The Philadelphia (and Newport, Rhode Island) Story

High Society (1956) promises fun at the movies. And it delivers. This spritely screwball musical stars Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, both of whose characters are at least somewhat in love with an elegant heiress, Tracy Lord, played by the blonde and beautiful Grace Kelly. This was to be Kelly’s very last movie role before she married a real-life Prince Charming and became Princess Grace of Monaco. Rounding out the cast are the acerbic Celeste Holm and the delightfully ebullient Louis Armstrong. The setting is ritzy Newport, Rhode Island, where the central characters live in posh mansions, surrounded by fawning retainers.  

 Armstrong’s presence is explained by the fact that there’s a jazz festival in the vicinity. He acts as a kind of narrator to open and close the film; he also memorably duets with Crosby on the up-tempo "Now You Has Jazz.” In this story, Crosby plays  C. K. Dexter Haven, a well-heeled singer/composer who is Tracy Lord’s neighbor, as well as her former husband. Though they were once deeply attached, and shared a romantic honeymoon aboard a yacht called the “True Love,” affection has turned to loathing (on Tracy’s part, at least), followed by an acrimonious divorce. Now Tracy is on the brink of marrying a staid businessman, and Dex wanders over to observe the hubbub. You see, C. K. Dexter Haven has (in his relaxed way) never quite gotten over Tracy, and he’s hanging around to check on what his former wife is up to.

 Also in residence on the wedding weekend are a magazine journalist (Sinatra) and his photographer sidekick (Holm), determined to get a scoop on this big society event. Everything goes haywire on the night before the nuptials, when Tracy gets drunk and Sinatra’s character gallantly comes to her rescue.

 The Cole Porter ditties (including the romantic hit, “True Love” and a nifty Crosby/Sinatra duet) are appealing, and there are no false notes among the performers. Still, seeing High Society again after many years, I became convinced that there was a better version of this tale to be found. And so, of course, there is. Back in 1940, the great George Cukor directed The Philadelphia Story, based on a Philip Barry stage hit that starred Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn’s Hollywood career had recently been foundering, and so she bought the play’s film rights in order to reintroduce herself to the moviegoing public. It worked magnificently well, especially since Cukor invited two of the era’s brightest male stars, Cary Grant and James Stewart, to play the main men in her life., If Hoboken’s rough-and-tumble Frank Sinatra is amusing when he romances the soignée Grace Kelly in and around her estate’s swimming pool, imagine how much funnier it is when aw-shucks Jimmy Stewart pitches woo to the imperious Hepburn. And of course Cary Grant is Cary Grant, effortlessly suave and just the fellow to tame this particular shrew. What we love about Katharine Hepburn is how wonderfully she plays a woman who is absolutely wrong about pretty much everything. Seeing her get her comeuppance is a delight for those of us who admire strong women but also place great stock in happily-ever-after.

 F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, insisted that the very rich “are different from you and me.” To which his pal Ernest Hemingway wryly reposted, “Yes, they have more money.” Movie fans, particularly in the years coming out of the Great Depression, preferred to think that—despite all their riches—the wealthy could be as foolish as those of us with emptier pockets. The Philadelphia Story certainly proves this is so.   

 

The Big Chill: Snow Days, Frozen Yogurt, and the National Film Registry

While much of the U.S. has been shivering through snowstorms, I’m almost embarrassed to say that we in SoCal are enjoying glorious weather: the kind that encourages you to be outdoors taking a walk, not inside watching a movie. Frozen yogurt sounds great to me right about now, and there’s a popular little shop nearby called “The Big Chill.” Which just happens to be named after a 1983 film that recently made it onto the National Film Registry administered through the Library of Congress.

 In 1983, The Big Chill was a hugely popular film peopled by some of Hollywood’s brightest new talents, including such stars-in-the-making as William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, and Glenn Close. They play former college pals gathering in a comfy home in South Carolina to memorialize one of their number who has died, a suicide. It’s a film whose central subject is nostalgia: they’re all remembering back to the Sixties, to their college days at the University of Michigan, when they were young, optimistic, and full of ideas about how the world should be run.

 Looking over the whole list of new inductees to the National  Film Registry, I’ve concluded that nostalgia is a central concept in many of them. Sometimes the movies themselves are thematically looking back on an earlier (and maybe better) era; sometimes it’s the modern viewer who’s transported by a classic film to a time when life seemed to hold much more promise than what we know today.

  What do I mean? Well, let’s start with two musicals from the 1950s that both made this year’s list. They were released by different studios (Paramount and MGM), but both, curiously, have the same top-billed star, Bing Crosby. Both are set in what was then the present-day, but the reality they portray is definitely candy-coated. White Christmas (1954) unfolds largely in and around an old country inn where two WWII army buddies who now have a nightclub act woo two talented singing sisters, while also trying to help the inn’s owner, their former commanding officer. Of course the plot climaxes with the singing of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” a song originally written for a 1942 Hollywood film with a very similar premise, Holiday Inn. Listen to its hyper-nostalgic lyric: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.” And 1956’s High Society is a musical throwback to 1940’s The Philadelphia Story, portraying a ritzy but placid social environment that all of us would just love to experience.

 There are some serious dramas on the list too. Glory (1989) is a powerful historical drama portraying the 54^th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, an African American unit that fought (under white commander Colonel Robert Gould Shaw) for the Union during the Civil War. I suspect most of us are hardly nostalgic for the racism and blood of the War Between the States, but we can look back with admiration on the raw courage of Shaw and his men. Similarly, 1993’s Philadelphia graphically portrays the depths of the AIDS crisis. It’s not a time to which we’d want to return, but the story unfolds in a way that makes heroes out of its central characters. And Tom Hanks’ Oscar-winning portrayal of a dying gay man includes a heartbreakingly nostalgic scene in which he relives an operatic performance by Maria Callas.

 We can feel a much happier kind of nostalgia in recalling how we (or our children) loved The Incredibles (2004) or how Wes Anderson helped us look cheerfully back to a time that never quite was in 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 

Black is the Color . . . . Toni Morrison, Shirley Temple, and Blackface On-Screen

I recently saw a dramatic version of Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, not on the screen but on stage. In it, a young African American girl with a grim past obsesses (circa 1941) over her desire to have blue eyes like her idol, child-star Shirley Temple. She’s not the only one in her increasingly tragic family circle whose life-goals are shaped by Hollywood movies. Her downtrodden mother, it seems, has long brightened her own sad life by admiring such Caucasian stars as Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Hedy Lamarr on the silver screen. Tellingly, she has named her daughter Pecola, closely mirroring the name of the young Black girl who successfully—though painfully—passes for white throughout much of 1934’s Imitation of Life.

 Funny thing about Pecola’s obsession with Shirley Temple’s blond-and-blue-eyed charms. Though Temple, who starred in black & white films in the 1930s and ‘40s, was truly an adorable tyke, her hair was on the auburn side and her eyes were emphatically brown. But Pecola, longing to be a little white girl, naturally assumes that her idol has big blue eyes, unlike her own. There’s something about the power of movies that showcases our dreams of what we’d like to be, particularly if those dreams are wholly out of reach.

 On the other hand, back in the 1930s and 1940s there are many screen entertainments that highlight white performers posing as Black for public amusement. There was an era when it was controversial indeed for a Black performer to be injected into a white cast, even when playing a so-called “tragic mulatto.” As late as 1951, when Lena Horne sought to play the tragically bi-racial Julie in an upcoming version of Edna Ferber’s hit, Show Boat, she was rejected in favor of the not-Black-at-all (and not-musical-at-all) Ava Gardner. It was OK for William Warfield, in the role earlier made famous by Paul Robeson, to sit on the dock and sing “Old Man River.” But it was definitely NOT OK for a light-skinned African American woman to be shown in a love relationship with a white man.

 Still, white performers of those eras seemed perfectly comfortable smearing on blackface makeup and pretending to be “colored.” This had been happening since the era of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), when all the rapacious Black men who trash democracy and menace heroine Lillian Gish were portrayed by white actors. Later it was common for musical performers like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney to do a blackface minstrel-show turn, as they did in 1941’s Babes on Broadway, completely with Judy’s hair in “pickaninny” braids.  In 1936, the great Fred Astaire—playing a nightclub performer—darkened his face for “Bojangles of Harlem,” designed as a tribute to Black tap dance legend Bill Robinson and also to Astaire’s friend and mentor, John Bubbles, whose dancing silhouette—I’m told—backs Astaire’s on screen in this number. I’m sure Astaire’s intentions were of the best, but today such moments can make us cringe. That’s how I felt when watching the otherwise frothy Holiday Inn (1942), in which Bing Crosby’s character establishes a country inn and nightclub which builds its floor shows around holiday themes. The President Lincoln’s birthday number, “Abraham,” features not just Bing (looking like Uncle Remus) and but also an entire dance band and chorus in blackface, with co-star Marjorie Reynolds forced to model exaggerated lips and a particularly obnoxious get-up. (One curious note: a cutaway to lovable Louise Beavers as the inn’s cook; she was earlier the  mother of Imitation of Life’s “tragic mulatto” child.)