I was going to put together my list of the ten best movies of 2010, but I think I only saw two, and one of them, Hot Tub Time Machine, is such a shoo-in for the Oscar this year I thought why bother.
Instead, in the spirit of pure narcissism—and because I'm still working on my marathon essay on the years 1906-1914 and have nothing else to post—here are the ten subjects I most enjoyed writing about in 2010 (click on the highlighted link to read the original post):
She was an actress in the early days of sound best remembered now for getting her neck bitten in Bela Lugosi's Dracula. But I love her for uttering my favorite line of dialogue from the World War I flying ace movie, The Last Flight:
"What are you changing your shoes for?"
"On account of I can walk faster in red shoes."
9. Norma Shearer It's fun—occasionally—to admit you're wrong and when I picked Norma Shearer as the best actress of 1931-32 for her performance in the comedy Private Lives, I had to admit I had been wrong in dismissing her so quickly in the past.
8. Ham Actors You remember that Oscar ceremony where Wallace Beery beat John Barrymore around the head and shoulders with a rotary dial telephone? You don't? Well, it happened, at least here at the Monkey.
7. Movie Lists I think I once vowed never to do a list—so, of course, this year I did two. Or three, counting this one.
6. The Aging Of Greta Garbo But for an anomalous couple of weeks when somebody's droid app led to 3500 hits a day on my post about Popeye the Sailor, this post—a chronological series of photographs of Greta Garbo, ranging from childhood to old age—is the most popular one I've ever written.
5. Anita Page Did you ever fall in love with a hundred year old dead actress you're not married to? You did? What are you, some kind of freak?
4. Leave It To Beaver In Japanese Actually, I mean Yasujiro Ozu's classic comedy I Was Born, But ..., the story of a couple of mischievous boys who discover their dad is a middle management toady who survives as the butt of his boss's jokes. Why? "He pays my salary."
"Then don't let him pay you," his son says.
"Yeah!" the little brother adds with the implacable logic of a six year old. "You pay him instead!"
2. Very, very old movies I still say a rocket hitting the moon in the eye is one of the greatest images in the history of movies.
1. The Marx Brothers Only a fool would write an eight-part, 12,000 word essay and not claim it as his favorite post of the year. Well, the Monkey may be crazy, but he's no fool.
The Monkey asked and you have spoken. "Of Greta Garbo's performances during the sound era to receive or likely to receive an alternate Oscar/Katie nomination, which do you think is her best?" By a vote of 16 to 11, her 1939 comedy Ninotchka edged out the cough-cough classic Camille as your choice for the best of her career. Queen Christina, which garnered Garbo a Katie-Bar-The-Door Award as the best dramatic actress of 1932-33, received 5 votes. Garbo's sound debut, Anna Christie received two votes and Anna Karenina received one.
Of course, there are no bad Garbo movies, only good ones and great ones, and all five of these movies qualify as great ones in my book. So whichever movie you voted for as her best, you're right, it is.
(The Garbo wallpaper, by the way, comes to you courtesy of Sylvie. As always, click on the photo to view it full size.)
The last time I tried a poll, a bug in blogger.com's programming dropped votes right and left. But in honor of Greta Garbo's 105th birthday today, we'll try again.
Of Greta Garbo's performances during the sound era to receive or likely to receive an alternate Oscar/Katie nomination, which do you think is her best? (Vote in the poll at the top right. And if you have no opinion, vote anyway—that's what democracy is all about!)
Anna Christie (1930) Queen Christina (1933) Anna Karenina (1935) Camille (1936) Ninotchka (1939)
[To read Part One of this essay, click here. For Part Two, here.]
From Stage To Screen After the success of I'll Say She Is!, the Marx Brothers had no shortage of producers willing to back their next Broadway show. They chose, however, the one producer who didn't come calling. Sam H. Harris was one of Broadway's most successful producers, with songwriters George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin in his stable and award-winning playwright George S. Kaufman recently put under contract.
With half a dozen hits in five years, Kaufman was one of the leading young playwrights working on Broadway and his quick wit turned out to be a perfect fit for Groucho, who years later referred to Kaufman as "his God." (He later went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes.) Kaufman built the play around the then-ongoing real estate boom in Florida and those of you familiar with the movie know the basic plot—with the help of a couple of disreputable guests (Chico and Harpo), the owner of a ramshackle hotel (Groucho) attempts to con a wealthy society maven (Margaret Dumont) into buying a worthless real estate development. As always, though, the plot of a Marx Brothers production is simply a framework for a lot of gags, and The Cocoanuts featured some of the best of the Brothers' career.
"Think of the opportunities here in Florida. Three years ago, I came to Florida without a nickel in my pocket. Now, I've got a nickel in my pocket."
"That's all very well, Mr. Hammer, but we haven't been paid in two weeks and we want our wages!"
"Wages? Do you want to be wage slaves, answer me that."
"No."
"No, of course not. Well, what makes wage slaves? Wages! I want you to be free. Remember, there's nothing like Liberty—except Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. Be free, my friends. One for all, and all for me, and me for you, and three for five and six for a quarter."
To Kaufman's consternation, the Brothers also tended to ad lib throughout the show—"I think I just heard one of the original lines," he quipped at one performance—and in fact the "why a duck?" sequence evolved from just such an ad lib.
The show also featured an Irving Berlin song score—alas, not one of his best (it was the only show he ever wrote that failed to provide a hit song, although as I explained here, that wasn't necessarily his fault). In fact, the primary differences between the stage and film versions of The Cocoanuts centers on the elimination of many of these musical numbers, including two Groucho songs—"Why Am I A Hit With The Ladies" and a duet with Margaret Dumont called "A Little Bungalow." There was also a "black face" number involving members of the cast other than the Brothers and a subplot involving Harpo's scheme to defraud Dumont.
The Cocoanuts opened on the road in Boston, followed by two weeks in Philadelphia, an out-of-town tryout that revealed serious flaws in the production, not least of which was its gargantuan running time, with shows running well past midnight. After some cuts and restructuring, the show opened on Broadway at the Lyric Theatre on 42nd Street on December 8, 1925. (For those unfamiliar with the precise meaning of the term "Broadway show," the reference is not to a precise street location but to the size of the theater. To be consider a "Broadway" production, the theater must hold at least five hundred patrons. A theater with between 100 and 500 seats is an "off-Broadway" show, and one with fewer than 100 seats is "off-off Broadway.")
The Cocoanuts ran for 377 shows before heading out on the road, a stripped-down production Groucho called "inferior," by which he meant that the chorus girls were neither as pretty nor as willing as their Broadway counterparts. The audiences weren't inferior, though. The road show version of The Cocoanuts was big business, and the Los Angeles opening was attended by the likes of Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo.
The Cocoa- nuts, by the way, marked the beginning of the end for Zeppo. Where in I'll Say She Is! he was part of the comedy, in Kaufman's new play he was relegated to straight man and occasional crooner. I have heard tell that Zeppo was actually a very funny guy and that from time to time he successfully understudied for Groucho, but the fact that the Brothers let Kaufman stand Zeppo in the corner without protest leads me to believe that either he was never that integral to the act or that he was already tired of performing and was looking forward to the day when he could work behind the scenes. He left the act after Duck Soup in 1933 to become a theatrical agent. A mechanical whiz, Zeppo also invented a watch to monitor the pulse rate of cardiac patients and founded Marman Products Co., which designed and manufactured, among other things, the Marman Twin motorcycle, and the Marman clamp which held the atomic bomb inside the B-29 used on the U.S. raid on Nagasaki.
After the success of The Cocoanuts, Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind set to work on a follow-up, added by songwriters Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar. Concluding that the Marx Brothers played best as a collision of anarchy with high society, they set the play on Long Island at the estate of a stuffy socialite (Margaret Dumont again). Groucho, as African explorer Jeffrey T. Spaulding, was the guest of honor, with Chico as Emanuel Ravelli and Harpo as The Professor providing the weekend's musical entertainment.
"I used to know a fellow who looked exactly like you by the name of Emanuel Ravelli. Are you his brother?"
"I am Emanuel Ravelli."
"You're Emanuel Ravelli?"
"I am Emanuel Ravelli."
"Well, no wonder you look like him. But I still insist there is a resemblance."
"Heh, heh, he thinks I look alike."
"Well, if you do, it's a tough break for both of you."
The play included some of Groucho's most famous monologues, including a description of his most recent safari ("One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know"), a letter to his lawyer, and a spoof of the Eugene O'Neill play Strange Interlude, with Groucho addressing the audience directly.
There are also subplots involving the socialite's daughter, a painter named John Parker and a wealthy art collector who in a previous life was Abie the fish peddler. Unlike the movie version, there is also a journalist character modeled on gossip columnist Walter Winchell, several songs and a final act revolving around a costume party.
The play opened on October 23, 1928, at the Forty-Fourth Street Theatre and played 171 performances. As with its predecessor, Animal Crackers acquired several gags along the way, including this speech which a despondent Groucho ad libbed the night his savings were wiped out by the stock market crash of October 1929:
"Living with your folks. Living with your folks. The beginning of the end. Drab dead yesterdays shutting out beautiful tomorrows. Hideous, stumbling footsteps creaking along the misty corridors of time. And in those corridors I see figures, strange figures, weird figures: Steel 186, Anaconda 74, American Can 138..."
While performing Animal Crackers, the Brothers signed a deal with Paramount Pictures to make a film version of The Cocoanuts. United Artists had first approached the Brothers a year earlier about turning The Cocoanuts into a film (imagine the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin working out of the same studio), but balked at the Brothers' asking price of $75,000 for the film rights. Paramount's Adolph Zukor balked, too, but then found himself upping the offer to $100,000 during dinner with a particularly eloquent Chico.
Actually The Cocoanuts was the Marx Brothers' second film, their first being something called Humor Risk, an attempt at a Chaplinesque "comedy with pathos" which the Brothers filmed in 1921. In it, Harpo played a dapper detective named Watson—according to biographer Kyle Crichton, making "his entrance in a high hat, sliding down a coal chute into the basement"—with Groucho as the villain, Chico his henchman and Zeppo a nightclub owner. Though a couple of reels were completed and exhibited, the film was never completed and was soon after lost, perhaps in a fire set by Groucho himself. Despite later attempts to find the film, including Groucho's offer of $50,000 to anyone who could locate a copy, Humor Risk has never turned up.
Frankly, I'm not sure I can imagine how an act that relied on quick verbal humor and musical interludes could succeed in a silent film. Apparently after one viewing, the Brothers couldn't imagine it either.
In January 1929, with the Brothers still performing Animal Crackers on Broadway every evening, filming of The Cocoanuts began at Paramount's Astoria Studio on Long Island, New York. Paramount's east coast studio had been used for years to film New York-based acts such as W.C. Fields, but it had yet to fully convert to sound (especially sound proofing) when principle photography began and most of the filming took place early in the morning before the noise of traffic made sound recording impossible.
As a finished product, The Cocoanuts suffered from all the problems associated with early sound pictures. Primative sound recording equipment required the camera—and thus the actors—to remain rooted in place, a particular problem for Groucho who had trouble finding his marks anyway. In addition, early microphones picked up sound indiscriminately. To muffle the sound of crinkling paper, every telegram, letter or map you see was soaked in water before each take (there was no muffling the sound of the crew's laughter, however, which ruined many takes).
The initial cut of The Cocoanuts ran nearly two-and-a-half hours, quickly trimmed after a preview to 96 minutes, mostly by dropping musical numbers. The film premiered in New York on May 3, 1929. The Brothers, who were performing down the street in Animal Crackers missed the show, but their mother Minnie was in attendance.
New York's critics were, at best, mixed in their reviews—prompting the Brothers to offer to buy back the negative from Paramount so as with Humor Risk they could burn it—but in the rest of the country, The Cocoanuts was a sensation. Only two years into the sound era, movie audiences had never before seen, or more to the point, heard anything like Groucho's nonstop wordplay, and the film wound up grossing $1.8 million on a budget of $500,000, enough to rank seventh on the year's list of top-grossing films. (Adjusting for differences in ticket prices and the population of the United States, a $1.8 million gross would be something like $103 million today; or looked at another way, the seventh ranked grossing film of 2009, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, grossed nearly $300 million domestically, more than $700 million worldwide. But however you put it, The Cocoanuts was very successful.)
After the success of The Cocoanuts, there was no question that the Marx Brothers would produce a film version of Animal Crackers. Filmed in Queens, New York, production began shortly after the road show in April 1930 and the film premiered at the Rialto in New York City on August 23, 1930. This time the critics were universal in their acclaim and the film grossed $1.5 million on its initial release (ticket prices were falling during the Depression), enough to rank fourth on the year's list of top grossing films.
In technical terms, Animal Crackers is far superior to The Cocoanuts—better sound, better sets, more movement—but where you rank it in the Marx Brothers' oeuvre depends in no small part on what it is you value in a Marx Brothers movie. Animal Crackers is the most quotable of all their films, with every line, particularly those from Groucho's monologues, a winner. And in terms of having worked out in advance what they were going to do, it's the most polished film they made before moving to MGM in 1935—personally, I rank it third behind Duck Soup and A Night At The Opera. But if what you respond to is the sense that anything can happen, as it often did when the Brothers were ad libbing, subverting not only the society the Brothers moved in but the conventions of film itself, then you might find the anarchic quality of their subsequent Paramount era pictures more to your taste—perhaps one of those the Marx Brothers made next, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers.
Postscript: Did you know that color test footage was shot for Animal Crackers, with sixteen seconds being rediscovered in the mid-1990s. Note, there's no sound. That's Harpo sans wig in the bath robe:
A few summers ago, five or six maybe, Turner Classic Movies launched a nationwide tour to promote both classic movies and the TCM brand name. Being a well-to-do mega-community located on the interstate between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. (we ranked #2 this year in Money magazine's top 10 places to live), the twin-towns of Columbia/Ellicott City proved to be a convenient place for the TCM crew to set down its circus.
And, man, what a great time! There were games, prizes, souvenirs, photo booths (have your picture taken with John Wayne!) and on-stage contests pitting audience members against each other in a battle royale of movie trivia. Yours truly won a plastic softball with the TCM logo (answer: Joan Crawford), and Katie-Bar-The-Door—well, we'll get to that in a moment.
Like all good tent revivals, though, the point wasn't just to reward the faithful but to convert the non- believers —plant a seed, coax a bud, harvest a crop of new movie fans. And as the grandson of a sharecropper, I can tell you that requires a certain amount of fertilizer.
The most coveted potential converts were teenagers—get when they're young and they're yours for life—and to give a fighting chance to kids who (it became clear as the day wore on) had never so much as heard of Casablanca much less seen it fifty times and memorized all the dialogue, the emcee steered the contests toward "word jumbles"—collections of letters which when arranged in the proper order spell out a word, or in this case, a film title or movie star. And then to nudge things along, he also gave them a cheat sheet with possible answers.
Now, let me tell you, the older you get, the more you know, but you know it a lot slower than you did when you were young and fresh, and while us middle-aged geezers cleaned up on straight trivia, the teenagers kicked our asses on word jumbles.
Especially when close was close enough.
And thus it turns out the star of Queen Christina, Camille and Ninotchka was in the mind of one perky blonde cheerleader, and forever after in this household—
"Gerta Garber!"
"Here," said the emcee, handing her DVDs of Casablanca and Singin' In The Rain, "go home and watch these—and pay attention to the cast lists!"
That was okay with me—as far as I'm concerned, Pete Townshend nailed it when he said "the kids are alright"—and it was okay with Katie-Bar-The-Door, too, until, that is, she found herself tied two-to-two in a best of five face-off with the high school quarterback.
Now, I think of Katie as a kind of cross between Myrna Loy and Maureen O'Hara —the perfect wife and the fiery redhead—except in the case of the latter it would have been Katie who dragged John Wayne five miles and beat up the brother, not the other way around. I mean, her idea of a chick flick is Rio Bravo and she once gave me a copy of The Dirty Dozen for Valentine's Day because for her Jim Brown and a satchel full of hand grenades is romantic. She's a sweet, elegant woman with exquisite manners, but she stands five-foot-two the way Napoleon stood five-foot-two, and when the emcee said, "The tie-breaker will be a trivia question—or should we have another word jumble?" he only thought the choice was his to make.
"No, no, you said trivia," laughed Katie, the way I imagine General Patton laughed just before he destroyed Rommel at El Guettar. "I want trivia!"
I guess I should feel bad for the poor kid on the other side of the stage, but just between you and me, anyone who's never heard of Gone With The Wind—the answer to the question "Which 1939 movie received thirteen Oscar nominations?"—probably shouldn't have been up there in the first place.
"I would have won if it had been a word jumble," he said afterwards.
"Absolutely!" said Katie. "Why do you think I wanted trivia?"
Sorry, kid.
Katie won a copy of the DVD game Scene-It—the TCM edition —a real hoot to play, especially after a couple of gin rickeys. And we discovered a new favorite actress that afternoon, too.
● For the first time, Garbo consented to rehearsals and extra takes—although not without some fuss. Director Rouben Mamoulian described the process to George Stevens, Jr., a conversation recounted in Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age:
"Garbo said to me, 'Oh, I don't rehearse. If I rehearse I become stale. If I do more than one take, I become empty inside.' So I said, 'Miss Garbo, this is incredible. Let's make a deal. I'll do it your way. If that works out it will be marvelous, because I will earn the reputation of being the fastest-shooting director in Hollywood. I'll get through the picture in four weeks instead of eight. But if it doesn't work out you will try to do it my way.
"So I rehearsed the two men for an hour and a half. Then she came in and I told her, 'You start here, you do this, you go there, you do this.' 'Fine.' So we made a first take. Afterwards, I said, 'Well, how do you feel about it?' And she said, 'Fine! Fine!' As she was about to walk past me, she stopped and said, 'Well, how do you feel about it?' I said, 'No good. It's all wrong. Let's rehearse.' She said, 'Believe me. I'll get worse.' I rehearsed the three of them for over an hour, and with each rehearsal she said, 'I'm getting worse. I am completely empty. There is nothing there at all.' Then we shot eight more takes, and I said, 'Print take eight, and print take one also Now, Miss Garbo, tomorrow morning, take one, yours, and take eight, the one I like, will be in projection room. You go in there alone. You see these two takes and then you tell me which I should use in the picture, and I promise to abide by your judgment.' She started walking out and leaned close to my ear, whispering, 'Please do not print take one.' From then on it was wonderful."
And which directors had a good working relationship with Garbo? Clarence Brown, Mamoulian, George Cukor and Ernst Lubitsch, who directed, respectively, Flesh and the Devil, Queen Christina, Camille and Ninotchka, which also happen to be the best movies Garbo ever made.
● Of Garbo's acting technique, Mamoulian said, "There are actors who are intuitive and actors who reason. Sometimes they are a combination of both, but that's rare. The greatest thing is intuition. For instance with Garbo, I would say to her, 'This mood is like the purple sunset, when the leaves turn their shadows, and now and then a yellow falls down.' She would say, "Oh, I know.'"
● The studio offered Leslie Howard, Franchot Tone, Nils Asther and Bruce Cabot as leading men. Garbo settled on Laurence Olivier based on his performance in Westward Passage. But after a disastrous rehearsal made it clear Garbo would never warm up to Olivier, she insisted on her old co-star John Gilbert in the role. Despite the fact that his career was in eclipse, Garbo's contract gave her complete control over all aspects of the production; she was comfortable with him and also felt she owed him a shot at commercial redemption given his role in promoting her early career; so over Louis B. Mayer's strenuous objections, Gilbert wound up playing the Spanish envoy, Antonio.
Contrary to Louis Mayer's slander, Gilbert had a fine voice, but by 1933 audiences were no longer willing to give him a chance. He made only one more picture then died of a heart attack in 1936.
King Vidor, who directed Gilbert in The Big Parade, speculated (again to George Steven, Jr.), "What I believe happened was that he was the image of the aggressive lover, and they thought he could just speak the same words he did when doing silent scenes that nobody actually heard. He would arouse himself by saying things like 'I love you, I adore you, I worship you. I can't wait to get you alone tonight,' the kind of things that were funny when you heard them. So I think it wasn't his high voice but that you couldn't just take an image and suddenly change it by putting a lot of words on the soundtrack. The words destroyed the image. You'll see that a lot in life—somebody will look like something and then they'll start to talk with maybe a deep Texas accent and it changes the image."
● The scene where Garbo wanders around the bedroom, touching everything and commenting "In the future in my memory, I shall live a great deal in this room," was choreographed like a dance and performed to a metronome.
● The famous last close-up which begins as a medium shot then zooms in and holds on Garbo's face was shot with a 48mm lens, a lens which would typically, as GarboForever.com puts it, make the pores of her face look like the craters of the moon. In order to achieve the sharp focus of the medium shot but the soft focus of the close-up, director Mamoulian held a long strip of glass, clear on one end, gradually becoming more diffuse at the other, in front of the lens and as the camera dollied in moved the glass across it.
I mentioned that Greta Garbo contemplated a comeback after World War II, a comeback that obviously never happened. She settled on the Balzac novel La Duchess de Langelais, with Walter Wanger producing and James Mason tentatively set to co-star, and the project got as far as three screen tests, one photographed by Joseph Valentine on May 5, 1949, and by James Wong Howe and William Daniels, both on May 25, 1949.
The only problem was, nobody in Hollywood wanted to finance the film. Wanger negotiated a shaky partnership with Italian financier Angelo Rizzoli, but Rizzoli and Garbo did not hit it off and after long delays pushed the project into 1950, Rizzoli finally pulled out. No other investors were forthcoming and Garbo rejected the suggestion that she invest her own money in the film. Garbo's comeback was effectively over.
Long thought lost, a snippet of the test footage turned up in 1989. Here it is for your viewing pleasure:
Of all the posts I've worked on over the past year and a half, the most popular turns out to be one I knocked off in about five minutes—a series of photos of John Wayne as he aged in the movies, from the shockingly handsome twenty-three year old of The Big Trail to the grizzled, terminally-ill sixty-nine year old in The Shootist.
Echoing that theme, here are a series of photos of Greta Garbo, tracing her career and the lines on her face from childhood to the end of her life and most everything in between.
Just between you and me, I'm not sure they really tell you anything other than that there was a woman named Greta Garbo made of flesh and blood who eventually withered and died. For me, she lived on the screen and nowhere else, but census takers would disagree.
Now, if you really want photos of Greta Garbo, there are two places to go: Dr. Macro's High Quality Movie Scans and Garbo Forever. The former has hundreds of, yes, high quality scans from her movies; the latter has an exhaustive supply of portraits that covers her entire life.
But for the nutshell version, here you go. As always, click on the photo to enlarge it.
1914—age 9 (that's Garbo in the middle) 1920—age 15 1923—age 18 (by Olaf Ekstrand) 1926—age 21 Flesh and the Devil (with John Gilbert) 1929—age 24 The Kiss 1932—age 27 As You Desire Me 1936—age 31 (color—not colorized—photo by Sinclair Bull) 1941—age 36 Two-Faced Woman 1946—age 41 (by Cecil Beaton) 1951—age 46 (by George Hoyningen-Huene) 1965—age 60 (by Cecil Beaton) 1990—age 85
I was going to put together my list of the ten best movies of 2010, but I think I only saw two, and one of them, Hot Tub Time Machine, is such a shoo-in for the Oscar this year I thought why bother.
