the view was to me. Captivated by both the book and the 1981 miniseries, I went to Alice Springs some years ago. I had business in another part of the country and this was a side trip, an opportunity I couldn’t miss. It is a long way to go because of a book you’d read nearly a couple of decades ago. It’s that kind of book.
I’m not the only one to think so. Also pictured here is the plaque dedicated to British author Nevil Shute on the Australian Writers Walk in Sydney. Among other literary heroes commemorated here is Banjo Patterson, who wrote “The Man from Snowy River” and the lyrics for “Waltzing Matilda.” Shute, a non-Australian, is included in the Aussie pantheon, honored specifically for A Town Like Alice.
Alice Springs is a bit larger now, and the McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken are businesses that would not have been frequented by Jean and Joe Harman back in the day, but the view from Anzac Hill is strikingly similar.
On the top of Anzac Hill, which is only a small hill but because of the immense flatness of the landscape, it seems much larger and gives an incredible view, there is a monument, an obelisk dedicated in 1934 to the fallen of World War I. Since that war, plaques have been added to commemorate the service of Australian military personnel in other conflicts, World War II, the Korean War, the Malaya conflict of 1950 to 1963, in Borneo from 1962 to 1966, and the Vietnam War.
We don’t see the monument in the 1956 film, and neither would have Virginia McKenna or Peter Finch, for I believe a second film unit took the few establishing shots of Alice Springs. I don’t believe the actors even went there.
The film has, despite its limitations, an intriguing freshness that even the excellent 1981 miniseries lacks. Perhaps it is the lack of innocence in the 1981 film. Perhaps it is just the telescoping of so many more decades, a wall between our interpretation of the past and what the past really was, not unlike the tantalizing wall between Joe and Jean talking in the darkness about a town like Alice.
All color photos in this post by J.T. Lynch. All rights reserved.
The above photo was taken Key Largo, Florida. The sign tells us only part of the story; that this is the original boat called “The African Queen” used in the 1951 movie of the same name.
Humphrey Bogart’s and Katherine Hepburn’s movie boat is on free public display docked in an ocean access canal next to the Key Largo Holiday Inn. We’re not told how the boat got here from the movie location. I'd love to know. This boat was built in Lytham, England in 1912 for service on the Victoria Nile and Lake Albert where the movie was filmed. The British East Africa Company used the boat from 1912 to 1968 to shuttle passengers and cargo across Lake Albert located on the border between the Belgian Congo and Uganda.
Key Largo, is of course, the name of the 1947 "Key Largo," featuring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. We see establishing shots of the Overseas Highway at the beginning of the film.
As for what business “The African Queen” has doing on Key Largo, that is perhaps pure Hollywood. For more on the boat and how you can visit or even charter it, have a look at this website.
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.
