ownership

In terms of feuding, the Hatfields and McCoys have nothing on Broadway and Hollywood - although, frankly, the rivalry between the latter two has always been a bit one-sided to me: While Hollywood seems blithely unfazed by the affairs of The Great White Way, theater denizens have harbored an ongoing, in-grained resentment of the movie medium.

Which is understandable. Film, unlike theater, is permanent. While a movie can be referenced over and over again, ad infinitum, a Broadway production is often reduced to dusty memories, followed by legend. Case in point: Anyone who saw Mary Martin and Enzio Pinza in "South Pacific" on Broadway in 1947 is dead (including the critics who reviewed it), but the 1958 movie version, for better or worse, will live on forever. And ever.

Then there is the exaggerated outrage about what the Hollywood studios have done to "Broadway's own." This is an ongoing whine by the two "chief theater critics" for the New York Times - who are white, male and middle-aged and who bring up this grievance whenever one of them is reviewing a revival of a play or musical that was once committed to film.

The movie is always a desecration, a violation. Always.

Of course, there's been a reversal in this area. Now preoccupied with family-friendly franchises almost exclusively, Hollywood shows scant interest in adapting Broadway productions these days (a reason for yet another anti-Hollywood grievance among theater folk!). Instead, Broadway is now mangling movies into glitzy stage musicals, only a few successfully.

Then, there is the fuzzy logic among Broadway types that anyone who opened a show on Broadway owns the role that he/she played and no one else is qualified to play that role on screen. Naturally, this fractured notion does not apply to any stage revival - the operative word being "stage." Anyone is qualified to inherit a role if that role is being played on stage somewhere, but a movie version inherently belongs to the performer who originated the role. Period. Trespassers keep away. Don't go there!

But, realistically speaking, there are few performers who could honestly claim to "own" a role. Actually, none. Okay, maybe one. (But more about that later.)

An early cause célèbre involved Laslo Benedek's 1951 film of "Death of a Salesman," based on Arthur Miller's 1949 play. Only two performers from the stage show were recruited for the film - female lead Mildred Dunnock and supporting player Howard Smith. But the lead role of Willy Loman, reportedly played powerfully on stage by Lee J. Cobb, went to Fredric March. Cobb was already an established film star and it was assumed that he'd reprise his role. Plus, the popular opinion was that Willy Loman was his role (even though his celebrated performance failed to earn even a nomination for a Tony, let alone the award itself).

March's performance in the film version has been underrated by Cobb supporters for decades now, largely because March is a less showy actor. He's also a much more versatile one. Despite the derision, March - who is currently being celebrated as Turner Classic Movies' Star of the Month - received an Oscar nomination as best actor.

Elia Kazan directed the Miller play on Broadway and, two years earlier, he directed Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire."

The 1947 production of "Streetcar" starred two then-unknowns in the leads, Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy, and Kim Hunter and Karl Malden in support. When Kazan directed the 1951 film version, everyone but Tandy was hired to recreate their roles. Vivien Leigh, of course, is the film's indelible Blanche DuBois - so indelible that no one seemingly remembers or cares that Tandy was the original Blanche.

There's never been any hubbub over this casting switch. This is a rare case where a stage performer didn't seem to own a role. Tandy received fine reviews when the play opened but, in intervening years, her performance has come to be seen as its weakest link. She won a Tony - but the caveat is that she shared it with two other actresses in, yes, a three-way tie.

Leigh, who played Blanche in the London production, was hired for her star power; Brando was still largely unknown. "A Streetcar Named Desire" is the first of Warner Bros. stage adaptations in which Jack Warner surrounded the original Broadway cast with one major film star, a recipe he used again for his films of "The Pajama Game" and "Damn Yankees."

Anyway, Leigh did more than deliver just star power. She delivered all-around, winning an Oscar for her performance in the role. She owned it.

Despite his studio's track record - i.e., its fidelity to the stage sources of its film versions - Warner attracted ire when the expensive film adaptations of two stage classics were cast with movie stars. Broadway was up in arms when Rosalind Russell was signed to play Madame Rose in the 1962 film of "Gypsy," a role played by Ethel Merman in the 1959 stage original, a role which Merman "owned." It was a given. The role belonged to Merman.

And, in one particular way, it did. The show's songs by Jule Style and Stephen Sondheim were written specifically for Merman, for her incredible range. She was cast in the show even before they were hired to compose the score. Russell could sing; she had starred on stage in Leonard Bernstein's "Wonderful Town" just a few years earlier in 1953. But "Gypsy" was something much more, musically demanding.

It also didn't help that the Broadway colony had soured on Russell because, just prior to "Gypsy," she had "stolen" two other stage roles. She replaced Gertrude Berg in the film of "A Majority of One" and Jessica Tandy (again) in "Five Finger Exercise."  She was persona non grata.

To this day, there are complaints about Merman being cheated (even by people who never saw her performance on stage), but Russell's nuanced acting in the film more than validates Jack Warner's bottom-line decision. Fact is, she's the better actress, a world-class actress and, while Russell tried her best to do all her own singing, the compromise of seamlessly blending her voice with Lisa Kirk's is an example of pure movie magic.

Then, of course, there's Warner's casting of Audrey Hepburn in the role that Julie Andrews created on stage in "My Fair Lady," a situation recently covered here. Once again, it was a matter of star power over the untested. Both actresses were suitable for the role, but Andrews was young and unknown by moviegoers. Hepburn's trajectory was the same as Russell's: She tried to brave the show's score, she was ultimately dubbed and she was derided/chided - not only by Broadway types but also by Hollywood itself - for being presumptuous enough to even accept the role.

Fact is, time and again, there have been film stars who successfully appropriated other actors' roles - for example, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Quick! Who starred in the Edward Albee play on stage? Stumped? No surprise. Look it up.

The late Zero Mostel is closely associated with "Fiddler on the Roof," a show he gleefully undermined on stage with inappropriate shtick. Topol is a vast improvement in Norman Jewison's sublime 1971 movie version.

Yes, there are valid examples of stars who arguably do own the roles that they created on stage. Robert Preston in "The Music Man" and Barbra Streisand in "Funny Girl," to name the obvious, immediately come to mind. But really? I can easily see other performers playing those roles. Craig Bierko was an excellent Howard Hill in the 2000 revival of "The Music Man." And imagine Emma Stone in a production of "Funny Girl." It would be different but it could work.

Yul Brynner laid claim to "The King and I," although many others have taken a stab at it. But Brynner kept going back to it - his "signature role" - again and again. He played it almost literally until the day he died.

Actually, digging around in the weird recesses of my mind, I could come up with only one example of someone who can conceivably claim to own a role. That would be Judy Holliday in the musical "Bells Are Ringing."

The songs for the 1956 show by Jule Styne and Betty Comden & Adolph Green are wonderful, but it would be generous to call its book (also by Comden & Green) flimsy. And, of course, it is now seriously dated. It was dated in 1960 when Vincente Minnelli filmed it, working overtime to make its brand of whimsy palatable under the scrutiny of the camera's eye.

If it works at all, and it does, it's because of Judy Holliday.

The material is unimaginable without - how shall I put this? - her absolutely unique personality. Describing your average Judy Holliday character is not easy. "Zany"? That doesn't even begin to describe what she achieved in her performances. "Bizarre?" That would give the wrong impression. "Eccentric" might work. In George Cukor's "It Should Happen to You" (1954), a character describes her Gladys Glover as "strange." Whatever she had, it's tough to pinpoint - and impossible to duplicate.

The shameless bits in "Bells Are Ringing" work strictly because of Judy Holliday. Even certain songs make sense because of Judy Holliday.

She plays an answering-service operator and one of her clients is a big-time Broadway playwright. So, when she sings the illogical line, "What does he look like?," in "A Perfect Relationship," it gets by only because Holliday is singing it. What does he look like? Given that he is a big-time Broadway playwright, his picture surely had to appear many times over in the entertainment sections of every New York newspaper at the time.

But who can quibble? It's Judy Holliday.

Because it is dated (and barely even works as a period piece), "Bells Are Ringing" is rarely revived. Florence Henderson starred (opposite Dean Jones) in a poorly received production, directed by Michael Kidd, that played in San Francisco and Los Angeles in 1979, and Faith Prince tried it in an underwhelming Broadway revival in 2001. And, to the best of my knowledge, that's it.

The material simply can't be done without Judy Holliday, although Kristen Chenoweth might be able to pull it off.  But then, Henderson was - and Prince is -  highly talented and they couldn't do it. Nah, it has to be Judy Holliday. She owns it. And she's one of the few who could make that claim. In my mind, the only one.

Notes in Passing: As for the original stage stars of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," they were Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill. And Jessica Tandy's two Tony co-winners in 1948 were Judith Anderson for "Medea" and Katharine Cornell for "Antony and Cleopatra."

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~images~
(from top) 

~A cautionary warning to any film star who has designs on a role that belongs to a stage performer

~Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock in the stage production of "Death of a Salesman" 
~photography: Friedman-Abeles 1949© 

~Display ad for the film of "Death of a Salesman"
Columbia Pictures 1951©

~Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in the film of "A Streetcar Named Desire"

~photography: Warner Bros. 1951©

 ~Ethel Merman (with Chowsie) in the stage production of "Gypsy" 
~photography: Friedman-Abeles 1959©

~Rosalind Russell and Ann Jillian performing the "Broadway, Broadway" number in the film of "Gypsy" 
~photography: Warner Bros. 1962©

~Judy Holliday recording the cast album of "Bells Are Ringing" with co-star Sydney Chaplin and record producer Goddard Lieberson
~photography: Columbia Records 1956©

 ~Holliday singing "A Perfect Relationship" in the film of "Bells Are Ringing" and with Dean Martin in another scene
~photography: MGM 1960©

 ~Ad for the 1979 West Coast revival of "Bells Are Ringing" 
~The San Francisco Civic Light Opera Company 1979©