AN HOMAGE TO STAGE MOTHERS

Stage mothers really have a bad rep, but is it deserved? I'm not so sure.  The fact is that an awful lot of talented people in the past started doing what they were famous for when they were five, if not sooner.  Think of Buster Keaton who lived his whole life on the stage and in front of the camera. Look at what he achieved. Could he have done that if he'd started at age 23 like college grads do today? 

Of course, starting early requires focus and that requires a pushy adults. Ditto for getting good work habits. That's why we need stage mothers.  You don't want a mother who nags, and bullies, but you do want one that pushes you.  I'm not talking about school work, I'm limiting this discussion to  professions like music and dancing, auto mechanics, art, etc which can be learned by watching skilled people and practicing, which is the natural way that kids learn. 

A few stage mothers in the entertainment industry are famous, and so far as I know were loved by their children: Minnie Marx, mother-manager of The Marx Brothers;  Jaid Barrymore, mother of Drew; Gertrude Temple, who managed Shirley and spent hours every day curling her kid's hair; and Judy Garland's mom Ethel Gumm, just to name a few.  Where did this myth come from that all stage mothers are evil (Gary Goldman's dad, notwithstanding)?

Stage mothers of the world, this toast is for you.  You gave your kids the gift of a trade, of a chance to  practice their profession while they were still young enough to innovate and develop a passion for it.  Good for you!

Er...is that woman above really female? She looks a little odd. 

I couldn't resist throwing this in (above): Judy Garland singing "Texas Tornado" in a completely professional manner when she was only 14.  She could do that because her mother arranged for her to learn how to sing while she was still in the egg shell.



Haw! Stephen Rodgers' ably answered my argument with this song (above) by Noel Coward.  I have to admit that it makes a powerful argument, but I'm not ready to admit defeat. I was hoping to score on a larger point, namely that people nowadays begin careers too late in life.

To make a big impact you have to start early, so you can turn professional when you're young enough to pour lots of energy and idealism into what you do.  Stage mothers add a bit of balance to a school system that wastes youth.

I wish we still had Vaudeville, or an updated version of it. Talentless performers would get weeded out pretty fast if they had to play  before live audiences that paid for their tickets.

COMIC STRIPS FROM A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

Indisputably in my opinion, the golden age of newspaper comics occurred in the two decades before WWI. It was an era before formulas became locked in,  when the field attracted first-rate artists like the one above (click to enlarge).  Hmmm...well maybe some formulas were locked in.  Editors couldn't get enough of Katzenjammer Kids-type stories where kids torment adults. 

Arists that weren't first rate made up for it by being downright weird (above).  Here the fruits and vegetables have a picnic, which is disrupted by a cow who eats them. 

Editorial cartoons were terrific in this period. How do you like this one (above) by Herriman? No wonder he was a favorite of Hearst.

Some of these pre-war cartoons were incredibly violent.  Here (above) a woman is threatened by a mugger and she sticks him with a pin.... in the stomach! Ouch! Good drawings, though. 

I love visual stories like this (above).  The storyteller was a continuing character, but the strips structure was loose enough to permit almost anything.  There was room for imagination. In later years regular characters in predictable situations dominated, and artists were expected to use the same setting, day after day after dreary day.

This is a sore point with me. I wish current editors wouldn't put so much emphasis on regular characters in rigidly defined situations.  Aren't you glad that Mad allowed the young Don Martin to draw whatever took his fancy, regular characters or not? Aren't you glad that he wasn't shoe-horned into a sitcom format?

I have a lot of tolerance for racial and ethnic humor when it's funny and not mean-spirited, but even I cringe at strips like the one above.  I include it here because it's so well drawn. 


More strips like these can be seen at Allan Holtz's "Stripper's Guide:"
http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/

THE INCOMPARABLE ANNA MAGNANI

Anna Magnani is arguably the best actress of the film era.  What a treat to see her in a film (clip, above) with Marlin Brando in his best period. The film: Tennessee Williams' "The Fugitive Kind."

Magnani's great here. Brando has to get out of town to escape the law, but Magnani thinks he's leaving to be with another woman. When he tries to push past her she grabs his precious guitar and won't let go. That's such a Magnani thing to do! She fights for her man. She won't take no for an answer. He slaps her and she just takes the slaps and holds on.

But Brando knows he's got a real woman. In another sequence (on YouTube, not shown here) a beautiful girl throws herself at him and he says disdainfully: "Look at your wrists, they're so thin. I could snap them like a twig with two fingers. That's not the way a real woman is." The real woman is Anna Magnani, who has wrists like Popeye.

My only criticism is that the script doesn't give Magnani enough to say. She needed more lines. Maybe the studio was afraid Magnani would outshine Brando. Or maybe Williams slipped up. Maybe Magnani couldn't learn enough English. I wish I knew.





From another film, here's (above) Magnani playing a wife whose husband is taken away by the fascists, maybe to be shot. Magnani's a real woman. When her man is threatened she battles her way through a gauntlet of armed soldiers to get him back. When you see this you say to yourself, "Now that's what love is. If you're not willing to do that for your significant other, then you're not really in love."



Here's (above) Magnani and a beau taking a walk in the woods. What's so special about a walk you ask, but when Magnani does a scene everything is special. Her feigned helplessness is beautiful to behold. Watch the first minute and a half, and don't be put off by the documentary footage that begins it.



Thinking about "The Fugitive Kind" reminded me of Brando's performance in that film. Here's (above) the standout first sequence of that film, beloved by caricaturists and impressionists everywhere. It's one of Brandos funniest.

WOMENS FASHION IN THE 50S

It's tempting to think of the 50s the way the fashion magazines portray that period (above), with every woman wearing space-age fashions.  i don't think that's the way it was, not in the early 50s, anyway.  So far as I can tell, most women then dressed simply, the way women dressed in the forties.  They all looked like Milt Gross women. 

Women of this period who couldn't afford Mink coats wore mink "stoles" instead.  Stoles  were entire dead animals: face, paws and tails, stitched together and draped over the shoulder.

But change was in the air. There must have been a lot of new wealth around because, by the mid fifties,  more and more women began to dress the way they did in magazines.  They even began to mimic the poses they saw there.  They'd linger coquettishly in doorways,  languorously lean on things, and playfully walk along anything elevated,  just to show off their new clothes.

Then as now,  photography always favors models who  look other-worldly (above),  and seem to have disdain for the human race.

I imagine that fashionable 50s women must have followed suit by snubbing  everyone around them.  If there were no strangers to snub, then they snubbed a friend.

"Brain" coats became popular at this time.  Somebody invented a fabric that looked like the kind of fur that poodles have, the kind that's curled into black brain convolutions.  The coat above is only partially brain-covered, as if the poodle it was removed from had mange. It looks good though.

Some high fashion never filtered down to street level, thank God.  Paris tried to foist ugly, tent dresses on women, and they refused to accept them.

Girdle ads of the period (above) are fascinating.  Models had to strike classical poses, frequently next to pillars.  They were very classy and aloof.

That's very odd, because the dresses that were made to show off the conservative girdles (above) were often outrageously sexy.

Lots of girls I knew when I was a little kid wore dresses like the  "Chubettes" one above.  The ad says they were for  "chubby lasses." Gee, maybe I live around a lot of fat girls.

Were pajamas (above) an invention of the fifties? I love wearing them, but I confess that in an entire lifetime I've never had a pair that fit.

If you can trust the magazines and films of the period, transparent baby doll nighties (above) were all the fashion. None of the women in my family wore them but when I a kid was I was convinced that all the beautiful women in the neighborhood had them, and thinking about it drove me nuts.

By the late 50s all that magazine fashion had evolved into the rock & roll look. What a decade! It started with the conservative Milt Gross look of the 40s,  morphed into Paris-influenced magazine fashion, and ended with the "Long Bang Fall (above)." Geez!

"CRIME WAVE"

Thanks to recommendations from commenters Paul Penna and Mr. Goodson2, I just rented this film (above) from Netflix, and I'm happy to report that it's SENSATIONAL....a must see film for fans of noir, direction, mise-en-scene and Stirling Hayden.

The trailer's on YouTube, but take my advice and skip it. It makes the film appear amateurish and boring, which it isn't. Instead take a look at this short video (above) about the film's director, Andre De Toth. He's the same guy who directed the underrated horror film, "House of Wax."

Jack Warner wanted to use Humphrey Bogart here, but De Toth held out for Sterling Hayden (not shown above), and it's a good thing he did. Hayden delivers what may be his best ever performance here.  I'd kill to do his detective character in animation.  That guy with the cards (above) does a pretty good job, too.

The film is wonderfully composed and shot (much better than in the example above), which is doubly amazing when you consider that it was made on location in only 14 days.  De Toth is obviously the guiding genius, but I want to find out who did the camera work and lighting.  I even want to know who scouted the locations. De Toth's Los Angeles is like nothing you've ever seen before. 

Extras on the disk include "Decoy," a flawed but interesting noir film from 1946. The film runs out of gas fairly quickly, but the first 15 or 20 minutes are hilarious.  Also included is a Crime Wave commentary by none other than crime novelist, James Ellroy.  John K watched it with me and hated it because every time Ellroy saw something he liked he dog-panted into the microphone. I kinda liked it myself. 

A DINNER I WON'T FORGET

Before I start, let me apologize for taking the Pizza Boy story down. It's only temporary. I'll put up an improved version soon, and I think you'll like it a lot better. I had trouble with Beta Blogger, which isn't set up for the kind of photo stories I like to do, but it gets better every day and, well...you can't argue with the price. Thanks to Roberto, Jorge, Rooni, Fritz and Ben for the kind comments on that post.

Fortunately, I have another pizza story ready to go, this one taken from real life...

A few days ago I had dinner in a pizzeria and I noticed what appeared to be a dad and his four kids wolfing down pizza in the booth next to me.  They seemed like a nice family and I gave in to the temptation to eavesdrop.  I'm glad I did, because what they said was fascinating!

I only heard bits of it. If I got it right, the dad had a small contracting business, which fit the way he looked: like the actor, Ned Beatty.  He seemed like an average Joe, a nice guy who was probably skilled and did good work.  He wasn't very eloquent or talkative but you could tell that he was enjoying his kids immensely.  

  

Three of kids talked mostly to each other about video games, friends,  rock music; the usual things ten year- olds talk about. The fourth kid, the one closest to the dad, was animatedly telling him about his internet business, which was buying and selling sci-fi figurines on ebay.  The kid was bragging about the deals he made.  He relished the details and the dad obviously relished hearing about them. 

So what, you ask, made this dinner so special? 

It was special because the kid seemed to genuinely enjoy talking to his dad.  Let that sink in for a minute. He actually thought talking to the old man was fun.  When's the last time you saw that? I guess he thought of himself as a businessman, just like his dad, and it was fun for him to compare notes with a sympathetic peer.  

The dad, who had the kind of stiff, cigar store indian face that most men have, was nevertheless beaming.  He was in Seventh Heaven because his son was talking to him just for the sheer pleasure of it, and maybe because he knew he could be useful to a son like that, and would never have to worry that the kid would grow up rudderless or penniless.  I got the feeling that the dad would remember that night as one of the best in his entire life.

When the family got up to go,  I felt like shaking the kids hand and giving him my wallet. What a gift he gave to his father! What a son! What a night!  

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF JAMES ELLROY?

It occurred to me that in my post on writers James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard I forgot to include a sample of Ellroy's writing. Ill make up for that here with a couple of brief Ellroy interviews.  He writes the way he talks, so this should give you an idea of what the writing's like.




Ellroy talks in short sentenses with short words.  It's a very lean style.  In the interviews he comes off as obsessive, which doesn't surprise me.  I think all good literary stylists have compulsive disorders.  They write whether they get paid for it or not. You have to write an awful. awful lot to get the kind of feel for words that they have.

The trick is to avoid getting seduced by your own beautiful words, and to never neglect the content. Good writing is always about something that's worth knowing.




YouTube has several videos where Ellroy talks about Elizabeth Short, the famous "Black Dahlia" whose corpse was found surgically cut in half in Hollywood in the forties. His own mother was murdered when Ellroy was a kid, some (not Ellroy) believe by the same killer. The two murders are always on Ellroy's mind. I'm surprised that Ellroy is able to keep focused on a subject he's spoken and written about so frequently through the years. Maybe this is another example of how you have to be an an obsessive compulsive in order to write well.

 Maybe the tragic crimes gave him a nucleus around which he could grow a compulsion. Maybe the best writers need compulsions for fuel and deliberately set about to acquire and nurture them. Or maybe I'm trying to over explain something that's simple and doesn't need an explanation. I don't know. Anyway, I love the way Ellroy talks.