Ann Blyth will be honored with the Legacy Award at the Coronado Island Film Festival, California, which is celebrating its sixth anniversary. The dates of the festival are November 10-14, 2021.
Halloween
is missing from the roster of holidays celebrated in musical numbers from Holiday
Inn (1942). At the time the film was
made, Halloween was barely clawing its way out of the era of time-honored street
urchin vandalism of petty theft and streetcar derailment to something different
– an adult-supervised, tamer holiday of parties, party favors, and treats. By the time the Boomers were kids,
trick-or-treating exploded across suburbia.
Today,
it’s the second-largest holiday of consumer spending in United States, with the
National Retail Federation predicting that this year Americans will spend more
than $10 billion on Halloween. This is
amazing considering the economy’s fragility while still dealing with a
pandemic, and even more so that this is an increase of some $8 billion over
last year. So far, consumer spending on
Halloween is still behind the level of Christmas—but for how long?
The
single day of Halloween has become a season of a month or even more of decorating
indoors—and most dramatically—outdoors.
One wonders if this is merely yet another example of the arrested
emotional development of Boomers, Gen-X-ers, and Millennials not so much yearning
for the fun times of childhood, but being oblivious to the fact that they might
have to actually grow up at all.
I
confess a monstrous craving for candy corn this time of year (similar to the
unaccountable monstrous craving I get for candy conversation hearts as Valentine’s
Day approaches), so perhaps, like most of us, I have become well trained by the
retailers. Though we joke about pumpkin-spice everything this time of year, at
least that’s innocuous compared to the severed heads and skeletal displays of
sometimes questionable taste on the neighbor’s lawn.
For
classic film buffs, society’s growing enthusiasm for Halloween has led to that
transfer of movies-as-holiday props such as we see during the approach of
Christmas. Christmas is a holiday
wrapped up in nostalgia as much as consumerism, and for fans of old movies,
this means dragging out not only decorations, Christmas music, and favorite
recipes—but also the retrieval from our own vaults of Christmas movies to watch
during December. To be sure, Turner
Classic Movies is there for a reliable backup, but we who have amassed our
private stock of movies without which Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas really
don’t rely on it, do we?
Holiday
Inn
is a teasing, tantalizing hybrid of holidays as Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire,
Louise Beavers, Marjorie Reynolds, and Walter Abel parade through the
calendar. Most classic film buffs watch
it during Christmastime, and are familiar with the tale that the song “White
Christmas” was created for the movie and become an almost instant hit, now a
national treasure. Other songs written
specifically for the movie include “Be Careful, It’s My Heart” for Valentine’s
Day, “Happy Holidays” (for those smug, hypocritical fools who think saying “Happy
Holidays” is somehow a sacrilegious insult to Christmas, a Bing Crosby
recording should be played over and over as an answer to their foolishness),
and “You’re Easy to Dance With,” which has no holiday connotation at all.
If
precious filmstock was being devoted to non-holiday musical numbers, then why,
we might wonder, could they not have filled that gap in the movie between Independence
Day and Thanksgiving with a Halloween song?
Irving Berlin actually did write a couple that might serve: “Down Where the Jack O’ Lanterns Grow”
written sometime around World War I about a rural love nest and not
particularly spooky. I would vote for “The
Haunted House,” a really cute ragtime ditty you can listen to here on YouTube:
As
for giving September a little attention, perhaps a Labor Day sequence could
have been thrown in with Berlin’s song “And Father Wanted Me to Learn a Trade” written
sometime in the middle 19-teens. We do
have that burst of industrial war worker footage montage during the Independence
Day sequence, so factory work had achieved a nobility not seen since.
Also
for the war, Irving Berlin wrote the pleasant if unintentionally comical “I
Paid My Income Tax Today” which you can listen to here:
Maybe
Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire would have a tougher time putting across Income Tax Day
in their musical romp.
But
it is on the calendar.
It
does feel like something of a wrench for us these days to have no Halloween in Holiday
Inn, but likely nobody missed it in 1942. Halloween was strictly for kids. For the grownups, there were scarier monsters afoot, and they came home to us when as
partway through the filming of the movie, Pearl Harbor was bombed.
But
classic movie fans, partly as a celebration of Halloween, have revived the popularity
of the Universal monsters: Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula, et al. Because of Halloween and our movies-as-holiday props habit, monsters walk the earth again, at least
once a year.
A memory of Jane Powell in a simple, elegant, long-sleeve gown with a bateau neckline at what must have been some televised awards show (how many years ago?), and especially comments made by some reviewers in effect that she outshone all the younger female entertainers. It was true. It was not a patronizing tribute to her representing a fond remembrance of Old Hollywood, like a treasured fossil we take down from the shelf and pay homage to that they don't make them like that anymore -- rather, it was the honest acknowledgement that this lady displayed class and that class is timeless.
I remember feeling proud of her, with that sense of ownership old movie buffs generally have for Old Hollywood.
One would suspect, however, that her elegance and her class on this evening was not effortless; a troubled childhood and difficult apprenticeship in the film industry -- a career she never wanted -- she revealed in her autobiography, The Girl Next Door and How She Grew.
An interesting quality Jane Powell had, however, was that she was able to observe that world like a fly on the wall and inspect it for what it was, holding herself apart. Her diffidence might have given her that quality, but her impressions, feeling as she did like an outsider looking in, give us a view of the studio system that we don't find in other memoirs. It's also interesting that Jane Powell finally found personal peace and happiness with another child actor with conflicting feelings on his film career, and first met Dick "Dickie" Moore when he was writing his own book: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, Don't Have Sex or Take the Car.
She eventually accepted her role as an alum of that rare world, and took it in good grace, as evidenced in her appearances in film industry events, and especially taking over the host position on TCM in 2011 when Robert Osborne was on medical leave. She had a long career on film, television, and the stage, and if being the girl next door in her early movies was such a small part of her life, she seemed resigned to allowing us to cherish it, even if it did not mean quite so much to her.
Hollywood public service shorts on behalf of the March of Dimes and the search for a polio vaccine remind us of a world where a deadly and extremely communicable virus was everybody's fight and patriotic Americans did their part.
The March of Dimes was founded in 1938, as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis was incorporated, launched by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. President Roosevelt, himself a victim of polio, was the nation's personification of the struggle against the mysterious virus. After President Roosevelt's death, his image replaced the old Mercury Head Dime and became the Roosevelt Dime because of the March of Dimes and the fight against polio. That fight still had almost another decade to find a solution. It found it in a vaccine. The success of the field trials were announced on April 12, 1955 - the tenth anniversary of his death. All of this, to a radical right fascist, might seem political.
Though there were plenty of detractors and outright enemies on the radical right against Roosevelt for his progressive programs, the fight against polio was not seen as political. Polio was scary.
It also took more than one vaccine to vanquish. The Salk vaccine was a two-injection process; the second shot was given three months after the first shot. Then an additional booster shot some seven months later.
In 1961, the oral vaccine developed by Dr. Albert Sabin was available, and even those who had received the earlier Salk injection still took the Sabin oral vaccine. Polio was that scary, people today who complain about the COVID vaccine and requiring boosters simply have no idea what they are talking about.
You were given a card on which to jot down the dates you received your shot:
Sound familiar? The difference between then and now is now we have allowed the most ignorant and immature and irresponsible people in our society a louder voice and far more power than they deserve.
Polio still has no cure. It is a virus that can be contained only by preventing it from spreading. Since 1979 no polio cases have originated in the United States, a couple of decades from the discovery of the first vaccine, and four decades from the founding of the March of Dimes by the nation's most famous polio victim.
Hollywood pitched in and did its part.
Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland from 1938:
Robert Young and his family from 1951:
Cecil B. DeMille:
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and their kids from 1954:
For a bit of a departure, here's an episode of Burke's Law from 1964 now on YouTube. From my book Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.:
"She made two appearances on the whimsical detective series Burke’s
Law starring Gene Barry. Both are fun and utterly goofy sides of sweet little
Ann Blyth that should make any future critic dispense with typecasting her in
their reviews.
In the “Who Killed Andy Zygmunt?” episode broadcast March 13,
1964, which satirizes the world of modern art and pokes fun at avant garde
artists—one such artist has been murdered—Ann plays another beatnik style
artist whose specialty is spray painting her live models with different colors
and having them roll around on a canvas spread on the floor. She is
a suspect in the murder, and replies to the investigator, “Hey, man, can’t you
see I’m busy working here?...you wouldn’t have buzzed Toulouse-Lautrec when he was fast sketching the lovely
Jane Avril?” She grins at the detective, “Your perceptivity just knocks
me out, soldier.”
We learn she is a junkie, hooked on previously prescribed
painkillers. To keep herself supplied, she forges doctors’ signatures on
prescription cards. The victim knew this and was blackmailing her.
However, Ann is not the only suspect, and collection of similar kooks includes
Aldo Ray as a dog groomer, Macdonald Carey, Jack Weston, and Tab Hunter all as
free-spirited weirdoes who could have murdered the dead man. Gene Barry,
star of the show, will tell us who did it after the last commercial."
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For more on Ann Blyth's career on stage and screen, television and radio, have a look at my book on Ann's career --Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.
