The Dancing Pig - My Favorite Silent Film

This is a favorite, one I've posted before, but let's trot it out again, shall we? Well, I'm doing it anyway.

Obviously this is some sort of crude vaudeville act that has been filmed with a still camera. The dancers are almost out of frame for most of it, and a man leaps in to remove chairs and other props, something you don't see in too many movies these days. But the most remarkable feature of this, which of course I have giffed in three speeds (small, medium and large), is the mugging at the end, in which the pig shows off all the technical marvels of his facial features, a tongue that sticks out and waves, nasty-looking fangs, etc. I'm not sure how the guy in the suit managed all this, but you will notice most of it took place during a head shot at the end. Keep your eye on the pig's neck, and you will plainly see hands working the strings and levers. As if it needed to be any creepier.

And now, for your enjoyment and edification, The Director's Cut by Wes Craven, a. k. a. A Nightmare on Pig Street. The fun begins at 3:52!

Am I blue? Not any more!

Oh Lor', I've had another one of my famous sojourns into 1929-land. Turner Classics has started showing a lot of (very) early talkies, most of them fairly unwatchable except for the novelty. It's strange that there are silent films right up to 1927, then an abyss in 1928, then a veritable explosion of cheap entertainment in 1929 which drew crowds like flies because, gee whiz, Mabel, these pictures can really TALK!

I suffered through a good chunk of Street Girl, which is not as racy as it sounds and is just a thinly-disguised attempt to showcase the talents of a passably-good dance band. But it's not the musical numbers (and some of the music was written by Oscar Levant) that intrigued me.

Early talkies are hybrids (see the related phenomenon of "goat glanding", below), most with at least some subtitles, and often major glitches in synchronization that give you an odd disjointed feeling. The static nature of these things, with everyone sitting around a table or on a sofa talking into a potted palm where the microphone is hidden, seems to suggest a badly-transcribed stage play. But that's not the weirdest thing: it's that damned infernal noise you keep hearing. It's as if someone is working heavy machinery outside.  It was worse in Street Girl than in any I've seen, with a whirring, vibrating hum alternating with a low rushing noise, and, sometimes, a grinding sound like a garburator.

I think it was the camera. No, really. I think I read this as a movie-curious child in that big coffee table book we kept in the den (I think it was called "The Movies" or some-such, and yes, it did have a full-page spread of Harold Lloyd hanging off the clock). The noise of the camera was such a problem that they had to stuff the camera and the cameraman in a soundproof booth. Every few shots he'd come lurching out of there dripping wet and ready to pass out. At some point somebody must've said, gee, wouldn't it be better if we just put the CAMERA in the box? Inventing quieter cameras was an even better idea (though nobody had bothered to think about that before). It's a mystery to me why no such noise-dampening method was even attempted in Street Girl, unless it was made on a budget of 49 cents.

The other one I saw, or semi-saw because I can never get through them all, was called On With the Show, and predates even 42nd Street as a hat-check-girl-becomes-a-star vehicle for some nascent starlet. In fact it seems like a sort of prototype for the whole genre. I was nearly halfway through it and getting bogged down in a sort of bizarre fashion show (which didn't seem to fit in with the fox hunt with real horses that preceded it) when I realized I'd seen the whole thing before. I remember because I thought the women all looked like drag queens, and who knows, maybe they were!

But then. 

Seems a shame that she was required to come on with a bale of cotton under her arm, dressed vaguely like Aunt Jemima, but being the fearless artist she was, Ethel Waters overcame every conceivable stereotype the minute she began to sing. All the flailing around without a recognizable theme didn't matter any more: as they say, she owned the stage, or, more accurately, owned the whole show. 

The best singers sing as if they're enjoying the hell out of the song, but the truly great singers somehow bring you on-side so that YOU are enjoying it at least as much as they are. This joy and sunniness and self-possession and the warm earthy quality of her voice almost, well, yes, they DO erase the mediocre acting, bawling sopranos and flailing choreography of a really bad show that probably drew them like flies. Calling Busby Berkeley! We need you! But then, it wouldn't be too many years before he rushed into the void. 

And now, beloved reader, just because you are you, I have a few luscious factoids about this sweaty transition period that might just interest you as much as it interests me. Well then, here it is anyway.

Goat gland (film release)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Goat gland was a term applied c. 1927–1929, during the

period of transition from silent films to sound films. It referred

to an already completed silent film to which one or more talkie

sequences were added in an effort to make the otherwise

redundant film more suitable for release in the radically altered

market conditions.The name was derived by analogy from the

treatment devised by Dr. John R. Brinkley as an alleged cure

for impotence. 

This "goat gland" succeeded mainly in causing previously sympathetic audiences

to abruptly lower their opinions of the characters' personalities

and level of intelligence.

A Harold Lloyd Mystery: SOLVED!

While waiting for my literary ship to come in (and based on past experience, that could take a long time, i. e.the next lifetime maybe,) I like to make Facebook covers featuring my hero, the Glass Character of the silent screen, Harold Lloyd.

In my incessant bloodhound search for new material, I recently turned up this caricature, at first completely unknown to me. But the answer was in there somewhere. It looked like one-o-dem things they used to hang on restaurant walls during the 1930s, sketches of famous people who used to sit in dem-dar booths. 

Turns out it was. It was drawn by a man named Vitch, a nickname based on the last 5 letters of an unpronouncable name. He frequented the legendary Brown Derby restaurant, the place where Hollywood types flocked after a long day's shoot, and drew (for tips, presumably) caricatures of celebrities. Based on this one, he was pretty good, because in a few deft lines he got a very convincing likeness of Harold.

The legend is that he did these clever, quick sketches on the spot. Perhaps it started out that way. But note the similarity between the photo (one of Harold's stock head shots which he autographed for fans and friends) and the caricature. One could easily have been based on the other. You have to tilt the hat just a little, but the jaw line, the glasses, the position of the nose and mouth are identical. Though the chin is only half drawn in, you get the idea of it. The sideburns are definitely the same. The shadowy right side of the face is also shadowy in the photo. In fact, the whole face and head are in such an identical position that the caricature almost looks like it could have been traced from the photo.

Clearly, this was not done from life. That would give the artist a lot longer to work on making it look effortless. He could also throw away all the attempts that didn't work out.

I hope he got a good tip for this one. But not too good.

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Whole lotta shakin' goin' on

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Was there a down side to Harold Lloyd?

A down side? Whaaaaat?

Why, certainly.

We could start with the talkies. Like every other huge star of the silent screen, the advent of the "talking picture" (originally called "talkers", a more logical term) traumatized Lloyd to the point of forcing him  to seriously regroup. Eventually he came to realize he was under immense pressure to let all the old pieces go and start from the ground up.

He found it nearly impossible. My feeling is that he stubbornly held on to aspects of his past filmmaking success, certain in his mind that at some point, things would turn around and the old visual style of comedy would return.

Though sight gags never entirely disappeared and still figure large in a lot of comedy, an actor's signature phrases ("I'm sorry, Ollie", "My little chickadee", "Hey, Abbott!") became essential for moving a comic persona forward. Another dimension had popped out, the other half, so to speak.  You didn't have to have a "great" voice or even a "good" one. You just had to have a memorable voice that expressed the character in no uncertain terms. (Perhaps the acid test was this: could you recognize it on the radio?)

Garbo made it because her dark, velvety voice startled people and dovetailed beautifully with her smoky, exotic looks. Can you imagine W. C. Fields without his whiny and irritating, carnival barker's delivery? And with their endless eccentric bantering, Laurel and Hardy were reborn as huge stars. But these were the few who lucked out. 

At the beginning, almost no one knew how to use the voice to best effect. Early "talkers" were pretty atrocious (I just saw an unintentionally hilarious one called The Vagabond Lover on Turner Classics, in which the hums, buzzes and crackles on the sound track nearly drowned out the dreary, colorless delivery of the lines). It didn't matter much, because the public flocked to them anyway.

It took a few years for things to settle. I always see 1931 as the year that things began to really work. An actor's voice became his calling card, and it didn't have to be conventionally audiogenic. Those actors in the gangster pictures had nasty snarly voices to go with their nasty snarly personalities. Vocal sneers.  But this non-law also applied to leading men. Think of Jimmy Stewart with his high, wavering, stammering delivery which somehow, almost magically conveyed integrity. Now how did he do that?

But Harold, now. Harold somehow didn't get it. After so many years of mastery, of innovative film-making, he didn't see the train coming.  When all this mayhem was going on, he was making a silent feature called Welcome Danger - an awful one, as it turned out, which is puzzling because he had never done anything like that before. It was 1929, everything was changing, and like Chaplin and Keaton, Lloyd was stubbornly hanging on to what had worked for him before.

A critic named Welford Beaton, whose very name suggests doddering and fustiness, had some decided opinions on what was happening at the time: "The silent drama has become a great art and I hope the advent of sound is not going to arrest its development." Sidney Kent of Paramount (and who knows who the fxxx Sidney Kent of Paramount was, but hey, it's a great quote) wrote, "Personally, I believe the time will never come when the outstanding silent pictures will be out of the market. We are trying to work out the best possible combination of sound and silent."

This reminds me of nothing more than Martin Short's insanely hilarious character Irving Cohen, a doddering old Hollywood relic: "So I walked into Jolson's office, at that time, and I said to him, Asa, this talking picture business will never get off the ground!"

As for that "best possible combination,"  such an unlikely hybrid was bound to fail, as Harold found out with his ill-conceived Welcome Danger. Legend has it he watched a movie short full of "punk gags" like whistles blowing, fire engine sirens, etc. - anything involving sound - and the audience was laughing uproariously. Shocked out of his denial about talking pictures, he suddenly decided to graft a sound track on to his partially-completed movie, with awkward, badly-dubbed results.

I have seen Welcome Danger one-and-a-half times, forcing myself to stay with it after bailing the first time. I was watching it in a hotel room with my husband a few years ago. "Look! There's a Harold Lloyd movie!" (He thought we were in for a couple of hours of enthusiastic squeaking and ahhhh-ing.) The first time Harold opened his mouth, I said, "Oh nooooooooooo." Midway, I sadly turned it off. "He didn't have a good voice," Bill said. But it was much more than that. 

I still don't really know what Welcome Danger is about. It goes on far too long, though the original cut was an astonishing two hours and forty-five minutes. Why was Harold making so many mistakes, even before this disastrous failed transplant? Only one picture ago, with Speedy, he was at the very top of his game. Now this. To me, it's an indication that Lloyd was profoundly spooked and had already lost his way. 

Harold's character in this mess, a man with the hideous name of Bledsoe, is some kind of botanist trying to break up a Chinese opium ring while pursuing a girl dressed like a boy. But when he opens his mouth to speak, he sounds like Jiminy Cricket on helium. That fussy, strident quality is an immediate turnoff. Whatever emotional appeal he had in his silents - and in most of them, his character was vulnerable enough to have it - evaporated, and sadly never really returned.

I don't like Richard Schickel's book about Harold, don't like his lack of respect and assumptions about Harold's personal life, but I have to agree with him that in his sound pictures, his voice was "inescapably colorless and flat - prissy would be the best way to describe it." The voice isn't just pitched too high (though at moments of stress it shoots up into the stratosphere until he sounds like a hysterical girl) - it has a lightness and lack of resonance that doesn't record well.  And for some reason, the delivery is unnatural, awkwardly hokey. Of course a comedian can sound weird as all get-out and still make it, but whatever he's doing, it doesn't work. All this from a man who began his career as a stage actor,  believing it was his destiny.

Ironically, when you look at interviews with the ageing Lloyd (and like a lot of good-looking men, his looks wore well as he evolved into a twinkly old charmer), his voice has dropped considerably, relaxed and mellowed into something you could easily listen to for two hours. It still isn't particularly deep or resonant, but it has a great raconteur quality, and an expressiveness that never came across in his post-silent films. The odd Nebraskan inflection pops through to charming effect: "While we were working on that picture, I think it was Girl Shy, the fire hose flew up and struck me on the foah-hayyd."

There were so many more after Welcome Danger (which, ironically, had better box office than any of his other movies due to his fans' curiosity about his voice), and I have tried to like them, believe me, I've tried. And the problem isn't just his voice. Though individual scenes work, something just isn't right. Hal Roach, his friend and longtime director, put it this way: "His character couldn't age."

No matter how good he looked, and he did look good even with the slightly higher hairline, you can't slip The Boy into a middle-aged body and work it like a puppet. A scene in Movie Crazy really does drive me crazy as he parodies the melodrama of the talkies: his voice soars up and up, growing more strident by the sentence. Feet First is even worse: he does an aerial stunt (and that's another water hazard of the new era: repeating gags, which most comedians had to resort to), yelling in that shrill near-falsetto for about 15 minutes as he scrambles agonizingly up the side of a tall building. The surreal, thrilling climb that worked so well in 1923 is just awful with grunts, yells and traffic sounds added, and some theatres did their audiences a favor during the sequence by turning the sound track off. 

Is there any good news here? Unlike most people, I did sort of like The Cat's Paw, in which he played a missionary (of all things!), but again the high light voice evoked a kind of virginity that had been kept in a glass case. Everything I've ever read about Lloyd indicates exactly the opposite: women loved him from the start, and he was not about to turn them away. Harold lived large, and never wanted just a little of anything.

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The classic musical  Singin' in the Rain (often called one of the best movies ever made, which is strange because I hate everything about it) dealt with the revolution in sound film, as did the more recent The Artist. (Ditto. I did not like any of the characters, from that ditsy little girl Blinkie or whatever-her-name-was to the strange Douglas Fairbanks-looking guy or that wretched dog lifted from The Thin Man, or perhaps Frasier.) As everyone predicted, all the actors from that much-touted movie disappeared without a trace, which is probably good for my mental health.

The Jazz Singer  supposedly began the revolution in 1927, even though it wasn't even a talkie - my ass it was a talkie, it had titles all the way through it, and only had sound during Jolson's blackface songs about tootsie rolls or whatever. What most people don't realize is that sound could have been introduced several years earlier - the technology had been basically worked out - but the industry dug in and resisted, and viewed from today's perspective, it's easy to see why. 

Harold kept at it, ending his movie career in 1947 with an ill-advised comedy called, variously, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock and Mad Wednesday. Even the wildly-popular director  Preston Sturges (with a nudge from producer Howard Hughes) couldn't save this one. Harold was 54, still playing boys that hadn't quite grown up. I find it excruciating to watch this so-called extension of his legendary The Freshman: he plays a man stuck in his dead-end job, stuck in his lonely life. He hasn't grown up at all. There is a scene where he is obviously deeply depressed, and I just didn't want to see it: his Glass Character never stayed down for long, but this fellow had been down all his life.

How could a man lose such great acting chops after all this time? Maybe he just didn't know how to apply them in an unfamiliar medium.  Though Harold went charging forward into a million other activities that he kept up for a lifetime, including a tremendous amount of philanthropy, the loss of his celestial career was sad for him, sad for movie posterity, sad for us all.

Post-blog:  There's one movie I've never seen, a mid-'30s Lloyd talkie called Professor Beware. All the evidence I've found that it ever existed are some stills, and all I know about it is that Lloyd didn't like it. He may have done something to the negative - Harold was even closer with his movies than he was with his money - or else it's just hiding in an old tin can in a basement somewhere. There was a rumor it was shown on Turner Classics, but only once. I WANT TO SEE THIS MOVIE. Not that it will necessarily be better than the others. It's the fact that it's not available. Is someone, perhaps the mysterious, unknowable Rich Correll, keeping this thing banked for a rainy day? 

The Glass Character: An Excerpt (Dance of the Comedian)

(This is an excerpt from my third novel, The Glass Character, a fictionalized account of the life and times of silent movie comedian Harold Lloyd. Sixteen-year-old Muriel Ashford has come to Hollywood in 1921 in hopes of meeting her screen idol. Thrilled by landing extra work in one of Harold Lloyd's comedies, Muriel finds her joy is somewhat dimmed by the realization that Harold is far from the godlike figure she imagined. Forced to work as a waitress at a speakeasy to make ends meet, Muriel encounters Harold out on the town with his former co-star, Bebe Daniels.)

After Bea’s horrified letter, I was beginning to wish this interminable shoot would end. We were only called in on certain days, often for very short periods of time, so there was no loitering about, no time for gossip. I was convinced my immortal seven seconds of screen time would end up on the cutting room floor.

I was always seeing things I shouldn’t, and this time it was Harold and Mildred necking behind a wobbly flat. His hand was on her breast, but she didn’t seem to mind. The wall was crumbling. No ring on her finger yet, so he would likely stop short.

Our brief sexual spark had fizzled. Just as well, for my cousin was right on all counts: I should never have let him touch me. Then during yet another back-aching, dreary, smoke-choked night serving illicit drinks at Frankie’s (password: chinchilla), my heart dropped into my shoes. There he was in the doorway in that spotlight stars seem to carry around inside them, elegantly dressed in a gleaming, expensive suit.

Panic-stricken, I ducked into the kitchen.

“Muriel,” Susan whispered in my ear, her eyes huge with excitement.

“Yes, I know.”

“He is an absolute doll! Even cuter than in his pictures. Who’s that he’s with?”

I wasn’t sure: a petite brunette who somewhat resembled Clara Bow, with bobbed hair, a silvery dress fringed all over, and long strands of artificial pearls. A real flapper. We all knew about the reputation of flappers, which ensured that Harold would have a good old time tonight.

I prayed he wouldn’t notice me, but my shift didn’t end until midnight, so I had to go on working. The studio paid me a pittance, and Frankie not much better, so I badly needed the tips to survive. This required a lot of smiling and leaning over.

I tried to avoid his table, but it was awkward. Then he and his girl got up to dance. I had never seen this particular step before, but it was complex and lively, and the music was simply wild. Some years later I saw a dancer named Kelly, and Harold had that same effortless, athletic grace. At one point he literally threw his girl up in the air and caught her, airplaning her around as the glitter-ball cast firefly rainbows all over the room. The other dancers slowly moved back to watch.

They finished with their version of the infamous tango from Valentino’s Four Horseman: both tribute and parody, sexy and funny at the same time. Their great comic gifts were evident, as was their physical oneness. The applause went on and on, and Harold casually reached up and caught the cup as it flew through the air.

Then I knew. It was Bebe Daniels. Officially they had broken it off, and she had moved on. (I didn’t know whether to believe the darker story doing the rounds.) Apparently they still had feelings for each other, for I was to learn that she’d had the diamonds from their engagement ring set into cufflinks which he constantly wore.

So they were still friends, or at least dance partners. Since this place wasn’t supposed to exist, they would be relatively anonymous here. (People were more inclined to keep their mouths shut in those days.) I studied her: she was dark, sleepy-eyed, and looked a bit dangerous. Not really pretty. I never could get a fix on Harold’s type.

Having effortlessly blown the audience down, they sat down again. Harold wasn’t even breathing hard. Bebe trotted across the room, waving gaily at a table of elegant-looking people.

Harold’s gaze swept the room.

His eyes lit.

If only he hadn’t smiled, ignited that way. I saw him mouth my name. I waved him off, he insisted, then I reluctantly came over to his table.

“Muriel! You look swell.”

“This awful thing? It’s full of smoke. And too short.”

He flicked his eyes up and down.

“Dance with me, Muriel,” he said in that wheedling, little-boy tone he had used with me in the rainstorm.

“I can’t. I’m on shift.”

“When do you get off?”

“At midnight.” I never should have said it. It sounded like a ludicrous fairy tale. “Anyway, I can’t dance like this. I look like a barmaid. And what about - ” I couldn’t say her name.

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Beebs has friends to talk to. We come to the clubs sometimes, just to dance. We’re not dating any more.”

“You’re awfully good. Where did you learn?”

“Didn’t, actually. Just sort of - ”

“I couldn’t keep up with you anyway.”

“I could teach you.” He could be so earnest, so Midwestern. Like he was teaching me the box step at a tea dance.

“C’mon, Muriel.” I thought: a gleaming movie star, one of the most famous people in Hollywood, is just at the tips of my fingers. Here I am, entering the mouth of the wolf again.

“Susan always brings her club clothes for when she’s off shift. Maybe I can change with her.”

“Good! Good!” Harold looked intoxicated with excitement, though I knew he was a good boy and didn’t smoke or drink or dabble in the white powder.

And at the stroke of twelve, I was led to the slaughter. Susan screamed with excitement and insisted she dress me. First I had to put on a strange undergarment that bound my breasts (not that I needed it). The dress was made of a heavy, shiny deep-blue material covered with hand-sewn glass beads, so I glittered when I walked. The neckline was shockingly low, the waistline dropped almost to my hips. The black patent-leather shoes had straps around the ankles, and higher heels than I had ever worn before. This wasn’t an outfit, but a costume.

Susan rouged my mouth, pinched my cheeks, and pulled a few strands of my hair out of the old-fashioned combs I still wore, making soft little tendrils.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and my pupils dilated. I looked nothing like myself. I could have been anyone. An actress. A flapper. A vamp. I’d have Harold in the palm of my hand.

I turned on my high heel, switched on my brightest smile, and flounced over to greet my swain.

He did a very admiring “whew!’, which was pleasantly enthusiastic without implying I looked a mess the rest of the time. Then snaked his arm around my waist.

“Don’t be afraid, it’s only the fox trot.”

“This fox doesn’t know how to trot.”

“Oh Muriel, you’re so funny!” He suddenly dipped me, in fact almost dropped me, then caught me at the last second while my head reeled. Yes, I realized, I am dancing with a comedian.

“Push against my hand a little. That’s it. There needs to be a bit of tension between us. Then with my arm, I’ll. . .”

My awkwardness lessened as he steered me around. The music was lavish: mellow saxophones, high keening clarinets, and a single violin soaring above it all in a melody so tender, it made my eyes sting. And my skin prickled with dizzy joy that I was in the arms of the most beautiful man in the world. 

He was very gradually easing me closer so that our bodies were almost touching, but I knew it was only another tease, proof of his power over me. This close, I could not help but feel his heat. I wondered if Bebe could see us, if it would even matter.

The fox trot escalated into the “toddle”, a sort of hop-step that was much harder to execute. The music grew wild, with razzing trumpets and primitive, thudding percussion. Harold had an almost shocking instinct for the music’s hot, sexy rhythms, and was practically lifting me off the floor so I could keep up.

Then came an announcement that made everybody cheer: “The Black Bottom!” Panicked, I shook my head vigorously: I knew I wasn’t up to this one. Maybe Harold and I could go sit down and talk. But to my shock, he grabbed another girl’s hand, a girl he didn’t even know, and set to, leaping around like an adorable little puppet. He radiated joy and exuberance like no one I had ever seen before. But he was dancing with someone else, as if women to him were practically interchangeable.

I left the dance floor, devastated, collected my things, changed back into my drab street clothes and headed for the door.

“Muriel . . .” I felt like I was being dragged back. 

“I have to go,” I said, trying very hard to keep the tremble out of my voice.

“Oh Muriel, I didn’t mean to abandon you. How about one more dance?”

“Harold, no! Why do you think you can yank me around like this? Go away, come back! Dance with me, but don’t touch me!”

“I thought we were having fun.”

“You know how I feel. And you told me not to. ‘We can’t do this, Muriel.’ Does that mean I can just turn my feelings off?”

“Be quiet, Muriel, you’re making a scene.” It occurred to me that a spat in a speakeasy wouldn’t be good for his career. 

“Go have fun, then.” I turned on my heel again, the dramatic effect ruined by a stumble because I was still wearing Susan’s ridiculous tottering shoes.

“It’s not fun.” He said it very quietly.

I had to turn back.

“It’s not fun to live like this. I feel like I’m not really close to anyone.”

“But what does it matter, so long as there’s a different girl for every night of the week.”

For an unguarded instant, he looked devastated.

“Oh, Harold, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“But you did.”

“Why can’t you just tell me if you like me or not?”

“It’s not a question of liking. You’re so very young, Muriel, not even out of your teens. Sometimes I wonder if you really know what goes on between men and women in this town.” 

“You don’t have to protect me. I can take care of myself.”

“I don’t think so, Muriel. You don’t know how pretty you are, and in five years you’ll be a full-blown beauty with real character, which means your looks will last. And you have talent, I’ve seen it. If you really want to be an actress, you can be. But you’ve got to be very careful.”

He seemed to be offering me stardom on a platter. I knew enough to suspect it. Still, I watched his face for the most minute chance that he would break his own rule and touch me.

“I might be able to help you,” he said.

“So what would I have to do, Harold?”

“What does that mean?” 

“I’ve heard the stories. Don’t you like them young?” My tone was provocative, acid, awful. 

“That’s not fair.”

“What about Bebe? Wasn’t she just a little underage?” 

His face darkened so quickly I had to catch my breath. 

“Leave Bebe out of this. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I know what other people are saying.”

“Why do you pay attention to such trash?”

“Oh, there’s more. Like the story of how you got your start.”

“Stop it right now. Don’t say another word.” 

“Oh, it’s just hearsay, but . . . who was that man who got you into the theatre? Connor, was it? Maybe it’s just a rumour, but I heard he was a bit of a nancy-boy.”

“What are you implying?”

“Can’t you guess?” 

The anger escalated into fury. “I don’t strike women,” he said in a frighteningly low voice. 

“That’s too bad, Harold, because then I could strike you.”

The air in the room was crackling and ready to explode. And he didn’t move. Stood vibrating with a fury that would soon turn to rage.

“I’ve given you every advantage. I only want the best for you.”

“You know what you want.”

“Show me a man who doesn’t.” The gloves were off, and I saw the hard, calculating man who had come from nothing and was tough enough to survive in a pitiless world.

I realized with a shock that I had no idea how to deal with him. He seemed to be getting bigger as I gradually diminished. I slowly backed up, and he advanced.

I ducked inside the unlit storage room. I grabbed his hand, and he followed. With Susan’s ridiculous wobbly shoe, I kicked the door shut.

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Painted Doll: the magic of the early talkies

The Wedding Of The Painted Doll

It's a holiday today
The Wedding of the Painted Doll
It's a jolly day
The news is spreading
All around the hall

Red Riding Hood & Buster Brown
The Jumping Jack Jumped into town
From far and near they're coming here
Church bells ringing, bringing

All the little dollies from the follies
With the painted cheeks
Little Mama doll has fussed around
For weeks and weeks

Shoo the blues
No time to lose
Rice and shoes
Will spread the news
That it's a holiday
Today's the Wedding of the little Painted Doll

Here come the bridesmaids
Look at them in their places
Look at the fancy laces
Look at them as they smile
All sorrow away

Here comes the bride now
Look at the little cutie
Look at the little beauty
Look at the little doll
It's her wedding day

Here's the preacher and all look
As he takes his little book
He is sure he knows his stuff
'Cause he's done it oft'n enough

Here comes the bride groom
Ready for the service
Just a little nervous
Now the preacher says,
"You're married to stay"

It's a holiday today
The Wedding of the little Painted Doll


Arthur Freed (W) & Nacio Herb Brown (M)
from the 1929 movie, "Broadway Melody"

I finally found a YouTube clip of one of my favorite Hollywood production numbers. It's one of my favorites because it's just about the first Hollywood production number ever, from the 1929 curiosity Broadway Melody. Then of course you know what happened. It was taken down due to one of those silly rules, such as the law against theft.

So I put up the closest thing I could find, which is grainy still pictures, but the music is good.

The days of early sound must have been heady and terrifying: everything was dumped upside-down. Theatres had to scramble to convert all their equipment, careers were shattered, others sprang up full-blown like Athena from the head of Zeus. (Sorry, I used that metaphor a few posts ago, but it was too good not to repeat. This Oscar Levant stuff is getting to me.) It wasn't so much actors with "good voices" who were able to make the switch, but actors who were able to adapt their style to something more fluid, more subtle, with no more fluttering eyelashes or jabbing, full-body gestures.

Try something here, if you will: look at some silent films, both dramas and comedies (and turn off the wretched music that usually goes with them: when I say silent, I mean silent). Then watch some black-and-white movies from ten years later, with the sound off. Observe carefully. It's a whole 'nother ball game, like comparing stage acting to screen acting. The old large gestures won't play. Often, one murmur will do.

This doesn't mean sound films are "better", but they do seem to be from another planet. Much as I'm intrigued by them, I find silent pictures hard to follow. I'm one of those auditory types, and seeing lips moving with title cards strains my imagination.  Except for Harold Lloyd comedies, the pace of silent film seems much slower, and I was raised as a vid-kid on television that, by comparison, moved at light speed.

So, with the release of that awful non-talkie The Jazz Singer (featuring Al Jolson, the most repulsive performer who ever lived), everything changed. Garbo walked in and mowed everyone down with a voice that was heavily accented, "foreign", and far too deep and gruff to match her ethereal beauty. Something about it worked, it snagged people, grabbed them viscerally. Comedians such as W. C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy, who already had a loyal following in silent pictures, exploded overnight into international stars: and need I tell you why?

So anyway, this Broadway Melody, which I have watched on Turner Classics (bailing halfway through the first time because the non-musical part of it is just so awful) is a fine example of the partial transformation that audiences gobbled up at the time. It's a sort of cliche of early talkies that everyone had to cluster around a microphone hidden behind a potted palm, but it actually is true that these movies had a peculiarly static quality. Nobody knew how to deal with a microphone, which to the actors (mimes, by our standards) must have seemed like a voice-sucking monster. That explains why they had to include frenetic production numbers like this one, to keep rigor mortis from setting in.

This is the strangest one ever, with girls being spun around like compasses, a preacher with Harold Lloyd glasses and rubber legs who appears to fall down the stairs, cartwheels and splits galore, girls with a pompom attached to one ankle (??), and precious lyrics sung by one of those young men with a falsetto voice. I also note a bit of '20s choreography I've seen before: the girls stand on one foot, the other leg extended, hold on to the extended ankle, and hop up and down.


The whole thing is so beautiful to look at: not "black and white", but silver and shine. The music has that charming, optimistic "oom-cha, oom-cha" quality that was so popular before the Depression brought it all crashing down. Soon would come a leap in sophistication:  better songs, real plots instead of stilted novelty-driven dialogue ("Take. . . him. . . for. . . a. . . ride"), Fred and Ginger. If you look at pictures from 1929, then pictures from 1931, you will be astounded at the transformation.

In the interim was a mad scramble, studded with quirky little sparklers like this one.