Ever have a Charlie Chaplin New Year's celebration? Didn't think so. I have.
Ever find your self voted designated driver for the night when you least expected it? Me too.
Ever celebrate with four of your best mates? Me too.
Ever have a Italian sex-bomb get on your table to dance? Me neither.
Ever have your brother kiss you on the lips at midnight on New Year's ? If so, it's the kiss of death.
Ever party like it's 1924, with hip-hop?? Didn't think so.
Ever see a beautiful girl sitting by herself at a party looking so forlorn that you couldn't help but go up to her and try to make her laugh? Try it sometime.
Ever been invited to one of Holly Golightly's toga parties? Me neither, but I did go to a toga party once. But Holly wasn't there.
That's it. Goodbye 2013. Been nice knowing you, but your expiration date has past. Cheers!!!!
I thought my first encounter with screen siren Gloria Grahame was in the movie The Bad & The Beautiful, Vincente Minnelli's inside view of Hollywood circa 1952. In it she plays southern belle/flirt/wife of Dick Powell. The role is not really typical Gloria Grahame for generally in the movies { and in life? } she was the bad girl par excellence. In B & B, Gloria is a coquette, not really bad. No, I was wrong. I first saw her, without knowing anything of her or her filmography, in 1946's It's A Wonderful Life. Not knowing what I had stumbled upon { the film was about half way in }, It's A Wonderful Life and George Bailey's story captured my imagination from that first accidental viewing long ago. I thought Donna Reed was a babe, but that Gloria Grahame was the kinda doll I couldn't take home to momma and I wouldn't want to, but I would want to take her to bed. Even, or especially, in that film's environment, there was something lethal about her attitude, strut, and the way she was ready to go with George on a wild ride, but wasn't ready to go up to the falls and watch the sun rise. Not her idea of a scandal, probably because it wouldn't be scandalous or, to be more specific, sleazy enough. By the time. Because Gloria Grahame knew all about sleaze.
With hubby number two, Nicholas Ray.
Born in 1924, Gloria Grahame began her film career in 1944 at MGM. Even with her success with Wonderful Life, Metro didn't see much potential in her and sold her contract to RKO in 1947. What at the time must have seemed to be a setback to her became one of the most important moves of her life and career, for RKO was the home of film noir with talents like stars Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, Robert Ryan and up and coming directors like Edward Dmytryk and Nicholas Ray. Ray, who would become her second husband, would make two films with her. 1949's A Woman's Secret and 1950's noir classic In A Lonely Place. Gloria would gain prominence and her first Oscar nomination for Dmytryk's classic noir Crossfire made in 1947 at her new studio. While making A Woman's Secret Nick Ray and Grahame, who had both been married before { Ray had a son from wife number one }, had a whirlwind romance and were wed about six weeks into the filming. They had a son born in November 1948. By the time they started Lonely Place in late 1949, Ray and Grahame's marriage was on the brink of collapse, due in no small part to Gloria's teasing and pushing Ray's jealousy button's. Patrick McGilligan's biography on Ray, sites how " many of those who knew Grahame considered her a nymphomaniac who lusted after multiple sex partners." According to actress Jeff Donnell, Grahame expected Ray to be " possessive and temperamental, and when he wasn't she would create situations to make that happen." McGilligan's book goes on to say "at one point in their relationship Gloria pulled a gun out of her handbag and ordered him to fuck or die." The couple separated for a time, reconciled, only to divorce in 1952 after Nick Ray caught Gloria in bed with his 13 year old son, Anthony, shortly after her turn in C.B. DeMille's circus epic, 1952's Best Picture Oscar winner The Greatest Show On Earth.
Gloria, no doubt leaving town on a rail, in Fritz Lang's Human Desire.
At the time of this scandal, which was generally known in Hollywood but discussed only in hushed terms, Gloria's career was riding the crest of a huge wave. In 1952 alone her credits included not only the DeMille and Minnelli films, but also the Joan Crawford thriller Sudden Fear and a small bit in Josef Von Sternberg's farewell to Hollywood filmmaking Macao opposite Jane Russell and noir icon { and former brother-in-law }, Robert Mitchum. Gloria nabbed the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Bad & The Beautiful, but the award was something of a career win for her stellar work that year.
1953, 1954 and 1955 would bring even more outstanding turns in such films as Elia Kazan's Man On A Tightrope as Fredric March's slutty wife; getting a coffee pot full of experience from Lee Marvin in Fritz Lang's crime classic The Big Heat and Lang's 1954 noir on infidelity Human Desire; Naked Alibi, playing a bar singer; back to Minnelli-land for the The Cobweb as shrink Richard Widmark's meddling wife; lost among the many stars in Stanley Kramer's maiden directing effort, the dismal, yet popular Not As A Stranger; and as Ado Annie in Fred Zinnemann's uneven adaptation of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!
After this slew of A-status films and performances, Grahame's film career took a dive. She would appear in only four more films over the next fifteen years, the best of the bunch being a return to noir with Odds Against Tomorrow for director Robert Wise in 1959. Over the years Grahame, besides addicted to sex, was obsessed with her looks, particularly her lips, which she would have surgery after surgery on to help achieve just the right pouty look she wanted to express. Grahame would have so many of these operations, mainly to her upper lip, that according to Wikipedia it left her mouth partially immobile and made speech difficult at times. After leaving Nicholas Ray, Grahame would marry two more times, in 1954 to Cy Howard which ended in divorce in 1957 and in 1960 to Anthony Ray, so in a way she kind of married her son. They were to have two sons before divorcing in 1974.
Great poster art for the Minnelli melo about the doctors, patients and significant others of a mental institution.
In the 1970's Grahame began working in film and television with more frequency, though mostly in low-budget affairs. One of the more high profile parts for Gloria was the mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man and the Howard Hughes-Melvin Dumar comedy Melvin & Howard directed with a deft hand by Jonathan Demme. While working in England in 1981, Grahame under went surgery for fluid that had developed in her abdomen. During the procedure the doctor accidentally punctured her bowel and she came down with peritonitis and died on October 5, 1981, age 57.
Gloria and her gun.
Gloria Grahame's life was without a doubt a bumpy ride, but with the rediscovery of film noir and the various websites and film festivals around the world, Gloria and here siren-sisters of the silver screen like Marie Windsor, Audrey Totter and Lizbeth Scott { to name just a few } have been rediscovered by millions of new fans and their work will continue to live on movie screens, big and small, of cineaste's the world over.
Sources : Media : Wikipedia page on Gloria Grahame
Turner Classic Movies
Books : Nicholas Ray : The Glorious Failure of an American Director by Patrick McGilligan
Prologue : Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck. { Taken from one of three suicide notes George Sanders left before he killed himself. }
On April 25, 1972, Oscar winning actor George Sanders took his own life in a hotel room near Barcelona. Sanders was only 65, but the nature of his death seems completely in keeping true to the screen character he had perfected for nearly 40 years; that of an absolute total cad. One of the Golden Age of Cinema's most exquisite character actors, Sanders career in the movies began in earnest in the mid-1930's and lasted to his death, though the quality of his roles had diminished considerably the last ten or so years of his life.
George in 1945's Picture of Dorian Gray.
It's a career that peaked with his turn as Addison DeWitt in the 1950 classic All About Eve, directed by Joseph L.Mankiewicz {The Barefoot Contessa; Suddenly, Last Summer}, Eve was also 1950's Best Picture Oscar winner and had been pegged with a total 14 nominations. Let that sink in for a moment. 14 Oscar nominations. No film in history had ever received that many, not even Gone With The Wind, and only one film has had as many since, 1997's Titanic, but All About Eve did it without a lot of technical nominations, too. Of the 14, 8 of them were in the top 7 categories, while Titanic racked up only 4 in the upper echelon.
Cast photo, Marilyn included, from the great All About Eve, 1950
Eve, along with his performance in Portrait of Dorian Gray, are my favorite Sanders creations. His cynical, sarcastic, biting line readings are among the finest in all of cinema. Only Claude Rains could equal Sanders ability to project that snarling, yet suave quality. A versatile actor, Sanders played in a variety of parts, from lavish costume drama's such as Fritz Lang's Moonfleet, Cecil B.DeMille's Samson and Delilah, The King's Thief, Ivanhoe, and King Vidor's Solomon and Sheba [ Sanders was on set when Tyrone Power suffered his fatal heart attack } to suspense thrillers like Rebecca, Foreign Corespondent and Witness To Murder to comedies such as Her Cardboard Lover and A Shot In The Dark. Besides Lang, Vidor and DeMille, Sanders also collaborated with such top flight filmmakers as Hitchcock, Sidney Lumet, Roberto Rossellini, Douglas Sirk, Huston, Friedkin and Cukor. Sanders was the Saint in a series of popular films based on the books by Leslie Charteris, after that he played a detective named The Falcon in four films before Sanders brother, Tom Conway { Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie } took over that role. In 1967 Sanders provided his perfect voice to the character Shere Khan in the Disney version of The Jungle Book. Based on the novel by Rudyard Kipling, the film has gone on to become one of Disney's beloved animated classics. One of Sanders less known talents was music, both singing and piano playing and he recorded a couple of albums. On occasion Sanders also appeared on TV. A couple of his more memorable "Guest Appearances" included a spot on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Batman, in the role of Mr.Freeze { take THAT Arnold! }, both childhood favorites of mine.
As the voice of Shere Khan in Disney's The Jungle Book
By most accounts Sanders in 1972 had come to the end of his rope. His third wife Benita Hume, the widow of Ronald Colman, who Sanders married in 1959, passed away from bone cancer in 1967 { his brother died the same year }. According to sources her death left Sanders devastated and adrift. In 1970, he married Magda Gabor, the eldest sister of second wife ZsaZsa, but the union only lasted a few weeks. In 1972 Sanders had been dating a girl about half his age and she somehow convinced him to sell his home in Majorca, Spain a home he adorned and regretted selling ever after. According to Wikipedia, in his last years Sanders was in poor health, including dementia, and fell into a prolonged depression. With nothing left to live for Sanders swallowed five bottles of Nembutal, essentially enough to kill a horse. Obviously George was leaving nothing to chance for only a truly desperate, despondent, self centered person takes his own life and this description fits Sanders pretty well. Anyone with Sanders gifts should have found something, anything, worth carrying on for, worth living for. Yet he had received some major body blows the last few years of his life. Exhausted, death must have seemed like the ultimate release from the life of purgatory he had been subjected to since 1967.From George Sanders point of view suicide must have made perfect sense and held a relaxing permanence that proved irresistible.
The romantic side of George saw the light of day with this album
Billy Wilder directed many a great film : Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, Sabrina and among others. As for me, I love all the previously mentioned and more, but I would have to offer up his Oscar-winning 1960 film The Apartment as perhaps my favorite. A sentimental choice, I initially saw The Apartment on KTLA Channel 5, an independent Los Angeles station, in 1971. When we see a film at an impressionable age it's impact is all the greater. I was only 12, but the theme of the film, that a man is not what he seems, that people will use others to get what they want, resonated within me and still does.
Miss Kubelik and Mr. Baxter
Jack Lemmon, in what has to be one of his two or three defining performances, plays C.C.Baxter { "C for Calvin, C for Clifford, however most people just call me Bud "} an employee in a large insurance company called Consolidated Life of New York. Along with the other 31,259 employees Baxter slaves away at his job in " ordinary policy department, premium accounting division, section w, desk #861 ". Baxter learned long ago that doing favors for executives in high places doesn't hurt one's chances at a promotion, so he lends his apartment out two or three times a week to four men who are married but fool around on the side. Eventually Baxter's boss, Mr. Sheldrake the President of the company { a perfectly reptilian Fred MacMurray }, finds out what has been going on and arranges for Baxter to get promotions in exchange for use of the apartment. Complications ensue when Baxter learns that Sheldrake has been taking Fran Kubelik { an absolutely irresistible, never more appealing Shirley MacLaine }, an elevator girl who Baxter has a huge crush on, to his apartment for a little " ring-a-ding-ding ". So we are in Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, The Best of Everything, Executive Suite-land. Mad Men before there was such a show, but also Rat Pack territory, which comes thru in the dialogue, martini's, the portrayal of women { no feminine execs here } and the cheating executives who have absolutely no shame or remorse in their philandering. Grown men behaving like boys. Still not that uncommon today I would venture, though perhaps more subtle.
Sheldrake sweet talks Fran back into his bed for a little "ring-a-ding-ding"
In the 1940's Wilder saw David Lean's Brief Encounter, a rather chaste film about an extramarital affair, and the idea occurred to him : what about a " movie about the guy who climbs into the warm bed left by two lovers ". The idea was ahead of it's time, but by the late 50's Hollywood's production Code had been showing the strain and the cracks were starting to break through that antiquated system, so Wilder, along with writing partner I.A.L { Izzy } Diamond , dusted off the idea and came up with The Apartment. Upon release some critics found the story line and it's characters morally reprehensible. Today the film looks both fresh and dated. Many things have been rendered obsolete such as elevator girls, { itself a rather crude reference to women being in charge things going up and going down } onlymale executives, no people of color are seen except for a black janitor, and so on. What I do find fresh is the prevalent use of Jewish and Eastern Europeans and their ancestors. Dobisch, Kirkeby, Matuschka, Kubelik, Eichelberger, Vanderhof, Dreyfuss; I love these names and the lingo of Baxter's landlady Mrs. Lieberman { who references " all that mishigas at Cape Canaveral " }, his neighbor Dr. Dreyfuss, who perceives Baxter to be a playboy { " Live now, pay later, Diners Club!" } because of the loud music and female giggling he and Mrs. Dreyfuss hear next door night after night. This, of course, this is not Baxter, but the execs and companions he loans his place to. It is the good Doctor who tells Baxter to be a mensch { " What is that, Doc?" , " A mensch! A human being.!! " }
Dr. Dreyfuss and Baxter try to revive Fran after her suicide attempt.
The music in the film By Adolph Deutsch deserves a big shout out and in this establishing scene it is especially spot on. Deutsch had worked with Wilder the year before on Some Like It Hot, he was one of many Wilder had worked with on previous films, for like most of the great filmmakers both past and present, they have a team of regular collaborators they try to corral together on every film : Diamond had worked with Wilder since 1957's Love in the Afternoon and would continue to co-script every Wilder film to his last one, the abysmal Buddy, Buddy; cinematographer Joseph LaShelle's work on the film was his first for TeamWilder, and would continue with Irma LaDouce; Kiss Me, Stupid and The Fortune Cookie. LaShelle had lensed several film noir's in the 1940's { Laura; Fallen Angel; Road House } and The Apartment is shot in a noir-like style, which suits the film perfectly because, though it's a Rom-Com, it has a dark sensibility with a pessimistic outlook on mankind. Alexander Trauner, a legend of art direction, worked on several Wilder films. Besides The Apartment, Trauner contributed to Love in the Afternoon; Witness For The Prosecution; One,Two,Three; The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and the underrated Fedora. These men, and so many others, helped Wilder achieve the effect and perfection he desired.
Baxter, unaware that Fran has taken almost fatal dose of sleeping pills, wants her to get up and "o-u-t. OUT!!" of his home and bed.
My identification with the film comes in the form of Baxter. The quintessential "lonely guy", Baxter is everything I have perceived myself to be, and more. He is a decent person, the mensch Dr. Dreyfuss exclaims he should be, not the no good lady-killer without a conscious he is perceived to be, with a deep sense of honor and chivalry. Baxter has a personal code, yet it is a code he has corrupted. Unlucky in love, Baxter has put all his focus and energies on getting ahead in the world of big business. By lending out his bachelor pad as a place for married men to tryst with their lovers, Baxter has become a pimp, essentially pimping out himself, and his self-disgust is palpable. His loneliness is made painfully aware to us at the film's beginning as he prepares his typical night at home, after Mr. Kirkeby and his phone operator mistress, Sylvia, have vacated Baxter's place. Alone with his TV dinner and old movie , which keeps getting postponed by the film's host who keeps hawking his wares { " Friends, do you have wobbly dentures? " }, Wilder paints a portrait of Baxter we can't help but sympathize with. He is the poster boy for loneliness. Along the way we also get suicide attempts which is fairly heavy waters for any romantic comedy to dive into but is precisely what gives the film it's timeless quality. Though technology has changed and people of color and gender have come a long ways since this film's release, The Apartment gets the basic human needs and emotions perfect; this is romantic comedy of the highest order. Along with Double Indemnity; The Lost Weekend; Sunset Blvd and Some Like It Hot, The Apartment is Billy Wilder at his caustic, cynical, yet humane, best. I leave you with one question : Why can't life be more like a romantic comedy?? Maybe I should just " shut up and deal ".
Sources : Books - On Sunset Boulevard by Ed Sikov
Conversations With Wilder by Cameron Crowe
Internet : Wikipedia
IMDB
YouTube
Viewing : Blu-ray disc of the film
