Three Olympics

Paris 1924
The 1924 Olympics were the second Olympic games hosted in Paris. Forty-five countries participated in 131 events. The Olympic motto, “Faster, Higher, Stronger” was used for the first time as well as the Olympic Village was introduced at these Paris games. Despite crowds numbering 60,000 spectators at one time, the venue lost a considerable amount of money.  Although Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams of Great Britain won the 400- and 100-meter events respectively, US swimmer Johnny Weissmuller (later Hollywood’s Tarzan) won 3 gold medals in Swimming and bronze in Water Polo to lead the US to winning the most medals…99 total.

Both Abrahams and Liddell were driven runners, but each was driven by different beliefs. When producer David Putnam brought Liddell’s personal Olympic success to the screen in 1981, he wanted to create a powerful movie, like Robert Bolt’s Oscar-winning A Man for All Seasons, about choosing honor instead of seeking glory. His movie Chariots of Fire endowed the 1924 Olympics with idealistic stature. The screenplay astutely analyzed Liddell’s moral dilemma and Ian Charleson perceptively illuminated Liddell’s decision elevating his Olympic track victory into a triumph of principle. 

Chariots of Fire won Oscars for Best Picture, Screenplay, Costumes, and Music. From the first frame of the credits, this is a lofty film. First notes of the musical theme are already glorious. The production is lush. Chariots of Fire is a movie elegant enough to encapsulate the past and fluid enough to catch the wind.

London 2012
I sat along the banquette in Caprice, my favorite London restaurant, after seeing the stage adaptation of Chariots of Fire at the Hampstead Theatre. Mike Bartlett’s stage adaptation streamlined the story into episodes in energetic motion.  Ed Hall’s direction was strong and physical. The familiar Vangelis movie theme was augmented by new music by Vangelis and Jason Carr as well as by Gilbert and Sullivan favorites. Debuting thirty years after Putnam’s film in this new artistic arena, the stage production was interactive, exciting, and athletic.

The Hampstead Theater had been re-configured into Olympic stadium seating surrounding a small revolving stage designed by Miriam Buether as a disc within a disc creating two revolving, concentric spaces. Behind and slightly above the four-sided seating ran a third space–another track—also occupied by actors in continuous motion. Jack Lowden was intense as Liddell; as Abrahams, James McArdle was explosive. In very different interpretations, both actors flashed electric high voltage as the young heroes. Brilliant story, splendid writing, and incandescent acting. I liked Chariots of Fire on film; I liked Chariots of Fire on stage—I’d figured I would. I was in London; it was a musical play, and the Olympic-year stage version was the brainchild of the film's director, Hugh Hudson, who co-produced the play. The adaptors were wise enough to re-imagine the movie for the stage.

The British possess an idiosyncratic sense of humor as well as a distinctive sense of decorum. Thus Oscar-winning Director Danny Boyle’s brilliant London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony that same summer included James Bond, the Queen of England, and a satiric interpretation of Chariots of Fire’s sacrosanct credits. Maestro Sir Simon Rattle, the London Symphony Orchestra, and master comedian Rowan Atkinson, all icons themselves, parodied Vangelis’s iconic movie theme.

Rio de Janeiro 2016
I recently streamed Mike Bartlett’s Wild live from London’s Hampstead Theater, the same theater where I saw Bartlett’s 2012 Chariots of Fire before its West End transfer.

The potential and ramifications of this worldwide stream amaze me and prompt an Olympic fantasy stream: Chariots of Fire with the same leading men as the 2012 London Summer Olympics stage version.  

Since this is Fantasy—let’s factor in that 2012 Olympics sense of humor with an American touch. Jack Lowden finished shooting Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk with pop star Harry Styles and began shooting his starring stint as Morrissey, “The Pope of Mope.” McArdle is fresh from playing Liv Nek in the global phenomenon Star Wars re-boot.  How about after the Chariots curtain calls, the worldwide stream continues with a roundtable interview with Rowan Atkinson, Mike Bartlett, Jack Lowden, James McArdle, and Harry Styles about Chariots on screen and stage, movie and pop music, and the Olympic Dream? One more name for my fantasy: the interviewer, full-figured Jiminey Glick.

Surely one or another of Morgan, Mason, Matthew and Modine, Glick’s four sons, is a fan of the Rio Olympics, the Star Wars franchise, Vangelis, One Direction, and the Smiths—so much to talk about. Olympic Gold!

“God, I’m a dancer. A dancer dances.”

Rittenhouse Square has that look of deep summer—unlighted windows, lots of foot traffic, and heavy heat hanging just outside the restaurant windows. I’m at a table, the second one offered to us, sharing a casual summer dinner in town with neighbors. We discuss the usual things—the heat, the menu, the service, the heat, and our discussion turns to the fall when, as Fitzgerald wrote, it gets crisp and everything starts all over again. So we look to next season’s Pennsylvania Ballet schedule—and it gets interesting.

None of us is a ballet expert. Yet, because we have been fortunate to have the Pennsylvania Ballet in residence within walking distance of our center-city homes, we have become enamored with ballet and are all surely now balletomanes. We’ve seen some great ballets there: Dracula, one Halloween,  as well as two different productions of the lovely classic, Serenade. My friends fill me in on this season’s Balanchine and Beyond and I relive an ultra-romantic Romeo and Juliet, with the company’s Romeo proposing to Juliet at the ballet’s curtain. That made for an impossible encore.

I always get this inebriated “it is glorious to be human” feeling at the ballet. How can they do that? I mean could a corps de ballet be more beautiful? I can also get that feeling when I go to the opera—but only during the arias. I’m overwhelmed that the human voice can produce such beautiful sound; I don’t know the language, yet I know where the aria is going because the sound is so right going forward, and I am enraptured; then come the recitatives—and I am lost—I fall back to earth. But there is no recitative at the ballet—dance is beauty upon startling beauty—and I am ecstatic because a ballet on stage is climax upon climax. I am able to remain in constant anticipation at the ballet as the dancers continually excite and surprise me with their gorgeous movements—Arabesque, Tour en L’air, Grande Jeté—posing, flying, and soaring.

What to do between ballet seasons? In the summer heat. Although the movies haven’t been able to replicate that elevated feeling of attending a ballet, there are some fun ballet movies. The underlying logical fallacy in Waterloo Bridge—“Since I can’t be a ballerina, I’ll have to be a prostitute”—makes for a flabbergasting plot device and the hippo ballerinas in Disney’s Fantasia are charming—and chaste. The Red Shoes’ frantic drive mirrors the intensity of ballet, albeit knowing director Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom is just around the corner makes that movie’s intensity a bit uncomfortable. Anne Bancroft, obviously one of the movies’ finest actresses, and as obviously not a dancer, is as commanding as Baryshnikov, a ballet genius, in The Turning Point. The Black Swan tends to be overwrought, but has its moments. 

Ballet scores its most compelling screen experience in Billy Elliot because the final ballet sequence is unmitigated movie: Billy’s father and brother ride the tube to his performance, cut to Billy’s father ascending from the tube on an enormous escalator, their wonder, their hurry to be seated in the theater, their past anxieties (Michael), and present anticipations.  Narrative movement further compels crosscutting between Billy in the wings and his family in the audience. Since Hermione Baddely was Oscar-nominated for about 2 and a half minutes of screen time in Room at the Top, Adam Cooper already deserves the nomination for the fifteen-second sequence of his back. When we see his face—upside down…“Billy, your family is here”…then pensive, posing to go on stage…determined…the dream…inspired…Billy becomes the magnificent swan. Then admired…his costumed legs…Motion…those two shots of Billy’s bare foot—his foot: “Approach”—Strength to Power; his foot: “Take Off.”  Cooper should have gone home with that golden statuette besting both Judi Dench and Beatrice Straight straight into screen history with his leaping one-minute love letter to Ballet. 

Because Cooper is as mesmerizing on screen as he is on stage, our watching Billy’s family watch him triumph on screen is just as electrifying for us as for them. When Matthew Bourne’s superstar becomes Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot and flies onto the stage and into the film’s conclusion, the final frames of Billy Elliot soar in mid-air. The camera not only translates the exultation of ballet into movie, but also, because this ballet is cinematic, the camera captures and savors it.  For Billy—and for us. Bravo!

“You hang up on me again, I’ll gut you like a fish.”

When I was in fourth grade, we attended a program, grade by grade, in the school’s small auditorium, The Little Theater, to learn about telephone etiquette. Sounds downright Paleolithic in these days of constant discourteous smartphone use.

Telephone communication continues to have both an aesthetic and historical place in moviemaking. Johnny Lobo is condemned by a telephone phone call in Scarface (1932). In early talkies audio was sometimes blocked on a phone to accommodate the primitive sound design. But in the glossy sound design of the 1983 Scarface remake—where “f__k” is amplified 226 times in phone calls and dialogue throughout the film—Lobo is again condemned by the same telephone call because telephone conversation continues to provide plot exposition, characterization, and tension in the movies. Where would Wes Craven be without menacing phone calls?

In 1930s Italy, “Telefoni Bianchi,“ a school of moviemaking, was named for Hollywood’s 1930 film comedies that featured white telephones as a status symbol of bourgeois wealth in their Art Deco sets.  The gritty Neo-Realist movement of the late 1940s was a reaction against this telephone genre.

In 1940s Studio System Hollywood, Sorry Wrong Number revolves around bitter invalid Leona Stevenson overhearing a phone exchange planning a murder.  Leona has only the telephone to prevent the crime.

911 and police-line ties to horrific crime today mean that Jordan Turner of 2013’s The Call has a more powerful phone system to fight a more powerful network of crime—alone.

Can you hear me now, Halle Berry?

In the 1950s, Phone Call From A Stranger builds each of its three cinematic episodes around a telephone call.  Bette Davis in the final episode, co-starring then-husband Gary Merrill, steals the film. During her adulterous holiday, Marie Hoke had gone swimming in a crystal clear lake in the lush woods. As she surfaced from her perfect swan dive, she hit her head on the bottom of a massive wooden raft and was permanently injured.  But the caller—and the audience—learns this only after the caller goes to visit Marie.

In Blow Up, the 1966 masterpiece, “Photographer” Thomas makes phone calls to his publisher about the blow up the photographer fashioned of a murder in the park…was there a murder? ...Did he take a photo? ...Thomas creates the blow up begging the existential question: If a murder happens and nobody sees or hears it, did a murder happen?

Telephone equipment has improved, not so Robert Blake’s discomforting telephone etiquette in Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997). Although Stu Shephard in Phone Booth (2002) would be hard pressed today to find a pay phone, being held hostage on the phone is an all-too-familiar contemporary situation because our reliance on the phone has increased geometrically as has the telephone’s power to communicate. And since electronic technology will continue to evolve and improve, “telephone” communication will remain movie-friendly. “Telephones”—however improved and re-imagined—will still be employed as plot devices and suspense builders on screen because as plot device technological communication (and miscommunication) can be frustrating, tragic, amazing, and fascinating.

Consequently, the remake “Sorry, Wrong Tweet” could be just as terrifying as the original with the tag line: “Text along with Sarah Jessica Parker in her most terrifying and challenging (read: no Spanx, no mascara) role!” An updated remake titled “Text From A Stranger,” could now address three calls initiated from a plane, voice mails, and dropped calls that are now part of everyday telephone communication.

No one could have foreseen the expanded artistic and lifestyle influences of the telephone in that long-ago Little Theater presentation. Today as we continue to see more sophisticated telephone technology used on the screen, we also use that same technology throughout our movie experience offscreen. We text, confirm the casts, buy our tickets, call our Ubers, and send ourselves reminders of show times on our phones. Bottom line, telephones have now become fundamentally significant to cinema: We watch movies on our phones; we make movies with our phones. This technological and aesthetic evolution drives the movies. We can marathon-watch the Bourne movies and enjoy widescreen images of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia on our smartphone screens at the beach. Tangerine was shot with three iPhone 5 smartphones and premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.  The new motion pictures indeed resonate loud and clear…even when there is no one in the darkened multiplex to hear it.

And the Winner is…

I make daily lists of things to do and catalog everything in my life in Lists. In fact, I have a List of My Lists. A Finalist List always numbers 3—like my Three Favorite Hotels… and the winner is the Umaid Bhawan Palace Hotel. I also have an Oscar-nominee-inspired List of 5, say, my Five Best Winter Wardrobe Items and a Complete Rendering List of 10, as in my Top Ten Broadway Musicals.  

I can’t explain why Movie Predators went into 3 and Local Burgers into 5 while Donna Leon Books were grouped at 10…they just were. I do know that I never number outside these numerical structured sets—I mean why would I list my Nine Favorite Shirts? My Four Best Restaurants in Altoona? There is one unchangeable protocol for all Lists: regardless the amount of numbers, once numbered, every List is ordered from the last to the first—building a numbered crescendo in a system most likely pirated in the days when people actually watched the Miss America Pageant on TV. Not coincidentally, on all my Lists, being awarded First Runner-Up is an important distinction.

The Big Three Italian Moviemakers—alphabetically Antonioni, Fellini, and Pasolini—are all Giants, so their inclusion was never in doubt on my Three Favorite Italian Moviemakers List:  

Third.  Pier Paolo Pasolini. He makes the most intense movies of the trio—powerful movies, Mamma Roma, Salo, Teorema with powerful performances. In his controversial short, La ricotta, Pasolini fuses the Crucifixion and a monumental performance by icon Orson Welles; he guided diva Maria Callas to operatic acting heights in his adaptation of the Greek tragedy, Medea.

First Runner-up. Michelangelo Antonioni is the perfectionist, stylist, and greatest thinker of the three. Antonioni’s investigates Modernity, Neurasthenia, and Existentialism in L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse, The Passenger, The Red Desert, and of course, Blow Up. His first English language film Blow Up  is about London, fashion, art, reality, and possibly murder, and is definitely the anthem of the swinging 1960s, the prototype for the International Art Film, and an unqualified masterpiece. Truth is, I have it for Blow Up and its Maestro. But let’s face it, Andrew Sarris didn’t coin the term “Antoniennui” without provocation.

And the winner is… Federico Fellini, quintessential Italian storyteller. La Strada is classic and Nights of Cabiria is unforgettable. Fellini movies happen in dreams and dream is the universal language. His genius was to make his Italian experience universal. La Dolce Vita jumpstarts global narrative; 8 ½, his esoteric aesthetic confession, spreadsheets human creativity; and his Amarcord evokes universal nostalgia for childhood; making Fellini the most emotionally resonant moviemaker of the three, perhaps the most cinematic storyteller of the last century.

There have been a lot of great movies, from Studio System films to Indies, in the 90 years since the first Talkies, and we are now almost fifty years into horizontal integration and global filmmaking. A 2006 Italian production, Golden Door (Nuovomondo) tops the list of my Ten Favorite Movies of This Century. I’m knocked out by Emanuele Crialese’s screenplay and his direction, as well as by the movie’s acting, music, and cinematography. The flawless casting culminates in a mesmerizing leading-lady performance by Charlotte Gainsbourg—you have to watch Gainsbourg on screen—just like you can never look away from Gainsbourg’s mother, Jane Birkin. Formal filmmaking elements mirror and carry the creative plot devices, that is, costume design is as perfect as acquiring the costumes is in the plot. The music is as rich and subtle as the silence is lush and loud. The production design elements are visually spectacular as historical idiosyncrasies are seamlessly assimilated.  The location shots of stark, mountainous Sicily are as outrageously surreal as the New World’s fantasy river of milk. When a mysterious English lady insinuates herself into the Mancuso family passport photo as they are posed in preposterous sideshow cut outs, Lucy Reed completes their family and their spellbinding tableau foreshadows the American cultural mosaic. The cinematography from the elegiac shot of the ship’s separation from the old world dock through the intense close-ups and two shots of the claustrophobic voyage to the minimalist simplicity of the straightforward long shots of Ellis Island is engaging, exciting, and gratifying.

At root, Italian moviemaker Crialese’s perspective of life in America is spellbinding. He tells his epic story in gentle details. And his inspiration making his film?  “I ventured out into a dream, into dreamlike images,” Crialese tells us, “keeping in mind the master, Federico Fellini.”

“Hello, Hog-eye”

Cecil B DeMille, Billy Wilder, and Gloria Swanson on the set of Sunset Blvd.

As recurrent characters in the movies, movie actors give a run for the money—but only figuratively speaking—to comic-book heroes on screen. The audience is fascinated by Stars. Action Star Kirk Lazarus is forced to become the soldier he portrays on screen in Tropic Thunder and franchise superhero Riggan ironically must confront Broadway in his underwear to be taken seriously in Birdman.

OK, sometimes it is not a pretty picture and the movie star character just doesn’t catch fire. In Paddy Chayefsky’s esoteric screenplay, The Goddess, for example, title character Emily Ann Faulkner is one gorgeous train wreck. She’d have to be: Emily Ann is modeled on the screen’s quintessential tragic sex goddess, Marilyn Monroe. Yet as portrayed on screen by a Broadway actress with considerable acting chops, even a Marilyn Monroe clone doesn’t have that explosive charge. Why is that? It is an insightful characterization, but the audience doesn’t feel that connection between movie star and movie-star character that they feel when silent-screen-goddess Gloria Swanson walks down her Sunset Blvd mansion staircase and Norma Desmond breaks through the fourth wall.

A Star Is Born, an enduring Hollywood story, first starred Janet Gaynor and then, in the most recent version, Barbra Streisand. Iconic child star Judy Garland’s performance drives the classic George Cukor musical version. On screen, Garland’s drunken husband slaps her face on stage on the night she wins the Academy Award.  Upon release of the movie, Garland’s Oscar snub in her comeback performance is as legendary.  

 Why? And why yet another version of A Star is Born? (Bradley Cooper is preparing to direct a new version with Lady Gaga.) Obviously, celebrity and glamor remain two predatory high-voltage charges and their mimetic casting proves combustible.

There appears to be a special place on screen and in box office for the movie goddess played on screen by a bona fide Superstar. Another classic Hollywood tale, The Bad and the Beautiful, flaunted sex, glamour, alcoholism, and backstabbing to win 5 Academy Awards. When not nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, leading-lady Lana Turner philosophized that her Hollywood sex goddess stature meant the studio didn’t promote her as an actress. Smoldering throughout the film, she explodes in one of Tinseltown’s greatest driving scenes: costumed in glamorous white with luxurious fur trim, Georgia Lorrison breaks down hysterically at the wheel of her car on the night Georgia both loses the love of her life to another woman—and a cheap bit player at that—and wins the Best Actress Oscar.

Turner acknowledged that this scene was shot solo (in one day in a special-effects car chassis) weeks after the movie wrapped. As such, it demanded that she draw on her biographical experiences in Hollywood—and it shows. The audience is introduced to movie star Georgia in the film, but already knew movie-goddess Lana Turner. Turner was the Sweater Girl, the blonde bombshell in white short shorts and turban from The Postman Always Rings Twice. Today, Turner’s casting impact has increased with time. In retrospect we can also factor in her Schwab’s Pharmacy legend; eight marriages/seven husbands—one twice, including Tarzan; her Ross Hunter movie comeback; her TV comeback; Harold Robbins; and the Johnny Stompanato murder trial. Now no one can take his or her eyes off screen-goddess Lana Turner losing control of her car and her life…I mean screen-goddess Georgia Lorrison, losing complete control.

The morphing of acting into seduction-and-glamour into professionalism in an Art that is also Big Business is complicated, perhaps even contradictory, and thus compelling to watch. Hollywood is the Dream Factory town with tract houses from Architectural Digest and driveways straight to Hell. The superstar depiction of goddesses both glorifies and chastises movie stars whom the audience sees as egomaniacal, driven, and tragic by profession as well as amoral, insatiable, and unattainable by publicity. Celebrity, evidently fun to dream about, is even more fun to watch gone awry. Thus audiences feel envious of the famous as well as feeling vindicated for not being famous because just as the vampire must forfeit the sun to live forever, the movie goddess must forfeit her private life in order to attain and enjoy every excess life can offer―in public. And the stars portraying these movie-goddess characters so viscerally, not only represent this paradox to us, they live it for us.  

Come on, you get what I’m saying; this isn’t our first time at the rodeo.

Save the United States

Many years ago, my wife and I were caught in traffic coming from the bridge in New Jersey. I don’t remember which bridge or why we were in traffic—but I remember my wife was wearing a turquoise dress with embroidered flowers and we were somewhere along the Delaware River. We saw a bar that I labeled “threatening” and she called “weathered” and agreed to go in and get something to eat.  As we entered, a guy among the old guys ensconced at the bar invited us to stand nearer where he was sitting because we “could see the United States just across the river from there.” We knew he was too inebriated to be making pithy social commentary, so my wife played along and sure enough, there it was—just across the river, the United States—the SS United States.

Now, whenever I go down to Columbus Avenue to do unmentionable shopping: paper towels in bulk, liquid soaps, potting soil, or electric cork screws, I enjoy my covert first-light-of-day car trips because the ship still stands there—5 blocks long and 17 stories high—like the Parthenon on the Acropolis—defying and defining time. I find myself staring—now from the same side of the river, but still from afar because as near as I can get to the fabled ship—even in my imagination—is a distance.  

In my mind, Pier 82 bustles with travelers dressed in tasteful suits with hats and gloves, who embark while uniformed porters carry their luggage. On board, I pass the First Class observation lounge where Charles Ryder and Lady Julia Flyte pretend to study the concave gesso and gold-leaf mural of the North Atlantic not to look at each other.  At a corner table Basil Plante is attempting to trick the already besotted Ann Grenville into revealing her secret. Continuing forward on deck, I spy Nickie Ferrante and Terry McKay rendezvousing at the rail. As always, Nickie wears cashmere socks paler than the color of his slacks; Terry carries Janou’s mantilla against the brisk sea air. I enter the luxurious First Class dining room to reserve my second-seating table close to Lorelei Lee’s to eavesdrop on the blonde bombshell making machine-gun-rapid “conversations” with every eligible male on the ship. While walking back to find my stateroom, I pass a door ajar revealing the Duck Suite reserved four times a year (at an arranged half-price rate) by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Custom drapery and a leopard skin throw rug have been installed for them. Standard lighting has been moderated with pink light bulbs flattering to the Duchess’s complexion and stewards have replaced the towels and bed linens with monogrammed Porthault.  A secretary will survey their 150 Louis Vuitton steamer trunks and suitcases to inventory the Duchess’s pug throw pillows, jewelry, and haute couture wardrobe for the crossing (First Class passengers make about four daily changes of clothes).

OK, movie history errors abound because none of those movies filmed aboard the SS United States (Although Gentlemen Marry Brunettes did). And even if I claim sanctuary in poetic license, this fantasy passenger list is an anachronistic hodge-podge of movie characters—but wait, Wallis Simpson was not a movie character, she was just an ordinary person…you have me there again.

I’m evoking all luxury sea travel, all the deluxe transatlantic crossings of the past. The SS United States is sole custodian of all that glamour—fictional and historical. Albeit a magnificent ruin, built for speed and capable of being turned into a troop ship, the epitome of mid-century design, she is our country’s beautifully engineered and operated Blue Riband Ship of State.

I read earlier this year that the SS United States is going to be completely rehabbed and returned to service. But nothing has yet materialized and I’ve followed previous failed plans for her future over the almost 20 years she has been docked in Philadelphia. I admit I would miss seeing that ghost liner docked here, but I am far more fearful of this beautiful ship’s being lost to us forever. I remain hopeful that the SS United States will sail again. But we simply cannot allow this piece of history to be lost.

The ocean liner, movies, and history are kinetic—they all move, and must always move—forward. I appreciate this is not 1952. But surely beauty must remain integral to motion. Thus restoring the SS United States will provide us graceful passport into the future.

Dziekuje, Bronislaw

Warsaw-born Bronislaw Kaper’s lack of name recognition is compounded by his success as a composer. His music is so organic that we know the melodies after we hear them in the film without again asking why or how we know them. We hear the soundtrack theme otherwise orchestrated and we know it; it speaks to us, but it does not shout its composer’s name.

Among his nearly 150 movie compositions, he co-wrote “San Francisco,” sung first by Jeanette McDonald six times in the film San Francisco, sung famously by Judy Garland in her Carnegie Hall concert, and sung again by Rufus Wainwright in his re-do of Garland’s classic program. Kaper composed the main theme for A Life Of Her Own, a Lana Turner potboiler that survived that strangely flawed George Cukor melodrama to re-appear as the main theme of the later film Invitation, and as “Invitation” became a pop-tunes standard. He adapted Chopin as well as composed the original music for the Broadway musical, Polonaise, the theme song for the television series The FBI, and the Academy Award winning score for the motion picture Lili, the basis for the Broadway musical, Carnival. Others of his most beautiful themes are heard in Butterfield 8, The Brothers Karamazov, Green Dolphin Street, Gaslight, The Prodigal, The Swan, Lord Jim, Them!, Auntie Mame, and the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty as well as his uncredited work in Sweet Bird of Youth, Green Mansions, The Clock, and Raintree County, among many other titles.

The Prodigal, based on the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son, features the human wheel of fortune, the wall of many colors, the gardens of pleasure, the vulture and fire pits—both of no return—as well as Stereophonic Sound, Colour, Cinemascope, and Perspecta to create “one of the all time spectacles in film history.“ Mutiny on the Bounty features an over-the-top performance by Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian, the role for which Clark Gable had been Oscar nominated in the original film and a 108-foot replica of the HMS Bounty built for MGM Studio (the Hollywood tall ship sank in the Atlantic Ocean in Hurricane Sandy) and thus“The greatest adventure ever lived becomes the greatest adventure ever filmed!” Lord Jim is based on the Joseph Conrad novel. A 1925 version, directed by Victor Fleming, was filmed on the lot while in this version, Kaper’s fellow countryman’s novel was “Filmed in the far corners of the Far East...High Adventure that reaches across the world!” Epics! Their soundtracks must be monumental—exotic and enormous—highly theatrical and even more highly orchestrated—Hollywood’s take on the Bible, history, and the literary masterpiece—brutal, reverent, flamboyant and inspirational. And Kaper’s music is on the grandest scale and leads where epics from The Gladiator to Jurassic World were sure to follow.

Indeed, Kaper’s musical masterpiece is probably the greatest standard of the American Song Book least associated with its movie source. The film, Green Dolphin Street, turns on a single drunken plot device: writing his marriage proposal in a long distance letter from New Zealand when he is drunk, William Ozanne sends for the wrong sister—you can see this one coming because the two devoted sisters—Marianne Patourel (shrew sister) and Marguerite Patourel (sweet sister)—live, sleep, love and even swoon simultaneously.  It could have been worse, instead of confusing sisters Marguerite and Marianne, and bringing the wrong sister to New Zealand, Ozanne might have confused destinations and sent the right sister to New Guinea, Newfoundland, or even New Jersey. Anyway, the main theme “Green Dolphin Street” (later re-titled "On Green Dolphin Street"), composed by Bronisław Kaper with lyrics by Ned Washington for the film of the same name, would become a jazz standard a decade later after being recorded by Miles Davis in 1958…a tip of the hat to Miles Davis!  And so Bronislaw Kaper’s musical theme for the costume epic Green Dolphin Street becomes “On Green Dolphin Street,” and earns its place in American jazz history.

The range of Bronislaw Kaper’s musical contributions decries the unfamiliarity with his name. He influenced the genre of movie soundtracks as well as he composed popular songs and standards including the quintessential jazz anthem. American immigration authorities misspelled Bronislaw Kaper’s Polish name. Sometimes credited under different names and different spellings as well as sometimes uncredited, Bronislaw Kaper wrote solo and in partnership. Fortunately, recording practices have increasingly cataloged Bronislaw Kaper’s works to make his music identifiable and available to contemporary audiences.

Dangerous When Wet

Aside from my cat—and I would rather have him than all the Barnes Foundation’s 59 Matisse masterpieces, I value my art works above everything else in my possession. Each artwork hanging provides me with keen self-awareness and evocative memories as well as aesthetic pleasure.

Less frequently hanging new pieces in recent years, I took a favorite poster to be framed just last month. The poster is from a reception and book signing for a biography of Philadelphia artist Emlen Etting. It had hung unframed in my campus office for many years. I was always afraid that framing the poster, like eating lunch at my office desk, would mean I was actually employed there.

When I arrived to pick up the finished frame, I could already see it from the car through the frame shop window, looming in the back of the shop, just waiting for me—like Audrey II in Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors. I’d wager that like the Great Wall of China, you might be able to see this frame from space.

Double matting defines the look but is unable to contain the poster because the outer mat is the identical boldest blue of the poster—blue floods the framed rectangles like those gargantuan pools in all the Esther Williams movies. Moreover, because the blue mat board didn’t come oversized enough, and this poster is gigantic, gold square mat board is constructed into the blue outer mat at every corner of the frame and anchors the frame with bold metallic stakes like monumental golden beacons.

The poster depicts the cover of the book with the artist pictured in a black-and-white photo under the title in white letters. Above his image “Book Signing and Reception” has been added in white poster lettering. The artist figure gleams like the deepest dark blue recesses of the pool while the white lettering floats, flickering like lingering smoke or faraway lights. And looking into the glass—aerial shots of the blue water below from a pool springboard…from an Olympic platform—and ultimately wide angle from the Hollywood stratosphere of Esther Williams’ movie spectacles morph as in a production number from the Million Dollar Mermaid. Metallic gold shimmers between blue poster and blue mat. And guided home to Atlantis by the golden torch of Neptune’s Daughter’s father emerging resplendent from beneath the sea of his bluest blue domain, I can dive into all that blue. I can dive like Esther Williams through golden wires now sensationally set afire—flames dancing and gleaming around me, smoldering watchtowers, and flares of burnished gold, to risk self-immolation just for the spectacle. And I did. I do.

Does the poster remind me of the book signing and of all those years in my office? Yes—but the framed poster submerges those decades and catapults me back to my childhood. It compels me to dive once more into the turquoise blue and gold of the lounge aboard Eastern Airlines’ Golden Falcon, the plane of the future, soaring from bleak Chicago winters into the flamboyant Florida golden sun. All this explosive Morris Lapidus’ “too much can never be too much” blue-on-gold-on-blue throbs under the glass and lights up my bedroom like the morning sun illuminated the French provincial mirrors in an ocean-view room of Miami Beach’s Eden Roc Hotel.

That was indeed one “lovely light.”

I am more than old enough to realize that the lovely light never lasts the night. I understand that, in fact, I had to vacate my campus office and forfeit a wall of more discreetly framed pieces just to make space for this bombastic frame in my center city apartment. Obvious care was taken with every detail to create the poster. Framing this treasured piece proved another careful and expensive task. Yet it is a small price because here it now hangs—blue spontaneous combustion.

LONG LIVE THE KING

Studio publicity shot of Gable (left) and Gable and wife Sylvia fishing in Colorado during filming of Across the Wide Missouri (right).

I recently read Adriana Trigiani’s novel, All The Stars In The Heavens, about Clark Gable and his Call of the Wild affair and “love” child with Loretta Young. So when I happened upon episodes of the old Loretta Young Show, I DVRed the lot and found myself watching one episode every night after dinner, sort of like enjoying a rich dessert without consuming all those frightening calories. Young always begins the half hour shows swirling through a doorway in fashions of the day. Among the first Hollywood stars to understand the power of radio and television, Young wisely prohibited including these classic entrances in the first syndication of the show because she was aware that nothing dates as fast as yesterday’s haute couture. But by now, her mid century dresses add luster to the show.

Everything back then looks glamorous—of course it was a glamorous time—or, more accurately, ours surely is not a glamorous time. It is getting summer again—how many feet in flip flops and unshaved legs will make you wonder if you wandered into some boardwalk pizza stand on a Saturday night when you are dining alfresco big-check/small-table in town? City life. Did you ever ride down early morning in a high-rise apartment elevator with people out to score their take-out morning coffee costumed in unisex dorm garb for a Zac Efron/Ariana Grande re-make of Good News? I mean, can’t they master Keurig? It evokes nostalgia for Claudette Colbert needing to borrow Gable’s topcoat so she can decently cover his borrowed PJs to wait in line for an outside shower in It Happened One Night—one of only three movies, and the only comedy, to sweep Best Movie, Screenplay, Director, Actor, and Actress Oscars. According to legend, Gable gave his Oscar to a kid who admired it, and it was returned to Gable’s widow and mother of his posthumously born son.

Although contested by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Gable’s Best Actor Oscar sold at auction in 1996 for $607,500.00. Gable was tentative about playing Peter Warne, but the Capra masterpiece provides Gable every opportunity to chew up the scenery. Gable is a power house—lashing out at bus drivers, hitchhikers, highway thieves—and Colbert, even taking a shot at men’s underwear by not wearing an undershirt when he strips on screen. Gable defines the classic “women want him, men want to be him” movie hero.

Gable would play that part on Studio System demand until after he was a real-life war veteran and as a freelancer after the Paramount Decision in a career of more than 60 films. He plays the same “all man” lead character twice two decades apart (Red Dust and remake Mogambo) and plays it most famously when he personified the classic uber-male, Rhett Butler. And he plays it right into his senior years as the night school teacher’s bad boy pet to Doris Day and as the Ugly American Philadelphia lawyer who finds and loses his heart to Capri, his orphaned nephew, and Sophia Loren. As the highest paid actor, earning the industry’s largest advance salary paid to date against a percentage of the gross with a weekly stipend for overtime, Gable plays it the last time in The Misfits—Marilyn Monroe’s and his macabre cinematic swan song.

Both in biographies and in Hollywood lore, it appears Gable also played that part off screen. A heavy smoker and a serious drinker, Gable loved fishing, hunting, camping, horseback riding, and working on his own cars. Gable is rumored to have had affairs with many to most of his leading ladies: one leading lady (this quip will sound like a salty Shelley Winters zinger, but it is apocryphal) is reported to have declared, and I paraphrase, Clark Gable is so clean you could eat off him. Two of his many liaisons were enduring. His affair with Joan Crawford, on again, off again, through eight film pairings, was labeled as “the affair that almost burned Hollywood down” in the press, and he had a daughter with Loretta Young. He married five times (acting teacher, Josephine Dillon; Maria Langham; Douglas Fairbanks’ widow Lady Sylvia Ashley; Kay Williams Spreckels; and his classic Hollywood marriage to comedienne Carole Lombard),

Darryl F. Zanuck hadn’t signed young Gable because of his big ears; by age 32, chronic trouble with his teeth resulted in Gable’s having full dentures; nevertheless, Clark Gable was—and is—King of the Movies.

Broadway Bosch

Friends and I went up to NYC to attend a Broadway performance of the long-running revival of Les Miserables in the final week before Alfie Boe departed the show. One of our party, an actress, introduced a discussion about actors who sing as opposed to singers who act (we put Boe in the latter category).

I saw Les Miserables the first time in London more than 30 years ago after its switch from the Barbican—it had received good-to-mixed reviews and was in no way yet the phenomenon it would prove to be, so we scored seats for that night’s performance. Must have been 1985. In those days in London, you could select what you were seeing the morning of the show—except for Cats—I suspect Cats has the ignominious distinction of starting the theater ticket hysteria that led to today’s ridiculous fiasco of getting theater tickets a year in advance. In London, that is. The crush for four-figure tickets to Hamilton on StubHub is pure Americana—like standing ovations for anybody who takes a bow at the curtain call. Premium seating. Ticket lotteries. Historic productions. Every stage production is historic today, just as every performance is now iconic. Hype. Anyway, in those days, my wife and I traveled to London frequently—it was our favorite city—and we spent about 10 New Year’s Eves in a row in London. We would see a big musical play to welcome in the New Year. We did not see Les Mis on New Year’s Eve because we figured (correctly) it would be a downer.

What does Patrick Bateman say about Les Mis in Bret Easton Ellis’ novel, American Psycho, “It’s long, but good”? More to the point, one could ask what doesn’t Patrick Bateman say about Les Mis in American Psycho? I like American Psycho—the novel has some problems, but it is brilliantly conceived and written. When I read the novel the first time, I did not note the frequency of references to Les Miserables. This is not the confession of a cavalier reader—there must be about 50 references to labels, designers, restaurants, and music per page. And of course in 1991, Les Mis was not yet Les Mis. I guess you could say I am a fan of American Psycho the movie; I know I am a fan of the musical. The musical debuted in London in 2013 and after a sell-out limited run, made some changes for a Broadway production. The musical has problems, but it is consistently exciting and frequently compelling to watch. Benjamin Walker who plays Patrick Bateman in the musical is an actor who sings; I say this because he played Brick in a recent Broadway revival of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (another feline-titled play), and Brick is not a singer—but whatever his singer:actor ratio, Walker is quite good on stage. American Psycho the play is also well-directed, as was the movie. Mary Harron did a good job—that reminds me, when I was a kid in high school, I knew her father, actor Donald Harron—but that’s another story.

American Psycho on stage runs like the proverbial well-oiled machine with a take-no-prisoners attitude. The wardrobe of Patrick Bateman never wavers from sartorial perfection. The sleek sets are brutally on-the-mark. And the transparent splash curtain is a provocative and discomforting stage device—a monumental decor. Like the Grand Guignol stage was immersed in stalls, confessionals, and statuary of the Paris chapel of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, American Psycho builds its Gothic world on stage, as well as surrounding the audience in its sound and visual design. While Huey Lewis, “Hip to be Square” throbs, Paul Owen (strangely Paul Owen in the book and musical, Paul Allen in the movie), Patrick Bateman and a chain saw morph behind the gigantic plastic curtain between them and their audience. Is the plastic wall to protect the audience from being splattered by more blood? Or, as in the seating of the Grand Guignol, is the plastic there to prevent the audience—already awash in blood—from becoming over-excited by the gore and violence and rushing the stage?

The show ended its American run June 5, having played a total of 81 performances. Because the novel has a different reputation today than it did at its controversial—even confrontational—publication, and the film adaptation has now attained cult status—I wonder how the musical will be met by audiences and critics two decades from now.

Lana, Myrna, Cary, Grace, & Troy

So I was thinking about Lana Turner yesterday—I think about her a lot, more than I think about Troy Donohue and he frequently comes to mind, but less than I think about Myrna Loy. I mean Myrna Loy and her house painter discussing room color choices in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House is a brilliant movie scene just as each black-and-white shot of her radiant face in Greg Tolland’s luminous sequence of her realizing that husband Frederic March is home from the war in The Best Years of Our Lives is picture perfect. Myrna Loy never won the Oscar for any of her perceptive performances‒not even her iconic recurrent role as Nora Charles. She was never even nominated for a competitive Oscar, and won her only Oscar as a lifetime achievement honor in 1991 two years before the end of her life‒sort of an eleventh-hour apology from the Academy. I don’t remember anybody being outraged, at least I don’t think I heard of protests. Anyway, Frederic March did win the Oscar, twice, and the second time was for Best Actor in The Best Years of Our Lives. I never think about Frederic March. That’s no indictment of Frederic March’s acting, but he is just not a leading man you think about‒unlike Cary Grant, whom I think about almost as much as I do Myrna Loy.

Grant and Loy made a great couple paired on screen. In their first pairing, Wings in the Dark, Grant is a sightless pilot for whom daring aviatrix Loy proves her love by intentionally crashing their planes at Roosevelt Field. A dozen years later in The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer, Grant is as charming as a playboy attracted to Loy, a no-nonsense jurist who has sentenced him to date her impressionable teenage sister. And then in their third pairing, Grant is Loy’s charming husband, the film’s title character, Mr. Blandings.

A decade later, the older Grant remained just as charming without Loy as his leading lady in his Return to the screen (remember Norma Desmond abhorred “Come back,” a real star made a “Return”), charming enough to obscure the film’s color photography of the French Riviera in To Catch A Thief. However no one, not even Cary Grant, is charming enough to obscure leading lady Grace Kelly‒a novice, more than 50 films, as well as 29 years Grant’s junior (Kelly was born in 1929). In Kelly’s brief 6-year Hollywood career (1951–1956), although she won her Best Actress Oscar stealing the screen from Bing Crosby, she steals it as easily from Clark Gable, William Holden, Stewart Granger, Jimmy Stewart, Ray Milland, Alec Guiness, Gary Cooper, and again from Crosby by obliterating both Crosby and Sinatra in a musical tag team, before she bolted to marry a prince. The camera loves Grace Kelly. Can anybody forget that shot of her leaning into the screen to kiss Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window? Recently, I was talking about how beautiful she is on the screen and a young film student countered, “OK so she’s perfect looking, but looking perfect doesn’t mean looking beautiful.”

And Grant is still as charming‒perhaps his most charming‒8 years after To Catch a Thief when pursued by the gamine Audrey Hepburn (like Kelly, born in 1929, Hepburn is 25 years younger than Cary Grant, but who’s counting?) in Charade. Although twice nominated, he never won the Oscar, but Cary Grant indeed became the screen’s classic man-of-the-world. And once told by an interviewer, "Everybody would like to be Cary Grant," Grant is said to have replied, "So would I."

In his long career, in addition to Myrna Loy, Grace Kelly, and Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant worked with leading ladies Mae West, Leslie Caron, Katherine Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Anne Sheridan, Jean Arthur, Doris Day, sisters Joan and Constance Bennett, Ethel Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich, Suzy Parker, Deborah Kerr, Eva Marie Saint, Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, Loretta Young, Laraine Day, Joan Fontaine, Rosalind Russell, Irene Dunne, and Carole Lombard, among many others.  And Cary Grant even worked twice with Lana Turner—both appear in the clips compiled for That’s Entertainment II and Grant stars in Topper where Turner briefly appears as a “nightclub patron.”

"What're you going to do, Charlie?"

The first light of morning is about to jump-start the city and a new day waits just 10 minutes outside the open upper floor window. Framed in the window (you’ll have to pretend there is no screen), a figure can be seen standing near somebody else staring up affectionately on the sill beside him. Who are they? What is the man furiously writing? A single light burns, a beacon, an eternal flame, first reflected in the window. Now, inside the room, you see me standing at the open window collecting my thoughts—the single light burning in my high-rise apartment while my loyal RagaMuffin cat poses beside me. I have been working all night, a wasted night, to reach this dawn with him, writing draft upon draft of a list of my intentions for this blog: It should be honest; it has to be perfect; it must be personal.

Finally I speak aloud—earnestly, idealistically, alas derivatively, but forcefully—to my cat lying on my desk near the computer monitor that rises just above the window sill—something is still missing—you know what this means—four times and we’ll have to re-make it again! My white cat opens his blue eyes and stares at me lovingly. Stretching as he rolls onto his back, he shoots me a knowing look, before he dismisses me and goes back to his own thoughts.

You’re damn right, I reply to him—using the personal pronoun “I” twice much less every time will let readers know who is responsible. Will I make promises I cannot keep? No. Will I be honest? Yes. Will I be entertaining? I’ll try. Will I be an advocate for my readers as citizens and human beings? Isn’t everybody so on the net? Aren’t web entries founded on their maker’s moral responsibility to honesty and accuracy? Aren’t all critics online informed, altruistic, productive, and vetted? Isn’t the web constructed as a creative arena born of aesthetics by, for, and with artistic tastemakers? Isn’t blogging a genre with intrinsic intellectual value? Aren’t we all citizens of the cyber world—isn’t every student entering college today therefore already educated by/in the media about how to think critically? And consequently weren’t we clever in the higher education curriculum to institute new “hands-on” and skill classes about how to blog, text, film, and video instead of forcing students to continue to take yesterday’s content courses—courses that these college customers simply do not like?

I am the other blogger and my blog will be about movies, architecture, fashion, theater, education, and yesterday. Mostly about movies. And about Memory told “Dimly and in Flashes” —as F. Scott Fitzgerald described the cadence of the movies. My cat opens his eyes and stares at me—does he taunt that “dimly” might also be perceived as the description of my intellectual acumen? Feline, I have already made my peace about employing this double-sided term. Yet my cat still stares at me. He suspects my proclaiming any agenda for this blog is mere affectation. OK, actually, the cat makes a good point. My blog will be about anything I choose. But every reader of this blog will know my interests as well as my identity. Could anybody fail to identify Miss Dove or Mr. Chips in a police line-up? Could anyone fail to recognize the Sondheim devotee slumped in the back row of Hamilton’s mezzanine? Who couldn’t whistle-blow the fellow who checks into Ian Schrager’s Public in Chicago chasing the police chasing the bad guys chasing Roger O. Thornhill into the lobby of the Ambassador East?

I’m aware that a blog is not like the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, or Jed Leland’s first report card at school. And ironically another blog is probably just as essential to the city today as the gas in that gaslight. And thus the crucial question: Will I sign my Declaration of Principles? Hell no. But headlines will be big enough. And I invite you to create the scenario with me. And if you are game, and they try to stop us, let’s just tell them that you are from the Central Office. Later scene. Same interior. Same gaslight.