Ben-Hur - 1925 and 1959

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) and Ben-Hur (1959) dramatize the novel from 1880 by Lew Wallace about a wealthy Jewish prince during the time of the Roman occupation of Judea who was sent into slavery by his old friend, now a Roman soldier who aspires to political high office. Judah Ben-Hur will eventually avenge himself, sorrow and suffer, and his path will cross many times with Jesus Christ until the moment of Christ’s Passion. The story combines so many elements dear to Hollywood: a successful novel, a biblical epic wherein images of suffering, torture, a certain degree of salaciousness, are permitted because they are deemed biblical, including a showing fair degree of muscled legs and chest of our hero, and the opportunity to appear as if they are enlightening their public as much as entertaining them. We mark the annual crisscrossing of Passover and Easter with this story of Ben-Hur.

The original feature-length movie from 1925, being a silent movie, and being predominantly in black and white, except for some two-strip Technicolor scenes, is obviously different from the blockbuster 1959 multiple Oscar-winner, which was made in color, and where every sound from grunts and groans, the hoofbeats during the chariot race, a relentless hammering of the wooden mallet on the drum to mark the time of the galley slaves rowing, is gloriously and intimately recorded. It was also shot in a widescreen process allowing us a view of everything on either side of the principal characters in the scene, thereby allowing our eyes, and our minds, to wander.

Astonishingly, however, there is much about both movies that is quite similar, including much of the chariot race and the scenes leading up to the race. The 1925 version is a little closer to the novel, but it is no less an opportunity to embrace all that is lavish and lush about an era in Hollywood where there was no CGI and those thousands of people we see in the arena and on the rocky hillsides and the lonely road to Calvary, were real people and not embedded by computer-aided graphics. One might even note that the naval battle in the 1925 version is actually a little more impressive than the 1959 version because it does not appear so much like models in the M-G-M pool.

One of the great delights of the Easter season is watching these old Hollywood epics on regular broadcast television. As we know, broadcast TV rarely shows classic films these days; they are to be found only on retro channels and on TCM, so fewer people are exposed to classic films today. And though broadcast TV does include those pesky commercials, does include edits which are extremely annoying to us old movie fans, there is still something wonderfully egalitarian about being able to see them for free, especially when one is sated after the holiday family meal and the kids are tired out from a long day of festivities and the whole family can gather in front of the TV and watch Hollywood’s ambitious take on the deeper meaning of the season.

Of course, Hollywood’s take on the deeper meaning is never all that deep, but it is entertaining and picturesque, sometimes as magnificent a feast for the eye as the old Renaissance masters’ versions of biblical events; their views were also slanted viewpoints. We could note that the scene of the Last Supper in the 1925 version of Ben-Hur looks almost exactly like the da Vinci painting. Of course, that was da Vinci’s version of the Last Supper, which probably did not happen on a long rectangular table with all twelve apostles and Christ sitting on one side of the table like the dais at a Friars roast. More likely they were all seated together on the floor, dipping pieces of their unleavened bread into a communal dish. And the lighting wasn’t as good.

The other fun aspect about watching biblical epics is that they always end up containing a dream team of players. Sometime or other we’re going to have to discuss The Ten Commandments (1956), a movie I cannot think of without recalling Edward G. Robinson in one of his most campy roles. Just hearing his gangster delivery makes me laugh. (Or was that Billy Crystal?) But that is Hollywood.

It was in The Ten Commandments that Charlton Heston first became famous for the biblical genre. He played Moses in that epic free-for-all, and he comes to the 1959 Ben-Hur with that under his belt. Sam Jaffe and Finlay Currie as well as Martha Scott are the old-timers from classic films here, but they are joined by popular actors of the day such as Stephen Boyd, and Hugh Griffith, who with great panache plays Sheik Ilderim. Newcomer Haya Harareet plays Esther in what was intended to be a dash of authenticity in this version. Ms. Harareet was herself from Israel, born before that country was established when it was still part of British Palestine. She made only a handful of films after that however.  Director William Wyler cast most of the Romans with British actors and most of the Jews with American actors, because he felt the distinction in accents would help differentiate them in the minds of the viewers.  It seems that most Romans in the old epics were played by Brits, which may lead many of us to assume Caesar studied at Oxford.

The 1925 version of Ben-Hur, untroubled by the need for different accents, we also have a dream team of sorts.  Except for star Ramon Navarro and Francis X. Bushman, the movie features a large cast of actors who are predominantly unknown even to classic film buffs. This might give the film more of a purity in the sense that we come to the story without any preconceived notions about the actors playing the roles. However, most of us would be delightfully shocked to discover that many of the Hollywood stars of the day played uncredited bit parts in this movie, lending themselves to crowd scenes, including John and Lionel Barrymore, who supposedly were spectators at the chariot race, as was director Clarence Brown, Joan Crawford and Marion Davis, Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert, Dorothy and Lillian Gish, as well as producer Samuel Goldwyn. Even theater owner Sid Grauman of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was there in the stands. Gary Cooper is supposed to have played a Roman guard, as was Clark Gable. Janet Gaynor and Myrna Loy played slave girls. I did not see them, but I promise you I’m going to watch this movie over and over again until I can find them. Let me know if you do.  I don’t think there has ever been such a collection of future stars in bit parts in the same movie.

There actually is something very pure and very innocent and strikingly emotional in the 1925 silent Ben- Hur. Directed by Fred Niblo, June Mathis was the scriptwriter, and we may recall that the 1920s was a time of greater opportunity in Hollywood for women. Ramon Navarro, a really excellent actor, is handsome and very moving as Ben-Hur. Francis X. Bushman is his friend and foe Messala the Roman soldier. In the 1959 version Stephen Boyd plays the role and at first, he and Charlton Heston meet after an absence of many years and renew their childhood friendship. It is only after they discuss the political events of the day and Boyd’s request that Heston inform on fellow Jews who work against the Roman Empire that they fall out and become enemies. Though the 1925 version has Navarro welcoming Bushman after a long absence, the beefy and brash Bushman acts like a bully from his first entrance.

May McAvoy plays Esther, the daughter of Simonides who is Ben-Hur’s slave and steward. She will be his future love. Claire McDowell plays his mother and Kathleen Key plays his sister Tirzah. Mitchell Lewis plays the flamboyant Sheik Ilderim but he does not have the grandiose humor of Hugh Griffith. Charles Belcher plays Balthazar, one of the Three Kings who paid tribute to Christ at his birth and who has been seeking him these many years. Finlay Currie gets the job in the 1959 version, and also serves as narrator.

The moments where Ben-Hur’s life intersects with the life of Christ are commonly treated with a two- strip Technicolor process. We see the brightly colored robes and skin tone on the actors.

Though the grand scenes of the enormous palaces, the gigantic sets are mind blowing, we are treated to very small, intimate scenes of equal power as was common in silent film. After the impressive naval battle when Ben-Hur has rescued the Roman captain and they are brought to another ship, he climbs the outer net of rope rigging to the deck and he passes by a porthole where a fellow galley slave looks up at him mournfully. So much is said with a glance. The director gets a lot of mileage out of these kinds of scenes. One of the problems with the widescreen process as used in 1959 is, as director William Wyler himself lamented, all the space has to be used and so even when the director is focusing on two people in the scene, the audience is going to be looking elsewhere because there is so much else to look at. The director is not able to focus on a pinpoint moment.

The chariot race is perhaps the most famous element of either movie or even the book. It is stunning. The silent version gives us remarkable camera angles where both actors are seen handling the four horses that pull their chariots and I’m assuming that stunt doubles were kept to a minimum simply because of the difficulty of filming. There are those amazing shots, replicated in the 1959 version, of the chariot actually driving over the camera which has been placed into the ground. The stunning wide sweeping shots of the chariots making turns and thrusting down the straightaway, sometimes crashing into each other and overturning is breathtaking. What the silent version lacks is the sound of hoofbeats. We have a beautifully restored version of the 1925 film from 1988 scored by Carl Davis which provides a stirring backdrop to this scene, but we have no hoofbeats.

One thing that some critics remarked upon in the 1959 version was that it was a very slow, unwieldy tale, a very long movie and the parade of characters were presented with chronological diligence but with without raw emotion. The 1925 version carries all the raw emotion including several scenes that are utterly heartbreaking. We may note that this movie was remade in 2016, and it was not successful, but though I have not seen it I can imagine one reason for its lack of success among others – the heavy use of computer graphics makes a modern film more cost-effective but it removes us emotionally from the scene. It must have been extremely expensive and extremely laborious to have thousands and thousands of people rising as one, perfectly choreographed to cheer during the chariot race but it is far more effective because it is real, and because people whose emotions we understand are more interesting, and always will be, than technology we don’t understand.

Both movies deal with the representation of Christ as a silent figure and whom we see only from the back or only his arm, or his hand. Christ gives Ben-Hur a drink of water when he has been marching through the desert to become a galley slave and we see his gentle touch on Charlton Heston’s hair; the difference, however, is that the reaction toward Christ is on a more human and less spiritual manner in the 1959 version. When Charlton Heston looks up at Christ, Heston’s expression seems to tell us that he is grateful for the water and relieved he has found a sympathetic person who is helping him. He does not look as if looking into the face of the Messiah. Ironically, the Roman soldier who comes by to bark at him and tell Christ to go away suddenly stops and looks towards Christ with more of a sensation of encountering something strangely mystical. We see a more powerful reaction from the soldier than we do from Heston.

Ramon Navarro always appears as if deeply moved when The Nazarene crosses his path. Another interesting moment done with pure acting, is when his mother and sister are healed from their leprosy by their interaction with Christ. They had been told that The Nazarene performs miracles for those who believe and they arrive in time for his Passion as he drags the heavy cross through the streets. We don’t see his face; we see the cross on his shoulder and his face is behind it. They sorrow for him, and just with lighting, a white light that centers on their faces, the dark circles of their illness disappear and they immediately delight, acting as if they had been cured of their leprosy. There is no Jekyll and Hyde makeup transformation; it is all in the acting.

The 1959 version has Christ on the cross in the storm, the rain pouring down, dripping from his fingers on the hand nailed to the cross.  In a nearby cave, Ben-Hur’s mother and sister discover they are cured of leprosy. The darkness of the cave masks their need to wear makeup. The 1959 version is more sweaty and dirty, but even the realism does not match the heartbreak of the 1925 mother and sister close enough to the sleeping Ben-Hur to touch him, but resisting to wake him from sleep because they want to spare him the knowledge of their leprosy.

Both films make an attempt to address the political issues of a conquered people, for the biblical events, as in current events, are always as much about politics as about faith. Ben-Hur’s quest for Christ is his militant quest for a king to lead them out of Roman bondage, but he eventually adopts Christ’s message of peace. In the 1959 version Stephen Boyd taunts Charlton Heston with the idea that he is a member of a conquered people and he needs to get used to that. “The glory of Solomon is gone... Joshua will not rise again to save you, nor David.” To which Charlton Heston replies, “Rome is evil... Rome is an affront to God.”

The story ends with Ben-Hur reunited with his mother and sister, and with his love, Esther. But there’s a big “what happens next” that is never answered. How does he live with no end to Roman occupation for the rest of his life? We are meant to assume that the early Christian followers find strength and comfort in the teachings of Christ and in their own growing numbers, but though Hollywood enjoyed platitudes as a way of staying on the good side of the public who always thought that movie capital was a Babylon among the orange groves, it did not even trouble to answer the larger questions, preferring to wallow in the spectacle.

I enjoy biblical epics, but not because I find them instructive or inspirational; rather because, like a painting by a great master, they are imaginative pictures of wondrous events brought down to a human level we are better able to relate to – and despite the temptresses, the virile warriors, and the gauzily dressed slave girls, I think the most frivolous thing about them is that they are so irresistibly commercial.

So frivolous that, unlike the more meaningful and reflective rituals of the holidays, I cannot help but equate theses movies with a handful of jelly beans and winding down a busy weekend of celebration.

May I wish a Blessed Passover and a Happy Easter to all who celebrate.

You have a chance to watch the 1959 Ben-Hur this Easter Sunday on TCM.  

Have a look at the chariot scene from the 1925 version below.

My Wife's Relations - 1922 - Fish for Friday

My Wife's Relations (1922), starring Buster Keaton, who also co-wrote the script and co-directed with Edward F. Cline, is a jubilant reminder of when comedy was not just king, but a rough-and-tumble jester in a world without political correctness but with a kind of egalitarian substitute -- the view that all of society was made up of fools and everyone deserved his chance to be made ridiculous.

The plot is simple, but the gags are elaborate.  Buster lives in a polyglot neighborhood, where, in a mistaken melee with a postman, a window gets broken in the office of a local magistrate/justice of the peace.  This judge happens to be an emigrant from Poland.  Moments before, he has been contacted by a young Polish couple wanting to be married and desiring to have the ceremony performed in their language.  He assures them that he can do the job, as he speaks no other language but Polish anyway.

Having set the gag thusly, a window in the magistrate's office gets smashed in the fight with the postman, and Buster runs away, knocking down a stout Irishwoman named Kate.  She is furious with him, and hauls him before the Polish magistrate intending to rat on him for breaking the window.  Of course, the judge thinks they are the couple who just phoned him wanting to be married, so he marries them.

I love how the title cards for his speech are written in Polish. Irish and Poles make up a good chunk of my ancestry, so the comic premise of this movie is especially dear to me.  My Polish grandmother, or Babci, never learned much English, and in her first days as an immigrant to America before World War I, she loved silent movies because she could understand them.  Even the title cards in English were irrelevant to her, so clear was the pantomime.  Marie Dressler was her favorite actress.

Poor Buster looks like a Liliputian among the giants, but he uses his wits to stay alive.

This brings us to one of my favorite laugh-out-loud moments, though it is probably too subtle for any viewer who does not really relate to the joke.  There is a moment when dinner is served and the family says a quick grace, then the men stab large chunks of beef with their ready forks and take all the meat before Buster can have any.  Buster is hungry and dejected...until he notices the date on the wall calendar.  It's Thursday.  Aha!

Buster goes over to the calendar, rips the page off, and demonstrates to the family greedily gobbling their beef that it is really FRIDAY!

They are Irish.  We next assume they are Catholic, because they choke and sputter in horror at committing a sin, and Kate, not so delicately, spits out the meat.

Kate is played by Kate Price, who performed in an astounding number of movies from 1910 to 1937, something like 300.  She was also a writer of silent film scripts.  I hope to learn more of her career.

Kate and her relatives ashamedly return the uneaten portions of beef back to the platter, and Buster, evidently not playing a Catholic in this movie, helps himself to a solitary feast.

Today, the observance of fasting from meat on Fridays by Catholics is reserved only for the Lenten season, but before Vatican II, this fish-for-Friday rule was all the time.  Indeed, in my home growing up we never stopped having fish on Friday and still do to this day, I suppose because we are just creatures of habit and we like fish.  Friday's as good as any day to eat it.

My favorite gag in the movie, however, is when they gather for a family portrait and the photographer's camera tripod slips to the floor, causing the family to slide down to the floor as well.  That is genius, and one of funniest scenes in any silent film.

But it is Buster's prank on the boorish family, using their religious observance as a level to gain parity with them, that clearly pokes fun at Catholics in a way that is pointed and shrewd without being caustic.  Films from the silent era are not so innocent as they are unselfconscious, which is their great strength and value.  This movie, made in 1922, was at the end of a long and boisterous era of mass immigration to this country where if not everyone got along, there was certainly an entertaining period of adjustment.  Later in that decade, the welcome mat got pulled in, immigration was restricted, and home-terrorist organizations like the KKK, long dedicated to the persecution of African Americans, added Catholics to their list of hated targets, as we discussed a few weeks ago in the intro to our series on films of the 1920s.

Come back next Thursday when we conclude the Lenten season on a less silly note and celebrate Easter and Passover with two versions of Ben Hur - from 1925 and 1959.

Have a look here at My Wife's Relations:

Old Uniforms Never Die

The uniforms are one of the most iconic images we remember from classic films.  They are the identification of The Greatest Generation.  For many of us, the uniforms are entwined with personal family memory; my father, for instance, wore the Army uniform in his formal portrait that my mother kept on the table all the years he was gone in the jungles of the South Pacific.  He wears it in snapsots  taken the first exhilarating days he finally returned home, hugging his wife and daughter while friends and relatives took turns holding the Brownie box camera (the men were allowed one month before they legally had to return to civilian clothes.)  Relatives asked him to wear it on his first rounds of visits to them, including the little nephew who wanted to see his uncle soldier. He wore out his uniform pants and shirts while gardening in the months and years ahead. 

All that's left are the medals over the breast pocket, which I still have, and the portrait photo, which sits behind me on my filing cabinet.

They are no more, except in photos.

Until now, apparently.  The Army is in the final stages of deciding upon a new uniform, and will move towards a new service dress uniform based upon the old World War II model. According to Sergeant Major of the Army Daniel Dailey, published on the site Military.com, "We wanted a uniform that we could re-identify with the American public that was significant in the American public's eye of the sense of pride in their Army," Dailey said.

"That's why we went back in history and said, 'What was the last time when there was this sense of pride and true identification … based upon their uniform?' And that's when automatically we both agreed it was Pinks and Greens during World War II.

"It was a very symbolic statement in America when you saw these young men and women coming back to and from war ... wearing that very distinctive olive drab jacket with pinkish hue pants uniform."

For more on the interview and information about this pending change in Army dress, please see this article on Military.com.

Housework in I'll Be Seeing You (1944)

I'll Be Seeing You (1944), which we covered in this previous post, and also in this one, features this scene of Ginger Rogers and Spring Byington cleaning the living room. 

Can you think of any other classic films where the characters are seen doing everyday housecleaning chores -- who don't happen to be servants, just housework in their own home?

11th Anniversary of Another Old Movie Blog - and a trivia question

This weekend marks 11 years for Another Old Movie Blog.  It has been a fascinating journey for me, and I thank you most sincerely for the pleasure of your company.

****

Recently a request came to me to ferret out the name of a movie with this clue.  See if you can help!

"The story was something like--- a group of college students were entering a parade float (some kind of contest maybe - maybe the parade of Roses in Pasadena). They all worked really hard, at the last minute the engine broke down- so they all got inside and under the float and pushed it while singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic."

I don't think it's:

Pigskin Parade 1936
College Rhythm 1934
Best Foot Forward 1943
Mr. Belvedere Goes to College 1949
Blondie Goes to College 1942
Love Laughs at Andy Hardy 1946
Mother is a Freshman 1949
She's Working Her Way Through College 1952
Horse Feathers 1932.

But if you have any idea of what this film could be, please let us know.

UPDATE:
Hold your calls, please, I think we may have a winner. Caftan Woman, you are, indeed, swell.

Your suggestion of Peggy (1950) starring Diana Lynn could be the one.  She plays a girl whose family has just moved to Pasadena, and the neighbor boy turns out to be Rock Hudson.  AND, Charles Coburn, Charlotte Greenwood, Connie Gilchrist, Jerome Cowan, and Ellen Corby are in it, so I don't know how this one fell off my radar.  I'm going to keep my eye out for it.  What I think may be the smoking gun, as it were...a lobby card with a picture of a parade float on it.

Leave it to Paddy at the Caftan Woman blog to save the day again.

ANOTHER UPDATE:

Hold the phone, classic film afficionados - the person requesting this info thinks this is not the movie:

"I checked out the write-ups of the movie Peggy- it's as close as I have come thus far but I am pretty sure that it is not the movie that I am seeking.The story line in the movie I am speaking of all leads up to the final moments when the students that built the float (some kind of competition) discover that the float's engine has broken-down and after moments of disappointment and angst, at the last minute they team together, triumphantly, to push the float themselves. It was the plot, not a sub-plot behind a love story which is what the parade in the movie Peggy is."

Well, that lets the air out of my parade float.  Keep your suggestions coming.

Joan Crawford's Oscar for Mildred Pierce

Joan Crawford’s Oscar award was the measure of her success. Arguably the pinnacle of her career, but in a career of so many makeovers and incarnations, so much achieved for the struggling young chorine with the Dickensian childhood and the lifelong need for recognition, with the strong on-screen personality and even stronger off screen, we may wonder not so much what an Oscar is worth, but what it was worth to her. It’s easy to assume she wanted it bad, but what was it worth to her?

This is our entry in the 31 Days of Oscar Blogathon hosted by Aurora of Once Upon a Screen, Kellee from Outspoken & Freckled, and Paula from Paula’s Cinema Club.   

Joan Crawford won Best Actress for her role in Mildred Pierce (1945), a movie which represented, yet again, another phase in her career as she had left, by mutual agreement, her over two-decade association with M-G-M, and attempted to rise from the ashes at Warner Bros. We covered Mildred Pierce here in our series on Ann Blyth, who, along with fellow castmate Eve Arden, were nominated in the Best Supporting category.  Both lost to Anne Revere.

Joan Crawford was up against a tough field of other nominees herself: Ingrid Berman for The Bells of St. Mary’s, Greer Garson for The Valley of Decision, Jennifer Jones for Love Letters, and Gene Tierney for Leave Her to Heaven.

Reportedly, Joan feared that Ingrid Bergman was the shoe-in to win.  I would have thought Gene Tierney was the more likely close contender with her powerful performance as the glamorous sociopath.  Ingrid had won the statue only the year before, and Greer Garson and Jennifer Jones were former winners as well.

The 18th annual Academy Awards was presented on March 7, 1946. It was the first post-war awards, and the austerity that marked the ceremony during World War II was gone in a stream of klieg lights and the flash of camera bulbs popping.  Plaster statues had been given out during the war—every metal except the fillings in your teeth was promised to The War Effort—and the post-war Oscars were bronze with gold plating.

Director Michael Curtiz had not wanted her for the role.  Bette Davis had first dibs, and she turned it down.  Curtiz preferred Barbara Stanwyck, who was interested, but he agreed to let Joan Crawford test for the role—as if she were an up and coming newbie—but was bowled over not only by her performance, but her willingness to work hard and humble herself to play a non-glamorous role, and worse still, the mother of a much more glamorous nearly grown daughter, played by Ann Blyth, who nearly stole the movie. Joan was generous to the newcomer and they became lifelong friends.

Bob Hope and James Stewart were co-hosts for the event, which was held at Grauman’s Chinese Theater.  Radio station KECA broadcast the awards ceremony, with a nationwide hookup on the ABC radio network.  ABC was only three years old, having been established in 1943 and formerly known as the NBC Blue Network.  (The NBC Red Network became at that time simply NBC.) The radio program began at 9:30 p.m. Pacific Time.

Joan Crawford came to Hollywood with the name of Lucille LeSueur, and Pete Smith, head of publicity at M-G-M, saw great promise in the young actress, but not in her name, which he felt had to go.  He set up a “Name the Star” contest in Movie Weekly magazine, and fans voted on the name.  Joan reportedly was less than enthused about the final selection, but seemed to immediately grasp that she owed her career even more to the fans than to the moguls, and she courted them for the rest of her life.  Her career, and her ultimate success, came through artifice, and she embraced it.

But she did not go to the ceremony.  She listened to the Academy Awards on the radio that night on station KECA.  So sure she would not win, and fearing losing in so public a setting, she spent the evening at home in her Brentwood mansion, in bed.  She reported that she had a fever and pneumonia. She was 41 years old and undoubtedly wondered where her career was going next after this evening.

Joan Crawford's Oscar ceremony program

Charles Boyer presented the award for Best Actress.  Joan Crawford sipped a few cocktails for courage. 

He read Joan Crawford’s name.

We can only imagine her reaction. 

Michael Curtiz accepted the award on her behalf.

Cue hairdresser and makeup artist, and off to Joan’s bedroom.

After the ceremony ended, Michael Curtiz went to her bedside to present the award, in the company of the press.  Several other well-wishers, including young Ann Blyth, arrived at Joan’s house to congratulate her. It was considered to be an enormous comeback for a woman who had been regarded as a has-been only the year before.  Her bed jacket and nightgown acceptance of the gold-plated prize was plastered all over newspapers, outshining any other victory of the evening.

In a woman notorious for hungering for legitimacy, did it give her the measure of self-worth she craved?

Years later, in a series of conversations in the 1960s and early ‘70s with interviewer Roy Newquist and published in his book Conversations with Joan Crawford, published in 1980, she presents a more complex, even sadder perspective on the event:

I remember how I felt the night the Awards were presented. Hopeful, scared, apprehensive, so afraid I wouldn't remember what I wanted to say, terrified at the thought of looking at those people, almost hoping I wouldn't get it, but wanting it so badly—no wonder I didn't go. I stayed home and fortified myself, probably a little too much, because when the announcement came, and then the press, and sort of a party, I didn't make much sense at all, even though I wanted to spill over...

I think the Academy voters honored me as much that night for A Woman's Face and Strange Cargo and maybe Grand Hotel as they did for Mildred. Or maybe it was for just staying around that long. Hollywood is like that; they compensate for their sins of omission later on, like the special awards they had to vote to Chaplin and Garbo in order not to seem completely ridiculous...

Winning the Oscar did revive her career, splendidly.  She received two more Academy Award nominations, for Possessed (1947) and for Sudden Fear (1952).  I assume she attended those awards, but I don’t know and I hope someone will fill us in.

Again, on her Mildred Pierce win:

And funny, the morning after, when I realized the award wasn't a dream after all, I realized that Mildred Pierce really rang down the curtain on "my" Hollywood. The character I played in that film was a composite of the roles I'd always played—and a few elements from my own personality and character. (Not the long-suffering bit; I'm too much of a Christian Scientist to suffer very long at a stretch.) My professional and personal worlds had changed so much—good friends were dying or moving away—the public was restless about making up its mind what it wanted to see—the studios were in bigger and bigger trouble. No, my day, my long and golden and often glorious day, had ended, and Mildred Pierce was sort of the bittersweet celebration of the end...

...In some respects everything that happened afterward—except  Alfred [husband Alfred Steele]—was anti-climactic...It's like being a mountain climber: After you've done Everest, what's next? And, why?

She was not one to rest on her laurels, and even apparently did not mind lending her laurels to a friend.  Have a look here at my Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.  blog for the tale of how Ann borrowed Joan’s Oscar for a scavenger hunt.

The Oscar win joined pop culture with an episode of the TV show Saints and Sinners called "The Year Joan Crawford Won the Oscar" in 1963, which we discussed in this previous post. This may have been less a nod to her 1945 win than the buildup to the Oscar nominations in 1963 for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, discussed in this post on the TV miniseries Feud.

Joan Crawford’s film career ended with Trog(1970) and she rang the curtain down herself, taking no further work, disillusioned with the film industry, with her own aging, and as the next few years passed, with ill health.  She did not appear in public after 1974, and suffering from cancer, died in her New York apartment of a heart attack in May 1977.

Her friend, director George Cukor held a memorial service at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.  He said of her in his eulogy:

 “She was the perfect image of the movie star, and, as such, largely the creation of her own indomitable will. She had, of course, very remarkable material to work with: a quick native intelligence, tremendous animal vitality, a lovely figure and, above all, her face, that extraordinary sculptural construction of lines and planes, finely chiseled like the mask of some classical divinity from fifth-century Greece. It caught the light superbly, so that you could photograph her from any angle, and the face moved beautifully....The nearer the camera, the more tender and yielding she became—her eyes glistening, her lips avid in ecstatic acceptance. The camera saw, I suspect, a side of her that no flesh-and-blood lover ever saw....I thought Joan Crawford would never die. Come to think of it, as long as celluloid holds together and the word Hollywood means anything to anyone, she never will.”

The Oscar she won was left to her daughter, Cathy Lalonde, along with all of her mother’s property, and shared an inheritance with her sister Cindy. She sold the Oscar at auction in 1993.  It was only the third time an Oscar was offered at public auction, and it was the first major award to be sold in this manner.  Expected to fetch between $8,000 and $12,000, the winning bid to a private collector was $68,000.

What is an Oscar worth?  It depends on who you talk to.

Almost twenty years later, Joan’s Oscar was sold again at auction, in 2012. For $426,732.  Does a gold-plated bronze statue appreciate in value?  Or is it the reputation of the actress that has cachet?

That Oscar is 13.25 inches tall and weighs 6 pounds, 2 ounces.  The plaque on the base is engraved:

“Academy First Award

To

Joan Crawford

For Her Performance In

'Mildred Pierce'”

It was described by Christie’s auction house to have, “Light speckling and rubbing to finish and scattered chips to base, else near fine.”  In other words, it had flaws.  But was still, like Crawford's body of work, “near fine.”

The souvenir program from that March 1946 ceremony at Grauman’s Chinese Theater was also auctioned off, and expected to fetch between $80 and $120.  It sold for $875.

In 1970, right around Trog and before her self-imposed exile from the public view to the confines of her New York apartment, she participated in an interview with David Frost on his television show.  With an expression that seemed to indicate she had re-lived that bedside Oscar win many times in her memory, she remarked as if still enthralled:

“I don’t think the public knows what the Oscar means to us.  It is one of the most emotional things that can ever happen to a human being.” 

Watch the David Frost interview below.

Please take a look at the other blogs in this terrific 31 Days of Oscar Blogathon hosted by Aurora of Once Upon a Screen, Kellee from Outspoken & Freckled, and Paula from Paula’s Cinema Club. 

The 1920s - Then and Now series #4 - The Cocoanuts - 1929

The Cocoanuts (1929) is a sublime way to end this series on The Era of Wonderful Nonsense, not only for the nutty hijinks of the Marx Brothers, but of their shrewd assessment of the foibles of their era so skillfully worked into the story.

We continue our series on the 1920s and its similarities to our era that began with our introduction here, The Racket (1928) here, and Joan Crawford’s Our Dancing Daughters (1928) and Our Modern Maidens (1929). They bring us a gamut of Jazz Age stories: flappers, college capers, hip flasks, gangsters and bootleggers, a world of societal revolution and at the same time a breakdown of what has been termed traditional morals, that was even celebrated.

The Marx Brothers had a hit on Broadway with their musical comedy The Cocoanuts, and its transference to film as one of the very early “all singing, all dancing – all talking movies” is remarkably clever due to some intelligent and laugh-out -oud lines that are a match for any cynical banter in a modern television sitcom.

But instead of using this sarcasm to paint themselves as the leaders of popular taste – since neither “cool” or “hip” or “groovy” were invented yet – and “the cat’s pajamas” just don’t seem to fit the Marx Brothers even if the phrase fits the 1920s – this talented gang of four never aspire to anything but holding themselves apart from society and enjoying the freedom of being outcasts.

As such they are free to mock and parody one of the decade’s most sacred shrines – investment and speculation. It was an era where wealth disparity created a chasm between the very rich and the very poor at an alarmingly fast rate and would have terrible consequences by the end of the decade. To be sure, there was a middle-class somewhere in between which, after World War I, sought to reward themselves with all the newfangled gadgets that were making life so much more easy and exciting, and perhaps expensive, than for their parents’ generation. Consumerism, commercialism, and credit joined together in a frantic dance as people for the first time were able to buy home appliances like electric stoves and washing machines and not only purchase them, but purchase them through credit on-time payments. Buying on credit meant that people could own property and suburban homes in a manner such as they could not at one time and this marvel of credit also extended to the new opportunity of buying common stocks.

Once the world of only the most educated and wealthy investors, now every man could own stocks. Most of the purchases were made “on margin,” which meant one was paying only a fraction of the stock’s price—buying on credit.

Among the myriad of get-rich-quick schemes that occurred in that decade, one of the most enticing, and flawed, was the great Florida land boom. This is the topic of the Marx Brothers play, The Cocoanuts.

It opened at the Lyric Theater in December 1925 and ran through August 1926. George S. Kaufman wrote the book of the musical, and music and lyrics were by Irving Berlin. With this stellar Broadway pedigree was added the brilliant and chaotic four Marx brothers: Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo. Straight man, or woman, Margaret Dumont was in the cast as well and made the leap to film with the boys.

The real estate bubble satirized in the play and film had been centered around Miami, which was promoted as an exotic tropical paradise for those who wanted to live there, retire there, and many others who just wanted to invest, flip properties and get in on the ground floor of what was sure to be a spectacular land boom. However, the area saw not so much extensive construction as of mere speculation on land value. At the start of 1925 investment was beginning to look shaky when land was offered at prices not according to appraised value, but according to how much brokers could jack up the price – whether it was swampland, which many naïve outsiders were surprised to find there was so much of in Florida, or land that really had any value for commercial or residential use. Soon the authorities and the banks began to take a closer look at what was revealed to be a bit of a shell game operated by unscrupulous brokers. There were other elements that caused the boom to go bust including difficulties with existing infrastructure and railroad service. In another portent of really bad luck, a schooner sank in Miami Harbor and blocked access to shipping.

Soon the hucksters could not find enough suckers to maintain this game, and the soaring prices of land began to plummet. That September 1926, as if matters weren't bad enough, a hurricane slammed into Miami which drove developers into bankruptcy.  It was a month after The Cocoanuts closed on Broadway.

The film version included Mary Eaton as the daughter of Margaret Dumont, both come to stay at a Florida hotel run by Groucho Marx. He is also involved in the shady land deals. A side story involves Oscar Shaw and Cyril Ring as rivals for Mary’s hand, and Kay Francis along as a jewel thief in partnership with Cyril Ring. Their scheme is to swipe the jewels of Margaret Dumont. Built around this plot is a zany kaleidoscope of music – several tunes by Irving Berlin but not all that were in the play – and Harpo and Chico generally turning the place into mayhem.  The movie, produced by Paramount was filmed at the Astoria Studio in Queens. Soon, the movie industry pulled up stakes on the east coast, put on sunglasses, and headed to Hollywood.

Being an early talkie, the movie seems to be taken pretty much as it might have been produced on stage, a succession of quick gags, skits interspersed with sudden lavish musical numbers, lots of chorus girls (high heels on the beach?).  The idyllic seascape is a noticeably fake backdrop, the kind Wile E. Coyote would usually smash into.

It was an era where men still wore tank tops attached to their bathing suits. For younger classic film fans, I’ll just note that this was not an affectation of the movies. On public beaches right up until the late thirties and even early forties, men were required to wear either a tank top or some kind of shirt along with their swim trunks. Going topless was not allowed.

The lines, a lot of them really laugh-out-loud, are often specifically reflective of their era and may go over the heads of some younger fans. Even something like Groucho’s remark, “There’s nothing like liberty, except for Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post.” Liberty and Collier’s were, like The Saturday Evening Post very popular magazines. The newsstand on the corner, in the train station, or on the first floor of your office building was the nerve center, the communications headquarters of the day

Mary Eaton and Oscar Shaw sing a romantic duet and Bob has one of those trilling tenors. It really sounds like it’s sung live.  Mary’s hair is Marcel-waved.  She is also equipped with a trilling voice considered proper vocal technique of the stage-trained of the day.

Other favorite lines “This is the biggest development since Sophie Tucker.”

Chico and Harpo arrive at the hotel and are asked “You want a suite on the third floor?” Chico’s response, “No, I want a polack in the basement.”  Inappropriate for today, but funny and evocative of the “melting pot” with which were we once so comfortable.

Groucho remarks, “All along the river there are levies.”

To which Chico responds, “That’s a Jewish neighborhood?”

And then of course, we have the famous viaduct and “why a duck?” exchange.

Kay Francis, sleek and sophisticated, with her short, boyish flapper hair slicked back off her forehead, spends time tussling with Harpo, who of course, has a habit of trying to get people to hold his leg. It was Kay’s second movie after several years in the theater, and her stardom was ahead of her. She seems a little too high voltage for this silly slapstick, but we can see at least the promise not only of her career in the 1930s, but that here, although looking like a flapper, she is not a flighty, man-chasing coed, but instead looks as if she has spent the decade as one of the “Lost Generation,” in Paris with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and not doing the Charleston with young men who swallow goldfish.

The movie, as with other Marx Brothers movies, breaks for intermittent and surprising cultural interludes as both Chico and Harpo display their splendid musicianship, which brings the chaos down to a quiet reflective center before it revs up again. It is as surprising as their silliest antics because it keeps us off-balance.

It is a way, the movie is like a perfect bridge between the innocent and lighthearted and somewhat sophomoric banter of the 1920s and the more sophisticated screwball comedy of the 1930s with its emphasis on social commentary. The Marx Brothers perfectly bridge the eras.

Groucho conducts a land auction, a common scene in the Florida land boom and he tries to get Chico to jack up the price by putting in outrageous bids. He utters the immortal words “You can get any kind of house you want, even stucco – oh, how you can get stuck-o.”

The jewel thieves are foiled, and true love prevails, although I think the most exquisite moment is the “He wants his shirt” song to the tune of “Habanera”/“Toreador” in Carmen sung by Basil Ruysdael in a bass-baritone.

The Florida land boom had an unhappier ending, that for a time, never seemed to end. A month after The Cocoanuts closed on Broadway, the September 1926 Miami Hurricane hit, leading to a lot of bankruptcies among the land developers, and a second killer Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928 (over 2,500 fatalities) and the stock market crash of 1929 effectively capped off the decade for Florida investment opportunities, real or imagined. The 1930s were bleak.

The stock market crash was also personally devastating to Groucho Marx.  Though known for being very frugal, ever mindful of his poverty-stricken childhood, he invested his entire life savings in the market that came to its own spectacular bubble in 1928. He lost it all in 1929.

In the excellent television documentary from the American Experience series on PBS The Crash of 1929 (1990), Groucho’s son Arthur was interviewed and recalled, “My father was ready to kill himself.”

Eventually, unlike millions of Americans, Groucho had a reprieve from destitution and found a lucrative career with his brothers in Hollywood.

These movies we discussed for the past few weeks tell us a lot about where our mindset was at the end of the Jazz Age but one aspect of that decade I suppose was difficult for the filmmakers then to capture, at least in one single movie, was the great struggle between conservative fundamentalists represented by the bankers and by Wall Street that were seen as demigods who were reflected in the glow of their fabulous ever-rising stock market, with extremists such as the KKK at the height of its power, with the animosity and outright hostility to immigrants and immigration, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White  House – versus progressives whose influence on the decade must have seemed appallingly radical, such as women flooding of the workforce in jobs such as secretarial work, which was once restricted for men (the new occupation of being a telephone operator was actually deemed better for women than men because it was reckoned that women had more pleasing voices and were more inviting on the phone); the almost shocking change in women’s apparel from what it had been during World War I – as we noted in our introduction, so comically and charmingly alluded to in the 1920s musical parody Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967); and the flaming youth that somehow took the spotlight in a society where the media was beginning not only to reflect who we were but to create who we were.

As regards the stock market, there are ominous similarities today, not only because of the great wealth disparity in our country that, when it happens no matter what era it happens, always leads to crashes, but because of allowing once again our greed to make us so naïve as to think the systems we have put in place are not fallible. Economist Roger Babson is well known for having predicted the 1920s stock market crash and also well known for being greatly disparaged because of it. Nobody wanted such bad news. Recently, we have experienced some market swings, and the market watchers, particularly on CNBC, rather than reporting dispassionately, instantly became cheerleaders and indignant deniers. Granted, money is an excitable issue, but journalists should just report what happens and not make excuses for what happens or attempt to deflect what is happening as if loathing to be held responsible for bad news.

This is not to say that we’re going to end up with bread lines and bank failures if the market takes a dive, but whether we do or not, whether the market crashes and we end up in another depression, we should receive the facts as simply and as unemotionally as possible. The truth, even when it is unpleasant, is better to hear than the same old spin.

We should pay more attention to the 1920s not just because of our bouncing stock market, but because of so many other coincidences that exists between that decade and ours. We might well learn valuable lessons. That’s what our parents, our grandparents, and our great-grandparents are for, to teach us.

As we noted in the intro to this series, historian William E. Leuchtenburg in his The Perils of Prosperity 1914-32 remarked, “Never was a decade snuffed out so quickly as the 1920s.”

The Great Depression loomed on the other side of the door, but also a more liberal and progressive era culturally, artistically, and politically that saved the nation in a frightening time.  It took courage to sing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and make it so.

Groucho Marx, whose screen persona created sanity from havoc, wrote in his book The Groucho Phile: An Illustrated Life, "I've been a liberal Democrat all my life," and observed,  "I frankly find Democrats a better, more sympathetic crowd.... I'll continue to believe that Democrats have a greater regard for the common man than Republicans do."

Have a look here at the documentary The Crash of 1929.

Thank you for joining me on this series.  This Sunday we’ll take part in the 31 Days of Oscar Blogathon hosted by Aurora of Once Upon a Screen, Kellee from Outspoken & Freckled, and Paula from Paula’s Cinema Club.  My contribution—Joan Crawford’s Oscar for Mildred Pierce.