Monthly Archives: June 2016

  • Stage Door

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gregory La Cava (1937)

    Brilliant entertainment.  Based on a play by George S Kaufman and Edna Ferber (who also wrote – inter alia – Showboat and Giant), Stage Door is set mainly in the Footlights Club, a New York boarding house for girls aspiring to theatrical fame and fortune – and one or two older women who never achieved it.   The boarders’ wisecracks come thick and fast – both the quality of the writing (the adaptation is by Morrie Ryskind and Anthony Veiller) and the delivery of the lines are elating.  Gregory La Cava does a great job of orchestrating the performances.  The cast is theatrical in the best way – they’re a company – but the rhythms of the girls’ combative chatter are beautifully free and true.  Orchestration really is the operative word here:  La Cava understands the importance of creating a variety of timbre and tempos, of having some performers register by coming in under the more obvious soloists.   The Depression setting increases the odds against the girls making it and their fear of failure gives the competitive wit an edge:  verbal attack is the girls’ best (only) means of defence.

    It’s obvious from an early stage, however, that the principal characters at least are going to have to learn lessons that give them depth of a more conventional (and less convincing) kind.  It’s soon clear too that that process will centre on the person of Kay Hamilton, the dedicated, intensely desperate young actress struggling to pay the rent and whose whole life is set on the lead in ‘Enchanted April’, which the powerful, philandering Broadway producer Anthony Powell is about to stage.   The climax of Stage Door arrives when Kay, who doesn’t get the part, commits suicide:  she jumps from an upstairs window in the boarding house as the curtain is about to go up on the first night of ‘Enchanted April’.   The starring role is being played instead by Terry Randall, the daughter of a vastly rich industrialist, who likes the idea of being an actress (as an act of rebellion) but who has no stage experience at all.   Terry gets the lead thanks to her father’s financing the production.  He does so with a view to exposing his daughter’s ambitions as a foolish fantasy and killing her theatrical pretensions as quickly as possible.  Terry is just as hopeless as her father expects – until she learns of Kay’s suicide.  The traumatic news is transforming.  It not only humanises Terry; it turns her – sur le champ – into an emotionally passionate and expressive performer.   This is not a one-night-only transformation but the beginning of a long run and, we assume, a stellar stage career.

    Stage Door slides nervelessly between comedy and tragedy – a movement epitomised by the aging actress Catherine Luther.  Most of the time, Catherine is a figure of fun, deploring the younger generation’s declining theatrical standards, latching onto Terry’s pretentious yatter about Shakespeare in order to indulge her own fragile vanity (Catherine’s yellowed newspaper clippings, for a performance she gave in Twelfth Night, are conveniently to hand).  But when Terry, shocked by the news of Kay’s death, panics in her dressing room and says she can’t go on, Catherine’s insistence that the show must is presented without irony.  You don’t remotely believe the serious side of Stage Door but, as I was watching it, I didn’t mind at all, assuming that the director and the writers were well aware of and amused by the falsity of their sudden change of tone.   Reading the BFI programme note afterwards, I was less sure that this was true of the authors of the original play.  Edna Ferber, at any rate, seems to have intended a straight-faced statement about the grind and agony of theatre life.   But the film soon shakes off its darker mood – not least because Terry’s success (and her father’s failure) comes across as a comic payoff.

    The superlative cast is headed by Katharine Hepburn as Terry and Ginger Rogers as her sharp-tongued, illusionless room-mate Jean Maitland.  The film was made around the time Hepburn was reckoned ‘box office poison’.  You can see why audiences disliked her high-strung hauteur – they must have accepted her in this role because they saw those qualities in Hepburn being lampooned (and paid for).  Ginger Rogers is highly convincing as a working girl, wonderfully natural and witty:  the opening verbal sparring between her and Hepburn is electric, with neither Terry/Hepburn nor Jean/Rogers giving an inch.  When Jean Maitland’s in a chorus line, you want Ginger Rogers to show why she wouldn’t stay in one for long.  She dances enough for you to be able to enjoy it but not enough to stop your feeling tantalised.

    The supporting players include Eve Arden (particularly distinctive as a dry, drawling, cat-owning boarder), Constance Collier (charming as Catherine Luther), Ann Miller and Lucille Ball.   Andrea Leeds is Kay Hamilton and Phyllis Kennedy is the Footlight Club’s very bad cook.  Terry Randall is the newcomer there at the start; at the end another hopeful arrives to lodge there.  She’s no Katharine Hepburn but her lack of obvious charisma seems like an odd foreshadowing of the charmlessly scheming Eve Harrington hanging round the stage door for Margo Channing in All About Eve.   The men’s roles are relatively thin but very well played by, among others, Adolphe Menjou (Anthony Powell), Franklin Pangborn (his droll butler) and Jack Carson.  The cat’s good too.   Among the names on the credits are two of Hollywood’s most enduringly exotic:  the producer was Pandro S Berman and the art director Van Nest Polglase.

    27 March 2011

  • The Feminine Touch

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Pat Jackson (1956)

    For much of its ninety-minutes, the title seems inappropriately Woman’s Weekly-ish for this Ealing non-comedy, which is at pains to promote nursing as a noble calling but a tough life.  The five student nurses of the story are based at St Augustine’s, a fictional NHS hospital in London (the filming locations included Guy’s Hospital), but the source of Iain McCormick’s screenplay is North American.  The setting of the novel A Lamp is Heavy – by Sheila Mackay Russell, a Canadian former nurse – is a US hospital.   The solemn, virtuous tone of the book’s title often suits Pat Jackson’s film, in spite of its regulation dose of awkward hearty humour, yet The Feminine Touch turns out to be well enough named.  It’s emphasised early on that, when a nurse marries, she leaves the profession. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that the hospital matron (Diana Wynyard), in her opening address to the student nurses, has something of the mother superior about her.  But the beautiful, conscientious heroine Susan (Belinda Lee) has taken a shine to Dr Jim Alcott (George Baker) even before she’s got through the hospital entrance and the main supporting character, Pat (Delphi Lawrence), is self-confident and a bit flighty.   At the climax to the film, Matron is about to dismiss Pat for burning the candle at both ends and Susan for her part in a deception to try and protect Pat.  Then Pat announces that she got married a few weeks previously.  (You’re meant not to ask why she didn’t mention this before.)  This is enough to remind Matron of her own youth, when she let her nursing career take precedence over the man she loved – a decision she has always regretted.   Susan, who was about to make the reverse decision, rushes out to tell Jim that she’ll renounce her vocation and marry him after all.

    Although this ending undermines what at first seemed to be distinctive about The Feminine Touch, it comes as no surprise.   The film has by this stage developed a pattern of taking on a difficult issue and resolving it conventionally and evasively.  Jessie (Mandy Miller), an orphan girl with a serious heart condition, is angry with God because her friend Tommy has a brain tumour and may die.  Mandy Miller gets some real force into the girl’s outrage and agitation; George Baker gives Dr Alcott, a father figure to Jessie, credibly divided feelings.  But Tommy comes back from the operating theatre alive and Alcott tells Jessie the young boy is ‘going to be all right’.  Her unhappiness dissolves immediately.  Susan’s quick thinking saves an elderly male patient.  Her sympathetic ear gives a new lease of life to a woman (Dorothy Alison) who’s brought into hospital having tried to kill herself.  (Even so, this character is pessimistically described in the cast list as ‘The suicide’.)   This series of retreats may have made the picture more palatable to audiences in 1956 but it weakens it in long retrospect.  Like much British cinema of the period, its potential interest at this distance in time is as an expression of social history.  That interest is lessened in this case because Pat Jackson and Iain McCormick are chiefly concerned with things turning out right.

    Belinda Lee wasn’t much of an actress but she’s surprisingly engaging as Susan and George Baker is a good foil to her.  Delphi Lawrence is too easily sophisticated as Pat – she makes her invulnerable.  The amusing actor who plays the medic Pat marries after a whirlwind romance is called Christopher Rhodes and his IMDB biography is certainly unusual[1].  The other student nurses are Adrienne Corri (garrulous Oirish Maureen), Barbara Archer (chipper Cockney Liz) and Henryetta Winters (ex-Roedean Ann).  Diana Wynyard shows her class:  she plays Matron intelligently and sometimes persuasively (no small achievement).  St Augustine’s Hospital has a very small staff but Richard Leech appears briefly as a casualty doctor.   Pat Jackson’s direction of the actors’ movement, particularly in cramped interiors, is very awkward.

    1 June 2016

    [1] ‘Sir Christopher Rhodes, 3rd baronet was the only son of Sir John Rhodes DSO, 2nd baronet and former chairman of Thomas Rhodes Ltd, cotton spinners and manufacturers. Educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford.  He succeeded his father to the [baronetcy] in 1955. He served in the Essex regiment during the Second World War and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel winning the Croix de Guerre and the United States Legion Of Merit.  He was 38 years old when he began his film career and specialised in well-bred military types for which he was ideally suited.  Married twice, he died aged 50 at his Blakeney, Norfolk home.’

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