In The Company Of Glenn

Debauchery, the old-fashioned way

I wish I could give an unqualified recommendation to Hollywood's Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and "The Bundy Drive Boys" by Gregory William Mank with Charles Heard and Bill Nelson. The Feral House pub is certainly a great idea for a book, compiling in one handy volume a lot of the far-flung lore concerning the "erudite morons" (as John Barrymore's fourth wife called them) who tore it up non-stop in Hollywood's Golden Age. Aside from the stars in the book's title, the carousers include great character actors John Carradine, Thomas Mitchell, and Roland Young; screenwriters and master cynics Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler; and a couple of "types": portraitist/forger John Decker and putative literateur Sadakichi Hartmann. The escapades of this not-quite-charmed circle of affluent, well, drunkards, makes for one eye-openingly cautionary tale after another. Unfortunately, Mank's florid writing style and the slack copy editing make the book sometimes literally painful to read. (UPDATE: In fairness, I should acknowledge something one of my commenters pointed out, which is that the volume is festooned with fascinating and in some cases rare illustrations/photos.)

Curtis Harrington

These two fairly unpleasant images are seared into my consciousness.

The man responsible for them passed away Sunday.

Stanwyck and Sirk

Barbara Stanwyck, the centenary of whose birth falls in July of this year, was in a sense the exemplary Sirkian actress. That is, as a performer she was as elegant an ironist as German-born director Sirk. It is often noted that she was not a great “beauty” but even so she was a devastating a seductress as the screen has ever seen, as witness her performances in Green’s 1933 Baby Face and Wilder’s 1944 Double Indemnity. Her Sugarpuss in Hawks’ 1941 Ball of Fire is an unabashed vulgarian who’s far wiser than the seven dwarves, I mean professors, that Gary Cooper compels her to set up housekeeping with. Then there’s her character in Sturges’ The Lady Eve, the hunter who gets captured by the game. Irony upon irony upon irony. Perfect for Sirk, who was not necessarily a comic or always altogether tragic ironist, but an unfailingly acute and intelligent one. Hence, it’s too bad that Sirk and Stanwyck only made two films together, but it’s great that we’ve got the two…

So long, Mr. Excitement

This is just the kind of knucklehead I am. Jack Valenti's passing leaves me nonplussed, yet here I am shedding a tear or two over the shuffling-off-of-this-mortal-coil, at 78, of Tommy Newsom, the nondescript tenorman of Doc Severinson's Tonight Show Band who was dubbed "Mr. Excitement" by Johnny Carson.

Guess you hadda be there. Here's how it worked. When Ed was out, Doc took over for Ed. Then Tommy led the band. On the rare occasions when both Ed and Doc were out, Tommy hadda play second banana to Johnny. A role he was profoundly uncomfortable with. Newsom couldn't banter. He wore dull suits. He didn't know anything about the guests, and didn't care, but he was too polite to make much of a point of not caring. He made Carson twenty times funnier just by being himself, and for this he earned his unforgettable sobrequet.

Make no mistake: The Tonight Show band was a hot ensemble. Any outfit smart enough to hire Pete Christlieb had to be, right? Clark Terry was among their number before Severinson took over. And Newsom, as bland a TV personality as he might have been, was a swinging player. Good night and God bless.

Contemptuous lips

It's one thing for Chanel to use Georges Delarue's gorgeous "Overture" for Godard's Contempt to accompany varied shots of model Julie Ordon primping and pouting the better to sell Chanel's new lipstick...but now there's an ad which actually tries to approximate the film's famed Brigitte Bardot interrogation of Michel Piccoli—the semi-nude "Do you love my..." exchange, apparently concocted by Godard when the movie's American producer Joseph E. Levine clamored for some BB nudity.

Ordon's attractive, yes, but man is she no BB. Nor, for that matter, is she Joe Pesci. (Many of you might remember Scorsese's use of Delerue's music for a desert confrontation between Pesci and DeNiro in Casino.)

So It Goes

Right now there must be a million How-Kurt-Vonnegut-Changed-My-Life-When-I-First-Read-Him-As-A-Teenager stories clogging the intertubes, so I'll spare you mine. I will say I was sufficiently entranced and haunted by Slaughterhouse-Five that I successfully begged to be allowed to see the necessarily-at-least-R-rated movie adaptation of the book that came out in 1972, when I was twelve. I had believed that Alain Resnais was the only guy who could handle the book's "unstuck in time" structure; in so doing, I seriously underrated the very deft George Roy Hill (not to mention screenwriter Stephen Geller, who won a special prize at Cannes for his adaptation; Hill won a Jury prize there as well). I was moved and dazzled by the movie, and a not-overly-precocious portion of my preteen self was very happy with Valerie Perrine's depiction of Montana Wildhack.

Slaughterhouse-Five was the second movie adaptation of a Vonnegut work (the first being a misbegotten version of his play Happy Birthday Wanda June in 1971, starring Rod Steiger and directed by Mark Robson.) It remains, I think, the best, although two first-rate pics come in behind it—not many, I know, but more than I initially remembered. There's Jonathan Demme's inspired 1982 American Playhouse mini-feature Who Am I This Time?, starring Christopher Walken, and Keith Gordon's ambitious, gutsy 1996 Mother Night, with Nick Nolte.

I know that the worst Vonnegut adaptation is Alan Rudolph's 1999 Breakfast of Champions, the most blatant betrayal of a literary work since Hollywood's upending of Bernard Malamud's The Natural back in 1984. And at least The Natural presented lots of pretty pictures and nice music before totally inverting Malamud's vision. Breakfast forces you to suffer throughout, and then completely pisses on Vonnegut's conclusion. Vonnegut has a cameo in the picture, which suggests an approval of sorts, but you know, a lot can happen between a set and an editing room. (Rudolph mentor Robert Altman wanted to make a film of Breakfast in the mid-'70s, and cast Sterling Hayden as Kilgore Trout.) I say I know it's the worst without ever having seen 1982's Jerry-Lewis-starring Slapstick (of Another Kind), which is reputed to be monumentally awful. Which it may well be. (Any commentors out there seen it? Fire away!) I insist it cannot be as bad as Breakfast is bad in the way that Breakfast is bad.

Vonnegut's most well-known film cameo is as himself in 1986's Back to School—rich old undergrad Rodney Dangerfield hires him to explain Slaughterhouse-Five. It was on that set that Gordon, who plays Dangerfield's son in the picture, first approached Vonnegut about adapting Mother Night.

I know I shouldn't say this, but I'm both horrified and impressed that Vonnegut remained a smoker to the end. When I saw him speak at William Paterson College way back in the day, I noticed he was a Pall Mall man, too. You ever smoke a Pall Mall? I'm getting a heart attack just thinking about it.

It can't be such a bad week, really,...

when such newly configured major works land in one's lucky, lap, can it?

Yes, that's Sly and the Family Stone's not entirely unapposite There's A Riot Going On in the middle of the four DVDs that constitute another milestone, Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema. Actually, the Riot CD is one of seven, a limited edition collection of the first seven proper albums from Stone's unique collective. Even without the epochal single "Hot Fun in the Summertime," it's a lot to take in. As is the Godard box, in whose existence I can scarcely believe, even though it's in my house right now.

More when I get over my good fortune.

James Laughlin's Eye

In his quirky, delightful, and posthumous "auto-bug-offery" (his term) The Way It Wasn't, James Laughlin, the gentleman publisher who founded the incredibly influential house New DIrections, points out his cameo in Ingmar Bergman's 1949 film Thirst (which Laughlin refers to by its first U.S. title, the kickier, then-distributor-imposed Three Strange Loves).

That's Laughlin's eye on the cover of the book. Said book is Henry Miller's The Cosmological Eye; the cover illustration is a photo-montage put together by some Harvard friends of Laughlin, incorporating a close-up of Laughlin's peeper. "What did Bergman see in my eye? I wrote him, but he didn't answer," Laughlin writes.

Oh well. Still; were one to be mapping out 20th century artistic convergences, this frame would make a great "place," as it were—a 1949 meeting of Ingmar Bergman, Henry Miller, and James Laughlin. Thirst is one of five formative Bergman films just out in the spectacular Eclipse box set Early Bergman; my interview with Eclipse head Peter Becker about the Bergman box and more is here.

Betty Hutton, 1921-2007

The blessed union of Kockenlocker and "Ratzkiwatzki," presided over by Porter Hall.

"...she's the cornfed blonde next door as backslapping joker-around, and she buys no bullshit." So says my man Robert Christgau, and he's just talking about the late, great Betty Hutton as a singer. It's only a little ironic that her greatest film role was a non-singing one, as the prodigiously knocked-up Trudy Kockenlocker in Preston Sturges' magnificent, outrageous farce The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. Even though she doesn't trill a note throughout, there's quite a bit of music in her brash but very deft adoption of Sturges' comic rhythms. It's a damn shame that there isn't more of Hutton available on DVD, but if you're looking for a great double feature to pay tribute to her with this weekend, it's out there—just pair Morgan's Creek with her sole MGM musical, Annie Get Your Gun (Hutton was a Paramount contract star; MGM borrowed her for Annie after Judy Garland became to ill to work on the picture). Your home entertainment room will echo with happiness for weeks.

Alice Faye, Raymond Queneau, and Me

Today sees the release of 20th Century Fox's excellent, extra-filled box The Alice Faye Collection, featuring four films starring the great Fox musical star, whose reputation has in recent years fallen into what I consider a very puzzling neglect. My friend and fellow fan Ed Hulse believes the set will win her new fans; Faye, who passed away in 1998, obviously doesn't need them herself—no, the pleasure and gratification will be on the part of those who discover her unique charm. The pictures in the box are the 1937 On the Avenue, also starring the now-forgotten (some would say justifiably) comedy team The Ritz Brothers; 1940's Lillian Russell, with Faye portraying a showbiz legend of a previous era in a picture said to be her personal favorite; the colorful 1941 That Night In Rio, and my personal favorite, Busby Berkeley's ravishing The Gang's All Here (from which the image below, which depicts Faye singing the great Warren/Robin torch song "No Love, No Nothin'", derives).

Back in 1993 I had the great privilege of bodyguarding Miss Faye. Sort of...