The Whole Truth and Nothing But (1963), Hedda Hopper and James Brough.

On the recently divorced Dinah Shore:  "She is a forty-five-year-old woman with two children still in school.  The fact that good men don't grow on trees is something most women don't realize until it's too late."

On Sinatra's distaste for the word "clan" to describe the Rat Pack:  " 'I don't like the word "clan",' Frank once said.  'Did you ever look the word up in a dictionary?' I said.  'It means a family that sticks together, like the Kennedys you're so fond of.  They're the most clannish family in America.  I don't like Rat Pack, but there's nothing wrong with the name of Clan."

On Edward G Robinson's second wife Jane Robinson: "The current Mrs Edward G Robinson would like to be a hostess with the mostest, but she has not attained the status of his former wife, who entertained in great style."

On Harpo Marx: "Harpo, whom I adore, once told me he couldn't understand why he couldn't join a local country club.  'That's easy,' was my reply.  'You belong to a different club, where they don't take in Christians.  So in a way you're sort of even."

On Rosemary Clooney: "Next door is a house of sorrow - Rosemary Clooney and her five children live there with no husband or father to guide them."

On fashions of the 1950s: "The cause is glamour, for which I've been fighting a losing battle for years.  Our town was built on it, but there's scarcely a trace left now.  Morning, noon and night the girls parade in babushkas; dirty, sloppy sweaters; and skin-tight pants.  They may be an incitement to rape, but not to marriage."

On Jackie Kennedy:  "When I look at Jackie Kennedy these days, I think: 'If those fellows [Hollywood designers of the 30s] were around today, what they couldn't have done for her!'  She'd be queen of fashion the world over.  Oleg Cassini can't hold a candle to any of them."

On Louis B Meyer.  "The biggest impact I made [as an actress] was on a pudgy little fellow who used to lurk around the set.  When the picture was finished he sidled up to me.  I mistook his intentions. 'I don't want to buy any fur coats,' said I.  'You don't understand,' said he.  'My name's Louis Mayer.  I'm the producer."

Tell me more, my good man!

Hick flicks: the rise and fall of redneck cinema (2005), Scott Von Doviak.

Oh yeah?

Scott Von Doviak's argument that Days of Thunder (1990) is a soulless, corporate rip off of Stroker Ace (1983) is just one example why Hick Flicks might be the best book of film analysis I've read for a long time.  Days of Thunder is basically a remake of Stroker Ace, not a particularly well-respected Burt Reynolds vehicle.  Von Doviak uses it as an example to show how in around ten years the regional "hick flick" had been replaced by slick flicks.  "[Days of Thunder] is a strictly formulaic Eighties Cruise vehicle that already seemed dated when it arrived on screens in the summer of 1990," he writes, "...unfortunately the picture surrounding [Cruise] is strictly ersatz, making its ostensibly gen-yew-wine touches - like the cameos by actual NASCAR drivers...- all the more unconvincing." With this handy slapdown of Days of Thunder in favour of a bottom of the barrel Burt Reynolds movie - when he was at his Burt Reynoldsiest - Doviak nails it!  High five and pass the Mountain Dew!

Von Doviak limits himself to southern-fried 70s B's -- no to porn, biker movies and foreign fare.  Yes to anything wearing cutoff jean shorts, preferably pushing the speed limit!  His writing style is like listening to an affable yet unpretentious moviegoer.  It's clear he knows what postmodernism and feminist readings are, but mercifully he doesn't feel the need to wow us with academese.  His reasonable, lighthearted approach means that  the easily dismissible genre of "hick flicks"  has been given a fair study.

Boy, do they like their cars and trucks down south.  Hick flicks have NASCAR, truckers, CB lingo, even films that give the cars names and their own credits!  But again, Von Doviak's book goes just the extra inch in giving the historical context and rationale.  The traditions behind all this car-lovin' comes from when, during Prohibition, moonshine was made down south and the fastest drivers raced up north (evading cops enroute) where it would be distributed from bigger cities.  See, I didn't know that!  I also had no idea that in an effort to save on gas, Nixon proposed a reduction of the speed limit to 55 miles an hour for trucks and buses, a move that was not popular with commercial trucking associations.  A little background goes a long way in understanding the overwhelming popularity of Smokey and the Bandit, a movie that in 1977 was second place only to Star Wars at the box office!

This book was so delightful I would like to personally request a prequel.  Sure, Robert Mitchum's Thunder Road is held up as a big granddaddy to the genre, but what came before?  The regional theatres sure played a lot of cruddy "classic era" B's....!

Cop Hater (1958), William Berke.

 

 Heat wave!  Robert Loggia asks Shirley Ballard a few questions.

Cop Hater is a by-the-numbers "post Korean war"crime B that I had to watch just to see Robert Loggia and Jerry Orbach as youngsters.  Funnily enough, I had also seen Loggia recently in a Kojak rerun so now I can proudly claim to have seen him in all stages of adulthood thanks to Joy TV, one of the many Christian networks that buys cheap, completely off-topic serials to play at night when all the preachers have gone to bed.  Hallelujah!  Based on Ed McBain's "love them or hate them" mystery novels about the adventures of New York's 87th precinct, you could say Cop Haters follows the same basic template as later TV crime shows like Kojak-- all the same ingredients are there and they thrive on the likability of their leads.  In this one Loggia is the clever, understated rookie on the trail of a cop killer.  There's at least two completely gratuitous partial nudity scenes and Shirley Ballard complains endlessly that she's hot.  What is there not to like here?

Sometimes cops just get snuffed, Daddi-o.  Jerry Orbach as Hispanic leader of the teen gang, The Grovers.

Hollywood Lawyer (1960), Milton Golden.

In 1951, roughneck B-actor and star of Detour Tom Neal gave Franchot Tone a wild beating that left Tone in a coma for eighteen hours.  They had been fighting over actress Barbara Peyton, who later married Tone but was eventually divorced from him when he discovered she had never stopped seeing Neal!  Throughout all of this, there was an invisible character whose only role was to cash everyone's cheques:  lawyer Milton Golden.  

Golden's tell-all book Hollywood Lawyer is cleverly written but doesn't spill enough beans!  Most of the little morality tales are "blinds," which leaves readers guessing who the identity of Mr D- or Miss X. may be.   Maybe back in 1960 it was possible to sniff out who was who, but I was just left scratching my head.  (I wonder if our modern day equivalent, entertainment lawyer Enty from the gossip site Crazy Days and Nights http://www.crazydaysandnights.net/ can help!)  

Here's a sample:  What male Hollywood actor (Golden calls the couple Bob and Cecile De Young)  adopted a baby girl only to unknowingly re-adopt the same child seven years later?  Golden says this was sometime prior to World War II when babies were the "must have" accessory du jour. Bob divorced Cecile, and his next wife "Estelle" retained custody of the child when she then also divorced Bob.  When Estelle was killed in an airplane accident, her new husband gave the child up to his next wife "Shirley," who eventually married Bob De Young!  ....  Is Golden trying to tell me this is Clark Gable?

From the August 18, 1961 Deseret News.

Milton Golden (R) and his client, Tom Neal (1951).

Actor: the life and times of Paul Muni (1973), Jerome Lawrence.

Six of the Seven Faces played by Paul Muni from the movie of the same name (1929).

Realizing that playing "ethnic" was perfectly acceptable (and even a badge of honour) for dramatic actors back in the day now strikes us as baffling, ridiculous, hilarious or simply downright disrespectful.  Reading Actor: the life and times of Paul Muni gave me a new perspective on at least one man's interpretation of this tradition.  For better or worse, author Jerome Lawrence sets most discussions of race or ethnicity in Muni's portrayals aside.  For Muni (according to Lawrence) the goal was simply the most accurate physical depiction of any fictional character or historical personality.  

Understanding that Muni came from an ethnic tradition himself - Yiddish language theatre - is insightful, as is knowing that he was firmly rooted in the tradition of itinerant actors.  His parents, Nachum Favel (Philip) and Salche (Sallie) Weisenfreund earned their meagre living as a two-person troupe, enacting sketches across the Austro-Hungarian countryside.  One routine involved a nudnick and a schlemihl drafted into the Army - a preposterous concept and sure-fire laughs for their Yiddish audience.  ("What was more unlikely than a Yiddish soldier?" asks Lawrence). Muni's father tried unsuccessfully to break into the blossoming Yiddish theatre tradition once the family made its way to New York, but Muni had better luck.  While far more sophisticated than his parents' old world routines, the Yiddish theatre had its own stock characters (rabbis, landlords, not-so-virtuous young daughters).  One strength of Actor is to provide a basic description of the tumultuous world of Yiddish theatre.  Lawrence draws an effective picture of this world, and for appeal of the "uptown" English-language theatres for Yiddish actors.  For some, to perform uptown (as Edward G Robinson did before Muni) was to really make it.

Yes, Edward G Robinson who in his own biography All My Yesterdays grumbles about never having the looks to be a leading man unlike his colleague Muni.  Indeed, in Actor,  actress Sylvia Hoffmann bubbles over with the memory of the "gorgeous" Muni as the last minute replacement for Robinson in a staging of The Fifth Season.  Then there's Paul Muni, whose lifelong tradition was to bury his good looks in fake beards. In almost all his film roles, Muni was slathered in makeup and spirit gum - crafting characters from these substances was a skill he was proud of.  Muni wanted to completely transform into his subject, to be that person.  To look like him, dress like him, to adopt the minutest gestures or tics that made that individual unique.

Actor is a fascinating portrayal of a relentlessly self-flagellating man obsessed with professional perfection, married to a dour wife who was more stage manager / mother than partner.  While written in a chummy style by a personal friend (Lawrence was co-author of the play Inherit the Wind, which helped revive Muni's career), Lawrence's subject seems fussy, rigid and completely unable to enjoy life, success or happiness.  Earning recognition playing heroic historical figures such as Louis Pasteur, Muni dove into ever more serious projects, culminating in the quest to depict Alfred Nobel onscreen with the objective of spreading the message of peace to all mankind (a project he later abandoned when he came to the conclusion that Nobel was probably gay).  Lawrence appropriately chides Warner Brothers for billing Muni as "Mr. Paul Muni" - lending an unnecessarily sombre gravitas to all his performances.  Muni's gravitas became ridiculous as his acting style, described by theatre director Herman Shumlin as "one of those actors who functioned both from an outward realization of appearance, makeup and clothes, as well as an interior examination of the character and his own feelings" grew dated.  By the 50s, wigs were very much out of style -- theatre was innovating and tackling adult themes. Although he felt deeply uncomfortable with these changes and never completely buried his fake beard kit,  Inherit the Wind gave Muni a chance to find success in modern theatre and recapture some of the respect he had earned as the kind of vibrant actor we can still see in I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang.  

Paul Muni, Director Mervyn LeRoy and Bella Muni on the set of The World Changes.