Incendiary Blonde (1945)

Director: George Marshall
Writers: Claude Binyon and Frank Butler
Stars: Betty Hutton and Arturo de Cordova

Index: 2021 Centennials.

After Klondike Kate turned out to be such a wildly inaccurate biopic that it was a precious detail indeed that came close to the truth, I probably ought to have sworn off Hollywood biopics for quite a while. But here I am with another one, after only a week, because 26th February would have been the one hundredth birthday of Betty Hutton and I couldn’t track down the film I wanted to explore anywhere. That was Cross My Heart, a comedy musical remake of the Carole Lombard movie, True Confession, in which she confesses to a murder that she didn’t commit so that her lawyer husband can secure her acquittal in court and so build a stellar reputation. It kinda sorta worked with Lombard because I could believe her as a sympathetic pathological liar, but Hutton? I was eager to find out if she would be able to carry it, but it’s a Paramount film from 1946 that was sold to Universal in a job lot of 700 for TV distribution and legal issues prevented it from being shown with the others. It seems like those issues may finally be solved, so fingers crossed.

But it’s Betty Hutton’s centennial today and so I plumped for Incendiary Blonde, as it’s another musical comedy in which she has the lead, playing a fictionalised version of Texas Guinan, a fascinating character from the early decades of the previous century. What’s important to note here is that we’re often not entirely sure what’s true and what isn’t from her life, because she made so much of it up out of thin air, so this Hollywood biopic could do the same and we might not be able to tell the difference. Yes, a lot of things got changed, but it’s not particularly important in the grand scheme of things and much of the sweep of the story resembles the truth. At least they got her name right! She really was known as Texas Guinan, for much of her time in the spotlight, and she did claim for years that it was her real name, though she was born Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan instead, in 1884 in Waco, Texas. When she died in 1933, she was known as “the queen of the nightclubs”. There were 7,500 people at her funeral and a biopic was inevitable.

The Feather Fairy (1985)

Director: Juraj Jakubisko
Writers: Ľubímor Feldek and Juraj Jakubisko
Stars: Giulietta Masina, Petra Vancíková, Tobias Hoesl, Sona Valentová, Pavol Mikulik, Milada Ondrasíková, Valérie Kaplanová and Eva Horká

Index: 2021 Centennials.

One of the unwritten rules of cinema is that, if you want to see a fairy tale on film done properly, you go to Europe, travel east and keep on going. There are many good countries where you could stop to see good fairy tales, but most of them are on the other side of where the Iron Curtain used to be. This one is a multinational production that’s nominally Czechoslovakian and primarily in the Slovak language. I’m guessing that my grey market copy was taped from an Italian TV channel, because the few sections in Italiano are not subtitled but all the Slovak is. It doesn’t matter that much, because it’s clear what’s going on, except that I find myself a bit in the dark about the circus troupe that’s our focus as the film begins and which returns to the story later. It’s easy to see why they would be watching it in Italy, though, because the one cast member I recognise is the one I’m watching for. That’s Giulietta Masina, the magical clown of European cinema, who would have been a hundred years old today.

This is a late film for her, but she’s just as much fun to watch here in 1985 as she was in La Strada and Nights of Cabiria in the fifties or Juliet of the Spirits in the sixties. Apparently she was talked into doing this by her husband, the director Federico Fellini, who was a friend of this film’s director, Juraj Jakubisko. I’m very happy that she agreed to do it, because she remains a bundle of energy at 64 years young and her quirky charm is utterly perfect for a fairy tale. However, I also enjoyed the eastern actors, none of whom I had seen before. Most of them are women, because that’s just how this story rolls, with only one male character of real substance. That is another worthy aspect of eastern fairy tales, where female characters can be anything, rather than merely the two opposites the Disney adaptations polarise: the beautiful young peasant girl or princess and the ugly and evil stepmother or crone. Those clichés are here too, though with some serious caveats, and they’re not all there are to be found either because there’s also Perinbaba.

Klondike Kate (1943)

Director: William Castle
Writers: M. Coates Webster, based on a story by Houston Branch and M. Coates Webster, suggested by the life of Kate Rockwell Matson, the original “Klondike Kate”
Stars: Ann Savage, Tom Neal, Glenda Farrell, Constance Worth, Sheldon Leonard, Lester Allen and George Cleveland

Index: 2021 Centennials.

The obvious film to review to celebrate what would have been Ann Savage’s one hundredth birthday is Detour, the highly regarded low budget film noir from Edgar G. Ulmer and PRC, released in 1945, in which she blackmails Tom Neal. However, as that’s the film that everyone else will be mentioning, I’m going to go back two further years to take a look at Savage’s first leading role, which also tasks her with acting opposite Tom Neal, under the direction of the great William Castle. It’s a biopic, of sorts, merely “suggested by the life of Kate Rockwell Matson”, the real lady behind the titular nickname, which means that it’s about as historically accurate as Klondyke Kate, the song by Suzi Quatro. What’s odd is that, unlike most heavily fictionalised Hollywood biopics, this one was written during the life of its subject, who lived until 1957, and it was apparently Kate herself who personally chose Ann Savage, then an up and coming actor at Columbia, to portray her in this picture.

We can tell how accurate it’s going to be as a biopic from the fact that they correctly name its subject in the opening credits but not in the film itself. The lady who would become known as Klondike Kate was born Kathleen Eloisa Rockwell, later adding a succession of surnames from three marriages. She was born in Junction City, Kansas in 1876, to parents who divorced when she was five, and she spent much of her youth travelling with her mother to places as farflung as Valparaiso, Chile. She became a chorus girl in New York City but soon followed a theatre troupe to Spokane, Washington, in which she’d previously lived, and it was while there that she heard rumours about the Gold Rush in the Klondike. She may or may not have got past the Mounties disguised as a boy, but she arrived in Alaska in 1899 and proved a big success in Dawson City, dancing her Flame Dance at the Palace Grande Theatre. This saw her trail two hundred feet of chiffon that she twisted into the illusion of fire. She made a fortune, sometimes over $750 per night.

Happy Go Lovely (1951)

Director: Bruce Humberstone
Writer: Val Guest, based on a film story by F. Dammann and Dr. H. Rosenfeld
Stars: David Niven, Vera-Ellen and Cesar Romero

Index: 2021 Centennials.

While this is precisely the sort of film that rarely appeals to me, I had an absolute blast with it, and I’m trying to figure out why. It’s a musical but, like 42nd Street or Singin’ in the Rain, the song and dance routines all make sense within the wider plot. It’s a romance, but a touching one that happens by accident while neither half is looking, even though that accident is the core of the entire script. In fact, it’s a romcom, but one that benefits from a lively set of performances, including by our centenarian, the dancer Vera-Ellen, who is the female lead here rather than a prominent supporting actress. It’s set in Edinburgh, the cultural and geographic elements used sparingly but capably, even if some of the stock footage is obvious. And it’s a fantastic opportunity for me to see a few faces at a much earlier point in their careers than I’m used to. So I guess it’s the template for the sort of musical romcom that I’m likely to enjoy. Now, how do I plug that into Google to get realistic results?

I think it also helps that it’s a comedy of errors but not a love triangle, written by a talented, genre-hopping writer who had already become a talented genre-hopping director. He’s Val Guest—the Val is for Valmond—and, while I know him primarily for his work in the horror and science fiction genres, often for Hammer, films like The Abominable Snowman, The Day the Earth Caught Fire and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, his filmography is as full of comedies, war movies and musicals. His handling of comedy here is surprising light but with a firm attention to detail, which only gets better as the picture runs on. For a start, everything is layered so that these situations build, as they ought to do in comedies of errors, but there’s a fantastic little detail that surrounds it all that’s the icing on the cake. Not only does one minor assumption on the part of a chorus girl kickstart the whole thing into motion, but all that motion is utterly unnecessary, as we learn at the end that that very chorus girl had the solution being sought all along. That’s glorious.

Clash by Night (1963)

Director: Montgomery Tully
Writers: Maurice J. Wilson and Montgomery Tully, based on the novel Clash by Night by Rupert Croft-Cooke
Stars: Terence Logsdon, Jennifer Jayne, Harry Fowler, Alan Wheatley and Peter Sallis

Index: 2021 Centennials.

Before you ask, this particular Clash by Night is entirely unrelated to the RKO film noir of the same name from 1952, with Barbara Stanwyck in the lead, and the 1941 Clifford Odets play on which that was based. This Clash by Night is British, made by Eternal Films at MGM’s studios in Borehamwood, on the outskirts of London, and distributed in the UK in 1963 by Grand National Pictures. When Allied Artists brought it to the States a year later, it was wisely renamed to Escape by Night to help avoid confusion. Its original title comes from its source novel, by Rupert Croft-Cooke, published only a year earlier, and the author’s background does a lot to shape our understanding of the script. I’ll come back to explain why later but, for now, I’ll just point out that I’m watching for Peter Sallis, who would have been a hundred years old today. I know him for The Last of the Summer Wine, but you may know him far better for voicing a claymation curmudgeon called Wallace, he with a canine companion named Gromit.

Sallis doesn’t have a large part in Clash by Night, but it’s a quirky and memorable one, as the wildcard in a bevy of unusual jailbirds thrown together into an equally unusual situation. There are half a dozen of them, handcuffed in pairs on a bus that’s about to take them all to prison. Terence Longdon has the the leading role of Martin Lord, sentenced to five years for killing a man, even if he did so in his own house while defending his own wife from sexual assault; she let a stranger in to use the telephone. He’s handcuffed to Doug Roberts, a talkative thief played by Harry Fowler, who’s been handed 21 more months; he’s been through this routine before. Sallis is seated right behind them as we learn all this, but he’s the last to be introduced, because Mawsley, the experienced guard on this bus, builds up to him as he passes key notes on to his assistant, Danny Watts, before they set off. This is Danny’s first transport duty and that makes it easy for Mawsley to let us in on who everyone is and how everything works too.