Counting Down the Hours with “The Clock”

I’m discovering that, in tough societal times like these, I truly appreciate movies that take me to an earlier era. It’s good to see that people can survive—even thrive—during dark days. Perhaps that’s why I’ve reacted so positively to The Clock, a 1945 romantic drama directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring his soon-to-be wife, Judy Garland, in her first non-singing dramatic role. Set against the backdrop of World War II, The Clock gives a happy ending to a tale that is best described as pure wish-fulfillment fantasy.

 The Clock begins with boyish-looking Robert Walker, in full military uniform, arriving at New York’s Grand Central Station. He’s a young American G.I., on weekend leave from training camp, and he’s come to the Big Apple to look around. I  couldn’t help comparing this opening section to the naïve young sailors on shore leave in a great 1945 musical—and subsequent 1949 film—On the Town, which like The Clock celebrates romance but hints at a world war always lurking in the background. 

  It’s quickly established that Walker’s character, Joe, is a small-town fellow, one who’s encountering for the first time such wonders as an escalator. While hanging out aimlessly in the station, he accidentally trips a pert young lady, whose heel snaps off of her stylish spectator pump. Mortified, Joe manages to get the shoe repaired, then wonders if he can tag along with its wearer (who of course is Garland) as she heads home from work. Garland’s Alice is naturally wary of this stranger. But she’s a good-hearted soul and finally agrees to meet him for dinner. Their rendezvous spot: under the clock in the lobby of the Astor Hotel.

 The clock, of course, soon becomes a symbol of the swift passage of time. As the two get to know each other, a dinner date turns into a romantic walk in Central Park. (The camera’s s-l-o-w build-up to the first big kiss is rather hilarious.) Suddenly it’s midnight, too late for Alice to catch a bus back to her working-class neighborhood. Cabs, as always in NYC, are nearly impossible to get, so Al, a friendly milkman making early morning deliveries, offers them a ride in his van. But the van gets a flat tire; the three enter an all-night café to call Al’s company; a drunk attacks poor Al and knocks him out. After the van is repaired, Joe takes over the driving, and he and Alice work together to make all the deliveries on Al's route in record time. Al, now recovered, invites them to his home for breakfast; his loyal wife greets them warmly, and the conversation turns to the homey joys of married life.

 Now it’s Saturday morning, and the pair have agreed to spend together the waning hours  before Joe’s early Sunday departure. Enter the challenges of the New York subway system. In a crowded station, Alice is forced onto a train car, leaving Joe behind. Their search for each other becomes frantic (if only they had cell phones!), made more desperate by the fact that they don’t know one another’s full names.  But, since this is a fairy-tale, they do at last reunite—and agree that they never want to be parted again. And so they take steps to make their love permanent, via matrimony.

 It's the love-conquers-all ending we’re rooting for, one that I’m sure was highly necessary in wartime. By 2025 standards, though, the lovers seem painfully naïve.  Ironically, both Garland and Walker found no lasting happiness in marriage. Both turned to drink and drugs, and died young.  

 Thanks to Danish Qureshi for alerting me to a careless error that made my storytelling VERY confusing. I've fixed it now. 

 

 

 

 

Liza Minnelli: A Star Was Born

The new documentary,  Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story, made me curious about the movie career of one of Broadway’s favorite song-and-dance divas, Liza Minnelli. After all, Liza (still alive and kicking at age 78) is the daughter of two charter members of the Hollywood pantheon, director Vincente Minnelli and the incomparable Judy Garland. 

Liza made her first screen appearance as a babe in arms at the end of one of her mother’s musical films, The Good Old Summertime (1949). Her first credited role came in 1967’s Charlie Bubbles, as an ingenue opposite Albert Finney, who both starred and directed. But it was in 1969 when she truly made a splash: her role as a needy college co-ed in something called The Sterile Cuckoo led to her nomination for a Best Actress Oscar, along with such dramatic icons as Genevieve Bujold (Anne of the Thousand Days), Jane Fonda (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?), Jean Simmons (The Happy Ending) and ultimate winner Maggie Smith (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). The following year she was featured as a disfigured young woman in another highly emotional dramedy, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. The death by overdose of forty-seven-year-old Judy Garland on June 22, 1969 had left Liza bereft just as she was entering young womanhood. Judy’s own youthful screen career had seen her frequently cast as a girl-next-door type, even though her huge singing voice contained paradoxical notes of what one critic has called “fragility and resilience.” For Liza, I would choose the word “waif.” Directors seemed to see in her someone who was hurting, but knew how to cover her grief with sheer pizzazz.

It all came together for Minnelli in 1972, when she snagged the female lead in the film version of Cabaret. Director/choreographer Bob Fosse knew how to capitalize on her combination of little-girl-lost pathos and brassy insouciance (as well as her musical skills and her long, long legs) to fill out the character of Sally Bowles. Sally, who first appeared in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, was portrayed as the top chanteuse at the city’s seedy Kit Kat Klub, at a time when Hitler and his thugs were taking over German life. It was the perfect melding of performer and role, and it won her the Best Actress Oscar in 1973.. (Also in 1972, Minnelli scored another triumph with her televised concert film, Liza with a Z.)  

Though after 1972, Minnelli’s continuing screen success would have seemed assured, she ran into a series of roadblocks. Projects that looked good on paper—like 1975’s Lucky Lady and 1977’s New York, New York—turned out to be expensive flops. Liza herself faced health crises (exacerbated by recreational drug use) and went through a pack of mostly unsuitable husbands and lovers. She craved motherhood, but it was not to be. 

It wasn’t until 1981 that she had another bona fide hit movie, 1981’s Arthur, in which she plays a scrappy waitress who unexpectedly becomes the love interest of a childish (and generally drunk) millionaire, portrayed with gusto by Dudley Moore. To be honest, I watched Arthur again recently, and found  much of it rather repugnant. To me there’s nothing particularly hilarious about a falling-down drunk, even if he generally means well. But the film won an Oscar for John Gielgud’s portrayal of a cranky but endearing butler. And Minnelli and Moore have some charming moments—notably when, upon first meeting, they instantly launch into spritely husband-and-wife banter to conceal the fact that she’s just been apprehended for shoplifting an expensive tie. The waif, it seems, also rises. 

 

Liza Minnelli: Getting By With a Little Help from Her Friends

I have a faint recollection of seeing Liza Minnelli perform on television when she was a mere teenager. She was coltish, even gawky, and I suspected that she owed her spot on the tube to her legendary parents, singer/actress Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli. It’s certainly true that Liza has had, all her life, the twin advantages of money and connections. But the label of Poor Little Rich Girl truly fits her. She was all of twenty-three when her mother died of a barbiturate overdose. True to form, she jumped in to make the necessary arrangements, while also taking in hand her younger half-sister and half-brother.

Bruce David Klein’s new documentary, Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story, captures the now seventy-eight-year-old Minnelli in all her ebullient glory. We see her as she is now, still chain-smoking, still belting out that memorable cackle, still enjoying life to the fullest, and we also catch glimpses of her back when she was just starting out. Klein is a veteran TV writer, director, and producer whose work has explored a number of wildly assorted topics. I heard him speak at a screening presided over by my long-ago UCLA film critic buddy, Stephen Farber, and it was clear that Klein—like most of the world—had fallen under Liza’s spell. 

In crawling out from her mother’s shadow, Liza was blessed by a series of formative friendships. Always modest about her own accomplishments, she does credit herself with a talent for choosing mentors. Her godmother,  Kay Thompson, helped teach her to put pizzazz into her life. (Thompson, known for her “Think Pink” role in the film Funny Face, was also the author of the Eloise books about a precocious child who lives at New York’s Plaza Hotel. Minnelli herself is often considered one model for this supremely self-assured tyke.) The musical theatre team of John Kander and Fred Ebb were strong influences on her performance style, leading to her Oscar-winning performance in the film Cabaret as well as the much-lauded TV special, Liza with a Z. Bob Fosse served as her choreographer, finding unique ways to showcase her dance skills. When she needed to develop a personal style that distinguished her from her mother, Halston was on hand to create for her the glittery costumes that showed off her long dancer’s legs. (I learned from Klein that Liza, when on stage before a live audience, performs with such intensity that she tends to get sweaty. That’s why Halston turned to sequins to detract, with their sparkle, from her inevitable perspiration.)  

Though Liza’s circle of friends may seem glamorous, she doesn’t only hobnob with fellow celebrities, Much featured in the documentary are a retired dentist and his wife who’ve been close friends of Liza’s for decades. Over the years, she’s been closely connected with their children as well, and everyone who knows her speaks of her generosity. An example: when one Kander and Ebb musical, Chicago, was playing in its original Broadway run, star Gwen Verdon had to leave the production for several weeks to undergo surgery. There was a very real chance that her absence would cause the show to close. When she learned of the situation, Minnelli jetted in from Europe to play the Roxie Hart role, but insisted there be no big press release to tout her appearance. This was simply, in her mind, something she wanted to do to help friends who had always been there for her.  

Minnelli’s instruction  to documentarian Klein: “Don’t put in anything foolish.” What we see is the unvarnished Liza, not foolish at all. 

Dancing through Time: “Wicked”

Time marches on? Time dances on? I only know that I seem to have become too grown-up to thoroughly enjoy Wicked. Yes, of course I still love watching what happens to Dorothy and her pals when they journey from Munchkinland to the Emerald City in the classic 1939 film. It’s a movie I’ve adored since childhood when, months before I actually got taken to see it, I pasted a newspaper photo of Glinda and Dorothy in my scrapbook. The screening I was so excited about was, of course, an encore presentation. The film’s debut occurred long before I was born—and long before the movie industry had adopted basic safety practices to protect actors from harm. I strongly recommend Aljean Harmetz’s The Making of the Wizard of Oz, first published in 1977 and now available in an illustrated anniversary edition, to anyone who wants to read hair-raising stories of the dangerous conditions on that set. 

The 1939 production was hardly the first attempt to film L. Frank Baum’s classic children’s tale. I’m told there’s a silent version dating back to 1925. But after the success of the Judy Garland vehicle, Hollywood tried several times to film other of Baum’s Oz books, with mixed results. (Does anyone remember Fairuza Balk in 1985’s Return to Oz?) More inspiring was the screen version of the Broadway hit, The Wiz, in which the familiar story of Dorothy and her friends is re-imagined in an African-American context, with such stars as Diana Ross (Dorothy), Michael Jackson (as the Scarecrow), Lena Horne (Glinda), and Richard Pryor (The Wizard of Oz) giving an urban twist to the saga, which starts on the mean streets of Harlem instead of on the Kansas prairies.  

I’ll say this for Wicked: it’s a thorough rethinking of Baum’s original story. Wicked began as a 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire, subtitled The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. I found its prose rather ponderous, but it cleverly explores the nature of evil by looking at the evolution of a young woman named Elphaba from pathetic misfit to incarnation of all things witchy. The novel became a 2003 hit musical, thanks at least in part to Stephen Schwartz’s songs, with a big assist from the performances of Adina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth. (Both get nice little cameos in the film version.)

The new movie, which is certainly doing its share of saving the financially precarious film industry, is actually Wicked, Part I. It’s also, I trust, introducing a new generation to the joys of movie musicals. Under the direction of Jon M. Chu, who had previously scored with Crazy Rich Asians and the Lin Manuel Miranda musical, In the Heights, it is visually impressive, with the palace of Oz, the complicated hair-do of Madam Morrible, and the frilly all-pink wardrobe of Galinda all given loving attention. The singers really sing; the dancers really dance. And Chu’s openness to casting actors of many backgrounds—especially Cynthia Erivo as the green-skinned Elphaba—adds a nice subliminal message about society’s scorn for those whose skin is a different shade. 

So what’s not to like? I guess for me (but not for the younger folks with me, including a starry-eyed ten-year-old) the movie felt overly long and overly effortful. The very earnestness of the film’s social issues (which get tangled up with a subplot about the mistreatment of animals) seemed overwrought to the point of dullness. Yes, I loved Ariana Grande’s rendition of the show’s best song, “Popular,” But I’m not counting the days until we get to see Wicked, Part II. 

 

A Star is Born (Again)

Why, exactly, do we love movies about the making of movies? Showbiz seems like a glamorous , mysterious world that most of us aspire to enter. Many of us nurse private fantasies about a stardom we know we’ll never achieve, and there’s a perverse comfort in discovering that show business has its seamy side—and its tragic side—as well.  

 Curiously, in the early days of sound movies, most of the showbiz stories on the screen—pictures like Busby Berkeley’s 42^nd Street and Footlight Parade as well as chestnuts like Stage Door—were devoted to the challenge of putting on a theatrical production. It was Broadway that seemed most glamorous back then. Berkeley’s famous musical numbers, like the “By a Waterfall” extravaganza from Golddiggers of 1933, contained elements like scantily-clad chorines swimming in formation, gliding underwater, or sliding down waterfalls into welcoming lagoons. Such moments were often shot from above, and the joke was that they couldn’t possibly work in a Broadway theatre.

 Despite moviedom’s ongoing fascination with success on the Broadway stage, the 1930s also saw two popular flicks that chronicle a newcomer’s overnight rise to Hollywood stardom. In 1932, George Cukor directed Constance Bennett in What Price Hollywood?, the saga of a waitress who’s discovered by a film director with a drinking problem. She quickly achieves fame and fortune, while he spirals downward, with romantic complications galore. It was briefly popular, though no one pretended it was a realistic look at the film industry. A mere five years later, William Wellman directed Janet Gaynor and Frederic March in A Star is Born, which is quite similar to What Price Hollywood ? in its plotting, but adds the complication that Vicki Lester (née Esther Blodgett) loves and marries her champion, fading actor Norman Maine. The lavish production, which some say mirrored the troubled marriage of Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay, was enormously successful.

 Almost twenty years later, in 1954, Cukor took another crack at the material, which was to be his first musical and first Technicolor film. This version of A Star is Born showcases the powerful singing of Judy Garland, who was looking for a career comeback, as well as the dissolute complexity of the ageing thespian played by James Mason. (In his George Cukor’s People, film historian Joseph McBride calls this film, despite its studio butchering, Cukor’s very finest effort.)  The restored version I’ve just finished watching is 178 moments long, and there are some unusual tonal shifts from cheery musical comedy hijinks to downright tragedy, but this is the version to see. And hear: Garland belting “The Man That Got Away” is a moment not to be missed. (It was nominated for a Best Song Oscar, but—unthinkably—lost to the sweet, syrupy “Three Coins in the Fountain”).

 Making Esther into a singer opened the door for two further remakes featuring pop legends of the moment. The 1976 film, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, shifts the familiar story to the world of rock ‘n’ roll, adding onscreen sex, a soupçon of infidelity, and a really memorable poster.  The year 2018 saw Bradley Cooper’s re-imagining of the story, with Lady Gaga garnering raves for her first serious acting role.

 Who knows when the next version will show up? Maybe—why not?—it could involve an older female star and an appealing young male newcomer. After all, there’s nothing that says that the woman can’t be the knowledgeable veteran of Hollywood. But we as audience members wouldn’t easily accept that as anything but grotesque. See, after all, Sunset Boulevard. 

 

Film Geeks Cheer for LAist’s Film Week Extravaganza

Over the weekend, I attended what has become an annual bash beloved by many Angeleno film geeks. For 22 years, Larry Mantle—the on-air voice of hugely popular public radio station LAist 91.3—has hosted an Academy Awards preview show, on which all eleven of the station’s regular “Film Week” critics give their candid opinions about the race for Oscar gold. The show is taped for broadcasting later this week, but in-person audiences also enjoy watching film clips and applauding loudly for their own favorites.

 This is the second year that the show was staged at the Orpheum Theatre, on Downtown L.A.’s historic Broadway. The street is lined with old movie palaces, many of which have been converted over time into churches, clothing emporia, and Apple stores. The Orpheum, originally a vaudeville house (from 1926) with a Mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ, has played host to such stars as Will Rogers, Ella Fitzgerald, the Marx Brothers, and Judy Garland (as one of the singing Gumm sisters). It has also played a version of itself in movies like The Artist, A Mighty Wind, Barton Fink, and The Doors.

 This past Sunday, on the Orpheum stage, critics of various ages and outlooks vied with each other to make colorful pronouncements. One described the Best Supporting Actor race between Robert Downey Jr. (for Oppenheimer) and Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things) as Iron Man vs. The Hulk. Another, bringing up a particularly outrageous European film called Mad Heidi, opined, “It makes Poor Things look like On Golden Pond.” At times, the panelists seemed to be competing for the title of Most Curmudgeonly. One snarky older man, the only one who took the stage wearing a jacket and tie, avowed that only four of the Best Picture nominees deserved to be on the list.  And yet a critic praising Celia Song’s Past Lives quoted with admiration a line from the romantic film—“I didn’t know that liking your husband would hurt this much”—and explained that it had moved her to tears.

 It was fascinating to see which films got the most love from critics and audience members. This group was partial to witty flicks like American Fiction but also to those that are sensitive (Past Lives) or tough-minded (The Zone of Interest). Front-runner Oppenheimer garnered much enthusiasm, but Barbie too had her fans. Not so Killers of the Flower Moon or Maestro: I liked both these films a great deal, but seem to be in the minority. In some cases the discussion made me want to watch a film again: such is the case with the complex whodunit, Anatomy of a Fall. There was also much critical appreciation for a movie that didn’t rack up a single nomination, the British entry, All of Us Strangers.

 At the close of the show, audience members were able to ask questions of the panel. I often cringe when questioners use their spot at the microphone to show off their own smarts, but the questions asked at this event were pertinent, and elicited intelligent answers. Someone wanted to compare the Oscar chances of the sound designers behind the films Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest, in both of which the audio track plays a key role. Another man questioned the public’s declining interest in the annual Oscar broadcast. I didn’t ask a question, but belatedly wished I had. Several of the Robert Downey fans on the panel said he was “due” for an Oscar, after years of strong work. Here’s my question: should Oscars winners be chosen for one outstanding performance or for the legacy of an entire career?

 

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.)