Ending April on a Ginger Note

April is coming to an end, and I just realized that a few entries this month have focused on Ginger Rogers. In fact, this blog will be spending a lot more time lavishing attention on La Lovely Rogers. Here's a photo of Ginger and mega-rich lothario Howard Hughes (1905-1976) at a no-doubt sophisticated Hollywood nightspot, circa 1937. Hughes, ever the aviator, was flying high, having broken the transcontinental airspeed record in January, 1937. Ginger was also soaring in her own career, as she completed Shall We Dance with Fred Astaire, as well as Stage Door with Katharine Hepburn, and was working on a film with James Stewart, Vivacious Lady, which I've been a raving lunatic about getting released on DVD. In fact, Vivacious Lady is currently #58 on Turner Classic's list of requested movies not on DVD. So click the link and vote.

Discovering Ginger Rogers

Ginger Rogers. It’s hard to believe that five years ago I was so dopey as to believe that she was the untalented half of the Astaire-Rogers partnership. I just didn’t see her appeal. She didn’t have any musical showcases of her own to spotlight her talent, she didn’t sing outside of her movies with Fred and only a bit in her earlier, Busby Berkeley musicals, where she was a stock player. Her decision to pursue mainly dramatic roles made me wonder what it was Rogers was running away from. If she was so talented, how come she didn’t do musicals of her own?

Another example of me being a dope and not checking the facts.

In 2006, Turner Classic Movies had their “Summer under the Stars” theme. So, while on a day off from the salt mines, I decided to give Rogers another look—signs of my slow-as-a-glacier maturity, no doubt. I began my day with Stage Door (1937). Ginger is a wisecracking chorine trying to make it big in theatre. She traded sarcastic remarks with no less than Katharine Hepburn and Gail Patrick—she had me right there! Ginger was so good! Her timing, her inflections on how she delivered the lines at a rapid-fire pace and yes, she hoofed it, too! She looked oh-so cute in top hat and short shorts and was stunning in her evening dress. She also emoted in her scenes which required pathos, and she’s effective as a major player in Stage Door—no small feat with Kate Hepburn as one’s co-star. Armed with newfound respect and interest for Ginger, I settled in for a glorious day with my new movie crush.

Later in the day I had my second great Ginger moment, which was in Weekend at the Waldorf (1946). This is a post-Astaire film and Rogers looked even more glamorous and beautiful as her movie star character was supposed to be. She was clearly the center of this Grand Hotel-sized cast and she wore a fantastic white dress that definitely caught my attention. Her performance was equally good, as she was a more mature character, definitely in the “ever after” period of a romance; something we wouldn’t see in her films with Fred Astaire until 1949’s The Barkleys of Broadway.

In the next few years, I would become quite the Ginger Rogers admirer, even if her personal life and views weren’t exactly fascinating. I like her for what she does onscreen and it only took two movies for me to realize how timeless her appeal is, how Ginger’s performances don’t grow mannered and stale over the decades. After all, movie buffs are still enchanted by the work she and Astaire put up on the screen over seventy years ago. That’s not likely to fade away anytime soon, is it?

I also realized why Ginger had to purposely remove herself from the musical genre--she had to in order to strike out on her own. Otherwise, she would have been forever associated with Fred Astaire. Of course, that happened anyway, but at the time she became a box office heavyweight on her own, even winning an Oscar for 1940's Kitty Foyle. I just hope that Ginger’s solo career will get more notice and evaluation. She was the only star of her caliber to sing, dance, and excel at both comedy and drama. You’d be hard-pressed to find many of her better-known contemporaries who could claim the same distinction.

Now, excuse me I have to continue waiting for Vivacious Lady on DVD…

From Ginger, with Love: I can dream, can't I?

Philip Marlowe on Film: Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

“This past spring was the first that I felt tired and realized I was getting old. Maybe it was the rotten weather or the rotten cases I’ve been getting lately--chasing after women’s husbands then chasing after the women to get paid. Or maybe it was just the plain fact that I am getting tired and growing old.”

~Philip Marlowe (Robert Mitchum) in Farewell, My Lovely


In 1975, Robert Mitchum played private investigator Philip Marlowe for the first time in director Dick Richards’ Farewell, My Lovely. The film tries gamely to convey the weary mood of Raymond Chandler’s second novel. Plot wise, FML is largely faithful to the book, but adds its own excellent, hardboiled dialogue as well as some slight departures that don’t screw up those who cherish Chandler’s novel. No doubt inspired by the success of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Farewell, My Lovely isn’t up to the level of its source material, or anywhere near the level of the masterpiece that is Chinatown, the movie it is most often compared to, but has enough merit to make a worthy addition to 1970s Neo Noir as well as in the adventures of Philip Marlowe.

Synopsis: Private investigator Philip Marlowe is working on two cases. The first is finding one Velma Valento, the missing girlfriend of Moose Malloy (Jack O’Halloran), who’s just released from the pokey after serving a seven-year stretch for bank robbery. The other has our hero trying to discover the killers of a client who was murdered when Marlowe accompanied him on a routine job to pay the ransom for some rare, stolen jade.

Farewell, My Lovely was among the first entries in the Film Noir style that I ever saw. I was immediately taken by the gloomy, weary atmosphere that a Film Noir--or “Crime Drama” as I still prefer to call movies of this type—represented. Dark deeds done by nasty people and a city in decay, an ineffectual and corrupt police force, and the lone knight with an outdated code of honor that is nevertheless all he has. I loved it. And I’m still surprised today that so many films, regardless of the decade, have some variation on that theme. Farewell, My Lovely remains a favorite film of mine, and one that has been on my DVD wish list for some time.

Seeing the movie again recently, however, and having read the book numerous times in the past ten years, I can see that even the great Mitchum wasn’t perfect as Marlowe, and the film drops a few characters, as well as adding a few of its own. I guess it was an attempt to make Marlowe less cynical and more sentimental. He pals around with a newsie, who also helps Marlowe out after the latter’s run-in with brothel owner Frances Amthor (in a brutal, but actually quite amusing scene; not in the book; The strict Hays Office rules no longer applied in 1975, and the movie is allowed to guess what Raymond Chandler might’ve done had he been able to write the book as a true crime novel), and Marlowe feels beholden to a mulatto child because he feels that the boy’s father died because of information he gave the detective. Though not in the book, the relationships are right in step with Marlowe’s character and they are worthy character interpretations. I would stop short of leveling 1970s-era I’m Okay, You’re Okay charges at the movie, but it differs enough from the novel enough and it interests me to point out the differences, as is always the case between the print and film mediums. The following minor narrative elements contained in the movie are not in Raymond Chandler’s novel:

Joe DiMaggio’s hit steak. Farewell, My Lovely was published in 1940; “Joltin’ Joe’s” 56-game hitting streak took place in 1941. The movie obviously takes place in summer, 1941, because Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union (mentioned in the film) began on June 22, 1941. The film most likely uses the hit streak as a way of threading together the narrative and the passage of time. I like it, but it’s not in the book. Chandler would use World War II in an effective manner in his 1944 Marlowe novel, Lady in the Lake.

Characters not in Novel: The newsie, Tommy Ray and his family, and Frances Amthor are not in the novel, though Amthor is a psychiatrist and a man, and has Marlowe locked away in a mental institution rather than a brothel. There's also a nasty, malodorous indian thug who gives Marlowe pain and grief, but he's absent from the film, too. The movie also omits the rather superfluous character of Anne Riordan, but that’s no big loss.

The main attractions here are the performances. I’ve said many times before that plots are never my main interest, and that characterizations and performances always take center stage in any movie I watch. Robert Mitchum’s take on Philip Marlowe is rock steady. He’s not as peppy as he is in his next portrayal of the detective, in 1978’s The Big Sleep, but he’s just too happy for my tastes. The Marlowe of the books ruminates over the decaying of civilization and his best wisecracks get delivered without him seeming pleased with his ability to do so. I enjoyed watching Mitchum and liked his display of frustration as one misfortune after another befell him, but I hold my belief that no actor ever played Marlowe to perfection. It’ll be my eternal gripe until the job gets done. I may have to wait a generation or two. By the way, in Lee Server’s Robert Mitchum biography, Baby, I Don’t Care, there’s a hilariously disgusting anecdote relating to the suit Mitchum wears and originally tailor made for actor Victor Mature in the 1940s.

The other quality performance is given by Sylvia Miles, who earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress as alcoholic former chorus girl Jessie Florian. Although her part is trimmed for the movie, Miles makes us remember her because she is so heartbreakingly sad; a woman lost in her loneliness and faded ambitions that never came to pass. Her reenactment of her pathetic stage show is embarrassing but it’s effective in showing some dimension to the character. The book gives Florian a better showcase, but Sylvia Miles brings the essence of the sad, forgotten Jessie Florian in her brief time onscreen.

Like so many films I enjoy, Farewell, My Lovely features a fine music score. This one's by David Shire. Shire, (The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3) nails the imagined sound of Film Noir with his haunting main title written with the weary, romanticized sound associated with the detective genre, even if that jazz-inflected feel was not present in the original 1940s crime dramas; that sound came later, after Alex North’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Henry Mancini’s A Touch of Evil. Popular culture always portrays Film Noir as having a slow, smoky and jazzy musical accompaniment, yet when watching 1940s Film Noir, the music is a marked contrast: very loud, melodramatic, and European. It a gradual "Americanization" seeing as these films were made in Hollywood by European directors and European composers who drew on their own classical backgrounds. Farewell, My Lovely is influenced more by the latter association of jazz with crime dramas of this type.

All in all, Farewell, My Lovely does an admirable job in attempting to put across the weary, tired-out Los Angeles and its most famous resident private eye, but like every take on Raymond Chandler’s world, it succeeds more as a way of enjoying Robert Mitchum’s take on the weary private eye, but those who know and love the books will still think this movie just misses. Yet the film contributes characters and situations that serve to populate Marlowe’s world with the types of people you’d expect to find in a Raymond Chandler novel, and given the author’s limited output—should have read about, too. Farewell, My Lovely is worth seeing---many times.

Credit Where Due: Images courtesy of Moviegoods.com

Taking a Break

It's Spring Break! I need to go and join Ginger by the pool for a little while (I think she's in-between husbands). There are a few entries I'd like to take the time and work on, including one for the Silents and Talkies blog in May. Give me a week or so to recharge and I'll be as good as new. In the meantime, stay cool everyone!