"That's Typing" Tuesday, in which I share unpolished, unpublished writings from my vast store of unpolished, unpublished writings. On Tuesdays.
Some thoughts about Dooley Wilson, Humphrey Bogart and the ending of Casablanca.
[SPOILERS DEAD AHEAD] Every now and then I see a complaint—or maybe just a plaintive wail—about the ending of Casablanca, along the lines of "But what about Sam?"
On an emotional level, I get it. Sam has followed Rick to hell and back, from at least Paris and probably before, all the way to this dead end job playing piano in a restaurant, and Rick just drops him like an unwieldy subplot, running off with Louie instead. What the frak?
But logically, it makes complete sense. I think Rick figures the trip to the airport is strictly a one way ticket to the afterlife. After he gets Lazlo and Ilsa on the plane, at best, he's going to wind up in a concentration camp; more than likely, the Gestapo will stand him up against a wall. That's not the sort of end you ask a good friend to share.
"Where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of." Indeed.
That Rick gets away is wholly unexpected. You can't blame the man for that.
I like to think he and Louie went back and got Sam. It's the romantic in me. And Carl and Sasha, too, and the croupier and the doorman. And Yvonne. She was pretty hot even if she was no Ingrid Bergman, but then Ingrid Bergman is on her way to America with another man, so what the hell.
And then, because it's also a great movie, Rick busts the cast of The Maltese Falcon out of jail—and now we've got Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Mary Astor along for the ride, too. Actually, we can have Greenstreet there twice since he also played Ferrari in Casablanca, and Lord knows he was fat enough to play two characters.
You've got a pretty good size army together by now.
Actually, this is just about what happened in Passage to Marseille, where Bogart, Rains, Lorre and Greenstreet reunited to fight Nazis. They even brought in Michael Curtiz to direct it.
Now if they'd only brought in Howard Koch and the Epstein brothers to write it ...
Some of the biggest names of movie history have already fallen—Chaplin, Keaton, Fairbanks, Astaire—and the list is down to two in the Silent/1930s Era bracket in Monty's Best Actor Tournament at All Good Things.
William Powell and Clark Gable have squared off before. In 1934, they teamed up with Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama, the Oscar-winning story of crusading politician and his roguish gangster pal. Powell may have gotten the girl in that one (the first of fourteen movies he and Loy made together), but Gable got the better of the two parts.
Nine months later, Powell and Gable squared off again, this time in the best actor category at the Academy Awards. Score round two for Gable as well, as he won the Oscar for It Happened One Night over Powell's performance in The Thin Man.
And finally, in the Carole Lombard sweepstakes, both men married her, but only Gable stayed married to her—Powell and Lombard divorced in 1933, Gable and Lombard were married in 1939 and remained married until her death in an airplane crash in 1942.
Now the two meet once again in the finals of the Silent/1930s bracket of the Monty's Best Actor Tournament and Powell is out for payback. Will he get it or will Gable trump him once again? You can help decide.
William Powell Birth Name: William Horatio Powell Birth Date: July 29, 1892 Birthplace: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Height: 6' Film Debut:Sherlock Holmes (1922) Awards: New York Film Critics Circle Award for best actor of 1947 (Life With Father and The Senator Was Indiscreet); 3 Oscar nominations, no wins Marriages: three, Eileen Wilson (1915-1930, divorced); Carole Lombard (1931-1933, divorce); Diana Lewis (1940-1984, his death) Best-Known Role: Nick Charles in The Thin Man Best-Known Quote: "He didn't come anywhere near my tabloids."
Clark Gable Birth Name: William Clark Gable Birth Date: February 1, 1901 Birthplace Cadiz, Ohio Height: 6'1" Film Debut:White Man (1924) Awards: Academy Award for Best Actor of 1934 (It Happened One Night); 2 other Oscar nominations Marriages: five, including Carole Lombard (1939-1942, her death) and Kay Williams (1955-1960, his death) Best-Known Role: Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind Best-Known Quote: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."
107 years old today, and more highly regarded now as an actor than he ever was during his lifetime. The forty-five years that have passed since his retirement without a worthy successor have proved that, while he may have made it look easy, it most certainly wasn't easy.
Here's a photo of Cary Grant, circa 1934. Katie-Bar-the-Door insists he gets better looking the older he gets. Something for you to look forward to.
If you don't already follow The Marx Brothers Council of Britain, you should. Matthew Coniam has just posted not one, but two, essays on the Marx Brothers' first MGM movie, A Night At The Opera. Indispensable reading if you're a fan of the Marx Brothers, comedy or good writing.
To read "A Night At The Opera: An Overture," click here. And to read "A Night At The Opera: An Annotated Guide," click here.
This is what makes blogging all worthwhile: our good friend Who Am Us of the blog Who Am Us Anyway (check it out here) wrote in the comment section of "Carole Lombard In The Public Domain" that "Believe or no, this was my first-ever viewing of My Man Godfrey." To introduce someone to a classic movie—well, for a blogger, it doesn't get any better than that.
That he also had the same reaction to My Man Godfrey that I did, that's just icing on the cake:
And ahh, Gail Patrick as Cornelia—have you written about her before? Must check ... dang! The search button produces results in the amount of zero! Well, I'm a Gail fan starting tonight ...
That's the phenomenon known as "the hotter younger sister," which the fine, fine folks at Bright Lights After Dark wrote about at some length last year. As they so eloquently put it, "damn is she hot!"
Amen, brother.
Born Margaret LaVelle Fitzpatrick in Birmingham, Alabama, Patrick was the dean of women at Howard College and was studying law at the University of Alabama when she entered a nationwide contest for a part in a Paramount film. She didn't win, but she was offered a film contract and moved to Hollywood.
Appropriate to a blog currently covering 1932-33, Patrick made her film debut in the 1932 film If I Had A Million, starring Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton and George Raft. She typically played arrogant socialites and femme fatales and is best known for three comedic roles—Carole Lombard's scheming sister in My Man Godfrey, a haughty wannabe actress who clashes with Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn in Stage Door and Cary Grant's not-so-favored bride in My Favorite Wife.
Patrick appeared in sixty-two movies between 1932 and 1948.
She abandoned acting when she married her third husband, literary agent Cornwell Jackson. One of Jackson's clients was mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner who created the fictional defense lawyer Perry Mason. Patrick (credited now as Gail Patrick Jackson) obtained the rights to Perry Mason and for nine seasons produced one of the most successful television series in American history.
Patrick died of leukemia in 1980 at the age of sixty-nine.
Today is Katie-Bar-The-Door's birthday, she of the world famous Katie Awards. She's a movie fan from way back—when Katie was a kid, her mom would take her and her siblings to see revivals of Chaplin and the Marx Brothers and whatnot, with A Night At The Opera making the biggest impression on her.
As a child her favorite sequence from that film was the opera itself—Groucho's speech, "Take Me Out To The Ballgame," and especially Harpo swinging from the scenery rigging. But just try finding it on the internet, uncut and in its proper aspect ratio. Oh, well.
Hopefully, this is the next best thing, the cabin scene from the same movie, maybe the funniest bit in movie history.
Of all the posts I've worked on over the past year and a half, the most popular turns out to be one I knocked off in about five minutes—a series of photos of John Wayne as he aged in the movies, from the shockingly handsome twenty-three year old of The Big Trail to the grizzled, terminally-ill sixty-nine year old in The Shootist.
Echoing that theme, here are a series of photos of Greta Garbo, tracing her career and the lines on her face from childhood to the end of her life and most everything in between.
Just between you and me, I'm not sure they really tell you anything other than that there was a woman named Greta Garbo made of flesh and blood who eventually withered and died. For me, she lived on the screen and nowhere else, but census takers would disagree.
Now, if you really want photos of Greta Garbo, there are two places to go: Dr. Macro's High Quality Movie Scans and Garbo Forever. The former has hundreds of, yes, high quality scans from her movies; the latter has an exhaustive supply of portraits that covers her entire life.
But for the nutshell version, here you go. As always, click on the photo to enlarge it.
1914—age 9 (that's Garbo in the middle)
1920—age 15
1923—age 18 (by Olaf Ekstrand)
1926—age 21 Flesh and the Devil (with John Gilbert)
1929—age 24 The Kiss
1932—age 27 As You Desire Me
1936—age 31 (color—not colorized—photo by Sinclair Bull)
1941—age 36 Two-Faced Woman
1946—age 41 (by Cecil Beaton)
1951—age 46 (by George Hoyningen-Huene)
1965—age 60 (by Cecil Beaton)
1990—age 84
The Monkey will be busy with family matters for the rest of the week. Rather than rush the essay on the best actress of 1932-33 (comedy/musical), I'm declaring a brief hiatus from blogging. But fret not. I should be back with another indigestible three thousand word nugget on Monday.
In the meantime, I leave you with the last big screen appearance of the great Douglas Fairbanks, the 1934 comedy The Private Life Of Don Juan. Directed by Alexander Korda and co-starring Merle Oberon, it's the story of an aging legend not quite sure how to fill the hours now that he's retired.
In case you're having trouble remembering where you've seen May Robson before, here's another picture of her, in this case from Bringing Up Baby. She played Katharine Hepburn's Aunt Elizabeth.
That's little-known actor Cary Grant on the left ...
Some quick facts about Kay Francis, star of the Ernst Lubitsch classic, Trouble In Paradise.
● Born in Oklahoma City to an actress mother and a father who left when Kay was four, Francis made her Broadway debut at the age of twenty in a modern-dress version of Hamlet. In 1928, she appeared in a play with future Oscar-winner Walter Huston who was so impressed with her that he arranged a screen test with Paramount Pictures. The test was a success, and Francis made her film debut the following year in the Marx Brothers' first film, The Cocoanuts, which was filmed at Paramount's Astoria Studio in New York.
● Francis had a lisp and was known around the backlots of Hollywood as "the Wavishing Kay Fwancis." Generally, dialogue was carefully tailored to conceal her speech impediment, but Ernst Lubitsch refused to rewrite key scenes of Trouble In Paradise for her and you can hear traces of her lisp if you listen closely.
● She left Paramount in 1930 for Warner Brothers. During the early sound era, she was the highest paid actress at Warners.
● At the time she was known for soap opera-style pictures about long-suffering women who wore great clothes, and much to her chagrin, these productions often focused on the clothes more than the dialogue. This eventually led to a protracted dispute with Warners she was destined to lose.
● She was married five times, divorced five times, and kept a diary that included details of numerous affairs with both men and women. George Cukor later said that all the great stars carry a secret which is revealed in their faces, and that Kay's face suggested her secret was particularly wicked.
● Along with Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Mae West, Francis was labeled "box office poison" in 1938 by a group of independent theater owners.
● She made her last movie in 1946. Among her best films were Jewel Robbery, One-Way Passage, Trouble In Paradise and In Name Only.
● She died of breast cancer in 1966. Her estate was valued at around $1 million, the bulk of which went to Seeing Eye, Inc., a company that trained seeing-eye dogs.
[To read Part One of this essay, click here. To read Part Two, click here. For Part Three, click here, and for Part Four, click here.]
V. Later Comedies and Lubitsch's Legacy After Trouble In Paradise and Design For Living, "comedies without music" he called them, Lubitsch returned to the comfort of the operetta form he had perfected during the first days of sound. The story of a randy army officer ordered to woo a wealthy widow in order to save the country from bankruptcy, The Merry Widow—made while on loan to MGM—was the most polished and least suggestive of his five musicals. The Hays Office, by 1934 enforcing the Production Code, objected to several scenes and required extensive cutting before it would approve the film for release. (Fortunately, this footage was saved and has been restored.)
The Merry Widow received good reviews and won an Oscar for art direction, but with production costs of $1.6 million, it was the most expensive musical made to date and wound up losing money. It was also the last pairing of stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. The former found himself relegated to smaller and smaller parts and eventually returned to France; the latter paired up with Nelson Eddy and made commercially successful movies for the next decade, though in retrospect, none are as satisfying as those she made with Lubitsch.
After the commercial failure of The Merry Widow, Lubitsch did not direct another movie for three years. In the meantime, he took a job as production manager at Paramount, becoming the only director to ever run a major studio. I'd like to say it was an inspired choice, but in fact, Lubitsch had never been able to delegate authority easily and wound up interfering in many of the sixty productions a year he oversaw without really being able to contribute anything substantive, a result that pleased no one.
"I think I am possessed only of a fascination for the work I have chosen to do," he said later. "I am so engrossed by the production of a film that I literally think of nothing else. I have no hobby, no outside interests and want none."
He was unceremoniously dismissed as head of production in early 1936.
The time away from the director's chair, though, gave Lubitsch time to consider what kind of film he really wanted to make. Whipsawed on the one hand by the enforcement of the Production Code which had effectively forbidden the racier aspects of his style; and on the other by the aggressive style of the screwball comedy which made his gentle approach passe, Lubitsch temporarily lost confidence in his ability to make a successful picture.
He eventually figured it out, though not at Paramount, moving in 1939 to MGM, where he directed Greta Garbo in Ninotchka and James Stewart in The Shop Around The Corner, two of his best comedies, both preserved in the National Film Registry. In 1942, he made what is arguably his best movie, To Be Or Not To Be, an anti-war comedy starring Jack Benny and in the last role of her career, Carole Lombard. Blasted by critics at the time as being in bad taste, To Be Or Not To Be has become a particular favorite of critics over the intervening years and was included in the National Film Registry in 1996, one of five Lubitsch movies so honored.
"None of us thought we were making anything but entertainment for the moment," John Ford said later. "Only Ernst Lubitsch knew we were making art."
"Lubitsch had the greatest sense of humor of any individual I've ever met," said director Joseph M. Newman. "The actors all loved him. He had a very human quality about him. He was the type of man that became your friend after you met him once. A great man."
His most faithful disciple was fellow German refugee Billy Wilder, who wrote the screenplay to Ninotchka and later directed such classics as Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. Over his desk, Wilder posted a sign "How would Lubitsch do it?" But despite winning six Oscars during his career, Wilder ultimately concluded he had never measured up to his mentor. "His art is lost," he said. "That most elegant of screen magicians took his secret with him."
In 1943, Lubitsch received an Oscar nomination for Heaven Can Wait, the third nomination of his career, but once again, he did not win. In March 1947, as it became clear that Lubitsch's health was failing, the Academy presented him with a special award "[f]or his distinguished contributions to the art of the motion picture."
"With the passing years," wrote his biographer Scott Eyman, "it became increasingly clear that Ernst Lubitsch had accomplished something only vouchsafed the greatest artists: he had created a self-contained universe with a sensibility so singular, behavioral beauties so intense, that it forever altered the world view of those lucky enough to experience it. He believed in his dreams so strongly that millions of others came to believe in them as well, and the fact that the values and style of Lubitsch's work constituted the finest examples of the discarded heritage of elegant screen comedy made his everlasting, gentle brilliance even more poignant."
Ernst Lubitsch died of a heart attack in November,1947.
"No more Lubitsch," Billy Wilder lamented at the funeral.
"Worse than that," said William Wyler. "No more Lubitsch films."
II. The Lubitsch Touch Ernst Lubitsch arrived at Paramount Pictures in 1928. Like Warner Brothers, Paramount gave the director complete creative control, but unlike Warners, Paramount's executives didn't care if his movies made money or not. As long as he delivered his pictures on time, stayed within his allotted budget and pleased the critics, the prestige his presence lent the studio was compensation enough.
Such latitude was virtually unheard of, then or now, and no artist could have taken wiser advantage of the opportunity. Although already established as one of the world's best directors (his silent Carmen, for example, made the New York Times top ten list in 1921), Lubitsch blossomed once he arrived at Paramount in 1928.
So productive were Lubitsch's early years at Paramount that film historian James Harvey, in his study Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, called this period in movie history (1929-33) "The Lubitsch Era." He made full use of storytelling possibilities only just becoming apparent to a handful of directors as the new sound technology took hold in Hollywood, and in the process his films came to define the early romantic comedy.
It was during this period that Lubitsch turned an advertizing slogan—"The Lubitsch Touch"—into a very real style that filmmakers have been trying to define and emulate ever since.
The phrase "The Lubitsch Touch" has been associated with the man for so long, it's easy to forget it didn't just spontaneously attach itself to him sometime after birth. In fact, Hal Wallis, who years later would produce Casablanca, coined the phrase while working in the Warner brothers publicity department in the early '20s, but while Wallis may have only dreamed up the label to sell movie tickets, the tag wouldn't have stuck if it hadn't been founded on truth.
In the silent era, what the "touch" mostly meant was that Lubitsch wasn't making D.W. Griffith pictures. Griffith, as you no doubt know, practically invented what we think of a "movie," and from 1915 to 1921, he was the most famous director in America. But while his technical expertise was sophisticated, Griffith's storytelling was not, with earnest tales of virginal heroines and cartoon villains. In lesser hands, these unfortunately are the kind of stories many people think of when they think of silent movies—Snidely Whiplash tying Penelope to the railroad tracks—and even as practiced by the talented Griffith, audiences during the Roaring Twenties were ready for something new.
Thus arrived Lubitsch to serve champagne to an audience raised on buttermilk and although some, such as author-activist Jim Tully, writing for Vanity Fair in 1926, criticized him for making "frothy films for sophisticated chambermaids and cinema critics," French director Jean Renoir later opined that by leading American tastes—or at least the studios' tastes—away from Griffith, Lubitsch had invented the modern Hollywood.
Admittedly, I'm not sure Lubitsch in the silent era was doing anything all that different from Robert Weine, F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Abel Gance and other European directors, but American audiences weren't seeing those films (Nosferatu, for example, wasn't released in the United States until 1929, seven years after its German premiere). The nearest thing to European sensibilities showing in American theaters in the '20s were the films of Erich von Stroheim, whose Foolish Wives and Greed were tough sledding indeed.
Later, though, once technical breakthroughs allowed him to add dialogue, songs, sound effects and a film score, Lubitsch really was doing something different, and when we speak of the "touch," it's most often the Paramount films we're talking about. He already had a sense of how to tell a story through visuals—for example, the way he established Irene Rich's character in Lady Windermere's Fan with just a shot of a man reaching for a checkbook while she bites her thumb—but with the coming of sound, he was able to draw deeper characters, sharpen the wit, speed the pace, and in the process, pull back the curtain on human behavior, particularly human sexuality, in a way no other director had managed before.
"He could do more to show the grace and humor of sex in a nonlustful way," said Charlie Chaplin, speaking years later, "than any other director I've ever heard of." He was "a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it," critic Michael Wilmington wrote, "and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well."
After starting at Paramount with a historical drama, The Patriot, as much a part of his repertoire at the time as were his sophisticated comedies, Lubitsch commenced to make a series of "naughty operettas" (Harvey's phrase again), five of them altogether including The Merry Widow while on loan to MGM in 1934, and it was here that he mastered the art of talking about sex without talking about it at all.
"When I married her," says a cuckolded husband in One Hour With You, "she was a brunette. Now you can't believe a word she says."
"He created a style of sophisticated comedy peculiarly his own," said three-time Oscar winner William Wyler, "as well as a new style of musical, both unknown before his time. His films bore the recognizable and indelible stamp of the gay, clever, witty, mischievous master, whose delightful personality matched his work."
Although nearly everyone agrees Lubitsch brought something unique to the screen, no two people can quite agree on what we mean when we speak of "the Lubitsch touch." For Orson Welles, it was his originality. For director-historian Peter Bogdanovich, it's "sophistication." For film critic Roger Ebert, it's "dialogue [that] shimmers like poetry." For director Cameron Crowe, it's the "elegant joke" followed by "an even funnier joke, which becomes the ultimate joke you never expected."
And on and on.
For me, the touch has come to be characterized by three things: elision, invention and exuberance—and by the latter, I mean both the joy Lubitsch took in his craft and the sense of euphoria I experience when I watch the best of his movies.
More than any other director before or after, maybe more than any artist not named Ernest Hemingway telling very different kinds of stories, Lubitsch relied on elision—omitting words, scenes and action—to tell his jokes and his stories. "He realized," Billy Wilder said, "that if you say two and two, the audience does not have to be told it's four." Give the audience the conspiratorial pleasure of finding the joke themselves, "and you were rewarded by the laugh of the people who added it up."
Perhaps the most famous example of this was in The Merry Widow—a soldier (Maurice Chevalier) is guarding the door as the elderly, obese king leaves the queen's bedchamber. The camera follows the king down the hall until he realizes he's forgotten his saber. He returns, where we notice Chevalier is no longer standing. The camera lingers outside the door and a moment later, the king emerges with the forgotten sword. But as he attempts to buckle it on, the belt reaches only half way around his waist. And he and the audience arrive at a realization simultaneously.
Lubitsch was also obsessed with finding inventive ways to accomplish the otherwise mundane—"How can we do that without doing that?" was a question he was always asking of his writers. The answer was sometimes as simple as allowing the camera to linger on a vacated space when another director would have followed his actors; having a character enter the frame from an unexpected direction; editing out an actor's long walk from one part of a room to another; or, in a more complex sequence, the way he would establish a locale, eschewing the traditional long shot of a famous landmark, instead opening with something unexpected as in Trouble In Paradise where the focus is on an anonymous doorway, pulling back to reveal a garbage can, then following a trash collector until he reaches a gondola on the canals of what can only be Venice.
The effect is cheerfully buoyant rather than coldly academic, and serves to create a sense that the characters are floating on air, and that even when ostensibly set in a real place, the events were happening in what biographer Scott Eyman called "Lubitschland."
"I've been to Paris, France," Lubitsch said, "and I've been to Paris, Paramount. Paris Paramount is better."
Sometimes this genius for invention represented the difference between a classic and a misfire. In Conversations With Wilder, director Billy Wilder described to Cameron Crowe how for Ninotchka Lubitsch solved the problem of how to show the transformation of Greta Garbo's character from an ardent communist to an equally ardent capitalist without writing pages and pages of turgid, political dialogue.
"'The hat.' And we said, 'What hat?' He said, 'We build the hat into the beginning!' [Co-writer Charles] Brackett and I looked at each other—this is Lubitsch. The story of the hat has three acts. Ninotchka first sees it in a shop window as she enters the Ritz Hotel with her three Bolshevik accomplices. This absolutely crazy hat is the symbol of capitalism to her. She gives it a disgusted look and says, 'How can a civilization survive which allows women to wear this on their heads?' Then the second time she goes by the hat and makes a noise—tch-tch-tch. The third time, she is finally alone, she has gotten rid of her Bolshevik accomplices, opens a drawer and pulls it out. And now she wears it. Working with Lubitsch, ideas like that were in the air."
Working with Lubitsch, marveled Robert Stack after filming To Be Or Not To Be, was "like playing chess at ninety miles an hour."
"In an age in which machine-gun editing has replaced the cinematic equivalent of perfect pitch," Scott Eyman wrote in Laughter In Paradise, "Lubitsch might seem stodgy to a modern audience. If people lack the vocabulary to appreciate the beauty of this particular lost language, it's their loss. They'll never know the exhilaration of an impeccable artist."
Lubitsch loved to work and took great pains to create precisely the right shot; he loved life, too, both its happy and its sad sides. He was funny, charming, exuberant, and forgiving of every human foible but mediocrity and sanctimony, and these aspects of the man show up in every frame of film he shot. Sometimes he's suggestive—shots of sounding artillery spliced into scenes of a wedding night in The Love Parade—and sometimes he playfully chides you for having your mind in the gutter—for example, in The Smiling Lieutenant when Chevalier suggests waggishly to Claudette Colbert that they could make beautiful music together, and then a cut to the two of them, what else, playing a duet on the piano.
"I let the audience use their imaginations," he said. "Can I help it if they misconstrue my suggestions?"
I think more important is a reluctance on Lubitsch's part to judge others—Harvey calls it "moral grace"—that leaves us with the hope that despite all our human failings, love will ultimately win out. In the hands of another director, these stories of pleasure sought and found would curdle into something sour as the characters inevitably faced the consequences of their actions. But in Lubitschland, charm and good manners always prevail. Thus, in a tale such as Trouble In Paradise, thieves can steal and lovers can stray yet all involved can walk away unscathed if they can only conjure the appropriate elegant gesture. This is a fantasy to be sure, but one central to the human experience of longing.
That he could make Americans steeped in Puritan piety believe in the promise of guilt-free pleasure, if only for ninety minutes, is perhaps the most compelling proof of all that Lubitsch did indeed possess the "touch."
Next up was supposed to be Part Two of my essay on Ernst Lubitsch, which is well in hand and maybe you'll still get it today if I can squeeze it in before Katie-Bar-The-Door and I head to Nationals Park with Mister Muleboy and MicheleMishka to see Stephen Strasburg.
But it's Jeanette MacDonald's birthday today and since she and Lubitsch are inextricably linked, I just have to stop here and tell her hello.
She was a discovery of Lubitsch's, don't you know. Actor Richard Dix had seen her on the Broadway stage in 1928 and had her make a screen test for Paramount, but nothing came of it until Lubitsch happened upon it a year later and immediately saw her star potential. He flew to Chicago where she was working and signed her to star in his first sound production, The Love Parade with Maurice Chevalier. The picture was a hit, she was a hit and the rest is history.
MacDonald made four movies for Lubitsch, The Love Parade (1929), Monte Carlo (1930), One Hour With You (1932) and The Merry Widow (1934), each better than the last. For those of you who only know her through her later work with Nelson Eddy, I strongly suggest you track down these musicals, and one other, Love Me Tonight, a Rouben Mamoulian musical in the Lubitsch style. She's beautiful and sexy and is allowed to show a naughty side you never get to see again once the studios began to enforce the Production Code in late 1934.
Born in Philadelphia in 1903, MacDonald began acting at the age of six and was winning singing contests by the age of thirteen. After her successful association with Lubitsch at Paramount, Irving Thalberg lured her MGM where she became known as the Iron Butterfly thanks to her skill at negotiating favorable contracts.
She's best remembered now for her association with singer Nelson Eddy. They made eight pictures together, including Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie and Maytime. She also made San Francisco with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, which includes a spectacular recreation of the 1906 earthquake.
A weak heart forced MacDonald into semi-retirement in the 1950s, although she did occasionally perform with Eddy. She died of a heart attack in 1965.
Trivia: MacDonald's sister Blossom, who performed under the name Marie Blake, played Grandmama on the television show The Addams Family.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
[SPOILERS DEAD AHEAD]
But logically, it makes complete sense. I think Rick figures the trip to the airport is strictly a one way ticket to the afterlife. After he gets Lazlo and Ilsa on the plane, at best, he's going to wind up in a concentration camp; more than likely, the Gestapo will stand him up against a wall. That's not the sort of end you ask a good friend to share.
And then, because it's also a great movie, Rick busts the cast of The Maltese Falcon out of jail—and now we've got Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Mary Astor along for the ride, too. Actually, we can have Greenstreet there twice since he also played Ferrari in Casablanca, and Lord knows he was fat enough to play two characters.
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