SUNSET BOULEVARD 1950

"If the monkey hadn't died, the show [movie] would be over."

Sign backstage during the L.A. run of the musical version of Sunset Blvd. 

"Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard" Sam Staggs 2002

Sunset Boulevard had its broadcast television premiere October 2, 1965, at 9 pm on NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies. Being just seven years old at the time, this event came and went without incident or notice by me. When I did get around to seeing Sunset Boulevard it was in the early '70s, when I was about 14-years-old and a budding film buff in the first flush of a newfound infatuation with old movies. 

Up until that time, my movie preferences leaned toward age-inappropriate contemporary films oozing with New Hollywood permissiveness. But in 1971 Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend was released, and that film---a visually stunning, spoofish tribute to the musicals of the '20 and '30s that took my breath away--single-handedly inspired me to seek out and discover old movies.  

A personal journey that happened to coincide with the then-peaking nostalgia craze. 

Ignited by the popularity and influence of Bonnie and Clyde in the late '60s, America grew increasingly enamored of its recent past. A rose-colored love affair of exploration and escapism (the '70s were no picnic) that found expression in every corner of pop culture from fashion to music. Classic films and their stars were especially popular with the younger generation, who responded enthusiastically to them for their artistry as well as their camp appeal.

1971 - Everything Old Was New Again

My own particular interest in nostalgia manifested itself in a fascination with movies headlined by former leading ladies of yesteryear. The more melodramatic, the better. I was especially taken with Grande Dame Guignol, which, if you're not familiar, are essentially monster movies for gay teens.

Grande Dame Guignol (or hagsploitation) are sensationalistic melodramas and horror thrillers centered around older actresses in roles that exploit or exaggeratedly play off the star's declined status and advanced age (by Hollywood standards, mind you, which is simply over 30) contrasted with their often over-the-top, prima donna behavior. Recognizable by their formula mix of deglamorization + histrionics + gerontophobia with a dash of kitsch and camp thrown in,  their plots tended to be baroque variations on familiar monster movie tropes. Only the "monster" in this instance is usually a middle-aged woman who behaves violently or becomes unhinged after suffering some kind of emotional breakdown or traumatizing social outcast rebuff (imagine Stephen King's Carrie for the AARP set). 

In its inability to imagine a fate more terrifying than aging for a woman, Hollywood channeled its misogyny and fear of "La femme vieillissante" into the creation of an entirely new horror genre - The Grande Dame Guignol. Aka: hagsploitation, hag-horror, or the psycho-biddy movie. 

Empathy always drew me to the "villains" in these films: these larger-than-life women who suffered or were driven mad by their unwillingness or inability to surrender their outré, outsized fabulousness to the conformist dictates of age, gender, marital status, childlessness, standards of beauty...or sanity. 

Even when they resorted to murder (which they always did), it was still kind of tough not to feel bad for them since their crimes were almost always pitiable acts of desperation and madness. Besides, from the film's point of view, the real crime these women were guilty of was growing old and ceasing to be desirable to the male gaze.  

Queer Identification in Sunset Boulevard - Approximating the Female Gaze

As written, the character of Norma Desmond is a direct assault on postwar cinema's reassertion of rigid gender roles. Her dominance, sexual agency, and solitary independence are presented as an appropriation of masculine power; ergo, she's a monster. Joe Gillis' dependent status and physical objectification render him "the male feminized," which, in the eyes of the film is an irredeemable sin.

Grand Dame Guignol movies were largely viewed as a comedown for the stars involved, but I credit them with introducing me to: Bette Davis (Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte), Joan Crawford (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), Tallulah Bankhead (Die! Die! My Darling!), Olivia de Havilland (Lady in a Cage), Barbara Stanwyck (The Night Walker), and Eleanor Parker (Eye of the Cat).

I’d never even heard of Gloria Swanson at the time, but when my older sister circled the plot synopsis of Sunset Boulevard in that week’s TV Guide, it sounded exactly like a horror movie to me, so I was looking forward to seeing it. (A weekly ritual my sisters and I shared in rotation was to go through the entire TV Guide when it arrived and circle every “must-see” movie and special scheduled.)

Of course, the noirish Sunset Boulevard – a grim melodrama that has a struggling screenwriter meet a bad end after hoping to take advantage of the comeback delusions of a  fading silent screen star – is neither a horror movie nor an example of Grand Dame Guignol (at least not, to quote Norma, not “in the usual sense of the word”). But it shares enough similarities with those genres for me to have actually mistaken Sunset Boulevard for a hagsploitation horror movie the first time I saw it.

Crazy in Love
From Frankenstein to Dracula, the monsters of horror movies have always been the most vulnerable and fragile figures in the story.  Over the years, Norma's delusional grand passions ("I wrote that with my heart!") and emotional vulnerability strike me as saner than Joe's cold opportunism or Betty's pushful ambition.

. 

Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond

William Holden as Joe Gillis

Nancy Olson as Betty Schaefer

Erich von Stroheim as Max Von Mayerling

Everything about Sunset Boulevard's set-up (from a screenplay by Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D.M. Marshman) is strictly Gothic Horror 101. The stranger-in-distress who happens upon a crumbling castle occupied by a mad scientist and henchman is a horror movie trope so timeworn it's parodied in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and countless Warner Bros. cartoons. Only in this instance, down-on-his-luck screenwriter Joe Gillis is the stranger in need, a decaying Beverly Hills mansion plays stand-in for the castle, and of course, it doesn’t take much imagination to picture fading silent screen star Norma Desmond as Frank N. Furter and Max as Riff Raff. 

Gothic tradition gives us a mad scientist obsessed with regenerating dead human tissue, Sunset Boulevard has a mad actress obsessed with regenerating a dead career.

The horror indicators keep piling up in Sunset Boulevard as the Old Dark House trope morphs into The Villainous Crush device that always leads to the Domestic Incarceration machination from which our hero (antihero in this case) must escape. To my adolescent sensibilities, Sunset Boulevard was every bit as chilling as any horror movie I’d yet seen. More so, in fact. Well into Sunset Boulevard’s 110-minute running time…what with Franz Waxman’s ominous (Oscar-winning) score; John F. Seitz’s stark and shadowy Black-and-White cinematography; and the utterly unique strangeness of Swanson’s raptorial Norma Desmond…I was certain I was watching Creature Features: The Hollywood Edition. 

So well had an atmosphere of "anything's possible" bizarreness been established that I was convinced there was going to be some kind of 11th-hour “big reveal” moment…something like Joe discovering that the only room in the house with a lock on it contained the mummified remains of Norma’s ex-husbands. Or that the film’s climax would involve an ax-wielding Norma stalking Joe and Betty through the halls of her Addams Family-chic gothic mansion.

Norma Desmond, The Hollywood Chimera
Age isn't the only reason Hollywood banished Norma Desmond to the scrap heap. The subtleties of  Gloria Swanson's extravagantly operatic characterization (and Oscar-worthy performance...she was robbed!) suggest that Norma knows only one channel. Her gestures, manner of speech, & facial expressions are representative of an acting style that had long gone out of fashion.  

Despite thwarting my cliché-fed, B-movie horror expectations at every turn, Sunset Boulevard nevertheless proved sufficiently dark of theme and weird of story to give me a good case of the willies that evening and a sleep full of nightmares (Norma’s advance to the camera at the end really freaked me out). 

But numerous viewings over the years haven't truly altered my initial impression of Sunset Boulevard as a horror movie, only the syntax: I no longer see it as a horror movie, but it’s most definitely a horrific movie.  A nightmare vision of Hollywood that qualifies as a grim antecedent to The Day of the Locust and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Time Passages
Twenty-eight years later and Joe is still hustling to make a buck in Hollywood. Billy Wilder (then 74) and William Holden (59) had their 4th screen collaboration in 1978's Fedora. A movie unrelated to Sunset Boulevard that feebly sought to evoke memories of that superior film with its plot involving a down-on-his-luck movie producer (Holden) and a reclusive screen star (Marthe Keller). Critics felt Wilder would have been better off shooting Norma's Salome script.

"There's nothing tragic about being fifty -- not unless you try to be twenty-five."

In life, aging and the passing of time are so subtle they're almost imperceptible. When you’re young they’re measured in things acquired: experience, independence, wisdom; as you get older they’re measured in things lost: hair, agility, time. And matters aren’t helped any by the fact that one’s chronological age (how old one is) and biological age (how old one feels) are rarely--if ever--in sync. 

That's How Young I Feel 
Anyone thinking Norma's reaction to being a 50-year-old woman in Hollywood is hysterical would do well to remember when the James Bond film Spectre garnered global headlines in 2015 simply for casting 50-year-old Monica Bellucci as 46-year-old Daniel Craig's love interest. 

In Hollywood, where time is the enemy and aging is regarded as a bad career move, Sunset Boulevard sees the ironic tragedy in the story of a woman for whom time has stood still being overlooked by an industry that’s literally in the business of stopping time. The Dream Factory paradox is that Hollywood is only able to peddle the fantasy of eternal youth and beauty by callously discarding its manufactured idols the moment their images are tarnished by reality (i.e., age). 

That’s where the horrific part of the Hollywood nightmare comes in. Are the stars who mutilate and starve themselves in an effort to hold onto youth considered "sane" because doing so keeps them in the game and they understand that's how the game is played? Certainly, the public seems to think so. 

In 2015, social media drew the ire of the late Carrie Fisher when Star Wars fans deemed the then-59-year-old actor to have "aged badly" since her Princess Leia in a metal bikini days. Her response: "Youth and beauty are not accomplishments. They are the temporary happy by-products of time and/or DNA. Don't hold your breath for either."  

Is Norma's insanity that she can't distinguish fantasy from reality,
or simply that she learned Hollywood's lessons all too well?

"All cardboard, all hollow, all phony, all done with mirrors."

Sunset Boulevard’s allegorical use of Hollywood’s artificiality serves to underscore its themes related to our susceptibility to fantasy, the importance of maintaining one's authenticity, the easy corruptibility of our values, and the price of losing touch with reality. 

And indeed, between the film’s use of genuine, Hollywood locations (Schwab's Pharmacy), real movie industry personalities appearing as themselves (Cecil B DeMille, Hedda Hopper), and silent-era star Gloria Swanson and silent-era director Erich von Stroheim playing characters that are NOT themselves, but kinda are… Sunset Boulevard blurs the line between fantasy and reality as freely as Norma herself.

In the 70-plus years since Sunset Boulevard’s release, Hollywood really hasn’t changed all that much. But the world HAS become a bit more like Norma.

Norma's cocooned narcissism finds its contemporary corollary in the normalized self-absorption of social media selfie culture where delusions are allowed to run rampant in Instagram and Tik Tok accounts devoted exclusively to self-enchanted images of oneself. Norma would love it. 

The tortuous regimen Norma undergoes in the name of self-rejuvenation, once the somewhat loony but practical province of those whose livelihoods are predicated on their appearance, is child's play compared to what the average person today is willing to subject themselves to under the marketing-friendly brand of "self-esteem."

Perhaps most remarkable of all, fame-culture and its attendant wealth-worship has turned America's working poor into the frontline defenders and protectors of the rich. The quickest way to pick a fight on social media these days is to criticize ostentatiously wealthy celebrities or question whether obscenely rich wealth-hoarders should perhaps pay proportionately as much in taxes as disabled veterans living on Social Security. 

I've been told that when I go off on one of my windy jeremiads about what I deem to be the superiority of '70s films over the movies made today, my arguments can take on a tone not dissimilar to Norma Desmond lamenting post-silent-era cinema's lack of "faces" and bemoaning the smallness of "the pict-chas."

A Most Unusual Picture!  - Movie poster tagline for Sunset Boulevard

The quotation that headed this essay - "If the monkey hadn't died, the show would be over" - only partially relates to the narrative logic suggesting that had Norma not been anticipating the arrival of an animal mortician, Joe Gillis would have never made it past Max at the front door. 

I think the quote also speaks to the loneliness of Norma's life. Whether she considered the chimp to be a pet, a companion, or a child surrogate, it's easy to conjecture that if the monkey hadn't died, perhaps Norma wouldn't have been so desperately lonely. Arguably, Norma's loneliness is the source of much of her pain and madness. Certainly, loneliness and desperation are what prompt her to go full Grand Dame Guignol and all but kidnap and hold hostage a complete stranger. 

Although, when speaking of a complete stranger who looks like William Holden...

BONUS MATERIAL

Clip from "Sunset Boulevard" 1950

This fuzzy screencap looks a bit like Dame Edna Everage is having a go at Norma Desmond (which sounds pretty fab, now that I think of it), but it's actually Mary Astor with Darren McGavin in a one-hour television adaptation of Sunset Boulevard. Broadcast in color on NBC December 3, 1956 as part of the anthology program "Robert Montgomery Presents," it was  2nd made-for-television version of the Paramount film. Available for viewing HERE.

Although Gloria Swanson herself had unsuccessfully tried to turn Sunset Boulevard into a musical for years, in 1993 Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black, and Christopher Hampton premiered their theatrical musical version of Sunset Boulevard in London's West End with Patti LuPone starring as Norma Desmond. The show had its pre-Broadway US opening December 1993 in Los Angeles at the now-defunct Shubert Theater in Century City with Oscar-nominated actress Glenn Close in the lead. I saw the production in January of 1994 and truly loved it. Especially the breathtakingly elaborate production and set design. 

As magnificent as Glenn Close was, I was in near hysterics when it was announced on June 15, 1994 that Oscar-winner and personal fave Faye Dunaway was set to don Norma Desmond's turban when Glenn Close took Sunset Blvd. to Broadway (with lots of attendant ugliness involving Webber giving the shiv to role-originator LuPone). It mattered not a whit to me that Dunaway had heretofore never evinced even a glimpse of singing ability. We fans of camp knew exactly what her casting in the role augered: "Mommie Dearest, Live!"

Alas, it wasn't to be.

In an 11th-hour twist worthy of Sunset Boulevard itself (screen star rejected!) on June 24th, word came out that Dunaway's services were no longer required and that Sunset Blvd. was to close. Cue the press circus reporting on the conflicting and litigious reasons for the decision. The trouble-plagued production moved on to Broadway where it was a great success, winning several Tony Awards, among them Best Musical and Best Actress. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2021

GHOST OF DRAGSTRIP HOLLOW 1959

As a youngster, it seemed as though I became interested in movies about grown-ups at precisely the time Hollywood became fixated on making movies about youngsters. In 1967 when I was about 10-years old, Hollywood, having opened its eyes to the newfound autonomy and boxoffice clout of teenagers and the college crowd, set about aggressively courting the youth market. Then still an industry run by old men who were, at best, only superficially aware of what the youth market even wanted, Hollywood nevertheless flooded movie theaters with all manner of what was presumed to be youth-themed product. A significant number of these films being devoted to hippies and social rebellion.

My personal apathy towards movies about young people and kids my own age wasn't born of any specific dislike for my peers so much as it was reflective of how badly at the time I wanted to be an adult. I was still at an age where I went to movies for escapism, and, what with having three teenage sisters lording over me at home 24/7, the last thing I wanted to do in my away time was to spend hours in a dark theater looking at more teenagers...or worse, adults pretending to be teenagers. It didn't help, either, that I grew up in the vicinity of San Francisco’s Haight/Ashbury district during the peak of its Summer of Love popularity; the proximity and ubiquity of so many real-life hippies sufficiently killing any mystery or allure they might have otherwise held for me on the big screen.

The dry rivers of Los Angeles popularized the postwar craze of hot rod drag racing.
The LA River was used for drag racing scenes in numerous films, among them: Girls Town (1959) and Grease (1978)

No, I wasn't interested in the "happening" younger generation movies of the day like Woodstock, Alice’s Restaurant, or Zabriskie Point. The movies I longed to see were those I thought would offer a glimpse into what my overactive and melodramatic imagination fancied the world of grown-ups to be like: Two for the Road, Hotel, Valley of the Dolls, Reflections in a Golden Eye.  But, alas, I was at that awkward age: a cinephile "tween" too old for Walt Disney but too young for Ken Russell. 

Paradoxically, while young people in contemporary films held little interest for me on the big screen, on the black and white console TV in our family’s living room, I was positively gaga over movies about teenagers from the ‘50s and early ‘60s. On Saturday afternoons local TV stations could be relied upon to supply a steady stream of ‘50s juvenile delinquent melodrama (The Violent Years - 1956); hot rod exploitation (Dragstrip Riot - 1956), rock & roll romance (Rock, Rock, Rock - 1956); jukebox musicals (Don’t Knock the Rock - 1956); low-budget monster movies (I Was a Teenage Frankenstein -1957), screwy sci-fi flicks (Teenagers from Outer Space - 1959); and Drive-in oddities (Teenage Caveman - 1958).

Kids Just Wanna Have Fun

These poor-relation follow-ups to Brando’s The Wild One (1953), Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Poitier’s Blackboard Jungle may have been marketed to teens, but in favoring harmless generation gap clashes over social rebellion commentary, their narratives always hewed close to the middle-class status quo. Juvenile delinquents were never depicted as anti-heroes whose mistrust of authority was justified, rather, they were seen as atypical bad apples and stand-alone troublemakers. Their disobedience was often shown to be the pitiable product of broken homes or of having been raised without the proper advantages (aka, a suburban home with a white picket fence).

Moderne Family: Jeanne Tatum, Jody Fair, and Kirby Smith
bask in the Streamline furniture, starburst clocks, wall sconces, and enormous coffee tables

Known in our house as "juvies" (juvenile delinquent movies) or "black & white shoe pictures" (in reference to the bobbysoxer footwear-of-choice: saddle-shoes), the movies in this genre I most enjoyed were those distinguished by their non-existent budgets, prodigious use of bop-talk slang, and the then-vanguard preponderance of rock & roll music on the soundtrack. (Predictably, the vision of America presented in these movies was unrelentingly white, save for the occasional, controversial appearance of an African-American rock & roll music act).

What used to really fascinate me—especially given that, at the time, these movies were only about 10 or 13 years old—was their jarring “otherness.” In everything from hair, speech patterns, modes of dress, music, dances, and choice of leisure pastimes; these movies depicted a teenage world so alien to life as I knew it, it was like our TV set was receiving transmissions from another planet. Compared to the real-time preoccupations of the day (the Vietnam War, civil rights, lowering the voting age, free love, drugs, Women’s Lib, and religious exploration) the '50s restlessness brought about by the Bomb and the Cold War seemed positively quaint.

Attack of the Well-Behaved, Appropriately-Dressed, Party Crashers

While some of these films were sincere in their efforts to call attention to the delinquency crisis hitting the suburbs at the time, most were conceived as exploitation programmers pandering to the teen preoccupations of the day, and geared for quick turnover in the Drive-In market. The silliest, ergo, the most entertaining of this ilk were the programmers that played out like dry-runs for the yet-to-come Beach Party movies of the sixties. These films had nonsensical plots, an almost vaudeville approach to humor, stock teen characters (the bland hero, his loyal “girl,” the jokester, the bad kids/rivals), and the elders were always well-meaning allies, ineffectual authority figures, or comic buffoons. 

A particular favorite I made a point never to miss whenever it cropped up on TV was Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow; a goofy titled, likeably awful goulash of teen-movie tropes economically crammed into a brisk 65-minutes...which made it perfect for those 2-hour afternoon TV programs whose hosts served up jokey commentary between the countless commercials.

Top on my list of reasons why Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow rocks is that the only rebellious drag racing done in the entire film is by the women 

Jody Fair as Lois Cavendish 

Nancy Anderson as Annita (Nita)

The almost surreally silly Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow was promoted as a sequel (of sorts) to 1959’s more straightforward Hot Rod Gang, but newcomers to this film needn’t worry about not being able to pick up the thread. There isn’t one.

Remember that list of ‘50s teen flick genres I referenced earlier? Well, Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow somehow manages to be ALL of them at once. Yes, in a mere 65 minutes you get juvenile delinquent melodrama, hot rod exploitation, rock & roll romantic comedy, a rockabilly and girl-group pop jukebox musical of (all the better to promote American International Pictures’ newly-formed record label), a ghost/monster flick, and a Scooby Doo mystery, to boot.

Members of The Zenith Motor Club
Amelia (Sanita Pelkey), Dave (Henry McCann), Bonzo (Leon Tyler), and Rhoda (Elaine DuPont)

The Zenith Club is a group of suburban hot rod enthusiasts devoted to disaffirming the public perception of hotrodders as street-racing, authority-flouting, juvenile delinquents. Pledged to a strict code forbidding street racing of any kind, this clean-cut clique spends its time tinkering with engines and bop dancing in the adjacent soda shop. Journalist Tom Hendry (Russ Bender), writing a human interest article on teenagers called “This Restless Breed,” has been invited to tag along as the Zeniths do whatever it is they do. A plot contrivance opening the door for a lot of exposition and the reciting of more hot rod minutiae than any of us deserve.

Alleged hot-rodder and likely junior ROTC recruit Stan (Martin Braddock) helps superannuated cub reporter Tom (Russ Bender) understand that not all young people are as trouble-making (or talented or charismatic) as Marlon Brando in The Wild One 

The leader of The Zeniths is Stan (Martin Braddock), a wholesome, cardigan-wearing type characterized  by his level-headedness and never being seen doing anything remotely car-related. Other members include pint-sized brainiac Dave (Henry McCann) and his bookish, Amazonian gal-pal Amelia (Sanita Pelkey); annoying, comedy-relief cut-up Bonzo (Leon Tyler) and kewpie-eyed girlfriend Rhoda (Elaine DuPont); and real-life drag racing Hall of Famer Tommy Ivo (as himself...and perhaps wondering, like me, why he isn’t the leader of the club) and his mostly silent, ponytailed partner Sandra (Judy Howard). A welcome break from all this gender stasis (the women don’t really do anything in the club except stand around watching their boyfriends work on engines) is Lois Cavendish (Jody Fair).

Madonna prototype Sandra (Judy Howard) stands by as drag racing legend Tommy Ivo contributes some long-winded verisimilitude to the film by delivering a 60-second, documentary-level monologue about his narrow rear end and unblown gas engine.

Lois is the only female hotrodder and mechanic in the club, and, as she’s so easily goaded into “chicken run” drag races by Nita (Nancy Anderson), a snarly rival gang member, she’s also the film’s only rule-breaker (albeit, reluctant). Refreshingly independent-minded for a film of this sort, Lois has her interest in cars trivialized (“I can dig the male of the species, but the female hotrodder baffles me!”) and boyfriend Stan laments her not placing him first in her passions (“She prefers hot rods instead of hot romances”), yet she persists. Even when it comes to her parents.

"You're approaching womanhood...."
"I've got news for you...I've arrived!"

When The Zenith’s lose their clubhouse lease, elderly eccentric Anastasia Abernathy (Dorothy Neumann) kindly grants the kids use of her late grandfather’s deserted house in Dragstrip Hollow…provided the youngsters can rid the place of a skulking monster and spooky ghost. And it’s at this point—roughly, some three-quarters into the movie, mind you—that Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow finally decides it might be time to actually be about a ghost of Dragstrip Hollow. Good idea. Especially since up to now the movie’s mostly been a series of vaguely connected false leads and narrative fake-outs designed to quash dramatic conflict (or story momentum, for that matter) every time it rears its head.

Dorothy Neumann as Anastasia Abernathy - with Alphonso, her loquacious parrot.
Fans of The Andy Griffith Show might recognize Neumann as the wife of Otis, the town drunk 

Among the many introduced-only-to-be-abandoned plot points: the whole gang rivalry angle; Lois’ generation-gap clash with her parents; Tom’s forgotten magazine article; the chance that Lois’ involvement in hot-rodding could adversely affect her father’s real estate business; and boyfriend Stan’s concern that he comes second to Lois’ love of fast cars.

But that’s no reason to despair. Not when there’s so much time devoted to slumber parties, bop dances, lengthy musical interludes, a wisecracking parrot, the invention of the smart car, and a wrap-up so hasty you’ll think you nodded off and missed something.

That's B-Movie monster costume designer/creator Paul Blaisdell inside this outfit he originally made for The She-Creature (1956).  A Blaisdell-designed costume for Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) also makes an appearance in Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

If ever there was a movie to exemplify the principle of making a virtue of one’s flaws, that movie is Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow. Proof that a deficit of production values and a meandering screenplay is no match for an appealing cast and a rockabilly soundtrack. Revisiting this film after so many years, I was certain that personal nostalgia would play the most significant role in determining how I would respond. But imagine my surprise to discover that Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow—in all its nonsensical, unpretentious glory—still rocks! 

And I don’t mean just in a campy, Mystery Science Theater 3000 way, either (although it has that to spare). I don’t know what it is, but there’s something so inoffensively featherweight and ridiculous about the whole premise and execution of this film that getting caught up in its jaunty good nature proves rather effortless. I actually found myself laughing with the film as often as I was laughing at it.  

The best way to rid a haunted house of a ghost is to throw a rock & roll masquerade party

What once felt like an “otherness” in the film’s setting and characters, now feels recognizably old-fashioned. Like a mash-up of Scooby-Doo, The Munsters, Father Knows Best, American Bandstand, and those “Abbott and Costello Meet…” movies.

Although it sounds like faint praise, the cast of Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow wins me over with their likeability more than their talent, the latter ofttimes proving to be a downright obstacle in movies like this. The older players fare best, what with the younger ones at constant risk of being upstaged by a wisecracking parrot. Jody Fair makes for a pleasantly spunky leading lady, but whenever bespectacled, statuesque Sanita Pelkey appears in the scene, I can’t imagine anyone’s eyes being on anyone else.

A former Miss New York and onetime showgirl, Sanita Pelkey appeared on a
1958 episode of the Groucho Marx game show You Bet Your Life  (audio only)

DIG THAT CRAZY BEAT:

American International Pictures, an independent movie studio that would make a name for itself in the '60s and '70s (not a particularly good one) with their Beach Party movies and biker flicks, was one of the first to mine the lucrative boxoffice potential of teenagers. In 1959 they launched their own record label, and the songs from Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (most written by Beach Boys producer Nick Venet) were among the first to be pressed. I'm happy to say I have them all in my collection. Perhaps I should be mortified.

Rockabilly band "The Renegades" perform Geronimo and Charge! and Ghost Train

The girls of the Zenith Motor Club badly lip-sync to a song titled My Guy. The song was released
as a 45 single by a group calling themselves "Linda Leigh and the Treasure Tones"

Jimmie Maddin sings "Tongue Tied." Maddin was a singer/saxophonist and nightclub owner in LA. He was still performing at one of his clubs (The Capri Club in Glendale) a year before he died in 2006

GINCHY* GLOSSARY:                                                  

From a narrative standpoint, Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow is a bit of a hodgepodge. But its silly/funny dialogue and overemphatic slang is the ginchiest.   (*ginchy means cool)

“Put the cork, York.”    —Please be quiet

“He’s got static in his attic. Completely zonk!”    —He knows not whereof he speaks

“My dragon wagon’s laggin'”      —My automobile is in need of a tune-up

“It’s PM-ing, I’d better peel out”   —It's getting late, I'd best take my leave

“Put that thing down, Dad. Before you clobber your clavicle.”    —Don't overexcite yourself

“Two weeks on the slab? That’s a real buffalo.”  —Grounded? That's distressing news

“This gal’s got what it takes. If she’d only give it.”  —She's pretty. I wish she'd notice me 

“Somebody get this bag of bacteria lost.”   —I'm afraid we haven't been introduced 

“It’s not a chop, kitten. I purr you. Why, I’m not just makin’ sound waves. Like, if you weren’t jacketed, I’d move in.’Cause you’re a dap…I mean a real dap!”  

    —I'm being sincere, I like you. If you weren't already spoken for I'd ask you out, because I find you quite dapper

(A parent confronting two kids necking)

 “We thought we’d come out for a breath of fresh air”

“Where’d you think you’d find it? Down her throat?”

  

“I dreamed I was an 18-cylinder motor. It was wonderful...you should have seen my driveshaft!”

“That was grandmother Aphrodite!”

“How’d she die, trying to spell that name?”

BONUS MATERIAL:

Available in its entirety on YouTube

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2018

THE ACTRESS 1953

I’m training my eye on The Actress: a film which marked the fifth and final collaboration between Spencer Tracy and director George Cukor. After teaming on Keeper of the Flame (1943), Edward My Son (1949), Adam’s Rib (1949), and Pat & Mike; Tracy and Cukor’s final collaborative hurrah was with the serio-comic domesticity of 1953’s The Actress.

From a screenplay by Ruth Gordon adapted from her autobiographical 1946 Broadway play Years Ago (which was itself based on her serialized memoirs Look in your Glass, published in several issues of The Atlantic Monthly in 1939); The Actress is set in 1913 Wollaston, Massachusetts, and chronicles, in episodic fashion, her teen years when first bitten by the acting bug. The featherlight project first caught the interest of two-time Oscar-winner Spencer Tracy—then the darling of MGM and well into the “professional father” years of his career (Father of the Bride, Father’s Little Dividend); accounting perhaps for this charming film feeling somewhat dominated by the character of the father. Making it more of a I Remember Papa sentimental memory play reverie than a contemplation on a young girl’s determination to embark on a life on the stage.

Jean Simmons as Ruth Gordon Jones

Spencer Tracy as Clinton Jones

Teresa Wright (given not a single closeup in the entire film) as Annie Jones

Anthony Perkins (making his film debut) as Fred Whitmarsh

When heretofore aimless 17-year-old Ruth Jones (Simmons) sees actress and former Ziegfeld Follies star Hazel Dawn on stage in “The Pink Lady,” she undergoes an epiphany: she MUST hereafter devote her life to becoming an actress.

Ruth freely shares her newfound ambition with her practical and empathetic mother (Wright), but due to his having a “disposition,” works hard to keep her aspirations a secret from her bearish father (Tracy), a former adventuring seaman currently bristling at the penurious state of his current life as a factory worker.

While Ruth's mother harbors the hope that she will settle down after graduation and marry Fred (Anthony Perkins), the handsome and genial Harvard student; Ruth's father, who paradoxically believes women should be independent and learn to earn their own keep, yet forbids his wife from lightening their financial load by taking in sewing, has set his sights on Ruth becoming a physical education teacher. 

Clinton participates in a YMCU fitness exhibition (married men's division)

Meanwhile, Ruth pursues her acting dream, albeit largely though daydreams and acting-out fantasies, until the day a well-placed fan letter to her idol Hazel Dawn occasions a much-coveted meeting with the Great Lady (offscreen) and a summons to Boston to meet with the director of the company. Ruth Gordon Jones’ dream of life as an actress is set! Or is it?

Since there is never any doubt that timorous Jean Simmons will grow up to be a Tony Award nominated stage actress, a novelist, a playwright, an Oscar nominated screenwriter (with her husband Garson Kanin), and win an Academy Award for Rosemary’s Baby; the only dramatic conflict The Actress has to offer are comedic slice-of-life vignettes highlighting the domestic uproar in the Jones household born of Ruth’s decision to pursue a life in the wicked theater. 

Indeed, the film’s slightness of plot and episodic nature proved a near-insurmountable obstacle for MGM's marketing department (as with the studio's Meet Me in St. Louis, not much really happens in the way of plot). The film certainly features one of Spencer Tracy’s finest performances, but there's no getting past the fact he's not exactly the central character, despite posters and ads prominently featuring his likeness next to the film's title. 

Instead of studying, Ruth and her girlfriends engage in an impromptu
performance of Hazel Dawn's signature song "Beautiful Lady" 

Reflecting this dilemma is the fact that The Actress (a title few were happy with) entertained several working titles from pre-production through preview screenings, the blunt and misleading Father and the Actress proving too reminiscent of Tracy’s Father of the Bride series, but at least reflecting the film’s proper character emphasis.

Although Jean Simmons cites it as one of her favorite films and Spencer Tracy won a Golden Globe for his performance (and a BAFTA nomination), favorable critical reception couldn’t save The Actress from fizzling at the box-office. In the book You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: Interviews with Stars from Hollywood’s Golden Era, Simmons recalls going to see the film at a theater in Westwood and being the only person in attendance.

I first came across The Actress about five years ago when it was screened on cable. I had never even heard of the film before, but found myself instantly charmed by its simple structure and how charmingly it captured the feeling of an old-fashioned mores and attitudes. In its gentle humor and nicely-drawn characters, it reminded me a great deal of the aforementioned Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), as well as The Happy Time (1952) and The Matchmaker (1957)—the latter being the play for which Ruth Gordon won her sole Tony Award nomination; the film adaptation affording Anthony Perkins another opportunity to mine, in a similar role, a likable boyish appeal charm.

For all the talent in evidence both in front of and behind the camera (personal favorite Teresa Wright is a tad underutilized, but wonderful as always), it's still Spencer Tracy who emerges as the film's most valuable player. The effortless naturalism he brings  to the role, the kind which earned him the reputation as “the actor’s actor,” serves to ground his blustering but principled character (and with it, Cukor's entire frothy enterprise) in a realism that is as engagingly funny as it is affecting. 

Clinton's most treasured possession is the spyglass he purchased during his time as a sailor

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The lack of a propulsive plotline seems to have been a major point of preproduction contention when it came to bringing The Actress to the screen, but for me, the small scale and intimate presentation of this character-driven comedy feels wholly appropriate to the subject matter. The simple, even drab surroundings and humdrum family concerns of budgeting, homework, school dances, pay bonuses, and housecats attracted to Boston ferns provides a fitting contrast, offsetting the grandiose, larger-than-life theatricality of Ruth and her dreams. 

Ruth's dreamy dissatisfaction with the confining contentment of the
life her parents have chosen for themselves is the source of a lot of household tension

The small-scale of the family’s domestic dramas and the workaday concerns of a small-town life are grist to Ruth’s desire for a better, more exciting life. When I watch Meet Me In St. Louis, the loving home depicted is one so enchanting, I can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to stray from it. But the home life depicted in The Actress, while every bit as loving, also contains an air of confinement and shared dissatisfaction. Clinton bemoans the overarching oppression of poverty and speaks of his past as a sailor as though it were the happiest time in his life. Annie, as much a housewife out of choice (love) as convention, is happy in her life, but her expressed longing for a velvet dress and suppressed desire to help with the family's fiances by plying her skill as a seamstress suggest there exist broader interests for her character than those of just home and family. 

It's to the film's credit that The Actress doesn't criticize those who find happiness in a quiet life of simple pleasures, nor does it make Ruth into a figure of derision because her dreams far so far beyond the scope of what we are shown to be her minimal talent. Rather, The Actress is structured as a coming-of-age story with Ruth’s desire for something more out of life is depicted as just one manifestation of the natural, keenly-felt human quest for independence and personal fulfillment.

Watching Hazel Dawn Perform, Ruth Sees a Vision of All That Life Can Be
Any person who's ever sought a life in the creative arts has likely experienced that one moment
when all that is beautiful in the world seems to beckon with a voice meant only for them

PERFORMANCES

If you’re going to mount a film more character-based than plot-driven, it helps to cast actors capable of creating indelible, fleshed-out personas out of sometimes slim material. The Actress distinguishes itself in its casting, even down to the smallest bits.

Former child actor Jackie Coogan (better known as "Uncle Fester" on The Addams Family TV series) is hilarious as an over-amused spectator at the YMCU fitness exhibition. Ruth is appropriately mortified.

The juvenile appeal of Tony Perkins is clear in this, his first film role. What’s also clear is that after seeing his performance here, then his livelier take on same in The Matchmaker five years later; Hitchcock’s use of him in Psycho was positively inspired.

The likability of the actors cast goes far in mitigating the fact that several roles, Anthony Perkins' moony suitor Fred Whitmarsh, for example, are a tad underdeveloped

If Tony Perkins’ trajectory from boy-next-door to everyone’s favorite psychopath seems swift, it’s nothing compared to Oscar winner Teresa Wright’s swift journey from fresh-faced ingenue in 1941’s The Little Foxes to long-suffering mom. Wright was only 11 years older than Jean Simmons when cast in The Actress (34 to Jean’s 23) and would play Simmons’ mother again in 1969s The Happy Ending. Late in her career when a reporter asked Wright why she stopped making movies, she replied: “I guess Jean Simmons no longer needs a mother.” 

As Far As I'm Concerned, Teresa Wright Can Do No Wrong
I wouldn't call her underappreciated, for her reputation as an actress is one respected and revered. But Teresa Wright doesn't get nearly the attention and play in classic film circles as she deserves. She brought a contemporary, genuine quality to every role she undertook. In The Actress she is has marvelous moments where she is both funny and heartbreakingly sincere. Still, her impressive talents feel somewhat wasted in the role of caring mom, and as good as Simmons is (and she's very good) I can't help imagining how Wright would have been in Simmons' role just a few years earlier.

Without recalling the idiosyncratic Ruth Gordon in any way at all, Jean Simmons is really splendid embodying the character of a stage-struck teenage girl. Called upon to show vivacity, naiveté, rebelliousness, and ultimately, determination and maturity; if her performance suffers at all (test audiences at the time took a decided dislike to her) I’d say it’s perhaps because she captures the sulky self-absorption of adolescence all too well. Gordon the memorialist isn’t exactly easy on her younger self, depicting her self-centered behavior and willful single-mindedness in sometimes harshly unsentimental ways. But I like that the character has an arc of growth in the film. And if perhaps she starts out as something of a dreamy-eyed brat, she grows into a mature woman of some empathy and understanding of what parents sacrifice in raising spirited and independent-minded offspring.

Ruth suffers her first taste of rejection 

Because he’s never been tops on my “favorite actors” list, I tend to harbor the impression of Spencer Tracy as one of those solid, dependable, studio system actors who could always be relied upon to deliver a skilled, professional performance in any film assigned. It’s only when I actually watch one of his films that I’m reminded what a valuable and rare quality that is.

It could be argued that nothing Tracy does as Clinton Jones is anything he hasn’t done before, after all, by this time in his career he’d made well over 50 films. But what’s remarkable about Tracy is that he was a star with a character actor's gift for inhabiting a part so completely: the behavior, movements, and vocal inflections all seem to exist exclusively for whatever character he was portraying in a particular film.

In The Actress, his character is largely identified by an irascible demeanor and an authoritarian gruffness, but to watch Tracy stay in character while delivering a monologue that's part searing tirade against the cruel aunts who brought him up/part lamenting requiem for his mother who committed suicide when he was two years old--well, it's to watch a little bit of acting genius.

Ruth gives an impromptu performance in hopes to convince her parents
 of the soundness of her decision to go upon the stage

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Much like my experience with the film adaptation of Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, I came to The Actress with low expectations and found myself not only surprised by what a wonderful film it is is, but completely captivated by its warm humor and charm.
The film's vignette structure may play a bit of havoc with Ruth and Fred's relationship (we never understand whether it's as serious as Fred takes it to be or as casual as Ruth makes it out to be), but it nicely suits the photo album/scrapbook setup of the title sequence. The script is witty, the performances uniformly fine.

Ruth's reaction to seeing Hazel Dawn (Kay Williams) on the stage is not unlike my response to seeing the critically lambasted 1980 musical Xanadu (of all things). Although I was attending film school at he time and had set my sights on becoming a filmmaker, something about that roller-skating muse musical so inspired me that I quit school, devoted all my time to studying jazz and ballet, and eventually made dance my career for the last 30-plus years.   

Illogical, irresponsible, and highly improbable, yet it was a dream that came true.

Effort and hard work are indispensable, but having a dream is where it all begins

I think there is much in The Actress that speaks to anyone who seeks to strike out on their own, armed with little more than impossible dreams and a (by appearances) baseless belief in self.

Copyright © Ken Anderson