Lucille Ball at 100: We Love You Lucy!

People from 5 to 105 love Lucy. Who? You know who, even if you aren’t one of the millions who DO love Lucy, you know who she is. She is the zany redhead we have watched since childhood on the hilarious 1950‘s comedy “I Love Lucy“. (We know she is a redhead because, well, just because we do. It’s not because we see her on her world famous T.V. show with red hair since it is in black and white). August 6th is the 100th anniversary of her birth in Jamestown, New York and much hoopla will be made in her honor, as well it should be.

Although she is known across the globe for her comedic genius, she got her start in none other than classic movies, first at RKO, then later as a Technicolor queen at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Many forget her dramatic film roots (pardon the hair coloring related pun, as she herself made quite joke of it often on her show) and it’s a part of “Lucy” history which should be brought to light for those who may not be aware of a pretty darn impressive career.

This post isn’t going to be a deep retrospective, as so many and so much has been written about this great performer, but just a gentle reminder of a few of her more interesting film roles. If you haven’t seen them, you might want to check them out. You might be surprised.

Stage Door (1937) ~ Ball shares the screen with some RKO heavyweights, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers and tosses a few verbal punches in as well. Early Lucy.

Dance Girl, Dance (1940) ~ Although Maureen O’Hara is the technical star of this show, Lucy comes out ahead most of the time. As Bubbles, exotic dancer, she is brassy and sassy and extremely attractive (pictured below). Early Dramatic Lucy.




The Big Street (1942) ~ The first time I saw this film I couldn’t believe I was watching the fun and loving star of one of my favorite comedy shows! Ball is cold and callous as a nightclub performer who treats her mousy admirer (Henry Fonda) like something scraped off her dog’s paw, she shows a whole different side to our favorite redhead.

The Dark Corner (1946) ~ Lucy as a “girl Friday” in an intriguing film noir at the peak of the genres popularity. Can’t miss. Suspenseful Lucy.

Then there are the fun and frivolous musical comedy confections she made when she moved over to MGM. DuBarry Was a Lady, Best Foot Forward and others. These performances, along with her great television work, built a career than spanned over 50 years and showed just why so many “loved Lucy”.


Lead graphic by illustrator Glen Hanson
http://www.glenhanson.com/

The Silver Cord (1933): Come to Mama

Ah, motherhood. From Madame X to Stella Dallas, Marmee March to Mrs. Judge Hardy (her movie husband, Lewis Stone, even called her “Mother”), the institution of motherhood in Hollywood during the golden age could verge on the sanctimonious and saccharine. That, however, was just one end of the maternal meter. If one goes to the other extreme, they find silly, self serving women, Mommies Dearest to the nth degree. The cinematic grandmaMA to these characters (or even great-grandmaMA, as our subject is an early talkie) would have to be Mother Phelps in RKO’s The Silver Cord (1933).

Based on a play which had a successful run on Broadway in 1926, The Silver Cord is the story of a woman who, by all outward appearances, adores her two grown sons (Joel McCrea and Eric Linden). But as we begin to realize, barely before Mrs. Phelps (her first name is never mentioned) gets her coat off in her first scene, this woman is a manipulative, conniving, self centered barracuda, who, upon meeting her new daughter-in-law (Irene Dunne) for the first time, marks her line in the sand as to where her son’s loyalties should lie! Also present is her younger son’s fiancee (Frances Dee). Matriarch Phelps is ready to devour Dunne, limbs and all, as the main course and finish off Dee, as the lighter, easier to digest dessert, albeit under the guise of sugar-laden maternal concern for her ”big young things.” Dunne’s character, Christina, is a scientist; bright, modern and intelligent and has no intention of giving up her new husband (McCrea) to “another woman” as she calls his mother.


The Silver Cord is a Freudian film fantasy. There is no end to Mrs. Phelps’ mouth kissing both her sons, cleaving them to her ample bosom and having them lay their heads in her always waiting lap. She even admits romantic attachment for them (though verbally falling short of declaring lust) after she discovered her marriage to their father was a loveless one. No woman will ever be good enough for them because no woman is her.

The entire cast is spot on in their portrayal of various members or potential members of this very dysfunctional tribe, headed by Mama Smother Me Not performed with great relish by stage veteran Laura Hope Crews. Crews played the role in the stage version and was a natural when the story came to the screen. Best known as the fluttery spinster Aunt Pittypat Hamilton in the epic Gone with the Wind, Crews channels the same fidgety anxiousness displayed in her Pittypat for Mrs. Phelps, only tempering her flamboyance with a steely resolve to have her own way regarding her offspring.

The apples of her eye, David and Robert, are played by handsome up and comer Joel McCrea and Eric Linden, respectively. The major lack of continuity in character seems to lie with McCrea, whose David makes light of his mother’s fussy cuddling and (wo)man-handling him in the film’s first half, yet defends her against his bride (unfounded, of course) in the second. Linden’s Robert is a spineless “effete” rounder who has no problem being tied tightly with his mothers apron strings. These mama’s boys are whooped! The lovely Frances Dee is splendid as his fiancee, Hester, whose defiance of her would-be viper-in-law brings cheers from the audience. She has one of the best lines in the picture. When asked what she will do by Robert after they have broken their engagement, Dee replies: “Marry an orphan.“ She and McCrea (pictured together below) would become romantically involved off screen during the making of the film, marry and remain so for 57 years until McCrea’s death in 1990.



Star billing went to the sublime Irene Dunne. As Christina, she gives as good as she gets, better in most cases, when going rounds with the monstrous dowager. The role was considered for both Katharine Hepburn and Ann Harding before RKO cast Dunne. Not the mega star she would be later in the decade, Dunne’s grace and sophistication shone through in this pre-code soaper. She would have several collaborations with the film’s director John Cromwell including 1946’s Anna and the King of Siam.

The Silver Cord is very much a filmed play, with lengthy stretches of dialogue by both Hope Crews and Dunne, but it packs quite a wallop in its 74 minute time frame. It would make a great double feature with Craig’s Wife.

Katharine Hepburn starring in “Box Office Poison”

1932. Making her film debut with the legendary John Barrymore in A Bill of Divorcement, Connecticut born and bred Katharine Hepburn was set on a path for screen stardom. Within a year of her auspicious Hollywood entrée, she starred in the first of her four Academy Award winning roles (Morning Glory) as well as one of the most recognized and popular films of the decade (Little Women). She was the darling of her home studio, RKO, and her continued success seemed inevitable. But unlike her contemporaries, she refused to play the Tinsel Town game. She abhorred interviews and rebuffed reporters (when asked by one newsperson if she and then husband Ludlow Ogden Smith had any children, her unorthodox reply was: “Two white and three colored”). Her disdain for makeup and wearing of pants and masculine attire was seen as too independent for public taste and she was tagged by some with the moniker “Katharine of Arrogance“. She went back to the stage on her native East coast, for the not very well received The Lake. When she returned to Hollywood, RKO cast her in Alice Adams (1935) for which she received yet another Oscar nomination, but the accolades were short lived.

In 1936, Hepburn made Sylvia Scarlett with Cary Grant and Brian Aherne, in which the non-stereotypical actress played a woman who is disguised as a young man. The RKO oddity cost Kate a big chunk of her reputation and the studio a big chunk of change (The film lost a whopping $363,000 in Depression-era dollars). Her period costume dramas of the mid-30’s, including Mary of Scotland, A Woman Rebels (both 1936) and Quality Street (1937), were flops as well, the latter two losing almost a quarter of a million dollars each at the box office. The public was staying away from Hepburn pictures in droves.


There seemed to be a ray of hope with the modest success of Stage Door (1937). The film paired the haughty Hepburn with Ginger Rogers, who, commercially, was a much more popular star and lucrative commodity for the studio. As Hepburn’s status at RKO plummeted, Rogers’ simultaneous skyrocketed. Still, the sparkling and intelligent comedy based on the Edna Ferber - George S. Kauffman hit play, didn’t hit the mark RKO execs had aimed for, bringing in only $81,000 in profits.


Desperate for a Hepburn hit and with fingers crossed, the studio cast her in a comedy, based on the humble financial success of Stage Door. Again paired with Cary Grant, who had just made a comic breakthrough of his own with The Awful Truth, the actress starred in Bringing Up Baby, the story of a man, a woman and a leopard named Baby. As inane as it sounded, that was the stuff of screwball comedies in the 1930’s. In retrospect, Bringing Up Baby is considered by some, one of the premiere classic comedies of its time (an opinion not personally shared by this blogger, but that is for another post), but in 1938 it was a box office disaster, losing $365,000, and when RKO slated Hepburn’s next film to be the standard programmer Mother Carey’s Chickens, the actress saw the writing on the wall. She bought out her contract for just over $200,000 and left the studio, with whom she had become synonymous.

Then the final blow was dealt. On May 3, 1938, a full page ad appeared in The Hollywood Reporter from the Independent Theater Owners of America lambasting studios and producers for promoting stars “whose public appeal is negligible ~ receiving tremendous salaries necessitated by contractual obligations”. Along with Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Kay Francis and Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn made this list. The statement went on to label those mentioned as “box office poison”. On that very day, RKO made the public announcement that it had parted ways with Kate Hepburn.

In the heart of the “box office poison” fiasco, two significant career factors occurred. The first film released since the Reporter ad, Holiday (1938), paired her yet again with Cary Grant. It had been made before she left RKO, on loan-out to Columbia, where Grant had seen his enormous success with Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth. Disappointment again hit home, as Holiday, although liked by critics, sank with the masses. The public was just tired of Katharine Hepburn. Then there was talk of the actress as a strong contender for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in the upcoming filmization of Margaret Mitchell’s hugely popular novel Gone With The Wind. Supposedly, Hepburn offered herself as a last minute replacement should the film’s producer, David O. Selznick, not have the part cast in time, but according to one of Selznick’s infamous memos, Kate’s box office standing and lack of sufficient sex appeal did little for the advancement of her cause. Says Selznick: “…because I think Hepburn has two strikes against her ~ first, the unquestionable and very wide-spread intense public dislike of her at the moment, and second, the fact that she is yet to demonstrate that she possesses the sex qualities which are probably the most important of all the many requisites of Scarlett….”



Heading back east, the frustrated actress spent the summer of 1938 in Connecticut with her family. Later that year, playwright Philip Barry approached Hepburn with a play he’d written with her in mind. It was called The Philadelphia Story and it was tailor-made for the cool actress. Retaining the film rights to the play (via her paramour Howard Hughes), she made a huge comeback in Hollywood in 1940 when MGM bought the rights to The Philadelphia Story (along with Miss Hepburn’s services, thank you). She remained a major star for the rest of her life, but she was never to forget her time as “box office poison” either.

Suspicion (1941): Cary Grant a Killer?

Although not usually one for spoilers when discussing classic films, the topic of this post has many of the films final elements revealed as they are key to the information examined here. Be warned.

There was so much going on behind the scenes of Alfred Hitchcock's 1941 suspenser, Suspicion, it's a wonder it ever got produced. Actually, it had been floating around for years before Hitchcock finally made it at RKO studios. Based on a novel by Francis Iles called "Before the Fact", the film version starred Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine, and would be one of the first American made Hitchcock films that focused on the psychological aspects of its characters, much more so than his previous year's blockbuster, Rebecca.



At the time Suspicion was made, Alfred Hitchcock was under exclusive contract to producer David O. Selznick, the mastermind behind Gone with the Wind (1939). Together, they formed an unholy union that created Rebecca, Hitchcock's first American film, but Selznick was so unyielding to the British director on creative issues, Hitchcock was more than grateful to be loaned out to make Suspicion (Selznick was notorious for loaning out his talented contractees, making enormous profits off their services, instead of using them for his own films, except on occasion). Another of the Selznick group loaned to make Suspicion was the film's female lead, Joan Fontaine. She too, had been part of the success of Rebecca, being nominated for an Academy Award as the meek second Mrs. deWinter. Hitchcock had been keen on casting her in that role, even though publicity mad Selznick had hoped to recreate the hub bub he had enjoyed with his search for Scarlett while casting Gone with the Wind. The producer cast a wide net to entice established actresses to test for the part. In the end, Fontaine got the role and when it came time to shoot Suspicion, the shy, awkwardness she displayed in Rebecca held her in good enough stead with Hitchcock that he cast her again.

Fontaine plays Lina McLaidlaw, a reserved young Englishwoman, who comes from a well-to-do country family but is well on her way to spinsterhood, a fact brought to the forefront by none other than her parents. Also a fact noted and filed away by handsome and roguish playboy Johnny Aysgarth (Cary Grant). Johnnie knows a good thing when he sees it (a skill that doesn't always shine through with his regular trips to the racetrack). The good looking ne'er do well woos and eventually charms the awkward lass into marriage, assuming the would be heiress will eventually net a fortune. As the weeks go by, Lina begins to see Johnnie for the scheming, charmingly manipulative man he is, yet still loves him. When his old friend , the lovable but slow witted Beaky (terrifically played by Nigil Bruce) arrives, Lina's suspicions grow even stronger. Johnnie persuades the trusting Beaky to go into a real estate venture with him only to see the friendly fellow die a questionable death shortly afterward. Finally, the shrinking wife, realizes her affable husband has inquired into her life insurance policy and sees his actions from that point in a sinister light.



Studio brass at RKO, didn't think the public would accept Grant as a cold blooded killer and wanted the film's ending to reflect that assumption. According to Alfred Hitchcock, in his famous interview with Francois Truffaut, he wanted the film to end with Fontaine's character realizing that her husband was a murderer, but so in love with him that she couldn't leave him. Instead, she writes a letter to her mother exposing her husband and proclaiming her wish to die. When Grant's Johnnie brings her the "poisonous" milk, she asks him to mail the letter, drinks the milk and drifts off. The final fade out, according to the director, would show Cary, whistling a chipper tune as he slips the letter into the mailbox. The weaker conciliatory ending didn't curtail box office returns and Suspicion was a bonafide hit over the 1941 holidays.

Hitchcock's signature use of creative lighting and camera angles, along with with an atmospheric score by famed composer Franz Waxman, garnered the film a nomination at the next years Oscars. (As to the directors creative genius, he also confessed to Truffaut that a small light was actually placed in the glass of milk carried by Grant up the dark stairwell to make it luminous. He wanted it to be the complete focus of the scene). The big winner at Oscar time was actually Joan Fontaine. The young actress, unhappily married at the time to actor Brian Aherne, felt she wasn't getting the guidance she needed from the formidable director and her sense of loss both on the set and off, brought to her performance the sense of fragility and paranoia, needed to convey Lina's neurosis. It won her the Best Actress Oscar, beating out her sister Olivia DeHavilland and fueling an infamous rivalry between the siblings which was never resolved. Many thought the win was a consolation prize for not winning with her Rebecca role, but as it turned out it was the only Hitchcock directed role to ever win an Academy Award.

The Most Dangerous Game (1932): Second Cousin to King Kong...Once Removed

When I was in the 8th grade, our class read the short story The Most Dangerous Game (also known as The Hounds of Zaroff) by Richard Connell, and I thought it a thrilling read, as stories read in school were not always that glamorous at that age. I discovered years later that several film versions had been made of the classic 1924 story and was particularly interested in the first and most famous one made in 1932. It wasn't until recently that I had the opportunity to finally see this oft filmed tale in its original screen incarnation and found it was worth the wait.

Although the RKO golden boy of the early 1930's, Joel McCrea, was top billed, the films villain, British stage actor, Leslie Banks, was the true shining force. As the sinister Zaroff, Banks is in melodramatic overdrive, overplaying his role like so many bad guys in the early sound era did. But this zeal only added to the eerie atmosphere of an eerily atmospheric picture.

McCrea plays big game hunter Bob Rainsford, who, as the lone survivor of a shipwreck, swims to the safely of a nearby island. On the island he finds the creepy mansion of creepy Count Zaroff (Banks), complete with creepy servants. Amongst all this creepiness, he finds the lovely Eve Trowbridge (Fay Wray) and her drunken brother Martin (Robert Armstrong), also guests in the Zaroff household due to a shipwreck near the island. It doesn't take long before our hero finds out that Zaroff, a self proclaimed fellow hunter, is a madman, who, bored with hunting mere animals, steers ships toward the rocky cove near his island in order to find a new and more dangerous prey...humans.

The Most Dangerous Game packs a wallop in its 63 minute time frame. Made for approximately $200,000, it was a success at the box office. If it looks and feels familiar, that may be because it gives the distinct impression of being King Kong~esque. That, in fact, is not by happenstance, as the two were being made simultaneously at RKO studio, by the same filmmaking team of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack. Kong stars Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong even gave a two for one by playing in both. 26 year-old McCrea gives a performance of smooth self assurance in this, one of his early beefcake roles. Master musician Max Steiner adds the perfect musical complement to all the mayhem. But Leslie Banks steals each scene in which he appears. Stroking the scar on his head, and staring off in the distance, one can only imagine the twisted atrocities running through his deranged mind as Zaroff. And what does the striking Miss Wray do? Why, cast look after look of sheer terror and scream, of course.

The Most Dangerous Game is part adventure film, part horror (Portions of the "trophy room" scene were cut when preview audiences started leaving the theater in horror/disgust). The principles make an engaging group, and the overall flick is like And Then There Were None without the mystery. If King Kong is the more ambitious and better known of these pieces of Siamese celluloid, Dangerous Game at least needs to be acknowledged in its own right as a classic example of early adventure, Hollywood style.

Want to know more?Here are some recommendations regarding the article above:

The Most Dangerous Game(1932) DVD

The RKO Features: A Complete Filmography of the Feature Films Released or Produced by RKO Radio by James L. Neibaur

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Kitty Foyle (1940): Ginger Proves She Can

They started out "flying down to rio" and ended up telling the story of the famous dancing Castles with nine movie hits by 1939. They were Fred and Ginger. Yep, Astaire and Rogers, and they were the most famous movie dance team in film history. In 1939, after six years of hoofing, waltzing and generally making movie magic, they shot their last film together (until Ginger took over for an ailing Judy Garland opposite Fred in 1949's The Barkley's of Broadway). They made major money for not so major studio RKO, but each wanted to branch out in his or her own career path. Rogers had been making strides in a solo starring career for a few years by the time they parted company, in fact she had been a supporting player and minor lead for years. More recently she had made a splash in Stage Door (1937), Having Wonderful Time (1938) and Bachelor Mother (1939). Next she wanted to break out in dramatic roles.

Kitty Foyle was a bestselling novel by Christopher Morley about a career working girl from humble beginnings in Philadelphia, who gets involved with two men, a rich playboy with an upper crust pedigree Wynward "Wyn" Strafford VI (Dennis Morgan) and a poor but idealistic doctor Mark Eisen (James Craig). Wyn is her first and true love, but their differences in social standing create problems. Despite protests from her blustering but loving Irish father, Kitty falls head over heels for the loaded pretty boy and takes a job as his personal secretary at the struggling magazine he owns (his money is not his own but a trust fund from the Main Line family he refuses to break from). When the rag folds and she realizes Wyn will never buck up against his family, she takes a job in New York. There she meets Mark, who woos her much differently than Wyn had, choosing to play cards in the tiny apartment she shares with two other girls. When the Philadelphia freewheeler, whom she'd never gotten out of her system, shows up in New York, Kitty throws over her solid steady and marries Wyn. When the couple returns, with wedding bands in tow, to Philadelphia, Kitty's fears about the social gap between them proves legitimate and they split as quickly as they had joined. More turmoil, more heartache for the heroine and by the end of the picture she has a big decision to make.

The film is a grand showcase for Rogers, who traded her honey blond hair for a brunette coif to push the drama a little farther away from the comedy. Although a well produced film, if not for Ginger and the RKO build it would have been a standard soaper in its day. Instead it was the studio's biggest financial success of the year (#10 of top grossing films for 1940) and nominated for an Oscar as Best Picture of the year. Also nominated was none other than former Astaire dancing partner, Ginger Rogers for Best Actress. Her competition was fierce, going up against Bette Davis in The Letter, Joan Fontaine in Rebecca, Martha Scott in Our Town and her old RKO rival Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. When the winner was announced in 1941 it was the lovely Miss Rogers. She had broken away from her lightweight image and won the highest honor the industry could bestow.