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

                            

 

The Rashomon Mishmash that is “Les Girls”

Which Hollywood film borrows something from Akira Kurosawa’s groundbreaking Rashomon and something from Marlon Brando’s biker persona in The Wild One? Give up? It’s an MGM musical comedy from 1957, titled Les Girls.

 As a longtime fan of bright, splashy Hollywood musicals, I looked forward to seeing a film directed by George Cukor, scored by Cole Porter, and starring Gene Kelly. Sadly, none of their talents are fully on display here. The words and music by Porter (for whom this was a final motion picture) are totally forgettable. The charm and precision of Cukor (I just rewatched Adam’s Rib for the umpteenth time) are only a sometime thing. Kelly, about to move on to producing and directing, still looks good and dances well, but he seems in this film to be ageing out of the romantic lead category. The three “girls” of the title do each have their moments, but the film itself is an odd hybrid of outrageous shenanigans, romantic passion, and musical comedy shtik. Still, it’s not the worst way to pass an evening at home on the couch.

  The film begins in a London courtroom, with one very posh matron suing another for libel. It seems Sybil (now Lady Wren) has published a tell-all memoir of her years in a cabaret performance troupe. In her best-seller she has detailed the suicide attempt of Angele, one of her dance colleagues, when a passionate romance went awry. Cut to Paris, where younger versions of the elegant British Sybil (Kay Kendall) and the perky American Joy (Mitzi Gaynor) are featured in a popular stage revue led by Barry Nichols (Gene Kelly). They are quickly joined, both on-stage and in a not-too-shabby Paris apartment, by a new recruit, the flirtatious French Angele (Taina Elg). Angele has a devoted French suitor back home in the provinces, but she is all too quick to make the moves on Barry, who responds with enthusiasm. Disaster strikes when Angele’s provincial (but hugely wealthy) fiancé shows up with his parents, thinking she’s in the nation’s capital to study nursing. She panics, ruins the evening’s performance, as well as—apparently—her romantic future on both fronts. Sadly, suicide seems the only way out, but she’s rescued just in time.

 Back in the British courtroom, we now get Angele’s testimony, which exonerates her completely while flashing back to Sybil’s (hilarious) drunken antics in that Paris apartment. Her condition prompts fisticuffs between the supportive Barry and Sybil’s own longtime suitor, a starchy British lord. Kendall’s uproarious tipsiness in this section reminds us what a boon she was to the entertainment world before her all-too-early death at age 37. The flashback ends with an account of a suicide attempt not by Angele but by Sybil herself.

 On Day 3 of the trial, Barry himself shows up as a surprise witness. In HIS version (this is how the Rashomon analogy fits in), neither Sybil nor Angele successfully captured his romantic attention. And the suicide attempts in each woman’s courtroom story have a very different explanation, which winds up ending the trial with good will restored all around. Or is it?

 How does Marlon Brando fit into all this? There are, of course, a number of dance numbers in the film, all choreographed by Hollywood legend Jack Cole. Some are lurid, one tries hard to be risqué, all are well danced. But the best of them features Kelly and Mitzi Gaynor. She’s a lovelorn café proprietor; he’s a biker (like Brando’s Johnny) with a black leather jacket and a gang of henchmen. Things quickly get steamy: definitely worth the price of admission. 

 

China Dolls? Anna May Wong and “Joy Ride”

Anna May Wong? Who exactly was she? Fans of Old Hollywood remember her as an “exotic” (though American-born) actress, mostly cast as self-sacrificing Madam Butterfly types or as a sinister Dragon Lady. The most outrageous moment of her career (basically 1919-1961) came in 1935, when MGM denied her the leading role of O-lan, the sympathetic Chinese peasant in Pearl Buck’s bestselling The Good Earth. The part went instead to Luise Rainer, a German actress who won an Oscar for playing O-lan in yellowface. The word is that Wong was screen-tested to play the seductress Lotus in The Good Earth, though it is not clear whether she was rejected by her studio or indignantly turned the part down.

  My colleague Carl Rollyson, an extraordinarily prolific biographer and chronicler of biography as an art form, recently published a piece in the New York Sun assessing what has come to be a boomlet of books on Anna May Wong’s career. Now that people of Asian heritage are slowly being acknowledged as part of the American scene, the time seems ripe to survey those who’ve come before. I read Carl’s column with great interest, partly because my own growing-up years had important links to Japan and partly because I’d just seen (in the wee hours on a trans-Atlantic flight)  a recent flick called Joy Ride.

 There was a time, of course, when actors from Asian backgrounds were rarely at the center of any Hollywood production. In 1961, two decades after The Good Earth, I remember the very Caucasian Alec Guinness being cast as a Japanese businessman with a romantic streak in A Majority of One and a bucktoothed Mickey Rooney in a cringeworthy performance as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Actual Asian women seemed to have slightly more opportunity: though the 1956 comedy Teahouse of the August Moon starred Marlon Brando as a wily Okinawan interpreter, the lovable geisha role was played by a genuine Japanese actress, Machiko Kyo, who had previously starred for the great Kurosawa in Rashomon. In the splashy 1957 romantic drama, Sayonara,  Miiko Taka played opposite Marlon Brando in a story of two post-war love affairs between  American soldiers and Japanese civilians. The same film featured Miyoshi Umeki, who won a Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Red Buttons’ doomed Japanese bride.

 These roles for Asian (and Asian-American) women have tended to showcase them as demure and loving. But in recent years it has started to seem OK to be both Asian and funny, even brash. The burgeoning career of Awkwafina has surely helped move things in that direction, and the success of Crazy Rich Asians is another indicator that Asian (and Asian-American) actors can be as outrageous as anyone else in Hollywood. Then of course there’s the Oscar-nabbing Everything Everywhere All At Once, which introduced some moviegoers to both screen veteran Michelle Yeoh and busy newcomer Stephanie Hsu. Having gotten critical acclaim for playing both Yeoh’s daughter Joy Wang and arch-villain Jobu Tubaki in the Daniels’ absurdist film, Hsu is also highly visible in this year’s Joy Ride, a female-and-Asian take on the kind of raunchy road trip movie that has previous featured white males (The Hangover) and Black females (Girls Trip). Joy Ride begins with the stereotypical high-achieving Asian-American lawyer (Ashley Park), sending her to Beijing along with her hot-to-trot childhood friend (Sherry Cola), an androgynous cousin (Sabrina Wu), and a star of Chinese TV with secrets of her own (Hsu). Their language is raw, and some of their adventures are grotesque, before the inevitable upbeat ending. Who says blondes have more fun?

 

The Academy Museum: Some Exhibits You Can’t Refuse

 So what’s new at the Academy Museum, that Wilshire Blvd. monument to the art and science of filmmaking? The museum has always promised to evolve over time. Now that it’s been open for more than a year, several exhibits have departed and been replaced by others. In the space formerly occupied by an in-depth look at The Wizard of Oz, there’s now an even more impressive focus on The Godfather. Writer-director Francis Ford Coppola, bless him, has apparently documented his every impulse regarding the first Godfather film in particular. For me, as a teacher of screenwriting, it was a thrill to see a notebook made up of the pages of Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel, with Coppola’s scribblings marking his evolving plans for bringing Puzo’s text to the screen through dialogue and visual cues. 

 In the Godfather section, there are also film clips aplenty. Some of my favorites showcase the various actors auditioning for the roles of Michael, Kay, and Don Vito Corleone. I learned that Coppola had Al Pacino’s look in his head from the start, even though his studio backers tried to hint that a blond like Robert Redford could be perceived as northern Italian. I also learned the lengths to which Coppola had to go in assuring his bosses that the often difficult Marlon Brando would be worth hiring for the title role. And costume sketches show how the creative team tried to set Michael’s WASP-y lady love apart from those with Italian roots by way of costuming and hair color. The importance of ambient sound is highlighted by a long clip from a scene in a Bronx trattoria that starts out amiably and ends with a brutal double murder.

 A few steps from the large Godfather exhibit is the small gallery devoted to costume design. I was surprised and pleased to see that the costumes I had remembered being on display (like Marilyn Monroe’s glittery red gown from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the bizarre floral raiment from Midsommar) had been replaced by alternatives, like the black velvet young-boy suit worn by Mary Pickford as the star of Little Lord Fauntleroy. There are also new video interviews featuring costume designer Anne Roth, makeup department head Joel Harlow, and hair designer  Yolanda Toussieng. I liked Roth’s steely insistence that she doesn’t design to please celebrities. Even though a major star may hate the color yellow, Roth goes ahead with her artistic plans if it’s determined that yellow is the character’s favorite color. Meanwhile Harlow explains in detail how and why he created exotic head tattoos for Black Panther. And Toussieng reminisces about how, to suggest a sort of topiary look for Edward Scissorhands, she invented radical cuts (and wigs!) not only for human actors but also for the  pooches cast in the film.

 My main goal in visiting the museum was to see the massive new full-floor exhibit called “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971.” I learned a lot in the first few rooms about how Black cinema evolved out of Vaudeville, featuring such stars as Bert Williams. There’s info about the first Black actor to play Uncle Tom in an early version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (formerly the role had been taken by white actors in blackface.) And a stunning installation reminds us that in many local movie theatres, “colored” audiences were required to watch from the balcony. The heart of the exhibit is the period, much loved by my parents, when musically gifted Black performers were being featured. Who knew that there once were “soundies,” in which musicians like Fats Waller performed their latest hits in two-minute film clips?