Hollywood Fights Fascism - cover reveal

Hollywood Fights Fascism...Coming later this month. 

Past is prologue.  Our greatest gift from the Greatest Generation was freedom from fascism...until now.  Trumpism is Hitler 2.0.  Relive, and celebrate, how evil was faced, discussed, dramatized...and fought.  

Classic films were the weapon.  

Collected essays from the blog, special thanks to Casey Koester for the striking cover art.

 

Strange Holiday - 1945

Strange Holiday (1945) is a dystopian view on the United States in the closing days of World War II. It’s warning message, belatedly, was for the generation of civilians that fought the war on the home front to keep them pitching in, doing their part, and remembering why doing their part was so important. Soon to be a museum piece in the post-war era when victory brought both relief and amnesia, the movie ironically has more punch to it today. It is a message for our time.

I’d like to note that this movie first came to my attention back in May when I posted a request from someone wanting to know the name of a move he recalled from childhood.  I had no clue, based on his description, but a reader came up with this movie, and I think it might have been the one in question.  Many thanks to readers of this blog for always providing such a wonderful wealth of information.  I learn a lot from you.  The movie is currently up on YouTube.

Claude Rains stars as a businessman on a fishing trip in the wilds of “the north woods” with his buddy, played by Milton Kibbee. Since the movie is sandwiched in this period of Rains’ career between Mr. Skeffington (1945) and Notorious (1946) and Deception (1946), which we discussed here, it’s a little surprising to see this magnificent actor in his prime appearing in such a low-key, and low-budget-looking film (it runs just over an hour).  It’s difficult to surmise whether this is just an example of Rains’ fulfilling his studio contract and getting off the bench when he was called, or if this movie was intended to create a bigger splash but the production never lived up to its greater possibilities.

Rains is a family man.  His wife is played by Gloria Holden, and his three young children are Bob (Bobbie) Stebbins, Paul Hilton, and Barbara Bate. It was little Barbara’s only film; the boys both had minor careers in a handful of movies, but Paul actually started in the Our Gang shorts in the 1930s. 

Rains’ marriage is a happy one, and he is a doting father.  The movie begins when he realizes he must return home from his vacation immediately because it is his wedding anniversary.  We have a flashback to his life at home, his kids celebrating Christmas, enduring school assemblies.  It is a quiet and contented life, but even through these prosaic early scenes we are jabbed with a sense of foreboding by his voiceover questioning, “How did it happen?  When did it happen?”

The director is Arch Oboler, from his screenplay based on his radio play.  His name may be more familiar to fans of old time radio for his work as a producer/writer/director, a creator of many thoughtful, inventive radio stories that were powerful in that medium.  Here, the emotional and psychological meandering seems somehow diluted as we must wait a rather long time to find out exactly not just how or when, but “what” happened.

Mr. Rains and Mr. Kibbee have taken their trip to get away from the tiring war news.  Rains is sick of it and wants a break.  They have been gone from home for a few weeks. They have been cut off from any news.  They are in such a remote area that it was only accessible to them by plane.  Kibbee flies the small plane that is owned jointly by several of their buddies. 

The plane has some engine trouble and they land in a field, where they approach a farmhouse to use the phone. The farmer acts as if he is suspicious of them, shuts the door and tells them to go away.  The buddies are baffled and miffed, but shrugging it off, they begin to hitchhike down a highway. A truck comes along and they stop the driver.  He is also standoffish, rude, but he will take one of them back to town for $20.  Kibbee stays with the plane, Claude Rains goes with the truck driver and will send help back.

When he reaches the city where he lives, there is nobody in the streets.  He meets a few people he knows, but they shun him. He goes to a familiar shop to buy an anniversary present for his wife, but is told, “We can’t sell anything. You know that.”

He knows nothing, but his unthinking, exuberant nature seems to keep Rains from questioning any of this too deeply.  At this point in the film, we have more questions than he does, and the sense of fear comes to him rather late in the game.

He meets someone from work and is told, “You can’t ask questions.”  There is no one in the office.  There is no one at home. Everyone is fearful and more than a little impatient with him for behaving as if he doesn’t understand what’s happening.  He gets on their nerves as much as they get on his.

Two plainclothes detectives grab him and hit him with a blackjack. He wakes up in jail. A slow-talking older man is his cellmate, who kindly brings him water and tries to revive him. He is played by Thaddeus Jones.  He had a long acting career, but not many movies and most roles were servants, porters, or waiters.  He quiet gentleness is appealing, and unlike all the other frightened citizens, displays humanity despite his obvious helplessness.  He tries to tell Rains what’s been happening to society while Rains was on vacay, but it is difficult to comprehend, let alone to explain it.  The best he can do is, “They threw out the Bill of Rights.”

Claude Rains doesn’t believe him, and shouts for a lawyer.  Though all the authority figures up to this time have been Americans, the local man in charge, called the examiner, is a man with a slight German accent, played by Martin Kosleck.  Kosleck had a long career in film and TV, with his earlier movies casting him mostly as terrifying Nazis.  He interrogates Rains, wants to know all about his vacation, where did he go.  They bring in Rains’ wife, who is crying, and then take her immediately away.  They knock Rains unconscious again and he wakes tied to a table, where the examiner will beat him with a rubber hose.  We see Rains’ bound hand flinching, and then it does not move.

He is interrogated again and is told, “Discipline, the first rule you must learn in this new state of ours…This glorious new state that we are planting here. The fulfillment of the dreams some of us have had since the day we heard a voice telling us of our destiny.”

Though there are few displays of fascist regalia, it is inferred that this new order came from outside our country, but that we were not so much invaded as displaced by people educated by a foreign fascist doctrine planted here.

The words were likely less chilling to audiences then, when the war was nearly won, than they are today.  “We will turn your own democratic weakness against you.”  Marches, labor unions, all our freedoms will be wiped away.

In a haze in between beatings, Claude Rains reviews in his tangled mind what has happened.  He dreams of an idyllic scene of his family and friends having a picnic in the country, where a young couple discuss their future.  “We were too young for the war and we’ll be much too old for the next one…We can have anything and everything we want…”  Are the young always so callow and self-centered, so unable to see trouble ahead?  Rains, back in his cell ponders with greater regret of those lost in the war, “They died on the battlefield that I might live, and out of their victory, I made nothing.”

Through nightmarish whispers, he confesses, “I’m not afraid to die.  I’m afraid to go on living.” 

“I thought that freedom was like the air, always with me as long as I lived.  I thought you didn’t have to do anything about it.”

He resolves in his cell to keep on fighting.  However, and somewhat disappointingly (because a Resistance-style pushback would have added some satisfying action), it was all a dream.  He wakes in the fishing camp in the north woods and is eager to rush home to his wife and kids.

“It was only a dream” is probably the biggest deflator in any movie plot.

A lot more might have been made of this movie, which feels like it was padded a bit to fill out what might have been a more taut radio script.  The most chilling aspects are the loss of the Bill of Rights and the way his frightened community has caved.  And his confession that he is afraid to go on living.

We are on the brink of such a scenario today. Russian election sabotage mixed with white supremacist street gangs playing soldier with AR-15 weapons, rampant police brutality, along with a Republican Party that has caved in to the Trump Party, all gleefully and greedily conspiring to destroy American democracy, and during a raging pandemic to boot.  It would be a good time to wake up.

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

Hollywood Fights Fascism - Coming Next Month!

 

Coming in October - HOLLYWOOD FIGHTS FASCISM.

My latest book is a collection of essays from this blog on how the film industry tackled the subject of fascism. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s remark in 1936 memorialized, even when they were still just teenagers, the generation that would later be called The Greatest Generation: “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

There were many hurdles and many adventures in the lifespan of these individuals, including the Great Depression, wars, Cold War, and often bewildering changes in society that always seemed to come too quickly and followed by more. The chief horror of the twentieth century, that century to which they were born and only a small number outlived, was fascism.

The Greatest Generation received instruction, inspiration, and, of course, entertainment from a source that affected them perhaps more than even the generations to follow, who grew up with greater technology: the movies.

This book is a collection of essays adapted from this blog which strives to examine classic films in the context of the eras in which they were made. The movies of the day tell us a lot about that generation, what was expected of them, what they hoped to achieve, and how they saw themselves. It is not a perfect measuring stick, but the movies of the day show a passion for fighting fascism by everyday people that may shame their twenty-first century descendants.  Or at least, it should. 

I invite you to join my  beta readers squad and get a free eBook before publication.  (Please consider leaving a review on Amazon - but this is not required, and any review must be your honest opinion.)  

There will also be an opportunity to pre-order on Amazon. A print version of the book will also be available.

Wear a mask.

In this era of repulsive politicizing of a simple, commonsense act of wearing a mask, we might do well to recall an era where citizens on the home front during World War II were called upon to do much more. Urged, reminded, hounded, and haunted by their patriotic duty, the level of homework on the home front would probably not be tolerated by the whining, selfish, stupid brats today who refuse to do so much as wear a mask in a store to save the lives of their fellow Americans.

Have a look at these posters. They speak to another generation, but before you laugh at the images, remember the ultimate sacrifice occurring on foreign shores made the folks on the home front willing to shoulder any responsibility for the greater good. They had a shared purpose: to survive.

Orson Welles and the Blessed Eloquence of Moral Outrage

Los Angeles Sentinel, August 15, 1946, p. 1.

Orson Welles, famous for his War of the Worlds broadcast on radio in 1938, actually delivered a far more daring, even inflammatory, radio program eight years later.  Listen to this remarkable episode below of Orson Welles Commentaries, an ABC radio program broadcast July 29, 1946.  It is remarkable for Mr. Welles’ articulate and noble prose forcefully and intelligently delivered (such eloquence, courage, not to say moral clarity, is sadly lacking by some in our media today).  It is remarkable for the rage of a white man in protest for the brutal beating and blinding of a Black veteran by cops.

In February of that year, Sergeant Isaac Woodward, Jr., a decorated soldier who had served in the South Pacific, had been discharged from the Army only hours before he suffered a brutal attack by the police.  He traveled on a Greyhound bus to his home in South Carolina when, at a planned rest stop, Sgt. Woodward asked if there would be time for him to use the restroom. The driver argued with him, but held the bus for him so he could use the restroom.  At another stop in the town of Batesburg near Aiken, the driver contacted the local police and had Sgt. Woodward forcibly removed from the bus.

Police Chief Lynwood Shull and a few of his men beat up Sgt. Woodward for having the temerity of being Black and insisting he be allowed to use a planned rest stop. They beat him with nightsticks and took him to jail. While in jail, Chief Shull continued to beat Sgt. Woodward for responding with “Yes” instead of “Yes, sir.”  He repeatedly jabbed his nightstick into both of Sgt. Woodward’s eyes. 

He was blinded for life.

Two days later, they allowed a doctor to come to the jail to look at him.  He was taken to a hospital, and his family, awaiting his return from the war and expecting him to arrive, had to endure three more weeks before they found out what happened to him. He was finally taken to an Army hospital in Spartanburg, but his sight was gone forever.

President Harry S. Truman, furious at the treatment of Sgt. Woodward and the lack of punishment of the police involved, directed Justice Department to investigate.  South Carolina was reluctant to put the police on trial.

A jury trial was finally held that November.  Police Chief Shull admitted blinding Sgt. Woodward.  Still, he was acquitted by an all-white jury.  In the days of Jim Crow, Blacks were not allowed to serve on juries.  When he went free, the courtroom burst into applause.  He was never punished.

Orson Welles knew it back then: Black Lives Matter.

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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.

Three Came Home - 1950

Three Came Home (1950) is notable for its presentation of courageous women struggling to survive in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, and for its presentation of their captors in a way that is not a racist caricature.  Both are a big accomplishment for Hollywood at the time.

Claudette Colbert stars as Agnes Newton Keith, on whose memoir, Three Came Home, the movie is based. Miss Colbert had long since been a giant in Hollywood, whose ability to play drama or comedy was equal and impeccable. This movie benefitted especially from another quality she displayed which was more subtle: a kind of impression of being unassuming. Another actress might have played this role chewing the palm tree and barbed wire scenery, but Colbert moves from one incredible situation to the next like a person who at once has no idea how she got here, but is intellectually open to every experience. As such, she is our stand-in.

Today we celebrate TCM’s star of the day, Claudette Colbert, in the Summer Under the Stars Blogathon hosted by Kristen Lopez over at Journeys in Classic Film.

Agnes Newton Keith, an American, is the wife of a British official, the Conservator of Forests and Director of Agriculture, in Borneo. Agnes herself is a writer, having authored a book on her experiences as a Yank in Borneo. She is the only American among a colony of Dutch and English government workers and their families.  It is a world of wearing tropical whites and delegating labor to native servants. War breaks out, and the Japanese Army reaches them far sooner than they’d imagined.

Patric Knowles plays Colbert’s husband, and little Mark Keuning plays their son. He was about six when he did this role, and played in only one other movie, in the same year.  When it appears the Japanese are on their way, Mr. Knowles encourages his wife to take their son and leave for her home country, the U.S., but she wants to stay.  We listen to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on the radio, and a month later, everyone in their small community is taken prisoner.

Sessue Hayakawa, whose film career dates back to the ‘teens when he was a matinee idol in silent movies, appears as Colonel Suga, who will figure prominently as Colbert’s counterpart in the story. Hayakawa has read her book on Borneo, and he is very impressed with her, “You were very sympathetic with Orientals,” he remarks, “It’s not usual, you know.”  We have the suggestion that racism is a subplot to the story.

Mr. Hayakawa’s character studied in the United States as a young man, and he and Colbert reminisce about their college years.  It is one of those moments where Colbert’s quality of being unassuming makes the scene almost otherworldly for her being able to take in his surprising words and gentlemanly behavior (he lights her cigarette) while being scared to death at the soldiers with their bayonets about to herd them into a concentration camp.

The Japanese soldiers are present everywhere, some are stony-faced and stoic, some are cruel, some are bumbling, but all are human. That is one of the achievements of this movie, made only five years after the war ended.  Agnes Keith in her book was clear that she felt barbarism was to be found not in people, but in war, and the movie seems to have followed the spirit of her book.

The other aspect of Keith’s book well replicated in the film, as Colbert remarks, “Life was reduced to one simple, stubborn purpose – to keep alive.” 

They are brought on trucks down the jungle island to a camp where they spend nine months, the women and children separated from the men.  The men’s camp is nearby and they sometimes catch glimpses of them out in forced labor parties or are left notes.  There is a harrowing scene where Colbert sneaks out at night to meet her husband in the bush, while she is weak with fever, having not seen him for five months.

There are scant rations, working in rice paddies, beatings.  Colbert clings to her son and cuddles him.  Her friend Betty, played by Florence Desmond, sneaks her food from the garbage.  There is more in the book about the Dutch and English communities and the sometimes rancor between them, but the movie flows along quickly and with dramatic visuals of the muddy camps in the rain, of a group of British women singing “God Save the King” in their bunks at night while Colbert and her son, giggling, substitute the words for “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” of the threat of death always present.

They are moved to a new camp where they will spend the rest of the war, and will not be near the men anymore. They are allowed a distant goodbye with a ditch between them, barely allowed to touch their fingers if they can reach far enough.

The commander at the new camp, Lt. Nekata, is played by Howard Chuman. He is sadistic.  One night, Claudette Colbert is outside the hut retrieving laundry when a guard tries to rape her.  She reports the incident to Mr. Chuman, who wants her to sign a confession that nothing happened and that she lied.  She refuses, and Chuman has one of his men beat her.  The scene is about to be repeated the next day, when Sessue Hayakawa shows up unexpectedly, is delighted to see her, and he seems like a hero because we know she will be safe if he is near.

Though he is obviously strict and authoritarian, he behaves kindly to the children in the camp, and insists Colbert sign a copy of her book to him.  Toward the end of the war, in August 1945, they know that Allies will eventually arrive.  Hayakawa is stunned, almost somnambulant, but not because the Japanese have lost the war and he will likely face retribution; it is because, as he confesses to her, his family have all died at Hiroshima.  He says of his three kids, “Three of the dearest children you ever saw.”  Later, while watching Colbert’s son and some other kids playing in his garden and eating fruit he gives them, he will break down and sob.

A month later, in September, 1945, they are liberated, with a long scene of reuniting with the men prisoners that is more suspenseful than jubilant as we discover some of the women will not see their husbands again. Colbert at last spots her husband, stumbling down the dirt road on crutches.

The film was directed by Jean Negulesco with a smooth, rather quick pace and many dramatic visuals, but one aspect to the book was left out of the movie.  It is not dramatic, but it is important to the character Colbert plays.  Agnes Keith made secret notes and left them on bits of paper stuffed into cans, buried in the camp, sewed into her son’s teddy bear, hidden all over, and when she was liberated, she made stubbornly certain that she was not going to leave this part of her behind.  She was a writer.  She scrounged up all her notes and took them with her, and they eventually became her book.

The story of women in a Japanese concentration camp is reminiscent of our look here at A Town Like Alice (1956), which took place on the Malay peninsula.  Nevil Shute’s novel was based on stories of women’s real-life experiences as prisoners of war, but because he was a novelist, that story made more of a full arc in the telling.  Agnes Keith’s memoir was nonfiction, so it was detailed and precise, and less concerned with dramatic arcs, more concerned with chronicling a record. Nunnally Johnson’s script is necessarily episodic.  The movie does not tell us, as the book does, that Colonel Suga committed suicide in his Allied cell by cutting his throat on the day Agnes Keith, her husband, and son, left for the United States.

Claudette Colbert, despite her reputation for crisp, aristocratic elegance, had an everywoman quality that lent itself to her achieving a full spectrum of strong women’s roles during World War II: A nurse on Bataan here in So Proudly We Hail! (1943), a wife and mother keeping the homes fires burning—and eventually going to work as a Rosie the Riveter here in Since You Went Away (1944), and in this film, certainly an impressive trilogy. 

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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.

The Shocking Miss Pilgrim - 1947

The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947) is an affectionate spoof of a suffragette (or suffragist, as they actually called themselves) and her mission to become independent and self-supporting as a first step to gaining the right to vote, which, as we know, was a long way off.  We celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the 19^th Amendment this week, which gave women the right to vote in all federal and state elections.  It was not “universal.”  The poll tax and civil rights abuses kept women (and men) of color, and Native Americans, from voting in certain parts of the country until the late 1950s and finally, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited discrimination in registering to vote and being able to vote.

The real story of the fight for women to achieve full voting rights in this country, which took several generations, is a frustrating and often harrowing, even horrific, series of events. Recently, PBS tackled the subject in an excellent two-part documentary, “The Vote,” as part of its American Experience series.  Have a look at the clips on the website, and don’t miss the chance of watching it the next time you see it scheduled on your local PBS station. It is a well-told examination of the truly dramatic and inspirational fight that women endured to gain this most basic right of citizenship.

The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, obviously, does not tell the story of women’s suffrage in all its fullness, or grim realities.  To give it its due, it does show strong, intelligent women bucking the powers that be to gain respect (which, without civil rights, no respect would be required), and it shows the men to be grudging, but ultimately won over by the ladies’ perseverance.  And charm. That, it seems, would always be a necessary element. Hollywood was certainly frank about that.

Classic films were not dismissive of the 19^th Amendment, but on the few occasions Hollywood tackled the subject, it was always in this quaint, stereopticon view of The Good Old Days and my, wasn’t Grandma spunky?  We covered The Strawberry Blonde (1941) here, which showed Olivia de Havilland’s suffragette as a foil and a mere subplot to James Cagney’s aspiring dentist dealing with legal issues who didn’t get the girl of his dreams. Again, the story is quaint and affectionate, down to the singalong ending.  The suffragette theme is mere window dressing.

When it comes to this cozy view of the fight to gain suffrage, I think my favorite example is from Mary Poppins (1964), where Glynis Johns sings with ladylike gusto, “Well done, Sister Suffragettes!”  My favorite line, delivered with gentle sincerity: “Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group – they’re rather stooopid.”

Her jubilant, sunny, marching rant in the foyer of her home is turned into a party when the servants, Reta Shaw and Hermione Baddeley join in, dragging into the chorus the reluctant Elsa Lanchester (the children’s nanny who is about to quit, thereby creating a job opening for the new nanny, Mary Poppins). 

The background to Glynis Johns’ suffragette activities is sketched out for us by her husband, played by David Tomlinson, who sings with self-satisfaction, “King Edward’s on the throne; it’s the age of men!”  He is lordly, and therefore is somewhat clownish, but his wife is equally clownish, hiding her activities from him, stuffing her sash in a closet before he comes home. “You know how the cause infuriates Mr. Banks.”  At the end of the movie, she will give up her sash to make a tail for her son’s kite.

Interestingly, the magical, yet no-nonsense Mary Poppins is the ultimate feminist in the movie – independent, self-assured, not taking orders.  But she is humanized for us by being vain in a typically feminine manner.

It is 1910 in Mary Poppins, but The Shocking Miss Pilgrim takes us back to 1874.  Female independence from men is tied to, for me, a beloved object—the typewriter.  Betty Grable stars as Miss Cynthia Pilgrim, a new graduate of a business school in New York which has admitted women for the first time.  She and the other female students are admonished at the beginning of their course of study: “Until now, the business world has been a man’s world. If you fail, it will remain so!”

That’s quite a burden on their shoulders, but they are courageous pioneers, and Betty becomes the class champion at typing.  The students are referred to prospective employers (in an immediate job placement program that might be enviable for any college student today) and Betty draws a shipping company in Boston run by Dick Haymes.

Mr. Haymes runs his family firm, which is actually owned by his suffragette aunt, played by Anne Revere.  Haymes, however, thinks that women do not belong in the workplace and is surprised when Miss Grable shows up for work, as he thought he would be sent a male typewriter (or typist, when the person doing the work was finally viewed as separate from the machine).

Another person in the all-male office who disdains women in the workplace is Gene Lockhart, who plays the office manager.  The guys at first mock her, but her moxie, and her good-natured ability to take kidding endears her to them.  They put on their suit coats in a gentlemanly effort to not show her disrespect by working in the same room with her in their shirtsleeves.  Ah, me, but such niceties are lost to us today.

All are fascinated by her clatter on the typewriter, which was introduced in this same year of 1874 to commercial offices, though it would be a long time before they became common in workplaces or even had a standard keyboard.  Though Betty was the class champ in typing, we can see she does not know how to touch-type.  She does the old hunt-and-peck with two fingers. Actually, the touch-typing system was not invented until 1888, so this is not an error.

You will notice also that her typewriter appears to be operated with a foot treadle; this is because the first typewriters put out this year of 1874 were mounted on sewing machine stands and the foot treadle operated the carriage return.  They typed only in capital letters. So all your business correspondence would be screaming.

Betty takes a room at one of the few lodging houses in Boston that accepts women office workers, who are shunned as undesirables, women of probably questionable virtue.  Like actresses.

Elizabeth Patterson is her kindly landlady who takes her in and who belligerently accepts all outcasts from Boston society, including artists and writers.  Gad!  Arthur Shields and Allyn Joslyn are two of her vagabond lodgers, and together they make up a happy family.

Anne Revere recruits Betty into the local suffrage movement and Betty makes a hit making speeches. She drags the reluctant Dick Haymes along, and we have our obligatory, if clunky, romance budding between them. Dick introduces Betty to his mother, a high society lady played by Elisabeth Risdon, who is also a closet suffragette and who will, at the end of the film, buy her own typewriter.  I love the line when Betty, who is surprised to discover the great lady is a kindred spirit, is answered by Miss Risdon, “You expected to find a witch burner.”  This, of course, a nod to a period in Massachusetts history when intolerance, as it will, brought ghastly tragedy.  (It’s a common euphemism, of course.  Nobody was burned in Salem for witchcraft; nineteen were hung, one was pressed to death, and others died in jail.  Burning at the stake in Europe, of course, was another matter.)

As long as we’re being sticklers on accuracy on my home state, I’d like to congratulate those responsible for this film for the correct pronunciation of “Peabody.”  Hereabouts, it is not pea-body.  It’s PEAbudee. One of the men in the office, Mr. Peabody, who presents her flowers, corrects Betty on her pronunciation. 

Like Glynis Johns, Betty Grable dons her “Votes for Women” sash and heads out for another rally.  True love does not run smooth, especially when the ardent young man thinks suffragettes are frustrated old maids. But Betty is sensible, not flighty or shrewish.  She thinks women should gain equality by entering many careers, rather than just protesting. When he tries to replace her with male secretaries, he finds them lacking in…uh, charm.  Finally reverting back to female secretaries, he finds them plain, unattractive, and none suit him. He goes to the Boston Academy of Typewriting for a new graduate.  Our old friend Mary Field is the receptionist who refers him to the manager—Betty Grable.  Ah, Dick Haymes sees the light.  It is implied, rather than stated, that he has come around to the idea that women are just as capable in business as are men. Will they marry?  Will she give up her job if she does marry him?

How old will she be when she finally gets to vote in 1920?

Many social issues were covered across a broad spectrum in films from the 1920s through the 1950s, yet women’s suffrage was not really addressed except in parody.

There is a line in the “Sister Suffragette” song from Mary Poppins that Glynis Johns sings: “Our daughters’ daughters will adore us, and they’ll sing in grateful chorus, ‘Well done, sister suffragette!’”

Hollywood has never really said, “Well done,” or given them their due, and perhaps even today, neither have we.  Watch the PBS documentary.  Then go vote, each and every election you can. It took a lot of sacrifice and fighting to get that right.  If circumstances arising from the pandemic makes it more difficult for you to vote, or the current traitorous administration of criminals tries to stop you, then move heaven and earth to do it.

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.

 

 

 

SALE - Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.

 

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star., my book on the career of multitalented actress Ann Blyth is on SALE until Monday, August 17th (in celebration of Ann Blyth's 92nd birthday on August 16th). The eBook is reduced to $4.99 (regularly priced at $9.99), and the print book is reduced to $19.99 (regularly priced at $25.00)

Multitalented and remarkably versatile, Blyth began on radio as a child, appeared on Broadway at the age of twelve in Lillian Hellman's WATCH ON THE RHINE, and enjoyed a long and diverse career in films, theatre, television, and concerts. A sensitive dramatic actress, the youngest at the time to be nominated for her role in MILDRED PIERCE (1945), she also displayed a gift for comedy, and was especially endeared to fans for her expressive and exquisite lyric soprano, which was showcased in many film and stage musicals.

Get your copy of the eBook at Amazon here.

Get your copy of the print book at Amazon here.

I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for reading!

Requiescat in Pace - Olivia de Havilland

The incomparable Olivia de Havilland has exited this world after celebrating her 104th birthday, leaving us breathless, as usual, with the sum total of her talent, her elegance, her grace, and an unusual quality of self-knowing. Among her films we've discussed here are The Heiress (1949), for which she won one of her two Oscars and was made in the period where she did her strongest work; The Strawberry Blonde (1941), one of her last pretty young ingenue roles before her court fight with Warner Bros. resulting in her win and "the de Havilland decision"; and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), a lovely example of her early work, so mature, which brought her to Hollywood as a teenager.

Of all the greats we've lost this year, her career stretches farthest back to the Golden Age of Hollywood. Sometimes interviewers ask stars if they watch their old movies, but I wonder if someone like Olivia de Havilland, who had retired happily to France many years ago, only dabbling in TV in the final years of her career, watched any classic films at all -- and especially, did she enjoy recalling former colleagues in the industry.  For someone who has lived more than a century, one outlives almost all relationships.  Someone in the entertainment business has many more people passing through their lives than most of us do in our occupations.  We may number our working acquaintances in the tens; someone like Olivia must have known hundreds.  Did she ever watch a film and smile at being reminded of someone she knew?

For all her class and elegance, I like to think of her humor and this clip from Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943) doing a jitterbug parody with Ida Lupino, and George Tobias, who despite being a character player (usually of simpletons), gets the starring role of squiring the two hepcats. 

Bud and Lou on your home projector...

More on Castle Films this week...and an interesting variation.  Midget Car Maniacs (1947), a short subject comedy starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, could be purchased on 16mm or 8mm by Castle Films for your home viewing pleasure on the projector you kept on the shelf in the living room closet.  It was, I believe, pieced together at least in part from discarded sequences from another film or films.  

You'll recognize some old friends in the cast: Nat Pendleton, Don Beddoe, Milburn Stone, and others.

The Castle Films version is silent, shown with titles.  There was also a sound version for the theaters, and eventually, television.  You can see both versions on YouTube.

Castle films at home

As this ad from 1941 reminds us, long before there was the VHS cassette, serious film fans had those 16-mm reels of "6 great cartoons to select from"..."each a great thrill on your own screen!"  

So get out your projector, put up that screen, and make the popcorn.  "Let's movie," as they say on TCM.

Requiescat in pace - Carl Reiner

Carl Reiner will be remembered for his long career and incredible talent, for being a mensch, for being a pioneer of early television.  For just a moment, let's remember a scene from those early years and the man who came into our living rooms as a friend we loved and looked forward to seeing.  Here from the fantastic Your Show of Shows, he provides support to Sid Caesar in one of the funniest sketches ever performed on television.  How fitting that it is also a parody of television. From April 3, 1954...