These Three, Starring Merle Oberon, Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea (1936); Part of The Joel McCrea Blogathon

We are delighted to participate in Toby Roan’s Joel McCrea blogathon.  Toby is the mastermind behind the always-delightful 50 Westerns From the 50s blog (see link to your right), and Western lovers – and you know who you are – should visit regularly.

Joel McCrea (1905-1990) has long been one of our favorite actors.  He was equally terrific in comedies, dramas, love stories and westerns.  It would be hard to select a single McCrea performance as his definitive role, as it is really the body of his work that is most impressive.  Some actors – Clark Gable, Gary Cooper or Humphrey Bogart come to mind – often play extensions of themselves.  Their screen personas are so clearly delineated that they all play within the confines of their screen characters.

But McCrea’s art was more subtle.  It’s not that he always played himself so much as he always played … us.  One of the great (and certainly the most missed) inventions of the mid-20^th century was the idea of the American Everyman.  Sometimes comedic, sometimes crusading, always savvy, unfailingly honest and always representative of the best in ourselves, the American Everyman was an idealization that did not strain the truth.  This is how Americans once saw themselves, and few actors better exemplified the American Everyman, with all his flaws and virtues, better than McCrea.  We didn’t want to be him, but, on our best days, we were him.

It’s not surprising that McCrea would eventually morph into a western specialist.  The West is the defining American myth, and McCrea was our surrogate in that world.  Whether opposing outlaws, crooked business interests, Washington fat cats or homicidal Indians, McCrea met the challenges of the West with honesty, integrity and modesty.  McCrea was the natural choice to play many of the great figures of the West, Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill Cody among them, because we would like to see these great figures much like we like to see ourselves.  He made them real by making them like us.

It is too easy to forget how terrific an actor he could be when rising to a challenge. There are two versions of Lillian Hellman’s (1905-1984) 1934 play, The Children’s Hour, and the 1936 version, called These Three and staring McCrea and directed by William Wyler (1902-1981), is easily the best.

Wyler would remake the film himself in 1961, with James Garner (1928-2014) in the McCrea role.  Because the play deals with two women teachers who find their lives ruined when a little girl accuses them of a lesbian relationship, one imagines that the later film would be superior, if for no other reason than Wyler could openly address the scandal.  However, that is not the case:  Wyler’s handling of the situation in 1936 actually has great emotional resonance and honesty.  His 1961 film is so over-the-top in its hysteria, that it lurches into melodrama, and then camp.

With his 1936 cast, Wyler had to change the story to fit the Hays Code: here, a little girl (the magnificent Bonita Granville – justifiably Oscar nominated) ruins the lives of teachers Merle Oberon (1911-1979) and Miriam Hopkins (1902-1972) by starting the rumor that the women are involved in a ménage à trois with local doctor, McCrea.  As a result, their school is ruined and they are later financially crushed when they unsuccessfully sue for libel.

McCrea – quietly heroic, rankling at injustice and eager to set things right – stands by both women.  It’s not that McCrea has any showy scene or overly dramatic monolog: no, it’s his presence.  Here once again McCrea is our surrogate, doing his best in an unwinnable situation … much as we hope we would behave ourselves.  In the later film, Garner (usually a more subtle actor) broadcasts at high volume his integrity and decency, becoming a cartoon.  McCrea just … is, the perfect friend and protector that we would want to be.

Amazingly, Wyler wanted to replace McCrea with Leslie Howard (1893-1943), which would have been a catastrophe.  A terrific actor (in fact, a better actor than McCrea), Howard would have played his helplessness in the situation, providing only dignified weakness, much like his turn in Gone With the Wind (1939).  The friction between Wyler and McCrea is not evident, and one wonders if he changed his mind after the finished film. 

One final note – the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves reflect our points of view and how we interact with the world.  That sense of a national identity – and American Everyman – is impossible in our currently fractured state.  Wouldn’t we be better off if we had a presence like Joel McCrea … who reflected the best impression of ourselves? 

One cannot help but think that we need a hero, not a figure in tights with superpowers, but one who embodies the best qualities in Americans as a people.  I, for one, would certainly welcome the return of more actors like Joel McCrea.

Law of the Desert Born, A Graphic Novel, by Louis L’Amour

Here’s a first for The Jade Sphinx, a review of a graphic novel, and it’s a humdinger, Law of the Desert Born, adapted from a Louis L’Amour (1908-1988) short story of the same name by Charles Santino (working off a script by Beau L’Amour and Katherine Nolan), and illustrated by Thomas Yeates.  Even if you have never been the ‘type’ to try a graphic novel (i.e., novel in comic book form), you should try this one.  Not only is it a model of the craft, it is a spectacular Western, as well.

The late Gary Cooper (1901-1961) used to opine that he loved Westerns because, when they were good, “there was an honesty about them.”  Though they sometimes devolved into simple stories about white hats vs black hats, more usually there were shadings of complexity and subtlety.  Great (and even really good) Westerns are only ‘plot driven’ in the same manner as great literature: we are the sum of our motives and the consequences they drive us to.

Law of the Desert Born takes place in New Mexico, 1887, during the worst drought that anyone can remember.  Rancher Tom Forrester has his access to the Pecos River cut off by the son of his old partner, and he convinces his foreman, Shad Marone, to rustle cattle on his land.

Shad squeezes his poor employee, Jesus Lopez, a half-Mexican, half-Apache on the run from the Fort Marion prison in Florida, to do his dirty work.  Lopez, a scout and tracker for the army, helped relocate the Chihenne and Chiricahua Apaches for the government, and was repaid for his loyalty with a one-way trip to the same gulag.

When the rustling is discovered, Lopez takes the fall.  Tensions escalate, and Forrester is fatally injured by his enemy; Shad kills the rival rancher in revenge and goes on the run.

Now, the sheriff must release Lopez from jail and allow him to use his skills as a tracker to lead the posse to Shad.  Lopez guides them through miles of trackless badlands, into a crucible to test their courage and skill.  But, as the story continues, the question becomes: what are Lopez’s real motives?

This is great stuff.  Both Shad and Lopez are equal parts hero and villain, and the sheriff is both compassionate man of justice and unthinking hardcase.  The townsfolk that make up the posse are like most humanity – neither hero nor rogue, just simply people trying to get along.

L’Amour also dispenses with many of the tropes that would degrade the core integrity of the tale: there are no deadeye gunslingers, or rancher’s daughters to provide love interest – nor even any clear indication of whether either side was right or wrong in the issue of water rights.  What it all is … is very complicated.  Much like life.

The book comes with a wonderful coda from Beau L’Amour on the differences between this adaptation and his father’s original pulp story, and details his efforts to get the story made into a film.  It also has some valuable biographical data on his father, and notes to put the whole story in historical perspective.

Now, a graphic novel lives or dies on its illustrations, and I’m delighted to report that Yeates’ pages are wonderful.  Rendered in stark black and white, Yeates has created a pen-and-ink wash world of stark landscapes, wide vistas and intense close-ups.  He creates his pages with a cinematic flair; if anyone ever did make a movie of this, they could simply tear the pages out and stuff them into the camera.

Yeates’ anatomy does sometimes seem to be slightly off, but any slight failures of draughtsmanship are more than made up by his genius for composition.  His pages are not a static series of regiment panels, but, rather, a dynamic expression of motion and story on the page.  It’s a textbook lesson on how the form is done.

This oversize hardcover is a great addition to the library of any Western or comic fan, or, indeed, anyone who likes a good story.

1776, Encores! at City Center

Once again, Encores! pulls a musical gem from out of the ether, this time 1776, last seen in revival in 1997 with Brent Spiner (born 1949) as John Adams.  1776 features music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards (1919-1981) and a book by Peter Stone (1930-2003). The original production opened on March 16, 1969, at the 46th Street Theatre and played for 1,217 performances, winning the Tony for Best Musical, trouncing Hair and Zorba in the process.  (Inexplicably, time has looked favorably on both Hair and Zorba, but here the Tony committee made the right decision.)

The show was invited to perform at the White House, Courtesy of then-President Richard Nixon (1913-1994).  This caused concern for some in the show, most notably Howard Da Silva (1909-1986), who played Ben Franklin.  The last time Da Silva had received an invitation from Nixon, it was to testify before 1947's House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), the anti-communist purge Nixon enabled during his time in Congress. Da Silva refused to talk and was subsequently blacklisted from Hollywood for many years.  Amazingly, the show decided to play for the President, and did so uncut.

Many are familiar with the movie version, released in 1972 and retaining the entire, original Broadway cast – a rarity at the time.  The film is a record of the show as it was originally, save for the excision of a song critical of a conservative Congress, “Cool, Cool Considerate Men,” which was cut by Jack Warner at the request of Nixon – a cut the Broadway producers would not allow when the show played live in the White House.  The film was a commercial disappointment, but it has had a continual afterlife on television, where it plays every July 4^th.

In an election year, when it seems that the nation is moving further and further away from the democratic ideals of the Founding Fathers, it’s only natural that Encores! revive the show now.  Despite that impetus, though, it is a choice more interesting than artistically sound, for no matter how much I immoderately love 1776, I must admit that it is an uneven, and ultimately unsuccessful, show.  While it has always remained a great favorite of Your Correspondent, I cannot dismiss its many flaws.

What’s good:  Peter Stone’s book, which is amusing, compelling and historically accurate.  Rather than render the Founders as a bunch of plaster saints, he creates real human beings who have their private agendas, rivalries and petty complaints.  What’s not-so-good: much of the score by Edwards.  It’s not surprising that there are no songs from the show that have emerged as standards, because none of them work outside of the context of the action of the show.  And even with that in mind, most of the songs are ponderous, heavy-handed and unsingable.  What’s bad: even a musical with indifferent songs should sing, and so much of 1776 concentrates on the book, that the distantly-placed songs often seem like an after-thought.

The original Broadway and film cast were able to surmount many of these complaints through sheer charm and magnetism.  The Encores! cast includes Santino Fontana as John Adams, John Behlmann as Thomas Jefferson, and John Larroquette as Ben Franklin, with Nikki Renée Daniels as Martha Jefferson and Christiane Noll as Abigail Adams.  With the surprising exception of Larroquette, each performer brings a great deal to the table.

We have admired Fontana in the past (notably in Cinderella and Zorba), but he is perhaps too soft and likeable a player for the obnoxious and disliked Adams; he is, however, top notch in his romantic duets with the incandescent Noll, who glistens as Abigail.

Daniels has only one number as Martha Jefferson, but she and it are spectacular.  Her voice is clear and dulcet, shimmering with a vibrancy that is palpable.  One day she will be a big star.  Behlmann, as Jefferson, is Americana personified.  Tall, lanky and impossibly handsome, Behlmann brings Gary Cooper more to mind than Jefferson, but his grace and charm radiate from the stage.

Larroquette would initially seem to be inspired casting, but his performance is disappointing.  As written, Franklin serves more as a Greek chorus to the action, making wry asides and winking at the audience.  Larroquette – under-rehearsed and under-prepared – seems so peripheral as to be absent.  Franklin has the best lines in the show, but you wouldn’t know it from Larroquette’s lazy performance.

Director Garry Hynes stages 1776 in contemporary times, and it’s not surprising that much of the cast struggled with their lines in such a book-heavy show.  But the Congressmen who do not carry their weight (how some things never change!) are more than complimented by those who shine.  Particular praise should go to Jacob Keith Watson as Robert Livingston of New York, Macintyre Dixon as the Custodian (handily stealing every scene he is in), and the fabulous Robert Sella as Secretary Charles Thomson.  Thomson is a thankless role, but Sella brings so much wry humor, understatement and weight to the part that the impression is undeniable – more of Mr. Sella, please.

Alexander Gemignani nearly stops the show with his powerful number “Molasses to Rum,” a song virtually impossible to sing, and Bryce Pinkham, as Pennsylvanian John Dickinson, shows very strong.  Ben Whiteley is the guest music director, and he acquits himself smartly.

Much like the original, Viet Nam-era production, director Hynes uses the story of the Founding Fathers to comment on contemporary, dysfunctional politics.  Where the original emphasis may have been on a Congress and American leadership disassociated from the public actually fighting the war, Hynes uses the opportunity to attack our Congress which is so mired in party politics as to be paralyzed.  The song “Cool, Cool Considerate Men” has been slightly tweaked to Conservative men, and while we here at The Jade Sphinx think there is more than enough opprobrium to spread on both sides of the political divide, the choice works well. 

1776 also stars Terence Archie (Dr. Josiah Bartlett), Larry Bull (Col. Thomas McKean), André De Shields (Stephen Hopkins), John Hickok (Dr. Lyman Hall), John Hillner (Lewis Morris), Kevin Ligon (George Read), John-Michael Lyles (A Courier), Laird Mackintosh (Judge James Wilson), Michael McCormick (John Hancock), Michael Medeiros (Caesar Rodney), Wayne Pretlow (Roger Sherman), Tom Alan Robbins (Rev. Jonathan Witherspoon), Ric Stoneback (Samuel Chase), Jubilant Sykes (Richard Henry Lee), Vishal Vaidya (A Leather Apron), and Nicholas Ward (Joseph Hewes). The show will run from March 30-April 3, 2016.

Though never a perfect show, 1776 is a stunning reflection of American ideals, grounded in debate, high-minded moralism and Enlightenment era independent thinking. We could use a little more of all of that right now.

Vampire Over London: Bela Lugosi in Britain (Revised 2nd Edition), by Frank Dello Stritto and Andi Brooks

Some months ago, we had so much fun reading Frank Dello Stritto’s masterful I Saw What I Saw When I Saw It, his memoir of growing up during the Golden Age of Television, that we decided to dip further into his corpus.  My interest happily coincided with the new, revised 2^nd edition of Vampire Over London: Bela Lugosi in Britain.  For those who love Bela Lugosi (1882-1956) or Dracula, and you know who you are, this book is essential.

It is a strange quirk of history and cinematic fanaticism that the great figures of the age often sink into obscurity and people less respected in their own time find greater posthumous importance.  Such is certainly the case with Bela Lugosi; more books have been written about Lugosi than Clark Gable (1901-1960) or Jimmy Stewart (1908-1997) or Gary Cooper (1901-1961) or Bing Crosby (1903-1977) combined, though those luminaries worked in the upper echelons of the movie industry while Lugosi toiled on Poverty Row.

What is it about Lugosi that makes him so potent a figure nearly 60 after his death, while greater stars (and much better actors) fade into obscurity?  Perhaps it has something to do with the medium of film itself.  Though the camera moves very close, it loves the large gesture, the show of big personality and individuality.  Smaller, more subtle actors are applauded by the critics, but the movie-goer loves people who take it big.  And few actors took it bigger than Lugosi.

Lugosi’s legacy to motion pictures remain a handful of interesting performances, a generous number of truly bad B films, and a legend that has lost none of its potency.  Lugosi first played Dracula on Broadway.  When Dracula premiered at the Fulton Theater, neither the critics nor the audience realized that they were witnessing the creation of one of modern theater history's great signature roles.  Typecast as Dracula forever after his 1931 film appearance, actor and role merged for eternity when the actor requested that he be buried in his vampire costume.

Like many jobbing actors, Lugosi strove to go where the money was.  He made two trips to Great Britain – the 1930s and 1950s, respectively – and little is known of his activity there.  Legends among Lugosiphiles suggest that his 1950s tours of Dracula throughout the English countryside were a dismal failure.  However, research by Dello Stritto and Brooks suggest that the tour was wildly successful, and that it was the last great triumph of Lugosi’s tumultuous life.

Dello Stritto and Brooks interviewed many of the survivors of tour, and also unearthed a great deal of previously unpublished material to make this a rich history indeed.  But a book full facts could be deathly dull – despite the inherent interest of the topic – if the historian cannot make them come alive.  Dello Stritto and Brooks do not drown in his own research.  They are scintillating raconteurs, and this 300+ page book moves along as breezily as a fascinating dinner conversation.

This is not just a chronicle of a once-respected actor trying to recapture former glories, but a wonderful evocation of English provincial theater in the 1950s.  It reflects a lost world of interest to theater buffs, movie buffs, Dracula and Lugosi mavens, and people drawn to the nascent English film industry.  It is all there, from train travel and one-night stands in the sticks, to alliances and challenges among a small company of players, to hoping to open big in London’s West End.  (Sadly, that was a triumph denied Lugosi and company.)

In addition to a lively and inviting text, Dello Stritto and Brooks have managed to uncover dozens of photos never-seen-in-print.  Your Correspondent has spent decades reading about Bela Lugosi, with little hope of anything new on the horizon.  Vampire Over London is crammed with photos I have never seen, that provide a greater understanding of both Lugosi the theatrical presence and Lugosi the man.  This is a terrific book, not to be missed.

Vampire Over London: Bela Lugosi in Britain can be ordered directly from Cult Movies Press at: http://www.cultmoviespress.com/.

Meat’s Not Meat Till It’s In the Pan, by Charles Marion Russell (1915)

Here it is, a New Year, and already we at The Jade Sphinx are thinking about the past.  To be exact, the past that makes up our great American Western Myth.  We spent the holiday season happily listening to Christmas carols, reading some of our favorite seasonal texts, and, of course … thinking about Westerns.

You mean you didn’t?

This Christmas we made our way through more of the Zane Grey (1872-1939), corpus, reading more of the letters of cowboy artist Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), watching a western with both (and I kid you not!) Ronald Colman (1891-1958) and Gary Cooper (1901-1961)… and thinking about Randolph Scott (1898-1987).

We will look at all of these this week, but let’s open with a droll evocation of where winter is heading this year with Russell’s wry and wonderful Meat’s Not Meat Till It’s in the Pan, painted in 1915.  The work is oil on canvas, mounted on Masonite, and it currently resides in the Gilcrease Museum of Tulsa, OK.

It’s no secret that we here at The Jade Sphinx love the work of Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the cowboy artist.  The boyish Russell went West in his early youth, and worked as a cowboy, watching the waning days of the American West with an artist’s eye.  He didn't seem to be very effective in the saddle, but it was all Charlie wanted and he was happy.

Charlie spent his artistic life drawing and painting the West that loomed so large in his personal myth.  This delightful picture from 1915 is Charlie at his puckish best.  A man of expansive, genial good humor and a delight in a good joke, Charlie was not immune to including humor in his work.  Indeed, humor is one of the integral human experiences, and any aesthete is bereft if he does not fully embrace the lighter side of life.

Clearly our cowboy has done some winter hunting, but he was just a little too close to the edge of a gorge.  He’s bagged his meat, but how will he get it from the outcropping on which it fell?  Aside from the simple narrative of the painting, there is the sound emotional tenor of the work, which is … yeah, I’ve had days like that.

It was part of Charlie’s genius to set the work in the dead of winter; it would not nearly be as witty as a picture depicting a summer scene.  The cold, the snow and the barren quality of the landscape all conspire to make the hunter’s challenge all the more grueling.

Again, let’s look at Charlie’s simple mastery of the medium.  The dominant color is blue, but … look at what he does with it.  Various shades of blue depict everything from cavernous depths, stony distances, cloudy skies, ice on the precipice, and the snow itself.  There are even hints of blue in the rifle-barrel and upon the lighter-colored horse.  Such versatility of shade, warmth and cold, and gradation of a single color is remarkable.

Charlie is also a master of body language.  The vexation of the hunter is comically rendered without being over-the-top; the horses merely indifferent or simply miserable at being out in the weather.

Look at the circle formed by the horse’s nose pointing at the hunter, the gun butt pointing at the ram, the ram pointing to the scrub, pointing back at the horses.  Charlie’s sense of composition was unerring.

It is astonishing that a painting that so deals with death can also be so light-hearted.  Charlie creates a pyramid shape to draw attention to his hunter by having a dead steer create the left foundation, and a tangled mass of withered scrub form the right.  But it is never gloomy or dour; in fact, it only calls to mind the quote by Mark Twain, who wrote, life is just one damn thing after another.

Tomorrow: Zane Grey!