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OT: "The Music Man"(1962) -- or "The Anti-Psycho"

posted 7 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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I've mused about this post(thread) for awhile now. It comes from this place:

For whatever reason, whether here or at "that other place," I've found myself posting on Psycho for many a year. To some extent, its not my fault. I've tried posting on other movies on other threads and little to no response or interaction came through. Its as if -- in a limited universe like Moviechat(blessedly available to us, but evidently not huge in audience) -- only a movie with a known title like Psycho can draw much attention for ANY conversation.

And yet...I feel that Psycho skews my personal movie storyline. If I have moved it to the top of my list of favorite films, it is as much as for how it was the scary, ugly, forbidden movie I wasn't ALLOWED to see(for many years) as much as for any embrace of it. That its famous status proved to be as much a factor of its supreme movie-making technique and incredibly powerful atmosphere was the surprise that put the film over the top for me. Once the movie was NOT forbidden to me, and I got to see it, it was like: man, this is a great movie in any event.

But still...ugly. Forbidden. With a beautiful woman being stabbed to death(that's less nice to think about with every passing year). I often remember the very religious neighborhood lady who made the sign of the cross on her chest and implored me(in her heavy immigrant's accent): "You must never watch Psycho! Its about BAD PEOPLE!"

So I gave it some thought: what OTHER kind of movie more "nicely" captured my imagination and my interest in those formative early sixties.

And I came up with "The Music Man."

Its a 1962 musical from Warner Brothers which has this small connection to Psycho: CBS in announcing its major movies to be shown on network in the 1966-67 season kept showing a commercial in which clips from "The Music Man" suddenly lurched into clips from "Psycho." It was dichotomy that I remember to this day, those commercials. One commercial showed Robert Preston's Music Man strutting down the street leading a parade and BOOM...we were in the shower with Janet and Mother. (I recall seeing that commercial with the shower scene footage only ONCE...whereas they OFTEN showed a commercial with Norman's eye at the peephole with the Music Man footage..I wonder if they got complaints about running the shower scene clip in the morning when kids were watching?)

As it famously turned out, Psycho never got shown on CBS that season. But The Music Man did, over two nights as a two-parter on "The CBS Thursday Night Movie" and then "The CBS Friday Night Movie."

But by then -- 1966 -- I had already seen The Music Man. Twice, in fact. Both times with my family , in 1962. And The Music Man held a big slot in our family movie history. Its the only movie we elected to SEE twice in the movie theater. We liked it that much; the kids clamoured for it and the parents wanted to see it again as well. As my mother pointed out at the time, The Music Man was the only movie she ever saw that got applause for the "cast march" at the end...in a regular neighborhood theater. She said, "I mean, its unheard of to applaud people who weren't even on stage in front of us." Oh, I got that audience reaction all the time when I started going to movies in Hollywood in the seventies -- they were "insiders and shills" primed to applaud EVERYTHING.

But for The Music Man to generate applause at "a theater or drive-in near you"...that was an achievement.

And a deserved achievement.

As musicals go, "The Music Man" is rather one of a kind. Rodgers and Hammerstein had a group of musicals; Loerner and Loewe, a somewhat smaller group. But The Music Man seems to be the ONE major acheievement of one man, who got his name attached to his work: "Meredith Willson's The Music Man." I think Willson got one other musical to the screen -- "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" but THAT one never had the staying power and societal impact of The Music Man. Meredith Willson seems to have been one of those artists who was put on earth to give us one achievement and one acheievement only, head and shoulders above anything else he did, before or after. It put him on par with Alfred Hitchcock for just one time:

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo
Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds

....

Meredith Willson's The Music Man.

Well, sometimes, just one time, can be enough...

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Before reaching "the plot"(ie "the book") of The Music Man, it is worth noting the three main reasons it is so unforgettable:

The setting: River City, Iowa(a fictional creation) -- an All-American, all-White, Mid-American small town with a park that's perfect for fireworks and a picnic; and well-ordered streets of nice houses surrounding a small Main Street. In some ways, it is a town of Fantasy; in some ways, it is a town to be rejected in a modern-day American of diverse races and cultures. But back then River City was in many ways, the Epitome of the American Way, a "comfort zone" where family life was sacred, summer days were endless, and people were, for the most part, nice. This is a tale of Early Twentieth Century America that was released to movies in mid-Century America right before JFK's death year. Its a double dose of innocence.

The music: the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe rather stretched across many musicals(My Fair Lady, Camelot; The King and I; South Pacific; Oklahoma), but "The Music Man" is a one-time wonder. Much of it has a rousing John Phillilp Sousa feel(complete with marching brass band and 76 trombones); there is a strong strain of Barbershop Quartet("How can there be any sin in sin-cere? Where is the good in good--bye?") and the rest is of delightful "syncopation unto itself" -- how men talk-sing in an opening number and match the pace of a clattering train down the tracks("Whaddya talk, whaddya talk, whaddya talk?") and hissing down to a stop(Yessir...yessss...ir....yesss...ir.") ; how the ritual of getting your book stamped for check out at the library could be transformed into a syncopated yet slithery sexual come-on of a dance number("Marian..the Librarian.") And immortally..how a talk song number could become an exercise in line reading AND music: "You've got trouble, right here in River City, with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for POOL!)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

You've got trouble, right here in River City, with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for POOL!)

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And that brings us to the third major element in the success of The Music Man...the man who talk sings those tongue-twisting lines above with a gift for robust over-the-top line reading rarely known to man: The Music Man himself. Robert Preston.

I mean, Robert Preston's booming, sing-song line readings in The Music Man make Richard Boone sound like mumbling Monty Clift...

Robert Preston seems to have had a movie career of sorts in the forties. Didn't he do a movie or two for Cecil B. DeMille? But came the fifties I believe he became a Broadway man, and he used The Music Man to fortify a decades-long career mainly ON Broadway(or touring, as he did with a play called Mack and Mabel that Hitchcock actually saw one night in Los Angeles, says a Hitchcock bio.)

Jack Warner was looking at a movie star to play the Preston role on film. Cary Grant was offered it, and it is said, said "not only will I not play the role, but if you don't cast Robert Preston, I won't buy a ticket to it."(Unfortunately, exactly the same quote has been given for Grant turning down My Fair Lady to Rex Harrison -- maybe Grant said it BOTH TIMES.) A more believable movie star replacement for Preston was offered up in Frank Sinatra: HIM , I can see. He was an American; he was singer, of course, and he had a rogue's reputation off-screen that would have fit con man Professor Henry Hill perfectly on screen. But Sinatra said no and Jack Warner decided to do what he did with Damn Yankees: cast one player from Broadway(Robert Preston) and one player from the Movies(the gorgeous Shirley Jones, two years after her Oscar for "her abrupt about-face as a trollop" in Elmer Gantry.) Done.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Miss Jones WAS a movie star in this, beautiful and able to shift from prim to sexy and back again. But the movie plays to Preston. Its almost in Norman Bates territory, really. One actor, playing one role that would make him famous for ONLY that one role.

Robert Preston didn't get many movies after The Music Man. All the Way Home as I recall, in the sixties. In the seventies, the disastrous "Mame" with Lucille Ball.

It was only all the way out in the eighties, that Preston got to make a Music Man like comeback, back-to-back for writer director Blake Edwards: the Hollywood spoof SOB(1981) where he was a Hollywood "Dr. Feelgood"(opposite Bill Holden in his last role), and then -- bigtime -- as the gay friend of Julie Andrews in "Victor Victoria." Preston got Oscar nommed for that one, and would have won if Louis Gossett Jr. had not had been so good in "An Officer and a Gentleman."

But the Robert Preston movie career apart from The Music Man isn't all that much of a long career. One man, one role, perfectly played, forever.

The setting(early 20th Century small town mid-America), the music(All-American within an inch of its life, and FUN), the star -- Robert Preston --- these are the elements that made this one a pop classic I will never forget.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Some side issues:

The Music Man isn't totally "innocent." The adult viewer notes that Preston IS a crook. To the good, he really sells band instruments to small town families for their boys to play, but to the bad, he is NOT able to teach them a thing. The film is ultimately about a crook's redemption at the hands of a good woman and a forgiving town.

But the film also uncomfortably postulates Preston as "out to sexually snare" Jones, and his initial spate of come-ons look a whole lot like predatory sexual harassment seen today(especially TODAY.) Jones eventually gives in(because Preston is GOOD to her sheltered brother, Little Ronny Howard, but ALSO because it seems that the sexual come-ons work.)

I also noted the line of a villainous travelling salesman who rats out Preston to Jones saying, "he's got a girl in every county in the tri-state area, and he's taken it away from all of them, and that's 102 counties!" "Taken it away from them?" Hmmm...oh, well, perhaps its fun for adults that "The Music Man" isn't all sugar and spice. (And Jones "fake seduces" and kisses that villainous salesman to stall for time -- her Elmer Gantry character suddenly reappears.)

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The supporting cast:

Buddy Hackett's on hand as Preston's sidekick. Hackett was coming off being Terry-Thomas' sidekick(versus a dragon) in The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, and would re-join T-T the next year as part of the great Mad, Mad World. In short, the early sixties were Buddy Hackett Time at the movies, his roly-poly mush-mouthed presence was at once funny and comforting. As I recall, Hackett was my draw to The Music Man as a kid...and I liked his "credit march" shot at the end, the best. It was funny. We all applauded happily for him.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Paul Ford and Hermoine Gingold as the Mayor and his Wife. Ginghold had a "friendly gargoyle look" and a hilarious way with a line, as when she accused librarian Jones of stocking the poems of Omar Khayam in the library: "Its a smutty book!" Also her disgusted reading of the name "Balzac" as "Baaaaallll-zac!" gets me every time.

For Ginghold is the leader of the time's matronly gossip squad, literally presented as a bunch of clucking heads in an overhead shot(hmmm..."they cluck their thick tongues and suggest oh so very delicately") with a chicken-pecking syncopated song called "Pick a Little, Talk a Little." And "The Music Man" makes its pointed point that small town America could be Puritanical, judgmental, and unforgiving. (They're after Shirley Jones as a "shameless hussy" even before they are after Hill as a crook.) There's a connection here to "Picnic" the modern-day small town movie of some years earlier, and maybe -- in a little bitty way -- even to the barely-seen Fairvale in Psycho, with the idea that even the smallest of towns has its scandals.

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Speaking of Psycho, Hitchcock's favorite cinematographer, Robert Burks, did not photograph that one(TV guy John Russell did)...but Burks did photograph everything else from Rear Window to Marnie. And in 1962, when Hitchcock didn't make a movie...Burks photographed..TA DA!...The Music Man. Which is why The Music Man has that crystal-clear 3-D-like imagery. Its a musical that looks like a Hitchcock movie.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

And how about Little Ronny Howard. He rivals Clint Eastwood for career longevity and amazing comebacks:

Opie
The Music Man
The Courtship of Eddie's Father

...then

American Graffiti
Happy Days
The Shootist

...then: the director decades

Night Shift
Splash
Ransom
Apollo 13
A Beautiful Mind
(and now) the Han Solo Film.

Ronny does a great job in The Music Man, with his initial sad silence(his father is dead, his mother and his sister are raising him, ala The Birds) , his revelation of a terrible, comical lisp; how Preston overcomes all of that and then...

...the scene that moved me when I first saw The Music Man in '62 and which still can get me today:

The climax. The townspeople are hunting Preston down like Frankenstein's monster, with torches, and he should be running. Buddy Hackett is trying to distract the mob, but Preston stops to lovingly confront Little Ronny about having trusted a con man...who, it turns out, really cared and who, it turns out, is jumped by the mob BECAUSE he stays long enough to talk to Ronny. The music here is great, the emotion strong...Hill's life of crime catching up with him just as he has finally become a Good Man. Its a great movie scene that I will never forget....

...and it leads to a happy ending of course. A great big, fantasy parade down main street in which "76 Trombones" plays loud and clear and each of the cast members gets their "shot and credit" and we leave the theater very happy indeed.

Happy enough that my family saw THIS movie TWICE in 1962. And then on CBS in 1966...when Psycho got the boot.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I launched this thread, I think, because recent national and world events have been ugly, murderous, psychotic...a sad endorsement that the themes of Psycho(a world gone mad, people who just have to kill other people) are very relevant, and because I do, from time to time, feel a certain amount of guilt at how high Psycho is on my list of life experiences, entertainment-wise.

But you know, in 1962, I didn't even know that a movie called Psycho existed. I had no real knowledge of it in 1960; it didnt' enter my life until its re-release in 1965.

No, in 1962, it was The Music Man that held my attention and mattered in my life, and in the life of my parents, and in the life of our home. It was a truly good movie which -- alas - I've now consigned to second place for 1962(behind the more sophisticated and chilling Manchurian Candidate) but which nonetheless stands for something very important in my lifetime:

A celebration of what's good in life.

And I will try to think of The Music Man with at least as much affection as "Psycho" for the rest of my days....



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[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

Thanks for the interesting discussion of The Music Man (1962). I've not seen the movie (or stage show) but kind of half feel like I've seen it via The Simpsons: they use the 'Shyster comes to town' story-line a lot (with or without full musical accompniment) and The Music Man is clearly the model they half-reproducing, half-satirizing. I dare say that The Simpson's Springfield is modeled in part on Our Town and in part on The Music Man's River City. I believe there is in fact a 'Springfield' in every one of the lower 48 states and that it was this essential representativeness that led to the name-choice in The Simpsons case. Anyhow, I'll try to track down a copy of TMM...

1962 was quite a nifty year in film:
Lawrence
Manchurian
Jules et Jim - classic Truffaut
Vivre sa vie - classic Godard
Mockingbird
Knife in The Water - Polanski's ace feature debut
Ivan's Childhood - Tarkovsky's ace feature debut
Baby Jane
Lolita
Exterminating Angel - classic Bunuel
L'Eclisse - classic Antonioni
Ride The High Country - Peckinpah arrives
Liberty Valance - Ford's still got it
The Trial - Orson's still got it
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner - Great Brit anguish from Richardson
A Kind of Loving - Great Brit anguish from Schlesinger
La Jetee - Chris Marker arrives
Le Doulos - classic Melville
David and Lisa - Frank Perry arrives
Mamma Rosa- classic Pasolini
Cape Fear - oh yeah!
Carnival of Souls - not bad cheapie
Dr No - Bond arrives

and quite a few more really. In a perfect world where you could see everything that's released anywhere you'd have been able to see a new film that's a real keeper most weeks of the year in 1962.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Ride The High Country - Peckinpah arrives

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I watched that again the other day, and, frankly, teared up a little at the end. Its the world's most basic twist -- of the two heroes, it is the more kindly and decent of them(Joel McCrea) who takes the bullet that kills him; his decency doesn't protect him. His more shady partner(Randolph Scott) will now "go good," and their last exchange in which McCrea tells Scott to wave off the younger people "I don't want them to see this...I want to go it alone." It just worked like hell this time, that final death scene and the music that accompanies it.

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Liberty Valance - Ford's still got it

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I will never failed to be amazed at the very basic character dynamic of that film...and the deep emotional pain that arises from it.

Lee Marvin is the vicious villain out to shoot down Jimmy Stewart(who can't shoot) in a gunfight.
John Wayne is the only man in town fast enough to stop Lee from killing Jimmy.
Jimmy is too valiant and principled NOT to step out into that street to face Marvin.

And Wayne saves Stewart...and loses everything(the woman he loves, Vera Miles; his house) because he does. And Stewart gains everything except he knows he's not REALLY The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Its also a movie about how the "principles" of law(James Stewart)are no good unless you have force to back them(John Wayne) against unprincipled brute force(Lee Marvin.)

And its the movie where they say "When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend." You know, like the legend that Hitchcock didn't want anyone to know that Psycho had a shower murder...

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The Trial - Orson's still got it

--

And he's got Anthony Perkins, hot from Psycho -- and a few years after Orson had Janet Leigh in Touch of Evil.

For his part, Perkins said he was most proud of working with Welles, thus snubbing Hitchcock. But Welles worked so infrequently..

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Dr No - Bond arrives

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And I saw it! My parents took me, unbelievably enough. Hard to believe I got in on the ground floor with that series.

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and quite a few more really.

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Oh, yeah.

Lonely are the Brave
The Miracle Worker
And, for lesser Howard Hawks/John Wayne fun, Hatari.

In a perfect world where you could see everything that's released anywhere you'd have been able to see a new film that's a real keeper most weeks of the year in 1962.

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I'd say 1962 goes down with 1967 as "the best year of the sixties" for sheer number of notable films. And the two years "feel different" -- 1962 is rather the close-down year for the old studio system(the Bugs Bunny series ended that year); 1967 is rather the start-up year for New Hollywood. The years in between were "formative."

And Hitchcock didn't have a film in 1962. The Birds almost made it, but got moved from Xmas 1962 to Easter 1963.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Ronny (Howard) does a great job in The Music Man, with his initial sad silence(his father is dead, his mother and his sister are raising him, ala The Birds) , his revelation of a terrible, comical lisp; how Preston overcomes all of that and then...

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I decided to revisit my thread about a "nice" movie(The Music Man) to "pollute it" just a bit in the realization that Little Ronny Howard has a big connection to Psycho:

He remade it.

Oh, the movie was called "Gus Van Sant's Psycho," but it was produced by Imagine, the Universal-based production company which was in 1998, just this side of Spielberg's operation for studio power at Universal. Imagine was run by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, who, wrote Variety editor(and former Paramount executive) Peter Bart, "gave off the impression not of being movie moguls, but of being two very nice WalMart managers." I trust Ron Howard was no Harvey Weinstein.

Imagine signed Gus Van Sant to a deal after his Oscar nom for "Good Will Hunting" and Van Sant demanded that the Psycho remake be his first movie in the deal. Imagine was one of the few companies that could get Universal to turn over the remake rights.

The deal was done. Ron Howard's name isn't on "Van Sant's Psycho," -- his partner Brian Grazer took the credit(and, it is reported, lunched in his office for the two weeks that Van Sant's Psycho bombed at the box office.)

But wait, there's more: Ron Howard's name isn't on "Van Sant's Psycho," but his father -- Rance Howard -- is in the movie. He plays Marion's real estate boss, Lowery. He's OK -- with the look of a raw-boned farmer --but lacks Vaughn Taylor's near-cartoonish mousy looks.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Trivia:

Unlike, say, The Sound of Music or My Fair Lady, The Music Man isn't filled with well-known radio hit songs.

But its rather too sweet and too sappy love ballad "Til There Was You," WAS a hit.

And not only for Robert Preston and Shirley Jones.

The BEATLES recorded it early in their careers, and IMDb trivia tells us that Meredith Willson made more money off of the Beatles version of that song than he made off of The Music Man as play OR film!

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[–] movieghoul (213) 7 years ago

Before they hit the US, the Beatles performed at a Royal Gala and were advised they had to do at least one number that wouldn't offed Her Majesty's ears and came up with an arrangement of Till There Was You. What they didn't expect is that it went over so big that they were pressured into recording it. It wasn't something they would have chosen.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Before they hit the US, the Beatles performed at a Royal Gala and were advised they had to do at least one number that wouldn't offed Her Majesty's ears and came up with an arrangement of Till There Was You. What they didn't expect is that it went over so big that they were pressured into recording it. It wasn't something they would have chosen.

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Incongruous...but it seems to have been a hit for all concerned -- Beatles, Meredith Willson, etc.

The Beatles did a few other "contemporary tunes" that I recall -- A Taste of Honey was one; Besame Mucho was another. They'd been cover artists in Hamburg dance clubs, as I recall, only slowly branching out to their originals.

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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

One more factor in the enduring and, I think at the time of its Broadway premiere especially, popularity may be what one might call its provincial quality (i.e. it's All-American, and it's not embarrassed to be that way). Broadway musicals and dramas were moving in an increasingly European and cosmopolitan direction in the postwar years; those of Rodgers & Hammerstein in particular, and The Music Man was a pulling back from All That, to the middle America (admittedly, of an other era) that hadn't been "celebrated" for some time.

Also worth pondering is dramatist William Inge's "deconstruction" of more or less the same region of the country that The Music Man is set in,--in his case it's usually Kansas-- in his "Middle American Quartet" of Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop and The Dark At The Top Of The Stairs. Add to this the on-screen rebellion of James Dean and Marlon Brando it must have seemed to many a conservative, "square" American that Broadway and Hollywood were turning against their own people, their own audience, making The Music Man a corrective, of sorts.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

One more factor in the enduring and, I think at the time of its Broadway premiere especially, popularity may be what one might call its provincial quality (i.e. it's All-American, and it's not embarrassed to be that way). Broadway musicals and dramas were moving in an increasingly European and cosmopolitan direction in the postwar years; those of Rodgers & Hammerstein in particular, and The Music Man was a pulling back from All That, to the middle America (admittedly, of an other era) that hadn't been "celebrated" for some time.

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Likely so. When I think of Rodgers and Hammerstein , I think of the foreign and exotic -- The King and I, South Pacific, The Sound of Music. Even Oklahoma seemed foreign and exotic in their hands. And San Francisco in the all-Chinese Flower Drum Song.

But The Music Man is All-American in all the right ways -- brass marching bands, barbershop quartets(and the one in this movie is GREAT), small town pride...and a decided stand against "Captain Billy's Whizbang" -- whatever THAT is.

rivia: there's a rather famous and sad scene in The Apartment, where cold-riddled Kleenex-dripping Jack Lemmon waits in the winter chill in front of the STAGE theater playing The Music Man (in 1960.) Shirley MacLaine has stood him up -- for their mutual boss, Swine Fred MacMurray.

Well, writer-director Billy Wilder had originally written that scene to have Lemmon standing in front of the theater playing The Sound of Music. Wilder was an investor in TSOM. But when Wilder SAW TSOM...he switched to The Music Man, which he liked better, even if not an investor.

Thus we end up with a great "meta" scene: Fictional character CC Baxter(Lemmon) waiting in the cold to see the FICTION of the PLAY The Music Man which, two years later, would be screened at the movies to be taken "as real."

If you get me...


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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Also worth pondering is dramatist William Inge's "deconstruction" of more or less the same region of the country that The Music Man is set in,--in his case it's usually Kansas-- in his "Middle American Quartet" of Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop and The Dark At The Top Of The Stairs.

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"The Dark at the Top of the Stairs" always struck me as a great alternative title for Psycho. Except its not dark up there in Psycho -- we can clearly see Arbogast under attack. But there is a darkNESS at the top of the stairs....Mrs. Bates, lying in wait...

And Robert Preston stars in Dark at the Top of the Stairs...and it came out in 1960...connections everywhere.

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Add to this the on-screen rebellion of James Dean and Marlon Brando it must have seemed to many a conservative, "square" American that Broadway and Hollywood were turning against their own people, their own audience, making The Music Man a corrective, of sorts.

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Probably so. Bound to happen. Its also a very NOSTALGIC movie. In 1962, enough was going wrong(Cuban Missile Crisis) to want to go back before BOTH World Wars, to a simpler time and place, simply rendered.

The movie also rather magically soars up and away from what should be a downbeat ending and into a MASSIVE fantasy(seen through a teenage girl's eyes) of everyone in the best band outfits with the best instruments imaginable happily marching down the street, into each others arms, and off the screen -- a concrete statement of the need we all feel to ESCAPE.

I felt it then. I feel it more now.

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[–] swanstep (2616) 6 years ago

I finally got hold of a copy of The Music Man (1962) and am currently half way through it... I'm enjoying Robert Burks' crystal-clear cinematography, and some of the verbal by-play. Big negative for me so far is the absence of any real dance numbers, and skimming ahead I can see that that barely changes later in the film. Bummer.

I'm not sure why it is but, except for Fosse, after West Side it's as though the Hollywood musical gives up on dance. It could be just a matter of particular talents on both sides of camera (Kelly, Astaire, Charisse, Donen, Minnelli, etc.) getting old and moving on, but it's striking how beginning with The Music Man suddenly dance is barely an issue, e.g., in Bye Bye Birdie, Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, Funny Girl, Sound of Music, Fiddler on the Roof,... It's as if the Gangster movie evolved so that one day suddenly there were no violent deaths! A first big step towards genre suicide.

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[–] swanstep (2616) 6 years ago

OK, have finished The Music Man (1962), and, boy, did it *not* work for me. I found all characters idiotic and unlikable (and not in any good ways), essentially all plot-points were absurd and literally unbelievable, the songs (apart from 'Till There Was You') struck me as undistinguished and for the most part just busy rather than especially melodic or interesting. Very few songs moved the plot along or developed character and so most just felt like time-wasting to me (this last thought occurred repeatedly in part because individual songs were dragged out way past the length their scant lyrical and melodic ideas had earned them, e.g., 'Marian the Librarian' was interminable!). Dancing was almost non-existent as lamented above. Robert Preston's character struck me as supremely slimy and uncharming... I didn't buy for a minute that anyone would be fooled by or won over by him - characters constantly have to tell us 'Golly gee, he won me over' to staple shut the credibility gap that opens up because we seemingly can't be *shown* the magic personality at work. Maybe if Gene Kelly had Preston's role...

Anyhow, I'm obviously an outlier on this board. Possibly I'm a mixture of wrong age, wrong nationality, wrong movie musical experience, and wrong music background (I didn't grow up with much marching band music) to resonate positively with TMM. I can't imagine ever watching The Music Man again.

One Hitchcock connection that no one has noted: Jesslyn Fax who has small parts in both Rear Window and NbNW is one of Hermione Gingold's matron flunkies (she's on the player piano in the Greek chorines scene. (Fax's appearances in Hitchcock films are sometimes claimed to beinstances of Hitch himself in drag!)

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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

Swanstep: I greatly appreciate your negative review of The Music Man. The movie's in yer face All-American, and it hits the ground running, and it never stops. Also, it's relentlessly upbeat, with nary a trace of tragedy,--but then who wants tragedy in a musical?--though I suppose the boy's lisp is its one concession to real life problems.

An odd project for 1962. The way it was made, I mean. All back lot. Very artificial, from a time when its particular brand of artifice was going out of style aside from dark films and certain kinds of stylized comedies of the sort Blake Edwards specialized in; and even he was for the most part shooting on location by then.

The kind of story The Music Man tells would have been great for fifteen or twenty years earlier, from the Freed unit at MGM, with someone like Vincente Minnelli directing. For a lot of people the movie works in spite of itself,--if that makes any sense--in its unbridled exuberance, Robert Preston's middle age (pushing fifty) somehow not mattering much, its near artless, almost throwaway (as distinct from fine tuned) professionalism. It gets the job done.

I'm of the opinion that the movie just plain crashes through. It's not perfect by any means, but its naivite endears it to me; and for some of us it's downright irresistible.

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[–] swanstep (2616) 6 years ago

@Teleg. Thanks for putting up with my broadside! 'Just plain crashes through', 'succeeds in spite of itself'... these kinds of salutes remind me of a few thoughts I had when watching the film: (i) that TMM felt like it owed a lot to the kind of 'put on a show' spirit that animates High School productions - no supreme singing or dancing required, most of it done in chorus, which is ideal for High Schools; (ii) The exact way in which I was underwhelmed reminded me of the way I'm underwhelmed by the sorts of singers etc. who do well on American Idol and other big TV talent shows - I feel like they oversing everything and that one is constantly being asked to be *impressed* by them when what we really want out of popular singing is that we *feel* something, and that some distinctive personal voice and interpretive angle shines through. Someone like Tom Petty would never make it through American Idol! But in the real world we'd always take a Tom Petty over another Whitney/Mariah/Celine knock-off. But but....maybe if I'd been in High School when American Idol etc. arrived I wouldn't be nearly as critical. Maybe then I'd thrill to the idea of every-time-yet-another-W/M/C-oversinger! Similarly, I wonder whether maybe if my background were different in a few ways then I'd be that much more receptive to TMM's pep. Finally, (iii) When I was in Grad School I went to a concert of the Martha Graham Dance Company where among other things they performed her ballet Appalachian Spring with the famous original music Aaron Copland wrote for it. All the *American* Grad students in the group I went with *Hated* the Copland music - they thought it was over-exposed cornball - whereas all the non-Americans (including me) loved it and were much less cynical/weren't worn out on it. It feels like TMM maybe cuts the other way, but that the underlying principle - that material with national significance is going to spread people out according to their background - is the same.

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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

Thanks for the response, Swanstep. There was, as you probably know, a sort of sub-genre of musicals, often called "backyard musicals" that Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland appeared in, were hugely popular late Thirties-early Forties, are fondly remembered by those who saw them when they were new. Mick and Judy were at the top of the heap among box-office draws. The Music Man maybe draws on these.

I remember a Mary Tyler Moore show when someone suggested a charity event of some kind and Mary went into overdrive with "hey, we've got grandma's old clothes, that big old barn nobody uses in Tommy's backyard, those musical instruments that old man Taylor threw out down the street,--hey we can put on a show!". Even Mary appreciated the cliche and laughed at it Those musicals are beyond corny now and I doubt they'll be in big demand when the old folks who grew up with them die off, aside from being historical artifacts.

Those amateur musical/singing/dancing shows on the tube are beyond awful. The few times I've watched more than fifteen minutes of one I just hoped these people had day jobs. Dreadful, most of them. There's seems to be political correctness at work on the part of the judges, as sometimes the homely one with no talent but a good voice wins. Terrible dancers who are good athletes can wow audiences and even judges on shows like that.

As to Aaron Copland, I liked him a lot when I was young,--was blown away by some of his stuff--then, something happened, and after around the age of thirty I moved away from it. His music, his themes, began to sound almost saccharine; and the overall tone of even his best work came to feel like self-pity (Leonard Bernstein's stuff affects me the same way). A singer-songwriter who's similar in terms of attitude, his over-insistent lyrics: Billy Joel. I'd like Captain Jack a whole lot better without the jerking off part. Was that really necessary? I wonder if these guys suffered from mood disorders. Bipolar maybe. It's like can't stand back from their moods and control themselves.

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[–] telegonus (727) 7 years ago

I loved The Music Man and saw it twice in the theater when it came out; first with a friend, then with my parents, whom I damn near dragged to the theater to watch it another time. Everybody loved it.

A few thoughts: just as Psycho was a William Castle horror raised to the level of a classic and a masterpiece, one could say that The Music Man is rather like a Disney flick (musical sub-division) made by a studio (Warners, not some indie), that's far better than all but a handful of Disney pictures. It goes the same Middle America-midwest route as many Disney pictures but goes there its own way. It's no Disney knockoff, not with that Meredith Willson score and its terrific and yet non- (or un-) Disney cast.

Like Psycho, The Music Man features a character more or less in flight from someplace else (Gary, Indiana?,--great song,--not Phoenix, Arizona); in any event, itinerant and somewhat shady. Couldn't one say the same for Marion Crane, right down to her affair with Sam? Yet the story of The Music Man is near the opposite of Psycho, needless to say, with the "fleeing person" becoming the hero, not the victim. Could it be said that the couple of the mayor and his wife, as played by Paul Ford and Hermione Gingold, are The Music Man's Al Chambers and wife? No "in bed" or "periwinkle blue" from Miss Gingold, thankfully.

Both films hint at the "salacious" (is this word even used anymore?), with Psycho more graphic, and, sometimes, going over the line for its time, The Music Man, innocently, with the capital t that rhymes with p that stands for pool. Both films ""have fun" with small towns and their "mentality". The Music Man does it with affection and respect, Psycho, more from "above", from a sophisticated attitude blessedly absent from The Music Man from start to finish

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[–] movieghoul (213) 7 years ago

One thing I love about the score of TMM is how it perfectly fits the character of Harold Hill. In his opening number Trouble, he talk sings his way through ala Henry Higgins, but then as the film goes along he talks less and sings more, until Till There Was You where its all singing.

Also the scene toward the end when Hill and Marian are singing 76 Trombones and Goodnight my Love in counterpoint which clarifies that they're practically the same tune, and suddenly they reverse roles, Marian singing Trombones and Hill Goodnight. THat's the moment we know that these two will be inseparable (just as we're told earlier that the barbershop quartet will be).

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

One thing I love about the score of TMM is how it perfectly fits the character of Harold Hill. In his opening number Trouble, he talk sings his way through ala Henry Higgins, but then as the film goes along he talks less and sings more, until Till There Was You where its all singing.

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Great analysis, I had not noticed that before...it makes perfect sense.

I do like Hill's line to Ronny Howard(I think) at the climax: "Its the first time in my career that I got my foot caught in the door...")

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Also the scene toward the end when Hill and Marian are singing 76 Trombones and Goodnight my Love in counterpoint which clarifies that they're practically the same tune, and suddenly they reverse roles, Marian singing Trombones and Hill Goodnight. THat's the moment we know that these two will be inseparable (just as we're told earlier that the barbershop quartet will be).

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You reveal here something crucial about "The Music Man" -- great "family" entertainment (and for kids) it may have been -- but it operated at a level of sophistication about its musical score(lyrics, melodies, counterpoint, syncopation) that was completely, totally , adult.

Don't the barbershop quartet guys get a song in counterpoint to Shirley Jones' love song, with both interwoven together, too?

The director gave the film a nice "cinematic theater" effect, too -- he closed out most scenes with the screen fading to black except for a light on the key character or characters in the scene...as if we were on a stage with a "black out" effect.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I loved The Music Man and saw it twice in the theater when it came out; first with a friend, then with my parents, whom I damn near dragged to the theater to watch it another time. Everybody loved it.

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It was kind of infectious in its joy. Exciting even. The first time I saw it, I couldn't stop thinking about it. And then -- joy -- eventually the parental decision was to see it AGAIN.

I will note that we saw The Music Man neither time at the drive-in. We needed to be seated in a theater at full attention, surrounded by it, with an appreciative crowd.

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A few thoughts: just as Psycho was a William Castle horror raised to the level of a classic and a masterpiece, one could say that The Music Man is rather like a Disney flick (musical sub-division) made by a studio (Warners, not some indie), that's far better than all but a handful of Disney pictures. It goes the same Middle America-midwest route as many Disney pictures but goes there its own way. It's no Disney knockoff, not with that Meredith Willson score and its terrific and yet non- (or un-) Disney cast.

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That's a great take on it, one I hadn't thought of -- but that fits. A couple of Disney flicks on either side of it make the connection -- Pollyanna(1960) and Summer Magic(1963). Both saluted small town turn of the century America, as I recall.

I saw Pollyanna at the drive-in in the Psycho summer of 1960..and I REMEMBER seeing it. (Pre-1962 movie memories are very few for me.) I recall several things: the wind chimes one character had(our neighbors had wind chimes; the whole effect was very soothing for a kid); Pollyanna's traumatic fall from a tall tree trying to get in a window; and the whole town seeing the (hopefully temporarily) crippled girl being carried to a train to see a special doctor. This was Disney when Uncle Walt was alive: tough, scary...and tear-jerking at the end.



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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Anyway, Disney movies were always a bit hamstrung by the production and budget limitations of Disney studios -- I think only Mary Poppins got a big budget like most studio films -- and thus The Music Man IS a bigger deal version of a Disney film.

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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

I think the Disney version of The Music Man, if there could have been such a thing, wouldn't have worked so well as the Warners one. At the time Disney & Company were geared more to family pictures, and as you mentioned, their budget consciousness gave even their biggest pictures a somewhat programmer ambiance even when they spent more money than usual, as in The Swiss Family Robinson, which at least played "big" in the theater.

The Music Man had to knock it out of the ballpark, and it succeeded spectacularly, with the only sad note being that while it did boffo b.o. (as they used to say) in the U.S., it was a disappointment internationally. It wasn't a hit in Europe. I believe it was big enough to have turned a tidy profit here but not at the blockbuster level to kick it, from a financial standpoint, into, well, say the level of a North By Northwest, a Ben-Hur, a Guns Of Navarone or, yes, Psycho.

One thing that saddened me personally in all this was that Robert Preston, while past the leading man age for a major comeback, didn't remain active in films afterwards, till such time he became a character actor. He was one of those stars who, in the early Sixties, would slip away by the middle of the decade. Steve Reeves is another like that. Marilyn, of course. This is somewhat less true for Laurence Harvey and Alec Guinness, though both began to slip, and worse yet, become irrelevant, as the years went by.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I think the Disney version of The Music Man, if there could have been such a thing, wouldn't have worked so well as the Warners one.

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Weirdly, the simile I find here is the idea that a "Wait Until Dark" by Hitchcock would not have been as good as the Warners version we got -- with Audrey Hepburn menaced by a terrifying but funny Alan Arkin, and a hipness to the whole thing that I doubt Hitchcock would have gone for. The connection? Wait Until Dark was a Warners Brothers production.

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At the time Disney & Company were geared more to family pictures, and as you mentioned, their budget consciousness gave even their biggest pictures a somewhat programmer ambiance even when they spent more money than usual, as in The Swiss Family Robinson, which at least played "big" in the theater.

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Swiss Family Robinson DID seem big, I must admit. I didn't see it in its 1960 release, caught it in one of those later Disney re-releases. For 1960, SFR is the movie that seems to top Psycho at the box office on many charts, but its pretty amazing that Psycho almost beat SFR...because Disney(like Pixar today) always had the leg up of all those KIDS. (Though surprise: evidently a lot of kids were let in to Psycho, too.)

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The Music Man had to knock it out of the ballpark, and it succeeded spectacularly, with the only sad note being that while it did boffo b.o. (as they used to say) in the U.S., it was a disappointment internationally. It wasn't a hit in Europe.

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Well, perhaps its "All-American" celebration didn't go over so well in European and Asian theaters....

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I believe it was big enough to have turned a tidy profit here but not at the blockbuster level to kick it, from a financial standpoint, into, well, say the level of a North By Northwest, a Ben-Hur, a Guns Of Navarone or, yes, Psycho.

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I don't much read of The Music Man having the grosses of , say The Sound of Music or West Side Story. I suppose it just wasn't THAT epic a musical -- it was filmed entirely on the Warners back lot as opposed to all over Austria...or in NYC.

Of course, when I saw it as a kid, I didn't notice the lack of scope at all.

Funny: when Francis Coppola made the musical "Finian's Rainbow" for 1968 release, he said that Warners forced him to stick largely to the backlot. So he asked for a "gimme" -- an opening "trek on foot" by Fred Astaire and Petulia Clark(and their doubles) from one All-American landmark to the next: The Statue of Liberty to Mount Rushmore to the Grand Canyon to the Golden Gate Bridge(note: three Hitchcock landmarks in that group)...and then past the schoolhouse from The Birds! A tip of the hat from Francis to Alfred.


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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

Apparently The Music Man is one for Americans only. Nowadays, of course, movies are MADE to play internationally. Back then a foreign musical, or rather a European one, could play throughout Europe, whether classic, literally opera, or light opera, Gilbert & Sullivan, I suppose, things like The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg. American films were popular abroad, very popular, but it was the most American ones,--westerns, crime pictures--that made the most money and won international acclaim (by moviegoers, I mean, not critics). But The Music Man presented a culture that was near incomprehensible elsewhere.

Agreed on Wait Until Dark. For what it is, perfect and better still, of its time. Hitchcock was too old to direct it Too hip, too New York. I forget who directed it and am too lazy to look it up (not home, as write). It would have been a good project for someone like Blake Edwards, who showed that he could "do hip" very well. Heck, he damn near invented it on the small screen!

Ten, twelve years earlier, Wait Until Dark would have been a "first dibs" for Hitch but he grew old fast. Just as he got Dial M For Murder for Grace he could have got Wait for any actress he wanted. How's about Jose Ferrer for Alan Arkin? Glenn Ford,--hey!--for Crenna, and he'd have been right for it mid-Fifties. Not sure about billing, though.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Apparently The Music Man is one for Americans only. Nowadays, of course, movies are MADE to play internationally.

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I think I read somewhere that whereas up to the 90s or so(with a slow shift), American films made 70% of their gross in the US and 30% in international markets -- today its reversed. Thus we are always being given reports on "worldwide grosses" and practically ORDERED not to consider an American studio film's success son only its US receipts(though 200 millon or more in US receipts still usually means something special.)

If "all movies are international in audience," the "foreign film market" starts to shrink, I guess. Do we have an Ingmar Bergman or a Francois Truffaut now? Swanstep would have some nominees, I'm sure. That Cache guy, for instance. And thus: yes, we DO still have foreign films, and foreign auteurs.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago


Agreed on Wait Until Dark. For what it is, perfect and better still, of its time.

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Very much of its time in two different directions - (1) Much "hipper" than Dial M for Murder(from the same playwright, Frederick Knott) and (2) much less gory than most shockers that followed it -- and yet still an absolute scream-athon for most of the third act. Not to mention -- Psycho of 7 years earlier actually had more blood, both shown(on Arbogast's face) and implied (in the shower stabbing.)

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Hitchcock was too old to direct it Too hip, too New York.

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There is a story -- confirmed by telegrams -- of Jack Warner inviting Hitchcock to loan out from Universal to direct WUD on the Warners lot. Warner wrote someone that Hitchcock turned the project down because he never forgave Audrey Hepburn for deserting "No Bail for the Judge." But still, I wonder -- would Universal's Lew Wasserman have LET Hitchcock go to Warners for even one film? As an AGENT, Wasserman set up the one-time deal for NXNW at MGM, but I'm not so sure he would have let Hitch go to Warners UNLESS he got major profit sharing in WUD.

That said, all the hipness of the dialogue in general and Alan Arkin's twisted performance in particular -- I can't see Hitchcock approving THAT script(which was changed from the stage play a lot, on dialogue.) Or "getting" (in both senses) that great Arkin performance -- all funny-voice menace from the get go. ("Dey had comic book minds. Dey wanted to kill me. I knew it. I knew it before DEY knew it. And now its topsy-toivy. Me topsy...dem toivy." )



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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I forget who directed it and am too lazy to look it up (not home, as write).

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It was Terrence Young, who had directed one or two of the Connery Bond films and was thus considered a thriller specialist.

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It would have been a good project for someone like Blake Edwards, who showed that he could "do hip" very well. Heck, he damn near invented it on the small screen!

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Well, I tell you -- thanks to Henry Mancini's cool-scary score -- which matches at times his cool-scary scores for Charade(NOT a Blake Edwards movie) and Experiment in Terror(INDEED a Blake Edwards movies) -- people thought it WAS a Blake Edwards movie(see also: Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Pink Panther, more Edwards/Mancini collaborations.)

So terrible that Hitchcock fired Mancini off of Frenzy. Seeing as Family Plot with a John Williams score sounded like a Spielberg movie -- Frenzy could have sounded like a BLAKE EDWARDS movie! (Mancini's Frenzy overture survives on YouTube...far better than what we have in the finished film by Ron Goodwin.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Ten, twelve years earlier, Wait Until Dark would have been a "first dibs" for Hitch

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Absolutely, as Dial M had been(again, from the same playwright.)

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but he grew old fast.

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Yes. Had Hitchcock directed Wait Until Dark, it would have come between Torn Curtain and Topaz and saved him. But maybe not. Maybe he didn't have the "juice" for it. When he did succeed with Frenzy -- it was on his own very dark, very weird terms. Frenzy -- unlike Psycho OR Wait Until Dark -- wasn't FUN.

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Just as he got Dial M For Murder for Grace he could have got Wait for any actress he wanted. How's about Jose Ferrer for Alan Arkin? Glenn Ford,--hey!--for Crenna, and he'd have been right for it mid-Fifties. Not sure about billing, though

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All agreed. And great casting choices! Ford before Ferrer, I think, even with Ferrer's Oscar of the time. Grace Kelly third billed if around 1954. Even in the lead. Though hey, Audrey Hepburn was a star in 1954(Roman Holiday, Sabrina), if perhaps too young for the role.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

My "Wait Until Dark" viewing stories -- two of them -- are proof of A Universe Perfectly Ordered for Arbitrary Meaninglessness.

WUD came out in December of '67. But I saw it in March of '68 "at a theater near me." It was meant to be on a double-bill with a Western -- Firecreek with James Stewart and Henry Fonda. But the theater pulled "Firecreek" to show a NEW Western -- a "sneak preview" called "The Scalphunters," with Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis as a white-black team.

"The Scalphunters" was fine, but Wait Until Dark(played second) was screams, screams and more screams in that famous final 30 minutes(yes, one BIG one with about seven minutes to go, but the seven minutes AFTER were MORE screaming.)

Perfect memory of a night at the movies.

Flash to July 1970. Over two years later. I had moved hundreds of miles away but came to "my old town" to visit old childhood friends (from only two years earlier in my childhood.)

Well, at the SAME theater where I saw Wait Until Dark in 1970, it was playing again -- on a re-release with another damn Warners Western -- "Chisum" with John Wayne. "Wanna go?" asked my friends. "Sure," I replied, "didn't we love Wait Until Dark two years ago?"

So I watched "Chisum," and it was fine(though not one of the really good Waynes) and then I watched Wait Until Dark again -- with the same friends, in the same theater, and practically the same screams, as two years earlier -- even though now I lived hundreds of miles away.

Thus, Wait Until Dark lives on as the screamer I saw twice at the same place -- with a Western each time -- and with the same friends. But I didn't live in the same place, anymore....

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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

Grace could have been third billed in '54 but not after. She won an AA for The Country Girl, a '54 release,--William Holden, already a superstar, gallantly took third billing, and what a great career move it was, as he was excellent in it--and yes, Hepburn was still in her gamine period then.

I can't, btw, see Holden in a Fifties WUD. That wasn't his kind of material. He'd do light entertainment, the occasional western or breezy comedy, but overall, once established, he steered clear of what I suspect felt like B list material being done as an A. Holden managed his career shrewdly till the Sixties, then had some bad years. He knew what was good for him, right for him. WUD would have been as wrong for Holden as Dial M would have been,--either male lead.

As to Jose Ferrer, at his more modest, from a box-office standpoint, level, he was in his field as big as Holden, by which I mean as in, say, the Thirties, guys like Paul Muni and Charles Laughton were, as character stars, in the same league as more handsome leading man types like Fredric March, Ronald Colman and Gary Cooper. Ferrer took second or third billing,--does it matter?--and he almost but not quite stole The Caine Mutiny from its very talented cast of heavy hitters. In the end Bogart owned it but Ferrer came in a close second, with Van and Fred about tied for third place. Agreed?

These kinds of musings are more fun where old Hollywood is concerned. I think the Seventies was the last decade when things like who got chosen to star in what movie,--and increasingly, who's going to direct it--were topics in conversations among intelligent and even average people. I can remember talking with friends about whether Dustin Hoffman was good casting for Lenny,--a jerkier, more raw actor might have been better--and then, earlier, the much anticipated (and it bombed anyway) Portnoy's Complaint, as it should it been Elliott Gould instead of Richard Benjamin?



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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Grace could have been third billed in '54 but not after. She won an AA for The Country Girl, a '54 release,--William Holden, already a superstar, gallantly took third billing, and what a great career move it was, as he was excellent in it--and yes, Hepburn was still in her gamine period then.

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D'oh! I should have said 1953 for Grace -- the year of Dial M, I think she was third billed there, maybe second(over Cummings.) 1954 for Grace Kelly was famously an incredible year with many movies in it -- Rear Window , County Girl, Dial M(in some markets), a not so good one called Green Fire, and -- was this the year of Bridges at Toko Ri(in a short role opposite Holden) or was that '55?

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I can't, btw, see Holden in a Fifties WUD.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago


In the 1967 film as we have it, the "Holden role"(with Richard Crenna) is rather secondary to Hepburn(heroine) and Arkin(evil psycho villain.)

And...how about a few moments about Richard Crenna?

Crenna got a movie career for a grand total of...two major films: The Sand Pebbles of 1966 (with Steve McQueen the star) and Wait Until Dark of 1967(with Hepburn and Arkin.) I remember feeling that he FELT like a new star...he had regular guy, boy-next-door looks tempered with a pockmarked face and the ability to convey weakness(Sand Pebbles) or menace(WUD) that spelled "actor" to me.

And Crenna did this, amazingly enough, having played an adenoidal high schooler on Our Miss Brooks and a good ol' boy farmer on The Real McCoys. His "midwifery" was a serious political show called Slattery's People that evidently paved the way for the movie parts.

But they were short-lived, and Crenna found new fame in two venues -- (1) TV movies in the 70s, and (2) as a character man and sometimes bad guy in the movies in the 80s(the husband who gets murdered in Body Heat; the General sympathetically hunting Rambo.)

Richard Crenna had a TV and movie career pretty much til his death, but it was lower case except for The Sand Pebbles and Wait Until Dark. And he's particularly good in Wait Until Dark as a criminal hired for his nice voice(Hepburn can't see his nice face) to lure Hepburn into giving up hidden treasure -- who slowly falls in "like" with his prey and changes sides. To his doom.

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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

Right. I think that Holden was best as a reluctant if not downright ambivalent hero, as a man not accustomed to deep thinking,--he wasn't good casting for "intellectual" roles, though he pulled a couple of them off nicely, as in Sunset Blvd and The Country Roles--but he'd have been all wrong for even just a "basic hero" part like Shane. Alan Ladd owned that one, and with his mute depressive charisma he could own the screen. Dialogue wasn't his strong suit, but it was Holden's.

It's interesting how he rose, similar to his real life pal Glenn Ford, and yet different. There's an iconic quality to Holden that just ain't there for Ford. In a way he was sort of a more mainstream, conventional Monty Clift, only more prolific, less vulnerable. Clift was even up for Sunset Blvd, then passed. Both men appeared opposite John Wayne; Clift more successfully in the grand Red River. Holden also "went against" the Duke in The Horse Soldiers but the movie was too freakin' corporate, with those "dueling" superstars it just plain felt top heavy, like some of the pictures Burt and Kirk made together.

Also like Monty, Holden began the Sixties on a roll, and it looked like he had another good decade as a star. Didn't happen. He spent most of the period like a superstar emeritus, still a name, he appeared often in low profile or just plain bad pictures. Monty was, even more so, MIA in those years, dying on the cusp of what may or may not have been a great comeback for him, Reflections In A Golden Eye. Brando got it instead, but he was wrong for the part. Clift had a genius taking on what on the surface seemed like bad casting and turning it into gold. We'll never know. Holden did get his comeback, and a roaring one it was, with The Wild Bunch, becoming hot all over again as his contemporaries were cooling down.

Monty did get to work for Hitchcock, as a priest. Holden got to play a priest (Satan Never Sleeps) ten years later, not for Hitch.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago


I can't, btw, see Holden in a Fifties WUD. That wasn't his kind of material. He'd do light entertainment, the occasional western or breezy comedy, but overall, once established, he steered clear of what I suspect felt like B list material being done as an A. Holden managed his career shrewdly till the Sixties, then had some bad years. He knew what was good for him, right for him. WUD would have been as wrong for Holden as Dial M would have been,--either male lead.

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A good place to remember that Hitchcock always expressed regret that he never got to work with Holden(as Wilder expressed regret at never getting to work with Cary Grant.) But Hitchcock evidently only pitched Holden for Guy in Strangers on a Train and the lead in The Trouble With Harry.

Its hard to think if Holden would have been better than Hitchcock's Jimmy and Cary in any of their fifties films. I can't see Holden playing the borderline wretches Jimmy gives us in Rear Window and Vertigo, and Cary Grant (who competed for the lead of River Kwai with Holden) was just a bit more suave than Holden and thus better for To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest.

I suppose had Hitchcock really wanted to get Holden for a film, The Man Who Knew Too Much '56 would have been the best bet in Holden's best years. In the sixties, perhaps any of the films from The Birds through Torn Curtain in the lead(though Holden was aging and fighting a drinking problem.)

And Holden would have been great in John Forsythe's cameo in Topaz as a button down CIA man. Holden did a few of those star cameos in his later years.

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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

I think that where Hitchcock was concerned he HAD his All-American in Jimmy Stewart. None of the others quite measured up, not even the stalwart Gregory Peck, whose work with Hitch in two films was mediocre, along with his performances. We can probably see in Peck's miscasting something of what like a Hitch-Holden collaboration might have been like.

Strangers On A Train: Farley Granger's boyishness (Holden was past that by then) combined with his air of weakness and ambisexuality made him the perfect foil for Robert Walker. Holden was too strong and solidly built to be a credible patsy for the scheming Walker character. It looks good only on paper, as Holden was becoming a top star by then.

Interesting about Granger: his early years as a boy next door type leading man in the making were rather like Holden's in his ten years post-Golden Boy. Producer Sam Goldwyn used Granger as Paramount used Holden, for certain kinds of parts, with an eye to the future (as in watch this kid, he's gonna be big some day). This was true for Holden, not for Granger, whose star inexplicably in some ways, didn't rise in the wake of Strangers On A Train, which, one might think, ought to have been his Sunset Blvd, if he was going to have one.

Also, and FWIW: working for Hitchcock was not a lucky charm for even some of the stars who worked well with him. For every Cary Grant (Suspicion started the ball rolling with him Hitch-wise) there's a Bob Cummings here, a Joseph Cotten there. Nice careers, but nothing great. Same for John Hodiak, Richard Todd, John Forsythe and Rod Taylor. Many of Hitchcock's leading men did well enough for themselves but not because of their work with the Master. Anthony Perkins, an icon thanks to Psycho, probably lost more than he gained at the star level even as Norman Bates made him a sort of icon long term. It limited him when he was still young enough for a more conventional career.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I think that where Hitchcock was concerned he HAD his All-American in Jimmy Stewart.

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And thus, "the rest of the list" at the time(Holden, Glenn Ford, Gregory Peck) wouldn't fit the bill.

Jimmy Stewart remains, to me, the one star of an era (30s through 50s) who really seems uniquely NOT so many things. He was not brawny and muscular. He was not matinee idol handsome(though he certainly could look handsome in certain shots). He was not particularly suave(I can't see him in NXNW, much as he wanted the role.) And for much of his career he lacked the youth that now defines our stars(Tom Cruise, Leo, Damon) ...so modern young audiences can't seem to relate to him at all.

And yet: clearly he was in a lot of classics; clearly Hitchcock cast him a lot (one thing Hitchocck reportedly liked about Stewart is that there was "no star neuroticism" to him, he showed up and did his work and went home), and clearly a LOT of people identified with him in the fifties particularly.

It remains "there for all to see" that Hitchcock cast Stewart in four pretty ornery roles; he's a borderline villain in Rope and Vertigo, too. Perhaps that's what Hitch admired about Stewart: a willingness NOT to be liked.



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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

---None of the others quite measured up, not even the stalwart Gregory Peck, whose work with Hitch in two films was mediocre, along with his performances.

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When I went to Hitchocck's memorial service in LA in 1980(outside, not let in), I was shocked by the stars who didn't show: Cary, Jimmy, Ingrid, Grace(and Jimmy lived just down the street.) Nor Perkins.

But Gregory Peck came. Which seemed odd to me. Peck did one big hit with Hitch(Spellbound) and one semi-flop(The Paradine Case), but in both he seemed miscast(too callow and young) and Peck simply doesn't come to mind as a "classic Hitchcock hero" on the same level as Grant and Stewart.

I've said this before: Hitchcock got Peck too early, too young and callow. Peck matured into a full-on leading man in the fifties and peaked 1958-1962(roughly as Hitch did as a director.) MGM wanted Peck for NXNW, but other than that, its hard to see Peck doing well in any of the 50's Hitch stuff save, again, Man Who Knew Too Much.

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We can probably see in Peck's miscasting something of what like a Hitch-Holden collaboration might have been like.

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Certainly on Strangers on a Train, though oddly enough, I think Hitchcock was right to think of Holden for The Trouble With Harry. With John Forsythe in the lead, the film screams "minor league," star-wise. But Holden would have elevated it, and I can picture him riffing off the cynical antiestablishment chit-chat that Forsythe gets. His all-American voice would have fit well with the bucolic setting. And I guess he would have romanced Shirley well enough.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Strangers On A Train: Farley Granger's boyishness (Holden was past that by then) combined with his air of weakness and ambisexuality made him the perfect foil for Robert Walker. Holden was too strong and solidly built to be a credible patsy for the scheming Walker character. It looks good only on paper, as Holden was becoming a top star by then.

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Its weird. Hitchcock told Truffaut that Holden would have been better BECAUSE he would have been stronger than Granger, but the movie clearly demonstrates that Granger's softness is just what the tale NEEDED -- Walker is out to dominate Granger, to force him not only to commit murder but to NOT rat him out to the cops (which works only for awhile.)

And the film's gay subtext is well communicated by Granger. He was openly gay, so this can be noted: the straight actor(Walker) played gay; the gay actor (Granger) played straight. It created a certain, well...criss-cross(aha!)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Interesting about Granger: his early years as a boy next door type leading man in the making were rather like Holden's in his ten years post-Golden Boy. Producer Sam Goldwyn used Granger as Paramount used Holden, for certain kinds of parts, with an eye to the future (as in watch this kid, he's gonna be big some day). This was true for Holden, not for Granger, whose star inexplicably in some ways, didn't rise in the wake of Strangers On A Train, which, one might think, ought to have been his Sunset Blvd, if he was going to have one.

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Well,as we know, becoming a big star is a tricky thing. Being in a hit or a classic helps -- Sunset was one, and Strangers was another(it was Hitchcock's first top ten hit in years). But it didn't happen for Farley Granger(it happened a little better, but not much, for STEWART Granger, and that may have caused confusion.)

Ultimately, Farley Granger lacked toughness. Holden had it, as did most male actors who could act in Westerns. Non-pretty boys Bogart, Cagney and Tracy had it. Farley didn't have it. He was too soft and boyish. I suppose we can consider HIM as a "time warp Norman Bates," but Perkins had more accessibility and friendliness in his persona. Someone wrote that Granger in Strangers acted like "his tongue was stuck in his throat."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Also, and FWIW: working for Hitchcock was not a lucky charm for even some of the stars who worked well with him. For every Cary Grant (Suspicion started the ball rolling with him Hitch-wise) there's a Bob Cummings here, a Joseph Cotten there. Nice careers, but nothing great. Same for John Hodiak, Richard Todd, John Forsythe and Rod Taylor. Many of Hitchcock's leading men did well enough for themselves but not because of their work with the Master.

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Hitchcock's casting -- especially with leading men -- seemed to vary wildly. He got the big stars a lot(Grant, Stewart, Fonda, Peck, Clift), but just as often got second-tier guys(everybody you mention above.) He seemed almost to WANT second tier guys, particularly as we know, for his heroes -- he cast bigger stars as villains in their pictures(Ray Milland, Anthony Perkins.)

Hitchcock told Truffaut that in the forties, his thriller genre was looked down upon, so he just couldn't convince the biggest stars to work for him. Cooper turned him down; Fonda turned him down(and finally changed his mind in the late fifties.) Gable turned him down. And frankly, even Cary Grant turned him down -- far more often than he said "yes"(Grant turned down Foreign Correspondent, Mr and Mrs. Smith, Spellbound, Rope, I Confess, Marnie and Torn Curtain.)

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Anthony Perkins, an icon thanks to Psycho, probably lost more than he gained at the star level even as Norman Bates made him a sort of icon long term. It limited him when he was still young enough for a more conventional career.

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Perkins "got" that -- but years later I think he got what I got: without Psycho, his movie career would have petered out to nothing. A Farley Granger career. A Richard Beymer career. Psycho harmed him in the 60s and saved him in the 70s when new fans found him and wanted to cast him. And then it paid him royally with the sequels in the 80's and 90s.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

As to Jose Ferrer, at his more modest, from a box-office standpoint, level, he was in his field as big as Holden,

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He was pretty big. He had a Best Actor Oscar for Cyranno. "Personal reveal" -- my mother swore by that performance as her favorite by an actor in any movie, and I mean she brought it up for YEARS. I thought he was OK. That's OK. She didn't like Psycho.

And in '54, Ferrer had that great role in The Caine Mutiny as the defense lawyer who turns on the most craven of his clients(Fred MacMurray, always good as a louse; see: The Apartment) with a toast of wine in the face and a great line: "If you want to meet me outside, that's fine. I'm drunk enough that it will be an even fight."

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by which I mean as in, say, the Thirties, guys like Paul Muni and Charles Laughton were, as character stars, in the same league as more handsome leading man types like Fredric March, Ronald Colman and Gary Cooper. Ferrer took second or third billing,--does it matter?--and he almost but not quite stole The Caine Mutiny from its very talented cast of heavy hitters. In the end Bogart owned it but Ferrer came in a close second, with Van and Fred about tied for third place. Agreed?

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Agreed. Fred's great as the late-reveal coward; Van's great as the good guy literally stuck in the middle of the mutiny plan(and he let his forehead scar from a chopper accident show, no makeup.) TV trivia: I read that Jose Ferrer was first offered -- and almost took -- the role of the Joker on the TV show. Then Caesar Romero took it. I was always mystified by this: how did Ferrer and Romero even come UP as likely Jokers? It was "abstract casting," you ask me.

I might add that a fifties "Wait Until Dark" is a little hard for me to picture. It isn't as bloody or perverse as Psycho, but Arkin is quite the psycho, at a level that I'm not sure the 50's would have allowed for Ferrer. Still, Ferrer is a great casting idea -- a slithery deep voice, an exotic manner.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

These kinds of musings are more fun where old Hollywood is concerned. I think the Seventies was the last decade when things like who got chosen to star in what movie,--and increasingly, who's going to direct it--were topics in conversations among intelligent and even average people.

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Well up through the seventies, more movies were made from popular novels so people could mentally cast the movies in advance: GWTW, Rebecca, From Here to Eternity, Giant...Airport, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws(I was sure that Quint would be either Lee Marvin or Richard Boone; it turned out that Marvin turned the role down and Boone never got an offer.)

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I can remember talking with friends about whether Dustin Hoffman was good casting for Lenny,--a jerkier, more raw actor might have been better--and then, earlier, the much anticipated (and it bombed anyway) Portnoy's Complaint, as it should it been Elliott Gould instead of Richard Benjamin

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The seventies was the decade of the Jewish Star, it seems to me. We'd always had them, but they had been changing their names -- I recall that Lee J. Cobb's real name was Leo Jacob. And Tony Curtis was Bernard Schwartz. John Garfield and Edward G. Robinson had changed their names.

Not so in the seventies: Hoffman, Gould, Benjamin, Richard Dreyfuss, James Caan, George Segal...and so things shifted to the appropriate actor for certain roles. I recall that Richard Benjamin seemed the wrong choice for Portnoy...except that he had been in the successful film of Goodbye Columbus, also from a Roth novel.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Trivia on Portnoy's Complaint: it was the first -- and only -- film directed by Ernest Lehman, who had been the screenwriter on NXNW and then the producer of big hits like West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and Virginia Woolf.

But two bombs in a row -- as producer on Hello Dolly(which made money, but not enough) and as director on Portnoy's Complaint -- froze Lehman's career to the point where Hitchocck could RE-hire Lehman as a screenwriter on Family Plot (and Hitchcock noted that very point in interviews, nasty fellow.) Worse: Family Plot is a good, not great, screenplay, which exposed some weaknesses on Lehman's part in his older age with regard to dialogue and overlength of scenes(the latter, maybe Hitchcock's goof).

But this: Karen Black is in Family Plot...and she had been in Portnoy's Complaint.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

One thing that saddened me personally in all this was that Robert Preston, while past the leading man age for a major comeback, didn't remain active in films afterwards, till such time he became a character actor. He was one of those stars who, in the early Sixties, would slip away by the middle of the decade.

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I looked at Preston's imdb filmography, and its all over the place. Movies in the forties; a lot of live TV in the fifties -- then Broadway and The Music Man.

Came the sixties, Preston "launched" with The Music Man, but found little traction: a comedy called "Island of Love"(with Walter Matthau as a gangster) , the sad All the Way Home (1963)...and then nine long years NOT in movies. Until the great Junior Bonner of 1972.

Junior Bonner is, famously, an UNviolent Sam Peckinpah movie(save one funny barroom brawl, no one is punched, and no one is shot, and no one is killed.) Steve McQueen is a fading young-middle-aged rodeo star searching a town for his faded old-middle-aged daddy -- Robert Preston. McQueen and Preston kill in individual scenes -- "just missing each other" -- and when they FIND each other, its fun and heart-warming; Preston makes great macho sense as McQueen's father.

1972 also found Preston in a movie I wanted to see but missed -- Child's Play(not about the doll) -- from a Broadway play and directed by Sidney Lumet a year before Serpico, Orient Express, Dog Day, Network all kicked in. I wanted to see the film because it starred James NXNW Mason and Robert The Music Man Preston -- evidently with the former as a hated professor who is actually a good guy, and Preston as a beloved professor who is actually a bad guy. I must track this down someday.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Preston off and on-ed as a character man(Semi-Tough), TV star(Finnegan Begin Again -- I love that title about late love), and still a stage star.

But in his "prime" -- the sixties -- he just didn't fit what was being made. He looks a bit long in the tooth and with make-up and eye liner visible as The Music Man. He was too old for the McQueen and Newman roles and not competitive with peers like Cary Grant(for the years Grant worked) or Greg Peck.

Oh, well, clearly, he worked all the time SOMEWHERE. He got a real comeback in the 80's with Victor Victoria. And he lived and died his final years in gorgeous Montecito on the central California coast(Oprah lives there.) So he must have socked it away...

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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

Yeah, Preston slowly but surely worked his way back into the mainstream post-1970. He was one of the few stage stars who had done movies able to move back and forth with ease. Hollywood had a way of being unforgiving when a star took time off for stage work,--too good enough for us, huh?--while the New York theater was famously snobbish. Hollywood loved to make a movie star out of a Broadway "sensation", didn't want their property toyed with once it was "acquired".

Things were loosening up somewhat back then. I can recall Jason Robards and George C. Scott moving back and forth between stage and screen without problems. Many character actresses,--Maureen Stapleton, Colleen Dewhurst--did same. Preston was a "special case", having begun his theatrical career at the Pasadena Playhouse, he debuted on Broadway after he became a movie star (albeit second tier at best), then went on to become a stage superstar returned to the big screen in "triumph", and that's sort of the way he went out. A nice career. Robert Preston defied the odds, and he won.

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[–] movieghoul (213) 6 years ago

Funny, I don't recall mention of the film at all, although I did see the play on Broadway with Fritz Weaver and Pat Hingle in the hated/good and beloved/bad roles, so I guess casting Mason and Preston makes sense. The play wasn't very good, though, and it didn't help that it played at the same time as Sleuth; there's usually only room for one hit Broadway thriller at a time.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Funny, I don't recall mention of the film at all,

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I was an inveterate reader of Time and Newsweek in my youth, so I read about both the play and the movie, and I was excited to see the movie because of the NXNW/Music Man connection -- Mason and Preston were charismatic actors with great voices.

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although I did see the play on Broadway

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Wow! I only got to read about it in Time and Newsweek.

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with Fritz Weaver and Pat Hingle in the hated/good and beloved/bad roles, so I guess casting Mason and Preston makes sense.

Well, they were great actors, but I suppose a bigger star was needed. I hear Marlon Brando was to take the Preston role originally. Also -- two middle-aged guys. I guess there was a young male lead for Beau Bridges, but...he wasn't Jeff.

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The play wasn't very good, though, and it didn't help that it played at the same time as Sleuth; there's usually only room for one hit Broadway thriller at a time.

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Its funny. Nobody remember Childs Play (the movie of 1972) as a great thriller that's lasted through the years. But movie-wise, both Sleuth and Frenzy from the same year, and more famous at the time, have rather fallen by the wayside, too. Time marches on. Hits fade, tastes change.

And: funny how a killer doll franchise has made the title famous.

You saw the play -- was there something Satanic about the villainous professor played by Preston? I seem to remember reading that there was a supernatural element to Child's Play with Mason/Preston. Indeed -- what does Preston do that's so evil? I'm just wondering, if its all been forgotten -- never mind.

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[–] movieghoul (213) 6 years ago

Sorry can't help much here. All I recall is that Hingle had some kind of cult type hold on the boys until they turn on him at the end, but it may have been ambiguous as to whether it was supernatural or just psychological.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Oh, well. It was a long time ago.

I'm sure the movie can be found somewhere if I look for it.

It remains interesting to me that Sidney Lumet made it; this was just as a fairly big period for him was about to commence(Serpico, Dog Day, Network.) Its as if this is a lost film of his (Along with Lovin' Molly, starring Tony Perkins....)

I have to figure somebody gets killed in "Child's Play." Otherwise...it ain't a thriller.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

He was one of those stars who, in the early Sixties, would slip away by the middle of the decade. Steve Reeves is another like that.

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Well, Steve Reeves proved to be a one-hit wonder(Hercules.) If only he had "hit" in the 80's, when Arnold could make it to superstardom, or to today when our highest paid star is an ex-wrestler(The Rock.)

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Marilyn, of course.


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A shocker, but she went out an icon. It has been said that she feared getting old, and its hard to imagine what she would have done "old"(even as Ann-Margret is still playing sexy elderly ladies today.) Someone wrote an article that had Marilyn survived, she could have played Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. As we have it, she was tentatively set for Irma La Douce and What A Way to Go(Shirley MacLaine got both roles after MM's death.)

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This is somewhat less true for Laurence Harvey

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Harvey was a sad case. I recall in the early seventies he took two TV gigs at Universal -- one as a Columbo villain(classy, but not a movie) and one memorable turn in a Night Gallery episode where an "earwig" crawled through his brain from one ear to another(excruciating pain)...and laid eggs.

And not too many years later, Laurence Harvey died young of cancer. But at least he had that early run of stardom -- Room at the Top, The Alamo, and his so very cold, so very sad Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate.

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and Alec Guinness, though both began to slip, and worse yet, become irrelevant, as the years went by

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Well, Guinness got Star Wars -- I remember recognizing ONLY his name in the cast list in Variety during its year of production(no, strike that, I knew Peter Cushing too and Carrie Fisher from Shampoo.) But Guinness rather faded away as a star -- a victim, I think, of his unique ability to "become colorless" as a character on screen. River Kwai was a huge lucky "get" for him , but he couldn't really ride it to stardom.

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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

Yes, poor Laurence Harvey. He was apparently rather sleazy in his personal life when he was young, was some British producer's boytoy. Then he decided he wanted "class", appeared in a modestly successful Technicolor film adaptation of Romeo & Juliet, made in England, then began to catch on as a sort of raffish borderline "angry young man", but with cheek, and became a surprise star, rather as the more successful Albert Finney did a few years later. But Finney had the theatrical bona fides and I think it's fair to say he was more talented than Laurence Harvey (insert laugh emoticon).

I rather liked him, even as a child, even in The Alamo, in which he literally stood apart, held his own with some heavy hitters,--Duke Wayne, Widmark, Richard Boone--and came off as a gallant if dandified hero in the end. But his leading ladies despised him, save Liz Taylor. I think it was Jane Fonda who said that acting with Laurence Harvey is like acting with yourself,--only worse! famously self-absorbed, almost a caricature of what later would be called a narcissist, I have a fondness for Harvey's daring, debonair foxiness on screen, prefer him to the likes of, say, Dirk Bogarde, whose sincerity could be off putting; and such dandies as Patrick McGoohan and Roger Moore. I got the impression that Robert Vaughn wanted to be,--astounding as this sounds--a sort of American Laurence Harvey. He rather succeeded as The Man From UNCLE, never quite found his fanbase. Critic John Simon put it nicely when he wrote that Vaughn's talent (sic?) was scaled for the small screen, not the big one (a paraphrase, from me).

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Yes, poor Laurence Harvey. He was apparently rather sleazy in his personal life when he was young, was some British producer's boytoy. Then he decided he wanted "class", appeared in a modestly successful Technicolor film adaptation of Romeo & Juliet, made in England, then began to catch on as a sort of raffish borderline "angry young man", but with cheek, and became a surprise star, rather as the more successful Albert Finney did a few years later. But Finney had the theatrical bona fides and I think it's fair to say he was more talented than Laurence Harvey (insert laugh emoticon).

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I didn't know all this. Funny, the other day I watched, for the first time, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which evidently "introduced" Albert Finney in 1960, which was not only the year of Psycho(and this British film is much more realistic) but the year of The Alamo -- in which Laurence Harvey was getting his Hollywood epic debut. So I guess Harvey was a couple of years earlier 'out the gate" than Finney. And with Butterfield 8, The Alamo, and The Manchurian Candidate as "a launch," Harvey got to be a star for a little while.

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Odd, though: even as Laurence Harvey was "launching" as a movie star for American audiences in 1960, the same year , Hitchcock used Harvey in a TV EPISODE: "Arthur," directed by Hitch himself, about an elegant chicken farmer who grinds his fiancée into chicken feed. How odd for Harvey to allow himself to be used for a TV episode just as he was trying to be a movie star!

I guess Hitchcock made the difference. After all, Hitchcock had just cast Laurence Harvey for a MOVIE -- No Bail for the Judge, opposite Audrey Hepburn. Yes, Harvey was almost a Hitchcock Hero.


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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I rather liked him, even as a child, even in The Alamo, in which he literally stood apart, held his own with some heavy hitters,--Duke Wayne, Widmark, Richard Boone--and came off as a gallant if dandified hero in the end.

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I"ve read a bio of John Wayne that covered The Alamo -- a huge personal vanity project upon which he bet a lot (losing a lot of his own money, but getting it made.) The deal: Wayne and Richard Widmark detested each other to the point of a near fistfight -- but Wayne and HARVEY got along splendidly. Harvey elected to "overplay the British fop" and joke around with Wayne, poking fun at his macho and "acting gay." Wayne and Harvey went to a restaurant for drinks. Wayne was besieged with autograph hunters; Harvey drew none. Harvey noted to Wayne, "but if we were in London, I'd be besieged and no one would ask for yours." Yeah, right.

Harvey also got everyone's respect on The Alamo when a cannon rolled over and crushed his foot during a take...he completed the scene before crying out in pain.

So he seems to have been a man of both good and bad reputation...

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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

Odd how reputations work out. Richard Widmark, good liberal that he was, and an educated man who actually hung out at the local library in the town he lived in in Connecticut, yet he could be a terror on the set and a pain in the arse to work with.

When Wayne signed Widmark on for The Alamo he had a big sign erected near the main set reading "Welcome, Dick!" (before that name became commonly used for something else), and Widmark was immediately pissed off, insisted on being called Richard. Wayne, by all accounts, was a good guy to work with and genuinely liked and respected in the industry.

For all that, Widmark became one of the last players to join the John Ford stock company, and Ford was Wayne's padrone. As we've discussed. Widmark seemed to rather "throw away" his screen career despite an excellent start as a leading man once his "psycho days" were over (Tony Perkins wasn't so lucky). Oddly, they were both in Murder On The Orient Express,--a movie for which I can easily imagine Laurence Harvey being perfect for a guest role in--but Richard and Tony had no scenes together. Harvey was gone before filming began anyway.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

But his leading ladies despised him, save Liz Taylor. I think it was Jane Fonda who said that acting with Laurence Harvey is like acting with yourself,--only worse! famously self-absorbed, almost a caricature of what later would be called a narcissist,

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I have a fondness for Harvey's daring, debonair foxiness on screen,

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Intriguingly, I think Harvey plays similar characters in both The Alamo and The Manchurian Candidate -- a cold, too-snobby outsider military man who is not respected by his fellow grunts.

BTW, Frank Sinatra wanted to play Harvey's role in The Alamo, but scheduling problems nixed it. (Interesting: Frank and the Duke hated each other during the Blacklist period; I guess all was forgiven.)

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prefer him to the likes of, say, Dirk Bogarde, whose sincerity could be off putting;

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My mother was a bit of an Anglophile movie fan, and Dirk Bogarde was a big deal to her. I saw a lot of his films, never quite "got" him. But he was a star. For awhile.

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and such dandies as Patrick McGoohan and Roger Moore.

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Funny, even in their youths, I see Moore as more cute-boyish and McGoohan as more cerebral and even kind of rugged.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I got the impression that Robert Vaughn wanted to be,--astounding as this sounds--a sort of American Laurence Harvey. He rather succeeded as The Man From UNCLE, never quite found his fanbase. Critic John Simon put it nicely when he wrote that Vaughn's talent (sic?) was scaled for the small screen, not the big one (a paraphrase, from me).

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The late Robert Vaughn got himself three pieces of fame: he's one of The Magnificent Seven, he's one of the MEN from UNCLE(David McCallum was the other), and he's a non-murderous snob politician villain in "Bullitt." Two good guys, one bad guy -- all rather on the snooty and near-effete side. And yet he didn't project a gay vibe, and did well with the ladies offscreen. I liked his Napoleon Solo very much -- a man of seemingly slight build and high voice who was actually quite suave and able to duke it out quite well(thanks to stunt men and the fantasy of being a TV spy good guy.)

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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

I liked Robert Vaughn on The Man From UNCLE, and even in the film The Venetian Affair, which I saw in the theater and enjoyed. He was apparently not a humble man in real life, and yet he had a sense of humor about himself, as in an interview a few years before he died when he said (I paraphrase from memory), "I'm a lucky guy, have managed to parlay my journeyman talent and my fifteen minutes of fame (on UNCLE) into a fifty year career". I'd say that's a fair estimate of the man and his talent.

When I see Vaughn in anything now, early Vaughn, I mean, he does not impress me as a better than average actor. Journeyman's about right. And a fair to middlin' one at that. He was adequate in a Thriller episode, ditto on an Untouchables, kind of blew a good chance to shine in The Magnificent Seven, but to be fair he had little to do in that film. Try, if you will, to imagine an alternate universe Vaughn as Bruno Antony in Strangers On A Train. He bore a fleeting resemblance to Robert Walker but wasn't in the same league. There was no zing to the guy, no bravura.

Vaughn was okay in smooth villain parts later in his career, was excellent in the Nixon TV movie Backstairs At The White House, never really wowed me in anything I've seen him in. That he was Method trained marked him, made him play roles in certain ways common to that school of acting, and it didn't really suit him. If he could have let all that go and loosened up a bit he might have made it as an American George Sanders, though he lacked Sanders' height, deep baritone voice and stylishness generally.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I liked Robert Vaughn on The Man From UNCLE, and even in the film The Venetian Affair, which I saw in the theater and enjoyed.

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As I recall, The Venetian Affair was from MGM, home studio of The Man From UNCLE, and really was a stand-alone movie where Vaughn didn't play Napoleon Solo. On the other hand, MGM kept shipping out --to American movie theaters, even -- two-part episodes of The Man From UNCLE edited together and "disguised" as movies. It shows you how cheapjack the American movie system could be, back then.

"Bullitt" was Vaughn's most famous movie role, but he had others. The Venetian Affair, I think some war movie about some bridges...and "The Towering Inferno," reunited with Steve McQueen from Bullit and surprisingly playing a GOOD and heroic politician.

Vaughn also appeared in 1981 as a super-mean studio boss(with a penchant for wearing ladies underwear) in "SOB," Blake Edwards now-innocent-looking expose of Hollywood venality. With Robert Preston. And William Holden in his final role.
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He was apparently not a humble man in real life, and yet he had a sense of humor about himself, as in an interview a few years before he died when he said (I paraphrase from memory), "I'm a lucky guy, have managed to parlay my journeyman talent and my fifteen minutes of fame (on UNCLE) into a fifty year career". I'd say that's a fair estimate of the man and his talent.

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That's a fair estimate of a LOT of Hollywood lower-level stars. TV stars in the main, guys like Robert Vaughn and Robert Conrad and Robert Culp who had big early spy show hits that only lasted three or four years -- and THEN they had to maintain careers to retirement age. All of those guys pulled it off. William Shatner, too.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

When I see Vaughn in anything now, early Vaughn, I mean, he does not impress me as a better than average actor. Journeyman's about right. And a fair to middlin' one at that. He was adequate in a Thriller episode, ditto on an Untouchables, kind of blew a good chance to shine in The Magnificent Seven, but to be fair he had little to do in that film.

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One interesting thing I will note about Vaughn's period -- without seeking to counter your observations -- is that he actually got an Oscar nomination for 1959 -- The Young Philadelphians. This got him reasonably high billing in The Mag 7 the next year, and evidently set the stage for his TV stardom. He had a little prestige.

Not bad for a guy whose movie the year before Oscar was "I Was a Teenage Caveman." I kid you not. You could look it up.

And I've never seen his work in The Young Philadelphians.

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Try, if you will, to imagine an alternate universe Vaughn as Bruno Antony in Strangers On A Train. He bore a fleeting resemblance to Robert Walker but wasn't in the same league. There was no zing to the guy, no bravura.

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I can certainly see Vaughn's snippity flamboyance in Bruno(and, I might add, not at all in Norman Bates -- which is why Bruno and Norman are such DIFFERENT psychopaths.) But your point is well taken that there ARE levels of depth and talent among actors. Robert Walker was a star of sorts for the years before Strangers, he had something extra. If you DON'T, well, its likely off to TV for you. (Though even that has changed -- broadcast TV isn't where actors HAVE to go, there's 1000s of cable networks and streaming networks, now.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Vaughn was okay in smooth villain parts later in his career, was excellent in the Nixon TV movie Backstairs At The White House, never really wowed me in anything I've seen him in.

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I vaguely remember the Backstairs TV film. Vaughn became a "survivor actor." I recall he ended up on the 80's TV hit "The A Team." I was no longer watching TV of that type in the 80's, but he still had to act in it. Oh, well, its a living.

There was some sadness at the end for Vaughn, I think. His Man from UNCLE sidekick, David MacCallum, landed a supporting role on a TV hit called NCIS that, I can only assume, has made McCallum lower-level rich with steady work. And during this time, Vaughn and McCallum sat together to do interviews for a Man from UNCLE series disc set that I own. They are cordial to each other, but you know as you watch them: MacCallum's in a big hit TV show; Vaughn's still struggling.

Well, not anymore. Vaughn has passed.

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That he was Method trained marked him, made him play roles in certain ways common to that school of acting, and it didn't really suit him.

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His neurotic, shell-shocked gunslinger in The Mag 7 is pretty Method -- I wonder if his work in The Young Phildelphians(supporting Paul Newman, a Method Man) was, too?

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If he could have let all that go and loosened up a bit he might have made it as an American George Sanders, though he lacked Sanders' height, deep baritone voice and stylishness generally.

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As a "TV star matter," Vaughn as Napoleon Solo was rather an offshoot of Cary Grant(specifically, in NXNW, which is rather an inspiration for UNCLE, right down to Leo G Carroll and the UN building.) But he probably was more in George Sanders territory. Still, physical size and baritone DO matter.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Vaughn was okay in smooth villain parts later in his career, was excellent in the Nixon TV movie Backstairs At The White House, never really wowed me in anything I've seen him in.

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I vaguely remember the Backstairs TV film. Vaughn became a "survivor actor." I recall he ended up on the 80's TV hit "The A Team." I was no longer watching TV of that type in the 80's, but he still had to act in it. Oh, well, its a living.

There was some sadness at the end for Vaughn, I think. His Man from UNCLE sidekick, David MacCallum, landed a supporting role on a TV hit called NCIS that, I can only assume, has made McCallum lower-level rich with steady work. And during this time, Vaughn and McCallum sat together to do interviews for a Man from UNCLE series disc set that I own. They are cordial to each other, but you know as you watch them: MacCallum's in a big hit TV show; Vaughn's still struggling.

Well, not anymore. Vaughn has passed.

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That he was Method trained marked him, made him play roles in certain ways common to that school of acting, and it didn't really suit him.

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His neurotic, shell-shocked gunslinger in The Mag 7 is pretty Method -- I wonder if his work in The Young Phildelphians(supporting Paul Newman, a Method Man) was, too?

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If he could have let all that go and loosened up a bit he might have made it as an American George Sanders, though he lacked Sanders' height, deep baritone voice and stylishness generally.

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As a "TV star matter," Vaughn as Napoleon Solo was rather an offshoot of Cary Grant(specifically, in NXNW, which is rather an inspiration for UNCLE, right down to Leo G Carroll and the UN building.) But he probably was more in George Sanders territory. Still, physical size and baritone DO matter.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Vaughn was, mainly, a lucky guy. As he pointed out "The Man From UNCLE" drew screaming female fans just like Beatlemania did -- they hit around the same time and McCallum was sort of "the blond Russian Beatle." This HUGE launch carried him for decades of steady work.

And oh, he was a Columbo villain, too. A perfect one. And then, in a SECOND episode, he seemed to be the killer again -- but he got killed early in a big surprise.

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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

Agreed on Moore and McGoohan. Moore always seemed too pretty to play tough parts. It was an almost feminine prettiness that Peter O'Toole also had. Funny about good looking men. Richard Burton was, in his youth, quite handsome but certainly not pretty. Same with the other Granger, Stewart, who was ruggedly handsome.

Patrick McGoohan might but for the grace of God had the career that Michael Caine had, or better still, have risen due to the one lucky film to become England's "answer" to Steve McQueen. I've always liked him. He could be rough or smooth. If you want to see McGoohan rough catch Hell Drivers, a Stanley Baker picture from the late Fifties.



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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Agreed on Moore and McGoohan. Moore always seemed too pretty to play tough parts.

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Including James Bond. I know for certain generations, Moore WAS Bond, but it seemed to me he never failed worse at the role than when he was called about to be cruel or ruthless in killing the bad guy. He just couldn't "sell it." Connery could, all the time, with ease.

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It was an almost feminine prettiness that Peter O'Toole also had.

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The "pretty boy" stars are always in trouble -- people react against it. O'Toole, I think, found a way to be funny and lightly drunkish about his later career.

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Funny about good looking men. Richard Burton was, in his youth, quite handsome but certainly not pretty. Same with the other Granger, Stewart, who was ruggedly handsome.

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As a man watching men on screen, this always seems to stand out. I know for the ladies, too. Certain stars became stars fast on their obvious looks -- Redford, Beatty. But others had to cultivate their sex appeal -- Burton for one. James Coburn for another.

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Patrick McGoohan might but for the grace of God had the career that Michael Caine had, or better still, have risen due to the one lucky film to become England's "answer" to Steve McQueen. I've always liked him. He could be rough or smooth. If you want to see McGoohan rough catch Hell Drivers, a Stanley Baker picture from the late Fifties.

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I'll take a look. Rather like Richard Crenna, McGoohan was given a brief chance to be a movie star in the 60s/70s cusp. MGM put him in the very big "Ice Station Zebra" with Rock Hudson, and then in the not very big at all "Moonshine War" with Richard Widmark. And...nothing.

But McGoohan was a great Columbo villain. Like, four times. And he won the Emmy one of those times.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Agreed on Moore and McGoohan. Moore always seemed too pretty to play tough parts.

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Including James Bond. I know for certain generations, Moore WAS Bond, but it seemed to me he never failed worse at the role than when he was called about to be cruel or ruthless in killing the bad guy. He just couldn't "sell it." Connery could, all the time, with ease.

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It was an almost feminine prettiness that Peter O'Toole also had.

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The "pretty boy" stars are always in trouble -- people react against it. O'Toole, I think, found a way to be funny and lightly drunkish about his later career.

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Funny about good looking men. Richard Burton was, in his youth, quite handsome but certainly not pretty. Same with the other Granger, Stewart, who was ruggedly handsome.

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As a man watching men on screen, this always seems to stand out. I know for the ladies, too. Certain stars became stars fast on their obvious looks -- Redford, Beatty. But others had to cultivate their sex appeal -- Burton for one. James Coburn for another.

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Patrick McGoohan might but for the grace of God had the career that Michael Caine had, or better still, have risen due to the one lucky film to become England's "answer" to Steve McQueen. I've always liked him. He could be rough or smooth. If you want to see McGoohan rough catch Hell Drivers, a Stanley Baker picture from the late Fifties.

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I'll take a look. Rather like Richard Crenna, McGoohan was given a brief chance to be a movie star in the 60s/70s cusp. MGM put him in the very big "Ice Station Zebra" with Rock Hudson, and then in the not very big at all "Moonshine War" with Richard Widmark. And...nothing.

But McGoohan was a great Columbo villain. Like, four times. And he won the Emmy one of those times.

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[–] swanstep (2616) 6 years ago

McGoohan's movie career was perhaps stalked and forestalled to some degree by the impact he'd made on TV in The Prisoner. In a way that's quite hard to appreciate now, The Prisoner was a true sensation when it was first screened, and then its reputation only grew in memory both for people who'd seen it and for people like me who'd never had the chance to see it (with only 17 eps The Prisoner never went into syndication and endless reruns the way, say, Star Trek did). Growing up in the '70s and '80s The Prisoner was regularly hailed as the smartest and fartherest out TV had ever gone. It wasn't until The Singing Detective (1986) and Twin Peaks (1990) that it was really surpassed in that way, and really the lessons of The Prisoner for what TV could be weren't properly absorbed until the current post-Sopranos golden age.

Apparently too, McGoohan was just a super-smart guy who could do almost anything he set his mind to. He did a lot of the script development for The Prisoner and he wrote and directed a few Columbo eps (not sure if those were the ones he starred in). He lived in one of the nicest houses in the richest part of Pacific Palisades for decades and allegedly funded this by regularly picking up huge checks for script-doctoring and uncredited (McGoohan apparently insisted on privacy/secrecy) rewrites on blockbusters. E.g., I heard that the Third Indiana Jones movie was one that McGoohan did some work on. (Note: This may be BS - googling around now I can't find any confirmation. You'd expect that years after McGoohan's death that big fans who'd know such as JJ Abrams wouldn't be able to keep the secret up....)

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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

Yeah, there were so many like these two, EC. Crenna and McGoohan, I mean. Each had a kind of "tantalizing" quality, suggesting that there was much more than meets the eye. More so with McGoohan, who often came off like an intellectual moonlighting as an actor. Crenna was harder to pin down. When well cast he could dominate a scene effortlessly, outshine even a major star. But I sensed that he didn't know what he had and long term he just got lost in the Sixties to Seventies shuffle.

Back in the day television produced a lot of guy like that. Think David Janssen, a superstar as the Fugitive, and a very good actor, yet the face of Hollywood did not smile on him as the years went by. Robert Lansing, so commanding and charismatic on 12 O'Clock High, never recaptured that brief period of glory and became a major star. In his case a character career might have been in the mix, as it often was in Europe and in England, where a "failed" star with first rate talent can survive and enjoy a long and successful career doing other things than being a star. Acting, for instance.

James Garner had his day in films, then wisely returned to the small screen. In his case a certain lack of cojones seemed a factor in this. His Great Escape co-star Steve McQueen had them in spades, and so did some lower down on the cast list. Coburn and Bronson, for instance. Clint Eastwood just plain got lucky and managed his career better than anyone in the history of Hollywood, right? I don't think it can be done better than Clint, leaving aside whether or not one is a fan. Some guys who seemed to have more presence,--Robert Culp, Peter Breck, James Franciscus, Robert Conrad--didn't get the same breaks, or maybe make so many right moves (as the case may be).

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Like Psycho, The Music Man features a character more or less in flight from someplace else (Gary, Indiana?,--great song,--not Phoenix, Arizona);

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I heard an 80's rock song just the other day that used cities as rhymes -- Gary Indiana and Phoenix Arizona -- are both in it!

Gary, Indiana, the song, is a great one, wonderfully sung first by Robert Preston and then touchingly sung later by Little Ronny Howard with great joy and fearless lisp.

"Gary Indiana is the fair city's name, named for Albert Gary, of judiciary fame..."

I have driven through Gary, Indiana, with heart aflutter -- until I found it to be a grim industrial shell of its former self....

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in any event, itinerant and somewhat shady. Couldn't one say the same for Marion Crane, right down to her affair with Sam? Yet the story of The Music Man is near the opposite of Psycho, needless to say, with the "fleeing person" becoming the hero, not the victim.

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More good thoughts. Both films take up "the road" and how a person can transplant themselves to a new place and start over. But Marion never really makes it to her new home(Fairvale) and even if she had, it wouldn't be home for long. She's got that cash.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Could it be said that the couple of the mayor and his wife, as played by Paul Ford and Hermione Gingold, are The Music Man's Al Chambers and wife? No "in bed" or "periwinkle blue" from Miss Gingold, thankfully.

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Ha. Well, both movies postulate the "sexless companionship pact" that a middle-aged/older marriage used to be. The Chamberses actually seem like a more settled and mutually supportive couple; the Mayor is somewhat a slave to his domineering wife -- but Ford and Gingold get THEIR "credit march at the end" arm in arm and clearly still in love.

Bulletin: middle-aged love into elderly love no longer need be sexless, or lacking sensuality folks....never give up...

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Both films hint at the "salacious" (is this word even used anymore?),

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I forgot to mention "upthread" Preston's great number -- sung and danced "to" (not with) Buddy Hackett -- called "The Sadder But Wiser Girl for Me." The theme is that Preston's ladies man prefers "loose women" to "schoolmarm" types who want to marry him(the ultimate imprisonment-- "That type knows knots...no sailor ever knew!")

I love the line, "I smile...I grin...when the gal with the touch of sin walks in!"

Biographical note: my father commented on movies as much as my mother. And I know for a fact that he called the above song "his favorite" from The Music Man. His favorite from Damn Yankees(which is more salacious still) is Gwen Verdon's vamp brag "A Little Brains, A Little Talent."

Thanks, dad, for setting the pace. Though harassment has never been part of the approach to take towards women. Thanks, Harvey, for ruining consensual courtship.

And this: OK, so a salacious tone runs (innocently) through both Damn Yankees and The Music Man. Is that why I like those musicals so much? In contrast, The Sound of Music is about nuns and lots of singing kids. Though even in THAT one, the horrific evil of the Nazis grows slowly over the movie like a spreading stain. Perhaps NO musical is completely "innocent." You have to have some elements of conflict or tease...

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Both films ""have fun" with small towns and their "mentality". The Music Man does it with affection and respect, Psycho, more from "above", from a sophisticated attitude blessedly absent from The Music Man from start to finish

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I think what is interesting here is that while The Music Man gives us plenty of views of River City(all on the Warners backlot, I think)....Fairvale's small town is almost entirely a construct of our MINDS. The process shot main street briefly viewed outside the window of Sam's hardware store(a "world" from which first Lila, and then Arbogast, emerge.) And the tightly shot scene in front of the church. And that's it.

Whereas the screenplay for Psycho had one long scene of Sam walking Lila to her hotel down Main Street Fairvale as Arbogast watches them from a car rental office. And a high angle shot over the block where Sheriff Chambers lives.

In any event, we "see" small town Fairvale(with its unseen diner nearby and the moral qualms of the Chamberses about Mrs. Bates death) as clearly in our minds in Psycho as we REALLY see River City in The Music Man.

One off-shoot of Psycho that has always intrigued me is how the bedrock horrors of the Bates Motel unfurled not 15 miles from a small, plain, dull "normal" town. The residents of Fairvale had no IDEA of the depravity down the road from them. I would expect once it was found out...the whole town felt shame.

As for River City in The Music Man, it is laid out in a first song "Iowa Stubborn" as a hotbed of tough, skeptical, hard-to-get to know locals who don't take kindly to outsiders. It takes Harold Hill to "melt them down" a bit -- before taking them for their money.

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[–] telegonus (727) 7 years ago

Fairvale seldom gets outdoors, and as compared to River City, well, they're both small towns, sort of, but the former is more borderline, the kind of small western or midwestern ""burg" of the sort that is now literally vanishing from the map. There are, sadly, quite a few villages like that they scarcely have enough people left to rate a post office, a local government. Unless a mall comes along, or some corporation decides to relocate there, or a mill or factory opens (unlikely these days), there are a lot of places that seem unlikely to survive.

River City is, I gather, a small city (hence it's name), and places like that shall survive. Odd, if you think about it, but like It's A Wonderful Life's upstate New York Bedford Falls, The Music Man's Iowan River City is a fair-sized place; and yet both films are known for celebrating the virtues of small town America. Small they are not. As I recall River City it's really not Hicksville, USA. It Nowhereland to a coastal hipster type but home to a large number of people who like it there and have no desire to move. The downtown lights up for national holidays, for Christmas and Thanksgiving.


I wonder if Tod and Buzz ever visited a place like River City in the starkly existential Route 66 TV series. They drove all over the country, though usually the smaller places they visited felt underpopulated, often harboring the (near obligatory for the time) dark secrets. I have no doubt that such places exist, yet I also have no doubt that there were plenty of reasonably happy large towns and small cities of the River City sort. Cars and buses now, and somewhat more sophisticated in tone, they were there all the same.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Fairvale seldom gets outdoors,

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Nope. It remains fascinating to me(and we've discussed this before) how little Hitchcock shows us of Fairvale at all(as opposed to the real towns of Santa Rosa in Shadow of a Doubt and Bodega Bay in The Birds.) He probably didn't want to use too much of the familiar Universal streets and buildings already on view in TV shows and movies(you can see these buildings in Harvey of 10 years earlier). And it kept him under his small budget. And it allowed "Psycho" to play tight and claustrophobic -- we never really get too far away from the scary Bates Motel and House.

I would like to point out that William Castle DID give us some small town/small cities location work in his Psycho knockoffs, Homcidal(Ventura, the small town of Solvang -- also seen in "Sideways") and Strait-Jacket(never named, but I think Riverside or San Bernardino.) These are/were all small Southern California rural towns and cities and they DID give the Castle movies a bit more realism that Fairvale.

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and as compared to River City, well, they're both small towns, sort of, but the former is more borderline, the kind of small western or midwestern ""burg" of the sort that is now literally vanishing from the map.

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Psycho suggests that the vanishing will nail BOTH Norman and Sam eventually. They likely would have had to close their businesses. Norman could perhaps live in his house comfortably...but then he never gets to...

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

There are, sadly, quite a few villages like that they scarcely have enough people left to rate a post office, a local government. Unless a mall comes along, or some corporation decides to relocate there, or a mill or factory opens (unlikely these days), there are a lot of places that seem unlikely to survive.

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Yep. California Highway 99(the one Marion drives from California Charlies' to the Bates Motel) runs north/south through California's dusty Central Valley. For years through the 70s, Highway 99 ran THROUGH several small rural cities -- stop lights kept you briefly "stuck in the towns" until you could drive on.

Well, one by one, each town was bypassed by a "freeway go-around" to allow travelers to speed up or down California's central valley without ever having to stop IN a town. And those towns all shriveled, not to death, but to lesser existence.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

River City is, I gather, a small city (hence it's name), and places like that shall survive.

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I think there are a number of real River Citys in America. Or cities with that as a nickname: Sacramento, California sits at the convergence of TWO rivers, and hence is nicknamed "River City."

And perhaps that's it: having a river indicates at least the potential for shipping commerce, large or small. Or of (as in The Music Man), a railroad running through town.

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Odd, if you think about it, but like It's A Wonderful Life's upstate New York Bedford Falls, The Music Man's Iowan River City is a fair-sized place; and yet both films are known for celebrating the virtues of small town America. Small they are not. As I recall River City it's really not Hicksville, USA. It Nowhereland to a coastal hipster type but home to a large number of people who like it there and have no desire to move. The downtown lights up for national holidays, for Christmas and Thanksgiving.

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Yes. Usually these "small cities" did grow into something bigger and more formidable and hence all sorts of crowd holidays and celebrations were possible.

Here's a bit o' trivia, too: The small block of houses -- if not THE house -- where Shirley Jones lives in The Music Man (1962) is exactly where the insurance salesman protagonist of Damn Yankees(1958) lived. I recognize the block -- I've been on a tour of the Warners lot and seen it. I think in Damn Yankees, this was meant to be a real small city: Chevy Chase , Maryland, immediately adjacent to Washington DC.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I wonder if Tod and Buzz ever visited a place like River City in the starkly existential Route 66 TV series. They drove all over the country, though usually the smaller places they visited felt underpopulated, often harboring the (near obligatory for the time) dark secrets. I have no doubt that such places exist, yet I also have no doubt that there were plenty of reasonably happy large towns and small cities of the River City sort. Cars and buses now, and somewhat more sophisticated in tone, they were there all the same.

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I recall two series -- Route 66 and The Fugitive -- giving Americans glimpse of the many small towns and cities "between the coasts," though I know Route 66 travelled the country and shot on location and I think the Fugitive "fudged" various towns near Los Angeles and called them Indiana....

These shows gave us "the real Fairvale." "The real River City." But...circa the 60s, when declines had already begun and nostalgia wasn't too much "in the air."

I suppose its a "parlor game of the imagination" to imagine a more "open" Psycho. All these locales were scripted but not filmed: the front of the hotel where Marion leaves Sam(temporarily, she thinks); the front of the rental house she shares with Lila as she drives away with the loot; downtown Fairvale various times; the block and exterior house where Sheriff Chambers lives; the gas station where Arbogast makes his fatal phone call. Hitchcock could have given us this "atmosphere," hopefully at real locales such as where California Charlie's was filmed.

I suppose Psycho still would have been Psycho(the big murder and scare scenes all happen on soundstage sets) but...it would have felt different.

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[–] telegonus (727) 6 years ago

Yeah, between them Route 66 and The Fugitive helped prime time TV "get physical". Prior to their arrival on the scene both popular evening shows were either like "canned" theater, with the New York anthologies first, then the later west coast ones, less theatrical but still seldom action packed.

What action there was in prime time prior to this period was mostly violence, literally gunplay, mostly in westerns and cop-private eye shows; and also those ridiculous fights that just about every non-sitcom series had to have, from the uber-dramatic Route 66 to the now almost laughable fisticuffs happy The Law & Mr. Jones (played by James Whitmore).

The doctor shows helped cool things down a bit; and the set in World War II Combat! managed to blend action with drama, and it "moved around a lot", wasn't indoorsy. Neither was The Fugitive, which moved all over the place. There was even that surprise Canadian produced hit (which I loved), The Littlest Hobo, which ran in syndication for a few years.

Spy shows moved around more than cop and detective series did, with the color I Spy feeling at times as much like a travelogue as an espionage series. Then came Star Trek, which moved all over the galaxies. Mission: Impossible moved around a lot, too, if mostly on the back lot. These shows made the Hitchcock series as well as most anthologies look somewhat quaint. Even Perry Mason was coming to feel old hat before they pulled the plug in 1966.

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[–] telegonus (727) 7 years ago

Yes, and thanks, EC. Tardy here, not for bad reasons, fortunately. I hadn't thought of the rhyming/euphony of Phoenix, Arizona and Gary, Indiana. For some reason that song stands out in my memory of The Music Man. My favorite song from The Music Man is the wonderfully romantic Till There Was You. There used to be so many songs like that. Gentle love songs, all about the literally waking up to love, as if the singer was blind, in an eclipse, and then the sun began to shine again and he/she is bubbling with enthusiasm.

Broadway shows had many like it, rock and roll not so much. Now they're pretty much gone. Sheryl Crow sings (beautifully) about whether her prospective lover is "man enough to be my love". I like Sheryl, but egads! Sarah McLachlan sings "your love is better than chocolate", and then there's "where have all the cowboys gone?". And these are just off the top of my head from the last twenty/thirty years, give or take. Don't let's talk about hip-hop. It seems that the craftsmanship, the literal art of songwriting is vanishing. Even in the "teeth", as it were, of the Counterculture of the Sixties there were those Burt Bachrach and Jimmy Webb songs and others like them, about falling in love, going to San Jose, Galveston, wherever.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Yes, and thanks, EC. Tardy here, not for bad reasons, fortunately. I hadn't thought of the rhyming/euphony of Phoenix, Arizona and Gary, Indiana.

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Honestly, I heard them in a song (for the first time, and it was from the 80s) around the time we made these posts.

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For some reason that song stands out in my memory of The Music Man.

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Its a great one, another tongue-twister for Preston...and thus impressively done by Little Ronny Howard later.

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My favorite song from The Music Man is the wonderfully romantic Till There Was You. There used to be so many songs like that. Gentle love songs, all about the literally waking up to love, as if the singer was blind, in an eclipse, and then the sun began to shine again and he/she is bubbling with enthusiasm.

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It is with a modicum of shame that I note elsewhere on this thread I dissed the song as "too sweet and too sappy" or some such. I want to confront myself here. It is certainly a pretty song, and it comes as the culmination of the film's love story -- not only does Shirley Jones now love Preston, but he has found love instead of(evidently) just a small town girl in every port.

I've oftimes asked someone to listen to a song that I find just "beautiful and melodic" and -- it doesn't seem to have the same effect on them. So I feel bad -- "But, but...I think its BEAUTIFUL." In short, we all have our different tastes in tunes. I will say that "Til There Was You" seems to be the "survivor radio song" from The Music Man. Yes, the Beatles covered it, but also -- it is divorced from the syncopation/Sousa rhythms of all the rest of the songs. It stands by itself.


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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

You want to know a disliked musical that I think has at least three beautiful songs? "Finian's Rainbow" of 1968. "That Old Devil Moon"(sexy, too, as done by Petulia Clark with lover Don Francks -- unknown today); "How are Things in Glocca Mora?"(Clark, again) and "Look to the Rainbow"(sung by Clark, Fred Astaire, and everybody) -- very sweet, with a touch of '68 "hip"(Clark's phrasings.)

"Finian's Rainbow" was made on the cheap by Warners, and has "too much book"(too much talk), but as directed by young Francis Coppola and sung by Clark and others...I love those songs and how they are presented.

And I'll understand if others DON'T like 'em.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Don't let's talk about hip-hop. It seems that the craftsmanship, the literal art of songwriting is vanishing. Even in the "teeth", as it were, of the Counterculture of the Sixties there were those Burt Bachrach and Jimmy Webb songs and others like them, about falling in love, going to San Jose, Galveston, wherever.

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Its part of my "pre-geezer credential," but I've about given up on connecting to new pop/rock music...let alone hip hop or rap (and I used to like Motown from the Supremes sixties through the Issac Hayes seventies.)

I think what is interesting is that you can find melodic songs (of different types) in America in the forties, fifties(hey, there, Sinatra!), sixties(Bacharach , Webb), seventies (Taylor, King, Browne, Mitchell) and a ways into the eighties(Jackson, Madonna) and then....everything just sort of fell off the map and changed. I listen to some of the biggest hits of today and I keep wondering why they are so lacking in depth, structure, MEANING.

I'd say "they are selling like hotcakes, so I don't matter." But evidently, they aren't.

Oh, well. I have those other decades to listen to(on Sirius radio for one place -- they have a Sinatra channel AND a Beatles channel) and leave today to today.

Speaking of Jimmy Webb, here's a song of his that I love:

Wichita Lineman.

Glen Campbell got the hit of it in the late sixties -- and it seems to have outlasted his more famous hits By the Time I Get to Phoenix and Gentle on My Mind.

Then the soft and sultry female voices of the bossa-noved tinged group Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66 did it.

Decades later, James Taylor did it -- and won a Grammy for it.

Its a mournful, romantic , exquisite song, with a great refrain -- "And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time, and the Wichita Lineman...is still on the line...." .

And the best version is...ta da...Sergio Mendes and his sexy, soulful female singers.

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