They Could Have Been Contenders: The Hollywood Blacklist

I’m just back from a week in Washington, DC. To my surprise, the nation’s capital currently seems a lot more bipartisan than I would have guessed. Yes, there were giant Trump portraits hanging from some prominent government buildings. But I also saw a major Washington boulevard shut down on behalf of a wild and crazy Gay Pride festival. And overt dissent was on display nearby: outside a tent manned by some dedicated anti-Trumpers, I spotted a large placard that gave MAGA a new definition: Make Algae Great Again.

 Washington’s wonderful Smithsonian museums (open daily and free to all comers) seemed as welcoming and as even-handed as ever, pointing up our nation’s failings but also its glories.  Some of the city’s private museums, though, were clearly interested in viewing today’s deep political divide in the context of past eras that were equally contentious. That certainly seemed part of the reason the Capital Jewish Museum is now hosting an exhibit called “Blacklisted: An American Story.” Its focus is on the era—starting in 1947 and lasting until the early Sixties—when the House Un-American Activities Committee was terrorizing Hollywood, forcing the major studios to remove from their ranks anyone (Jewish or otherwise) who had ever been sympathetic to the Communist party. (The only way to return to the film industry’s good graces in that era was to dish up the names of others whose politics were—or had ever been—suspect.)

 As part of this exhibit, the museum showed a series of film clips relevant to the blacklist period. Two of the films were directed by Elia Kazan. Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) makes a brave argument against the built-in anti-Semitism of that era; the clip from On the Waterfront (1954) shows Marlon Brando as a longshoreman and would-be boxer climatically choosing to risk everything by bringing a mob boss to justice. Because Kazan was infamously known as one of those who “named names” to save his own career, many in Hollywood never forgave him. Orson Welles, for one, disparaged the latter film as “a celebration of the informant.”

 Three films written by Dalton Trumbo are also included in this montage. Two are from 1960, when the once-disgraced Trumbo was finally able to resume getting on-screen credit for his work. After writing Spartacus, he was championed by star Kirk Douglas, to whom he said, “Thanks, Kirk, for giving me back my name.” On earlier Trumbo films that appeared during the blacklist era, Trumbo had had to submit each of his scripts under a fictive monicker, or that of another writer. The screenwriting Oscar he won in 1954 for crafting under an assumed name the delightful (and totally apolitical) Roman Holiday was not awarded to him until 1993, almost three decades after his death.

 The exhibit also focuses on the sad example of John Garfield, one of many actors whose careers (and lives) were destroyed during the blacklist years. Garfield (born Jacob Garfinkle on New York’s Lower East Side) was a longtime supporter of liberal causes. He began appearing in major Hollywood films in 1938, usually in blue-collar roles, and was twice nominated for Oscars, notably for his lead role in the 1947 boxing film, Body and Soul. But his refusal to speak against his wife (once a member of the Communist Party) as well as his unwillingness to provide the House committee with the names of other Hollywood “Reds” ultimately destroyed him. He died of a heart attack in 1932 at the age of 39, just after a dream project in which he was to star was abruptly cancelled.

Despite it all, Happy 4^th of July!

John Garfield, with quote from his daughter

                            

 

Elegy Written in a Westwood Burial Ground

Recently I attended an event both sad and uplifting:  a memorial service for Frances Doel, who was Roger Corman’s right-hand woman for decades. The high esteem in which she was held by everyone who knew her was indicated by the who’s-who list of attendees, including producer Gale Anne Hurd, who credits Frances with being the very first to read and support her and James Cameron’s landmark script for Terminator.

 Frances’ celebration of life, wonderfully stage-managed by her sister Rosemary, was held at what is now called Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park. As cemeteries go, it’s tiny, and tucked away behind office towers that make it hard to find. But it dates back to 1905, and has been an interment site of choice for many well-known members of the Hollywood community. That’s why it’s a popular draw for tourists. L.A. has several celebrated burial sites that attract looky-loos. Hollywood Forever cemetery near Paramount Studios boasts the celebrated wall crypt that holds the remains of Rudolf Valentino and for years was ritually visited by the mysterious Lady in Black. (Hollywood Forever also hosts an annual summer film series on its sprawling lawn.)

 Westwood Village Memorial Park is known, first and foremost, as the final resting place of Marilyn Monroe. I couldn’t resist seeking out her site, and admiring the fresh flowers in a vase next to her wall plaque. Famously, right next door to Marilyn is Playboy honcho Hugh Hefner, although his flowers are fake (which seems rather apt). On my leisurely stroll through the premises on a very hot day, I missed many other famous names: among them Burt Lancaster, Natalie Wood, Dean Martin, Ray Bradbury, and Billy Wilder. Still,  I saw some historic resting places, like that of early director Josef von Sternberg, celebrated today for directing Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. Kirk and Anne Douglas share a simple space that also bears a poignant reference to their troubled son Eric, who died young. Screenwriter Ernest Lehman’s gravestone sums up a busy, fulfilling life; composer Ray Coniff’s boasts a snatch of one of his most popular musical themes. Carl Wilson of The Beachboys is memorialized as “the heart and voice of an angel.” Soul singer Minnie Riperton (mother of Maya Rudolph), is honored by the presence of some actual CD’s of her work. Any native Angeleno will be especially moved, I think, by the joint resting place of Harry and Marilyn Lewis, whose Hamburger Hamlet restaurant chain was the backdrop for our growing-up years.

 Most eccentric gravesites? Comic actor Don Knotts has a plaque etched with images of him in highly familiar roles, like Mayberry Deputy Barney Fife. The splashiest site I saw belonged to German-born filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen, whose most celebrated work was 1981’s World War II submarine drama, Das Boot. (His ample section boasts candles, a world globe, landscaping, and a lot of fabric roses.) I also appreciated the sites of more modest Hollywood figures, like one Jeff Morris, whose plaque describes him as fine actor, and records what must have been a favorite phrase: “weather permitting.”

 But of course not everyone interred here has a Hollywood connection. I don’t know who Rita Kaslov was, but her stone contains her photo, as well as the information that she was a psychic. At bottom, passers-by can read an advertisement for her services: there’s the image of a hand, fingers  outstretched, and the announcement that she offers $5 palm readings. It’s impossible to say where the late Rita is now, but I’m sure she has gained a lot of insights since she shuffled off this mortal coil.

PS I couldn't resist looking up the gravestone for writer/director Billy Wilder, famous for (among many others) Some Like It Hot.  It reads: "I'M A WRITER. BUT THEN .  . . NOBODY'S PERFECT." 

R.I.P. Val Kilmer (and Tombstone’s Doc Holliday)

Sometimes it seems that Val Kilmer made a specialty of portraying men who die young. At least, that’s the impression I got after watching his electrifying performances as Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991) and as a tubercular Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1992). Still, Kilmer remained very much alive as the warrior Madmartigan in George Lucas and Ron Howard’s fantasy epic Willow (1988), in which he was upstaged by tiny Warwick Davis but also chanced to meet his real-life wife-to-be, Joanne Whalley. (They fell for one another on the set, and Howard obligingly re-shot their love scenes to take advantage of the budding romance. Fairytales do tend to come to an end, however. Though they wed in 1988 and had two children together, the couple divorced in 1996.)

 Kilmer’s “Iceman” character in Top Gun (1986) was also a survivor, living long enough to show up in the film’s decades-later sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. Still, when the sequel was shot in 2022, Kilmer’s voice was so affected by treatments for throat cancer that it had to be digitally altered to add clarity. Sadly, Top Gun: Maverick was Kilmer’s final performance. He died on April 1, 2025: at sixty-five he was by no means a youngster, but many of us had hoped for additional cinematic brilliance from him.   

 Tombstone, at its essence, is essentially the story of two gangs—a group of local Arizona lawmen (three of them brothers) versus a loosely organized cluster of cattle rustlers and horse thieves who called themselves the Cowboys. At the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, several men on both sides went down. The thirty-second shootout was followed up by later skirmishes, in which much blood was shed on both sides. Various versions of the story—which became widely known only after Earp’s death and a popular book about him—show up in a number of films, starting with 1939’s Frontier Marshal, which starred Randolph Scott and Cesar Romero. Then there was John Ford’s 1945 My Darling Clementine followed by the 1957 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which starred Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as his buddy, Doc Holliday.

 I suspect that Tombstone, directed by George P. Cosmatos, was intended to be the last word on the subject. Certainly, its cast is chockful of famous names.  It seems as though every red-blooded male in Hollywood wanted to take part in this semi-true tale of law-and-order on the American frontier. In addition to Kilmer and top-billed Kurt Russell (as reluctant lawman Wyatt Earp), the film features such established names as Powers Boothe, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Jason Priestley, Thomas Haden Church, and Billy Zane. Dana Delany of China Beach fame is the female lead in a movie that is predictably short on women’s roles. (Yes, she plays  a gal with a checkered sexual history.) Ageing Charlton Heston , not long before his 2002 retirement from acting, takes on a small but key part in the proceedings, and none other than Robert Mitchum serves as the film’s narrator.

 Though Tombstone pits lawmen against renegades, the story is such that it’s often hard to tell them apart. Earp and Holliday seem at times no less bloodthirsty than the Cowboys. This puts me in mind of the response, back in 1967, to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, decried then by many for its level of on-screen violence. As film scholar Robert Alan Kolker put it, “Penn showed the way: Bonnie and Clyde opened the bloodgates, and our cinema has barely stopped bleeding since.”   Now Bonnie and Clyde seems rather tame. Today, there will be blood.  

 

Listing the Deceptions in “Adrian Messenger”

 

The List of Adrian Messenger, directed by John Huston in 1963, begins with a joke on the audience. We just don’t know, until the film is practically over, where it’s going. The film begins in classic thriller style, with a mysterious old man casing an ornate bank building that is closed for the night. Slipping inside the darkened lobby, he manipulates some levers, and an elevator comes crashing down. Someone, we gather, has just plunged to his death. Whereupon the old man slips out into the darkness and disappears.

 When the main titles come up, we’re surprised to see (against a swirling backdrop of distinctive faces) the names of some of the biggest male Hollywood stars of the mid-century: Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum,  Frank Sinatra. Then there’s another card: Starring George C. Scott. Say what? As we launch into a classic whodunit in which Scott (using an unconvincing British accent) investigates his friend’s death after a mysterious plane crash, the movie seems to be all about unearthing a revenge plot that may date back to the Burma campaign in World War II. But of course for the viewer the real mystery is this: when are those famous movie stars going to make an appearance?

 This was the era when Hollywood studios were desperately looking for ways to counteract the rising popularity of television. One idea was to dazzle potential moviegoers with spectacle; another was to give glimpses of major celebrities, the sort who wouldn’t be caught dead appearing on TV. I well remember the brouhaha surrounding the 1956 release of Around the World in Eighty Days, a blockbuster that was named Best Picture at the Oscars but is virtually unwatchable today. (I saw it at the Carthay Circle, an ornate movie palace that – alas – has long since been replaced by an office building. There were fancy theatre programs in the lobby, and even a special curtain designed to show off in comic fashion the movie’s various thrills.) This elaborate telling of the classic Jules Verne adventure tale, with David Niven in the leading role and a young Shirley MacLaine as the Indian (!) lovely he rescues, was not considered enticing enough to lure Fifties audiences. Instead, the film is crammed with 48 celebrity cameos – hey look! There’s Sinatra at the piano in that saloon!  And Marlene Dietrich at a table!

 Buoyed by the film’s success, other movies reached for the same gimmick. I remember something called Pepe, starring the Mexican comic Cantinflas, who’d been introduced to the English-speaking world as Phileas Fogg’s sidekick in Around the World in Eighty Days. In Pepe (1960) he journeys to Hollywood to retrieve a beloved horse, giving him the opportunity to hobnob humorously with legendary movie stars. And How the West Was Won (1962) used three directors, heaps of stars, and wide-screen technology to tell a vast frontier tale.  But The List of Adrian Messenger is different in that its famous faces are hidden behind elaborate makeup, only to be unmasked just before the final fadeout. Major kudos to Bud Westmore of the long-lived  Hollywood family for his false-face designs.

 To my disappointment, I’ve learned that the disguised cameos—much touted in the media upon the film’s release—were in some cases total fakes. Yes, we see the celebrities remove their phony faces at the end, but that’s not really Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster fooling the audience with facial prosthetics and exotic accents. Actor Jan Merlin, a latter-day Roger Corman alumnus, apparently stood in for Kirk Douglas in some of his disguises.

 Yes, the laugh’s on us.

 

Biopics: Hailing Two Great Ladies of Song

Hollywood always seems ready to launch another biopic. In the early days of talkies, studios rushed to immortalize famous men on film, resulting in the fawning treatment of such historical figures as Sam Houston, Abraham Lincoln, and waltz king Johann Strauss. Accuracy was not exactly the goal: a 1929 flick starring George Arliss made a long-ago prime minister of Great Britain sound like an action hero: “Benjamin Disraeli outwits the subterfuge of the Russians and chicanery at home in order to secure the purchase of the Suez Canal.” As the decades wore on, America’s top actors vied to play high-achievers whose lives were picturesquely tortured. Kirk Douglas, portraying Vincent Van Gogh in the 1956 biopic, Lust for Life, was honored with an Oscar nomination. And Anthony Quinn, as Van Gogh’s frenemy, Paul Gauguin, went home with a Supporting Actor statuette for the same film.

  Which suggests there’s gold to be gained by playing a real historical figure with a compelling life story. Like Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan: both Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft (yes, Mrs. Robinson herself) won Oscars for their roles. More recently, biopics of major entertainment figures like Richie Valens (La Bamba, with Lou Diamond Phillips), Jim Morrison (The Doors, with Val Kilmer), and Ray Charles (Ray, an Oscar-winning role for Jamie Foxx) have heaped accolades on actors while reminding us of the huge talents we have lost.

 Just two years ago, Rami Malek nabbed an Oscar for his flamboyant portrayal of Queen’s Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. Not long thereafter, another gay rocker, Elton John, was vividly portrayed by Taron Egerton in Rocketman. These things go in cycles: now it seems to be the turn of African-American musical divas with complex family histories.

Of course I’m thinking about this year’s The United States vs. Billie Holiday, for which singer/songwriter Andra Day has already picked up a Best Actress Golden Globe. She’s also now an Oscar contender for this role. It’s a powerhouse performance, one that asks her to approximate Holiday’s unique singing style while also conveying the lady’s painful life. This is hardly the first time Holiday has been portrayed on the big screen: back in 1972, Diana Ross starred in Lady Sings the Blues, for which she too earned an Oscar nom. (In that same landmark year for Black women, Cicely Tyson was nominated for Sounder, but both lost to Liza Minnelli’s iconic performance in Cabaret). The focus for Ross’s portrayal was on Billie Holiday’s heroin addiction. This year’s film, by contrast, tells the fascinating true story of how J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI went after Holiday (even sending a young Black agent to pose as a super-fan) because of the political implications of her show-stopping ballad, “Strange Fruit.” It’s a tale worth telling, but director Lee Daniels, never known for subtlety, crams the screen with intertwining subplots, so that we’re never entirely certain who’s doing what to whom.

While Andra Day is lighting up the screens of whatever movie houses are open these days, the talented Cynthia Erivo is portraying Aretha Franklin in a multi-part segment of the cable-TV series called Genius. Less glamorous than Billie Holiday, Franklin lived a life that had its own challenges, including a domineering father who was a superstar preacher. I saw the first episode, which introduced us to the child who grew up to be the Queen of Soul as well as the young woman whose grasp of how she wanted to sing was already secure. And an Aretha biopic starring Jennifer Hudson is on its way to the multiplexes this summer. Genius indeed!

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