Another Part of the Forest - 1948

Another Part of the Forest (1948) is one of the finest movies made in this era, and Ann Blyth displays her ability to inhabit the role of a lusty, complex conniver so thoroughly that her film reputation as a meek good girl of only a few years later, mentioned in this post, is an almost shocking contradiction. 

The film is currently not available for sale either in VHS or DVD, and this is a shame.  I think it’s time to take a large battering ram to the Universal vault.  Where are all those rampaging village idiots with the flaming torches and pitchforks when you really need them?  Off chasing Frankenstein's monster when they should be here.

Long post.  Oh, stop crying and pull yourself together.

All three elements of acting, writing, and direction come together so perfectly, so intensely that the movie stands as a remarkable work of art—truly, and timeless.  The screenplay by Vladimir Pozner is based on the Lillian Hellman stage play.  The story is of the Hubbard family, a prequel to her The Little Foxes, which had been wildly successful both on Broadway and in the 1941 film starring Bette Davis.  Another Part of the Forest takes us to the earlier years of the three inscrutable Hubbard siblings and how they got to be that way. 

The second element is the flawlessly creative and evocative direction by Michael Gordon, which we’ll get into in a little bit.  It is, I think, the best filmed version of a stage play I’ve ever seen, because it takes the intimacy and the dynamics of a live stage setting and yet implements those tricks and nuances of film to make it a kind of hybrid film-play.  Some stage plays are filmed with a static camera and so we are left with what appears to be an authentic image of the play, but it seems stiff on film.  Conversely, some stage plays are adapted to film in such a manner that we forget they ever were on stage; the director applies superfluous action and settings that draws away from the intensity of the literary drama. 

But in Another Part of the Forest, we have a director who understands the subtleties of the finest elements of film and stage, and combines them in a beautifully artistic way. 

The third basic element to the making of any great film, of course, is the acting and here we have an ensemble cast who simply could not be better.  We see on the opening title card the unusual setting of the four main players all listed equally above the title and they deserve it.  They are a well-oiled team.  I wonder how long these scenes, particularly the dining room scene, was rehearsed, because it looks for all like they’ve been playing it on stage for months.

The story is set in 1880.  Fredric March plays Marcus Hubbard, patriarch of this dysfunctional clan.  His real-life wife, Florence Eldridge plays his wife Lavinia.  He is a storekeeper and up-and-coming businessman in a sleepy southern town, and he has been branching out into different investments that have been profitable for him.  He gives loans, he takes over mortgages, growing his tiny economic empire.  He is a shrewd and cunning man, and not at all likable.  He is rude and blunt, and openly displays his disdain for his customers, his family, his community.

He is also something of a pariah in his town because of an incident that happened fifteen years earlier during the Civil War.  He was a merchant even then, and he was accused of profiteering from the war by securing a supply of badly needed salt and then charging high prices for it to a war-torn townspeople who couldn’t pay for it.  Marcus is proud, defiant, and totally uncaring in a kind of Scrooge-like way about the needs of others.  He is focused on his own advancement.

His wife, Lavinia, a soulful, gentle, frightened woman is his whipping boy in the sense that she carries the burden of his guilt because only she feels it.  But there is another secret between them, and another secret in the town of a terrible betrayal that occurred during the war leading to the ambush and massacre of several local boys in the Confederate army, and it isn’t until the end of the movie that we discover the traitor. 

Fredric March is riveting.  The character alone is intriguing. Marcus had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, emerged from a hardscrabble boyhood through very hard work.  When he was still a boy, he took his first hard-earned dollar and bought a card at a lending library.  While he was still a child in the fields and driving a mule team, with what little free time he had he taught himself to read and then he taught himself languages: French, Latin, Greek.  He read the classics and he desired what he saw in those classics: a sense of beauty and grace that was denied him in shabby poverty.  There is much to admire in Marcus.

But like those ancient Greeks and their tales and fables, he bears a fatal flaw, and that is his avarice.  Though he has a deep love of beauty and literature and music, there is a very strong strain of the acquisitor in him, so much so that like all acquisitors, his main joy is not in the appreciation, but in the simply possessing, the controlling.  Fredric March is stunning in this role, and we at turns can despise him, can feel sorry for him, and yet also can admire him for his clear thinking.  There is a certain nobility about him.  If it weren’t for his weaknesses, he could be a great man. 

His three children are the sins he created and also the burdens on his back.  Edmund O’Brien plays Ben, the eldest, a man about thirty years old who is taking after his father, inheriting his father’s intelligence, shrewdness, and acquisitive acumen, and also his hardness of heart.  But he has something his father hasn’t, and that is a true sense of graciousness.  It is a false graciousness in many instances.  He is able to speak to people, to make people like him, to ingratiate himself when he needs to, to close a business deal, where his father is just rude.  Edmund O’Brien does not have his father’s arrogance, but he is double the monster because, like his father, he has no heart or feelings for others.  Any display of affection or kindness is merely a tool he uses to get what he wants.  The wheels are always turning in that sneaky mind.

I think it is one of Edmund O’Brien’s best roles and he commands most of the scenes he’s in.  It makes you wish he had done more leading man parts instead of character roles, but in a role like Ben Hubbard he gets to do both, and he’s quite good. 

The second son is Oscar, a weak-willed sniveling creep, who has the position in this film as a kind of comic relief.  He’s played by Dan Duryea in whimsical casting because Mr. Duryea earlier played Oscar’s son in the film The Little Foxes.  Oscar’s son Leo in that film was very much like his father is in this film. 

Duryea does not have that sinister sneer he wears in other villain roles.  Here he is helpless in his petty self-absorption, and we can even feel sorry for him, particularly in the luncheon scene when he says something stupid and his father makes a sarcastic reply.  Duryea looks down, wearing an expression of pain, because he knows he put his foot in his mouth again. 

He just can’t please his father, lacking shrewdness, and he is the most despised by his father for his ignorance.  Duryea is also an undisciplined hothead, much more so than his father.  He is easily led, and by the end of the movie, Edmund O’Brien will do the leading. 

The youngest sibling is Regina, played Ann Blyth.  Here she has one of her best roles and one of her most complex and sinister, even to rival Veda Pierce.  In the movie The Little Foxes, Regina is played in middle age by Bette Davis.  Perhaps not so coincidentally, Ann Blyth in this period of her career was being called a young Bette Davis.

Regina is attractive, sexy, and her moods rise and fall--coldness to her mother, a beguiling charm to those who can do most for her.  She is shrewd and intelligent like her elder brother and her father.  She also bears their flaw of avarice and the need for power, but she has another need which neither father nor elder brother seem to share: she juggles a strong sexual longing, where the other two men appeared to be asexual.  They lust only for money.

John Dall plays Capt. John Bagtry, a man in his thirties who left the best part of his life behind him in the Civil War.  He is the cousin of Miss Birdie Bagtry played as a delicate flower by Betsy Blair.  Betsy and her mother still run the old plantation and are struggling financially.  John lives there on charity, not able or willing to contribute to his support.  He just loafs and dreams of the old days when he was a gallant soldier.  When we first see him, he is still in uniform, having attended a Confederate Day service.  He is the pathetic object of Ann Blyth’s lust, and though John Dall is happy to let himself be captured for stolen liaisons, he does not want to marry her.  He does not want to do anything but live in the past, and it takes a while for her to see that. 

Another sticky relationship she juggles is the one with her father.  Fredric March has only one weakness—and that is his daughter.  He loves her more than his wife, more than his despised sons and his relationship with her is somewhat incestuous.  Not literally of course, but emotionally.  He splurges on her and when he arranges to go for a walk with her, it looks for all as if he is courting her.  She refuses an invitation to spend the afternoon with her mother, who suddenly looks like a wallflower losing her beau to a more glamorous rival.

 

In one scene, several boxes of dresses have arrived that she ordered from Chicago, and she takes them out and shows them off to the family, like a child trying to make her brothers jealous that her father is spending money on her.  She lifts one gown out of its box and goes to sit on the arm of her father’s chair.  She spreads the skirt of the dress over her lap and over his, and he is obviously delighted with her, and she knows this, and she’s using it.  She’s manipulating him, and in certain scenes, seems to coyly dangle herself before him.  They are always “Darlin’” to each other.

But she’s playing with fire, as her older brother Edmund O’Brien teasingly reminds her.  She and Mr. O’Brien walk up the stairs, a promenade-cum-plot exposition, while she gloats about her ability to control her father and O’Brien suggests that one day she will be a forty-year-old woman and will still be taking care of her father because he won’t let her go.  

Edmund O’Brien is in the background, a calm look of command on his face.  In the foreground, we see Ann’s expression has turned from gloating to one of cold fear.  Staying with her father until she is forty is just the thing she does not want, and knows that she must not let her father get too great a control over her.  She spends the better part of the movie walking a tightrope in her unnatural relationship with her father.

She wants the pretty things he buys her, but she wants to be in John Dall’s bed.  Controlling him.

Late in the film, a climactic scene occurs when the Bagtrys come to a train wreck of a party at the Hubbard’s house, along with a floozy girlfriend Mr. Duryea has invited, played by Dona Drake, and we see a smashing of wills, intentions, and the worst of these people come pouring out.

John Dall has a plan to take borrowed money and travel to Brazil where they are having a revolution.  He wants to be a soldier again.  As Betsy Blair explains, the “radicals” are trying to abolish slavery down there and “ruin the country” and her cousin is going to fight for his “ideals” to preserve slavery.  Fredric March is the only courageous one in this polite bunch who dares to snub the "quality" folk and tell the once-and-future Confederate to his face that he's a jerk.  But his reasons for doing so are only partly because of his admiration for the vox populi of his heroes of Ancient Greece.  Mainly, he just enjoys telling people off.

He is also jealous of the man who appears to have turned his daughter's head.  He refuses to lose her to anyone.

Ann Blyth, in a profile view, stands silent during the discussion while a leaden epiphany sneaks up on her, her eyes curiously roaming on John Dall as her father berates him.  We see the truth is settling in that John Dall will never be anything than what he is—a boy in his thirties who can’t give up playing the soldier, a job that was never really more than an ego trip for him and if he were fighting for as ideals, his ideals are pretty shabby.  And yet she wants him for the sexual hold he has over her, which she imagines is reciprocal.

However, she gets another grim surprise that evening when the floozy that Duryea invites also appears to know John Dall intimately.  Clearly, he is not as obsessed by Ann as she is with him.

The intricate plot flip-flops constantly in the tricks the siblings and father play on each other, like kids playing keep-away with somebody’s hat on a schoolyard, only it is bits of information they toss around and keep from each other, and tell lies instead. It is all a lovely, literate, shell game.

There is so much to admire in the staging of the film, in the camera blocking where characters in the background are as much as part of the intensity of the scene, and where mirror shots allow for a larger grouping.    March’s store is filled with goods and items and trinkets and you could spend the whole movie just looking at everything. 

There’s a comic scene where Dan Duryea, afraid that a lynch mob might be after him for something he did, walks through the store and bangs his head on a pair of men’s riding boots hanging from the ceiling.  He looks up and we see instantly it is like an image of a man being hanged, and we see only his boots dangling from a tree.  It’s sinister, but it’s also funny. 

Another fascinating sequence is where Duryea and his gang of KKK friends chase down a Yankee visitor and beat him up.  There’s a scene where a horse rears and we see the horse’s mouth open and his sharp teeth parted in a grimace. 

Immediately we cut to the local saloon where Duryea’s floozy girlfriend is dancing a can-can.  In a flirtatious toss of the head to her audience, her teeth are parted in the same manner as the horse. 

We cut back to the Yankee being dragged to the ground, trampled in the forest of legs around him.

Then cut back to the can-can where the floozy drops to the floor of the stage looking submissively at the audience, tauntingly, seductively in the forest of legs of dancers around her.  The shots of the brutal beating and the dance are erotic mixture of violence and pleasure. 

The camera work flows beautifully from the very beginning of the movie.  There is a Confederate memorial celebration where a speaker refers to an act of betrayal and he points to a far hill to discuss an event of the past.  But the past becomes instantly the present, as the camera swoops to the hill and we see Florence Eldridge hiding with a bouquet of flowers waiting to place it at the memorial. 

We hear a train whistle, and she looks over her shoulder at a distant passing train and the camera swoops to the interior of the train and there is her son, Edmund O’Brien.  It is so flawless and keeps the action moving wonderfully.

The costumes, the hair, the makeup, the men’s full sideburns and muttonchops are historically accurate and not caricature.  There is no cartoon campiness of the Old South, here it is all very real and unblinking. 

We see the mother has a good relationship with their three black servants, especially with Coralee, played by Libby Taylor, who finds small and clever ways of protecting Lavinia from her family’s meanness.  In the play, we are told that Mrs. Hubbard actually goes to the black church because she feels more at home there.  She feels the congregation is more spiritual; besides, she is the wife of Marcus Hubbard and so she is ostracized from the white townspeople, the "quality folk." 

At the end of the film, Edmund O’Brien has wrested his father’s business and fortune from him through blackmail.  Fredric March wants to run away with his daughter, and tells her he will continue to find a way to provide for her.  But Ann Blyth has had enough of this cloying “suitor”.  She considers her options, pouring herself a cup of coffee on the patio while Edmund O’Brien announces his plans to invest his father’s money and make still more, that they will all be rich.  Her father, beaten and begging her attention, asks her to pour him a cup of coffee too.  In a priceless image of nasty survival instinct, Ann Blyth, one eyebrow raised, walks away from her father and sits down by her brother.  She gleefully agrees to let Mr. O’Brien plan her marriage to his future business partner, Horace Gibbons.  She gives up her lust for the fleeing John Dall in exchange for a profitable, and loveless, marriage.

She, Edmund O’Brien and Dan Duryea will continue to squabble and play tricks on each other the rest of their lives and become the people we know from The Little Foxes.  Part of our enjoyment of this film is knowing where they ended up.

It’s difficult to pick out favorite scenes because they’re all so very fine, and the dialogue crackles, especially when Fredric March rises to sarcasm.  Then there is the delectable cagy sparring between Edmund O’Brien and Ann Blyth.  Dressed in her new finery, showing it off for O’Brien, she taunts him, “I just wanted to show you what you’ve been paying for.  How do I look?”

He replies, “Bright and shiny, honey, like a new two-bitpiece.”  A lovely backhanded compliment, and we see the insult is not lost on her.

And when the Yankee carpetbagger, a guest at the Confederate memorial ceremonies, responds with surprise, “In Boston, we stopped fighting the war fifteen years ago.” 

To which the old Confederate soldier, a town pillar, replies, “You won it.  You can afford to forget.”

And I love Dan Duryea's nervous Woody Woodpecker laugh, that Fredric March even imitates at one point. 

Today we have many sequels and prequels of films.  It’s become kind of a standard practice, but it is not done for the storytelling—it is for the merchandising, and we know that. Yeah, I’m looking at you “Star Wars 23”.  Another Part of the Forest was created by Lillian Hellman for the excitement of discovering more about the characters, knowing with a writer's instinct that there really was more to the story she had left on the table.  This film was one of the first times a prequel was created and some of the critics didn’t seem to know how to take a prequel.

Lillian Hellman, unfortunately, did not really have any part in the making of this film.  At this time, she became blacklisted in Hollywood for her refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.  Lillian Hellman, who wrote the play Watch on the Rhine, which Ann appeared in on Broadway as a child, discussed here in our intro post, proved to be good luck again for Ann.  She shows again how adept she is at playing complex women, not simply females who were dastardly. 

Louella Parsons announced in December 1946 that Ann, “…that marvelous child actress, who did so well in Mildred Pierce,” had won the role of Regina.  It was a splendid opportunity for Ann Blyth to work as part of a top-notch ensemble cast, and so demonstrate an ability to stand out among them.  Syndicated columnist Dorothy Manners wrote, “In spite of her tender years, she is one whale of an actress…When Fredric and Florence March were here, they said they would like to do a show with Ann on Broadway.  That’s real praise, because the Marches do not usually like anything in Hollywood.”

The columnist Sue Chambers wrote, “Fredric March, who doesn’t usually go overboard for the young and unsophisticated told me, ‘She’s a great actress,’ when he was doing Another Part of the Forest with Ann.”  Apparently March wanted her for his upcoming film Jupiter’s Wife, but according to this columnist, William Powell snagged her for Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid(For which she took time out from Another Part of the Forest to fabricate the mermaid’s tale, which we discussed here), and Chambers commented, “How about all this for a girl who isn’t yet twenty?” 

I’ll go one more and say that, as regards her portrayal of Regina Hubbard, if Gone with the Windhad not made it to the screen until 1949, instead of having been made ten years earlier in 1939, Ann Blyth would have been a top contender for Scarlett.

Ann remarked of Fredric March and Florence Eldridge in a 2006 interview with Eddie Muller: "To watch both of them so impressed upon me. They were so good at what they did. He was terrific. It was just electric to be on the set even if I wasn't in a scene with him. He was wonderful."
 

Another Part of the Forestwas also made as a Lux Radio Theater presentation, with Ann as the only cast member from the film.  Walter Houston played her father Marcus and Vincent Price played her brother Ben.  You can hear it here at the Internet Archive website.  Unfortunately, the quality is a bit muffled, but it will give you an idea of the story.  Later on in November 1948, Ann also re-teamed on radio with Edmund O’Brien in the Suspensestory “Muddy Track.”  The quality is quite good and you can listen to it here.  She plays a woman who is not all what she seems to be, and he is a man in trouble and on the run.  At the end, the announcer reminds us that she can now be seen in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid.

The copy of Another Part of the Forest I managed to obtain was in poor condition, but I was lucky to be able to find it at all.  This film badly needs to be restored and released for sale, not only because it is one of the best films of the era, but because it is an example of stellar American playwriting of the twentieth century, and about distinctly American themes.   I don’t know about the complex legal machinations involving the Universal vault and what keeps so many Universal films, thereby of course, several Ann Blyth films, from not being widely shown again, but I certainly hope that TCM is able to use its influence and free these films from that stupid vault.

I still think a battering ram is a good option.

Come back next Thursday when we jump ahead to 1957, the year Ann’s last three movies were released, all very different and showing, not surprisingly, her versatility.  However, her film career was winding down as good roles were getting harder to come by for a 29-year old in an industry that was changing.  Her second-to-last film was The Buster Keaton Story, the last time she was paired on film with her first co-star and old friend, Donald O’Connor.

 

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The Deseret (Salt Lake City, Utah) News, syndicated article by Dorothy Manners, February 4, 1949, p. F-3.

The Evening Class Blog, July 28, 2007, transcript of Eddie Muller's interview with Ann Blyth July 2006 at Castro Theater, San Francisco.

Milwaukee Journal, syndicated article by Sue Chambers, February 29, 1948.

Milwaukee Sentinel, syndicated article by Louella Parsons, December 27, 1946, p. 10.

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HELP!!!!!!!!!!

Now that I've got your attention: I'm still on the lookout for a movie called Katie Did It (1951) for this year-long series on the career of Ann Blyth.  It seems to be a rare one.  Please contact me on this blog or at my email: JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com if you know where I can lay my hands on this film.  Am willing to buy or trade, or wash windows in exchange.  Maybe not the windows part.  But you know what I mean.

Also, if anybody has any of Ann's TV appearances, there's a few I'm missing from Burke's Law, Switch, The Name of the Game, The Dick Powell show, the Dennis Day Show (TV), the DuPont Show with June Allyson, This is Your Life, Lux Video Theatre.  Also any video clips of her Oscar appearances.  Release the hounds.  And let me know, please. 

 

 

Murder She Wrote - "Reflections of the Mind" - 1985

In an episode of Murder She Wrote, Ann Blyth got to go nuts, stab her husband with scissors, and be accused of murder.  It must have been a swell gig.  Certainly, it was a deviation from the good girl image we discussed in our last post, here.  (As were two murder mystery episodes of Quincy, M.E. that we’ll discuss down the road.)  Not that there weren’t opportunities for more wholesome assignments in the 1970s and 1980s for an actress who had more range than her wholesome reputation seemed to indicate, but wholesomeness trailed her like a long shadow. 

The makers of Hostess snack cakes made good use of that image in a series of television commercials.  Have a look below for these commercials now on YouTube:

There is a collection of Ann Blyth’s Hostess cupcake commercials in the Library of Congress.  I don’t know…that just makes me smile.  And crave Crumb Cakes. 

Becoming a television spokesperson for Hostess may have been only a lark for Ann, especially as it gave her a chance to work with some of her children in front of the camera, but she did have her weather eye out for TV roles, even if she was selective.  In an interview with syndicated columnist Vernon Scott in 1976 she remarked,

“Rather than just appear on television for the sake of it, as many do,” she said, “I’d rather wait for things that appeal to me.”

One role she apparently would have liked was a part as Amelia Earhart’s mother in the 1976 NBC-TV movie Amelia, based on the life of aviatrix Amelia Earhart, played by Susan Clark.  Miss Blyth was 48 years old at the time, but according to columnist Marilyn Beck, was not chosen because she looked too young to be the mother of a grown daughter.  We should all have such a problem.  She lost out to Jane Wyatt, then 64 years old, who had once played Ann’s mother in One of Our Own (1950), which we’ll discuss later in the year.

By 1985, the year she did the Murder She Wrote episode, Ann Blyth was still active in a long stage career, performing the role of the Countess in Song of Norway in March at the Long Beach (California) Convention Center for the Long Beach Civic Light Opera.  She played opposite Bill Hayes, with whom she had appeared in Brigadoon in 1968 in St. Louis, would later team in a series of musical variety cabaret performances. 

Just before the show opened, in the decade after she lost the role of Amelia Earhart’s mother for looking too young, Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Hawn remarked, interviewing her at the Brown Derby restaurant, “At 57, she verily glowed.”

The Murder She Wroteepisode, called “Reflections of the Mind”, was telecast November 2, 1985, the sixth episode of the second season of what would become a long-running and much beloved series, due mainly to the talent and likeability of its star, Angela Lansbury as the intrepid mystery writer, Jessica Fletcher.

 

The show would be a reunion of sorts: between Ann and Martin Milner, who played the sheriff in this episode who accuses her of murder, and who appeared with Ann in the above-mentioned One of Our Own as her sister’s boyfriend.

Ben Murphy, who plays Ann’s younger second husband (14 years her junior in real life), was also a regular in the late  TV 1960s show The Name of the Game when Ann did a guest star role on that series in an episode called “Swingers Only” in 1969.

Most especially enjoyable to fans was the matchup of Ann and Angela, who four decades earlier were both nominated in the same Best Supporting Actress category for the 1945 Oscars.  Ann, 17 years old, had been nominated for Mildred Pierce, which we discussed here.  Miss Lansbury, 20 years old, was nominated for The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Both lost out to veteran actress Anne Revere.

A fond and teasing reference to their earlier careers must be the framed photograph we see at the very beginning of the episode of a young Ann and Angela standing together before what appears to be a microphone.  The occasion is clearly not the Oscars, but if anyone knows of any radio show they did together, I’d love to know about it.  It looks like early 1950s to me.  I haven’t been able any to track any information about that photo yet, but I’ll let you know if I do.

 

This comes from the fun fan blog The Definitive Guide to Murder She Wrote.

Speaking of intriguing images, there’s a large oil painting in one of the rooms of the mansion (the setting of the story is the home of Ann’s character, who is wealthy).  The painting depicts a young and glamorous Ann lounging seductively in a chair in a long gown with the figure of a man standing behind her.  I’d love to know more about that painting.

 

The episode starts with a slow pan across family photos, including the pic of Ann and Angela in younger days, and then we see Ann lying on her bed, having nodded off reading one of Jessica Fletcher’s books.  Ann plays Francesca Lodge, a really rich lady in Ohio with a grown daughter and a younger second husband.  She and Jessica are old pals from days gone by.  For those of you familiar with the series, you know that Jessica has friends and family all over the country, all over the world, and they are frequently murdered, have committed murder, or were somewhere on the premises when a murder was committed. 

It’s not really a good idea to be a friend of Jessica Fletcher’s because of this.  But Ann is, so you know there’s going to be a murder.

Ann is troubled lately with forgetfulness, delusions, and seems to be haunted by images and reminders of her late first husband.  She is especially plagued by a music box he had given her years before, that plays unexpectedly by itself.  We hear it, too, so perhaps she’s not really nuts, maybe somebody is driving her nuts, “gaslighting” her, as it were.

Still, she flips out during a thunderstorm, hears things, sees things, and when her second husband, Ben Murphy arrives home, she attacks him with a pair of scissors.  A manic fit of hysteria is always a good way to start an episode, and we see Ann is in fine form, tearing around the house, staggering down a palatial staircase, and swiping at Ben Murphy like a nervous Zorro.  Anyone who can slap Joan Crawford and send her sprawling down a few stairs is certainly going to be pretty handy with a pair of scissors.

Ann ends up in the psychiatric ward of the city hospital, where Jessica, who has been summoned (you always go to writers for help), arrives at her private hospital room and offers sisterly comfort.

Ann is released (because even Jack the Ripper would be released into the custody of Jessica Fletcher), and Jessica bunks at Ann’s house while we settle into story. 

Mysterious reminders of her first husband continue to terrorize Ann, whose screams rouse Jessica into action.  Funny how on TV people roused in the middle of the night always look perfect in attractive robes. I’d stagger into the hall, disheveled  and  far less articulate than Jessica Fletcher in ascertaining the problem at hand.  My interrogation would be more like, “Huh?  Wha…mmpfh...z-z-z-z-z.”

But I digress.

Ben Murphy runs his wife’s family business, and it turns out his secretary is also his mistress.  There’s a lot of suspicious characters around, including that secretary; Ann’s grown daughter who is a former drug user and runaway; a creepy gardener who keeps peering into windows; and the family doctor with the in-your-face manner of a creepy child’s party clown.  The aloof housekeeper played by Esther Rolle also seems suspicious—I still don’t get how the switcheroo with the dead canary could be done so quickly. 

The only two people we trust are Angela Lansbury and Martin Milner as the sheriff.  I love Martin Milner.  He’s been on Murder She Wrote a handful of times as different characters.  The innocent open-faced boy we saw in Life with Father (1947) here, and I Want You (1951) which we discussed here, grew into a frank and confident and no-nonsense guy you’d want on your side.  You can almost smell the Old Spice.

I’ll not give away the details, this being a mystery, but it’s a treat to watch Miss Lansbury and Miss Blyth together as a couple of pros who grew up in the business.  Ann Blyth here is fragile, high strung, at the breaking point.  Regrettably, the climax occurs when she is out of the room.  Our last image of her is back in the psychiatric ward screaming at that weird doctor.

It’s the last time we saw her play a character on television.  Only in her late fifties, she seems too young not to have done more TV, but it had already been an over 50-year career for this woman who started as a child of six.  Nor was the career over, for there would be more live appearances on stage doing what she started out doing as a six-year-old child: singing.

We’ll take that up another time.  Come back next Thursday when we jump back to 1948 and one of Ann’s finest performances as a dramatic actress, playing the sultry and devious young Regina in Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest.

 

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The Definitive Guide to Murder She Wrote blog.

Karr Collection Television Commercials, Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/findaid/karr/karr16.html

Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1985, article by Jack Hawn.

The Milwaukee Journal, January 27, 1976, syndicated article by Vernon Scott p. GS1, also April 12, 1976, syndicated article by Marilyn Beck, p. 3.

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HELP!!!!!!!!!!

Now that I've got your attention: I'm still on the lookout for a movie called Katie Did It (1951) for this year-long series on the career of Ann Blyth.  It seems to be a rare one.  Please contact me on this blog or at my email: JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com if you know where I can lay my hands on this film.  Am willing to buy or trade, or wash windows in exchange.  Maybe not the windows part.  But you know what I mean.

Also, if anybody has any of Ann's TV appearances, there's a few I'm missing from Burke's Law, Switch, The Name of the Game, The Dick Powell show, the Dennis Day Show (TV), the DuPont Show with June Allyson, This is Your Life, Lux Video Theatre.  Also any video clips of her Oscar appearances.  Release the hounds.  And let me know, please. 

 

What's a Nice Girl Like Ann Blyth Doing in a Place Like This?

One of the most fascinating aspects to Ann Blyth’s film career is how her reputation flipped from powerful actress doing moody parts to nice girl playing nice girl roles in which she was invariably taken less seriously.  A lot of that transformation in the eyes of the press and the public had to do with the fact they found out that in real life—she was a nice girl.  In terms of press copy, her natural and intuitive versatility as an actress seemed to be outshone by her real-life pleasant, even spotless, reputation. 

The utterly silly phenomenon began as How Could a Nasty Screen Character be Played by Such a Nice Person in Real Life...and morphed to Such a Nice Person in Real Life Cannot Play a Nasty Screen Character.

Mildred Pierce, in which she ferociously played a budding young conniving sociopath (see last post here), established her at the age of 16 as a serious actress—so much so, that some in the press, including Los Angeles Times drama editor Edwin Schallert, were excitedly calling her a young Bette Davis.

For the first few films after Mildred Pierce, she played other troubled young women with chips on their shoulders, axes to grind, or evil plots to hatch.  But she didn’t want to be typecast, and worried at first that “mean” roles were the only kind she would be offered.  Mr. Schallert interviewed her when she was making Swell Guy (1946), her first movie after the long recovery from her back injury, discussed in this intro post.  We’ll talk about Swell Guy later in the year.  “Miss Blyth is reputed to give her most sensational performance in this.”

Ann described her character in the film: “I’m not a mean girl…but I don’t change completely for the good…She is wild at the beginning, but her wildness results in unhappiness for her.  So I naturally am not against that part.  However, I do want to do a nice role now, and I want to sing in a picture.  You see, I am hoping, as perhaps many people do in Hollywood, for a variety of opportunities.”

Mr. Schallert notes in his November 1946 article that Ann “is essentially shy,” but he kindly does not call her naïve for wanting or expecting not to be typecast in Hollywood.  It was the bane of many, if not most actors, that the studio’s bottom line and the public’s perception would roll over like a steamroller an actor’s usual hope of playing something different than his last movie.  Mr. Schallert also kindly notes the catastrophes suffered in the past two years with her spinal injury, and the death of her mother, and that “The emotion associated with that bereavement is too close as yet for Ann to discuss.

“Ann’s fortitude is nothing light in the film world.  Her experiences have undoubtedly given her an unusual maturity in her work.  She has no formula for playing the roles that are so much at variance with herself.  She indicated that she does them intuitively as much as anything else.”

A simple answer to a question that trailed Ann through her early career.  How could a nice girl play such less-than-virtuous people so convincingly?  She’s an actress, that’s why.

The very question seems to lead us to the astounding conclusion that actors who play murderers, thieves, and pickpockets must actually be murderers, thieves, and pickpockets.

Another article that November of 1946 notes her latest role in Swell Guy: “Her part…is that of an ornery little brat grown up, and Ann is quite aware of the danger she will be typecast as a ‘meanie.’  Result: she is studying vocal music, with every intention of snagging a part in the next big musical show filmed at her studio.”

That next big musical at Universal never happened, but after a few more ‘meanies’, her roles began to change towards nice girls in less demanding parts.  How much of this was due to her seeking new material, and how much was due to a personal life that the press was touting more and more as laudatory is an interesting question.

The notice of her as a young woman living an exemplary life may have gained more steam in April 1949, when she was slated to play the lead in a film called Abandoned, which she refused and was put on unpaid suspension.  The movie, (judging by this swell lurid poster, was a crime noir with a great cast) deals with unwed mothers and a black market baby adoption racket. 

Many actors risked studio wrath by rejecting scripts because the scripts were lousy.  However, though I don’t know the reason she rejected the movie and have never read an interview with her opinion on the subject, some columnists seemed to infer that taking the suspension was an exercising of her moral conscience.  One would assume that none of the greedy, conniving, promiscuous characters she had heretofore played, performing unsavory deeds including shooting Zachary Scott dead, would fall in line with how a proper young lady should behave, but the columnists took the shortcut and wrote her up—and wrote her off—as a nice girl.

It was also regarded as somewhat quaint, if admirable, that she preferred not to do any cheesecake photos.

Sheilah Graham noted in August 1949, that Ann didn’t smoke, or drink, and went to church regularly and attended church socials, but also gave Ann credit for spunk.  “She seems happy and easy going, but she has a mind of her own.  Not too long ago she took a suspension from her studio for refusing to play a role she didn’t like.  In spite of her lack of experience in real life, on the screen Ann is able to portray hardened, willful, sinful characters.”

 

By 1954, syndicated columnist Sue Chambers echoed the, by now, cemented public view of Ann, that she was deeply religious, and there has  “…never been a whispered breath of scandal about her….she has never been temperamental; she has never kept anyone waiting for an appointment…She leaves a good impression with everyone.  Her working associates have never known Ann to raise her voice in anger or turn down a request for a benefit appearance, no matter how ‘small’ the group.” 

Not keeping anyone waiting for an appointment may be really fishing for nice things to say, but the press was also apparently intrigued that she could be a homebody who was equally interested in a career, the antithesis of the 1950s nice girl.  Ms. Chambers noted that Ann, married the previous year and expecting her first child at the time the article was published, wanted a family “but she has no intention of giving up her career; she’s intensely ambitious, too.”

Her reputation more than preceded her; it wrapped around her like a cocoon.  From a syndicated article in 1952:  “Can a nice girl make the grade in the movies?"

Nice girls get paper dolls made in their image.


“Ann Blyth, a girl any fellow could proudly take home to meet mother, is proof that virtue is its own reward—even in Hollywood.  The young and beautiful actress is one of the most talented and successful in the business.  Yet, paradoxically, her name is seldom, if ever, mentioned in the gossip columns…Ann, it seems, spends most of her leisure time at church bazaars, a most unlikely hangout for gossip columnists.

“She has three major motion pictures either just released or about to be.  All of them accent her versatility…somehow, in between, she manages to make countless benefit appearances at church suppers or hospital wing dedications.”

One of Hollywood’s most famous gossip columnists, Louella Parsons, early on noted the amazing paradox of the young girl who was career-ambitious and yet still seemed like a nice person.  By 1951, Louella, who had this backyard fence familiarity/condescension in her prose, was still ruminating on the problem child who was so frustratingly not a problem:  “Ann’s aunt and uncle are her family, and she lives with them.  She has been brought up as if she had never been in Hollywood or motion pictures.

“Her aunt waits up for her until she gets home at night…likewise, Ann’s escorts are always carefully scrutinized by both her aunt and uncle.  She might have been brought up in some small town and then not had the protection she had with these two loving people.  And, withal, she is a fine girl and a versatile actress.

“Her first success was ‘Mildred Pierce’ when she played the horrid daughter…and was everything a young girl should not be.

“How could you happen to play that girl so well when she is just the antithesis of you?’ I asked her.”

Did Ann’s reply shock her? 

“I like to vary my roles, and it would be very tiresome if I played only sweet young things…I’d really rather have a part I can get my teeth into—one with character rather than a milk and water girl.”

Louella wasn’t listening.  She had decided, as did other members of the press, that the nice girl should only play nice girls.  A movie to be tentatively titled White Sheep was proposed for Ann in April 1951 (though never made with Ann), and Louella Parsons announced, “This is the story of a small town minister who helps regenerate a rather wayward family.  Ann, of course, is the white sheep of the family.  You could not believe her in any other role.”

You could not believe her in any other role?  What happened to Another Part of the Forest, or A Woman’s Vengeance, or Mildred Pierce and the scheming, sultry, promiscuous, greedy, backstabbing, murderess roles for which she had earlier been called a young Bette Davis?

On her film, The Golden Horde – columnist Harold V. Cohen also scoffed at the notion of the nice girl playing anything but:  “Nobody in his right mind could possibly visualize sweet, wholesome Miss Ann Blyth in the role of a seductive Persian princess, dressed in scanties and flimsies, who uses the wiles of her sex to stop the ruthless march of the terrible Genghis Kahn…Now Miss Blyth can take off those veils and go back to her cashmeres and dirndls, where she belongs.  In ‘The Golden Horde’ they’ve sent an innocent child to do a woman’s work.”

You can seduce Zachary Scott and then blast him to smithereens, but how quickly they forget.

Another aspect of Ann’s personal life which may have influenced press opinion may have been her resplendent Roman Catholic wedding ceremony in June 1953 celebrated by several clergy including a cardinal—James Francis Cardinal McIntyre, who also delivered a blessing from Pope Pius XII. 

In the company of several priests and monsignori was an old friend from back east, the Rt. Rev. Charles E. Hagearty, a monsignor at that time located in Hartford, Connecticut.  Msgr. Hagearty had been a curate at St. John's Church in Stamford, Connecticut when Ann visited her uncle and aunt there in the summers as a child.  It was this same uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Tobin, who gave up their Stamford home and moved out to Los Angeles to care for Ann after the death of her mother, which we discussed in the intro post here.   According to an article in the Hartford Courant at the time, she was ten years old when she and Fr. Hagearty first met.  He played the organ.  She liked to sing. 

The church was packed with some 500 people, but according to a newspaper description of the event, "set workers and crewmembers...far outnumbered the celebrities."  The press lumped the nameless techies together as "friends of the bride."  To most of them she was Annie.

More about her bridesmaids in a future post.

In a town that loved spectacle, it was a spectacular beginning to a long and happy marriage.  Dr. James McNulty, a Los Angeles area obstetrician, was invariably referred to in articles as Dennis Day’s brother (who acted as best man at the wedding) more than I think he ever was referred to as Ann Blyth’s husband.  Dr. and Mrs. McNulty had five children over the next ten years, further cementing Ann’s confounding respectability.

Her respectability, itself, became a problem for television producers of the 1953 Oscars, when she had been asked to perform the song “Secret Love” from Calamity Jane (a movie we discussed in this previous post).  Doris Day had been slated to reprise the song she made famous, but according to the authors of Inside Oscar – The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards, Miss Day turned down the opportunity due to being afraid to sing before the live audience (made bigger still by television).  The program was telecast March 25, 1954.  Ann was pregnant with her first child (her baby son was born in June).  Having a pregnant woman on television at all was still considered a dicey subject in this buttoned-up era, but one who stood there and sang the lyric “and my secret love’s no secret anymore” seemed to fill the NBC network powers that be with considerable trepidation.

It was the second time that the Oscars were broadcast on TV, called by columnist Bob Thomas, “The biggest star splurge in television history,” to an expected 60 million viewers.  The ceremony was held at the RKO Pantages Theater with Donald O’Connor as host in Hollywood, and Fredric March handling the live TV-hook-up from New York.

Ann, who the newspapers were a little more brave about acknowledging her pregnancy, still referred to it delicately as her “soon-to-be-mother-condition” wore an emerald green chiffon gown (“naturally,” commented columnist Buck Herzog with a nod to her Irish ancestry) with a big skirt and off-shouldered neckline.  She also wore emeralds.  Too bad TV was still black and white then.

Ann, who evidently felt no reason to wear a scarlet letter on her green gown, and seemed to see no reason why the sight of a pregnant woman should engender sophomoric double entendres about love not being a secret, performed without incident or apparent damage to her career.  Unfortunately, her old pal and former co-star Donald O’Connor, did suffer the wrath of pundits, including the disgust of Ed Sullivan, when he made the unpardonable faux pas of publicly acknowledging that Ann was with child.  He playfully introduced her before her number as “Ann Blyth and family.”

He was berated for his poor taste.  Ann thought his remark was cute.

Over two years later, the press was starting to crow with its typically short memory how mature the public was in accepting pregnant women in society.  “Women entertainers used to retire temporarily when they became expectant mothers, but in this day of the working wife, females everywhere go on working as usual.” The columnist, Aline Mosby, cites for her examples as Lucille Ball, Rosemary Clooney, and “Ann Blyth sang at the Academy Awards show shortly before she had a baby.”

And the world didn’t end.

Not too long after the birth of her son, she took her nice girl act on the road and really showed them. 

That September, Ann performed a night club act at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, and brought the house down.  Los Angeles Times writer Edwin Schallert, who we quoted at the beginning of this piece when he interviewed her some eight years earlier, marveled at how well the nice girl blossomed.

Nice girls also do Lux Soap ads.  With Peter Gunn.

 

“Miss Blyth won completely and without sensationalism the cosmopolitan public that had previously been intrigued by Dietrichs, Mae Wests, Gabors…it was a simple, sincere victory gained by a fragile-looking young girl in a modest shell-pink lace gown who confessed her knees were shaking.”

She sang such hits as “April in Paris,” “September Song,” excerpts from The Student Prince and Rose Marie(movies which we’ll discuss in future posts this year), an Irish song, and in a series of songs labeled as a “Calendar Hit Parade”, she belted out “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, and “Silent Night.”  She closed the segment with “Auld Lang Syne.”

“With her eyes misty with tears as she held a huge armful of flowers, she thanked the audience again and again for their tribute…There were also many misty eyes among the people present.”

Louella Parsons crowed that Ann, “…brings down the house, she’s so good.”

Syndicated columnist Bob Thomas wrote, “The gamblers and dealers in this hard-boiled town never saw anything like it.  Everyone in the night club was standing and cheering a demure beauty whose act was pure enough for a Sunday school picnic.”

 

Good girl makes good.

He reported on her closing performance after a three-week stint in Vegas, “With tears streaming down her cheeks, she sang, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and bowed off with a thundering ovation.  Most of those in the Congo Room were misty-eyed too.”

He compared her to other more ribald acts such as the striptease by Marlene Dietrich and Mae West’s racy humor.  “But along came little Miss Ann Blyth to prove that purity pays.” 

She had tried out the act first in San Diego, and then sang to the crowds at the California state fair in Sacramento.  Ann acknowledged, “It is the first time I played night clubs or any singing dates, and it has opened up a whole new world to me.”

However, the old world of Hollywood was increasingly reticent to accept Ann’s versatility as easily as she had.  A big role was coming up that would, unknown to anyone at the time, be her last film, The Helen Morgan Story.  The down-and-out, troubled, hard-living alcoholic 1920s saloon singer was considered by everyone who voiced an opinion about it to be beyond Ann’s abilities.

Some still recalled her earlier career of sultry gals.  According to Armand Archerd, “She is truly a paradox, having been described as ‘sweet Victorian’ to ‘sexy and sultry’…by nature, of course, Ann is probably the sweetest person in the film colony.”

She was required to test for the role in competition with something like 300 other actresses.

 “Ann, by virtue of her own reputation, was the least likely candidate of all.”

By virtue of her own reputation.

“Of course, no one in Hollywood believed she would get the role of the sexy Miss Morgan.”

So how did she get the part?

According to Mr. Archerd, “…her test out-sizzled any of the so-called sexy stars of Hollywood.”

The headline in the Daytona Beach Sunday News Journal reflected a shocked public.

Good Girl

In Movie

Gutter

Hollywood reassured a nervous public, “Ann Blyth is still a good girl, despite what some of her fans think…who fear that Hollywood’s ‘little lady’ compromised her own moral principles in taking the part.”

Ann responded, “There are always people who can’t disassociate an actress’ personal life from her screen life…An actress, to keep going, must portray life, and life is not all sweetness and light…there was great conflict between good and evil in Helen’s life.  Unfortunately, she had weaknesses and the evil in her life often won over the good.  I personally think that such movies, when done in taste, do more good than ones that gloss over the brutal facts.”

 

We come full circle then to a description of Ann by Ida Jean Kain earlier in her career from 1949: “I thought you might be interested in knowing what she is like is real life, this girl who plays the hateful, spoiled darling roles so realistically.

She is poised and genuinely unaffected—completely unspoiled.  And in a quiet, confident way, she knows where she is going, and she is neither deviating nor taking short cuts.”

The quiet, confident woman replied to Mr. Archerd at the time of The Helen Moran Story as to how she could possibly make the transformation to such a wayward woman?

“Well,” she blushed, “I guess I just try to be the person I’m playing.”

Because she’s an actress, that's why.

 

Come back next Thursday when we jump several decades ahead to 1985, a time when even the wholesomeness of Hostess cupcake television commercials could not keep her from turning wayward again as a woman haunted by the death of her first husband, who stabs her second husband with scissors in a fit of hysteria, and who may be a murderer.  That's up for her friend, the intrepid Jessica Fletcher, to decide in Murder She Wrote.

 

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Beaver Valley Times, syndicated article by Aline Mosby, December 28, 1956, p.11.

The Deseret (Utah) News, November 8, 1946; also syndicated column by Louella Parsons, April 5, 1951, articled by Ben Cook, April 21, 1952.

The Florida Flambeau (Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida), article by David Dreis, January 18, 1955, p. 2.

The Free Lance Star (Fredericksburg, Virginia), syndicated article by Bob Thomas, October 21, 1954, p. 14.

The Hartford Courant Magazine, July 19, 1953, p.7.

The Kentucky New Era, syndicated column by Armand Archerd, June 22, 1957, p. 9.

The Lewiston Evening Journal, July 17, 1952,  p. 22.

Los Angeles Times, article by drama editor Edwin Schallert, November 17, 1946, p. A1; also by Schallert, September 22, 1954, p. B6.

The Milwaukee Sentinel, syndicated column by Sheilah Graham, August 22, 1949; syndicated article by Sue Chambers, May 1, 1954, p. 3; also syndicated article by Buck Herzog, March 28, 1954, p. 19; also syndicated article by Louella Parsons, September 27, 1954, p. 6.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article by Harold V. Cohen, November 12, 1951. 

Portsmouth Times, (Ohio), article by Ida Jean Kain, July 15, 1949 p. 15

Sarasota Herald-Tribune, June 28, 1953, p. 6; also syndicated article by Bob Thomas, March 24, 1954, p. 16.

The St. Joseph (Missouri) News-Press, syndicated column by Louella Parsons, December 16, 1951.

The Sunday News Journal (Daytona Beach, Florida), September 15, 1957, p. 12A.

Wiley, Mason and Damien Bona.  Inside Oscar – The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards (NY: Ballantine Books, 1986), p. 238.

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HELP!!!!!!!!!!

Now that I've got your attention: I'm still on the lookout for a movie called Katie Did It (1951) for this year-long series on the career of Ann Blyth.  It seems to be a rare one.  Please contact me on this blog or at my email: JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com if you know where I can lay my hands on this film.  Am willing to buy or trade, or wash windows in exchange.  Maybe not the windows part.  But you know what I mean.

Also, if anybody has any of Ann's TV appearances, there's a few I'm missing from Burke's Law, Switch, The Name of the Game, The Dick Powell show, the Dennis Day Show (TV), the DuPont Show with June Allyson, This is Your Life, Lux Video Theatre.  Also any video clips of her Oscar appearances.  Release the hounds.  And let me know, please.