GYPSY 1962

Sing out, Louise!

It’s not exactly a picnic being a movie musical fan who’s also a devotee of live musical theater. These distinct yet inherently complementary art forms have made such strange bedfellows over the years, I've found it necessary to run myself through a staggering array of mental acrobatics just to feel ready to commit to even the simple act of watching a film based on a favorite Broadway show.

Sometimes this means I have to ratchet down an overeager anticipation of the sort that usually leads to disappointment (Nine, Dreamgirls). At other times this means I have to hold in check a guarded, over-protective attitude harbored toward a beloved source material (to this day, I’m not entirely sure I hate the film version of Grease so much because I genuinely think it’s a lousy movie, or because its '70s-mandated disco-ification [Spandex in the 50s!] is so at odds with the original show’s satirically nostalgic charm). Upon occasion, if the filmmaker is particularly clever, I find I can surprise myself by being flexible and willing to surrender to an ingenious reinterpretation and reinvention  (Hair, The Wiz, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever).
However, if I’m really committed to giving a movie adapted from a Broadway show the benefit of the doubt, I know my chief duty is to refrain from engaging in that time-honored, ultimately fruitless pastime of all self-appointed musical theater “purists”: stockpiling comparisons and evaluating motion pictures by live theater standards. 

When I let go of the desire for to-the-letter faithful transfers of Broadway shows to the screen and accept the fact that film and stage are two entirely different animals, I always enjoy myself so much more. In fact, of late I've come to appreciate how most of my favorite stage-to-screen musical adaptations have not always been those that have cleaved religiously to the stage production, but rather, those which have discovered a way to translate the essence and excitement of a stage show into cinematic terms (Jesus Christ Superstar, Cabaret, Oliver!).

Happily, I was spared all this with Gypsy due to having discovered the movie version long before I ever knew anything about the well-regarded Broadway show. Equally fortuitous was the fact that I fell in love with this movie while I was still too young to know I wasn’t supposed to.

Rosalind Russell as Rose Hovick

Natalie Wood as Louse Hovick / Gypsy Rose Lee

Karl  Malden as Herbie Sommers

Directed and choreographed by West Side Story’s Jerome Robbins, written by Arthur Laurents (West Side Story, Anyone Can Whistle), music by Jule Styne (Funny Girl, Bells Are Ringing) and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (you name it), Gypsy, is the highly-fictionalized 1959 Broadway musical based on the memoirs of famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. On the strength of Ethel Merman’s star turn and the show’s then-novel integration of song, narrative, and character; Gypsy was already being heralded as a theatrical milestone by the time Warner Bros turned it into a critically lambasted, Top-Ten boxoffice hit motion picture in 1962.

Gypsy was adapted for the screen by Leonard Spigelgass (Pepe, of all things) and directed by The Bad Seed’s Mervyn LeRoy (can you imagine pushy Mama Rose coming across Rhoda Penmark? Gypsy would have had a 10-minute running time).

A backstage musical set in the waning, transitional days of vaudeville, Gypsy is a family drama (some would say tragedy) about Rose Hovick’s stop-at-nothing efforts to make her daughter, blonde and talented “Baby” June, a star. There’s another daughter, of course, the shy and talent-challenged Louise, but that’s a fact the thrice-married Rose makes the best of rather than rejoices in. As the family and their ragtag vaudeville act tour the country, Rose takes up with and secures the managing services of marriage-minded Herbie, a former kiddie talent show host. Meanwhile, her daughters grow restless for another kind of life: June, for a solo career on Broadway, Louise, for a stable home and family.

Four characters, four different dreams. But in Gypsy, only Rose’s dreams matter, which we come to learn is Rose’s one true talent. Mama Rose has a gift for deluding herself into believing her relentless ambition is genuinely in the interest of others. Gypsy’s humor, heart, conflict, and drama derive from the sometimes ruthless lengths Rose is willing to go to make those dreams come true.

"Some People"

In spite of its impressive showing at the boxoffice, the movie version of Gypsy is widely regarded as a disappointment...if not an out-and-out failure. Citing everything from Mervyn LeRoy’s uninspired direction to Rosalind Russell’s notoriously “manipulated” vocals, Gypsy’s reputation as a respectable misfire is so pervasive, few tend to credit it with one of the things it gets absolutely right: it’s an atypically faithful movie adaptation of a stage hit.

Me, I place myself in the opposite camp. While far from what I’d consider a classic, Gypsy is nevertheless one of my favorite movie musicals. It’s tuneful (not a clunker in the bunch!), funny, well-acted (save for that dreadful young Louise and the chorus boy with the overdone Bowery Boys shtick), and one of those rare musicals with genuine dramatic heft. And as good as I think Natalie Wood is in this, the real jewel in Gypsy’s crown is Rosalind Russell. She’s the first Mama Rose I ever saw, and although the role has been better sung and more showily performed, after all these years I’ve never seen anyone come close to Russell in giving Rose Hovick the kind of depth and humanity necessary to make me care about this somewhat monstrous creature.

Rosalind Russell IS Mama Rose to me.

"You'll Never Get Away From Me"

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine when I saw Gypsy on TV for the first time. My older sister was a rabid Rosalind Russell fan, so watching Gypsy, a musical I knew absolutely nothing about, was not a choice, but a household edict. Viewed on the family’s living room console, Gypsy as first seen by me was in black & white, pan and scan, with commercial interruptions and edits for time. In fact, it wasn’t until many years later when Gypsy aired uncut on cable that I even KNEW the "Little Lamb" number was a part of the film, let alone had the opportunity to see it. (I can hear my partner saying that’s an opportunity he’d gladly pass up.)

But even with these limitations, I thought Gypsy was something pretty special. Being a child myself, I was enthralled, in those pre-Annie / Oliver! days, by a non-kiddie movie where kids played such an integral role in the plot, and similarly, the whole “family” thrust of the dramatic conflict was nicely within the scope of what I could understand. Although I must add, being at an age where my notions of good/bad - hero/villain were still pretty simplistic; the chilling vision of motherhood as presented by the charismatic, likable, yet overweeningly selfish Mama Rose was really quite a shock to the system.

Ann Jillian (age 11) as "Dainty" June Hovick with Caroline the Cow

I remember loving all the musical numbers (especially “You Gotta Get a Gimmick”), thinking Natalie Wood was really a knockout (something I dared not relay to my sisters, lest be teased unmercifully), and just being bowled over by Rosalind Russel’s powerhouse performance. Then, as now, she fairly eclipses everything else about the film for me.

Over the years, as my appreciation for Gypsy grew both in terms of concept and context, the film never ceased being a favorite; even if all those repeat viewings only made me more aware of the film’s many flaws and inadequacies.

When critics hail Gypsy for its seamless integration of song, story, and character; the downbeat themes masked by its cheery vaudeville visage, and the emotional complexity of its lead character, you’ll get no argument from me.

If I have any complaints, it’s that the film’s innocuously cheery, prototypically '60s roadshow approach to the material seriously undercuts what’s so special about Gypsy as a musical property. There’s something disturbingly Eugene O’Neill-ish lurking beneath all that Hovick family dysfunction that the movie only touches upon.

"If Momma Was Married"

Because we’re a country that worships success and achievement, people tend to react to Gypsy Rose Lee’s ultimate attainment of wealth and fame as some kind of happy ending. As if Rose’s cutthroat determination is finally vindicated and Louise’s lonely childhood rewarded. But I always leave the film thinking that nobody’s won a damn thing. Louise winds up with a “dream” that was never really hers; the anonymous adoration of “celebrity” a substitute for a heartbreakingly anonymous childhood. And Rose, in spite of the reconciliatory tone of the fadeout, is, in spite of all of her efforts combating a lifetime of being abandoned, still alone.  

Russell and Wood are both effective at accessing some of the darker corners of their characters (as much as the screenplay allows), but it would be years before Hollywood felt comfortable reshaping the movie musical—traditionally a family-oriented genre—to accommodate more serious themes (Sweeney Todd, Cabaret, All That Jazz, Into the Woods).

"Rose's Turn"

PERFORMANCES

Movie musicals were having a hard go of it in the 1960s, and studios hedged their bets wherever they could. In Gypsy’s case, this meant turning a groundbreakingly complex, 4-character dysfunctional family musical drama into a splashy, $4 million, widescreen crowd-pleaser. It also meant ignoring the near-unanimous praise heaped on Ethel Merman’s head for what many considered to be her career-defining role and performance (vocally immortalized on the Original Broadway Cast album that seemed to be in every home, by law, when I was growing up), and going with a more skilled actress with marquee recognition. An actress whose biggest drawback was that her voice wasn’t up to the demands of the written-specifically-with-Merman-in-mind musical score. 

Bankable Rosalind Russell, adding a touch of Lavinia Mannon steeliness (Mourning Becomes Electra) to her Auntie Mame steamroller ebullience, controversially stepped into the made-to-order shoes of Ethel Merman in the iconic role of Mama Rose: stage mother to end all stage mothers.

Rosalind Russell's vocals were largely handled by Lisa Kirk
A 2003 CD release of the Gypsy soundtrack included a few outtake samples
of Russell singing unassisted. 

After having seen Ethel Merman in the movies Call Me Madam and There’s No Business Like Show Business, it’s hard for me not to appreciate the soundness of any decision designed to keep her off the screen (although I have to concede she’s pleasant and very un-Ethel Merman like in those early Eddie Cantor musicals). However, the by-product of Merman being passed over has been the fostering of an idealized “What if?” scenario regarding Merman recreating her greatest stage success onscreen, A fantasy scenario that has followed Rosalind Russell’s Gypsy around like one of Madame Rose’s trunks.

But speculating about what was missed in not granting Merman the opportunity to play onscreen the role she originated onstage, fails to take into account what a significant contribution an actress of Russell’s caliber (equally deft at playing comedy or drama) brings to a movie this stagy and set-bound. 

"Everything's Coming Up Roses"

Natalie Wood, fresh off of doing whatever she thought she was doing with that Puerto Rican accent in West Side Story (1961), was cast as late-blooming ecdysiast, Gypsy Rose Lee.

Natalie Wood has always held a lot of appeal for me, and her genuinely sweet persona is used to great effect during the film’s first half, just as her remarkable figure and stunning beauty provide a perfect contrast/payoff in the second. I’m not sure how she does it (star quality alone?) but her Louise looms larger in the film than it does in any stage production of Gypsy I’ve ever seen. That Wood naturally has the ability to make you care about her is one of the reasons I think her rather underwritten role carries so much poignancy.

Natalie Wood shines brightest in her quiet scenes. Consequently, her big, dressing room outburst moment is, for me, her weakest. But in delivering a few well-placed snarky lines to her meddlesome mom, Wood’s transformation from mouse to sardonic cat is a delight.

"Let Me Entertain You"
Gypsy afforded Natalie Wood a rare opportunity to do her own singing.
To help with her strip routines she visited a Sunset Blvd strip club where
strippers had names like Fran Sinatra and Natalie Should

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

In defense of "Little Lamb"

Maybe it’s because I was deprived of it for so many years. Maybe it’s because Natalie Wood’s vocals remind me of Audrey Hepburn singing “Moon River” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Maybe it’s because all my taste is in my mouth. Whatever the reason, “Little Lamb,” a song so maudlin it would make Mother Teresa roll her eyes, is my favorite song in the film.
I love that it is the single, solitary moment afforded the pushed-to-the-sidelines Louise, and the first time we get to hear about what someone else feels besides Rose. This external internal monologue captures so perfectly a child’s loneliness (associating sadness with what should be a happy occasion) with the single lyric: “Little cat. Little cat. Oh, why do you look so blue? Did somebody paint you like that, or is it your birthday, too?” 

That just knocks me the hell out. Reduced to waterworks each and every time.

Most musicals have draggy second acts, but Act II of Gypsy has two wonderful numbers: The show-stopping “You Gotta Get a Gimmick” and that masterfully-constructed musical nervous breakdown, “Rose’s Turn.”

"You Gotta Get a Gimmick"
Roxanne Arlen as Electra, Betty Bruce as Tessie Tura, and Faith Dane as Mazeppa

The one number that's perfectly fine but that I could do without is "All I Need Is The Girl". But this likely has to do with the song being done to death on TV variety shows long before I ever saw Gypsy. But the rousing "Mr. Goldstone We Love You" is a number I could watch a hundred times.  

"Mr. Goldstone, I Love You"
That's character actor Ben Lessy as Mr. Goldstone -  dubbed Mervyn Goldstone in
inside-joke honor of director Mervyn LeRoy

It's a shame the cute "Together Wherever We Go" number was deleted from the film before its release. Karl Malden had all of his singing bits (he sang briefly in "You'll Never Get Away From Me") left on the cutting room floor. Happily, 16mm prints of both numbers appear as part of the extras on the Gypsy DVD.

"Together Wherever We Go"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

One of the things I like most about Gypsy and why I think it’s so deserving of its status as one of the greatest American musicals, is that one could talk to fans and detractors of the show all day and never hear the exact same take on Mama Rose. In spite of her dominating presence in every scene of the musical, hers is a character influenced as much by a particular actress’s interpretation as by the audience’s response to her behavior.

"Don't you DARE answer that phone when I'm yelling at you!"
That's Jean Willes quaking in her boots as Mr. Grantzinger's secretary

I’m one of those who sees Mama Rose as (to quote Lewis Carroll on the topic of unicorns) a “fascinating monster.”  She’s pitiable and perhaps sympathetic in that she’s a woman clearly driven by frustration (what outlets did a woman with her brains, drive, and ambition have in the 1920s?), selfish desire, and her own childhood abandonment; but her treatment of her daughters—all in the name of love—qualifies her as a largely detestable character.

And as a look at some of my favorite films with strong female characters will reveal (Blue Jasmine, Queen Bee, Mommie Dearest, Angel Face, The Day of the Locust, Darling, Hedda), I have a real affinity for fabulous monsters.

Rosalind Russell, in not shying away from Rose’s unpleasant side, gives a portrait of a woman of contradiction. Contradictions so keenly felt during the “Rose’s Turn” number, that by the time mother and daughter take a hesitant stab at reconciliation at the finale, the scene resonates with melancholy. Melancholy because (if you’re as old as me and your parents are no longer around) it seems to be the inevitable legacy of the adult child to one day realize that one's parents, even at their worst and most flawed, were never more or less than simply human.

"Madame Rose and her daughter Gypsy!"

 BONUS MATERIAL

The real-life Gypsy Rose Lee appeared onscreen opposite her motion picture mother,
Rosalind Russell in the 1966 comedy, The Trouble With Angels

"Mama's Talking Soft," a song composed by Styne & Sondheim for Gypsy that failed to make it into the production (it was to be a duet sung by June & Louise following "Small World"). In 1959, pop star Petula Clark recorded a cover of the song for the B-side of her single, "Where Do I Go From Here?"

"Let Me Entertain You"

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015

THE TROUBLE WITH ANGELS 1966

I grew up in the '60s, the era of the "fun nun."

And while it's true I attended Catholic schools almost exclusively during my youth, the real-life nuns I encountered daily bore more of a resemblance to Jessica Lange's steely Sister Jude in American Horror Story: Asylum than all those spunky, irrepressible, exhaustingly adorable nuns that littered the pop-cultural landscape in the wake of the '60s reconfiguration of the Catholic Church and Vatican II.

Nuns were everywhere. In 1963, Sister Luc-Gabrielle (The Singing Nun) and her ecumenical earworm of a pop ditty Dominique topped the charts, actually outselling The Beatles. In 1965, Julie Andrews and those Nazi-thwarting nuns of The Sound of Music broke boxoffice records in movie theaters nationwide. The aforementioned Sister Luc had her life story Hollywoodized in 1966's The Singing Nun, which had perky Debbie Reynolds playing standard-issue perky Debbie Reynolds, only this time, in a wimple. Moving on to groovier, more socially relevant pastures, Mary Tyler Moore played a toothsome, inner-city nun romanced by Elvis Presley (of all people) in his last film, Change of Habit (1969). But perhaps the ultimate nadir and apogee of the entire '60s "Nuns can be fun!" mania, has to be the sitcom that launched a thousand Johnny Carson punchlines: Sally Field as The Flying Nun (1967-1970)—a credit took the talented actress an entire career, three Emmys, and two Oscars to live down.

Rosalind Russell as Mother Superior (Madeline Rouche)

Hayley Mills as Mary Clancy

June Harding as Rachel Devery

When I was young, nuns onscreen seemed like near-mythic figures of virtue, wisdom, and heroism on par with cowboys in white hats and combat soldiers at the front. The embodiment of Christian values in human form, they were untouchable (and, all-importantly, untouched) and representative of all the noble (aka, maternal) female virtues. But as I grew older, the long-suffering, queenly brand of nuns portrayed in movies like The Bells of Saint Mary's (1945), Come to the Stable (1949), and The Nun's Story (1959) struck me as just another variation of the self-sacrificing "grand lady" stereotype.

Come the 1960s, when overt displays of religious piety began to be viewed as corny and old-fashioned by the moviegoing populace, nuns became overnight comic foils. Much in the way that viewers today never cease to find amusement in little old ladies engaging in comically inappropriate behavior like swearing, sexual rapaciousness, or rapping (kill me now); nuns became the go-to images of charmingly comic inappropriateness. Anti-establishment humor, so popular at the time, relied on clearly defined standards of decency to offend. So in the mid-'60s, nuns—those walking anachronisms of starchy morality—played Margaret Dumont to a world of counterculture Grouchos.

Tolerance Tested 
Reverend Mother falls victim to the old bubble-bath-in-the-sugar-bowl trick 

To avoid the appearance of mocking Catholicism, these films took the stance that their lighthearted ribbing actually contributed to "humanizing" nuns—not a bad idea, as nuns can be pretty terrifying. To mute the impression that Catholicism itself was being mocked by outsiders, these movies tended to place the antagonist "in-house." By that, I mean the standard set-up was always very similar to that of your basic opposites-attract buddy film: a high-spirited, independent-minded novice (how does one solve a problem like Maria?) butts heads with a staunch defender of the old Catholic order. Old-order Catholicism, in these instances, is represented by the imposing figure of a Mother Superior: your typical imperious disciplinarian, wet-blanket authority figure, and parental surrogate.

Thanks to oversaturation, it didn't take long for the whole wacky nuns sub-genre to fall into a series of overworked, sitcom-y tropes (nuns on scooters, nuns in brawls, nuns in discothèques). But in 1966, director Ida Lupino made what is perhaps the best film to come out of the whole "fun nuns" genre: the delightful The Trouble with Angels. One of the funniest and most egregiously overlooked comedies of the 1960s. 

Fleur de Lis & Kim Novak meet The Dragon

Set in fictional St. Francis Academy, a conservative Catholic boarding school for girls in Philadelphia, The Trouble with Angels chronicles (in seriocomic vignettes) the misadventures of rebellious, headstrong Mary Clancy (Mills) and her bumbling partner-in-crime Rachel Devery (Harding), as their mischievous antics provoke the mounting consternation and ire of the school's formidable Mother Superior (Russell).

Marge Redmond as Sister Ligouri, Russell as Mother Superior,
and Binnie Barnes as Sister Celestine

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
As I've expressed in previous posts, so-called "family films" held very little interest for me as a kid. It's not that I thought they were beneath me (I did); it's just that I found most of the 1966 options in inoffensive family entertainment to be pretty offensive. On the one hand, there was the "wholesome smut" genre of ragingly sexist sex comedies typified by Bob Hope's Boy Did I Get The Wrong Number and Jerry Lewis in Way…Way Out. Then there were the live-action Disney films, which, when not engaged in music or magic, were so patently plastic and artificial (The Monkey's Uncle, That Darn Cat!) that they were like images beamed in from another planet.
Given that my older sister attended an all-girls Catholic school and was a huge Rosalind Russell fan, there was never any question about whether or not I was going to see The Trouble with Angels when it came out, merely when. (My sister turned me into a Russell Rooter by always insisting I watch Gypsy and Auntie Mame when they aired on TV, and by frequently pointing out how much Tony Curtis resembled her in Some Like It Hot.) Besides, like many '60s-era little boys and girls, I harbored a mad (secret) crush on Hayley Mills.

Mary Clancy, on the verge of a "Scathingly brilliant idea"

When it came to finally seeing The Trouble with Angels, I'll admit my expectations weren't very high. But from the minute I saw the pre-credits sequence featuring an animated Haley Mills (complete with wings and halo) mischievously blowing out the torch of the Columbia Pictures lady, The Trouble with Angels had me in its pocket.
Part insubordinate teen comedy, part sensitive coming-of-age film; part female buddy picture, part generation-gap farce (crossed with a bit of Sunday School theology); The Trouble with Angels is a family movie miracle. Certainly, divine intervention is at least one explanation for the phenomenon of a movie not exactly treading new comedy ground yet feeling so refreshingly original.
Of course, the most obvious miracle worker is trailblazing actress/writer/director Ida Lupino, who was directing her first film since the 1953 film noir The Bigamist. Lupino handles both comedy and drama with real aplomb and gets engaging performances from her talented cast of seasoned performers and newcomers (June Harding, who receives an "introducing" credit, is especially good). 

Girl Power
A true Hollywood rarity, The Trouble with Angels is a major motion picture directed by a woman (Lupino),  written by a woman (screenplay by Blanche Hanalis from Janet Trahey's 1962 memoir, Life with Mother Superior), and focusing on the lives of an almost exclusively female cast. In the screencap above is classic character actress Mary Wickes as Sister Clarissa. Wickes reprised her role for the 1968 sequel Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows, and, 26 years later, dusted off her nun habit again to appear in both Whoopi Goldberg Sister Act movies.

Lupino's deft touch is in evidence in the seamless manner in which the episodic sequences are tied together with clever connecting devices (for example, the departure and triumphant return of the school band is a great bit of visual shorthand) and in the largely silent scenes conveying the maturation of the Mary Clancy character. Best of all, Lupino manages all this without resorting to cloying sentimentality, mean-spiritedness, vulgarity, or the kind of over-the-top slapstick that bogged down the 1968 sequel, Where Angels Go…Trouble Follows.

Madame Rose & Her Daughter, Gypsy
Rosalind Russell famously portrayed the mother of stripper/author/talk show hostess Gypsy Rose Lee in the eponymous 1962 musical. The Trouble with Angels brings mother and daughter together again (for the first time) as Miss Gypsy herself  portrays Mrs. Mabel Dowling Phipps, interpretive dance instructor

PERFORMANCES

The Trouble with Angels' original title (changed sometime during production) was the far less whimsical-sounding Mother Superior. Well, the title may have been changed, but there's no denying that the film's comedic, dramatic, and emotional focus remains with the character embodied by the actress who's the film's greatest asset and most valuable player: Rosalind Russell. Whether getting laughs for her pricelessly droll delivery of simple lines like "Where's the fire?" or adding unexpected layers of emotional poignancy to scenes providing brief glimpses of the woman behind the nun's habit, Rosalind Russell gives an extraordinarily layered, subdued performance. No Sylvia Fowler (The Women), Auntie Mame, or Mama Rose flamboyance here. Russell downplays beautifully and conveys volumes with those expressive eyes of hers and through peerless vocal inflections.

After appearing to the students to be coolly unmoved by the loss of a friend, in private, Mother Superior gives vent to her complete anguish. Russell's performance in this scene alone single-highhandedly raises The Trouble with Angels far above the usual family film fare

The Trouble with Angels is well-cast and well-acted throughout. Marge Redmond as Sister Ligouri, the mathematics teacher who sounds like a race track bookie, is very good in a role similar to that which she played for three years on The Flying Nun. Former Disney star Hayley Mills (then, 19 years old) and co-star June Harding (25) display a winning and relaxed rapport and make for a likable contrasting duo of troublemakers. Both are real charmers from the word go, and every moment they share onscreen is a delight. Mills, soon to graduate on to more aggressively adult roles (with nudity, yet!) is just excellent. Her performance gets better with each viewing. Before movies became a total boys' club in the '70s, for a brief time in the '60s there seemed to be a small surge in movies that placed the friendships of teenage girls at their center: The World of Henry Orient (1964) and I Saw What You Did (1965) are two of my favorites.

June Harding never made another movie after The Trouble with Angels, and at age 25 it's not likely she could have ridden that teen train for much longer. But I always thought she would have made a wonderful Emmy Lou in a film adaptation of the Bobby Sox comic strip by Marty Links

Jim Hutton makes an unbilled cameo as Mr. Petrie ("Sort of like Jack Lemmon, only younger."), the headmaster of the progressive New Trends High School 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
One of the more impressive things about The Trouble with Angels is how beautifully (and effortlessly) it balances scenes of broad comedy and gentle humor while still allowing for sequences that are surprisingly touching in their humanity and compassion. Here are a few of my favorite scenes. No matter how many times I see them, the comedic ones make me laugh, the dramatic ones get the ol' waterworks going:

COMEDY:  Where There's Smoke, There's Fire

DRAMA: "I Found Something Better"

COMEDY: Shopping for "Binders" 

DRAMA: The Christmas Visitors (dam-bursting waterworks scene)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
The Trouble with Angels was a boxoffice success when released and is well-liked and remembered with great affection by many who saw it as youngsters. Yet it remains one of those movies which seem to have somehow fallen through the cracks over the years. It's not exactly forgotten (while available on DVD, the only time you can see it in widescreen is when it screens on TCM), but it rarely seems to come up in movie discussion circles. Part of this is due to the film being a somewhat innocuous, at times glaringly old-fashioned, comedy (in 1966, were there really teens who idolized Burt Lancaster and Jack Lemmon?) with no agenda beyond the modest desire to entertain while passing along a few life lessons and a simple message about growing up.

And while the above may serve as a fairly apt description of the movie on its most superficial level, I think it's a mistake to dismiss a film merely because its ambitions—which The Trouble with Angels surpasses with ease—are modest and chooses a light comedy touch over the bellylaugh sledgehammer. (Although I've never seen it, internet sources recommend the similar 1954 British comedy, The Belles of St. Trinian's for fans with broader tastes.)

For me, The Trouble with Angels remains one of my favorite "comfort food" movies; a thoroughly enchanting, fumy, sweet-natured movie capable of stirring up warm feelings of nostalgia. In this instance, the very distant memory I have of being young and the way movies like this made me associate organized religion with kindness, compassion, and empathy. Alas, these days religion and faith have become weaponized banners behind which so many cloak their bigotry, ignorance, and hatred.
Maybe it wouldn't hurt if some of those "fun nuns" made a comeback.

BONUS MATERIALS
Rosalind Russell reprised her role as Mother Superior in the 1968 sequel, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows, but Hayley Mills was conspicuously absent. Some say it is because Mills was back in Britain and overbooked with film projects. Others attribute it to the rumor that Russell and Mills didn't get along. A rumor supported by Rosalind Russell's 1977 autobiography, Life's a Banquet, in which Russell writes: "Haley Mills was a demon. She used to stick out her tongue whenever I passed (she couldn't stand me) and she was bursting at the seams with repressed sexuality."

Mills, for her part, has said that she adored Russell and was in awe of her and that the offending incident was her being silly with her co-star June Harding off-set and sticking her tongue out at a passing Russell in Mother Superior drag. Mills, playing around as her character, Mary Clancy, had no idea that Russell caught sight of it out of the corner of her eye, and thus a misunderstanding was born.  

In many ways, The Trouble With Angels marks Hayley Mills' last "girlish" film role. From 1967 on, she appeared in roles explicitly designed to promote a mature image and distance her from her Disney persona. In 1974, Hayley Mills dropped her Disney princess image for good (as well as her knickers) in the bizarre but oh-so-engrossing British thriller Deadly Strangers, co-starring Simon Ward and Sterling Hayden. A real departure and available on YouTube HERE

After a benefit premiere at which Russell, Mills, Harding, and Lupino appeared, The Trouble With Angels opened in San Francisco theaters and drive-ins on Wednesday, April 6, 1966

"The Trouble With Angels" 

Copyright © Ken Anderson        2009 - 2014

PICNIC 1955

Good, old-fashioned, classic movie storytelling doesn’t get much better than the first 80-minutes of Picnic. Comprehensive yet concise; expositional yet economical; intimate, but at the same time expansive, Picnic seamlessly blends sensitive drama, delicate humor, and dreamy romanticism. All the while sustaining an entertainingly effortless narrative flow.

Picnic’s depiction of life in a small Kansas town in the midst of prepping for Labor Day festivities—its people, their routines and rituals, both mundane and apart–—is evocatively rendered in that uniquely idealized, true/false reality Hollywood does so well. Full of finely-observed details of character and setting redolent of William Inge’s childhood spent in Independence, Indiana (where his mother ran a boarding house inhabited by spinster schoolteachers), Picnic is set in the then-contemporary 1950s, but has thenceforth become cloaked in a rosy nostalgia which looks back on a time when drifters hopped boxcars, marriage was the end all and be all for any single woman, and people wore ties, sportcoats, and full-skirted dresses to picnics.

William Holden as Hal Carter

Kim Novak as Madge Owens

Rosalind Russell as Rosemary Sydney

Betty Field as Flo Owens

Susan Strasberg as Millie Owens

Cliff Robertson as Alan Benson

The last day of summer serves as both the time-frame and primary narrative metaphor of Picnic, William Inge’s wistfully contemplative look at the sometimes painful inevitability of growing up. Following the death of his alcoholic father, handsome but feckless Hal Carter (Holden) drifts into town in search of a job from former college pal Alan Benson (Robertson), whose father is a grain industrialist. The story's unnamed Kansas town (represented in the film by four real-life Kansas towns) has a stressfully low male-to-female-ratio, the heat and idleness of the summer contributing to the town's dormant powderkeg atmosphere of  sexual frustration and withering dreams.

Town beauty Madge Owens (Novak) is the vessel of everyone’s projected fantasies in spite of the fact that, while not very bright, she’s smart enough to know (in 1955 yet) that being the object of the appreciative gaze is not the same as being appreciated.

Into this ripe-for-disruption environment comes Hal, whose rambunctious, superannuated frat-boy act—invariably played out sans shirt—understandably draws the attention of the local women folk. There’s favorable: the grandmotherly Mrs. Potts (Verna Felton); the puppy-love type: tomboy-in-transition, Millie Owens (Strasberg); distrustful: Flo Owens (Field), a mother alone raising two girls; conflicted: repressed schoolmarm Miss Sydney (Russell); and of course, love at first sight: Madge. Hal’s appearance in town has a different effect on each character, and as they all converge at the picnic, Labor Day becomes something of a day of reckoning, bringing out the best or worst in each individual. Truths are confronted, illusions shattered, facades dropped, and everyone is forced to grow up just a little bit. 

Verna Felton as Helen Potts
TV fans will recognize Felton from her guest stint as the maid from hell on I Love Lucy, or as the voice of Wilma's mother on The Flintstones

Picnic is one of those movies I discovered on TV as a child (loaded with commercials and only in an awful pan-and-scan version) and fell in love with from the start. To this day Picnic remains one of my favorite comfort movies. I can watch it (the first third, anyway) anytime, anywhere. These days, without exception, if ever I happen to be channel-surfing cable TV and Picnic pops up, I always tell myself I’m only going to watch it for a couple of minutes, but before I know it…boom! an hour has passed. That I own a DVD copy of it matters not a whit…I just take such pleasure in the film's setting, characters, conflict, and dialogue; I never tire of it.

That I expressly favor the first 80-minutes of this nearly two-hour film (those comprising the introduction of the main characters, establishment of the central plot, and the picnic scene in its entirety) speaks to director Joshua Logan’s breezy and sure-footed handling of these character-driven, slice-of-life early sequences. Winner of the 1953Tony Award for his direction of the original Broadway production, Logan shines brightest when Picnic is capturing vivid tableaux of small-town culture, or compassionately conveying the defeated spirit born of withered dreams and repressed hope.

As fellow schoolteachers, character actresses Reta Shaw (Irma Kronkie) and Elizabeth Wilson (Christine Shoenwalder) recreate roles they originated on Broadway

Somewhat less persuasive is his handling of the film’s final third, which becomes a little too melodramatic and plot-driven for my taste. Here, as if under outside pressure to provide some “action” in an otherwise gentle romantic drama; Inge’s sensitive play feels as though it were temporarily hijacked by Douglas Sirk. And to little effect, I'm afraid, as the swift introduction of a gratuitous car chase and unconvincingly-staged two-against-one fistfight with armed lawmen merely succeed in being distracting. Not helping matters further is the fact that, in lieu of a then-unthinkable sex scene between Holden and Novak, we have in its place, three (count ‘em, three) repetitious and very talky “tortured longing” scenes which never fail to leave me looking at my watch.

Discounting this sluggish detour, Picnic gets back on track with the final scene, where story threads are tied up and Rosalind Russell’s performance single-handedly reinforces my opinion that the too-casual romance between Rosemary and Howard is the film’s most satisfying love story. 

Recreating the role he originated on Broadway, Arthur O'Connell as Howard Bevans received the only acting category nomination of Picnic's  total of six (it won two: Art Direction and Editing). Many thought Rosalind Russell was a shoo-in for a nomination, if not a win, had she allowed herself to be submitted in the Supporting Actress category, which she refused. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Even as a kid I was hard-pressed to imagine a time when a film as tame as Picnic could ever be considered racy.  But of course, at that age I had no idea that Madge and Hal’s impassioned embraces alongside that barreling freight train was Censorship Code shorthand for sex, and, to be honest, only after it was brought to my attention in a college film class did it ever cross my mind that it was Inge’s intention to intimate (a little too subtly, if you ask me) that Rosemary and Howard had also had sexual relations that night. Who knew?  Anyway, from its male bodice ripper ad campaign to its convention-flouting themes of sexual frustration and libidinous urges, Picnic was pretty hot stuff in its day.

But Picnic’s reputation as a classic romantic movie doesn’t resonate with me very strongly (the sex feels born of despondency more than passion). Not as strongly as its sharp-eyed, often witty, depiction of small-town life and the incisive details William Inge (Splendor in the Grass, Come Back, Little Sheba) brings to his characters.

Failure to Live up to Expectations
Alan's resentment of Hal is rooted in feeling he is a disappointment to his father

Inability to Accept Reality
Flo copes with past failures by projecting all of her hopes for happiness on daughter, Madge 

Lack of Identity
Madge longs to find something to value about herself beyond her beauty 

PERFORMANCES

Picnic is a uniformly well-acted motion picture that, like a great many '50s films adapted from stage plays of the day (the works of Tennessee Williams come to mind), retains a certain staginess in dialogue and acting style which locks it forever in particular era. That the overall appealing performances in Picnic seem also to be a tad old-fashioned plays favorably into the whole glimpse into the past, days-gone-by feel of the movie as a whole. 

Perhaps because the central romance feels as though it's based primarily on physical attraction (for all his talking, Hal never asks Madge anything about herself), my strongest memories of Picnic have to do with Rosalind Russell’s superb performance as Rosemary, the old-maid schoolteacher. In a career of many high points, I think this is one of Russell's best performances and she practically walks off with the entire film. (Which is probably what Russell felt, too, explaining her refusal to be considered as a supporting player by the Academy.)
Here, the actress's trademark sardonic wit and vitality is channeled into a character whose thin veneer of nonchalance and dimming vestiges of pride show the wear of too many lonely Labor Days bleeding into solitary school semesters. Russell gives the role everything she's got, and she is, in every scene, a force of nature daring you to look at anyone else. She’s funny, moving, sad, and even pitiful; but you wind up rooting for her and she’s a marvelously sympathetic, dimensional character. 

If Picnic falls short of being the great film it might have been, I'd attribute it to the sense I have that everybody is pushed a little too strongly against type. I agree with the common complaint that William Holden is too old for his role (not jarringly so, but his college days seem far, far behind him) and that his attempts at expressing Hal's coarse nature aren't all that convincing. And while he's every inch the likable charmer the role requires, Holden's efforts just feel forced when trying to play dumb. The same can be said for the sad-eyed Novak, who has Madge's vulnerability down, but lacks (oddly enough) the kind of switchblade, protective shield of vanity unconfident pretty girls carry around with them like security blankets. She too, seems a bit too astute.

Susan Strasberg, while the right age for Millie, is far too angularly beautiful to be believable as either a tomboy or anybody's definition of "goonface." She seems out of her element in the earlier scenes where's she's called upon to convey juvenile anxiety, but seems to relax into both herself and the role as the film progresses. Cliff Robertson, on the other hand, is a perfect fit. I've never been much of a fan of Robertson, but I like him a great deal in this movie.

"I had a job as a model once...like this. They had me posing in front of a class almost raw."
Hal shares one of the high points of his checkered past with the adoring Millie. For those too young to know just what '50s male physique modeling looked like, I offer this real-life sample to illustrate that Mr. Holden was right on the money. The nude model is Tabby Anderson (!) which is the ideal name for my cat...if I ever get one.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

When I was a child, it seemed every household in the neighborhood had an LP of the Picnic soundtrack, or, if not the score itself, most certainly one of the myriad easy-listening versions of “Moonglow/ Theme from Picnic” available on instrumental collections from the likes of Living Strings or Ferrante & Teicher. I cannot honestly recall when I first heard this popular medley (which I considered “old people’s music” at the time), but it’s as much a part of my childhood as the theme from The Mickey Mouse Club, and to this day I can’t hear Moonglow (a 1933 song, I was later surprised to discover) without seeing William Holden and Kim Novak dancing so photogenically under those paper lanterns.

In this great shot representative of the consistency in performances throughout Picnic, each character reacts differently to the sight of Madge as she's crowned "Queen of Neewollah" 

Well, perhaps calling Novak & Holden's movements “dancing” is casting a rather wide net (neither star held any illusions about their dancing skills, Holden being so reluctant as to request extra pay and getting himself fairly drunk before filming), but after all these years I still get quite a kick out of that iconic sequence. Both actors radiate old-fashioned movie star luster; Novak’s steady, unbroken gaze is sexy as hell, and that elusive thing called chemistry is present in almost corporeal abundance.

Composer George Duning’s Oscar-nominated score--which, upon occasion, veers perilously close to Carol Burnett-spoof territory when significant dramatic events are histrionically emphasized by blasts of horns serving as the musical equivalent of exclamation points--is absolute perfection here. The smooth jazz arrangement of the pop standard Moonglow, lushly underscored by the orchestral Picnic theme, creating a sense that our lovers-to-be are dancing to two songs: the tune played at the picnic itself, and a melody only they alone can hear.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

William Inge’s Picnic won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1953, but if your only familiarity with it is the film version--rather brilliantly adapted and opened-up for the screen by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Daniel Taradash (From Here to Eternity) --seeing it on stage can be quite the sobering experience. In the theatrical version, all the action plays out on the back porches and adjoining backyards of Mrs. Potts and Mrs. Owens. The titular picnic is never shown!

Happily for literal-minded me, the film version has a masterfully constructed, protracted picnic sequence that not only shines as a fine example of studio-era location shooting, but serves as the film's narrative and thematic nucleus. The five-minute montage that kicks off the sequence is so good it could stand alone as a short film highlighting 1950s Americana. James Wong Howe's CinemaScope cinematography covers all the action and basks everything in such a honey-colored glow, no wonder this amusing and appealing sequence continues to be the part of Picnic I remember most fondly.

Save for the obvious set for the Moonglow dancing dock, the entirety of the picnic sequence was filmed in Halstead, Kansas. The swimming lake scenes in Sterling, Kansas. In the screencap above, that's Nick Adams (Bomber) and What's My Line? stalwart  Phyllis Newman (Jaunita Badger).

BONUS MATERIALS 

Jennifer Jason Leigh played Madge in a 1986 made-for-cable-TV production of Picnic for Broadway on Showtime co-starring Gregory Harrison (who produced, answering any "WTF?!?" casting questions) and Rue McClanahan. Like the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, this adaption of Picnic, although set in the 1950s, has '80s written all over it. It's available for viewing on YouTube.

Broadway on Showtime Presents: Picnic

I didn’t grow up in a small town, and this typically Hollywood, all-white vision of Midwestern life is nothing I clutch to my bosom with misty-eyed nostalgia (although with HD and sharp eyes you might catch a fleeting glimpse of one or two black people in the picnic scenes). But on a human level, I tend to find irresistible any story which celebrates, with compassion and dignity, the small struggles and victories of people leading simple lives. Few writers conveyed this with as much heart and humor as William Inge.

Copyright © Ken Anderson