Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Three

There are few Christmas specials that are as iconic as A Charlie Brown Christmas.  You can buy your own Charlie Brown tree and the Vince Guaraldi soundtrack has found its way into permanent rotation in Christmas playlists.  For me, perhaps the most iconic part of the special is when the Peanuts gang breaks into spontaneous dance.  If you think about it, it's a pretty simple scene.  Every character on screen must have no more than a dozen cells devoted to their individual dance motion, and those movements are repeated over and over again, yet somehow it's magic. It makes me wish that everyone would break into their own spontaneous Charlie Brown dance.  Here's the original and a pretty convincing imitator...

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day Two

Two morally questionable retro ads for today's Christmas offering...

  Santa hocking cigarettes?  No it's just Alan Hale, father of Gilligan's Island's Skipper.  But doesn't he look just like Santa.  He's obviously very classy with his cigarette holder.  He's probably a big Holly Golightly fan.  And look, Coke isn't the only company who uses Santa's image to decorate their packaging.  Way to go Chesterfield. 

Oh look, it's 1963's NRA poster family.  These squares don't hold a candle to Red Rider.  Clearly this mother isn't worried about her kids shooting their eye out. I wonder why the middle child gets a double barreled shot gun?  Mom and Dad have probably just gotten through with reading one of those Pinko books on middle-child syndrome. 

Twelve Days of Christmas: Day One

Although I'm not a huge fan of the film, White Christmas (1954) consistently comes up as one of those perennial Christmas favorites.  I don't think that I would have a such a problem with the film if it had a different name.  But, as it is, for a film with the word Christmas in the title, there's barely any scenes that involve Christmas.  Sure, in many of the musical numbers the performers are wearing red, and there's the requisite singing of White Christmas by Bing Crosby, but ultimately had the studio that produced White Christmas had not wanted to bank on the popularity of the song, the film could have easily been released as a regular old, let's put on a show, musical. 

The film revolves around a showbiz duo (Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye) who team up with a sister act (Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen) to help save their former general's Vermont Inn.  Of course, romance blooms between the four leads, and by the end the inn is saved and the group puts on a magnificent show.

If you're looking for an old fashioned Christmas extravaganza, you're bound to be disappointed by the five to ten minutes of the run time that is actually devoted to yuletide revelry.  If you're looking for a delightful technicolor musical, you could do worse.  To save you from watching the entire film and being disappointed by the lack of Christmas, here's one of the two Christmas scenes... enjoy!

Another Fascinating Find: Dressed for Thrills

I've been sitting on this book for a while now, waiting for the Halloween season to be officially upon us.  Written by Phyllis Galembo, Dressed for Thrills: 100 Years of Halloween Costumes & Masquerade, offers a pictorial history of what people used to wear for Halloween.  Let me tell you, most of the pictures featured in the book are far scarier than modern costumes.

Many of the costumes, especially those fabricated in the first half of the twentieth century have an especially creepy feel.  Perhaps, it is because many of them are homemade from waxed or starched fabrics that have been painted in a very unsettling way.  Perhaps, it is because they are all aged and dilapidated to the point where they look like the artifacts of some backwoods cult.  Whatever the reason, if I met up with someone in one of these costumes I would run the other way as fast as I could.

If you're into vintage creepiness, I urge you to check this book out.  Here are a couple of sample pictures (and these are pretty tame compared to some of the other ones!).

Mickey Mouse (circa 1930):

Little Orphan Annie (circa. 1936):

Musical Madness: Show Boat

There are two types of Hollywood musicals.  There are those that take a number of songs from a composer's catalogue and cobble a film around them, or there are those based on an original stage musical.  Today's selection is in the later group.  Show Boat (1951) is based on the 1927 Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's musical of the same name and was previously adapted for the screen in 1936.  As a result much of the sensibilities that are on display in this version are very much influenced by it's previous existence on the stage.

Directed by George Sidney, the main story in Show Boat is that of 18 year old Magnolia Hawks (Kathryn Grayson), the daughter of Cotton Blossom (the name of the titular show boat) captain Andy Hawks (Joe E. Brown) and her marriage to gambler and milquetoast river scoundrel Gaylord (yup) Ravenal (played by 50s musical mainstay and Dallas alumn Howard Keel). The trajectory of this storyline is typical: they meet, fall in love, her parents don't approve, they run off together and get married, he abandons her, and eventually they are reunited. It's probably the most uninteresting part of the film. The film's other major plot thread concerns the character of Julie Laverne (Ava Gardner), the lead actress on the show boat who is hiding the fact that she is mulatto from everyone, but her white husband Steve (in the late nineteenth century it was illegal for African Americans to appear on stage and to be married to a white man). A jealous former suitor reveals Julie's secret and she and Steve are forced from the Showboat, eventually causing their marriage to break up and Julie to develop a serious drinking problem and fade into obscurity.

As far as film musicals go, Show Boat is not particularly great.  With the exception of the musical numbers sung by Julie (which I will get to in a moment) and William Warfield's show stopping rendition of Old Man River, the musical numbers fall incredibly short.  Because both Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson were both trained operatic singers their numbers are sung in this manner, which makes them somewhat inaccessible to modern audiences.  The songs they do sing are unmemorable and so little to sell the core storyline.  There are also a couple of number performed by the Cotton Blossom's hoofer duo, played by Marge and Gower Champion.  But while charming do little for the film other than extend its run time.

At this point you are probably wondering why I am bothering to talk about this film?  While I think this is  one of the weakest film musicals I will talk about in this series, I think some of the backstage machinations illustrate the politics of the studio era.  For the part of Julie, MGM considered Judy Garland (who was on contract to another studio), Dinah Shore (not famous enough), and most interestingly Lena Horne. Lena Horne was especially interested in playing Julie, and actively campaigned for the part.  As the only African-American actress of the candidates and a famed vocalist, she would have been the ideal choice.  However, because it was against the production codes of the ages to show African Americans to be shown kissing or in romantic scenes with white actors, she was ruled out (much like Julie is cast off of the Cotton Blossom for her relationship with Steve).  In the end Ava Gardner was cast as Julie, who was on contract to MGM and was famous enough).

Just as Lena Horne was considered unsuitable for the role of Julie, Ava Gardner also experienced her own issues with regards to her musical numbers.  While not a famed vocalist like Horne, Gardner was more than a respectable vocalist in her own right, and practiced extensively for the role.  Though she originally sang along to the vocal tracks she recorded for her sequences, it was decided in post-production that her voice did not fit the overall tone of the film and vocalist Annette Warren's renditions of Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man and Bill were added to the final film.  The likely reason is to match the Julie vocals to the operatic singing style of Keel and Grayson.  Unfortunate, seeing as in the play Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man is described as a 'coloured' song and as such should be performed more like a bluesy torch song.  Situations like this were very typical in Hollywood musicals, with many of the major actors and actresses of the day being dubbed by professional vocalists.  If you do a search on YouTube you can find a number of these musical sequences with the actress' original vocals re-dubbed onto the film sequences.  Ava Gardner's lost Show Boat sequences just happen to be my favourite of this phenomena.

So, without further adieu,  you can compare the original film version of Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man to the Ava Gardner version and see what you think.

Annette Warren:

Ava Gardner: