Garbo to Astaire: Films of the Thirties

  

This is the time of the year when various top ten film lists appear. Coincidentally, there was an article in the paper today claiming that most older people do not go to the movies anymore. Blame was placed on the pandemic but most senior citizens, like myself, cannot watch or even follow today's movies with rapid cutting and computer special effects. So, here is a list of films that I have watched this year from the 1930s that have more than withstood the test of time. They not only bring me back to the world of my parents and grandparents, but I think my  own children and grandchildren would enjoy them as much as I still do.

Greta Garbo

Grand Hotel: This 1932 film stars the legendary Greta Garbo in her greatest role. The silent screen actress from Sweden did not miss a beat with the coming of sound. In a world reeling from the Great Depression, she plays a famous Russian ballerina who just wants to be alone. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer put together a huge production set in a posh Berlin hotel with spectacular photography, and an all-star cast that included John and Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, and a young Joan Crawford. It was a huge box office success and won the Academy Award for best picture.

It Happened One Night: Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert starred in this 1934 romantic “road” comedy about two strangers from completely different worlds who meet on a bus traveling from Florida to New York.  Neither star wanted to be in this film, but under the guidance of director Frank Capra, they both turned in the most memorable performances of their careers. The film is filled with iconic scenes: bus passengers giving a rousing rendition of “the Man on the Flying Trapeze;” Colbert adjusting her stocking to hitch a ride; and Gable undressing in a motel cabin with only a blanket hung on a rope separating the two strangers. This sleeper film swept all the Academy Awards for 1934. 

Dodsworth. Director William Wyler brought Sinclair Lewis’ best-selling 1929 novel to the screen in 1936. Walter Huston, in what some consider to be his finest performance, plays a wealthy industrialist who sells his business and sets off with his wife of 20 years to discover Europe, and re-discover themselves. Co-star Ruth Chatterton gives a powerful performance as a wife seeking more than wealth, and Mary Astor gives one of her usual fine performances. Selected as one of the most important films of all time by the Library of Congress, Dodsworth surpasses the book on which it is based. 

                                    

Pygmalion. George Bernard Shaw wrote the screenplay adaptation of his own stage masterpiece about linguistics professor Henry Higgins’s wager to turn a low-class flower vendor into a “lady”. This 1938 film starred Leslie Howard, at the height of his career, before his untimely death in WWII, and Wendy Hiller, who would go on to become one of Great Britain’s greatest actresses. The film was later adapted into the famed musical, “My Fair Lady.”

The Petrified Forest. Leslie Howard stars in this 1936 adaptation of Robert Sherwood’s hit play. Bette Davis co-stars and demonstrates all the qualities that would make her a huge star. Also, Humphrey Bogart has a break-out role as Duke Mantee, a killer on the lam, who holds hostages in a bleak diner on the edge of the Arizona desert. Unfortunately, Bogart’s success led him to be typecast as a gangster for the next few years until he emerged as a leading man in 1941  with unforgettable films like the Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca.

Our Town: Thornton Wilder’s play about ordinary people and ordinary life in a small New England town at the beginning of the twentieth century, was an immediate success when it first appeared on stage in 1938. It won a Pulitzer prize and has become an enduring favorite. It was turned into a fine film in 1940 but poor DVD copies make it hard to watch today. For modern viewers I suggest a filming of a stage version originally performed in 2003 at the Westport Country Playhouse, and subsequently aired on PBS. This version stars Paul Newman as the stage manager.  Newman, a Westport resident, was at the end of his career, but was coaxed to return to the stage after a long absence. His performance, supported by a cast of relative unknowns, matches anything he did in his illustrious career.

Sons of the Desert: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are regarded as the greatest comedy team in film history. They began during the silent era with some of its greatest comedy shorts, and became huge stars in the Thirties where, in addition to shorts, they appeared in a number of full-length classics. The best of these is the 1933 film, Sons of the Desert.  The boys  vow to attend the annual convention of their fraternal order, the Sons of the Desert, but they are opposed by their dominating wives , one carrying a shotgun over her arm on her return from duck hunting, and the other, played by Mae Busch, brandishing a large kitchen knife like an accomplished fencer.  One gag follows another in this classic comedy that includes a charming rendition of the song, “Honolulu Baby.”

 

Swing Time: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are universally regarded as the greatest dance team of all time. Starting with their first appearance in Flying Down to Rio where they danced the Carioca, they appeared in a series of films whose dance numbers  have never been equaled. No one else danced together as a team as they did. My personal favorite is Roberta, but Swing Time is generally regarded as their greatest film. It includes “Pick Yourself Up,” the most popular of all their numbers; the effervescent “Waltz in Swing Time;” the dramatic finale “Never Gonna Dance;” and the solo “Bojangles of Harlem,” Astaire’s spectacular homage to the great black dancer Bill Robinson. (click on the link, or view the brief video below. "Sheer Heaven."

Bonus pick. Woody Allen’s Radio Days is set in 1940 on the eve of the Second World War. It brings to life the world of the thirties as few films have done. The world is seen through the eyes of a young boy, obviously Allen, growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Queens. The cast of characters  is excellent, and the soundtrack is filled with the music of the day. This film is a perfect way to usher in the New Year.

Happy New Year!!!

###

Christmas History

The birth of Jesus is recorded on the gospels of Matthew and Luke, but they only have one fact in common: that the Holy Family was in Bethlehem, the birthplace of King David, when Jesus was born.

Nevertheless, scholars now agree that the accounts have a firm basis in history and complement each other. Modern biblical scholars argue  that the birth occurred in what we  call 7 B.C. The gospel of Matthew says that Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod who died in 4 B.C. The gospel of Luke states that the birth occurred during a Roman census ordered when Quirinus, a Roman official, was governor of Syria. This official was governor in 6 A.D. but now we know that he was also governor between 10 B.C. and 7 B.C. During both terms he ordered a census.

The date Is also confirmed by astronomy. It appears that the star followed by the Three Kings or Magi is no pious fiction. There is no record of a comet or super nova in 7 B. C.,  but in the seventeenth century, famed astronomer  Johannes Kepler claimed that there had been a conspicuous conjunction of the two largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn, in the area of the constellation Pisces visible for months in 7 B.C. Only in the twentieth century did scientists confirm Kepler’s observation.

What about the Magi? Historians now doubt that they were kings but claim that they were astrologers (scientists) who were keen observers of the stars and planets. In fact, scholars now believe that they were Jewish astrologers living in the large Jewish community in Persia who were continually searching the skies for signs of the coming Messiah. 

What about Bethlehem? Joseph would have been required to travel with his wife the 70 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the hometown of his family to register for the census. The small town situated on a hill six miles from Jerusalem would have been crowded with others coming for the census. It would have been very likely that they would have had to stay in a stable or cave used to shelter animals.

There were certainly grazing fields around the town where shepherds could be watching their flocks, but scholars now believe that the flocks would not have been grazing at the onset of winter. The gospel accounts do not specify an exact date, and it seems most likely that December 25 is a later addition to the story.

Nevertheless, after all these years, it is hard to imagine a better date to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Winter is coming on, and we are faced with three months of cold and gloom. What’s wrong with a ray of light to pierce the darkness?

The birth of Jesus 2028 years ago was an actual event that took place in a specific time and place. It is confirmed by historians and scientists. No matter what you believe, you cannot doubt that it changed the world forever.

Maybe we still have not achieved peace on earth and goodwill toward men, but we can always hope. Years ago I heard this lovely rendition of "Peace on Earth" by famed country singer Vince Gill, and his daughter Jenny, now a star in her own right. Click on this link or view the video below.

###

Note: The image above is a painting by the Venetian Renaissance artist Giorgione. It is usually called The Three Philosophers, but I agree with those who believe it depicts the Magi when they first behold the star.

Deanna Durbin: America's Sweetheart

Deanna Durbin’s beautiful singing voice catapulted her to stardom during Hollywood’s Golden Age. From her film debut in 1936 at the age of 15 to her retirement in 1949, her charming personality and singing voice made her America’s sweetheart, as well as one of the highest paid actresses in the movies, something that made her one of the highest paid women in the world

Born in Canada, her parents moved to Los Angeles when she was little more than a toddler. By the age of ten she became the star pupil of one of Hollywood’s top vocal instructors. Her beautiful soprano led to a screen test and she was signed to a movie contract in 1936 at the age of 15.

Her first full-length film, Three Smart Girls, was so popular that many more light-hearted romantic teen musicals followed as quickly as possible. All of them featured at least two or three Durbin’ solos ranging from pop to operatic areas.  It is said that the success of these light comedies saved Universal Studios from bankruptcy. 

As she matured, she tired of the frothy comedies that had made her famous and wanted better material. She got one chance in 1944 when she played the lead in Christmas Holiday, a film adaptation of a novel of the same name by famed British author, Somerset Maugham. 

The novel has very little to do with Christmas. Set in the 1930s, it is the story of a young Englishman from a respectable middle-class family who has completed his schooling, and is about to enter the family business. Before doing so, his father treats him to a holiday in Paris over the Christmas holidays. It is to be a typical middle-class excursion where he will see all the sites, visit the art museums, and attend various concerts including a Midnight Mass celebration, a major Parisian event. 

On arrival in Paris, he meets up with an old friend, now a typical 30s radical, who takes him to a high-class bordello, where he meets a beautiful Russian émigré prostitute. When she discovers that he plans to attend Midnight Mass, she begs him to let her join him. During the service in a packed cathedral, she breaks down in hysterical sobbing. Over the next few days, she tells him her tragic story, and introduces him to a side of life that he has never experienced or even imagined. In Maugham’s words, the bottom falls out of his life.

The Hollywood Production Code required major changes in the film adaptation. Even without the Code, Deanna Durbin’s persona would never have allowed her to play a prostitute on screen. Instead, she plays a singer in a dance hall dive that is a thinly disguised bordello. The young Englishman is transformed into a newly commissioned, young American army officer whose fiancée has jilted him for another man. The locale has been shifted to New Orleans, where the officer’s flight home has been forced to land during a storm. The free-thinking friend has become a sleazy newspaper reporter who doubles as a pimp for the New Orleans dive where Durbin’s character works.

Despite these changes the film is remarkably true to Maugham’s novel with its emphasis on tragic love, sin, suffering, and  redemption. Christmas Holiday is a dark film superbly directed by Robert Siodmak, one of the great masters of what would later become known as film noir. The writer, Herman Mankiewicz of Citizen Kane fame, produced a brilliant script full of rare depth and meaning. The screen play is supported by a musical score created by Austrian Hans Salter that ranged from Durbin’s rendition of Irving Berlin’s ballad, Always, to a version of Wagner’s Liebestod performed in a packed concert hall, and at the film’s finale. 

Speaking of the finale, the film’s creators dramatically changed what I consider to be Maugham’s very weak and ambiguous ending. The film ending is still somewhat ambiguous but like the rest of the film, the direction, the acting, the writing, and the musical score transcend the novel on which it is based.

Deanna Durbin regarded Christmas Holiday as her best performance. She certainly demonstrated that the child singer had become a fine mature actress. In my opinion, most of her other films, despite their great popularity, are hard to watch today. One exception is It Started with Eve, a charming 1941 romantic comedy in which she stars along with Charles Laughton and Robert Cummings. 

In this "screwball" comedy her youthful charm and vivacity, as well as her singing revive a dying old man, played superbly by Laughton. When she accompanies herself on the piano with a spirited version of “When I Sing,” set to the music of  Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Waltz, you can see how she revived American audiences during the Great Depression and the war years. 

Deanna Durbin’s fame did not last unlike that of Judy Garland's, another teenage singer who became a huge star. Despite her box office success, Durbin never appeared in any immortal film musicals like the Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, Easter Parade, or A Star is Born. Perhaps even more important was the fact that she decided to quit show business in 1949 at the age of 28. After two failed marriages, she married a Frenchman who had directed one of her last films. They decided to quit Hollywood and move to a farm in France where she spent the rest of her life until her death at the age of 91 in 2013. When one considers the tragic life of Judy Garland, who can say that Durbin made the wrong decision? 

###

Note: Christmas Holiday can be found on DVD, or viewed on YouTube where many of her songs may be found. Here is a link to her first number in the film,  "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year." Or view the brief video below.

Mollie Hemingway: Rigged

  

In a post written in March 2021 I wrote: 

“President Trump did not lose the election, the Democrats won it. How they won it, with the most lackluster candidate in memory, is a story that remains to be told.”

Molly Hemingway’s “Rigged” a well-documented and carefully researched book on the 2020 Presidential election goes a long way toward telling the story. Early in the book she states her thesis by referring to a Time magazine article published on 2/4/2021 shortly after the inauguration of President Joe Biden.

 “Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump. Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests.” [36]

I recall that shortly after the election some news sources admitted that there had been fraud but claimed that it wasn’t enough to change the results.  Then, we were told that there was no evidence of “widespread” fraud. This latter claim soon became a kind of mantra even in respected newspapers like the Wall Street Journal.

But Mollie Hemingway’s book demonstrates that the fraud did not have to be widespread to steal the election. On the contrary, the efforts were targeted at a handful of key swing states with pinpoint accuracy. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona, key states that Trump had won in 2016, were the prime targets.

Hemingway describes the efforts of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to pour millions of dollars into these key states to generate votes in targeted Democratic districts under the guise of supporting increased voter participation.  Private organizations were set up to embed their operatives into the election process and even take charge of the processing and counting.

In Wisconsin, Hemingway notes that “After the Wisconsin legislature passed a bill banning private funding of election operations by a 60-36 margin in the state assembly and by an 18-14 margin in the state senate, Governor Tony Evers vetoed the ban. Without tech oligarchs buying the administration of the state’s elections, Democrats stand to lose.“ [222]

In Georgia, despite a Republican governor and secretary of state, the voting and counting in Fulton county with 1 million voters was controlled by Democrats. In chapter 10, entitled “The Trouble with Fulton County, “ Hemingway describes  the goings on in Atlanta’s State Farm Arena where hundreds of thousands of  absentee ballots were to be counted. She quotes a tweet from David Shafer, the chairman of the  Georgia Republican party.

“Fulton County elections officials told the media and our observer that they were shutting down the tabulation center at State Farm Arena at 10:30 p.m. on election night only to continue counting ballots in secret until 1:00 a.m. No one disputes that Fulton County elections officials falsely announced that the counting would stop at 10:30 p.m. No one disputes that Fulton County elections officials unlawfully resumed the counting of ballots after our observers left the center.” [290]

Here are some quotes from Hemingway’s account of  the election in Pennsylvania, a state with a rabidly anti-Trump governor, and a history of election fraud.

“In 2020, South Philadelphia judge of elections Dominick DeMuro pleaded guilty to taking bribes to stuff the ballot box in multiple elections.“ [252]

“Nearly $35 million in Zuckerberg funds flowed into government offices in Democratic strongholds of Pennsylvania to assist Democrats with their mail-in-voting push.” [256]

“The Democrats in Philadelphia did not have to allow the Trump campaign any observation of the vote counting. “ [260]

“That court’s ruling was overturned by the liberal Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which admitted that the ballots were violations of the election code but said that they should be counted in any case. “ [263]

According to Hemingway, Pennsylvania was crucial not only in the election but in the aftermath. She blames the Trump team for concentrating on minor issues like the thousands of dead voters on the registration rolls when it should have concentrated on the way in which voters and votes were treated differently in different parts of the state. This failure had great significance.

“By wasting time on less relevant claims, an important lawsuit failed. It had catastrophic effects for the remaining legal battles. Pennsylvania could have been the first domino to fall for the Trump campaign in a sequence of tightly contested courtroom victories. Instead, it was the beginning of the end for the campaign’s effort to hold Democrats accountable for foul play. It also had a ripple effect throughout the legal community. The media were soon dismissing all legal challenges as baseless attempts to prove widespread fraud ignoring more substantive claims. The avalanche of bad publicity scared off credible lawyers from participating in further election challenges on behalf of the Trump campaign, and it made judges inclined to view any such challenges, no matter how merited, with suspicion. [275]

Even the influential Wall Street Journal, my favorite newspaper, showed a reluctance to investigate claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Its news department, which has been leaning left in recent years, never did an independent investigation of the charges. The more conservative editorial page now just continually refers to charges of fraud as dubious. 

Now, charges that the election was rigged or stolen are regarded as unpatriotic or even treasonous. Former President Trump is routinely blamed  for continuing to dispute the legitimacy of the election, despite the fact that subsequent disclosures have backed him up. A court had ordered Pennsylvania  to remove over 200000 deceased persons from its voter rolls before the election, but the state only did so months after the election. Only after the Biden inauguration did the Washington Post admit that it had mis-quoted President Trump’s now famous phone conversation where he supposedly insisted an election official in Georgia find thousands of votes.

In a brief epilogue entitled, “Consent of the Losers,” Hemingway points out that consent of the losers to the result of an election is important in a democracy. However, she details have over the past few decades Democrats have repeatedly claimed that Republican presidential victories were illegitimate. The 2000 Bush-Gore contest is a case in point, but how can anyone seriously blame President Trump when Democrats from Hillary Clinton on down still refuse to accept the legitimacy of the 2016 election even after multiple investigations have shown that the Russia collusion charge was a hoax inspired by the Democratic party itself.*

###

*Hemingway's sources and notes take up almost 100 pages.