I’ve been taking a break from this entertaining site for a while, but I didn’t want to completely disappear during Academy Award time.  As the Morlocks have each explored their varied and fascinating takes on the season over the past few weeks, I tried to rustle up some photos on the theme.  You know how winners are supposed to always be kissing their Oscars, giving thanks to the gold statuette after they win?  The action has evolved into a glorious pop culture cliche, but if an internet photo search is any indication, either the kisses have been highly over-reported or they’re nearly mythical.  Where are all those kisses, anyway?

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Motherhood and the movies have often made for boffo box office returns. My glowing memories of those warm-hearted, endearingly fluttery, or nobly self-sacrificing mothers played by Spring Byington, Mary Astor, Fay Bainter and Barbara Stanwyck and others in classic movies may have fogged my vision of celluloid motherhood a bit.

The Silver Cord (1933), a 77 year old film made at RKO, broke that clichéd Mom mold with a disquieting crack, blending a domestic drama with strong elements of high camp. There were Bad Moms around in dramas before and after this exercise in theatrical Freudianism. Noel Coward enjoyed his first big success in the mid 1920s dramatizing the unhealthy relationship between a glamorous nymphomaniac socialite and her drug addicted son in The Vortex (1927), which was made into a silent movie in 1927. The same year as The Silver Cord (1933), director John Ford offered a surprisingly negative portrait of a mother played by Henrietta Crossman in Pilgrimage. Crossman’s dour character was so fixated on avoiding a marriage by her only son to “an unsuitable girl,” she sent him off to the trenches of World War I. And Gladys Cooper brought the Bad Mom to an artistic high point with her portrayals of lethally clinging matriarchs in Now, Voyager (1942) and Separate Tables (1958) in the ’40s and ’50s. The grandma of many of the later indictments of maternal love, however, might be this early talkie, which is statically staged but electrifying, thanks to the author, the actors and their under-appreciated director, John Cromwell.

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Last year, in part because of the celebrations surrounding the films of 1939, I had a chance to introduce Gone With the Wind to younger viewers in my family who had never seen the film. It’s not a favorite movie of mine, so I could understand their appalled reactions to the innate racism of the story that implied that a slave’s first loyalty was to the families that owned them, (even after the Civil War and emancipation). Seen at a glance in GWTW, maybe the antebellum South’s biggest problems may only seem to be uppity white trash like Victor Jory’s oily Jonas Wilkerson, or the need for rebellious girls like Scarlett to maintain their hypocritical poses in a rigid social structure, while secretly acting on their own half-understood impulses, and the upheaval caused by those damn Yankees. But look a bit closer and you can see the story of changing attitudes and a brave woman struggling to make her mark in a world that both rejected and accepted her.  I don’t mean Scarlett Katie O’Hara, either.

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My dictionary gives the definition of a cri de coeur (krēt kër′) as “a cry from the heart, an impassioned protest, complaint, etc.” If you really want to see that term translated onto film, the Warner Brothers movie, Two Seconds (1932) could fill the bill.

Crude, raw and disturbing, Two Seconds (1932) is being broadcast on TCM on Thursday, Jan. 21st, at 11:45am. First released in the middle of 1932, audiences flocked to see this financially successful but dramatically grim tale about the thoughts and memories that flash through the mind of a man just as he is about to die in the electric chair. Perhaps some of them felt as though they were walking the last mile too. After Americans had witnessed 13 million jobs evaporating into thin air since 1929, watching nationwide unemployment rise to 23.6 %, wouldn’t logic tell us that most people might want to go to the movies to escape a reality they could not control? Apparently not, especially when Warner Brothers had the good fortune to have several talented individuals involved in this film. READ MORE

I am always curious and frequently surprised at which movie stars, films, and Hollywood events survive the decades to become meaningful to modern-day audiences. Despite the efforts of film historians and scholars to discover and research important figures and then explain their contributions to the art and evolution of American cinema, movie buffs tend to uncover their own “significant” stars and stories, latching onto them for reasons that have little to do with the advancement of acting, aesthetics, or technology. Though actress Peg Enwistle is not mentioned in any of my film history books, she has a mighty presence on the Internet and in pop culture, less for her talents as an actress and more for what she represents. After costarring in only one Hollywood film, Entwistle committed suicide by jumping off the “H” in the Hollywood sign.  Since then, Peg has come to symbolize the dark side of Hollywood, which can smash the hopes and dreams of aspiring actors and actresses who still flock to the Dream Factory to break into the movies.

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Let’s see if I can describe the disquieting effect of The Unfinished Dance adequately for those who haven’t been exposed to it. The formula for The Unfinished Dance (1947-Henry Koster), a rarely seen film that will be aired at 1:15pm on January 15th, is a heady brew, composed of mysterious elements blended from this:

As my last post for the year 2009, I thought it might be fun to recount the last words of some of Hollywood’s illustrious, notorious, and even forgotten stars. And, I don’t mean their last spoken words, but the epitaphs on their gravestones. These are the thoughts, comments, and quips that they chose to be remembered by. Some seem to perfectly fit their star images, as befitting actors whose public personas were as important as their performances, while others are just plain odd. It makes me realize that all the good epitaphs are taken!

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When was the last time you saw someone who could be described as debonair?

Chances are slim that the word could be aptly applied to anyone in the twenty-first century, but I hope I’m wrong about that. I think that the first time I saw a person that term might describe was as a kid. I saw a dazzling old guy on stage in a summer stock production of a frothy comedy with considerable style, The Pleasure of His Company.  The actor portraying “Pogo”, an engaged young woman’s long lost father, had a spark, verve and style that was compelling and completely unlike anything I’d then seen in reality or my brief movie-going life, (and even shorter theater-going one). That role, which the actor alternated for years in touring companies with another part that fit him like a glove, Prof. Higgins in My Fair Lady, was played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

By the time I saw him, he’d long since relinquished any claim to motion picture stardom, preferring to pursue his interests in business, the arts and a kind of diplomacy, jetting between New York, London and Palm Beach. While he’d received several offers to take productions to Broadway, where his father had enchanted pre-World War One audiences, Doug Jr. preferred keeping his hand in the family business on the fringes of the spotlight. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of this under-appreciated actor’s birth, I thought it appropriate to give a nod to this man who gracefully swept through movies and life, until he left the scene ten years ago at the age of ninety. Understanding that less is so often more, he left us one last present that only the best performers seem to understand–a wish to see his like again.

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