The Year Joan Crawford Won the Oscar - 1963

“The Year Joan Crawford Won the Oscar” is the teasing title of an episode of Saints and Sinners, in which Ann Blyth guest starred as the anxious wife of a naïve hotel waiter.  He is wounded by a guest in the hotel, a big-shot entertainer, who tries to cover it up.  Reporter Nick Adams, series star, ferrets out the story.

The title of the episode is from a trivia question put to the star-struck waiter, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of Oscar-winning films.  One is inclined to guess that it is no coincidence that “the year Joan Crawford won the Oscar” was also the year guest star Ann Blyth was nominated for the same movie, Mildred Pierce, which we discussed here.  Other than that, the title has no great significance to the story.

Nick Adams stars as a roving reporter, the justice-seeking kind, and John Larkin is his scowling editor.  Set in New York City, the series ran only one season from 1962-63, and was cancelled due to poor ratings after only eighteen episodes.  Well written, the series was spun off from The Dick Powell Theater series the year before, an episode called “Savage Sunday,” which starred Adams in the same role as the crusading reporter, and Ann Blyth as a fellow reporter.  We’ll talk about that episode down the road.  Originally, Ann was slated to join the series when the pilot was picked up.

A UPI syndicated article in June 1962 reported:  “Ann Blyth will strike a blow for femininity next television season by starring in a weekly series playing a chic career girl…Her lines will be as smart and chic as her wardrobe.”

Her role was to be a Washington correspondent for this New York paper, a character called Lizzie Hogan.  It seemed like a new departure, a strong character and interesting woman for her to play, and something new for TV.

“Television actresses are limited to family situation comedies or western heroines,” she said, “and both have become clichés.”

For that reason it must have been an appealing role, but faced with the demands of a series versus having little time with her family, Ann Blyth turned down the part, preferring to make only guest appearances on television.  Lizzie Hogan, girl reporter, was gone, and in stepped Edith Berlitz, the simple wife of a gullible waiter.  (Before this episode was broadcast, she had another turn on Wagon Train in December 1962.)

She employs a soft Brooklyn accent here, easy and natural, and many may have forgotten she is a native New Yorker, after all.  Gentle Edith faces trauma and heartache when her husband Sidney gets involved with a fast crowd.

Sidney is played by Robert Elston, who had a handful of TV guest roles, more experience on stage and as an acting teacher.  He brings breakfast to a roughneck crowd of showbiz types: Robert Lansing commandingly plays a Sinatra-esque nightclub entertainer.  His flunkies include Leon Askin and Harvey Korman before his Carol Burnett sidekick days. 

They are yes-men to the big nightclub star, hangers on with their hands out for favors, a floozy among them for color.  Sidney is enchanted with them.

Kidding around with handguns, Sidney is accidently shot.  Horrified, the showbiz types hustle him out of the hotel, and into a sort of safe house “nursing home” where he can be treated by a less-than-reputable doctor and be paid to keep quiet. 

Ellen Corby, who gets a nice slow close-up, is a hotel maid who leaks the story to the press for a price.  Everybody’s out for a buck.

The story, with its payoffs, its misbehaving celebrities, its press who chase them, is as timely as if it were written today.  Of course, the script is a lot cleaner than if it were written today, and the language and the plot points are more direct, and the journalist is the crusading kind who wants truth and justice, but this was an era on television when progressive attitudes beamed out of cathode ray tubes and anything was possible when done with a noble heart. 

Ann is sweet, a bewildered housewife out of her element, but nowhere near as innocent as her husband is. She tries to talk sense to him, but Sidney is pleased with the attention the big shots are giving him, fawns over Robert Lansing, and wants to join them in their glamorous, swinging lifestyle. 

Ann, though the timid “little woman” when she braves the lions’ den of showbiz insincerity to visit her recovering husband, has more savvy about evil when she sees it than Sidney.

 

He thinks he can parlay his wound into some kind of assistant’s job, but the egotistical Mr. Lansing, whose charm is fleeing under the pressures of stardom, tells him to get lost. 

There are a couple of showdowns, one physical where a dressing room is wrecked, and one verbal, addressing the moral implications of what has been done and what is to be done.  It’s good dialogue.  Ann’s suspicion about the floozy, “that lady, if you’ll pardon the expression,” her shock at being kissed on the mouth by the creepy Mr. Lansing, and her devotion to her goofy husband—which does not prohibit her from calling him on the carpet—all make for an endearing character.  It's a kind of role she had not played before, a kind of slow-talking Edith Bunker with brains, and it's charming. 

The role of the press is called into question as well in how celebrities are courted, and persecuted. 

 

Look for syndicated entertainment columnist Army Archerd, who gets a cameo playing himself at work on the paper.

"The Year Joan Crawford Won the Oscar" was broadcast January 21, 1963.  It’s currently up on YouTube in four parts, starting here.  The video quality isn’t very good, but enjoy.

Come back this Sunday the 13th for a detour away from the Ann Blyth series for a special post participating in the "Diamonds and Gold" blogathon salute to truly "golden age" actors - that is actors in their senior years still performing in memorable roles.  It's being sponsored by Caftan Woman, handling the ladies, and Rich over at Wide Screen World is showcasing the gents.  My post is on Rosalind Russell in A Majority of One (1961), in which she plays an elderly Jewish woman whose narrow world grows and transcends her Brooklyn apartment, her family traditions, and her faith to include an adventure in Japan, and a Japanese suitor. 

Come back next Thursday when we return to the Year of Ann Blyth series and consider Ann's participation in religious programming on radio and TV, a special post for the upcoming Easter holiday.

**************************

Toledo Blade, Jun 4, 1962, p. 8.
Vancouver Sun June 23, 1962, UPI syndicated article, p. 6.
Youngstown Vindicator April 15, 1962, p.23.

**************************

THANK YOU....to the following folks whose aid in gathering material for this series has been invaluable:  EBH; Kevin Deany of Kevin's Movie Corner; Gerry Szymski of Westmont Movie Classics, Westmont, Illinois; and Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear.

**************************
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, 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.

***************************************
Oh, and while I still have you on the line, here's one more thing.  In response to the number of kind people who've requested print copies of my eBook Classic Films and the American Conscience, which is a collection of essays from this blog -- I still can't print that book because you wouldn't be able to lift it, and I couldn't afford to print it.  BUT, I'm putting out a new, smaller, collection of essays, some old, some new, from this blog titled Movies in Our Time: Hollywood Mimics and Mirrors the 20th Century.   It will be issued in eBook as well as print, and I'll let you know more about it down the road.  I hope to have it published sometime in May.

 

Crack-up - 1946

 

Crack-up (1946) takes us to the art world, not usually the sphere of film noir, but this brooding little mystery is unabashed in its take on salons of high culture and waterfront thugs.  Especially appealing is abating this quirkiness by casting veteran priest-coach-boring nice guy Pat O’Brien as the hero.  Pat was 47 when this picture was made, seems a bit long in the tooth for some of the stunts he (or rather his stunt double) is required to do, but his brand of sly, knowing maturity is particularly suitable for this protagonist who must solve the mystery with his brains and his expansive knowledge of art.

I also like that the plot hinges on a phone call he gets regarding his ailing mother, and how he rushes to see her in the hospital.  Real men worry about Mom.

Since this is a mystery, I’ll try to side step the spoilers, but there are some interesting scenes that push the plot along for their atmosphere.  First, we have the pulsating theme music over the opening credits and sounds like the rhythmic pounding of train wheels. A train figures prominently in the mystery.  Look at the lettering on the title.  Just that tells you we’re in for real noir.  Them’s real noir fonts.

We begin with Pat O’Brien in a crazed fit, smashing his fist through the glass doors of a New York City museum, tangling with a cop—in a hall of marble statues where a broken figure of a nude male topples to the floor and smashes—there’s a little artistic symbolism for you.  Pat passes out, psychotic or drunk, we don’t know.  Pat works at the museum.  The museum administrators, in a late meeting, are shocked and try to hush the matter up when detective Wallace Ford wants to haul him in.

Good old Wallace Ford.  He deserves a post of his own someday, for many reasons.

Ray Collins is a doctor on the board of the museum, the voice reason in this mess.

Claire Trevor is a society dame and magazine writer who appears in a different outfit and a different hairdo every time we see her.  She sparkles, but she’s a regular dame.  We gather she and Pat were an item once, and he’s still interested enough in her to be jealous and sarcastic of any man who takes her to dinner, like Herbert Marshall. 

Our old favorite Mr. Marshall is typically elegant and eloquent here as an international man of mystery.  We don’t really find out who he is or what his game is until nearly the end of the movie.  Mr. O’Brien does not disguise his distrust and disdain for him.

Pat is a docent at the museum and gives lectures on art.  (How many cool film noir guys do that?)  We are told that the museum curators regard Mr. O’Brien as revolutionary—in their eyes not a good thing—and that if it weren’t for his service record, they might have sacked him long ago.

This being film noir, nine times out of ten, the protagonist is a war vet trying to adjust to this weird new world he’s come home to but doesn’t recognize.  Especially interesting is that later we get some background on O’Brien’s war record—he worked for the Allied Reparations Committee investigating the Nazi theft of precious works of art. 

We trace Pat O’Brien’s psychotic disturbance to a train wreck he claims he was just in, though there are no reports coming to Wallace Ford that a train wreck has occurred.

Now we go to the requisite flashback as Ray Collins asks Pat to tell them what he remembers happened to him today.

We pick up from Pat’s docent job and his lecture, and the call about his mother.  When Pat rushes to the train station to start his frantic journey to see his mother in the hospital, we follow him pretty much step-by-step—the ticket line, the empty commuter car filling with nighttime stragglers getting off work late, a sarcastic butcher boy selling fruit, magazines and cigarettes.  There’s a guy half-dragging his buddy who appears to have had a little too much to drink.

The train car is already a place of tension because of Pat’s anxiety about his mother and trying to reach her as soon as possible.  He glances with impatience at the people around him, not studying them with interest, but as if they are adding to his annoyance and tension.  We hear the omnipresent sound of the train wheels, which seem to grow louder.  Pat seems to grow acutely aware of all the sounds and images around him, and so we, too, focus on these sensations.

He looks out the moisture-tinged train window, and sees in the distance, around a kind a bend in the track, a beam of light.  To his horror and ours, it appears to be another train on the same track.  Look at Pat’s frozen expression as he’s mesmerized by the sight, a sense of unavoidable doom.  Suddenly, the train whips around the bend and heads right toward us.  The flash of light splashes across his train window, and we hear screams.

 

 

 

 

Then the flashback ends and we are back in the present.  He is physically and mentally exhausted.

He is told by Wallace Ford that his mother is fine.  She was never in the hospital.  There was no train wreck.  They all think Pat is cracking up, and his clothing reeks of alcohol.

Poor Pat, baffled and shaken, and doubting his own sanity, is released by Ford for the time being, but the museum fires him.  You can’t have a loony giving lectures on Salvador Dali in the gallery.  Pat fears he really is cracking up, like other ex-GIs he’s known.  He confesses, “It’s the one fear everybody had.

Claire Trevor and her apparent new beau, Herbert Marshall, take Pat back to his apartment.  It’s all messed up, as if somebody has overturned everything looking for something.  We also see Pat is being tailed.

Pat, scared, but wanting to get to the bottom of this, even if it means he proves he’s a nut, tries to retrace his steps according to what scraps he can remember.

He goes to the train station, rides the same train, tries to track down the same butcher boy or others who might remember seeing him.  Nobody saw him, nobody remembers him.  We are filled with the same sense of tension as before, afraid another “wreck” will happen.  Just at the pivotal moment, that train that looks as if it’s on the same tracks comes barreling at us again, and Pat is panicked.  Then-whoosh!  It passes by.  It was a double track.  The conductor calls out the name of the next stop.

Aha.  Pat realizes this was the moment something must have happened to him.  He gets off at that stop, and the station master in this tiny, empty depot remembers him from the night before, as a drunk guy being dragged off the train and into a car.

Now he knows he’s not crazy, but he’s in somebody’s way.  Mr. O’Brien is mad and on the hunt.

A murder occurs meanwhile, and he’s implicated, and Wallace Ford is after him, so Pat takes it on the lam.  We are taken to a penny arcade where he meets up with Claire Trevor trying to help him hide.  It’s a neat setting, showing what typical urban penny arcades were like in the day, a place for grownups and not kids—see the “No Minors” sign—because there’s nickelodeon peep shows and stuff.

 

Pat slugs people.  He x-rays masterpieces.  He appeals to the mousy secretary of his museum boss to help him investigate a forgery connection to the museum.  Even Mary Ware, played by Mary Ware, is not what she seems.

We go to a cocktail party, end up at a rusty freighter at the wharf, where Pat saves a valuable canvas from a fire.  Ultimately, we have a showdown between Pat and the mastermind of the mysterious gang, and we discover the reason for his psychotic episode at the beginning of the film.  It might seem like a slightly goofball ending after all that noir atmosphere, but it’s a fun movie, especially for being offbeat.  Keep an eye out for Ellen Corby as a maid.

But, especially keep your eye on the graying middle-aged action hero with the knowledge of art history, a devotion to his mom, and a growing paunch at his belly.  Pat O’Brien was lucky to get the part with so many younger pretty boys in Hollywood, but none of them would probably be as interesting.  He earned it, because he gives it not so much an “edge” as a burnished shine. 

 

Besides, film noir protagonists are supposed to be world-weary and haunted—and who is more tired and cynical, and has as deep a back story as a middle-aged man?

As we discussed in last week’s Adventure in Manhattan, also about art theft, the surprise mystery or what we do not expect from a film doesn’t have to be a shocking plot device.  It can just be a little quirk that sticks out and fools us—and intrigues us.

 

***

 

Here's a preview of the cover of Dismount and Murder - number three in my cozy mystery series.  The book will likely come out in November, and I'll post more about that in weeks to come.  The artwork here is by the amazing Casey Koester, the Noir Girl.

 

  

Film Stars on Stage - La Jolla Playhouse

 

I love the names across the top of this typical summer stock playbill.  We old movie buffs will recognize the names of Dorothy McGuire, Jane Wyatt, Mel Ferrer, Mildred Natwick—but here we find them in a different setting.  Not the end credits of a film, but each of them “above the title,” as it were, on a small-town summer stock program.  Appearing not in a film noir or “weeper,” but the English classic, “The Importance of Being Earnest” by Oscar Wilde.  The play is produced in the town’s high school auditorium, a couple of hours south of Los Angeles.  Time: 1949.   See here for production photos.

The La Jolla Playhouse was founded by Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and Mel Ferrer as an outlet to their passion for the stage, and their regret at being so imprisoned by film studio contracts that they were not allowed to perform on Broadway between films.

Starting a theatre company is always chancy, walking a financial tightrope and needing to find community support and audience as much as backers with money.  It was not always easy for the La Jolla Playhouse, founded in 1947.  The three producers juggled things for some years, aided by Miss McGuire’s husband, John Swope (whose own interest in theatre harkened back to the days of the University Players where he was pals with Henry Fonda and James Stewart—see this previous post on my blog Tragedy and Comedy in New England.)

The group disbanded in 1964, but was revived in 1983, and continues to produce quality theatre, with some famous names appearing at its new playhouse.  Have a look here for what’s doing at the La Jolla Playhouse these days.

The lure of the stage is very strong for serious actors who are passionate about the workshop atmosphere, about improving their skills, and the thrill of the flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants experience that isn’t found in the controlled environment of film.  It was for Gregory Peck, who worked on the planning for this theatre company while he was shooting “Gentlemen’s Agreement” (1947).

 

 

Author Gary Fishgall in Gregory Peck-A Biography (NY:Scribner, 2002) pp. 125-126, notes that the cast rehearsed a play for a week, it ran for a week opening on Tuesday and closing on Sunday.  There were additional matinees on Wednesday and Saturday.  Sets were “struck” on Monday and the new set moved into the high school auditorium.  On Monday evening, the actors got their first dress rehearsal on stage for the opening the next night.  It was that hectic.  Since they were only being paid $55 per week plus hotel accommodation and two meals a day, as noted in Gregory Peck-A Charmed Life by Lynn Haney (NY: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003,  p. 157), we can only assume it was a very rewarding experience for these film actors who were normally paid thousands and thousands of dollars per year.

The La Jolla Playhouse put on 10 shows each summer.  The first one was “Night Must Fall” with Dame May Whitty, who re-created her film role.  (See this previous post on the movie.)  She had played the same role on the London stage and on Broadway.  Apparently this high school auditorium gig wasn’t too beneath her.  That’s an actress.

 

 

Others who performed with this fledging group, escaping their film shackles if only for a week, include Eve Arden, Una O’Connor, Robert Walker, Patricia Neal, Vincent Price, Joan Bennett, Charlton Heston, Laraine Day, Joseph Cotten, Jennifer Jones (the group also received considerable financial support from David O. Selznick).  Leon Ames trod the boards of La Jolla High School, June Lockhart, Wendell Corey, Craig Stevens, Teresa Wright, Raymond Massey, Mary Wickes, Marsha Hunt, Beulah Bondi, Pat O’Brien, Richard Egan, Fay Wray, Groucho Marx,  Allen Jenkins, David Niven, Jan Sterling, Olivia de Havilland, Kent Smith, and of course, the three founders: Mel Ferrer, Gregory Peck, and Dorothy McGuire.  There are lots more, and you can read the casts and productions here at the La Jolla Playhouse production history page.

 

 

According to the Mel Ferrer website, which also has some interesting facts and photos on the La Jolla Playhouse, co-starring for “The Voice of the Turtle” was a New York stage actress named Vivian Vance.  In the audience that evening was lady named Lucille Ball (stars not only appeared on stage at La Jolla, they made a grand audience as well), and she was so impressed with Miss Vance’s work, she invited her to become her sidekick on a new TV show she was about to produce with her husband, Desi Arnaz.  The show was “I Love Lucy,” and Ethel Mertz was born.

The neat thing about these old theatre programs is the actor bios.  Ellen Corby notes she spent 12 years in Hollywood as a script girl before making her first film.  Teresa Wright notes she got her first big break on Broadway as Dorothy McGuire’s understudy in “Our Town.”  La Jolla produced the show with Ann Blyth, Millard Mitchell and Beulah Bondi.

 

 

The bios frequently discuss the actor’s stage history first; later on at the end of the paragraph they’ll note, ah, yes, they made some films as well.  As if the latter was only to pass the time between stage engagements.

Stage work allowed them to stretch different acting muscles.  It allowed them to play against type: film heroes got to be stage villains, and minor film character actors got to be stars. 

 

 

Look on this playbill.  Florence Bates, perennial movie busybody, is right up at the top, a star in “Arsenic and Old Lace.”  Her cast bio in the program relates her interesting journey as the first female lawyer in the state of Texas, to antique shop owner, to investor in Mexican oil wells, to helping her husband run a bakery.  (More on Florence Bates in this previous post.) On a whim once, when she was already well on in life, she auditioned for a part at the famed Pasadena Playhouse (where so many young film stars were discovered), and got the part, though she had no experience.  Alfred Hitchcock discovered her shortly thereafter, and by time of this appearance on stage in La Jolla in 1950 she had appeared in some 60 films. 

But she wanted to be on stage again.  The communal experience shared by actors and technical staff and audience is unique to the theatre because it is live and simultaneous, and in the moment.  Once it’s gone, it’s gone, if forever remembered.

 

 

Even by someone stumbling across 60-year-old playbills from a small-town summer stock theater—who can only imagine.

 

***

 

As of a couple days ago, Another Old Movie Blog has reached its 6th anniversary.  Thank you all for the pleasure of your company.

 



***

 

Coming up: I'll be speaking at the Westfield Athenaeum, Westfield, Massachusetts on Tuesday, March 12th in celebration of Women's History Month. I'll be drawing from essays in my recently published States of Mind: New England. This, and some of my novels, will be available for sale at this event.