Two Minutes of Genius! Incredible Film Montage from Humoresque

So what can I say about this, one of my all-time favorite noirish 1940s melodramas? It even has Joan Crawford with giant shoulder-pads playing a wealthy alcoholic cougar pursuing the very dishy John Garfield, who fakes his violin-playing quite effectively. The incomparable Oscar Levant is actually playing here, and many claimed he was at the same technical and interpretive level as Vladimir Horowitz (and the two were, by the way, buddies). This montage thrills and delights me every time, as it says so much about Garfield's tough-guy character and his bewilderment at landing in the Big City to pursue his music career. There are some echoes of An American in Paris here, as Garfield begins to feel more and more like a gigolo who can't escape Joan's desperate clutches. It ends in her walking into the surf a la A Star is Born. In spite of all this borrowing and unabashed melodrama, Garfield keeps it from sinking into sappyness and gives it an effective edge. I play violin myself - not like this, of course, but I do play, and even though it took a team of people to convincingly show him playing, I think it worked very well. As he was a minimalist, he didn't ham it up or overdo it facially, which makes it especially effective. Garfield died of a heart attack depressingly young, so we don't get to see him very often. But in the film Three Daughters, he plays a sardonic pianist whom he admitted was based on Oscar Levant. 

My description of the clip on YouTube is as follows:

A brilliant bit of filmmaking, one of the highlights of this noir-ish 1940s melodrama. John Garfield plays Paul Boray, an ambitious young concert violinist pursued by wealthy cougar Joan Crawford. Here he arrives in the hustle and bustle of New York City. So could tough guy Garfield really play the violin? Of course not, but he was saved by some Hollywood magic. For close-ups, Garfield’s arms were pinned down, the violin was attached to his neck, and two professional violinists would crouch down beside the actor, out of camera range, one doing the fingering and the other bowing. The actual soundtrack heard by the audience was played by Isaac Stern, with Oscar Levant accompanying him on the piano. After a couple of takes working in this strenuously awkward manner, Levant called out, “Why don’t the five of us do a concert tour?”

"TROG!!"

(These will look teeny if you're watching this on your phone. Best to click "watch on YouTube" at the bottom. )

Why we love Baby Jane

You ARE in the chair.

They just didn't love you enough

A harrowing scene from one of my favorite movies. Bette Davis is scary in this thing - at the height of her genius. Has anyone ever captured alcoholic self-pity better than this?

The Baby Jane Quiz (for pretentious film students only)

You might not think so, boys and girls, but you are, you ARE in film school, or you wouldn't be reading this, and you will be taking this quiz or I won't bring you your din-din.

Everyone has seen the Bette Davis/Joan Crawford classic, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And if you haven’t, how can you call yourself a film student? This is the movie in which Bette Davis proves, once and for all, that she can mop the floor with Joan Crawford and act rings around her, rings that are every bit as dizzying as the donuts Blanche turns in her wheelchair when she discovers Jane has served her a large rodent for dinner.

(From the production notes: the rat is actually a capybara imported from Argentina.They'll work for scale, whereas rats charge an exorbitant amount to lie still for that many takes). 

This will by no means be a comprehensive exam, because that would mean too much work for me, I saw this film for probably the twelfth time last night and was struck once again by how it’s Jane who gets our sympathy. As in Gone With the Wind, in which we're supposed to love and admire Melanie for being so selfless and sweet, we just keep rooting for Scarlett. Want to know why? There are reasons, brutal ones, but true nonetheless - which you will discover as you wrap your enfeebled brain around this quiz.

1. Why do we feel so much sympathy for Baby Jane the screaming banshee/harridan/flaming bitch on wheels, who tears up the scenery, kills the maid with a hammer, and kicks her sister in the head, and so little for Blanche, the sweet, helpless paralyzed sister who sits upstairs in her room incessantly pressing a buzzer?

(a) Bette Davis gives a layered, nuanced performance incorporating vulnerability and heartbreak into even her most drunken, violent, abrasive behaviour.

(b) Joan Crawford is mainly good at bulging her eyes out.

(c) We’ll never forgive or forget TROG.

d) Crawford's reaction to the dead capybara is seriously "off", failing to touch a chord of sympathy. Nobody notices her reaction anyway because they're too busy groaning with delight as Baby Jane cackles her brains out.

e) With true generosity of spirit,  Jane wistfully states at the film's conclusion that the two sisters "could have been friends", if only Blanche had kept her foot off the accelerator. 

2. If the Baby Jane doll could talk, what would it say?

(a) "Really? Did she like it?"

(b) "I was cleaning the cage and it flew out the window."

(c) "Isn't that how I was conceived?"

(d) "Just a few questions, ma'am."

3. Describe Edwin's role as a gay icon, taking into account the socio-psycho-sexual mores of 1962 and the damaging effects of the illegality of certain sexual acts. Speculate on Jane Hudson's true feelings for Edwin as a potential partner: is he merely a boy-toy/"walker" who could escort her to premieres and other social events as she makes her second debut? Elaborate on the socio-psycho-whatever significance of the fact he still lives with his Mommy. Essay answers to be graded on word count only.

3. Why is it our business whether Edwin is gay or not? What possible bearing could it have on the movie’s plot? Why do you think it matters, given the fact that the REAL issue is his inability to tear himself away from his niggling, naggling, annoying, utterly irritating mother? Discuss in three words or less.

4. What are the chances of Baby Jane making a real comeback?

(a) Very low (her act is so completely out-of date);

(b) Very high          "            "            "                   ;

(d) Middling, if she aims for a middle-aged/middle-brow crowd;

(e) Dead-certain! Have you no knowledge of film history at all? She has already MADE an unforgettable comeback which will live in cinematic history forever!

5. Of the two sisters, who has the really rotten deal? 

(a) Blanche, who  gets to watch herself on TV and get flowers from the neighbors and all sorts of fan mail, get her meals brought to her on a tray, etc. etc., or

(b) Jane, who gets doodlysquat from anybody, has to forge signatures just to get her liquor, hauls her sister around to the bathroom, the bathtub and the bed, trundles her meals upstairs (though granted, those meals may be a little unusual), and receives no glory at all for her forgotten career, with which she supported the whole family for years and years and kept them all in ice cream.

"All this time, we could have been friends."

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

The ultimate horror film (or, why we love Baby Jane)

This is one of those movies that, when it comes on TV, you tell yourself: no way, I’m not watching this again, or if I do, I’ll bail after a few minutes.
And you come reeling out the other side, just as gobsmacked as you were the first time around – or maybe more, because you always notice new things every time you see it.

Turner Classics is responsible for most of this, because certain movies are always shown in rotation. Now, Voyager and Mildred Pierce and Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon seem to come around monthly, along with a lot of those noir-ish (and spell-check, STOP changing this to “nourish” NOW) ‘40s films from Warner Brothers, complete with lavish and somewhat overblown scores by Max Steiner.

In this case, well, yes, it was Bette Davis all right, but not the same Bette Davis who experienced such a melancholy metamorphosis in Now, Voyager (complete with Paul Henreid’s famous dual cigarettes). This one was – oh God, NO – What Ever Happened to Baby Jane!

I first saw this film while sleeping in the den on a pull-out bed when I was a kid. I wasn’t allowed to do this very often, so it was a treat. It meant I could stay up as long as I liked and watch TV, and maybe my older brother Arthur would come in at some point, a little drunk from a piss-up with his high school buddies, and provide a running commentary. I saw great films this way, the original Frankenstein and Dracula, the incomparable On the Waterfront (which I still believe is, Citizen Kane aside, the greatest movie ever made), and – even more macabre than any James Whale creepfest – the Baby Jane movie, which from the first frame provides more howls and shudders than anything else Davis ever did.

I say Davis, because in spite of the fact that Joan Crawford plays Blanche, the “sympathetic” sister in the wheelchair, crippled decades ago when Baby Jane rammed her with her car, Davis just walks off with it. With her ashen face layered with old face powder that has never been washed off, her hideous rotting child-star clothes, her foot-dragging shuffle, slovenly drunkenness and foul temper, it’s Davis we can’t take our eyes off of, can't get enough of.  And why? Reactions. Flickers of reactions like swiftly-moving storm fronts that seem to pass (for some reason) left to right, as if sweeping through her flesh and bones – this is HATE, folks, out-and-out hate for the sister who upstaged her pathetic little career as the mincing, shrieking vaudeville performer Baby Jane. Her role as resentful, foul-mouthed nursemaid is forced on her after the "accident", the event that snapped Blanche’s spinal cord at the same time that it ended her career. 

The point I’m trying to make here is: though we know we should, NOBODY likes Blanche. She is denigrated, harassed, even tortured (especially with her sister's unique luncheon plan of dead budgie and stiffened rat), ruthlessly kicked in a scene of real horror that might just reflect Davis’ true feelings about her, but still and all, we either hate Blanche or are just plain bored with her.

Nobody wants to be Blanche. Nobody wants to be the victim, no matter how virtuous she is (in fact, the more virtuous she is, the more bored we are). I suspect that this picture was proof, once and for all, that Davis’ acting chops so far outstripped Crawford’s that she lived in a separate universe. When someone does something seemingly simple and you think, with a slightly creepy feeling, “how in hell did they do that?”, then you know you are in the realm of genius.

But it’s more than that. She must be snagging something deep inside us somewhere, gleefully yanking it out and celebrating it, throwing it up in the air. This law of identification, if that’s what it is, doesn’t stop with this movie. Not by a long shot. Let me ask you: you’ve seen Gone with the Wind, haven’t you? Well, what’s the matter with you? (Go see it now.) Anyway, how many of us love and admire and identify with Melanie Wilkes, the sweet, brave, unselfish wife who patiently waits while her husband returns from fighting them damn Yankees in the Civil War? How many of us think to ourselves, oh dear, she’s having a baby in a wagon, how will she ever survive?

Piffle! All we care about is Scarlett, trying to manage a fractious horse while wearing a dirty dress and a corset, her alabaster brow furrowed as she faces the first of many mortal challenges in her bitchy, spoiled, overindulged life.

Yes, everyone loves Scarlett, and it’s not just because she’s so supernaturally beautiful, her eyes glittering with the first signs of the bipolar disorder that will eventually derail her life. Everyone loves her because she is duplicitous, greedy, conniving, and just plain bad. Melanie never seems to make a single mistake in her life (oh God, she even forgives that whore!) but is so poisonously good that we just don’t want to bother with her. When I first saw this movie at age thirteen, I was sort of hoping she would die in childbirth so Scarlett could get her claws on Ashley.
So what’s going on here besides superior acting skills and a much meatier part? We like bad people because deep inside ourselves, no matter how far down we push it, we are afraid we are bad: that someone will some day see our awful, unforgiveable secret.

But even worse, we WANT to be bad, bad enough to wield the kind of power these half-mad, scary women do. These harpies, these broom-riding supernatural scream-queens raining down a firestorm of gleeful destruction on all that lies around them.

There’s something a tad sociopathic about them – wait a minute, a tad? That budgie-killing, rat-serving, head-kicking, haranguing Jane (“But you AAAAAARE in the wheelchair, Blanche! You AAAARE!”) rivals Norman Bates in the realm of antisocial personality disorder. Though we fear them and are supposed to disapprove of them, we like sociopathic characters because they pull all the bad out of us and act out all the things we’re not supposed to do.

Though this was the sixth or seventh time I had seen it, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? creeped me out more this time than ever before. I had a new appreciation of Davis’ subtlety. Yes, subtlety – you can read her devious, duplicitous thoughts, her careful plotting and planning of the kind of medieval torture specifically designed to drive her sister to the brink of insanity. The crazed child’s laugh behind the door when Blanche lifts the dome on her ratatouille lunch – the ruthless yanking out of the phone cord – forging her signature, imitating her voice, withholding her fan mail and her food – all these devices are tailor-made for Blanche, ever-escalating until that scene on the beach where she lies so flat and lifeless she resembles a dessicated corpse.

Then, of course, we have the final turnabout confession: Blanche confesses that SHE ran Jane down and somehow snapped her own spine, and yet had the strength to crawl to the gate and – oh, never mind. We accept this absurdity because by then we don’t have much choice. We are held as captive as poor Blanche, manacled to the ceiling with electrical tape over her mouth.

Then comes one of the most incredible lines in film history, delivered in the dulcet tones of a Jane who has rocketed back in time to the charming brat who wowed them all on the vaudeville stage: “You mean. . . all this time we could have been friends!”

It’s only then we realize that not only are we enthralled by Jane – we actually feel compassion for her. We’re somehow on her side. Freaking Jesus, how the hell did THAT happen?

It’s a mystery, as all superb crafting is. Is it just the fact that these are better parts, and that better actresses land them? What if someone else had played Jane: say, Olivia de Havilland? What if Crawford had played her, as was originally planned? Wasn’t she pretty good at Mommy Dearest-style torture herself? But no. It had to be Hurricane Bette or no one. It’s the same dynamic as in the Wizard of Oz, when Margaret Hamilton chews up the scenery and fills the room with brimstone and green smoke as the Wicked Witch, but Billie Burke makes you half sick to your stomach as the quavering, sparkly-gowned Good Witch of Whatever. We must either want the bejeezus scared out of us (which I still don’t understand, because in “normal life” most of us try very hard to avoid anxiety and danger), or we want to be every bad thing, every shameful thing, every heartless hideous inhumanly insane thing we know we shouldn’t be. 

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Oscar Levant: and so, good night

Go gentle (unfinished)

If I should see you on a flickering screen

And hear you set your instrument on fire,

I want to reach into your silver time

And show you all my cockeyed, strange desire.

To love a man who’s gone into the mere

Who leaked away in 1972

It’s stranger than 

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

Sunday Underwear and other signs of longing

When the mellow moon begins to beam,

Ev'ry night I dream a little dream,

And of course Prince Charming is the theme,

The he for me.

Although I realize as well as you 

It is seldom that a dream comes true,

For

To me it's clear

That he'll appear.

Some day he'll come along,

The man I love

And he'll be big and strong, 

The man I love

And when he comes my way

I'll do my best to make him stay.

He'll look at me and smile

I'll understand ; 

And in a little while,

He'll take my hand ; 

And though it seems absurd, 

I know we both won't say a word

Maybe I shall meet him Sunday 

Maybe Monday, maybe not;

Still I'm sure to meet him one day

Maybe Tuesday will be my good news day

He'll build a little home

Just meant for two,

From which I'll never roam, 

Who would - would you ?

And so all else above

I'm waiting for the man I love.

I wish that I were dead!

Agghhh! The worst has happened, and a whole post disappeared. Is this some sort of "sagn" that I'm not supposed to write about Oscar Levant any more?

At this rate, I never will, for I HATE trying to piece together lost posts.

It didn't even save as a draft, which is insane! I tried to listen to some Debussy while fucking around with my photos, which are probably gone also.

Perhaps Oscar is playing with me.

Levant was a strange one. In the video he is being marched along between two ageing legends, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, who have been hauled out of retirement to do yet another musical, The Barkleys of Broadway. I'm not keen on the retread aspects of this show, with Astaire in his 50s dancing with a bunch of disembodied shoes. This 3-minute ditty is the best part: it's a charming little song, with Oscar bellowing in a voice that sometimes reminds me of Walter Matthau. And it was true, he really did hate the country - the crickets scared him.

So what was I going to say about all this, before it was all fucking lost? I wanted to tell a little story from the Levant bio I am reading, A Talent for Genius. I'm not sure what I think about this book, or about Levant generally, because he ended up such a wreck. He looked about 100 years old when he died, twitching, bent over, virtually incoherent, his mind in a million pieces. Such a mind. And he was only 65.

"Levant's film career was about to become another stroll through a hall of mirrors," the bio claims, "not only reflecting his own life experience as a struggling musician in New York, but full of biographical doppelgangers as well."

Anyway, one of the first times he played the "Oscar Levant type" that was soon to be popular in the '40s was in Humoresque, in which Joan Crawford plays a rich older woman lusting after a novice concert violinist (incongruously played by John Garfield). Levant probably got along fine with him, since they had a certain gangsterish quality in common, even though he was hardly a musician: Isaac Stern had to stand behind him and stick his arms through his jacket to play the violin.

Crawford was another matter.

To quote A Talent for Genius: "To Levant's mystification, Crawford always showed up on the set carrying two raw steaks under her arm. She also had a habit of knitting during the long hours between scenes - she was a compulsive knitter. She even brought her knitting to dinner parties. Noticing this habit, one of Levant's first remarks to her on the set was, "Do you knit while you fuck?"

 

I can't picture it. I can't picture Levant with Crawford - at all - though legend has it he was a chick magnet, a fact that was written into several of his movies (e. g. The Barkleys of Broadway, in which he plays a bravura version of Khatchaturian's Sabre Dance while four gorgeous babes "woo-hoo" him from the balcony.)

 

Oh I don't know, I suppose I should try to be more charitable towards Joan Crawford. Then again, why should I? She's dead and she was a hard bitch who only cared about herself. She ate men alive and spat out the bones. I tried to find a picture of Catherine O'Hara spoofing her Humoresque rich-bitch character on SCTV: they did a superb satire of the movie called New York Rhapsody, though they didn't include Levant. (Eugene Levy might have been up for it.) I just remember O'Hara's shoulders wouldn't fit through the door, so she had to go sideways.

It's hard to know what exactly happened to create the "Oscar Levant type", because there really was no such thing. He didn't do anything an actor was supposed to do. He didn't project. He said his lines in a flat New Yorkish voice and showed little emotion. He rarely smiled. He played piano in a way that could give you an orgasm, but when he was finished and took his bow, he had a sort of pained look on his face. Why did everyone love him so much?

Joan, you had your chance. Or did you take it? If so,  please tell me. . . did you knit?

CODA. Or something. This book just gets better and better. I mean the "fuck" parts, as Levant himself might put it. He started out with an awful fondness for professionals, and seemed to have thought of sex mainly as a business transaction. Later it was married women - no strings attached, and by this time he seems to have gained some technique. His two wives (not at the same time) might have thought he was crazy, but both admitted he shone in a certain arena. "Oscar was sexy," his "forever-wife" June said about him, "and women instinctively knew he'd be good in bed, particularly married women who felt a little thwarted in that area." Though he was given to explosive battles with his first wife, she said about him, a little sadly, "Oscar was a wonderful lover. He was tender."

Stop the necrophilia? OK.