Monroe Clone # 2a

Thanks to Thad for sending me a copy of one of the few Frank Tashlin films I hadn't seen (at least not all the way through), The Lieutenant Wore Skirts starring Tom Ewell and Sheree North. It's a pan-and-scan copy, and it's not anywhere near as good as The Girl Can't Help It or Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, but it's an interesting movie, not so much for Tashlin or cartoon buffs -- it's one of his less cartoony movies, all told -- but for being representative of the kind of stuff Fox was doing in the mid-'50s and its search for a new Marilyn Monroe.

Sheree North was a good-looking, talented dancer who'd made a big splash doing a jazzy dance in the Broadway musical Hazel Flagg and the movie version (where the title character was re-cast as Jerry Lewis) Living It Up. When Marilyn Monroe turned down the movie How To Be Very, Very Popular, Fox signed North to be in the film, with a view to making North into their "backup" Monroe -- a buxom blonde who could do the films that the unreliable Monroe couldn't or wouldn't do. North considered herself a dancer, not an actress -- Popular was her first big non-dancing part, and she thought she was terrible in it -- and she said later that it was against her better judgment that her agent persuaded her to do another film for Fox. This was The Lieutenant Wore Skirts. North, of course, did not work out as the next Monroe; she had no star quality and always looked rather short on film, even though she was only an inch shorter than Monroe. But she was talented, and by the time her Fox contract had expired, she had become a very good, solid character actress, and would remain so until her death in 2005. (You remember her as Kramer's mother on Seinfeld among others.)

Anyway, The Lieutenant Wore Skirts was produced by Buddy Adler, who was just about to be promoted to take over from Darryl Zanuck as head of production at Fox. Adler was most famous as the producer of From Here To Eternity, and when he moved to Fox, he embarked on a strange mix of projects: half the movies he produced were big soapy stories like Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, Anastasia and South Pacific, and the other half were odd ducks like Sam Fuller's House of Bamboo, the bizarre Jane Russell flop The Revolt of Mamie Stover, and Monroe's highly successful serio-comedy Bus Stop. But most of the movies he produced were very successful at the box office, which is presumably why he got the job to take over from Zanuck; he was not popular in that job, but I actually think he did some interesting things, making Fox's CinemaScope productions a little sexier, funnier and harder-edged than they'd been under Zanuck. And one of the things he did to facilitate that was sign Frank Tashlin for Fox.

Adler knew Tashlin from when they'd been working at Columbia in the late '40s and early '50s; he signed Tashlin, produced Skirts and set up Tashlin's next two projects for the studio, The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Sheree North was originally going to be in The Girl Can't Help It, but Adler and Tashlin jointly decided, rightly, that Jayne Mansfield would make a far better Monroe clone, and Adler bought the rights to the Rock Hunter play just to get Mansfield under contract.) Tashlin told Peter Bogdanovich that Adler gave him complete freedom on Rock Hunter. If you're wondering why the quality of Tashlin's live-action movies went downhill so quickly in the '60s, part of the reason may be traced to Adler's sudden death in early 1960; without his biggest supporter at Fox, Tashlin was left with only one producer who liked to work with him, and that was of course Jerry Lewis. His post-Adler career was a long succession of projects that stalled in development, plus the occasional Lewis project.

Skirts stars Ewell as a TV writer (cue many of Tashlin's usual bitter jokes about the evils of TV) and WWII hero whose air force reserve unit calls him up. His wife, North, also used to be in the Service during the Korean war, so she decides to re-enlist to be near her husband. Except he flunks his physical due to a psychosomatic knee problem, meaning that he has to stay behind while she is sent for a two-year stretch in Hawaii. Fearing that North will be tempted into infidelity in a military base where there are "forty men for every woman," Ewell goes to Hawaii after her, and winds up tricking her into letting him stay in her quarters; as the only civilian husband on the base, the army wives ask him to be a fourth for their bridge game, and so on; then he tries to get her discharged by Gaslighting her into thinking she's crazy. It's pretty much halfway between Tashlin's early romantic comedies and the cynical style of his Mansfield comedies, which is the problem with it: because the sex role-reversal story is told with such a cynical edge, it becomes more mean-spirited than funny. That's an accusation that can be leveled at a lot of Tashlin's live-action comedies; I don't agree with it a lot of the time (Susan Slept Here and Artists and Models have some heart mixed in with the laughs, and even The Girl Can't Help It makes you genuinely like the characters), but it's definitely true here.

Still, you can watch it and tick off the Tashlin trademarks: you've got the boob jokes -- North tries to put on a uniform and finds she can't quite get it around her chest -- and you've got the scene where the wife dumps food on her husband, which is a direct self-plagiarism from The First Time. You've got the double entendres that the censors, even the more lax censors of the mid-'50s, really must have been asleep at the wheel to let through, especially this line when Ewell sees North in a sexy negligee:

"Why, Lieutenant. This is the first time I've felt like saluting you."

Then there's the opening sequence, which in just one minute features slightly arch narration (by North), Hollywood insider jokes, nasty jokes about television, and, of course, an entirely gratuitous leg shot -- which, even panned-and-scanned, gives an idea of what Tish Tash thought CinemaScope was good for:



But the main point of the movie is to try and test out North as a possible Monroe substitute, and the weird thing about it is that neither she nor the director seem to be trying at all. Although the film is Ewell's follow-up to The Seven Year Itch, the only Monroe substitute in the picture is not North, who basically just plays the sweet-but-sexy young wife, but, of all people, Rita Moreno, whose scenes are a direct, directly acknowledged parody of Seven Year Itch. ("I didn't see that movie," Ewell remarks.) Moreno's scene is the weirdest and best in the movie because it's completely absurd: she's talking like Monroe, acting like Monroe, but she isn't changing her appearance at all, except for wearing the most obvious padded bra ever seen. The sight of a totally un-Monroe-ish woman trying to be Monroe makes for the best joke in the film, and one that would be carried over into Girl Can't Help It and Rock Hunter: in the '50s, every woman is under pressure to act like Marilyn Monroe, who is herself doing an act. The movie comes to life in this scene, which it doesn't in any of North's scenes, because while she's very attractive and clearly has a lot of potential as an actress (though not as a star), neither she nor Tashlin nor Buddy Adler seem to have any real interest in trying to make her the next Monroe. It was a non-starter.

I'll try to upload the Moreno scene later, but this page has screen captures

One more item in what is a very long post on a very flawed movie (but between my ongoing attempt to study Tashlin's work, my fascination with the Adler era at Fox, and the whole Monroe-clone issue, there's a lot to talk about): Sylvia Lewis, who plays the sexy burlesque dancer in the film -- and had been one of Jane Russell's backup dancers in Son of Paleface -- has this to say on her official site:

Frank Tashlin was a joy to work for. He was good natured, patient, very positive and encouraging to be around. He made it easy to try things and he laughed out loud when he thought something funny. He used to embarrass me a little by asking me to walk away from him. He'd say, "look at that... there goes the greatest walk any woman ever had..." Some men saying that would have been insulting, but coming from Frank, it was cute. He was a big jovial teddy bear.

Mike Maltese Speaks in 1960

Here's an article I found a while back on Newspaperarchive.com; it was originally printed by the New York Herald-Tribune in 1960, and re-printed by a few local papers. By this time Michael Maltese was working at Hanna-Barbera, and the article provides a reminder that H-B's corner-cutting was seen as something of a blessing at the time; while the people who worked on their shows would of course have preferred to have more time and money (and in Maltese's case, not to burn through all available story ideas in one season), H-B provided an outlet for slick professional cartoon-making at a time when everybody knew theatrical cartoons were on the way out.

And when Maltese talks about the influence of silent films on his work, he really seems to light up. Notice also that the author doesn't even mention -- unless it was cut out of this reprinted version -- Maltese's association with Warner Brothers. It wasn't considered as important a credit in 1960 as it would be 10 years later when those cartoons had become TV legends.

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Cartoonist Makes Transition From Movies To Television

By John Crosby

Mike Maltese is a cartoonist who started in animation in Hollywood about 20 years ago. He's never heard of Feiffer and probably never heard of Low or Mauldin either. He's a West Coast boy who can mimic almost any voice he's ever heard, can actually make a line drawing of himself by sheer will power and native acting talent and is now a very successful cartoonist for television.

He draws three frames simultaneously for his cartoon strip Quick Draw McGraw which my kids rarely miss. This is a kiddie strip but it's satiric and adult enough to make me laugh. Quick Draw McGraw is also fairly significant in that it is typical of cartoons that are drawn entirely for television. Most of the cartoons on television originally were drawn years and years ago for theater audiences which, of course, are largely comprised of adults.

Maltese explains: "The reason so many cartoonists are now working for television is that that is where the money is from. Movie exhibitors couldn't afford to pay enough for cartoons because of the double feature and all. But working for theatrical cartoons I worked much less. I wrote eight cartoon features a year. Since I've been working for television, I've done in seven months about eight years' worth of stories. This medium eats the stuff up."

According to Maltese, animated cartoons began originally as picturized nursery rhymes for the movie houses. When they came on, the adults would excuse themselves and go out for a smoke. In order to keep the adults in their seats, the cartoonists started doing their own stories including satire, which would be over the kids' heads without losing them.

"I've been in the cartoon business for 25 years and I've been in every department. Animated cartoons arrived with Walt Disney and they've come a long way since that. Until recently the only cartoons on television were old ones done for the movie theaters. I used to watch some I had done about 15 years ago. Hanna and Barbera, the outfit I'm with, were the first to come out with products which have all the crispness and technical finess you'd find in theatrical cartoons despite the handicap of supplying so much more than theater use.

"In filling the schedule, they were forced to work out a technique of animation that would be faster, actually faster than that used in theatrical cartoons. In TV animation we have to do about 300 feet of animation a week, as opposed to about 25 feet for theatrical cartoons. Some are a little jerky but, on the whole, they're expert jobs.

"The gags that Red Skelton throws away, we would never throw away. We're footage misers. As a boy I was a great fan of the silent pictures. In 1913 I saw Chaplin and I came alive." It still shows in his work. "I went home and I made up as Chaplin. There isn't a film of his I haven't seen over and over. He showed me how close humor is to tragedy. And the original Mark of Zorro with Douglas Fairbanks, with its chases and its humor, depended very much on the sort of action and pace cartoons have now. I'm going to draw Quick Draw as Zorro one day."

Many of the cartoons in Maltese's cartoons sound like the voices of stars. Baba Looie sounds like an exaggerated Desi Arnaz, Yogi Bear like an overblown Art Carney. It's easier for Maltese to do it this way than to originate a new voice for each character.

"In the cartoon business," says Maltese, "no one can take the credit for the finished product. One hand washes the other. The beautiful part of animated cartoons is that, even though we may all hate each other, everyone is working for the same thing. You can't tell where one animator leaves off and the other begins. No, I don't mind the anonymity. We animators are a sort of exclusive club and none of us would want to do anything else."

Then he sighs and adds: "Except -- I might have been a comedian in pictures."
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(Update: Turns out that this was already transcribed at GAC forums a while back. If I'd known that I could have saved myself the work of transcribing it, but on the other hand, it's fun to transcribe old articles, so everybody wins.)

WKRP Episode: "Changes"

Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen have a new book out, "Tim and Tom", about their years as America's first and only black-white comedy team. So here's the WKRP episode that was sort of a reunion for them, since Dreesen is one of the guest stars. He doesn't have much of a part, and he and Reid only get one moment where they get to really do anything funny together (the bit where they fire questions at each other and then sit down in unison), but it's good to see them together again, if only briefly.

This episode, which I've always liked, is basically just another variation on the old TV theme of "just be yourself," but done in a slightly off-kilter way that's typical of the writer, Peter Torokvei. His sense of humor is always a little bent, and that manifests itself in a lot of the jokes in this episode, whether it's Les speculating on why Russian women look like men, Herb's new suit turning him into a Reagan Republican, or the offhand revelation that there's an alternate-universe, race-reversed version of WKRP somewhere out there.

Music: "Magnolia" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; "Real Situation" by Bob Marley; a song by Peabo Bryson; and one more song (?) playing in the record library (the only time we ever see this room in the whole series).

Cold Opening:



Act 1:



Act 2:

Miss Novak

TCM recently devoted a day to the films of Kim Novak, and Stanley Fish wrote this New York Times piece called "Giving Kim Novak Her Due" (with a lot of enthusiastic reader comments).

You can see why Novak continues to fascinate a lot of people. Everybody in the '50s was trying to develop overdeveloped bombshells to compete with Marilyn Monroe -- even Fox was trying, and they already had Monroe -- and Novak was the most manufactured of these new stars, someone who hadn't even had a speaking part before Columbia signed her and decided to turn her into an instant sex goddess. (The buildup for Novak in Pushover was huge; rarely has so much publicity been devoted to a fairly small noir.) Even Jayne Mansfield had been a success on Broadway before she came to Hollywood; Novak was entirely a creation of Harry Cohn. Yet her own discomfort with the sex-kitten image was always visible; unlike the other Marilyn Monroe knockoffs, and unlike Monroe herself, she wasn't doing much to sell the image, and instead seemed to be working against it. And because she wound up getting loaned out to Paramount for Vertigo, where her part eerily mirrors her own life and her transformation into a synthetic, artificial sex symbol at the hands of a powerful man (coincidentally, since the part wasn't intended for her), it makes the fascination even greater; her most famous movie happens to be the one that almost seems like it's about her.

That said, I always found the idea of Novak more fascinating than the actual onscreen Novak. Too often I watch a movie with her and find myself wishing that someone else were playing the part; Bell, Book and Candle needs a charming light comedienne (the original playwas written for Lili Palmer and Rex Harrison), and instead Novak weighs it down with her dour attitude; Kiss Me, Stupid proves that Novak couldn't play a parody of Marilyn Monroe -- since that's what the character is, like most of Billy Wilder's post-Some Like It Hot characters -- any more than she could be Monroe.

I think the director who worked best with her was George Sidney, who had a great eye for beautiful women and was able to get some energy out of her. But even in Pal Joey, she's still overshadowed by Rita Hayworth.

Here's Novak in Sidney's over-the-top but fun Jeanne Eagels.



Interestingly, when the James Wong Howe, who photographed Picnic, was asked about Novak, he said that she was beautiful "from the waist up. Below, she was very hippy." Having read that, I'll have to go back and check whether or not directors/cinematographers actually tried to photograph her with that idea in mind. (Obviously that wouldn't say anything bad about her; many if not most movie actors are photograph to emphasize their strong points and de-emphasize their less strong points. That's what the glamour factory's all about, making it seem like people have no flaws.)

Great Movie Musical Numbers of the '60s?

Bob Fosse's Sweet Charity is probably my favorite movie musical of the '60s, which doesn't say a lot for the '60s. The movie has a lot of problems: Shirley MacLaine is merely a good dancer instead of the really spectacular dancer the lead role requires (though in fairness I don't know which established movie star would have been better, and Gwen Verdon just wasn't a big enough movie name to do the film), Fosse never settles on a consistent tone for the movie version, most of the characters are unlikable and the ending -- either version -- is terrible. (The original ending of the stage version is in keeping with the whole show, a whimsical, fairy-tale take on what is admittedly a dark and depressing story. That ending wouldn't have worked for the movie, but Fosse never came up with one that worked; actually, I think the "happy" ending he rejected is better than the one he wound up using, but neither one really plays.) What it has that most other '60s movie musicals don't have is a handful of really superb numbers. Not functional numbers that move the thing along; not numbers where you're supposed to be impressed at how much money they cost; and not numbers that come off as filmed stage plays (which is how a lot of good '60s musicals, like The Music Man, come off to me).

They're numbers that do what a great movie musical number must do: blow you away with the combined impact of music, choreography, performance and camerawork. Even though they're similar to the way they were done onstage, Fosse makes them cinematic, not so much with the flashy cutting and temporal tricks, but the more old-fashioned virtues of putting the camera in the right place and staging the numbers with the camera in mind. A great cinematic moment in the "Rhythm of Life" number, below, comes near the end at about 3:53 when Sammy Davis Jr. dances Shirley MacLaine across the Panavision frame; Davis runs out of frame, and then he and his two buddies pop up again from below the frame. That's staging a musical number with the boundaries of the frame in mind -- and that's genuinely cinematic because the staging is based on the fact that we can't see anything outside of the frame, instead of just seeing the frame as a way of zeroing in on bits of a stage picture. The best number in the film, "The Rich Man's Frug," is the same way.

By contrast, most movie musicals of the '60s, even the good ones, had numbers that didn't really stand out as brilliant self-contained conceptions where all the elements come together, like the best numbers of Fred Astaire, or the Trolley Song, or the "Isn't It Romantic?" sequence from Love Me Tonight (those last two aren't dance numbers; a great musical number doesn't have to have dancing). They're nice approximations of the stage versions, or they're big bloated overdone monsters like the Hello, Dolly! numbers, or they're numbers that do their job in moving the story along and don't -- and aren't meant to -- stop the show, like most of the numbers in The Sound of Music.

As I said, this applies even to the good or great movie musicals of the '60s. Oliver! is a very fine, cinematic musical, and a very good candidate for best musical of the '60s (it deserved the Oscar, in my opinion) but the numbers strike me more as very good versions of the typical '60s movie musical number: big, splashy numbers that depend more on size and scope than on the actual choreography or concept of the number -- they're much better than the numbers in Hello, Dolly!, but they're of the same type.

Whereas a small number, quickly-shot, can be a knockout moment if the director, choreographer and performers all share a really interesting, coherent concept for the number and execute it well. Take the "My Rival" number from Viva Las Vegas. That number shouldn't be anything and, by the standards of the big musicals of the time, it isn't anything; it's a not-great song and the number is confined to one room. But George Sidney, the director, shot the whole thing in one take, worked in precisely-timed and funny gags related to the fact that Ann-Margret is making lunch while doing the song, and came up with a number that is a little gem in the great tradition of '30s, '40s and '50s musicals -- and not at all in the tradition of big bloated '60s musicals.



What are some '60s movie musical numbers that work that way for you -- not necessarily the biggest, or the most expensive, or the ones that reveal plot and character the most efficiently, but just numbers that are truly effective, coherent, cinematic numbers that make you feel that you just have to rewind and watch that again?

Here are some others that come to mind for me:. Several of these numbers involve Ann-Margret, and that's not a coincidence; of all the '60s stars she's the one who was best suited to the old-school musical numbers favored by the old-school director George Sidney, and she was almost completely unsuited to the big-budget high-class '60s musical. (She was considered for the second lead of Mrs. Molloy in Hello, Dolly!, but she didn't get the part; there are persistent rumors that Barbra Streisand didn't want a second lead who might overshadow her. But A-M wouldn't have been right for such a bland part anyway.) She was basically a '40s musical star in the wrong era.

- "A Lot of Livin' To Do" from Bye Bye Birdie, which may be the single best number in any '60s movie musical; it's tasteless and garish, from a tasteless and garish movie, but everything, choreography, lighting, performance, composition and color, is working brilliantly and working toward the same goal. Also the opening and closing title song; just A-M and a wind machine and a treadmill, and that's all you need for a good number.

- "Cool" and "America" from West Side Story (two of the ones Jerome Robbins actually got to work on before he was fired).

- "C'mon Everybody," also from Viva Las Vegas, and you could also make a case for "What'd I Say" even though the choreography looks like it was done at the last minute (which it was).

Even though it's not well-directed at all, I might add "Mr Booze" from Robin and the Seven Hoods, the last of Bing Crosby's long line of "clowning around" numbers, where he actually manages to make the Rat Pack funny (they usually weren't when they did numbers like these). A fun '50s throwback, and much more fun than anything in the average '60s musical.

I love Les Demoiselles De Rochefort and I would really like to choose something from it... but the choreography just wasn't that good, and while many of the numbers are adorable, most of them feel like that last bit of brilliant execution is missing.

How Can You Laugh When You Know I'm Down?

I'm not going to be posting all the episodes from WKRP season 1, since those are on Hulu -- albeit in the butchered version -- and apart from the difficulty of posting them, it's more iffy to material that's already online in an official version. ("A Date With Jennifer" is an exception because the online version is missing so many scenes, apart from musical ones.) But I do want to at least re-introduce some of the musical material that is missing from those Hulu episodes. So from the season 1 episode "Preacher" -- the third episode produced, but for some reason held over and aired after the regular season was over -- here is the original opening, where Johnny Fever plays "I'm Down" by the Beatles. I believe this was the only time in the first or second season that the Beatles were used; they were really expensive even with the reduced licensing costs for taped shows. On the DVD/Hulu version this song is replaced with a generic instrumental, leaving you with the question of why they're pausing for 30 seconds to let us listen to nothing.