It’s summertime, and the perfect opportunity to pull out some photo albums — no groans, please — and take a look at Hollywood behind-the-scenes from my stash of old news photos.  It’s a nutty mixed bag, but that goes along with these lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, right?

Here’s Jimmy “Schnozzola” Durante and the highly respected actress Ethel Barrymore together, with Jimmy supplying the hilarious ham.  They had appeared together in radio and on TV, on Durante’s show, even recorded together, and this photo shows their unlikely but delightful collaboration.

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After Marilyn Monroe died during the wee hours of August 5, 2012, perceptions of her life and career began to change, and her blonde bombshell star image evolved into something more complex. Like others who have become pop culture icons—Elvis, James Dean, John Lennon, and second-tier figures like Hank Williams, Louis Brooks, Jean Harlow—death launched a second career for her. The entertainment industry, biographers, and filmmakers as well as fans were instrumental in charting this phase of her career. But, I can’t help but think that MM had no control over this “second” career, and it yielded no benefits for her. And, her struggle to control her work and image was important to her personally, and it is crucial in understanding her place in film history.

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I believe the best way to understand the appeal of Marilyn Monroe is to separate the flesh-and-blood actress from the two-dimensional icon by focusing on her work. In this second of my three-part series on Monroe, I offer a primer on her films. This is not a list of my favorite MM movies; nor are they all superior examples of classic filmmaking. Instead, these are the films that altered or affected the course of her career as she evolved from starlet to movie star to actress.

Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! June Haver stars in this 1948 comedy with the ridiculous title, which revolves around small-town life. The film would be entirely forgettable if not for MM’s bit part in her first film appearance. She speaks one line, “Hi Rad,” as she passes Haver on the church steps, but the line is a throwaway and inconsequential to the scene. She actually passes by the camera before uttering the line. For years, rumors persisted that her one line had been cut; Monroe herself believed this as evidenced by her remarks during a 1955 television interview. However, with the benefit of VHS, DVD, and Youtube, it is possible to slow down the scene to see Monroe walk by and hear her say the line as she strolls out of camera range. MM also appears in a later scene paddling in a canoe with another girl.

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Next year marks the 50^th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, but the pop culture machine is already ramping up to review her life and recast her career. Recently, the famous white dress from The Seven Year Itch—a signifier of her star image as Hollywood’s premiere sex symbol—sold for $5.6 million. Next month, a retrospective of her films is playing at BAM, the performing arts center in New York City. Two narrative films featuring Monroe as a character are scheduled for release: My Week with Marilyn (2011), starring Michelle Williams as MM, focuses on the tumultuous production of The Prince and the Showgirl in which an unsympathetic Laurence Olivier attempted to direct a neurotic Monroe; Blonde (in development for 2012), with Naomi Watts as MM, is another adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s imaginary Monroe memoir.

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In the twilight of her career, sassy, brassy Joan Blondell reflected on her star image by noting, “I was the fizz on the soda.” Considering her talent for snappy patter, her ability to get the most out of one-liners, and her full, robust figure, the description is apt. Like Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Ginger Rogers, Blondell enjoyed a long career stretching over several decades, and yet she lacks the critical and popular recognition of her peers. Perhaps this slight is the result of  playing the second female lead most often, alongside Rogers, Una Merkel, Barbara Stanwyck, or Ruby Keeler, who tended to get higher billing than she did. Only in hour-long programmers or B-films did Blondell get to play the lead. I have always enjoyed her wise-cracking characters, but it wasn’t until recently, while doing some research on Blondell, that I realized what a terrific movie star she really was.

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Please Note: In Tribute to Jackie Cooper, on Friday, May 13th TCM will broadcast nine of the actor’s films, which are listed here.

Jackie Cooper, who was an Oscar nominee for Best Actor in a Leading Role when he was only nine,  died on May 3rd at the age of 88. His shy smile, seemingly artless candor, and innate ability to suggest an overwhelmed child’s desire to make everything all right in the world continues to make those who stumble on his films smile in recognition.

If your most vivid mental image of Jackie Cooper is still as one of the ragamuffins in Hal Roach’s The Little Rascals, or the boy pleading with The Champ (1931-King Vidor) to rise again, or the privileged child befriending a kid from Shantytown in his Oscar-nominated performance in Skippy (1931-Norman Taurog), that’s understandable. Despite the fact that his early performances are eight decades in the past, his wonderfully natural portrayal of boys on film are still painfully fresh and have an evergreen realism at their core. In the darkest years of the Great Depression audiences felt a connection to that innocent, lion-hearted kid on screen whose life wasn’t going any more smoothly than their own. I like Shirley Temple, Jane Withers, and Freddie Bartholomew very much. I’ve been astounded by Mickey Rooney’s seemingly boundless talent. Yet to me, Jackie Cooper was one of most natural child actors, even though he had a different, understandably complex perspective on his own work. “I wasn’t great,” he claimed. “The directors were great. I was just a kid who did what he was told. And what I wasn’t told to do was done for me.”

His son, Russell Cooper, commented that his father “was a fascinating guy who really did everything, from all different aspects of the business. You can’t really say that about many people.” Looking back at Cooper‘s long life, when he acted in over a hundred movies, plays and television shows, and directed and produced over 250 TV projects, it seems that he may have done everything but sweep up the stage–and, as an apparently down-to-earth person–he probably did that at least a few times.

Much of Cooper‘s acting has a similar, recognizable quality, as he personified a kind of ragged moxie laced with a guileless intensity. Even when the stories were schmaltzy, he was not. As he grew up, and seemed likely to succumb to the neglect and adulation that early fame often breeds, he eventually approached his later problems with a similar ingenuousness as he struggled to become an adult in real ways. As he later pointed out about his childhood career, “I was trained to be a professional, not to be a person.”

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Golden Age musical star Ann Miller would have turned 88 years old tomorrow, April 12. A spectacular dancer who claimed she could tap out 500 taps per minute, Miller danced with power and ferocity. She was one of those old-school stars who worked well into her senior years, touring in musicals and making guest appearances on series television. When I was in high school, she appeared in commercials for Great American Soups as a housewife who greeted her husband with a spirited tap dance before serving dinner. The wall to her kitchen gave way to a stage with dancing girls, while Ann tore off her dress to reveal a sparkling costume underneath. She tapped vivaciously on top of a giant soup can before spinning back to her kitchen with perfect timing as the kitchen wall closed behind her. Around this time, I was lucky enough to see her onstage in Hello Dolly at the Kenley Players in Warren, Ohio, one of the most famous summer stock theaters in the country. She attacked the role of Dolly Levy with the same energy and spirit as she did the musical numbers, which were choreographed around her tap-dancing style.

Ann Miller’s biography reads like many bios from the Golden Age because it features several stories just offbeat enough to make her life story memorable. Having researched many Golden Age movie stars whose bios were enhanced by the studio press agents, I know better than to accept all the information as the absolute truth without extensive fact-checking. Ultimately, the facts are not as telling as reading between the lines of the official bios, which serve to enhance the images of the stars. Miller was born as either Lucille Ann Collier or Johnnie Lucille Collier in Texas in 1923. Some sources claim the latter name was given to her by her philandering father, who had always wanted a boy. Her father was a defense attorney who had supposedly defended such famous Prohibition-era outlaws as Baby Face Nelson and Bonnie and Clyde, though given what I have read about Nelson, I am skeptical.

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Note:  Please read fellow Morlock Kimberly’s wonderful appreciation of Hollywood icon Elizabeth Taylor who died today, Wednesday, March 23, 2010, at the age of 79.  Her post is beautiful!  But since Morlocks clearly think alike sometimes, I also did a post at just about the same exact moment as Kimberly, and here it is: 

Whether you thought she was a great actress or just a movie star, you have to admit she was THE movie star for a generation of moviegoers.  From her debut as a little girl of 10, through her star-making MGM years, then into the years of crazy international stardom and oodles of publicity for her colorful and passionate off-screen life, Elizabeth Taylor held a fascination for the public nearly unequalled even today.  It was a different time, of course, when Elizabeth Taylor ruled the headlines, a slightly more genteel time when beautiful movie stars maybe stole husbands from each other, but refrained from publicly exposing themselves quite the way it’s done today. 

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“I want it all quickly ’cause I don’t want God to stop and think and wonder if I’m getting more than my share.” – Elizabeth Taylor as Velvet Brown in National Velvet (1944)

A blur of thousands of words and pictures began to tumble out of every medium as soon as news of Elizabeth Taylor’s death at age 79 was announced on March 23rd. I know that the most noteworthy features of this performer’s life are the many adult roles she played with skill (on screen and off), her remarkable beauty, durable, often deliciously excessive glamour, the ups and downs of her not-so-private life, and ultimately, her pioneering charity work to assist those with AIDS. People will naturally mention her two Oscars. One was awarded for her tart with a heart in the often ludicrously steamy Butterfield 8 (1960)–making up for the Academy’s neglect for her fine work in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)–and her well-deserved Best Actress Award for the harrowing and truthful characterization in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).

To me, however, Elizabeth Taylor is cherished in memory for her extraordinary work near the beginning of her career, when she gave herself completely and unselfconsciously to the role of Velvet Brown, a dreamer, whose love of horses seems to border on a pagan devotion deeper than civilized analysis can ever explain away. All of the entertaining blather surrounding this “last great star” falls away when watching National Velvet (1944), a beautifully crafted product of the studio era at its height. This role prompted the already accomplished rider (Elizabeth Taylor’s father had taught her to ride at the age of 4) to train rigorously each day and, with the guidance of her ambitious mother Sara, prompted the tiny girl to try to grow three inches to be an acceptable height for producer Pandro S. Berman (lifts in her shoes and some natural growth helped a bit).

Bewitched by the equestrian allure of the Bagnold story, Taylor plastered her room with horse-related images and paraphernalia. The slight girl also sustained a back injury during riding for this movie that would plague her for the rest of her life. Despite any of the background pressures, this film appears to be one of the last times that the then 12-year-old actress seemed so blissfully unaware of her own “rapturous beauty,” as critic James Agee acknowledged in his review of the film at the time of its first release. Perhaps the openness of Taylor‘s heartfelt performance in this movie was the result of careful tutoring or simply reflected her own well-documented love of animals, but I suspect that it may also have been because, as an outstanding part of a strong cast, she was treated for what she was rather than for how she looked, allowing her inner spirit to soar on screen. As an adult Taylor later tried to explain it, “National Velvet really was me.”

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