Posts tagged Frank Sinatra

Was Dean Martin a Movie Star or a TV Star?

Dec08
2011 2 Comments Written by Joe Morella and Frank Segers

Hello, everybody, Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys here to announce that the answer, naturally, is both.

After splitting with Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin continued a successful career in films with notable performances in Some Came Running with Frank Sinatra, Rio Bravo and The Sons of Katie Elder with John Wayne.  Martin appeared in comedies, dramas, musicals and westerns.

A few weeks ago Frank induced Joe to reminisce about his time with Universal Pictures, working in Texas for the opening of Texas Across the River, the western/comedy Dean made in 1965.

We ran a photo of Joe in a convertible on tour with one of the other stars of the picture, Peter Graves. (See our Sept. 16 blog, Are Movie Premieres A Thing Of The Past?)

Today’s photo shows Dean with Graves, but can you recognize the ‘Indian’ hiding in the background? BIG CLUE: He was part of the Sinatra rat pack.

Also pictured, to Graves’ right, is actor Andrew Prine.  Joe recalls that at the party after the movie opening in Dallas, Prine had a contest with character actor Chill Wills as to how many women each could bed that evening.  (It was a close contest.)

Dean Martin came to the opening in Dallas to provide the “big star” quality needed for a movie Premiere. Joe remembers him as gracious and easy going.  One aspect of the stars from that era is that they all knew the value of publicity and had respect for their fans.

A few lines about Texas Across The River. Its is totally forgettable comedy western in which Martin’s eclectic costars include French actor Alain Delon and the gent who played the ‘Indian’ (see above).  Graves, the younger brother of “Gunsmoke’s” James Arness, plays one Captain Rodney Stimson, and given to delivering such lines as “Take it easy, Yancy. You got a wedding to go to.”

After this film, Graves went on the TV stardom in Mission Impossible.  Dean Martin’s movie career continued with the Matt Helm series but with the exception of the all star Airport, his film career was winding down.  He too turned to TV and as everyone knows had one of the most successful musical variety shows on the medium.

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FROM HERE TO ETERNITY — What the movie left out!

Sep06
2011 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

 

 

Hello Everybody.  Mr. Joe Morella and Mr. Frank Segers, your Classic Movie Guys, watching Mrs. Norman Maine working on that luau at the backyard barbecue.

We still have Hawaii on our mind since today’s blog is another installment in our series (written by our Books 2 Movies maven Larry Michie) about the 1953 Columbia Pictures classic “From Here To Eternity,” a movie we like a lot.

As you probably know, the movie is set in Hawaii and concerns the antics of restless GI’s just before the Pearl Harbor disaster. The 1951 novel by James Jones is pretty raw stuff. Our Books 2 Movie maven Larry details today about what DID NOT make it from the novel to the movie.

1 — The Army brass held stag parties, complete with whiskey, whores, and private rooms for cavorting.

2 — In the book, Karen (Deborah Kerr) had 12-year-old son by her husband. She nonetheless was bitter about the hysterectomy she was given without consultation, so she could have no more children.

In the movie she blames her husband for coming home drunk while she was pregnant with a child, who she lost. Her childlessness is a clear difference from the novel.

3 — Karen’s husband (Philip Ober) was a Lt., not a Captain until well into the book. In the movie, he’s a Captain throughout.

4 –Karen had long blonde hair. In the movie she had a curly mop-top.

5 — Prew’s (Montgomery Clift) girlfriend, Laurene (Donna Reed), revealed her real name late in the game. In the movie, she spoke right up in calling herself Alma from the get-go.

6 — In the movie, Laurene and the other girls were hostesses, although they were clearly good-time girls. In the novel, they were simply whores. Prew already had dumped his local girlfriend, and he fell hard for Laurene, frequently referred to as the princess.

7 — It’s kind of corny but charming :  The movie manages to insert some of Prew’s friends in the barracks playing guitars and singing The Re-enlistment Blues. In the novel, the guys with guitars haul out their instruments in nighttime while out on maneuvers, and they collaborate on the lyrics as they go along.

8 – In the novel, Prew is court-marshalled after a trumped-up charge, and he’s too damned hard-headed to plead guilty to a minor infraction. He gets sent to the rock pile, where he meets a kind of guru who is vouched for by Maggio (Frank Sinatra), who is also breaking rocks.

Maggio’s defiance lands him in The Hole, where he eventually dies. (Severely injured, he escapes detention in the movie, and dies on a deserted road in Prew’s arms.) Prew vows retribution when he can catch up with Fatso (Ernest Borgnine), who is responsible for Maggio’s death.

In the movie, Fatso earlier has a run-in with Maggio in a bar, but Sargent Warden (Burt Lancaster) steps in to stop the fight. Fatso vows the get The Wop, as Maggio is regularly called. Later, Maggio gets picked up for drunkenness, and Fatso throws Maggio in the slammer.

In both the novel and the movie, Prew eventually gets Fatso in an alley and a knife fight ensues. It’s probably like a realistic knife fight — quick stabs after some circling. Fatso dies, but Prew is badly hurt as well. He gets to the house in a nice section of town where Lurlene/Alma lives with another girl of the night, and they manage to bandage him up.

9 — Sargent Warden and others attempt to cover up for Prew, who stays out of sight. But Alma and her girlfriend are right to be worried. Prew, who is  utterly committed to life in the Army, misses that comradeship and is fearful that he might be discovered.

He has two major pastimes at Alma’s house. One is reading, and Alma’s girlfriend brings home book after book that Prew devours. The other hobby, alas, is getting dead drunk day after day after day. He’s so lost and confused that he treats Alma badly, and even she begins to get fed up.

Then, dramatically, the Japanese attack (on Dec. 7, 1941), and Prew knows where he must go. He steals a pistol from Alma and sets out to get back to Schofield barracks. He makes his way down to the beach, but there are patrolling soldiers there, and they are jumpy about reports that the Japanese may be infiltrating the island, and so forth.

When Prew tries to run away, the solders shoot and Prew dies. Sargent Warden comes along to identify the dead Prew. (In this respect the movie follows the book.)

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ESTHER Slaps Powell — Right In The Kisser!

Aug18
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Joe Morella and Frank Segers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Despite her relentlessly cheerful on-screen demeanor, “America’s Mermaid” — one of MGM’s biggest stars of the Forties and Fifties –was no simpering pollyanna.

Judging by Esther Williams‘ outspoken comments about her famous fellow workers, she subscribed to Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s naughty dictum.

Said Teddy’s daughter, “If you have nothing nice to say about anybody, sit next to me.”

Hi everybody, we’re back again with another sampling of cheerful Esther’s acerbic (and honest!) appraisals of her famous costars as excerpted from her excellent tell-all book about herself, “The Million Dollar Mermaid” co-authored with Digby Diehl.

ELIZABETH TAYLOR:  Esther was hardly alone in being dumbstruck at Taylor’s physical precocity. “Barely a teenager, (she at 14)) was already more beautiful and voluptuous than Miss America.”  Esther admits that Taylor filled out a swim suit better than she did. “With that superstructure of hers, she floated just fine (in a Beverly Hills pool). What she couldn’t do was sink.”

VAN JOHNSON (Esther’s costar in five movies):  ”Through the years, I swam with Van, married him, fought with him and made to love with him — all on camera.” Esther and Van shared knowledge of their private secrets, which in Johnson’s case there were quite a few. Together they were “a sweetheart couple who had that MGM look that was so ‘American,’ with no ethnic traces whatsoever.”

JOHNNY JOHNSTON (A former night club and radio crooner who was Esther’s costar in 1947′s “This Time For Keeps”):  Johnston isn’t widely know today but he had his moments of costardom at MGM. He was carrying on a torrid affair with actress-singer Kathryn Grayson (they married in 1947) while he and Esther were making their movie on location in upper Michigan. To amuse his “dewy-eyed groupies” on location, Johnnie would read aloud Kathryn’s intimate letters “including the all-too-graphic details concerning what she liked about his love-making. I was appalled.” (So, apparently was Grayson; she was one of Johnston’s half dozen wives.)

GENE KELLY (Esther’s costar in 1949′s “Take Me Out To The Ballgame.”)  Esther disliked Kelly, “one of the most the most winning and likable men on-screen, (who) was nothing less than a tyrant behind the camera — at least with me.” He resented Esther’s height (5-feet-8-1/2 inches). “There was no hiding that I was half a head taller than he was.”

FRANK SINATRA (Esther’s other costar in “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.”) Williams liked Sinatra” “I not only adored the way he sang, but admired his underrated natural approach to acting….He told me that both of us approached acting the same way, speaking like you talk to a friend, as if the camera wasn’t there.” Esther also noted that Sinatra loved to party. “As soon as the day’s filming was done, he went rushing off to one bash or another.” As a result, he sometimes showed up on the set “fighting a hangover.” The picture’s unit manager reported this to studio higher-ups. “When Frank told me that he had heard the rumor that he was getting bounced off the picture, I tried to reassure him.” (As it turned out, Sinatra had nothing to be concerned about.  He’s pretty good in ‘Take Me Out To The Ballgame.”)

WILLIAM POWELL (who costarred with a 27-year-old Esther in 1946′s “The Hoodlum Saint.”) In one of the picture’s first scenes, Williams was required to slap Powell, not gently but, as director Norman Taurog ordered, to “really connect with Bill’s face in order to make that distinctive hollow thwack of palm against cheek.”  So a young, athletic Esther did as instructed, hauling off and really smacking the 54-year-old Powell in the cheek. “Then I watched in horror as one side of his face collapsed.” As an apologetic Esther approached hysteria, a team of make-up specialist rushed onto the set to reconstruct the elder actor’s face. “When the makeup men were finished, it looked as if somebody had pulled all of his face up towards the top of his head,” recalled Williams.  ”It was an instant face-lift, which is what they did for older actors instead of plastic surgery back then.”


 

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ESTHER WILLIAMS –”Wet, She’s a Star”

Jun17
2011 Leave a Comment Written by classicmovieguys

 

Esther Williams’ initial break in movies came not in an aquatic setting but as Mickey Rooney’s girlfriend in 1942′s “Andy Hardy’s Double Life.” The fan mail streamed in, always a sure signing of a budding star at MGM.

Hello everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers here with more on America’s bathing beauty.

By the time Esther played Caroline Brooks in 1944′s “Bathing Beauty,” she was in her element.  MGM had spent about $250,000 — a fortune at the time — to build an elaborate swimming pool set just to accommodate their future star.  She was not yet “America’s mermaid” but she was on her way.

It’s our opinion that Esther’s swimming movies — particularly 1949′s “Neptune’s Daughter,” 1952′s Million Dollar Mermaid, 1953′s “Dangerous When Wet” and 1955′s “Jupiter’s Darling” — hold up extremely well today. (Kudos to cable channel Turner Classic Movies for selecting Esther as their star of the month in May.)

For one thing, Williams looks gorgeous.  Tall for her time (she was about a half-inch under five foot nine), she had superbly toned legs that go on forever. In a bathing suit, Esther looked dazzling — something she later parleyed into lucrative off-screen business, creating a bathing suit fashion line, after her movie career ended in the early 1960′s.  The clean-cut athleticism she has in abundance in her pictures wears particularly well today.

She was, in short, a cheerful knockout in her pictures. Like Betty Grable, that slightly less cheerful knockout at at 20th Century Fox,  Williams was a huge box office draw.

Her swimming films also boast of  rarely-matched visual mastery driven by elaborate production numbers choreographed by the likes of Busby Berkeley .  How did Esther stay under water for so long?  (She later confided that some of her more dangerous under water stunts nearly cost her her life.) She occasionally used doubles for some high dives.

Williams fared less successfully in some of MGM’s non-acquatic titles. In 1949′s “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” she was cast as the owner of a baseball team that included Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra on its roster.  Kelly and Sinatra are fine, but Esther looks a bit out of kilter in the movie although she more than holds her own in the singing and dancing sequences. (One reason for her apparent discomfort: she took an intense dislike to Kelly, who made her life difficult. Among other things, he resented Esther for being taller that he was.)

She was largely wasted in 1952′s “Skirts Ahoy!,” a song-and-dance version of navy WAC life. In all, Williams appeared in more than 25 films. Comedian/singer Fanny Brice is credited with the quip, “Wet, she’s a star, dry she ain’t.”

But critic-author David Thomson wrote that two of Esther’s later movies made after she departed MGM — 1956′s “The Unguarded Moment” and 1958′s “Raw Wind In Eden” — “show that she was worthy of drier things.”

As one of Hollywood’s major stars of the Forties and Fifties, Esther’s personal life drew a lot of attention.  We’ll get into her private affairs in detail in a later blog. We’ll also reveal how Esther really felt about some of her famous coworkers.

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KEEP BETTY GRABLE

Apr27
2011 1 Comment Written by classicmovieguys

 

“Keep Betty Grable, Lamour and Turner.”

Hello Everybody.  Back again with a quiz or two.

Many of you recognized that line opening today’s blog as a lyric from the Frank Sinatra hit song “Nancy with the Laughing Face.”  It goes, “keep Betty Grable, Lamour and Turner, she makes my heart a charcoal burner, no angel could replace my Nancy with the laughing face.”  In the early 1940′s everyone knew the pin ups he referred to. Grable, Dorothy Lamour and Lana Turner.

The song was written for Sinatra’s daughter who was then his only daughter. (the lyric says “sorry for you, she has no sister.”) Pop Quiz. One of the song’s lyricists was a famous eye glass wearing comic and good friend, who was a second banana in films but later a star on television.

The song remained one of Sinatra’s standards and in the early 60′s he re-recorded it and the famous lyric was updated.  “keep Audrey Hepburn, and keep Liz Taylor, Nancy’s the feature, they’re just the trailer.”  Note they kept the movie reference. And note that they used the two biggest stars of the period.

Today’s big question.  If we were updating the lyric for 2011 what would it be.  We await your inspired contributions.

An aside:  Grable wasn’t the only pin up of World War II, although she starred in “Pin-up Girl.” There were Lamour and Turner.  But also Rita Hayworth,  Jane Russell, -even Paulette Goddard and Ginger Rogers (and others.)  Who is your favorite?

 

YP: That was, of course, Nancy Sinatra.  Posed with Peter Fonda.  Nancy was about 5 when the song was first released.

 

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