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Eugene Pallette—best known for his froggy bass voice, this veteran of such films as My Man Godfrey and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington made his first movie in 1913 and had an important role in D.W. Griffith's classic Intolerance.
Adolphe Menjou—debuting in 1914, he was already great in such silent films as A Woman of Paris and The Marriage Circle, but sound added another layer of smarm and good humor. See, e.g., Morocco, The Front Page, A Farewell to Arms, Stage Door, Paths of Glory, etc.
Wallace Beery—a ham in any age, he played supporting roles in the The Last of the Mohicans (1920), the Douglas Fairbanks version of Robin Hood (1922), Buster Keaton's Three Ages (1923), and The Lost World (1925), but he won an Oscar in the sound era.
Mary Astor—made her film debut in 1920, but did her best work in Dodsworth and The Maltese Falcon, and won an Oscar for The Great Lie in 1941.
Lionel Barrymore—debuted in 1908 and was excellent in the Gloria Swanson version of Sadie Thompson but is best known for such sound work as It's A Wonderful Life, Key Largo, Grand Hotel and his Oscar-winning role in A Free Soul.
Marie Dressler—she starred across from Chaplin in the first feature-length comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance in 1914, became a supporting player, then virtually disappeared before becoming Hollywood's top leading lady (no, seriously!) in the sound era, winning an Oscar for Min and Bill and providing the best double take in film history opposite Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight.
Carole Lombard—debuting in 1921, she made multiple brief appearances as eye candy until Howard Hawks had the good sense to cast this irreverent, salty-tongued goddess in a comedy, 1934's Twentieth Century. After that, we got such classics as My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred and To Be or Not to Be before her untimely death in 1942.
Myrna Loy—played dozens of largely-forgotten vamps and exotics between 1925 and 1934 until cast opposite William Powell in the classic comedy whodunit, The Thin Man. After that, she was one of the biggest stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, a leading lady to the likes of Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Fredric March and, of course, Powell with whom she made fourteen films.
William Powell—Roger Ebert once wrote that Powell was to dialogue what Fred Astaire was to dance, and with the coming of the sound era, his career blossomed. But you can see him in thirty-five silent films, mostly as the stock heavy (including a brilliant turn as a Russian revolutionary in Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command.)
The Monkey has spent most of the summer reading the collected works of Alexandre Dumas—or, more accurately, The Three Musketeers which is long enough to feel like the collected works of Alexandre Dumas. It's a sprawling epic, crammed to the gills with plots and subplots enough for a dozen novels.
Even if you haven't read it, you probably have some sense of the story: a young Frenchman named d'Artagnan pals around with three of the king's elite guardsmen—the musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis—wielding swords, battling bad guys, and getting into all sorts of scrapes. It's two tons of fun, with memorable heroes and villains, lots of action and pretty girls, and very little angst to slow you down.
No wonder movie makers have been so fascinated with it.
The first film version of the novel (a short fencing scene) appeared in 1898 and people have been retelling the story ever since. At 700+ pages, there's enough here to make any kind of movie you want—a historical romance, a swashbuckler, a buddy comedy, a political thriller, even a sex farce—and there are versions in French, English, Russian, Latvian and Dutch, feature-length versions, musical versions, television versions, and even one version starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy—and that's just in the last ten years!
As a silent film fan, I'm most interested in the one starring the legendary Douglas Fairbanks. Released in 1921, this version of The Three Musketeers opts to emphasize the palace intrigue, specifically focusing on an episode from the first half of the book where Cardinal Richelieu—the real power behind Louis XIII of France—hopes to catch the queen in an affair with England's Duke of Buckingham, thus discrediting her and removing her as a counterweight to his influence on the king.
Riding to the rescue are d'Artagnan and the three musketeers.
Fairbanks had already established the conventions of the movie action hero with The Mark of Zorro in 1920, and after one last foray (The Nut, 1921) into the kind of modern comedy that had previously defined his career, Fairbanks spent the rest of the silent era making the lavish historical action-adventures he's now known for, beginning with The Three Musketeers.
It wouldn't take Fairbanks long to perfect the formula—The Thief of Bagdad, The Black Pirate and The Iron Mask are among the era's best films—but here, he was still figuring out the proper balance between swashbuckling and plot, in this case erring on the side of the latter. The long set-up introducing all the scheming court figures will serve only to tax the patience of some viewers without making what follows any clearer. The movie also tries to squeeze in as many incidents from the book as possible without necessarily investing any emotion in them or tying them together, dissipating the narrative momentum and proving once again that it's possible for a book adaptation to be too faithful.
At those moments, though, when it turns its attentions to d'Artagnan, the film takes off. A young rube from the country, he initially alienates Athos, Porthos and Aramis, but quickly wins them over with his bravery, ingenuity and superior swordsmanship. He falls in love with his landlord's niece who, as it turns out, is moonlighting as the queen's go-between to Buckingham, thus drawing d'Artagnan—and the three musketeers—into the royal intrigue.
When the time comes to act, all the bad guys in Paris can't stop him from succeeding.
Fairbanks, as usual, was in fine fettle. At thirty-eight, he was too old to play the twenty-one year old d'Artagnan, but once the swordplay begins, you don't care. With grace and gusto, he fends off a dozen men, scales walls, leaps through windows, and saves enough energy to woo the girl and outsmart the Cardinal. And his one-handed handspring to stab a man and save his friends ranks with his best stunts and is worthy of a man half his age.
Admittedly, he was not a subtle actor, but then he rarely played subtle characters, and d'Artagnan is no exception. While modern audiences may find Fairbanks's style amusingly outdated, the d'Artagnan he plays is an impetuous, inexperienced youth, untrained in the manners of an urban gentleman, unable to harness his raw emotions, and always looking in his youthful insecurity to pick a fight with anyone he thinks has looked at him wrong. A more subdued, modern style would only wind up highlighting the silliness of the storyline without adding to the fun.
As for the other actors, Adolphe Menjou is well-cast as the ineffectual Louis, and Nigel de Brulier is so good as Richelieu that he played him three more times, in 1929, 1935 and 1939. A long list of nobody-much plays the various female roles, including Mary MacLaren as Anne of Austria, Marguerite De La Motte as Constance Bonacieux and Barbara La Marr as Milady de Winter. The three musketeers wind up being minor characters in a film bearing their name, with Leon Barry playing Athos, George Siegmann as Porthos, and Eugene Pallette (yeah, the frog-voiced tub who played the father in My Man Godfrey and Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood) as Aramis.
Director Fred Niblo (best known for the 1925 silent version of Ben-Hur) and cinematographer Arthur Edeson (All Quiet on the Western Front and Casablanca) made a good team, allowing us to easily follow the swordplay as well as using visuals rather than intertitles to reveal the character of Richelieu—showing, for example, his lurking shadow in the background as the king unwittingly sets the trap designed to ensnare the queen. (Richelieu sometimes also strokes a cat while devising his plans, decades before Ernst Blofeld, Don Corleone and Dr. Evil made it the signature move of the truly wicked.)
Edward M. Langley designed the sets; and Paul Burns and Edward Knoblock were responsible for the costumes.
The film was released in August 1921 to good reviews and a solid box office. Its $1.5 million gross placed it among the top earning films of the year, finishing behind only Rudolph Valentino's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Charlie Chaplin's The Kid.
Overall, this is not top shelf Fairbanks, but it's pretty good, and once you've seen The Mark of Zorro, The Thief of Bagdad and The Black Pirate, I can recommend this one as a worthwhile follow-up.
P.S. Fairbanks returned to the character of d'Artagnan in 1929 with his last silent film, The Iron Mask. Based on a pair of sequels to The Three Musketeers penned by Dumas himself, the second go-around is even better than the first and it proved to be the perfect cap to Fairbanks's swashbuckling career. You don't have to see The Three Musketeers before you see The Iron Mask, but doing so will add to the fun—and poignancy—of the latter.
This last Tuesday afternoon, Mister Muleboy and I made our way to Manhattan for a V.I.P. preview of Golden Boy, a revival of a 1937 Clifford Odets play about an up-and-coming boxer who also happens to be a talented violinist—a high concept that might strike you as faintly ridiculous, but then maybe you're not old enough to remember Mike Reid who some forty years ago was an all-pro defensive tackle for the Cincinnati Bengals as well as a concert pianist and later a Grammy-winning songwriter who was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005.
As I keep telling you, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. So we were there with open minds.
Clifford Odets, as you probably know, was a playwright who had a brief but wildly-successful run on Broadway in the 1930s. He was also one of the founding members of the Group Theater, an influential theater company that introduced "Method" acting to America. His best-known stage work includes Waiting For Lefty, Golden Boy and The Country Girl. After tastes changed on Broadway in the early '40s—or should I say, after Broadway lost its taste for Clifford Odets—he decamped for Hollywood. He famously struggled there, but he did make one lasting contribution, collaborating on the screenplay to Sweet Smell of Success, starring Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster, one of the most biting and cynical movies of the 1950s. He died in 1963.
That the Coen Brothers spoofed Odets in Barton Fink as a pretentious Broadway playwright lacking the talent even for hackwork perhaps should have given me pause before racing up to see what the New Yorker notes is a "rarely revived" play, but what can I tell you—I love the theater, I love free food and, to quote Cole Porter, I happen to like New York.
And when I have to give the world a last farewell,
And the undertaker starts to ring my funeral bell,
I don't want to go to heaven, don't want to go to hell.
I happen to like New York.
After cocktails and hors d'oeuvres at Jeffrey Zakarian's Lambs Club with forty or so of our fellow blog-typing wallflowers—I am as dull and dreary in person as I am fascinating and unforgettable online—Mister Muleboy and I crossed 44th Street to the Belasco, a fully-refurbished turn-of-the-last-century jewel built by the legendary Broadway producer David Belasco. He designed the auditorium to create what he called a "little theater" experience, with three tiers of seats pushed close to the stage to foster an intimacy between the performers and the audience.
Sitting there, I thought it's no wonder that the Belasco has featured so much serious drama over the last century, including such plays as Johnny Belinda, The Song of Bernadette and A Raisin in the Sun, as well as much of the Group Theater's output. Indeed, Golden Boy premiered 75 years ago this month at the Belasco—and I'm thinking that its revival there now is not a coincidence.
This new production of Golden Boy stars Seth Numrich (War Horse) and Yvonne Strahovski (Chuck and Dexter) in the leads, with Tony Shalhoub, Danny Burstein, Ned Eisenberg and Dagmara Dominczyk, among others, in support. Tony winner Bartlett Sher directs.
The play opens in the seedy offices of Tom Moody, a boxing promoter who was once the best in New York, but who, like the rest of the country, has been struggling to make ends meet since the stock market crash of 1929. At his side is his mistress and girl Friday, Lorna Moon. Lorna is a self-described "tramp from Newark" who was plucked by Moody from a life that sounds vaguely like prostitution to live a life that still sounds vaguely like prostitution, only with one client, better clothes and a softer bed.
Moody is trying to figure out how to raise the $5000 necessary for a divorce settlement—the sap genuinely wants to marry Lorna—when into his office and into his life rushes Joe Bonaparte, a brash young punk who claims to be a great boxer in need only of a great manager to hit the big time. When one of the fighters in Moody's stable breaks a hand before that evening's bout, he shoves the kid into the ring and discovers, shock of shocks, he has a potential goldmine within his grasp.
The only problem is, the boy is also a gifted violinist who's afraid of ruining his delicate mitts on another man's chin. And how can you hope to win the title if you won't take your hands out of your pockets?
Enter the girl.
You know how to get men to do what you want them to do, Moody tells her. Get him to fight and we can finally get married. And so she sets out to seduce the kid. The thing is, though, as time passes, she can't quite decide whether she's manipulating the boy or falling in love with him. She's been batted around enough to want the security that Moody represents, but like most of us, still longs for true love.
Despite the complications of the love triangle, though, the central conflict is between Joe and his father, with the violin and Joe's rare talent for playing it—he's won a gold medal and a scholarship—standing in for the decision each of us must make eventually: what do you want out of life?
Joe's tired of being ashamed of his poverty and sees boxing as a shortcut to fame, fast cars and flashy clothes—all the things he's never had and his father, a Zen master who pushes a fruit cart, has never counted as important. His father will support Joe's choice as long as he's passionate about it, but what he sees in the boy suggests to him that it's the soulful beauty of the violin rather than the violent release of the ring that gives him true pleasure. That there's no real money in music, his father tells him, isn't important as long as you have a purpose in your life and a song in your heart.
But a parent can't live his child's life for him, he can only hope that as the boy makes his mistakes, the consequences aren't so permanent and debilitating that they ruin him for good. And therein lies the rub, for the violin requires delicate hands and boxing is the destroyer of hands. That boxing is also the destroyer of minds and souls—as represented by the angry, brain-addled palooka the father meets in act two—only exacerbates his fears.
In a time when, thanks to the internet, it's possible to be both a struggling artist and a capitalist fat cat, the choices presented here might seem a little quaint. Played out, though, as Golden Boy was in 1937, against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe, the choice between the humane and the expedient wasn't a trivial one—the future of civilization hung in the balance.
So what did I think of the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
The acting is top-notch—especially that of Danny Mastrogiorgio as Tom Moody and Tony Shalhoub as the father. Shalhoub you probably remember from Monk, and I imagine he could add warmth and wit to a recitation of the phone book. Mastrogiorgio, who was previously unknown to me, turns a heel into someone you can root for without softening Moody's edges, and it's his performance you can't take your eyes off of. I'll be looking for more of him in the future.
As for the rest of it, the direction is crisp, the staging inventive, the costumes expertly evoke the period. Kudos all around.
The production's flaws lie within the play itself. At times, Odets was so keen to make his points, he seemed to forget his characters were people rather than allegories and plot devices. Lorna, especially, changes tack from scene to scene depending on which direction the story needs go, rendering her motivations not so much complex as murky.
And let me tell you, while complex is exhilarating, murky is frustrating, irritating, and finally enervating—especially by the end of a nearly three hour play.
Still, it's the sort of story that'll stick with you for days, giving you something to mull over rather than forget, and since for a change there was no traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, I'd call the evening a success—I was home in bed with Katie-Bar-The-Door well before the sun peeked over the horizon.
This being a classic film blog, I was naturally curious afterwards to see how the pros in Hollywood adapted the play to the big screen, and the following morning, I wound up watching the 1939 film adaptation starring Barbara Stanwyck, William Holden and Adolphe Menjou.
It's a more conventional crowd-pleaser, that's for sure.
The girl was already a hop skip and a jump from being a classic Barbara Stanwyck character and Hollywood simply straightened out her through line, turning her into a "dame from Newark" who rediscovers the heart of gold that was always beating in her tastefully slender bosom. Her Lorna is both bitchier and ultimately sweeter than Odets's conception because she, not Moody, is the schemer calling the shots. She's got the boy, her boss and the whole wide world by the balls and she relishes that it's up to her to decide whether and how hard to squeeze.
Like most of Stanwyck's best roles, she's interesting because—right or wrong—she's the one in control.
And how does the film handle Joe Bonaparte?—a pertinent issue since, Mike Reid or no Mike Reid, the choice between the boxing ring and the violin is not and never has been a real world dilemma. William Holden plays him as a tousled-haired schoolboy, twenty-one going on twelve, who nevertheless feels a need to pull his own weight. Music is wonderful, he concedes, but it doesn't put food on the table. The shift in motivation changes the story's central philosophical conflict from an issue of the eternal versus the ephemeral to one of the idealistic versus the practical, a subtle but significant difference.
With Adolphe Menjou playing Moody for laughs, Lee J. Cobb (at age 27!) channeling Chico Marx as William Holden's father, and the supporting cast delivering their lines at twice the speed of normal human speech, the tone is bright and brassy rather than portentous, more Guys and Dolls than Eugene O'Neill.
Does that make the movie better than the play? Well, it's shorter anyway. No doubt the changes were necessary to make the story palatable to an audience that had sacrificed a great deal more than the violin to survive the Great Depression. There's no denying, though, that the movie version of Golden Boy has always been regarded as a minor entry on each of its stars' resumes.
In the final analysis, the film is more a curiosity—a chance to marvel at an impossibly young William Holden eleven years before his breakthrough in Sunset Boulevard—than a necessity. Fit it into your schedule, maybe, after you've run through the best of Holden's (and Stanwyck's) work.
So how about the Broadway revival—can I recommend it to you?
Well, the Ice Capades it isn't, and if you're in town for one night looking for the dramatic equivalent of hot dogs and cotton candy, honestly, you should go elsewhere. But if you're hungry for a deep dish of heavy think in the company of Odets, the Group Theater and the ghosts of Old Broadway, by all means, dive in.
Just don't expect them to spoonfeed it to you.
Golden Boy is currently in previews at the Belasco. It officially opens on December 6 and runs through January 20, 2013. To visit the show's website, click here.
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