fireball robert matzen

Who Did She Have to Screw?

Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen

The ultra-rare one sheet movie poster for Supernatural; rarity caused by its rapid run through American theaters and a resulting lack of need for a lot of advertising material.

As die-hard fans know, Carole Lombard made one horror picture in her too-short but very active career. It was the 1933 Paramount release, Supernatural, produced and directed by the Halperin brothers, Victor and Edward, who were at the time flush with cash from their 1932 independent production, White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi.

White Zombie is the mighty little swimming sperm that erupted into generations of succeeding pictures where the zombies grew ever more creepy, lustful, menacing, intelligent, speedy, and carnivorous, right up to today’s The Walking Dead, which I choose not to watch because death is around us enough without using it as entertainment. I digress. These Halperins from Chicago were the adolescent minds that started the Zombie Invasion by creating some glassy-eyed shufflers who now seem docile and even cute by today’s comparison, and now the brothers set their sights on ghosts and possession with Supernatural.

Didn’t FDR promise a chicken in every pot and a 20-foot bird cage in every conservatory? Carole Lombard and Randolph Scott live the good life in Supernatural, until…

Readers of Fireball know that Carole Lombard lived and breathed filmmaking. She knew when a pan was better than a tilt, when a close up was better than a wide shot, when less light was better than more light. So imagine her vexation, after working for several top directors, when she tried to understand the vision of 37-year-old Victor Halperin, fresh off his stint working with Bela Lugosi and the undead. Most telling of all the unusual aspects of this picture as viewed today is the relentless series of brightly lit, full-on close-ups of Carole Lombard’s face. The girl who only felt comfortable when she controlled the lighting because of her scars is super-exposed in Supernatural, and truth be told, she looks great. The cheek scar is highly visible in several shots because it’s an indentation in her cheek and casts a shadow, but the blown-out lighting obliterated the other, flatter scars on her face, the one by her left eye and those near her mouth. Carole at 24 going on 25 is shown in Supernatural to be as uniquely beautiful as they came onscreen in that time period. She brims with vigor, her physical powers entering their peak. Why she worried so much about the way she was lit, I don’t know.

Supernatural is the one Carole was making when she entreated the heavens, “Who do I have to screw to get off this picture??” It’s easy to see why. Supernatural fades in to a dark and stormy night and warnings by Confucius and the Bible about the undead. The first quarter of the economical 64-minute run time concerns the pending execution of serial killer Ruth Rogen, a hot little number who manages to strangle her strapping male lovers. The inference is that she gets them drunk and then, does them in. Mad-doctor-sort-of-psychologist Dr. Houston is certain—certain, mind you—that when Ruth is put to death, her spirit will inhabit a nearby living breathing woman and so after execution is carried out, Dr. Houston claims the body, and………

He what? He claims the body? I guess these were simpler times, the 1930s, because you’d think it’d be a tough case that some guy can just claim the body of a headline-grabbing, newly executed serial killer. But next thing you know, he’s got her in his laboratory and he’s experimenting on her.

Is it just me, or are you fellas also suddenly feeling like murdering people? Roma is possessed by the soul of Ruth Rogen as Dr. Houston (H.B. Warner) and Grant (Randy Scott) look on.

If you were so inclined, you could spend a week questioning the plot of Supernatural, but it would be a pointless exercise. Just enjoy Carole Lombard as young, wildly rich Roma Courtney, who’s possessed by the murderous soul of Ruth Rogen and bent on putting an end to Ruth’s evil lover, Paul Bavian. I’d tell you who the actors were but you never heard of them.

What I want to know is, how did everyone in this time period, from Roma Courtney to Nick and Nora Charles, get their MONEY? Wasn’t there this thing going on called the Great Depression? DAMN these people were well off. Roma’s digs are so vast that the dolly operators have a tough time keeping up with her. Roma has a yacht, too, which I mistook for a U.S. Navy destroyer.

Paul Bavian stages a bogus séance related to the picture’s other story line: Roma’s twin brother has just died, and she wants to make contact with him. (I was annoyed that all pronounced it “SEE-ants.” Was that really the word as used in the 1930s?)

Randolph Scott is in Supernatural, but I’m not exactly sure why. He’s too good for this sort of thing and yet manages to make no impression as Roma’s boyfriend, a part that could have been played by any guy plucked off any street corner in Hollywood. It’s the kind of role that only becomes necessary in the last reel, and (Spoiler) only for the moment it takes to rescue Carole Lombard’s possessed character from committing a murder.

Ironically, Carole’s off-screen posse included two psychics, and these weren’t money-grubbing Long Island Mediums either. These two refused to take her money and instead hung around Carole and her mom Petey just because. They routinely raised hackles by knowing things they couldn’t know. As a result, Carole should have found some interesting concepts in Supernatural, but the chaos of its production negated any such inclinations on her part.

Paul Bavian (Alan Dinehart) is only a little suspicious when Roma takes him to his late lover Ruth Rogen’s apartment. The full-length portrait of Ruth (Vivienne Osborne) offering up a tempting apple is emblematic of the fact that bad girls are a lot more fun. Until they strangle you, that is.

Don’t get me wrong. Supernatural is a rollercoaster ride of a picture, and if it were made today, it would be all CG and over the top and loud and entrail-strewn and in your face and no fun at all. But because of the times and the stars involved, this thing is a hoot, with enough genuine creepiness to keep an audience onboard for an hour of mayhem thought up by genuine adolescent brains.

This is one of those “pre-Code” pictures they’re always talking about—you know, before the Hollywood Production Code went into effect and pinch-faced censors took over. This doesn’t mean Lombard’s bouncing around naked in Supernatural (unfortunately), but it’s clear that actual sex breaks out in this universe, and that booze is fun, and murder rewarding. Ruth Rogen doesn’t get her comeuppance for being a killer, which the Production Code would soon require. Sure, she’s executed, but then her soul floats free to continue the mayhem, and it’s implied at fade out that she’ll possess again after being driven from Roma’s body. For all I know, Ruth Rogen is still out there somewhere, strangling away.

Will Grant arrive in time to save Roma from a murder wrap for strangling evil Paul Bavian?

I hope Turner Classic Movies runs Supernatural soon. If it doesn’t, seek out a bootleg copy and emulate Paul Bavian by pouring a triple shot of hard liquor. It worked for me. Then sit back and enjoy the picture that drove Carole Lombard crazy, the one she didn’t talk about, the one horror picture she ever made; the one that collectors today revere for its rarity. Whatever else you can say about Supernatural, it is hands-down the wildest, most unusual picture to which Lombard’s name is attached. And, oops, I think she just turned over in her grave.

Feathering the Nest

Notes: Check out the latest bestseller list for Movie Biographies. Fireball peaked at #2 on the list last Sunday and is still going strong. Also, please consider clicking the Follow button on this blog to get an alert when a new column appears, and if you’re a Twitter person, you could follow me (@RobertMatzen) to receive important updates on book lectures or other Fireball news.

Think how profoundly we all have been impacted by the cellular telephone. A generation is growing up that knows nothing about the “phone booth” or telephones in your house that used to be tethered to walls. What? It’s all part of the march of technology, and as I sat and watched Errol Flynn’s 1952 pirate picture, Against All Flags, last night, I thought most of all about technology and how it brought about pictures like this one.

What red-blooded lad could resist this art announcing another pirate picture hitting port soon? Many a dad also felt the call of this particular brotherhood of buccaneers

There’s a lot to like about Against All Flags, which has the look and feel of a big-budget picture the way Universal International made them at the time, and they made them that way at that time because of the impact of television. Movies had to keep being bigger and better to lure people out of their homes because in 1952, families could suddenly sit at home while metal antennas pulled broadcast signals out of thin air and allowed people to watch grainy black-and-white images on television for free. You didn’t have to get dressed up and haul the brood to a theater with all its related expenses at the concession stand. You could lounge at home and be entertained.

In Against All Flags, Errol Flynn is a British naval officer who goes undercover to bust up a band of pirates. How could any kid not find this to be a disagreeable plot since Hollywood pirates were always attractive, well-costumed rule-breakers—every boy’s dream of the way life should play out. Anyway, here’s Flynn undercover and since he is Errol Flynn the script tosses out a lot of innuendo, playing on his bad-boy reputation with the ladies, lines that came oh-so-close to being snagged by the censors but never quite crossed the line.

The key gag in the picture is that a virginal Indian princess, age about 16, falls for Flynn on first sight and after an innocent Flynn kiss to quiet her, she spends the second half the picture puckering up and exclaiming with youthful enthusiasm, “Again!” She’s young and willing as portrayed by 19-year-old brunette Alice Kelley, and the tailoring of the subplot says something about how Flynn swashbucklers were constructed at this time. They traded on his reputation as a swordsman in more ways than one and offered sexual morsels in vivid Technicolor that television couldn’t begin to rival.

What you couldn’t see on TV in 1952: flesh-baring, under-aged girls throwing themselves at Errol Flynn, in Technicolor yet. Or does Spitfire want the wench for herself? Alice Kelley broadcasts raw sexual desire for the bad boy as Maureen O’Hara and Mildred Natwick look on.

There’s a big-three starring here, including Flynn, Maureen O’Hara, and Anthony Quinn, who cuts a fine figure as “Captain Roc” in his black headscarf. And how many of these pictures did Maureen O’Hara make? Here she plays buccaneer Spitfire Stevens in a man’s clothes and fetching leather hip boots and does so with credibility. Am I the only one who sees a hint or two of masculinity in everything about her? How else could she carry and wield a sword as if she could hold her own in a duel and actually hurt somebody? Plus the androgynous nature of her character gives a kinky undertone to dialogue about ownership and uses of a slave girl—television certainly wasn’t offering such suggestive fare.

Maureen O’Hara was smart enough to follow the money wherever it led, including many a swashbuckler, and feathered her nest in these sweet Universal International profit participation deals. It was a setup that Carole Lombard had dreamed up for herself in 1941 with To Be or Not to Be; had she lived past 1942, she would have blazed this trail as an independent for the remainder of the decade.

Hmmm, who to root for…Flynn the undercover do-gooder or Quinn the minding-his-own-business pirate?

In the early 1950s, Universal International managed to thrive on this setup in the ongoing war between the studios and upstart television. UI turned out lush Technicolor offerings that drew top stars like Errol Flynn and Maureen O’Hara specifically because they knew that black ink was likely and they would be getting a cut.

It doesn’t matter that Against All Flags frays long before the last reel and becomes just another loud and mindless pirate picture. I admire the pluck of the studio, the writers, and the stars for managing to turn out product more than 60 years ago that maintains enough sass for a Friday night primetime broadcast run on Turner Classic Movies/U.S. In this case, the dreaded medium, television, is taking a moment to salute a one-time enemy that only went down after one hell of a fight.

On the Street Where I (Didn’t) Live

I was a kid out of college the day in 1987 that my then-wife Debra and I visited Robert Stack at his home in Bel Air, California. Mr. Stack’s longtime next-door neighbor was Ronald Reagan, so I knew as we wound along the lush and winding roads, with the landscape abloom, that I was about to be in good company. My second book, under contract to Greenwood Press, would be an academic volume about Carole Lombard with a 30-page biography included. I queried all the old stars still alive at the time seeking in-person interviews. I didn’t know protocol and had no track record as a biographer, so Ralph Bellamy sent quotes in a letter and so did Cesar Romero. Jimmy Stewart, operating out of his Beverly Hills office, was downright gruff. I was in contact with many others, but the correspondence is buried somewhere. Then there was Robert Stack. I wrote him a letter with the basics—book about Carole Lombard, may I speak with you, etc.—and he shot back a note in the minimum number of days for mail to go from Pennsylvania to California to Pennsylvania. It included his phone number and he said, basically, love to talk about Carole, give me a call and stop by any time.

Robert Stack had met Carole Lombard in 1933 when he was 14. She befriended him in Tahoe as she took up Nevada residence in anticipation of divorce from William Powell. Carole had the ability to make a guy feel special; she was beautiful, accessible, and genuine, and made electric eye contact. Grown men fell in love with her almost daily, so what chance did an adolescent boy have of avoiding a head-over-heels tumble?

Lombard knew the effect she had on men, so she must have known Bobby Stack’s feelings, and she must have pulled her punches with this poor mop-topped kid.

Ironically, Stack’s first picture after migrating to Hollywood six years later would be called First Love, and he would portray new sensation Deanna Durbin’s onscreen boyfriend. A couple of years and five pictures later, Carole Lombard asked for Stack to portray a younger man smitten with her in To Be or Not to Be, a move that was typecasting for Stack—but didn’t make Carole’s husband, insecure Mr. Clark Gable, any too happy.

Robert and Rosemarie Stack right around the time I met both of them at their home in Bel Air.

Forty-five years later we pulled into Robert Stack’s driveway and were ushered past the pool and into his den by the housekeeper. We waited only a moment on an overstuffed leather couch before Bob breezed into the room, hair longer and blonder than I would have guessed, dressed in lounging pajamas, that big friendly movie star smile lighting up from ear to ear and his handshake firm. If he was surprised to be looking at a couple of wet-behind-the-ears kids, he didn’t let on.

He talked first about the film version of The Untouchables and this was bitter Robert Stack, grumbling that he hadn’t been involved in the production, then nearing completion, and he seemed to want to be on the record voicing his displeasure to anyone with an audio recorder.

Then he seemed to recall why I was there, and brightened, and a light clicked on in his eyes. Carole Lombard. Ah yes. He launched into stories of those early Tahoe days, laying eyes on and getting to know 24-year-old Carole, teaching her to shoot skeet, this boy teaching this woman, and Stack confessed that his mother, to whom he was very close, didn’t much care for Lombard’s loud personality and penchant for swearing. “Mother didn’t think I should be hanging around her,” said Stack with a smile that showed the perspective of decades.

He sat on an adjacent couch, cross-legged as he talked. But then at powerful memories of Lombard he would stand and pace, often ending up leaning against a giant fieldstone fireplace with a dark wood mantel. This was a man’s room, trophies, guns, and now I know that Stack had had Gable’s den in mind when he created his own. He talked a lot about Gable, about admiring the King and worrying for him after Carole’s death, when “He would race up and down Laurel Canyon on his motorcycle, not caring if he lived or died.”

We talked about the making of To Be or Not to Be and the lengths to which Carole went to keep a very nervous “Bobby” loose on the set. He told a story that showed up in his memoirs, how Carole would gently take him by the elbow and ease him back into his key light when he drifted out of it. She was, he said with awe, the only fellow performer ever to do that for him, but he learned from her to do it for other newcomers over the years.

Carole Lombard keeps an ill-at-ease Robert Stack loose on the set of To Be or Not to Be.

I asked him where he was when he learned of the plane crash and his response was telling. He didn’t hem and haw, and look far off and reach for the memory. “I was walking out of the Hollywood Palladium,” he boomed at once in that Unsolved Mysteries voice, reflexively. “I was with my date; we had been dancing. I heard a newspaper crier on the street corner. It was the Los Angeles Times, and he was calling out, “Carole Lombard in Plane Crash!”

I get goosebumps now thinking about that moment in Bob Stack’s den, seeing this friendly, sincere man tearing up. “I saw it in a newspaper headline,” he said, regarding me through the mist. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Unfortunately for me, one can only live life straight ahead, with no do-overs. There was so much more I could have and should have asked him. About her, about Gable, about his career—The High and the Mighty, Written on the Wind, his TV series

—about Flynn for crying out loud, since he haunted Flynn’s Mulholland tennis court for years. I need to give myself a break, though. I was just a kid starting out.

Finally I ran out of questions and he led us back outside by the pool, where I met his wife Rosemarie, who was just as gracious as her husband, and their friendly white poodle Hollywood, regarded by both as a beloved child and the heart of the household.

This was my first celebrity interview, and therefore the most memorable. I wish I had taken pictures that day but I didn’t. I just lived it, a kid out of college on the street where the president lived.

I Love a Parade

In this case it’s a parade of good news about Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3. I learned yesterday that the ebook version of Fireball has been chosen by Amazon as part of its June Big Deal program. This means it’s discounted from $10.99 to $1.99 from June 13 – 28, potentially opening the book up to a legion of summer beach readers who might not take the plunge at Amazon’s regular price. Please spread the word as far and wide as you can about this opportunity to get Fireball at deep discount.

Now that the book has been out there for several months, fewer reviews are appearing, but here’s one from the most recent Vegas Seven magazine, which is distributed free all around Las Vegas and represents a terrific way to expose Fireball to an international audience.

My PR rep, Sarah Miniaci, with a copy of Fireball at Book Expo America.

Fireball also got nice exposure at Book Expo America thanks to the team at Smith Publicity, which featured Fireball in its display. My PR rep, Sarah Miniaci, spread the word at BEA, which is the largest annual gathering of book industry professionals and this year was held at the Javits Center in New York City. I have to take a moment and thank Sarah for months of hard work and expertise, which got the book in front of millions of people via broadcast television and radio, print articles and reviews, and vast internet exposure.

The last bit of good news for today is about my latest lecture and signing, which took place at Cinevent, the annual film convention held in Columbus, Ohio each Memorial Day weekend. The lecture drew the largest crowd yet and we sold a record number of books over three days. I want to thank Cinevent manager Steve Haynes for making time for me in the packed program and also for an outstanding level of support that pretty much guaranteed success.

The lectures always result in meeting great people. This time it was Bob King, publisher of Classic Images magazine. Bob invited me to do a Fireball-related article, which I’m getting started on today. I also met David L. Smith, author of the 2006 book, Hoosiers in Hollywood as well as the article “Carole Lombard: Profane Angel,” which appeared in the Summer 2001 issue of Films of the Golden Age magazine. Dave sent me a copy of the 2001 broadcast documentary, Carole Lombard: Hollywood’s Profane Angel, in which he appeared as an on-camera expert with, among others, Robert Stack, Robert Osborne, A.C. Lyles, Eddie Bracken, and William Wellman, Jr. Watching this 2001 documentary gave me an idea for my next column, so stay tuned for what I hope to be a good one.

Fireball: Carole Lombard the the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen

Preaching to the choir of Hollywood film lovers at Cinevent.

You Can’t Win ‘Em All

I bet you never saw Olivia de Havilland’s last theatrical picture. I bet you didn’t know it was a swashbuckler set around the time of Captain Blood. I bet you didn’t know she played a queen and the key to solving the plot of the film. Do you want to know why you don’t know?

After her Academy Award run of the late 1940s, Livvie tried everything to remain relevant. Screen, stage—nothing went according to plan. Into the 1960s she sought to reinvent herself with the shocker, Lady in a Cage and then she took over Joan Crawford’s role in the follow up to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, this one called Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Like all actresses from the Golden Era, she had an ever more difficult time finding good parts in decent pictures, which is what led Miss Bette Davis to make everything from Baby Jane to Return from Witch Mountain—it was a living.

Her biographer, Tony Thomas, would never quite forgive Olivia for showing so much skin in 1970’s The Adventurers.

OdeH lay low from 1964 until the 1970 Harold Robbins Eurotrash feature, The Adventurers. There she became the best thing about the picture, playing a 40-something cougar to young Bosnia/Herzegovina leading man Bekim Fehmiu. If you think about a Bosnia/Herzegovina leading man in a Hollywood picture, the problems with The Adventurers become pretty obvious pretty fast, and speak to the dearth of parts for Miss deH and the questionable judgment she brought to bear when something did come her way. She even showed some flesh this time around, much to the mortification of some of her admirers.

If you weren’t yet born in 1970, you missed a hell of a brouhaha when Airport hit big screens, and by 1972 turnstiles were spinning madly as The Poseidon Adventure capsized its way to box office history. Suddenly, the all-star disaster epic was in vogue. Olivia saw aging Helen Hayes claim an Oscar for Airport and Shelley Winters nearly follow that path for Poseidon. From there, Livvie watched Earthquake shine the spotlight on aging sexpot Ava Gardner and MGM ingénue Monica Lewis, and The Towering Inferno do likewise for Selznick discovery (and wife) Jennifer Jones.

Lots of water–too much water–and not enough substance plagued her appearance in Airport ’77.

Meanwhile, on a separate track, swashbucklers came back in vogue with Richard Lester’s irreverent version of The Three Musketeers, shot in 1973 and released in 1974. Of all people, Raquel Welch scored biggest this time, winning a Golden Globe for her wacky Constance. Livvie had to get in on this gravy train and gain back some relevance. After all, she was then in her youthful 50s with a lot yet to offer the motion picture world. Then she got what seemed to be her break with a role in Airport ’77, sequel to the huge Airport 1975. Yes, work was work, but what a thankless part, with endless reaction shots in her passenger seat aboard an airliner that sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and then a less-than-flattering dunking during the ocean rescue. I’m on your side, Livvie, but, it’s hard to look good with a couple tons of water smacking you in the face.

Oscar nods do not result from death by bees.

Airport ’77 did well, not as well as the previous two, but well enough. By this time Hollywood was groping for disasters with which to imperil all-star casts, and somebody at Livvie’s old studio, Warner Bros., decided that bees hadn’t been done and bees are scary and why don’t we do bees? Hence, The Swarm. This time Olivia shared screen time with Ben Johnson and Fred MacMurray, but fans of the great dual Oscar winner had a hard time watching her get stung to death, her face eaten, as the bees rampaged. Never mind that these days killer bees have since been proven to exist, and they really are scary. Way scarier than those depicted by Warners of Burbank. And how strange must it have been for Olivia de Havilland to return to the studio she so desperately sought to sever herself from 35 years earlier? Oh the ghosts she must have brushed past during production since so many of her colleagues had by then passed, including Errol Flynn.

Which brings us to the little-known swashbuckler that became Livvie’s swan song in feature pictures. It must have looked like a godsend in 1976 when the idea first came up. Behind the Iron Mask, based on Alexandre Dumas’ Man in the Iron Mask, would be lensed in Austria by Director of Photography Jack Cardiff and directed by Ken Annakin, veteran of Disney pictures and some all-star hits, including Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.

Behind the Iron Mask would feature 60-year-old former fencing champion and veteran Hollywood heartthrob Cornel Wilde as D’Artagnan, Oscar winner for his Cyrano (a brilliant swordsman) Jose Ferrer as Athos, and Alan Hale Jr. as Porthos. In a 1952 Howard Hughes picture for RKO named Sons of the Musketeers, Cornel Wilde had portrayed the son of D’Artagnan and Alan Hale Jr. had played the son of Porthos. That in itself was a kick because his dad, Alan Hale, had portrayed Porthos in the 1939 version of Man in the Iron Mask.

Sons of the Musketeers was renamed At Sword’s Point for its 1952 release. Here a very young Alan Hale Jr. portrays the son of musketeer Porthos. Next to him is Cornel Wilde as the son of D’Artagnan. The “twist” is offered by Maureen O’Hara as the daughter of Athos. As modest as this RKO B picture was, it feels like Citizen Kane next to The Fifth Musketeer.

So here was Alan Hale Jr. back in a role that had been in the family for 40 years. And into this cast was invited Olivia de Havilland—Alan Hale’s co-star on so many Warner Bros. hits—to portray Anne of Austria, wife of Louis XIII and mother to wastrel Louis XIV and his good-hearted twin brother, Philippe.

This was not your father’s Man in the Iron Mask. Although I’m pretty sure Dad would have approved–of the European version at least.

How freakin’ great is this? Olivia must have thought, to cavort with a veteran cast that also included Rex Harrison and old Warner Bros. contract player Helmut Dantine. But a funny thing happened on the way to swashbuckling glory. Actually, a series of funny things. The script stank. The key role, that of Louis/Philippe, was given to Beau Bridges, an actor with zero romantic appeal. The director couldn’t figure out how to approach the material. The audio was bad, even by European standards. The producers decided to shoot a European version featuring nudity for the two leading ladies in the picture, Sylvia Kristel of Emmanuelle fame and Ursula Andress, who was ready and willing to show off her still formidable 43-year-old body. Unfortunately, some of the plot was embedded in the nude scenes and so when they were cut for U.S. audiences and a PG rating, the picture didn’t quite make sense. And finally, those same infallible producers changed the name of the picture to cash in on the success of The Three Musketeers and its sequel The Four Musketeers. The picture that was shot in 1977 as Behind the Iron Mask now carried the U.S. title The Fifth Musketeer, which made no sense, and Fifth was launched in limited U.S. release in 1979 after sitting around a good while and sank so far and so fast that if you blinked, you missed it. The run on cable TV was similarly short, and if I hadn’t happened upon a late-night run of Ursula Andress pictures on Turner Classic Movies this past week and DVRed Fifth in its pre-dawn run, I would never have thought of The Fifth Musketeer again.

One more, just because. Sylvia Kristel in the European version of Olivia de Havilland’s last feature picture, The Fifth Musketeer.

I told myself that it couldn’t possibly be as bad as I remember. But, oh, my friends, it is. In 1979 I was appalled that the swords were made of obvious plastic, as if from the Marx toy factory, and for the especially dangerous scenes, and I kid you not, the swords were made of rubber so, I guess, to keep the advancing-in-age musketeers from hurting themselves or skewering an Austrian extra. The dubbing sounds just as horrendous today as it did back then, and the musical score is an offense to musicians everywhere.

Livvie shows up in three scenes for a total of about six minutes of screen time, in a nun’s habit. You should probably be aware you’re in for a rough time as an actress when the script calls for you to be amidst a 30-year vow of silence. But she does pipe up to vouch for her son Philippe at the climax of the picture, one of too-few lines for the actress who launched Errol Flynn, became the Maid Marian of all time, brought Jack Warner to his knees, and earned two Oscars in four years and should have claimed a third for her most daring picture of all, The Snake Pit.

So there you have it. Olivia de Havilland ended her screen career in a costume picture, which is how she started it. But it’s a picture with maybe five great moments that remind us how talented these actors were in their prime, and how much they still had to offer in the right hands and the right vehicle, which this most certainly was not.

Plastic swords and costumes that must have been scrounged from Barry Lyndon.

Note: Portions of the European version of Behind the Iron Mask are available on Youtube. Although they are dubbed in French, these segments allow a glimpse into this picture that should have been one for the ages.

Joan Jett Wisdom

The crazy kids back when life made sense.

Who was the first one to sing, “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone?” I remember the Joan Jett version, You don’t know what you got till it’s gaw-aw-aw-aw-onnnn. Joan wasn’t just whistling Dixie, my friends. You lose things, and it hurts. You lose living things, and in an instant the world stops spinning and everything goes flying in all directions, and usually only then do you realize what you had and don’t have anymore; how blessed you were when the parts of your life all fit together so nicely day by day, routine by routine. Then suddenly, there’s a big hole in your existence. Things go all out of whack and you’re stumbling about all fuzzy-headed because your days are numb and your nights are sleepless.

Do you ever wonder how Clark Gable survived January 16, 1942? He was ripped from the ranch to fly up to Vegas in dead of night, then driven this way and that, sequestered at the El Rancho, forced his way to the mountain, tried to climb it, got stopped partway up by news that his wife was dead, was taken back to the El Rancho, sweated out victim retrieval, was given a piece of her jewelry that had been pried from her body, and had to pick out caskets. If ever a man appeared to be shell-shocked, it was the Gable seen in those photos at the El Rancho, hiding behind sunglasses as he walked across the parking lot and climbed inside a car.

Today we know “shell shock” or “combat fatigue” as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. I suspect I am tasting a bit of that over a recent trauma, where memories stab into your brain with no warning, memories that are too horrible to process, and startle and hurt as much the fifteenth time as they did the first. Or they wound even more because you’re still trying to come to grips. Soldiers and law-enforcement professionals suffer such trauma and it can endure years, decades, lifetimes. Those first responders to the crash of Flight 3 tasted it, like the one rescuer who told of stuffing body parts in mail bags said, “I still see it in my dreams sometimes.” He said it 50 years later.

Gable at the El Rancho.

Gable showed all the signs of PTSD, not just that weekend but for the rest of his life. I wonder which moments produced the flashbacks. You have to know he never went back to the El Rancho. I haven’t investigated to learn if he ever stepped on another Western Air DC-3 like the one chartered to rush him to Vegas. I bet he lived that moment on the mountain, “I’m sorry, Mr. Gable,” over and over. And that moment when he was asked if he wanted to spend time with Lombard’s body, which was in the next room. And that first bad memory, when MGM VP Eddie Mannix and PR man Ralph Wheelright barged in the front door of the Encino ranch to interrupt prep for a dinner party, two bundles of nerves to announce that the plane was down. It was the instant his royal, carefully crafted, highly insulated, pampered and preened, forever-adolescent movie-star life stopped making sense. Clark Gable liked being an actor because he could portray successful, secure, confident people quite unlike himself, but on that Friday evening his bill of 10 years was due, and the world got to see the other Clark Gable, the real-life one.

And then, oh, the grief. Inhuman, what he endured, what any husband or wife endures when the spouse exits suddenly. And this spouse, with her shtick, her sayings, her constant carrying on, talking a mile a minute, high-high energy every instant she wasn’t asleep. She would buy outlandish hats just because he disliked outlandish hats. She dared kid the king, and how he loved her for the audacity. The hunting trips wherever, the premieres where they dressed to the nines, the ranch with its orchards and horses and tractor and constant carrying on. Santa Anita, aaaaaaaand they’re Off! The shouting matches and jealous brawls and how they hated each other and loved each other. Driving at 80 with the top down and laughing their heads off. All that………….removed. In its place, silence. In its place, stillness.

It was no longer his life. He could make no sense of life.

The most telling and recurring theme: His friends didn’t want to be around him anymore. He was that different. His hands shook; his hands always shook after that weekend. He had been laid bare for the world and what good was a hero so vulnerable under the shining armor? He never got to enjoy a giant, classic movie hit again. Some of his pictures made a lot of money, but he became the King of Hollywood in name only.

You don’t know what you got till it’s gaw-aw-aw-aw-onnnn. Whoever or whatever you hold dear, go give it a big hug. Look at it and appreciate and imagine what your life would be like without it. I’m feeling a personal loss right now because I dared take for granted and maybe you can profit from my misfortune. Give him or her or it a kiss. Look him or her or it square in the eye and say, “I love you” like maybe it’s the last time, because you never know when it will be.

Unbalanced

Samuel Langley, a smart guy

In the late 1800s, a scientist named Samuel Langley pretty much invented airplanes. Lots of things astonish me, and many of them involve aeronautics. I’ve never gotten past the concept that a hundred tons of metal can get off the ground and stay off the ground. That’s number one, and it goes from there, and here’s the guy who from nothing imagined that humans could fly around in the sky and then wrote about it in a book called Experiments in Aerodynamics that was published in 1891.

Do you hear me, people? Langley dreamed up the “airfoil” and invented the idea of “lift” and the concept that became wind tunnels. Then he successfully flew UAVs powered by mini-steam engine almost a mile on two occasions late in 1896. UAV, you know, like the Predator drone? An Unmanned Air Vehicle in EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND NINETY-SIX. Langley was flying these things around seven years before the Wright Brothers! In fact, nine days prior to the Kitty Hawk breakthrough in 1903, Langley was floating on the Potomac River on a houseboat-turned-aircraft-carrier and was trying to catapult a manned, powered airplane into successful flight. It was a failure of an experiment that came oh-so-close to trumping Orville and Wilber on the verge of their great triumph. Langley was called a fool and a failure afterward.

Langley’s successful UAV, which he dubbed an “Aerodrome.”

I can hear you saying, What’s your point, Matzen? Well, OK, my point is simply this. People don’t much care for history lessons but people love stories and Langley’s is a hell of a story, the race to figure out how to enable humans to fly. Here you have these incredible people in 1890 and 1900 working desperately with sticks, fabric, and leather to make a contraption that could go up and stay up, and less than 40 years later movie stars in fur coats are stepping into polished-aluminum airplanes and flying across the country.

I’ve been saying it a lot in lectures and interviews lately, but it bears repeating: TWA Flight 3 crashed in January 1942, killing Carole Lombard and 21 others, at a time when commercial flight was still in the process of being figured out. It was still the era when biplanes were serving as the training platform for U.S. military pilots. DC-1s and DC-2s still served commercial passengers along with the beefier DC-3—these were the very first modern airliners replacing the serviceable but clunky Ford Tri-Motor.

One of the most telling quotes in Fireball was spoken during the House investigation into the crash of Flight 3 by TWA DC-3 Captain Alexis Klotz. In describing the airway out of Las Vegas, which includes the Spring Mountain range and Mt. Potosi, Klotz said, “It is very true that you can wander off just a little bit and hit something…. We drive down a narrow highway. There is traffic within 12 inches on one side and a gully on the other. It is considered safe. You watch what you are doing.”

They didn’t call this the Greatest Generation for nothing. These men had no virtual displays or talking consoles. They had no radar. They had guidelines, procedures, rudimentary gauges, two wings, and a prayer, and flying perhaps the finest airplane ever constructed, Douglas Corporation’s DC-3, they got where they were going and safely conveyed passengers, 15 and 20 at a time, from place to place.

Except on January 16, 1942.

Enabled by Samuel Langley: the Douglas Corp. masterpiece DC-3.

If you do the math, between December 1903 when the Wrights flew on that ridge in the Outer Banks and January 1942 when Flight 3 smacked into Mt. Potosi, that’s a tad more than 38 years. Now think about what was going on 38 years ago today, in 1976. All of a sudden 38 years is nothing. It’s the blink of an eye, but in that span of time, airplanes went from fabric to aluminum, from sputtering engines with spindly propellers to two or four growling beasts, and from open cockpits to luxurious, closed cabins with meal service on transcontinental flights. All in 38 years.

I was a great disappointment to my father the mathematician and physics professor. He would try in vain to tutor me in high school trig, and there was no way I was ever going to get it. I still don’t get it. But in the end, Dad, I did turn out to be smart enough to recognize a smart guy when I see one, and Samuel Langley was one smart guy whose ideas changed the world—just 38 short years prior to the crash of Flight 3.

Note: If you want to see a great documentary about Samuel Langley, check out Undaunted: The Forgotten Giants of the Allegheny Observatory because, oh, by the way, Langley was an astronomer who invented aviation in his spare time. And I can’t even balance my checkbook.

My checkbook, unbalanced.

A Little Don Juan

I find myself down of late. I started to spell out exactly why, but I’m a little too private for that, so let’s just leave it as, I’ve got the blues. I’ll admit that, in part, it has to do with Fireball, my baby and the book of my life to date, being out there in the world, all grown up. And there are some other things.

At times like this I find myself needing to reach for the touchstones of my life, the things that evoke strong memories of other times. One of these is Adventures of Don Juan, Errol Flynn’s Christmas 1948 masterpiece that many people haven’t ever seen. To many, there’s only one “Adventures of” picture connected to Errol Flynn, but they just don’t know.

Swedish-born Viveca Lindfors as Queen Margaret of Spain.

Adventures of Don Juan is a sassy picture that pokes fun at Flynn’s reputation, but it’s also the very sad story of the seventeenth century character Don Juan falling in love, really in love, after a lifetime spent wooing women and carousing. It’s a brilliant depiction of vulnerability and sacrifice, of a wanderer who finds something he’s been seeking—one great love—and must give it up for a greater good. It contains sequences that move me every time, interactions between Don Juan and the woman he falls in love with, who happens to be Queen Margaret of Spain.

They say Flynn had great chemistry with Olivia de Havilland. Wait, I said that, in the book Errol & Olivia. Sure they did. They were point/counterpoint: big, athletic, hedonist Errol and diminutive, depressed Livvie. They recognized a kinship from the first time they met—two young people who had endured brutal childhoods at the hand of tyrannical parents, and two beautiful people who made a beautiful couple onscreen and, sometimes, off.

But chemistry’s a funny thing. Errol and Olivia had it, but not to the degree that Errol had it onscreen with Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors, newly brought to the United States by the Warner Bros. under contract to make pictures, the first and biggest being Adventures of Don Juan. This lady had talent. She would go on to a great career as an acting teacher, and here she presents every inch a queen. Every single inch, in every frame in which she’s seen.

And then there are the scenes with Flynn.

In her memoirs, Lindfors—26 years old when shooting commenced—would say she liked Errol, she really did, and she could see that the weight of being a sex symbol was crushing him to death. Of course she was right; he was oppressed by the pressure, and production of Adventures of Don Juan was a year-long exercise in hell for all involved because Flynn spent a good deal of time off the deep end. Undiminished, however, is the fire between Flynn and Lindfors; such natural combustability in three particular sequences that it’s no wonder the climax of the picture involves a fire at the palace.

In the first, Don Juan shows Queen Margaret around his workplace, the fencing academy. We know via a previous scene that he’s fallen for her, but she doesn’t know. He describes the workplace with veiled references to his attraction; we see from her nonverbals that she’s attracted but fighting it, and with Max Steiner’s score behind them in this high-ceilinged set, we face more repressed passion than Hollywood had presented in all the film noir produced to that time.

Sequence 1, Don Juan is infatuated and the Queen is starting to soften.

The chemistry between the two stars is visible early on.

In the second sequence, he makes it clear that he has fallen in love with a mysterious someone, and as the queen, she commands him to talk about it. Steiner’s score again sets up a gut-wrenching moment: He confesses he is in love with her, his “paragon among women,” and for a flash, an instant, she is happy at this news, but then suspects that he’s just laying the ol’ Don Juan line on her and she’s furious. She orders him away, and he’s crushed.

In sequence 2, Don Juan confesses his love for his “paragon among women,” and she explodes in fury.

In the third, after Don Juan has gained credibility by thwarting the bad guy and proving himself a national hero, she comes to him and confesses her love. This hard, nationalist leader is now laid so bare, so tortured, ready to give up the throne to be with Don Juan. The scene between two vulnerable people is so intimate that I’m surprised it passed the 1948 censors. My friend Trudy and I have long marveled at the string of saliva between Flynn’s lips and Lindfors’, captured in 35mm Technicolor after their passionate, all-revealing first kiss. These two didn’t just enact a stage kiss; these two kissed like they meant it. You can’t fake a kiss like that. For all time we’ve got it on record. When she kisses him a second time in this sequence, it’s clear she’s not interested in the kind of buss learned in acting school. Come on, Errol, let’s sell this thing! And we can see that the boy was willing.

Sequence 3: Queen Margaret is ready to abdicate and run away with Don Juan, but he knows she can’t do that because “the people will suffer.”

Yes, I’m a little down and so I turned to one of my touchstones, Adventures of Don Juan, in part to wallow in a wistful and bittersweet picture, and in part to lift myself out of the blues (such a magnificent, Technicolor masterpiece from the tail end of Hollywood’s Golden Era).

What it leads me to is, what are your touchstones? What are the things you turn to when you’re down? Movies? Books? Music? Places? People? Why do you turn to them? Maybe we can form our own support group to get through a couple down days in this crazy thing called life. It’s the place where I am this evening, and I know I’m not the first person ever to be here, and I won’t be the last.

Mathematics

DOS…Oscar-winning visionary, mad genius, and ODing druggie.

I’ve had a couple of weeks now to digest the fact that America is not celebrating 75 years of the motion picture version of Gone With the Wind. I’ve tried to think of any cast members still with us beyond the indefatigable Olivia de Havilland, little Beau Wilkes, played by now-82-year-old Mickey Kuhn, and littler “Melanie’s Baby,” played by Patrick Curtis. Come to think of it, maybe OdeH is rubbing off on her celluloid kin since the Wilkeses are the only ones left among us. I asked you to help me put Gone With the Wind in perspective and the response was enlightening, and got me to thinking.

Let me run this past you: aside from spine-tingling stories of the sneak preview, David Selznick’s epic run on uppers that should have killed him but didn’t, the coast-to-coast search for Scarlett that ended by firelight in Culver City, and the notorious replacement of George Cukor with man’s man Vic Fleming (note to Vic and his pal Clark Gable: this is still a women’s picture despite the testosterone injection), the motion picture version of Gone With the Wind isn’t as great as the sum of its parts. In some respects it’s sort of…average.

Oh, man, I’m pretty sure my mom just rolled over in her grave. Sorry, Mom.

Gone With the Wind is the big, inspired vision of a filmmaker, but so is David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, James Cameron’s Titanic, and Peter Jackson’s trilogy of the Rings, and I attest that GWTW doesn’t measure higher than any of these later examples. It’s too fixated on the performance of a decent-at-best English stage actress affecting a Southern belle. Selznick and his three directors (counting Sam Wood) threw the picture her way because the country was then ripped through with Scarlett Fever, and there was no cure in sight.

Gable loved winning his statuette for It Happened One Night, then gave it away to a little boy after the death of Carole Lombard.

The epidemic is over, my friends. Miss Leigh is long gone, and her performance, despite the golden doorstop, plays today as antiquated as a sternwheeler. I always found Leslie Howard an embarrassing Ashley, embarrassing because his miscasting damns the picture’s credibility for future generations. For God’s sake where was Randy Scott when we needed him?

Over the years I’ve been surprised to see the shots taken at two-time Academy Award winner Olivia de H. for lack of acting range. For kicks you should peruse the reviews of her Broadway version of Romeo and Juliet in the early 1950s. Yikes! My point being that Livvie was an accomplished actress in her day, but considering that her day was 1939 and by 1951 she was passé, her performance as Melanie isn’t new-school enough to help keep the good ship GWTW afloat.

Then there is The Saving Grace of Gone With the Wind. Well, wait. All those craft Oscars went to people who were saving graces of Gone With the Wind: cinematographers Ernie Haller and Ray Rennahan, art director Lyle Wheeler, and the film’s heroic editors, Hal Kern and James Newcom. Sidney Howard probably helped to save the picture with all that screenplay he wrote, which was then rewritten by a couple dozen other writers and finally Selznick himself. Walter Plunkett’s costumes, Max Steiner’s music—fantastic craftspeople at work, no doubt.

But it’s Clark Gable’s picture to save and looking back from a modern perspective, he’s the best thing about it. In all his glorious insecurity and grousing and grumbling, his Rhett Butler was perfect in 1939 and it’s a bulls-eye 75 years later. I know a lot about Gable now, but I feel there’s more still to learn. I’m tempted to say that Gable rose to the occasion when he spent eight months playing Rhett, but I need to keep reminding myself that the part was fitted to him with great care, staying within the “Gable range,” which was sort of from A to B or maybe, on a good day, C. Parnell was still fresh on everybody’s minds and neither Selznick nor Mayer could survive Gone With the Wind becoming another Parnell.

I’ve never committed myself to MM’s novel, but I very much want to read it now. I know that the book version of Rhett is a good deal darker than the movie-star Rhett drawn up by that football team of screenwriters. What we get from Gable as depicted is a square-shouldered, worldly wise, wry-humored, and slightly tarnished knight in armor. Honorable enough to reclaim wedding rings and rakish enough to look comfortable in Belle Watling’s parlor. Between the Hays Office censors on one side and his MGM bodyguards on the other, Gable was safe as safe can be making Gone With the Wind. But who could have predicted that the greatest role of a not-so-great actor would hold water so well all these decades later?

I’m tempted to call this column, “Disillusioned,” because that’s what I realize I am about Gone With the Wind. All the fuss and bother of my boyhood, all the reverence paid to the picture as it floated for oh so long and oh so watertight on the memories of a couple of generations. Gone With the Wind is now a Technicolor time capsule of 1939 Hollywood, more interesting for what went on behind the cameras as what is captured in front of them. I wish it were otherwise. I wish it were a perfect 10 of a picture that could serve as THE shining example of Old Hollywood. Counting everything, the entire experience of Gone With the Wind, the people and the pre-World War II times, it probably still is. But just as a big stack of cans of celluloid, math has overtaken the movie of the Novel of the Old South, and it’s getting, for me at least, old.

OdeH: two Oscars in four years, but she would never get an award-quality role again.

So Red the River, in Black & White

Buy it, consume it, spread the word about it.

I want to continue the discussion of Gone With the Wind that we started this past week, but have to interrupt to report that I couldn’t be happier for my friend and colleague Scott Eyman for the success of his new book, John Wayne: The Life and Legend, released April 1 by Simon & Schuster. It hit the New York Times bestseller list at mid-month and is, as of this writing, #1 on the Amazon bestseller list for Movies/History & Criticism and #8 in Biographies. A writer can work a lifetime and never achieve success like this. Of course Scott has emerged as the preeminent Hollywood biographer and he’s done very well with his past books, particularly Lion of Hollywood, his Louis B. Mayer bio that was of such help in researching Fireball themes.

All this week Scott has been sitting with Robert Osborne in prime time on Turner Classic Movies introducing the best of John Wayne’s pictures and last night it was one of my favorites, Red River. Back when I was a silly, uneducated youngster, I was enthralled with Lonesome Dove, in part because of the vivid depiction of that cattle drive up to Montana. I had thought what a wonderful thing they dreamed up for television, not knowing that the epic cattle drive had long before been envisioned and executed by director Howard Hawks in black and white for Red River, and that Lonesome Dove was a pale, small-scale update.

I’ve taken John Wayne way too much for granted my whole life and felt free to skip some of his pictures, including The High and the Mighty, which I discussed here a couple months ago, and also Red River, which I only discovered in recent years. I didn’t know until last night, when Scott told us that Red River was actually produced in 1946 and sat around for a couple years, that it represents Montgomery Clift’s first screen work. I find Clift mesmerizing in this picture, young, lean, tough, handsome, and so damn capable with his new type of underplaying that would soon change Hollywood. I’ve never read a Clift bio, so I didn’t know how he learned to ride a horse like he does in Red River, as if born in the saddle. He has this thing where he hops up into the stirrup like some sort of trick rider. I know he became obsessed with bringing realism to his roles, as confirmed by Howard Hawks later.

John Wayne and Montgomery Clift

Speaking of Clift to Peter Bogdonovich, Hawks said, “He came down two weeks early and went out after breakfast with a cowboy, taking a lunch with them, and they rode all day long – up hills and down steep places, and through water and so on. And by the start of the picture he really rode well. You could tell that. And I taught him a little jump step to get into the saddle – he’d make a little hop into the stirrup. He worked – he really worked hard.” So that answers my question about the riding, and that hop. Clift was one rare specimen, and looked every bit the equal of John Wayne in the saddle after only two weeks of training.

I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the peculiar way Howard Hawks handles dialogue, but since at least three Hawks pictures are on my favorites list, I don’t consider Hawksian quirks a deal breaker. You know, he has actors step on the lines of other actors, which can emulate realism when done right, but often his players aren’t quite up to it and come off instead as self-conscious. Hawks also has his women constantly saying their man’s name in the clinches. “You know what I’m talking about, Matthew, don’t you, Matthew?” All right already with the Matthews!

Last night, Eyman referred to Red River as something like “nine-tenths a classic,” and I agree with him. Here we have this spellbinding epic with noirish qualities, and suddenly, toward the end of the last reel, a Damon Runyon picture breaks out. Here we see the worst of Howard Hawks and his obsession with sassy dames, throwing figurative cold water on a perfectly set up, deadly confrontation between two beautifully written and played characters in Wayne’s Dunson and Clift’s Garth. Such a shame the way it ends. Two hours of buildup, the pace ratcheting up until there’s so much going on in every frame that you can’t take it all in. Then…that? As Scott put it, “Hawks blinked.” Eyman described how Mr. Dunson was supposed to die at fade out, but Hawks couldn’t bring himself to see it end that way. Instead, Joanne Dru’s Tess Millay, a character just recently introduced into the narrative, breaks up the big fight, and Wayne and Clift laugh and make up while sprawled there in the dust. It’s an all-wrong ending. It was all wrong in 1948 and it’s all wrong today.

Adding to the realism, Hawks chooses to show an arrow striking Joanne Dru in the shoulder, nailing her to the side of a wagon. She barely flinches, and Montgomery Clift reacts with bemusement rather than concern.

But Hawks was so damn good that I am forced to forgive him his trespasses. Tell me you don’t have a Hawks picture somewhere on your favorites list. Twentieth Century, maybe? Bringing Up Baby? His Girl Friday? Ball of Fire? Sergeant York? He did two of Bogart’s best pictures in To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, and also two other favorites of mine, The Thing (from Another World) and Rio Bravo.

Cinematographer Russell Harlan and director Howard Hawks capture the sweep and grime of a cattle drive long before budget-friendly CG effects are around to help.

Another “so damn good” ingredient in Red River is the cinematography of Russell Harlan. When you see the way he frames up a cattle drive, with no CG effects and thousands of cattle and cowboys visible going back a quarter mile as Wayne and Clift play a scene in foreground, you think this must be the most gifted cameraman in Hollywood. But Harlan was a journeyman who cut his teeth on Hopalong Cassidy westerns and would move on after Red River to photograph Gun Crazy and Tarzan and the Slave Girl, proof once again that Hollywood was after all a factory chock-full of highly skilled cinematographers. No time to sit around dreaming of art. We must shoot! They’ll need this picture next month in Hoboken!

So thank you, Scott, for a very enjoyable Thursday night, and congratulations on the release of John Wayne: The Life and Legend. My goal this weekend is to go to my closest independent bookstore and buy a copy. In the meantime, may the awards and acclaim roll in.

The furious, hate-filled climax that is soon to be spoiled by Joanne Dru.