GWTW - the pickaninny shot

Who's the mocking, blonde cutie in Stage Door (1937)?

Update 2019: The mystery gal is Jan Wiley, credited as Harriet Brandon for Stage Door and for her debut, New Faces of 1937. Wiley succeeded as a serials star throughout the '40s.

I've Overlooked George Stevens

Gap-filling recently with Alice Adams (1935) and A Place In The Sun (1951), George Stevens is emerging for me as a bang-up director. Before this I'd mainly thought of him in connection with Penny Serenade (1941) [fine but not my sort of thing], Shane (1953) [great], and Giant (1956) [just OK], stupidly never associating him such star-identified classics as Swing Time (1936) and Woman Of The Year (1942). Given that Alice Adams is good with some great parts and A Place In The Sun is flat-out terrific - Stevens is already up to between 5 and 7 classics. Beyond that I have at least Annie Oakley (w/ Stanwyck) Gunga Din (w/ Grant), Talk of The Town (w/ Grant and Arthur), and The More The Merrier to further gap-fill with, and who'd bet against finding at least one classic among those?

Stevens is neither a dazzling stylist like Hitchcock or Kubrick nor a dialogue fireworks specialist like Wilder or Lubitsch, instead, rather like immediate peers Wyler and Cukor, he's a talented craftsmen who serves the story whatever it may be, gets great performances, always has the camera in the right place. The upshot is that Stevens racked up (near-)triumphs for more than twenty years, a very fine career albeit not a revolutionary one. But the history of any artform must give proper respect to its exemplary regular practitioners.

Note that about 28 mins into Alice Adams there's a 'rain streaks on the windows as tears' shot that substantially anticipates a famous shot from near the end of In Cold Blood (1967):

One difference: the rain-streak shadows are in addition to Katharine Hepburn's real tears whereas they're instead of Robert Blake's. But Hepburn's father in the film, hearing his daughter weep, gets (subtler) rain-streaks instead of real tears, so I say that Stevens and his DP Robert DeGrasse indeed gazump almost all of Richard Brooks's and his DP Conrad Hall's conception.

Update: Talk Of The Town (1942) is just OK. Above all it's brutalized by a crazy ending (apparently enofrced by giving A/B test audiences final cut!) in which, Movie-Star Logic holds - Cary Grant gets the girl - at the expense of Story and Performance Logic - a beautifully underplaying Grant allows and helps Ronald Coleman (w/ a touch of Victor Laszlo about him) to get the girl. Obviously Grant's movie-star-ness had deformed Suspicion (1941) the previous year so we're now pressing up against the serious downsides of the Golden Age studio/star system: it became impossible for beloved actors to surprise us, and only utterly archetypal story forms could be diligently cast and competently told. In the early '40s both Hitchcock and Stevens are trying to find new stories and open Grant and other stars up to different kinds of roles but the studios (and to some extent audiences) won't let that happen yet.

Two Recent Vids

"Turn Your Back On The Wind"/"Believe In Love" (1970) was one of The Fourmyula's final, unsuccessful singles, but it has since achieved renown on their various Best Of/Compilation releases. It hasn't been available on youtube up till now except in a recent live version here. I hereby plug that gap:

My visuals are the heartbreaking last few minutes of King Vidor's Stella Dallas (1937) w/ Barbara Stanwyck in the title role. The story is as follows: Stella wants what's best for her daughter, Laurel (Anne Shirley), and she realizes that Laurel will only be able to 'marry up' if she exits from her daughter's life (Stella's hard-scrabble roots constantly show through, vulgarities cause embarrassment, etc.). Laurel, however, won't abandon her mother just to better herself. So Stella has to fool Laurel that she, Stella wants her daughter out of the way so that she can herself pursue another husband. In the final scene Stella watches her daughter's wedding from out in the street in the rain, happy that her ruse has secured her daughter's future and probable happiness. It's a 'two boxer', and a triumph for both Vidor and Stanwyck. The obvious strong case for Stanwyck as one of the 2 or 3 greatest screen actresses starts here perhaps.

Soon after the release of Bob Fosse's film Sweet Charity (1969) (which adapted Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, via the original stage-show that Fosse also directed and choreographed), Paul Mauriat rearranged and reorchestrated part of Cy Coleman's Overture into this magnificent pop-classical/lounge band confection. This piece of music was used as background music, e.g., for events montages, throughout the 1970s.

Fosse's film starred the great Shirley MacLaine as Charity Valentine. The film's a bit of a dud overall. but MacLaine is dynamite, as is much of the music and dancing. Many of the stills I've used come from a very warm appreciation of the film due to Ken Anderson here.

If you want to see what a more successful, ultra-dramatic version of the underlying story looks like, watch the ending of Nights of Cabiria here. In my perfect Hollywood-world, MacLaine would have got to star in a straight remake of Nights of Cabiria as well as Fosse's musical. Oh well.

Note that Mauriat's Sweet Charity first appeared on his album Un Jour, Un Enfant (1969):

I'm In A Different World (Connecticut)

Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin released an excellent single in 1984: a heavily reworked Four Tops cover, I'm In A Different World (b/w Henry and James). Neither side of the single was a hit, but other musicians paid attention, and everyone from the Pet Shop Boys at the time to Mark Ronson recently has strip-mined these tracks. Stewart & Gaskin's IIADW strikes me as perfect Manic Pixie Dream Girl Movie s/track material. My visuals go back to the original, slightly frightening, manic pixie, Kate Hepburn's Susan Vance in Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938), but I'm vaguely hopeful that my vid. might help get the song discovered by someone making a contemporary film. We'll see.

BTW, the cutie at the beginning of the clip (with the good comic timing and Grace Kelly voice) playing Cary Grant's fiancee is Virginia Walker. Under personal contract to Hawks, BUB was Walker's debut and big break. But in a screwball-worthy twist, soon after BUB wrapped, Walker eloped to Mexico with Hawks's brother, thereby leaving the business. Walker did return in a few (mostly uncredited) very minor parts in 1945-1946, but died soon after that, at age 30, following (according to Louella Parsons) 'a long illness'. Too bad/sad.

Jane Siberry's Symmetry (The Way Things Have To Be)

Jane Siberry's brilliant, gorgeous, but relatively obscure, geek-girl anthem, Symmetry (The Way Things Have to Be) from her 1984 album No Borders Here hasn't been represented anywhere on youtube. My video plugs that gap. Our visuals are from the title number of Dames (1934), created and arranged by Busby Berkeley.

Dames is a 'must see' film in my view (see this blog post for terrific promotional images from the film including the ultra-classy ad. image at right), but it has recently drawn attention mainly because Michel Gondry and Matthew Barney have spent the last 15 years strip-mining it! Edgar Wright, however, has repeatedly advocated for Dames itself by screening it at various festivals. At any rate, I think the combination of Siberry and Busby Berkeley works well - two genius level items together for the first time, what could go wrong! - and hope that the relatively distinct audiences for these materials might productively cross-pollinate.
While many people nowadays associate symmetry in film with Wes Anderson or Kubrick, Busby Berkeley got there first and deepest, especially in the numbers for a remarkable string of somewhat risque, pre-Code, pictures he directed for Warner Bros in the early 1930s. Note that Dames probably isn't the best starting point if you're new to Busby B., for that I recommend the very topical (Depression-themed) Gold-diggers of 1933, e.g., here, here and here.
Berkeley influenced Escher and the wider development of Topology, and since he occasionally had his chorines dance and rearrange themselves on what look for all the world like giant folded proteins and viruses, Berkeley's influence on the sciences probably hasn't fully played out even now.

Mind-bogglingly, given that it's now a favorite, I only heard Siberry's track for the first time just over a week ago thanks to the wonderful Now you're at Songblague! blog. (Forget politics, a week is a long time in music appreciation!) Since one of my discoveries of last year was (the original mix of) Moev's Cracked Mirror - which I only heard about from a College remix 'tape' after liking their contribution to Drive (2011)'s soundtrack - I'm beginning to think I've got a thing for '80s C(anadian)-pop, as the kids might say.

Finally, a couple of other (recently-new-to-me) Siberry exceptionally-goodies from the '80s. From The Speckless Sky (1985), Taxi Ride:

and from The Walking (1987), the official video (with somewhat unfortunate poor audio quality) for The Walking (And Constantly):