Tomorrow November 13th would have been the 69th birthday of actress Jean Seberg, the delicate blonde beauty whose auspicious film debut in 1957 as Saint Joan–after being hand-picked for the role by director Otto Preminger–seemed to have set impossibly high expectations for her life and subsequent career.  While her most lasting fame came from her roles in European movies during the glory days of French New Wave cinema, this Iowa-born, uncommonly intelligent woman was treated poorly in her own country on many fronts.

How indeed, could an American teenager hope to fully inhabit the character of Shaw’s Joan of Arc?  Much of the criticism thrown at her and the film came from critics who thought her shallow and unconvincing, but some of that carping came from sources who were no doubt more perturbed at Preminger for fingering religion as a force for brutality.  Receiving universal raves for at least her perky pixie-length hair cut, Seberg had only slightly better notices for her Preminger-directed second film Bonjour Tristesse, where she continued her French phase as a sophisticated teenage girl with a playboy for a father.

In 1960 Jean Seberg starred opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo for writer Francois Truffaut and writer/director Jean-Luc Godard in the classic groundbreaking masterpiece Breathless, the film that helped usher in a breezy new style, completely contemporary in both characterization and technique.  Playing a young American girl marking time in Paris, Jean is adorable, naïve, shocking and irresistible.  Her success in France kept her busy for the next several years, during which time she was wed and divorced, then married novelist Romain Gary in 1962.  In 1964 she returned to the U.S. to star in director Robert Rossen’s (All the King’s Men, The Hustler) last movie Lilith, co-starring Warren Beatty and Peter Fonda.  As the titular Lilith, a disturbed and ethereal young woman who enchants Beatty’s young psychoanalyst, Seberg gave an unforgettable performance in a movie which unfortunately failed to ignite the box office yet continues to gain in critical stature. 

More European movies followed, along with several American titles, including Moment to Moment, A Fine Madness, and Pendulum, and finally she ended up in the big 1969 flop musical Paint Your Wagon.  While the movie was mocked and reviled for the singing of its non-musical stars Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin, you can’t fault Jean Seberg for looking luscious as the runaway Mormon wife who takes the lusty pair of gold miners as her lawfully wedded husbands.  Seberg’s biggest box office success was the bloated crowd-pleaser Airport, where she runs around as an airport middle manager, all efficiency and with every bit of her unique talent and intelligence kept completely under wraps. 

It was to be her intelligence and feisty personality that would get Jean Seberg into trouble–big trouble–when she became an outspoken advocate for a variety of liberal and even radical political movements.  She supported Native American rights and the NAACP, but the cause that would eventually take the cruelest toll on Seberg was her support of the controversial revolutionary group the Black Panthers. In 1970 Jean Seberg was targeted by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover.  He started a rumor, spread with the help of then-powerful Hollywood gossip columnist Joyce Haber, that the pregnant Seberg was carrying a baby fathered by one of the Black Panthers.  This shocking attack caused the seven-month along Seberg to go into early labor and deliver a stillborn child (though some sources say the child lived a couple of days).  In order to quell the rumors and clear her name, Seberg held a press conference and showed a photo of her dead baby–a pale little girl–to prove that the FBI smears were untrue.  (She also procured a glass coffin for the funeral to offer further proof.)

From this point on life was hellish for the beleagured Seberg.  She divorced Romain Gary shortly after the FBI mess and did marry again in 1972, but happiness seemed to be far out of reach by this point.  Though she continued to make films, her private life was wracked with bouts of severe depression and several suicide attempts, all of which took place on the anniversary of her daughter’s death in 1970.  In 1978 she threw herself under a train on the Paris Metro but survived.  In 1978 she married again, evidently while still legally bound to her third husband, but that didn’t stop the fourth from engineering the sale of her Paris apartment and reportedly abusing Seberg, who fled from him.

In August of 1979 Jean Seberg had gone through enough.  She was reported missing, and after an extensive search of Paris, Seberg was found, eleven days later, in the back seat of an automobile parked on a side street.  She had been dead for nearly two weeks, dying alone after a huge overdose of alcohol and drugs.  There were intimations that her suicide had been engineered by the same forces who attempted the Black Panther smear years earlier, but these suspicions were denied by the FBI, who were nevertheless hardly blameless in the deterioration of Jean Seberg’s mental state.

The sad story of Jean Seberg and her death at age forty-one is especially shocking when you watch one of her films, even the lesser titles.  She is radiant, clearly intelligent, and she paid the price for her independent spirit.  Even her fresh-faced Midwestern good looks and all the benefits they brought her couldn’t pull her back from the brink. 

Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed Guys and Dolls (1955), which was also Marlon Brando’s only musical. Its Score received an Academy Award nomination (among three others); “Luck Be A Lady” is #42 on AFI’s 100 Top Movie Songs of All Time and the film is #23 on AFI’s 25 Greatest Movie Musicals list. Though I wouldn’t rate it as one of my favorite musicals, I think the first scene with Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons in the mission – where they make “the deal” – is worth the price of admission. What great dialogue! Any doubts I had about Brando in the role were erased after watching it, even though his singing was pretty hard to bear. Frank Sinatra and Vivian Blaine also star in this Samuel Goldwyn produced film. In the Damon Runyon story that was adapted by Mankiewicz, Brando plays gambler Sky Masterson, who agrees to assist Nathan Detroit (Sinatra) find a place to play their “Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York” by putting one over on Sarah Brown (Simmons); she runs a mission in need of “buns on seats” (sinners to convert). Blaine plays Nathan’s longtime fiancee while Robert Keith plays the law. Stubby Kaye and Sheldon Leonard also play memorable roles.

Fred Zinnemann directed Oklahoma! (1955), perhaps the best among the musicals included in this article; it’s a (Richard) Rodgers and (Oscar) Hammerstein II gem that’s become a perennial favorite. Featuring the screen debut of Shirley Jones, who’s fifth billed behind Gordon MacRae, Gloria Grahame, Gene Nelson, and Charlotte Greenwood, this entertaining musical western romance also features plenty of comic relief. The rest of its outstanding cast includes: Eddie Albert, James Whitmore, Rod Steiger, and Jay C. Flippen. The film took home Oscars for its Musical Score and Sound, Recording and received nominations for its Color Cinematography (Robert Surtees) and Editing. The following plot summary is from my website:

On a beautiful mornin’, cowboy Curly (MacRae) comes to call on his childhood gal pal Laurey (Jones), who lives on a farm with her Aunt Eller (Greenwood). Even though people have said they’re in love, Laurey plays “hard to get” on the eve of the big dance party. So, Curly ends up taking Eller in his surrey with the fringe on top. Laurey ends up being “forcibly” escorted by their rough and dirty farmhand Jud Fry (Steiger) who, though he’s poor, is also very much alive. Will Parker (Nelson) has returned from Kansas City, where everything’s up-to-date, to marry his girlfriend Ado Annie (Grahame), who “cain’t say no” and has gotten mixed up with peddler Ali Hakim (Albert). But Will is an all er nothin’ kind of guy, so Ali will get a three day belly ache and giggling Gertie (Barbara Lawrence) to boot. At Skidmore’s (Flippen) dance party, the farmers and the cowmen can’t be friends. Then, there’s a dispute which leads to a death, and the judge (Whitmore) and Marshal (Roy Barcroft) must hold an impromptu court to decide the accused’s fate. The film ends with a rousing rendition of the title song O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A, Oklahoma, yeah! James Mitchell plays Curly in a 16 minute dream sequence that splits the movie’s two superior one hour halves (it could be cut from the film without being missed).

William Wyler directed Barbra Streisand’s screen debut in/as Funny Girl (1968), and the singer ended up sharing the Best Actress Oscar that year with Katharine Hepburn (The Lion in Winter (1968)) for her portrayal of comedienne Fanny Brice. The film received seven other Oscar nominations including for Best Picture, its title (Original) Song, Score, Supporting Actress Kay Medford, and cinematographer Harry Stradling (Sr.), who had been nominated for Guys and Dolls (1955) and several other notable musicals (The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), Auntie Mame (1958), and My Fair Lady (1964), for which he won) during his career. This film also stars Omar Sharif, Anne Francis, and Walter Pidgeon as Florenz Ziegfeld; it’s #16 on AFI’s 25 Greatest Movie Musicals list, and “People” is #13 on AFI’s 100 Top Movie Songs of All Time.

John Huston directed Annie (1982), which isn’t nearly as bad as its IMDb.com rating. The most objectionable scene in what is otherwise better than average family fare is near its end: there’s an Oliver! (1968) inspired moment in which the film’s red-headed woman – the orphanage’s drunken Miss Hannigan (played to a tee by Carol Burnett) – tries to save the little orphan (Annie, adequately performed by Aileen Quinn) from the male villain, in this case her brother Rooster (played deliciously by Tim Curry, who’d similarly portrayed Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)). Not only is the sequence contrived to allow Burnett to appear (her character redeemed) in the final scene, but there are some G-Ds thrown in for the sole purpose of earning the film a PG (in lieu of a G) rating. Albert Finney is his usual brilliant self as the busy billionaire Daddy Warbucks, dancer Ann Reinking is fine as his secretary that loves him, and Bernadette Peters (who conspires with Burnett and Curry to claim Annie), Geoffrey Holder (best known for his 7-Up commercials and for playing the voodoo doctor opposite Roger Moore’s Bond in Live and Let Die (1973)) as the mystical Punjab, Edward Herrmann as FDR, Peter Marshall as a 1930′s radio personality, and the rest of the child actors are also good. There’s another homage to the classic era when Warbucks and his secretary take Annie to the movie Camille (1936) - even though this film is set in 1932 – and several of its sequences including Garbo’s death scene are featured.

Pressbooks were great for giving theatre owners ideas for local promotions but they also gave them several choices of ad slicks for newspaper promotions based on their clientele. In other words, you could present the standard studio promotional choice for the ad or chose something a little more customized for your audience if they tended to respond to the more sensational approach. Take for example these alternate newspaper ad teasers for THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972).

Variations on this teaser ad coupled Gene Hackman with most of his co-stars in duo mug shots but the clear winner is Hackman and Borgnine, both of them screaming their fool head’s off. Second favorite is the one with Shelley Winters. The ones with Red Buttons, Roddy McDowall, Carol Lynley and Stella Stevens weren’t as “intense.”

New World Pictures, a Roger Corman brainchild, released countless “professional women” movies in the early seventies (a golden time for pressbooks) but their Nurse movies hardly needed any promotion. Any movie with Nurse in the title was a guaranteed hit at the drive-ins. Here are some smashing ideas for a lobby promotion for CANDY STRIPE NURSES.

Who wouldn’t want to visit a “sexual therapy clinic” near the concession stand where usherettes were dispensing “love pills”?

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968) is often considered Sergio Leone’s masterpiece but the pressbook promotional ideas for it seem very uninspired and disconnected from the film.

A Claudia Cardinale lookalike contest? A quick draw sketch artist competition? Why not take the high road and have the local symphony present a concert of the evocative Ennio Morricone score? Or at least take the low road and have the neighborhood Italian restaurant offer “spaghetti western fare” for a limited time only.

THE OTHER (1972) was an offbeat horror offering, based on the novel by Tom Tryon (I Married a Monster From Outer Space), that was a difficult sell for theatre owners. There was no monster and no way to easily exploit the horrific aspects of the film. So…what to do?

Can you imagine if all of the identical twins in your town showed up at a promotion for THE OTHER? It would be so much scarier than the movie.

PEEPER (1976), a relatively obscure Michael Caine private eye parody, clearly stumped the pressbook writers who probably never saw the films for which they were creating promotional copy. I suppose you could consider detectives voyeurs to some degree but isn’t this being a little too literal?

Here’s a creative approach from the pressbook for SYLVIA, the 1965 melodrama starring Carroll Baker who was red hot at the time. She had just appeared in Seth Holt’s underrated STATION SIX-SAHARA and the Harold Robbins’ potboiler THE CARPETBAGGERS. Her next film – and the one that lead to the undoing of her Hollywood career – was HARLOW. But I like the approach here. It’s all about the deconstruction of her image before she had a real breakdown and ran off to Italy for a second film career.

Last but not least we have one of my favorites – the pressbook for the obscure drive-in thriller THE STRANGE VENGEANCE OF ROSALIE (1972 – what was in the water that year?) that was usually exhibited with the British chiller WHAT BECAME OF JACK AND JILL? ROSALIE was a stark three character melodrama that starred Bonnie Bedelie, Ken Howard and Anthony Zerbe and was a forerunner of Stephen King’s MISERY. The pressbook, however, positions it as a genuine horror film.

I just love the frightening trio concept to sell the show – “Rig up two attractive girls and a boy with novelty store fright wig (hair standing on end or teased hair) and plastic bulge-eyed pieces, and tour them on walks around town. Hello? For what movie? Give me some of that juice you’re drinking! I won’t even go into the “loose clothing” idea or the “Frightened Grannies” concept.

Ah, Those were the days.

At the risk of exciting the lay Freudians out there, I do love me a movie set aboard a moving train. I suppose the tent pole titles in this subgenre are Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1939) and Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express (1974), both murder mysteries and both classics. And they’re great, don’t get me wrong… but there are so many other MTMs (moving train movies) that don’t get discussed nearly as often and should.

Richard Fleischer’s The Narrow Margin (1952) stars Charles McGraw as a tough cop who must suck up the murder of his partner and chaperone witness Marie Windsor cross-country from Chicago to Los Angeles. He hates the mission and he hates her and sparks fly when these two hardcases rub up against one another. There’s a twist in the tail of this noirish number that knocked me for a loop… and I’m not so knockable. (The film was needlessly remade by Peter Hyams in 1990.) Along similar lines (if much lighter in tone) is the Mike Shayne mystery Sleepers West (1941), directed by Eugene Forde and starring Lloyd Nolan as the eponymous San Francisco private eye. The plot is similar to The Narrow Margin: Mike must shepherd a murder witness from Colorado to California while a train full of interested parties schemes to find out which of the passengers she is. Another great MTM is the Sherlock Holmes mystery Terror By Night (1946), in which Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce try to recover the stolen Star of Rhodesia diamond. These movies are essentially drawing room mysteries enlivened by being set aboard a moving train, which lends to the proceedings a sense of momentum and urgency they might not otherwise possess.

On a much different track is the Spanish-English coproduction Horror Express (1972), directed by Eugenio Martin and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. The plot turns on a humanoid fossil discovered in Mongolia that, when transported upon the Orient Express, thaws and reveals itself as an alien life form whose journey to earth back in the day sparked the dawn of the human race. Telly Savalas turns up late in the game as a cruel Cossack who takes the alien on mano a mano and winds up the worse for wear. By the climax, the whole train is full of eyeless zombies while Cushing and Lee take refuge with their fellow passengers in the caboose. It’s like Twentieth Century (1934) meets Night of the Living Dead (1968).  George Pan Cosmatos’ The Cassandra Crossing (1977) almost seems like a remake, with the zombies replaced by Tyvek-suited military drones herding plague-infected passengers (among them Richard Harris, Sophia Loren, Ava Gardner, Martin Sheen, Lionel Stander, Lee Strassberg and O.J. Simpson) like cattle towards a catastrophic finish nearly identical to Horror Express.

I think the dynamic that most pleases me about these movies is that, however tense the A-plot, however wicked the horror or extreme the violence, there persists an element of coziness. You feel tucked in for the night with these films. A lot of it has to do with the more formal times in which they were made and/or set, a time in which doors were held open for ladies, hats were tipped and people seemed to treat one another with gentility and decorum. Of course, the British have it locked down, with their wagon-lit compartments and the little shades to pull down for privacy, but any train will do that has sleeper berths and conductors who’ve seen it all and dining cars and shifty passengers and the persistent clacketty-clacketty-clacketty that provides metronomic accompaniment as the train rockets towards its destination and the film its denouement. The list of movies with train scenes such as these is enormous (off the top of my head: The Sting, Lawrence of Arabia, From Russia with Love, Live and Let Die, Octopussy, Continental Divide, A Passage to India, Gandhi, The 39 Steps, Red Sun, Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, Le Cercle Rouge, The Getaway, The Train, Silver Streak, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, La Chateau and hundreds of westerns) and everyone has their favorites.

Trains have been a popular object for moviemakers since the birth of the medium. The Lumière Brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (1896) was one of the first moving pictures ever exhibited and Edwin S. Porter’s one-reel The Great Train Robbery (1903) essentially beget the western film genre. It’s a rich history and accessible to anyone at any time for the simple price of a ticket to ride.

I noticed that tonight between Guest Programmer Charles Busch’s choices I Could Go On Singing and The Hard Way, the musical short subject Spade Cooley: King of Western Swing is going to be shown.  Fans of that particular music genre will be quite familiar with Cooley from his recordings, but the rest of us might be fascinated for a slightly more sordid reason.  In 1961 the fifty-year old world famous fiddler, singing cowboy and TV star brutally murdered his wife Ella Mae Evans and was sentenced to life in prison.

The Oklahoma-born Cooley studied classical violin as a youngster, but soon changed his style to the more down-home fiddling which led to many appearances at local hoedowns and similar country music venues.  While still a young man, his parents moved to California, where Spade started getting regular gigs at square dances and gradually gained a reputation as a terrific fiddler with a distinctive and popular style.  Living in proximity to Hollywood gave Cooley a chance to hope for a career in the movies, where singing (and non-singing) cowboys were making their mark and becoming enormous box office draws.  Cooley managed to land a job as stand-in for Roy Rogers in the mid-1930s, and Spade’s resemblance to the handsome silver screen cowboy is palpable.  (And in case you’re wondering, “Spade” was a nickname.  His real first name was Donnell, and he got his moniker from his proficiency at poker.)

Eventually Spade formed his own western swing dance band and procured a recording contract, using his incredibly popular Los Angeles-area live performances to gain fans and up his public profile.  During the 1940s he also worked steadily in movies, both in musical shorts and in full-length cowboy features where he and his band appeared.  Though his popularity as a musical performer grew (his biggest hit "Shame On You"), his dramatic talents as well as the kind of charisma that makes a just another singing cowboy into a big star seemed to be lacking.  The trio of films he made as an above-the-title star were lackluster, and he couldn’t seem to cobble together enough of a credible and unique singing cowboy character to pose any threat to Roy Rogers, Gene Autry or Hopalong Cassidy, the reigning cowboy stars.  As those other performers continued into TV series of their own, Spade also took the TV plunge, only as the star of his own musical variety show, on local Los Angeles channel KTLA.

Hitting the air in 1948, The Spade Cooley Show was an instant hit, a live Saturday night broadcast direct from the Ballroom at the Santa Monica Pier. It remained a mainstay in those early exciting days of local television until 1957, though at that point it was being aired from the KTLA studios at Sunset and Van Ness.  (A location that would later be purchased by one of the other major cowboy stars, Gene Autry, when KTLA became part of his Golden West Broadcasting empire.)  By the time the late 1950s rolled around, though, Cooley had started getting a reputation as a heavy drinker and his musical success started to wane.  He became a real estate speculator of sorts, purchasing large tracts of land in the Mojave Desert, where he eventually settled with his second wife, Ella Mae Jones, with whom he had two children.

Now comes the sordid part.  Cooley’s drinking problems increased, his marriage to the vivacious Jones started unraveling, and it got worse from there.  The stories go that Ella, attempting to get Spade to let her out of the marriage, taunted him with accounts of orgies she had attended with male friends and perverted sexual exploits she had enjoyed with them, tales that seem to have been invented to incite Cooley to jealousy.  Spade was also jealous of the perky Ella’s old friendship and supposed flirtation with his cowboy star rival Roy Rogers, who had never really stopped being a major celebrity while Spade’s star had faded after his TV show left the air.  No matter what straw exactly broke the camel’s back, the whole mess came to a head on April 3, 1961, when Spade Cooley brutally beat and murdered Ella at their Mojave ranch home.  It was a horrid crime, a sadistic killing that was even more shocking because he had committed it in front of his and Ella’s 14-year-old daughter, who later testified against him in court. 

Spade Cooley was tried and convicted of first degree murder — killing by torture, the court called it — and sentenced to life in prison, which he served in the facility at Vacaville, California.  Evidently contrite and a model prisoner, he was actually about to be released on parole in 1969 when he got the opportunity to play at a sheriff’s benefit in Oakland, California.  After doing his set to much applause, the fifty-nine-year-old Cooley stepped backstage and died instantly of a massive heart attack.

The Spade Cooley story has been the subject of much attention, some literary — in fiction from writers like James Ellroy and John Gilmore — and actor Dennis Quaid has reportedly been trying to get a movie of Cooley’s weird life journey to the screen for several years.  If you are interested in reading more about this talented performer who, for all the success he had, obviously didn’t have quite enough happiness to make it through, there are a lot of great websites with wonderful information, including this one, and this one, and this one, and this one.  If you miss the short subject tonight, it’s on YouTube here.

What else can you say?  Sometimes it's not good to be King….

My film series is fortunate enough to currently be hosting a small retrospective of films by Shohei Imamura (1926-2006), made possible thanks to the hard work of various individuals at the Northwest Film Forum, The Japan Foundation, and Janus Films. As part of this touring retrospective, the Freer and Sackler Galleries, with support from the Toshiba International Foundation, put out a customized booklet to distribute to the nine participating venues.

Both the tour and booklet share the same title: A Man Vanishes. I just finished reading this informative booklet full of great snippets from various contributors. I remember programming Imamura right at the start of my current job, starting with The Eel (1997), followed by Dr. Akagi (1998), and then Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001). So it was interesting reading in the booklet Joan Mellen’s appraisal of these last three features:

“Imamura’s last three films – The Eel, Dr. Akagi, and Warm Water Under a Red Bridge – enjoy modified happy endings. In each, the director highlights the solidarity of his marginal people, who band together to defeat inevitable threats to their well-being.”

Having just seen Pigs and Battleships (aka: Hogs and Warships, 1961), The Insect Woman (1963), and The Pornographers (1966), the concept of the “modified happy ending” is now clear. His early work spared no prisoners. This quality, among many others, attracted Martin Scorsese to Imamura. Scorsese contributes to the booklet and adds:

“Every time I watch one of Imamura’s pictures, I learn something. And every time I’m enthralled. He brings us up close, very close, to aspects of humanity that most of us, perhaps all of us at times, would prefer be kept hidden away. That’s why his pictures are so frightening, so unnerving, and finally so freeing.”

During a scene in Hogs and Warships (to use the onscreen title of the print we used), I couldn’t help but think of a moment wherein a prostitute takes on more than she can handle with several drunken U.S. soldiers and the camera suddenly whirls about from a ceiling-perspective, and how it evoked in me thoughts of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Suddenly the fact that Scorsese mentioned Imamura three times in a recent hour-long address to film critics made sense, even if he was referring specifically to The Insect Woman, which covers 45 years of one Japanese Woman’s hardships (most of which is spent in a brothel). Regarding this film, Rob Nelson, another contributor to the booklet, adds this:

“His original title for the film – Entomology – came to him while beholding a bug’s relentless circling of an ashtray. ‘My character found herself in somewhat of the same situation,’ the director surmised.”

But Imamura is not all gloom and doom, as Joan Mellen, again, reports:

“ ‘Do you know what satori means?’ Shohei Imamura asked me as soon as I had seated myself opposite him on the tatami at his studio on a hot summer day in Tokyo in 1974. All his films were a search for satori, the sudden flash, the Zen revelation of truth unpredicted. Imamura’s characters are people, as he put it, ‘at the bottom of society’: fishermen and prostitutes, homeless tramps, and ex-cons grown old in wisdom. Persuaded that what they say is true, he vowed early on to ‘write only about oppressed people.’”

We’ve only got two more films to show, as part of our mini-retrospective: The Profound Desire of the Gods (1968) and Vengeance is Mine (1979). Our ability to relive the cinematic past is a treat, but when considering a lifetime of work that covered several decades there comes a realization that this is, ultimately, a small representation of his oeuvre. Still: I look to the final note for what it reveals and it is this: at my program we also screened the episodic and international omnibus release of 11’09”01 – which we screened in 2002 and which had a short film contribution by Imamura to represent Japan. Worth noting, especially for its poignant and bittersweet tone as an unexpected swansong, is this excerpt by Mellen with Imamura’s final cinematic quote:

“Tellingly, in his 11’09”01 episode, Imamura conjoins Japan’s Pacific War with a twenty-first-century Jihad, both heralded as ‘holy war(s).’ ‘There is no such thing as a holy war’ is the final line Imamura ever conveyed on film.”

When last we met our imaginary conclave, a tall, dashing figure had abruptly entered the wood-paneled room where Lionel Atwill, George Zucco, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce had gathered on a foggy London night. Henry Daniell, separate from the others, gazed forlornly into the flickering hearth, seemingly oblivious to the conversation around him and the dimly lit figure who has just entered.

The interloper with the elegant walking stick purposefully strode to the head of the table. This individual struck the gavel forcefully on the table, calling the meeting to order without a word.

This tall figure then opens the massive dictionary to a page for the letter “C” and using the gavel as a pointer, finds the word he’s looking for. As though the effort of speech required all his flagging will, he manfully reads aloud the following definition in a rich baritone voice that drips with not very well veiled condescension:

“Cad: (kad) n.
A man whose behavior is unprincipled or dishonorable.

Related Term(s):
cad′dish adj.
cad′dish•ly adv.
cad′dish•ness n.” READ MORE

I love a good newspaper montage. You used to see them all the time in classic crime and horror movies. They were a time-honored device for communicating the gangster's/monster's path of destruction in a cost-effective way. The image above is from the Mike Shayne mystery Dressed to Kill (1941), which starred Lloyd Nolan as a private dick sussing out the killer of a theatrical doyenne. Even though the headline DOUBLE MURDER is meant as an attention grabber, I invariably find myself drawn to the lesser headlines. State Man Held Captive 30 Hours By Three Bandits… now there's a story! And then I'm thinking about that while Dressed to Kill (a very fun movie) unspools.

What a great headline! (If only it were true.) I so would have put down a nickel to read about the Mysterious Curse Hinted in Banning Murders but then my attention would drift over to Police Disperse Rioters because I'm interested in that kind of thing. This paper appears in Universal's The Mummy's Tomb (1942), the second sequel to the 1933 original with Boris Karloff. Later in the film, events inspire further headlines…

KILLER-FIEND LOOSE AGAIN! There goes another nickel. But as interested as I've become in the supernatural being committing serial murder in Mapleton, I see that Chinese Pirates Kill Two Britons and I'm all over that story.

In Warners' Frisco Kid (1935), James Cagney's merchant seaman Bat Morgan kills the hook-handed Shanghai Duck in a bar fight and winds up a local hero thanks to an essay by Donald Woods' crusading journalist. It's a good story but how they missed out on the headline BAT KILLS DUCK is beyond me. Of course, after scanning this lead, I'm drawn to the more mundane matters of Extra Session of the Legislature because that's how I roll.

Sure, the Manhunt For Public Enemy No. 1 is and should be headline news but check it… Traffic Officials Seek to Abandon Street Car Lines! Shouldn't there be a referendum or something like that!?

Even twenty years on movies were still spreading the bad news the old fashion way… black and white and red all over! But as concerned as I am about The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964), what about that traffic?

A solid handful of interesting actors were born today, November 5th:  cowboy icon Roy Rogers in 1911, the beautiful, talented and troubled Vivien Leigh in 1913, the seductive Elke Sommer in 1940, the singer who put the Herman in Herman’s Hermits–Peter Noone–in 1947, and the ubiquitous John McGiver, born this day in 1913.  He’s a face that you’ve seen a hundred times, and though he wasn’t one of those character actors that blended into the woodwork — you never forgot John McGiver in anything! — he carved out a prodigious body of work in a career that actually lasted only about twenty years.

McGiver, who first had dreams of becoming an actor while in university , instead turned to a career in education after graduation.  He became a high school English teacher in New York, and also served in the military during World War II.  McGiver resumed his teaching teacher after the war, and in the early 1950s he ran into an old college friend who had become a theatrical producer.  Knowing John’s interest in acting, the friend, who needed a replacement for a leading actor who’d unexpectedly left his latest production, asked if McGiver would step in.  The teacher-turned-accidental thespian said yes, and he never stopped performing for the rest of his life.

Appearances in plays off and on Broadway in New York prepared him for entry into the heyday of live TV, where he was acted on some of the important anthology series of the day, including Studio One.  In 1957 he had the honor of appearing in one of the longest-running movies anywhere, the short film called Williamsburg: The Story of  Patriot which still plays to this day, every day, at Colonial Williamsburg village in Virginia.  John McGiver’s first major motion picture was a role in the 1957 Gary Cooper/Audrey Hepburn starrer Love in the Afternoon, and it was followed by a steady stream of both movie and TV roles over the next two decades.

Probably best known for his light comedy roles, McGiver was an audience favorite in films like The Gazebo (Trailer), Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Bachelor in Paradise, Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation, Take Her, She’s Mine, Man’s Favorite Sport? (Trailer), Who’s Minding the Store?, A Global Affair, The Glass Bottom Boat (Trailer), Fitzwilly (Trailer) and many more, including the never-completed but recently-restored last-Marilyn Monroe project Something’s Got to Give from 1962.  On television he appeared in everything, including Alfred Hitchcock, The Twilight Zone, his own series Many Happy Returns which had a short run in 1964, The Fugitive, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Honey West, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Gidget, The Farmer’s Daughter, I Dream of Jeannie, the superhero spoof Mr. Terrific from 1967, The Wild Wild West, Alias Smith and Jones and a slew of others, both comedic and dramatic.  (Sentimental kids may remember him as an Angel in the Johnny Whittaker–Jody on Family Affair–Christmas special The Littlest Angel.)   

And lest audiences think his movie appearances were limited to comedies, he had important dramatic roles in titles like jazzy gangster film Johnny Cool, Cold War classic The Manchurian Candidate (Trailer), and his vividly memorable role as a religious fanatic in 1967’s controversial Oscar-winner Midnight Cowboy.  John McGiver’s last screen role was in the Don Knotts/Tim Conway comedy western The Apple Dumpling Gang, and his last TV role a guest appearance in the 1975 mystery series Ellery Queen. 

The versatile and talented John McGiver died of a heart attack on September 9, 1975, at the age of only 61, leaving behind his wife Ruth and ten children.  He was always immensely entertaining and completely unforgettable, and we salute him today, on the anniversary of his birth.  Though he's been gone for over thirty years, for classic movie and TV fans the great John McGiver is never far from sight.