Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Hucksters,’ on Radio Advertising)

Victor Albee Norman [played by Clark Gable]: “Miss Hammer, take a memorandum. To Mr. Kimberly: Dear Kim, For four years I haven't been listening to the radio much. Paragraph. Kim, in that time, it's gotten worse, if possible. More irritating, more commercials per minute, more spelling out of words, as if no one in the audience had gotten past the first grade. Paragraph. I know how tough Evans is, and some of the other sponsors, but I think we make a great mistake in letting them have their own way. We're paid to advise them. Why can't we advise them that people are grateful for what free entertainment they get on the air, grateful enough to buy the product that provides good shows. But, they have some rights, Kim, it's their homes we go into, and they're not grateful to people who get one foot in the door by pretending to offer them music and drama, and then take too much time in corny sales talk. Paragraph. I want to go on record as saying that I think radio has to turn over a new leaf. We've pushed and badgered the listeners, we've sung to them and screamed at them, we've insulted them, cheated them and angered them, turned their homes into a combination grocery store, crap game and midway. Kim, someday, 50 million people are going to just reach out and turn off their radios [snaps fingers], snap, just like that—and that's the end of the gravy, for you, and me, and Evans. Sign it love and kisses, Vic.”—The Hucksters (1947), screenplay by Luther Davis, adaptation of Frederic Wakeman’s novel by Edward Chodorov and George Wells, directed by Jack Conway

Quote of the Day (Ian O’Connor, on Palmer and Nicklaus)

“Palmer had a deep but friendly voice; Nicklaus sounded like someone who'd spent ten minutes sucking helium from a balloon. Palmer hit the ball right to left; Nicklaus hit it left to right. Palmer hit it low; Nicklaus hit it high. Palmer landed balls in ponds and hayfields; Nicklaus landed them on fairways and greens. Palmer had a hacker's cut only a mother could love; Nicklaus enjoyed a user’s-manual swing. Palmer was a stab-and-jab putter; Nicklaus stroked through the ball. Palmer made eye contact with everyone; Nicklaus only made eye contact with the pin. Palmer was prompt for his appointments; Nicklaus was often tardy.”—Ian O’Connor, Arnie and Jack: Palmer, Nicklaus, and Golf's Greatest Rivalry (2008)

Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus are on the short list of great sports rivals, along with the likes of Russell vs. Chamberlain, Borg vs. McEnroe, and Bird vs. Magic. As demonstrated insightfully by Ian O’Connor (like me, an alum of St. Cecilia, Englewood, NJ) here, the golf legends’ looks, personalities and styles of play made for the kind of contrasts that sportswriters love.

With 18 victories in major tournaments versus seven for his rival, Nicklaus got the better of Palmer over his long career. But there was a reason why Palmer, who died of heart disease over the weekend at age 87, was called “The King.”

There had been great golfers—Jones, Hagen, Snead, Hogan—before Palmer rose to prominence in the late Fifties, and there would be others (Woods) afterward. But none exuded the dash, drama, friendliness, charisma—the sex appeal, if you will—of Palmer. And the lucrative endorsement deals won for him by agent Mark McCormick paved the way that other golfers would gratefully follow.

But what also fascinates me about Palmer is that nickname, “The King,” possessed by another magnetic figure still active when the golfer was starting out in the Fifties: Clark Gable. Like Palmer, the star of Gone With the Wind enjoyed a rivalry, made up in equal parts of friendship, admiration and envy, with another male, an up-and-coming actor at their studio, MGM: Spencer Tracy.

Like Nicklaus, Tracy used a steely concentration to vault to the top of his profession. And, like the golfer, he earned more honors for his work, winning two Best Oscar Oscars and nine nominations, versus one Oscar and three nominations for Gable. But Tracy and, at the start of his career, Nicklaus were burly men who could not match Gable and Palmer in physical attractiveness or, for that matter, natural crowd-pleasing exuberance. (In the case of Palmer, there was also pull-out-all-the-stops style, memorably encapsulated in the 1973 book that expressed his "philosophy of golf": Go for Broke. Who doesn't love a come-from-behind, thrilling finisher?)

For their part, Gable and Palmer wished they had the laser focus on their craft that helped Tracy and Nicklaus adapt to almost any situation on film sets or on the green.

By the time of their deaths in the 1960s, Gable and Tracy, each secure in his own achievement, viewed the other with considerable respect. So did Palmer and Nicklaus as they became senior citizens. This week, the Web site of “The Golden Bear” prominently featured a photo of the two men smiling and hugging. The caption underneath noted graciously about Palmer: “He was the king of our sport and always will be.”

This Day in Film History (‘It Happened One Night’ Gives Rise to Screwball Genre)

February 22, 1934—When MGM and Paramount Pictures loaned Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert to Columbia Pictures for a single movie, nobody expected much to come from the results, especially the reluctant stars. But It Happened One Night—which premiered at Radio City Music Hall on this date—became a box-office hit, a multi-Oscar smash, and one of the most influential and beloved movies of all time.

Initial reaction to the film (which I touched on briefly in a prior post) was mixed: its run was not extended beyond its first week at Radio City, and a number of critics were quick to carp that this was the third movie in quick succession about a bus trip. Ultimately, of course, once word of mouth spread in the first month after its release, the film’s success triggered an entirely different trend, one of the most glorious genres in cinema history: the screwball comedy, often featuring a runaway/madcap heiress, with a plot that takes off in unexpected directions, and, above all, in what James Harvey, in his 1987 history of the genre, Romantic Comedy, calls "some new kind of energy": "slangy, combative, humorous, unsentimental--and powerfully romantic."

During its initial run, the movie made more than six times what it cost to produce, confirming that director Frank Capra, who had made it his special project, had his pulse on the audience. Its triumph at the Academy Awards the following year was even more resounding, as it became the first picture to sweep all the major categories: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. (In the eight decades since, only two other movies have matched that feat: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs.)  

You would think that every major star in Hollywood would do anything to appear in such a hot property, including (but hardly limited to) willingness to beg, borrow, steal, take a salary cut, murder, or sleep with the producer. You would also be wrong.

Robert Montgomery, a talented actor with some flair for comedy, turned down the male lead before the script made its way to Gable. The only reason he took it was because MGM head Louis B. Mayer wanted to teach lessons in humility and obedience to the box-office star well on his way to becoming known as “The King of Hollywood.” Gable’s rejection of a script triggered a reaction from Mayer that was swift, decisive and self-defeating: If that’s what you want, fine—but I’m lending you out to Columbia Pictures.  

In late 1933, that was far, far worse than it sounds now. MGM had the reputation as the “prestige” studio, largely due to its unparalleled group of stars and production head Irving Thalberg; Warner Brothers, as a scrappy, ripped-from-the-headlines outfit specializing in gangster and socially conscious films; and Paramount, where Cecil B. DeMille, Josef von Sternberg and Ernst Lubitsch operated with comparatively little executive interference, as a “director’s studio.” On the other hand, Columbia, headed by obstreperous, penny-pinching Harry Cohn, still had not overcome its origins on “Poverty Row,” a row of offices specializing in cheap productions. Columbia had few if any A-list actors of its own, and the only way it could acquire any was if (as in Gable’s case) a star at another studio had demanded one raise or script-approval request too many.

According to Capra's marvelous and indispensable memoir, The Name Above the Title, Gable showed up at Capra’s office unshaven, drunk, and abusive enough to tell the director, in no uncertain terms, what he could do with himself and this project. Colbert, while more polite, was equally reluctant. She had not liked the results of their first collaboration several years before, and when Capra showed up on her doorstep, she announced that she would only make the movie if a) it could be completed in four weeks, in time for her planned Christmas vacation in Sun Valley, and b) her salary would be $50,000—double her normal amount at Paramount. Capra got Cohn to agree to the terms, and a visit that had begun on a rough note (Colbert’s dog had bitten Capra in the rear end) ended up better than expected.

You have to ask why the stars were so reluctant to shoot the film, aside from the fact that the initial title, Night Bus, was an unpleasant reminder of two prior box-office bombs. But other actors were equally reluctant to take on the job, particularly for Colbert’s role, the runaway heiress Ellie Andrews, which Myrna Loy, Constance Bennett, Margaret Sullavan, and Miriam Hopkins had all rejected. 

These women were not really acting like divas. In the original script, Ellie had simply been a spoiled brat—the Depression version of Kim Kardashian. At the suggestion of Capra’s friend, producer-screenwriter Myles Connolly, Ellie was rewritten not so much as a bratty heiress but as one bored by her stultifying lifestyle, a princess ready to flee from routine—sort of like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday two decades later. The resulting rewrite, completed by Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin within a week, went a long way toward making her more sympathetic to Depression audiences.

The evolution of Ellie—crucial not just to the success of the film, but to the creation of the whole screwball comedy genre—also owed something to a change in the depiction of female sexuality as a result of Hollywood’s newly enforced list of censorship norms, the Production Code. In the early 1930s, films had often featured what were deemed women of loose morals—if not outright hookers (Joan Crawford, in Rain), then kept women who had slept their way to the top or forced by circumstance into cohabitating with an exploiter (Capra’s own Bitter Tea of General Yen). All of that went by the wayside with the Production Code. Now, a madcap heiress—willful and rebellious against Daddy, like Ellie, but not promiscuous—would allow filmmakers to obey the dictates of the Production Code while still winking broadly at them.

And so occurred several of the more widely discussed elements in the movie: the glimpse of leg Ellie permits, immediately besting Gable’s Peter Warne in a hitchhiking bid; the makeshift “Walls of Jericho,” or clothesline erected by Warne in a motel room so Ellie need not fear “the big bad wolf” (i.e., him); and the naked torso revealed by Gable in the same scene. (The latter was an improvisation when Gable was having trouble maintaining the energy of the scene while removing his undershirt.)

As happens in Hollywood to this day, It Happened One Night spawned countless imitations, in an attempt to cash in on a good thing--some decidedly "B" level (The Golden Arrow), others top grade (My Man Godfrey, Bringing Up Baby). None, however (including the 1950s musical adaptation, You Can’t Run Away From It, starring Jack Lemmon and June Allyson) worked as well as the original. 

It all went back to the film's ineffable charm. Capra might have shot the film fast, but he really wasn’t interested in cutting its running time. In fact, he indulged here one of the tricks he would use repeatedly over the next dozen years of his prime: stage a scene that does not advance the plot, but makes you care about the characters. A prime example comes when the fired working-class reporter Warne teaches high-class Ellie the fine art of donut dunking.

Colbert refused to believe the film would work, even by the end of shooting (“Am I glad to get here,” she’s supposed to have told her Sun Valley friends. “I’ve just finished the worst picture in the world.”) She was initially a no-show at the Oscars, having to be called while waiting for a train to pick up her award.

A daffy, happy ending, featuring a lovely heroine who’s a bit of a bill. Not unlike the whole screwball genre itself.

This Day in Film History (Selznick Lands Gable as Rhett Butler)

August 25, 1938 – Producer David O. Selznick took the first crucial step on the long road to Tara by signing Clark Gable for the role of Rhett Butler in the adaptation of Gone With the Wind (GWTW). Securing the services of the “King of Hollywood,” however, required giving Gable’s studio, MGM—the same company ruled by Selznick’s father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer—distribution rights and 50% of the profits.

Selznick’s own contract as an independent producer with United Artists required that they had the right to distribute all his films from 1938. This meant, in effect, that principal shooting for GWTW could not begin until 1939. By that time, Selznick would be shepherding three films through one stage of production or another—GWTW, Intermezzo, with the new young Scandinavian star Ingrid Bergman, and Rebecca, with the eccentric but extraordinary new director he’d just hired from England, Alfred Hitchcock.

Imagine that—three high-profile projects, all under the watchful eye of a perfectionist whose memos on every aspect of a production took forever for their recipients to read. To accomplish all of this, you could be a) a master at organization, b) filled with tremendous natural energy, and/or c) really hopped up on drugs.

I don’t think a) comes into play here – anybody who focuses on every tiny detail would not, most management consultants would say, really be well organized. But Selznick was certainly b) and c). He carried Benzedrine, his medication of choice, in his trouser pockets and even passed it around to production assistants.

All of the readers of Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War novel had definite ideas of how the book should be filled. One was silent-film “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford, who, off the screen, was far shrewder than the innocent characters she once played. She urged that Selznick sign Margaret Sullivan for Scarlett and Clark Gable for Rhett.

There had been talk bruited about getting Warner Brothers' Errol Flynn for Rhett, but the choice of America’s fans was, overwhelmingly, Gable. You really have to be a habitual watcher of Turner Classic Movies, where you can get an idea of his full output, to understand the hold he had on American moviegoers in the 1930s. If you were on the set of a movie and he liked you, the impression he could set off was palpable. The max exuded sheer magnetism.

But if he didn’t take to you…Woe betide. Frank Capra nearly found this out on the set of It Happened One Night, before he got the star to relax and trust him. George Cukor, the initial director of GWTW, was not so fortunate. Within one week after Gable had arrived on the set, the star’s annoyance began to set in. When Selznick got a look at the dailies, the inevitable clash occurred, and Cukor was out. A pity, too: he and Selznick, though they had worked well together on David Copperfield, would never collaborate on another film again.

In the closing months of 1938, unable to start shooting in any meaningful way, Selznick decided to take the time to concentrate on securing the ideal Scarlett. That story of endless screen tests --and who knows how many hissy fits flying between starlets and their beleaguered agents--is one for the metaphorical tomorrow—which, as we all know by now, is another day.