The Several Faces of Laura

 Laura? She’s the face in a misty light, footsteps that you hear down the hall, the laugh that floats on a summer night. These words come from Johnny Mercer’s memorable lyrics to “Laura,” a jazz standard that was written by David Raksin to underscore Otto Preminger’s 1944 romantic thriller of that name. It was because of that evocative music that I ended up watching Laura once again.  

 When the “Laura” theme turned up on my classical music station, I immediately recalled the Preminger film. In my mind’s eye, I could easily picture the cast: Gene Tierney as the beautiful but potentially tragic Laura; Dana Andrew as the clean-cut cop who falls in love with her portrait; Judith Anderson as her cold-blooded aunt; Vincent Price as the parasitic Shelby Carpenter. Most of all, I recollected Clifton Webb’s matchless portrayal of newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker, whose involvement in Laura’s sad fate is more complex than it first appears. Lydecker, of course, is a smug little man known for his sharp wit and vicious tongue. As he quips, discussing his writing methods, “I don’t use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.” He’s the character who has most of the film’s best lines: no wonder Webb was the sole acting nominee from Laura in a year that also featured Gaslight and Double Indemnity, along with unlikely winner Going My Way.

 One thing I learned from my local classical music station: Preminger was determined to build his film around a very different musical theme, Duke Ellington’s 1933 “Sophisticated Lady.” It’s a great tune, of course, but one that by 1944 was very well known. When Preminger, a man whose word was law on a movie set, announced to composer David Raksin his plans to use the Ellington piece, Raksin had an immediately objection. The tune, he argued, was just too familiar to evoke the mystery of Laura. Preminger gave Raksin a weekend to come up with something better. Happily for all of us, he did.

 The music, though, is not the only thing to admire about Laura . There’s its striking Oscar-winning black & white cinematography, its elegant costumes, its well-matched cast. It’s only in the afterglow of The End that the viewer stops to ponder character motivations that just don’t make much sense. The film was based on a best-selling novel by the once-hugely-popular Vera Caspary. Perhaps in novel form the murky doings of central characters might have seemed more convincing. In any case, Laura was a huge hit for Twentieth Century-Fox. When I wrote about it previously for Beverly in Movieland (March 26, 2013), I had just come from a big-screen showing of the film as part of the L.A. Cinematheque’s annual Noir City series. My friend and film noir expert Alan K. Rode was on hand to explain how Preminger became the director as well as the producer of Laura, despite a serious falling out with Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck over a previous project.

 I won’t repeat Alan’s full explanation here, except to say that Zanuck’s first choice for director was the well-established Rouben Mamoulian, who had made cinema history via his experiments with sound in 1929’s Applause, while also directing such landmark Broadway shows as Oklahoma! and Porgy and Bess. But because of questionable casting choices and an insistence that Laura’s essential portrait be painted by his own artist-wife, Mamoulian got the boot. I saw her work hanging on the walls when I interviewed an aged Mamoulian in his home, and I’m convinced that his firing was all to the good.

 

Sounding Out: Mamoulian, Rodgers, Hart, and “Isn’t It Romantic?”

There was a time, soon after The Jazz Singer broke the sound barrier for motion pictures, when movie musicals were all the rage. Every studio wanted to make flicks that could boast “all talking-all singing-all dancing.” (Singin’ in the Rain, the Golden Age musical from 1952, captures the frenzied efforts of that earlier era to capitalize on early sound technology. This Gene Kelly vehicle exaggerates for comic effect the challenge posed by sound, but not all that much. Yes, early microphones were large and cumbersome; soundstages were overheated to the point of feeling like saunas; many popular stars of the silent era simply didn’t know how to talk, or sing, in an appealing way.)

I was highly fortunate, back in 1982, to interview a pioneer of motion picture sound. We met in the Hollywood Hills in a villa-like home that was crawling with cats. Rouben Mamoulian, an Armenian from Tibilisi, Georgia, came to America in 1922 to direct theatre and opera. He directed the original Porgy on Broadway, then was sought out by Hollywood in 1929. His Applause, a backstage drama shot that same year, was a landmark early talkie, praised by film historians for its innovation use of camera and sound. Later Mamoulian went on to shoot such films as the Frederic March version of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), as well as Queen Christina with Greta Garbo and Golden Boy with William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck. He also returned to Broadway to stage the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, and spent much of the 1940s helming innovative stage musical  hits: Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Lost in the Stars.

Late in his career, Mamoulian had some notable Hollywood disasters: he was fired from the Technicolor film adaptation of Porgy and Bess after shooting only one scene, and later resigned from the notorious Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton Cleopatra. His very last complete film, shot in 1957 when he was sixty years old, was another musical, Silk Stockings. Starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, it was a Technicolor version of the 1937 Garbo comedy, Ninotchka.

But I want to focus here on Mamoulian’s interaction with two of Broadway’s favorite sons, the musical team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Rodgers and Hart, who started out writing comic songs for the undergrads of Columbia University, became the toasts of the Great White Way via a long string of sparkling musical entertainments, with Rodgers responsible for music and Hart supplying the witty lyrics. Their plots tended to be forgettable, but they contributed to the Great American Songbook such tunes as  “(I’ll Take) Manhattan,” “Mountain Greenery,” “Where or When,”  “My Funny Valentine,” and “The Lady is a Tramp.” Their most famous show, Pal Joey, eventually became a Frank Sinatra musical that incorporated several of the Rodgers and Hart standards written for earlier shows, changed the cold-hearted Joey from a dancer to a singer, and redeemed him to create a happy ending.

Pal Joey was filmed in 1967, seventeen years after the play surfaced on Broadway and long after Hart’s death. But a younger Rodgers and Hart had been brought out to Hollywood circa 1932 to provide music for a Maurice Chevalier vehicle, Love Me Tonight, in which a romantically-inclined tailor falls in love with a princess (Jeanette MacDonald). The opening song, “Isn’t it Romantic?”, was brilliantly staged by Mamoulian to take advantage of what a motion picture camera and sound equipment can do. The song begins with Chevalier in his tailor shop, then moves outdoors to cover the quaint locale and its citizens, before finally ending up on the lips of princess Jeanette. Isn’t it inventive?    

Fiddling Around with “Golden Boy”

It seems that there’s always a boxing movie or two in theatres. At the moment, we have Hands of Stone, with Robert De Niro playing not a boxer (see Raging Bull) but the trainer of real-life boxer Roberto Duran. Last year there was Creed, with Sylvester Stallone graduating from being Rocky the prize-fighter to Rocky the trainer of his former opponent’s son. Also last year, Jake Gyllenhaal bulked up to play a boxer in Southpaw. It was not so long ago that Christian Bale won an Oscar for The Fighter (which also featured Mark Wahlberg), while Russell Crowe impersonated boxer James Braddock in Cinderella Man. Then there are oldies like Body and Soul (1947); Kirk Douglas achieved stardom by playing the corruptible Midge Kelly in the 1949 boxing film, Champion, which was producer Stanley Kramer’s first big Hollywood achievement. 

But I’m here to write about the granddaddy of them all, 1939’s Golden Boy, based on a Broadway hit drama by Clifford Odets, who knew a great deal about downtrodden lives in New York City during the Depression era. The premise, approached with high seriousness on the screen, sounds almost comic in the telling: a young man with a talent for boxing can’t decide whether or not he’d really rather be playing the violin. Several major characters are determined to help him make up his mind. On the side of music and an impoverished but noble life in the arts is Joe Bonaparte’s Italian immigrant papa (Lee J. Cobb), who agrees with Joe’s sentiment that “a prizefight is an insult to a man’s soul.” The other point of view is represented by Joe’s new manager, Tom Moody (Adolphe Menjou), along with Moody’s fiancée, a self-styled “dame from Newark” played with gusto by Barbara Stanwyck. These two are quick to point out that success in the ring can lead to money and respect . . .  not to mention the possibility of Stanwyck’s favors.

The pivotal role of Joe Bonaparte -- who’s got to look convincing both punching out opponents in the ring and gently fiddling Brahms’ Cradle Song (“Lullaby and good night . . “) in his father’s living room -- was won by a Hollywood newcomer named William Holden. In a word, he is sensational. The part calls for him to have a mean streak, as well as a side that’s profoundly gentle, and he manages to persuade us that this character contains both possibilities. The cast is also full of colorful stage types: a dapper gangster (Joseph  Calleia); a Jewish socialist buddy of his father (William H. Strauss); Joe’s giggly married sister (Beatrice Blinn) and her always-hustling spouse (Sam Levene). Directing the film is a Broadway and Hollywood legend, Rouben Mamoulian. Mamoulian’s illustrious career included the stage premieres of Porgy and Bess (1935), Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945). As a movie director, he was responsible for 1929’s Applause. This early musical, starring Helen Morgan, was a landmark in the development of modern camera and sound technologies. The last film Mamoulian directed was also a musical, 1957’s Silk Stockings, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. (He also was fired from, or resigned from, some other notable films: 1944’s Laura, 1959’s film version of Porgy and Bess, and the infamous Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton production of Cleopatra).

Mamoulian was  born in Tiflis (now Tibilisi), Georgia, in 1897, when it was still part of the Russian Empire. He survived until 1987, when he died at age 90. I visited him in his Beverly Hills home circa 1978. The place was crawling with cats . . . but that’s a subject for another day.