Night and Day (1946) and De-Lovely (2004)

Night and Day (1946) and De-Lovely (2004), both about the life and career of Cole Porter, are equally entertaining and equally artificial.

This is the last entry in our series in musicals about composers.  Cole Porter was a difficult subject to tackle for these films, but not solely because of the subject of his homosexuality – which was not explicitly discussed in Nightand Day – but because Cole Porter was a complex individual who, maybe more than other composers and lyricists we’ve discussed in the series, really was his music.

Unlike the other composers we’ve covered, he wrote both the music and the lyrics to his songs – wickedly clever and complex, so intricately and perfectly joined.  It was a perfect marriage.  But both movies dwelled more on his other marriage.

Night and Day, directed by Michael Curtiz, stars Cary Grant as Cole Porter, and Alexis Smith as Linda Lee, his wife.  Monty Woolley, who was a lifelong friend, played himself, as does Mary Martin.  Others presenting songs but playing fictional characters are Jane Wyman, Ginny Simms, and Eve Arden.  Early scenes in the film depicting how Cole and Linda met and their World War I adventures are fictional. Cole's leading cheers at Yale is not as spurious as we might think – he was very prolific in his music in college and did create fighting songs still used at Yale today.

The musical numbers are staged in a style of the 1940s – leisurely, lavish, and glamorous.  There is much visually in the movie to appeal to the eye, most especially leads Cary Grant and Alexis Smith.  Linda is supportive of his career and encouraging, but eventually feels neglected when his work pulls him away from her.  There is a strange aloofness in Grant’s portraying of Cole – which may be a veiled intention to refer to his homosexuality.  It’s a line this 1946 film is obviously not going to cross.

De-Lovely deals with that subject in a very warm and gentle way.  Cole’s liaisons with men are a drain on his marriage when Linda, who otherwise accepts Cole for who he is, feels he is being too indiscreet, but this film is frank about their love for each other as much as about his extramarital liaisons.  Cole and Linda genuinely are devoted to each other; to dismiss her as only a marriage of convenience is to not do justice to their real and enduring bond.  (The exact nature of their sexual relations is illustrated by suggesting they have at least occasionally shared a bed and that Linda has become pregnant after they decide they would like to start a family; she afterwards suffers a miscarriage.)

Cole here is not aloof and strangely cold as was Cary Grant, but he is often so immersed what interests him that he displays only the most fleeting sensitivity for others: his liaisons are demonstrated as casual brief encounters with male prostitutes arranged for him by friends – not loving relationships. There appears to be little feeling behind his appetites, even his music is presented less as a passion and more as another hedonistic urge.

Perhaps this is the difficulty at the root of presenting the life and work of Cole Porter on film; and both movies dance around it.

Kevin Kline plays Cole and Ashley Judd plays Linda in De-Lovely.  Kline is playful, boyish, much warmer than Grant, but neither actor actually looks anything like Cole Porter.

Pop singers perform the Porter hits: Robbie Williams, Elvis Costello, Alanis Morrissette, John Barrowman, Sheryl Crow, Diana Krall, and Natalie Cole among them. None of the singers perform in the style of the 1940s, though Krall as a jazz singer and Natalie Cole as an interpreter of the American Songbook have a leg up on the others.  The songs are presented in a kaleidoscope of images always shifting, always moving, somewhat off-kilter – as the movie is actually a kind of dream sequence – as Cole Porter looks back on his life in the form of a musical. We do not hear most of the songs in their entirety, which is a shame, but the use of the songs within the framework of the narrative is so creative that it doesn’t seem distracting to have this modern style interpretation.  If anything, it may bring a younger generation to appreciate Cole Porter’s music.  (Although director Irwin Winkler does use an Ethel Merman impersonator for “Anything Goes.”)

Jonathan Pryce, who plays Gabe, or the Angel Gabriel, ushers Cole Porter through his personal life musical and also launches the cast in an exuberant “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” as a finale.  This and the whimsical number on the movie studio lot featuring, among others, Louis B. Mayer singing and dancing to “Be a Clown” are entirely fanciful and do not match the “realism” of the other musical performances.

In De-Lovely, Linda and Cole meet in Paris in the 1920s, which is true, and their exploration on how far Cole’s music, his “promise” will take them brings us to Broadway and Hollywood, and the tragedies of Cole’s crippling horse riding accident, as well as Linda’s illness and death from emphysema.

Perhaps the greatest similarity between the films is the several cigarette cases Linda gives Cole one for each of his new shows, with an appropriately themed design engraved, and also the fact that his equestrian accident nearly killed him and left him physically handicapped for the rest of his life.

De-Lovely gets closer to the mark depicting the terrible toll the accident took on him, when both his legs were crushed, but neither film explores the decades-long pain, suffering, multiple operations, eventual amputation in so far as what it was like for a man who created lighthearted, playful lyrics, who seems to take nothing seriously – to still be able to create, as he did, under terrible circumstances. It was after he lost Linda that most of his music and his delight in life left him.  He ended his days as a recluse.

Neither film covers more than but a handful of his songs.

De-Lovely acknowledges Night and Day with a brief clip which Cole and Linda watch in a Hollywood studio projection room – without much enthusiasm.  We are shown the final scene when Cary Grant as Cole, stiffly walking on crutches, reunites with Linda, played by Alexis Smith, at a celebration of his work. Radiant Alexis rushes towards him.  He mechanically puts his arms around her, but stares over her shoulder with an enigmatic, almost grim expression.

Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd watch as Kline says, “If I can survive this movie, I can survive anything.”

“Why on earth does Linda come back to Cole anyway?” she asks.

“Because he’s Cary Grant.”

“We should be grateful to them.  They found us a happy ending.”

But Cary doesn’t really look happy in that scene; it is a most unromantic ending.

De-Lovely concludes with Cole and Linda, elegant and young again, reunited in the hereafter as darkness falls over the city out the window of their apartment and the gentle strains of “In the Still of the Night” wash over them.

Which film is more true?  They both are true, and they both are fictional, and I like each for what it is.  I do not regard De-Lovely as a replacement for Nightand Day, it is just a revisiting of the story.

During this series about musicals we’ve discussed the sometimes fractious collaboration of a composer and lyricist.  Here we have both in one man.  He was delightfully, impossibly, maybe tragically schizoid, and neither film comes close to exploring or explaining his genius.  It was too private and too personal and beyond description.

***

Next week, I’d like to share a few thoughts on the series Feud and how modern filmmakers and a modern audience look back on the relationship between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

***

Other entries in our series on musicals about composers are here:

Rhapsody in Blue (1945) – George Gershwin.

I Wonder Who’s Kissing her Now (1947) – Joe Howard.

The Best Things in Life Are Free (1956) – Buddy DeSilva, Ray Henderson, Lew Brown

My Wild Irish Rose(1947) – Chauncey Olcott

*********************
The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon, CreateSpace, and my Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing.

Arsenic and Old Lace - A Connecticut Murder Mystery Plays Out

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) is based on a true story.  In this season of Halloween, we note that the daffy and macabre comedy with malevolent roots was first a play, which still haunts professional and community theatre stages across the country.  It is an American theatre classic.  The true story is much more macabre, and only slightly less daffy.

It happened in the small town of Windsor, Connecticut, just north of Hartford.  One hundred years ago, a woman ran a private nursing home in her house, and was investigated for the murder of five of her residents, and was eventually convicted.  It’s possible she may have murdered more than forty people in all—with arsenic.

Born in the town of Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1873, Amy Duggan went to the New Britain Normal School in 1890, and taught at the Milton School in Milton, Connecticut.  She married James Archer in 1897.  In 1901, the couple was hired to care for an elderly widower in his home in Newington, Connecticut, and when he died in 1904, his heirs turned the home into a boarding house for elderly, with Amy and James Archer in charge.  They called the business “Sister Amy’s Nursing Home for the Elderly.”

In 1907, the house was sold, so “Sister” Amy and husband James moved to Windsor, bought another house and opened the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids.  Residents paid for room and board and also medical attention if they required that, frequently signing over insurance policies to Amy so she could manage their final expenses when they died.

More than twenty residents died in the first four years of operation, most from gastrointestinal complaints that would kill them within days—or hours.  Poor Mr. Archer also succumbed suddenly, his death listed as kidney disease.  “Sister” Amy would discreetly have the bodies buried immediately so as not to upset the other residents. 

Dr. Howard King, the medical examiner for Windsor, was also the house physician for the rest home.  He apparently wrote out the death certificates and minded his own business.  Business was good. 

“Sister” Amy had a pattern of buying arsenic, nearly a pound at a time—to kill rats, she said— which was usually followed by the death of another resident.  When neighbors, and then reporters, started raising questions about all this, Amy declared she was the victim of a conspiracy.  Her righteous indignation was enough to quiet things down a bit, because she would not be charged with murder until five years later—after fifty more people died.

In the summer of 1913, Amy married a new resident to the home—Michael Gilligan, a 57-year-old man who was divorced and had a hefty savings account.  Early in 1914, her new husband drafted new will leaving his estate to her—and just in time, too, for he was dead two days later.   He died of “indigestion.”

The late Mr. Gilligan had adult children from his previous marriage.  They joined the growing ranks of neighbors, reporters, and eventually the state’s attorney, who were becoming suspicious of Amy’s home cooking.  More residents were killed, however, by May 1916 when the crime spree was finally ended by official investigation.

It had started quietly when a female undercover private eye working for the Connecticut State Police, moved into the rest home at the end of 1914.  She managed not to ingest any arsenic, and the evidence she gathered was enough to arrest Amy in May 1916 and bring her to trial.  Now that lady private eye is a character that would make a great movie. 

Amy went on trial in June 1917 for the five murders that could be proven, when the bodies were exhumed and discovered to be full of arsenic.  Among them was Franklin R. Andrews, who was regarded as apparently healthy, but who fell ill on the morning of May 29, 1914, and was dead by evening.  His death was the only proven count of murder that convicted Amy Archer-Gilligan.  Her only child, her daughter Mary, testified that her mother was addicted to morphine.  The jury found Amy guilty of murder in the first degree.  She was sentenced to be hanged.

But, wait a minute.  The governor granted a stay of execution until her case could be heard by the state Supreme Court of Errors, and then a second trial was scheduled, but her defense team plea bargained, and Amy was found guilty of murder in the second degree by reason of insanity—the sentence for which was life imprisonment. 

First sent to the old state prison in Wethersfield (no longer there), in 1924 she was transferred to the Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown, a state institution for the criminally insane.  She was assigned to work in the cafeteria.  One hopes she wasn’t allowed to season the food.  Amy Archer-Gillian died of natural causes at 89 years old in April 1962. 

In 2014, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that nearly 200 pages of documents related to the medical and psychiatric treatment of Amy Archer-Gilligan were to remain sealed, considering them not to be public records.  This hampered the plans of at least one writer to examine this material for a book on Mrs. Archer-Gilligan and her infamous crimes.

Another writer, years ago, was equally fascinated.  New York playwright Joseph Kesselring, following the case as had a shocked America, rewrote the story into a comedy.  Arsenic and Old Lace was a smash on Broadway from 1939 to 1944, and then made into the popular 1944 movie with Cary Grant and Josephine Hull, who played Abby Brewster, recreating the role she originated on Broadway.

One of the features of the play—beloved by community theatre groups for this alone—is that many of the little old ladies’ victims emerge for a “bow” at the end of the show—these non-speaking roles are usually taken by members of the community, usually ten or so people.  Many a town mayor or favorite teacher has emerged from the “cellar” as a murder victim to take a bow.

Considering how many victims were probably actually murdered by Amy Archer-Gilligan, this bit of black humor is gruesome, indeed.

Note: The above ad for The Valley Players production of Arsenic and Old Lace is from my forthcoming book to be published later this year on summer theatre on Mt. Tom, Holyoke, Massachusetts.  More on that to come.
****************

The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

Vaudeville - No Applause, Please, Just Throw Money by Trav S.D.

Vaudeville gave us many performers whose careers we've come to know from their eventual migration to Hollywood and the movies.  In turn, some movies managed to chronicle vaudeville performances and preserve them on film so we can enjoy them today.  It's a special relationship.

I've mentioned before on this blog the other points on the "star" that comprise the universe of the twentieth century actor: movies, of course, but also the stage, radio, and television.  The fifth point on the star is vaudeville.  I consider this separate from "the stage" because it was a unique world apart from full-length dramas, comedies, or musicals. 

Cary Grant started in vaudeville. Those simple acrobatics he performed in Holiday (1938) were learned when he was a youth, when he was Archie Leach, in vaudeville.

W.C. Fields, sure, and Mae West, and the Marx Brothers, but they essentially brought their vaudeville acts to the screen.  Mr. Grant, or we should say, Mr. Leach, morphed into something and someone altogether completely new.  The movies created many "personas" for many actors whose images, not to say talents, were a work in progress. Vaudeville was the training ground.

This post is just to point you in the direction of a swell book that is a terrific survey of vaudeville if you know little about it and want to know more:  No Applause - Just Throw Money, by Trav S. D. 

A few years ago I reviewed his book on silent film comedy, Chain of Fools, here.  He also writes the blog Travalanche, a wealth of information on classic films and vaudeville.  He's one of my favorite writers.

As I've mentioned in this post a few weeks ago, I'm currently working on a book about a summer stock playhouse on Mt. Tom in Holyoke, Massachusetts.  Vaudeville played an important part in the early days of this theater, and Trav's book has been a most enjoyable part of my research.

His knowledge on this art form and era is impressive, and you will be hard pressed to find a guide to this fascinating world more articulate and funny.  It really is a very enjoyable book, and I recommend it to anybody interested not only in vaudeville, but in classic films.  Exploring the history of vaudeville will enhance your appreciation of classic films. 

*****************

Next week we continue our series on the current state of the classic film fan with a discussion with Patricia Nolan Hall, aka Caftan Woman.

*******************