character counts: fred clark & larry keating

These two marvelous character actors were nothing alike but shared a common link.

First, meet Fred.

Fred Clark. He of the bald head, mustache, grumpy demeanor and penchant for childish petulance. Fred appeared in about 100 films and TV shows and is perhaps best known as the definitive conservative, Mr. Babcock, in "Auntie Mame" (1958) and Betty Grable's older "gentleman friend" in "How to Marry a Millionaire" (1954).

There were other films - "Don't Go Near the Water" (1957) with Glenn Ford, Jane Russell's "The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown" (also '57), the Pat Boone musical "Mardi Gras" (1958), the Debbie Reynolds duo, "The Mating Game" and "It Started with a Kiss" (both 1959), Jerry Lewis' "A Visit to a Small Planet (1960) and two with Judy Holliday, "The Solid Gold Cadillac" (1956) and "Bells Are Ringing" (1960), to name a few. And Fred was dependably (and delightfully) disagreeable is just about all of them. A real "character."

Then there's Larry.

Larry Keating. Balding (as opposed to bald) and also with a mustache. Impeccably groomed, urbane and erudite, Larry was every inch a gentleman. He was in two 1953 backstage musicals, "She's Back on Broadway" and "Give a Girl a Break." No surprise. Larry could have been the prototype for the wealthy, fatherly Broadway producer who believes in his new show and its big star.

You may also remember him from Fred Astaire's "Daddy Long Legs" (1955), a trio of biopics, "The Eddie Duchin Story" (1956), "The Best Things in Life Are Free" (also '56) and "The Buster Keaton Story" (1957), and "Who Was That Lady?" (1960). He could be dignified and funny - but without ever compromising that dignity.

Clark and Keating were forever linked by their participation on the "Burns and Allen" TV show in the 1950s. Both played the character of George and Gracie's next-door neighbor, Harry Morton (husband of the Bea Benaderet character, Blanche). Clark was the third actor to play the role and Keating followed him as the fourth and final Harry Morton. The cleverly-staged replacement took place between two episodes of the show's 1953 season.

Fred's Harry left the house during an episode titled "Gracie at the Department Store" and Larry's Harry came home the following week in the episode "Morton Buys Iron Deer/Gracie Thinks George Needs Glasses."

During this episode, George Burns walks on set and stops the show just before the new Harry's entrance and explains that Clark had left the show to do a Broadway play ("The Teahouse of the August Moon"). Burns then introduces Keating to Benaderet: "This is Larry Keating and he is going to be your husband now." Keating and Benaderet exchange pleasantries and then continue the scene with Harry coming back home to an angry wife.

At the end of the show, Gracie Allen says to Burns: "You know, George, I've been confused all day. There's something entirely different about Harry Morton this week. I finally figured out what it is. He never wore brown shoes before."  And George replies, "Say goodnight, Gracie."

Of course.

Clark and Keating each brought a different reading to the role of Harry Morton, both memorably so. The two actors would eventually appear together in the 1962 Kim Novak-James Garner comedy, "Boys' Night Out."

For the life of me, I don't understand why Billy Wilder didn't cast these wonderful actors as two of the executives in "The Apartment" (1960).

They would have been perfect, particularly Clark.

Larry Keating passed in 1963 at age 67, before his final film, "The Incredible Mr. Limpet" (1964),was released; Fred Clark died in 1968. He was 54 and his last film was Otto Preminger's "Skidoo," released that year.

Note in Passing: Burns' unorthodox introduction of Keating wasn't the first time he interrupted an episode. He earlier stopped the show when Clark was still in the cast. Amusingly, the actors performing in the scene stopped in mid-gesture and "froze" behind Burns for both occasions. 

double take

 ~Peter Lawford and June Allyson dancing in Charles Walters' "Good News"
  ~Location/Time: Campus of Tait College (aka, an MGM backlot) / around noon

~Choreography: Robert Alton 
~Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 1947©

~Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling dancing in Damien Chazelle's "La La Land" 
~Location/Time: The Hollywood Hills / around midnight
~Choreography: Mandy Moore

~Lionsgate/Summit Entertainment 2016 ©

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cinema obscura: two with june allyson

When the eternally youthful, all-American June Allyson died at age 89 on July 8, 2006, most of the coverage was devoted to her team-spirited work at MGM and the various “wife” roles that she played in a string of biopics.

Missing from the career appreciations were two atypical Allyson titles - José Ferrer's compelling "The Shrike" (1955) and Douglas Sirk's lovelorn "Interlude" (1957), both made and released by Universal-International.

The two are impossible to see (or even find) these days, although Turner Classic Movies had "Interlude" penciled in for a couple screenings in the recent past, only to subsequently substitute another title at the 11th hour.

The disappearance of “The Shrike” is particularly odd, given its lofty credentials. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1952 play by Joseph Kramm, the stage production won two Tony awards for José Ferrer – as "best actor in a play" and "best director of a play." On stage, Ferrer co-starred with Judith Evelyn, best known as the timid Miss Lonelyhearts, spied on by James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (1954).

However, when Ferrer decided to transfer the play to film, his first as a director and with himself again in the male lead, he did the unforeseeable and hired Allyson to play the role of a bright, seemingly caring wife (seemingly) who relentlessly pecks and pecks away at her husband – much like the bird of the title – until she has effectively reduced him to a state of utter helplessness and frightening mental instability.

Never before had Allyson's sunniness been made to seem so untrustworthy - it's toxic actually - and she responds to the challenge with a memorably unsettling (and yet subtle) performance. With this film, Ferrer explored what the critic Richard Schickel described as Allyson’s “vaunted sweetness,” as well as the perilous state of marriage when one of its partners fairly drips -  and seduces - with venom. “It was a delicious combination,” Schickel commented in his book “The Stars” (1962) – "her surface sweetness and the inner viciousness of the role.” A great performance.

James M. Cain concocted the story for Douglas Sirk's "Interlude," which was remade a decade later in 1968 under the same title by director Kevin Billington - although, for some bizzar reason, Cain goes uncredited in the Billington version. Oddly, Cain only supplied the story to Sirk. He didn't pen the screenplay. That was done by a collection of other writers.

Both films are European-based soap operas about a young, impressionable woman (Allyson in the Sirk version, Barbara Ferris in Billington's) who falls for a married orchestra conductor (Rossano Brazzi and Oskar Werner, respectively). The heroines both suffer in achingly beautiful surroundings, although neither film is exactly an emotional knockout. And the remake is as difficult to see as the original.

Allyson playing a woman who falls for a married man and pursues an affair with him could have meant career suicide in the 1950s, especially for someone who played uncomplicated, perky woman in which Allyson specialized. But her performance here is another gentle reminder that it was foolish for one  to underestimate June Allyson.

It's interesting to compare the two versions of the material. The Sirk film, of course, has those matchless Sirkian qualities that he so freely exhibited at Universal-International during this ripe, productive period, while Billington's take on it is more realistic and kept afloat largely by the mesmerizing, mournful Werner and the lovely Virginia Maskell as his wife.

 The choice of music is also interesting. The remake has a classic Georges Delerue score. Lots of harpischords here - way over the top. Frank Skinner scored Sirk's film in a more traditional, studio-approved way.

Sirk opens his film with a song by the McGuire Sisters; Billington and Delerue use the inimitable Timi Yuro for the remake's haunting title song.

You know, I'd actually like to see "Interlude" again - both versions.

And certainly "The Shrike," which is begging for a remake of its own.

* * * * *

~images~

(from top)

~Vintage June Allyson

~photography: MGM 1947©

~Poster art for "The Shrike"

~Publicity shots of June Allyson and José Ferrer in "The Shrike"

 ~photography: Universal-International 1955©

 ~Poster art for "Interlude"

~Allyson and Rossano Brazzi in "Interlude"

~photography:  Universal-International 1957© 

the american dream, unraveling

Nothing can undermine a good film quicker than preconceived notions or baseless expectations. And George Clooney's exceptional "Suburbicon" has been confronted by both, misunderstood by the moviegoing public (which has officially devolved into a state of permanent adolescence) and critics (who, one would think, should know better but generally don't).

I'd rather not know what might exist in the minds of the franchise-happy movie patrons who keep the Hollywood studios alive, well and obscenely profitable these days and I guess that I shouldn't expect much from contemporary critics either, but it baffles me when a film is casually dismissed simply because it's not what people expected or wanted it to be.

Prior to its release, the impression was that "Suburbicon" would be a fictionalized account, by way of the Coen Brothers, of the disappointing, shameful behavior of white people when a black family moved into Levittown, Pa. in 1957. It wasn't exactly America's greatest moment.

 The expectation was the film would actually be about a black family. But, wait! The Coens are noted for approaching their narratives circuitously and adding clever, inappropriate curlicues for entertainment value. And that's exactly the approach that Clooney and his co-writer Grant Heslov took and honored when they dusted off and filmed the Coens' script. It would be really rather foolhardy to expect the Coen-sourced "Suburbicon" to be a serious, cautionary tale about race relations.

The film is less about the plight of the tormented black family who moves into a blindingly white suburban community in the 1950s, than about the general awfulness of white people who have not changed since the '50s. Clooney is nothing if not brave to make a film in which, except for its little pre-teen hero, is devoid of a single Caucasian who is decent or likable.

The black family in "Suburbicon" - The Mayers - remain on the periphery throughout the film, a plot point that has outraged some critics. They are there simply to be bystanders to the shameful behavior of the white families who surround them and resent them. And especially problematic for reviewers is the fact that the film's leading white family - The Lodges - has barely noticed or is even aware that a black family has moved in.

Matt Damon plays the patriarch, Gardner Lodge, and in a more mundane, straightforward movie, Gardner would intervene on behalf of The Mayerses. But "Suburbicon" is a gleefully bent film: Gardner is too caught up in his own dubious doings to care about his new neighbors and their threatened civil rights.

In a daring style of storytelling, Clooney makes no effort to connect the two storylines, keeping The Lodges apart from the Mayers family. Only their children - Tony Espinosa as Andy Mayers and the remarkable Noah Jupe as Nicky Lodge - have any meaningful, humane contact in the film.

Clooney handily guides his film through a collection of amusing Hitchcockian twists and turns, many jaw-droppingly inappropriate and unapologetic, and locates humor (of the jet-black variety) that the politically correct might find insensitive and probably just plain gross.

Insensitive?  Gross? For me, it's simply some much-needed sarcasm.

Jupe is placed regularly in unsettling situations - very incorrect - but the young actor is almost preternaturally game in a performance that defines the fractured message of the film. Damon, always flawless, bravely abandons himself in a role and performance unlikely to win him any awards but should. And Julianne Moore is simply a hoot as twin sisters.

As far as her role(s) in the film, I'll leave it at that.

There are invaluable contributions here by cinematographer Robert Elswit, editor Stephen Mirrione, costume designer Jenny Eagan, production designer James D. Bissell, set decorator Jan Pascale and particularly Alexandre Desplat, who has composed a diverse, wall-to-wall music score that, artfully and surprisingly, never seems the least bit intrusive.

From where I sit, Paramount has had a banner year with radical cinema, as evidence by Darren Aronofsky's "mother!" and now "Suburbicon," brash films branded as "audience unfriendly" (for me, not entirely a bad thing). And, much like "mother!," Clooney's film goes through something akin to a hysterical nervous breakdown as it speeds towards its conclusion. Coming up from Paramount is Alenxander Payne's "Downsizing" (also with Damon) and, despite the cheery trailer, I'm hopeful that it also has a dark side.

And that it's similarly inappropriate (there's that word again) and sarcastic - "qualities" that we desperately need more than ever now.

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~image~

 from top

~One of the posters for Paramount's "Suburbicon"

~ Matt Damon and Noah Jupe in a scene from the film

~ Damon having dinner after a particularly rough day

~Julianne Moore, Jape (back to camera), Damon and Jack Conley looking for "bad guys"

 ~photography: Paramount 2017©

what if?

Happy anniversary, America!

Seventy-nine years ago today - yes, 79 years - the incorrigible Orson Welles broadcast the infamous "The War of the Worlds" episode of his popular radio program, Mercury Theater on the Air. It was October 30th, 1938 and it was a Halloween episode aired by the CBS radio network.

Directed and narrated by the then-23-year-old Welles, who had yet to become Hollywood's wunderkind with "Citizen Kane" (1941), the episode, simulating an actual newscast, was an adaptation by Howard E. Koch of H.G. Wells' 1898 novel "The War of the Worlds" and it caused collective panic among the ever-fearful, ever-gullible citizens of the U.S. of A. with its sensational reportage of an attack by Martians (the original illegal aliens) who, for some bizarre reason, set their sights on a little farm in Gover's Mill, New Jersey, before hitting New York City.

Next year will be the 80th anniversary of the broadcast and I have this perverse fantasy that, between now and then, some brave, resourceful filmmaker/documentarian might pull the same kind of prank, given that Americans are more skittish than usual these days (understandable, considering how chaotic life has become). It would be a terrific, much-overdue wake-up call. And think of all the horrible current events ready-made for an irresponsible, "scare-the-bejesus-out-of-them!" broadcast.

Perhaps Errol Morris or Morgan Spurlock or Gabriela Cowperthwaite could pull it off. Or Steven Soderbergh or The Coen Brothers. Or Mr. Provocateur himself, Michael Moore. Wait! I'm not sure about Moore, now that he's been sucked into a pointless Twitter war-of-words with Trump.

It would be perfect. After all, Welles' broadcast was the original Fake News. How appropriate would it be if the viewing public (it would have to be on TV these days) was sucked into faux "breaking news" about Trump or white nationalists or out-of-control police - a story even more outrageous than the ones routinely aired by ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News?

"Our actual broadcasting time, from the first mention of the meteorites to the fall of New York City, was less than forty minutes," Welles' producer John Houseman later reminisced. "During that time, men traveled long distances, large bodies of troops were mobilized, cabinet meetings were held, savage battles fought on land and in the air. And millions of people accepted it - emotionally, if not logically." And, surprisingly, there were no real ramifications from a prank that unsettled the nation, other than Welles and company being subjected to relentless hounding by the media.

I don't recall reading anything of a serious reprimand by the government or about any charges brought against Welles and the Mercury Theater.

Of course, these days, there would be consequences, with the usual suspects - the assorted talking heads of TV - self-righteously scolding the filmmaker in question for being either "inappropriate" or "insensitive" or "irresponsible" or "politicially incorrect." Or all of the above.
 
Happy Halloween!

~images~

~ (from top) the scare headlines of The Boston Daily Globe, The New York Daily News and The New York Times © from October 31st, 1938