Virginia O’Brien

  • Meet the People (1944)

    Meet the People (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2021) Don’t mind me, since I was watching Meet the People just for Virginia O’Brien — as her biography goes, she was playing in a local revue of the same name when she was discovered by MGM recruiters and thus got her movie contract. It must have been a return to roots of sorts when, a few years later, she was selected to play in the movie adaptation… even if I gather than the film and the revue don’t have much in common other than the title and a few numbers. O’Brien doesn’t have much of a role here, as the film is a musical comedy featuring Lucille Ball and Dick Powell: she does get a standout musical number (“Say That We’re Sweethearts Again,” a darkly funny song about the decidedly unfunny topic of homicidal spousal abuse — and she even sings the song without her usual deadpan tone) and assorted small comic bits, but she’s once more a supporting player. The rest of Meet the People is a very comfortable wartime musical, designed to both bolster the war effort and provide crowd-friendly entertainment. The plot has to do with a shipyard worker (Powell, before becoming a film noir fixture) becoming a Broadway writer, and getting involved in subsequent hijinks. It’s paced to allow for musical and comedy numbers, pulling the film closer to the 1930s Broadway revues as much as 1940s wartime comedies. It’s funny enough to be watchable, although the blatant propaganda is more interesting than inspiring nowadays (a good chunk of the first fifteen minutes is about characters selling war bonds). Unlike similar films of the era, there aren’t many top musical acts in Meet the People, although Ball is a perfectly charming presence as a showbiz star getting mixed up with blue-collar steelworkers. It probably doesn’t add up to much of a film for those who don’t have a specific affection for the era (or Ball, Powell and O’Brien), but it’s not unpleasant to watch, and it does have its highlights.

  • Sky Murder (1940)

    Sky Murder (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) My not-so-secret reason to watch Sky Murder was to get a glimpse of Virginia O’Brien’s screen debut, and I got exactly that: she shows up as part of a group of models and doesn’t get any discernible dialogue other than group screaming, but she’s there all right for the first half of the film. Of course, Virginia O’Brien is not the point of the film — Sky Murder is the third and final film in a series of mysteries featuring Walter Pidgeon as the then-popular literary hero Nick Carter. The plot has to do with subversive villains plotting attacks within the United States, and showing their hands too early by murdering someone aboard a charter plane in which Carter (and the models) are also present. After much screaming and another murder attempt, Carter gets on the case in a narrative that would feel familiar to any action movie fan: Chases, explosions, spies, high-stake gambits and villain unmasking are all part of the routine for Carter, and Pidgeon does carry the role with authority. It’s relatively easy to deduce that this is a film in the series by the way the protagonist moves around the screen, fully established and self-confident that audiences are watching. For a 72-minute film, Sky Murder features a steady series of sensational episodes, comic relief, romantic interests, perfidious antagonists (all of them caught by the police) and steadfast allies. It’s fun to watch, even though it won’t fool anyone into thinking that this was a high-class production. I’m now curious enough to seek out the other Carter movies — with any luck, TCM will run a marathon sometime soon.

  • Ship Ahoy (1942)

    Ship Ahoy (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) The combination of Eleanor Powell’s tap-dancing talents and Red Skelton’s rubber-faced comedy must have been an irresistible commercial prospect in the early 1940s, and Ship Ahoy mostly delivers on that promise, with a few extras on top. The best of those, to me, has to be Virginia O’Brien in a strong supporting comic role, her deadpan singing being limited to one sequence. (But what a sequence: A romantic ditty first performed straight by a young Frank Sinatra, reprised with heartfelt romantic humour by Skelton, and then mercilessly skewed by O’Brien’s usual flat singing and sarcastic interjections: “Wow!”)  Surprisingly enough, Skelton keeps a lid on his worst tendencies, even conforming to the demands of a romantic lead role (as a hypochondriac writer) rather than overindulge in comic showboating. The plot itself gets ingenious at times, with Powell’s character being duped into taking a piece of high technology out of the mainland states to the benefit of foreigners, being kidnapped, then alerting US agents by tap-dancing Morse code. One more highlight is a substantial performance by legendary big-band leader Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra as the source of many of the film’s musical numbers. While I’ll agree with those who point out that Ship Ahoy is a lesser effort than the second Powell/Skelton collaboration I Dood It (a Skelton catchphrase that you can hear as a line of dialogue here), there are enough bits and pieces here and there to make it great fun to watch—I never get enough of O’Brien anyway, and this film does let her do more than just a novelty song.

  • The Harvey Girls (1946)

    The Harvey Girls (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) I’m overdosing on Broadway musical comedies at the moment, so any musical comedy that heads out in a different direction is good news to me right now, and The Harvey Girls does offer a noticeable change of scenery—heading out west on a train, with a small crew of young girls ready to start working at the frontier Harvey House. Following the tangents of classic Hollywood movies is often as much fun as watching the movies themselves, and that’s how I ended up reading about the Harvey Houses (whose openings, as railway lines were extended throughout the 1880s, marked the arrival of modern comforts in the west) and the Harvey Girls (who often found husbands in frontier towns, further contributing to colonization). But little of that knowledge is essential to enjoying the song and dance numbers of the film. Judy Garland stars as a young woman seeking an engagement to a pen pal, with some support from notables such as Angela Lansbury (playing a dancehall madam), Cyd Charisse (in her first speaking role) and my own favourite Virginia O’Brien in what is best called a featured half-role. (The arc involving her character was cut midway through during the very long shooting due to her advancing pregnancy—but she gets “The Wild, Wild West,” a rather wonderful comic scene in which she sings in time with some blacksmithing and horse comfort.)  If you’ve been waiting for a film in which Garland, Charisse and O’Brien share a musical number—here it is, to the tune of “It’s a Great Big World” (even though Charisse is dubbed). The film’s biggest number is probably “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” (which ended up being a national hit song), with an honourable mention to Ray Bolger’s energetic tap-dancing during “Swing Your Partner Round and Round.”  The combination of favourite actors, memorable numbers and a more original than usual setting makes The Harvey Girl at least a second-tier musical and a solid hit for MGM’s Freed unit. It’s decently funny, historically interesting (as per my extracurricular reading), and romantic enough to wrap things up when the comic numbers end. I wonder what kind of career O’Brien would have had if she had been able to complete her character arc here—The Harvey Girls came toward the end of her brief filmography, with only a few more roles (including the female lead in the following year’s Merton of the Movies) before the end of her MGM contract and disappearance from the big screen.

  • Two Girls and a Sailor (1944)

    Two Girls and a Sailor (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) A surprising number of WW2 MGM musicals were made primarily to be shown to troops. As such, they were collages of artists in the studio’s stable, with a plot optimized to get as many numbers on-screen as possible without it seeming like a clip show. Two Girls and a Sailor borrows a plot lifted from The Broadway Melody and updates it with elements familiar to viewers of Hollywood Canteen and Stage Door Canteen. Here, we have two sisters headed to Broadway, but falling into all sorts of romantic and professional complications. But the script (nominated for an Academy Award, amazingly enough) is really a backdrop to the musical numbers once the film gets underway. Everyone will have their favourites – for myself, the number one performance remains Virginia O’Brien’s hilarious rendition of “Take it Easy,” taking her unflappable comic singing gimmick to another level by miming nearly falling asleep during her performance. Close seconds include a capture of Jimmy Durante singing his famous “Inka Dinka Doo,” Gracie Allen having fun with “Concerto for index Finger” (it’s exactly what it claims to be) and the superb Lena Horne crooning “Paper Doll” like only she could. Two Girls and a Sailor works better considered as an anthology film of the time’s entertainers coming in for a number or two. It’s fun, albeit best considered in bit pieces rather than a full course.

  • Hullabaloo (1940)

    Hullabaloo (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) I’ll admit it: I got suckered into watching Hullabaloo through a deceptive logline. It turns out that while “A radio star creates a national panic when he announces a Martian invasion” is part of the film’s plot, it’s nowhere near all of it. The film was also billed as a drama (probably thinking about the obvious inspiration of Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds broadcast), whereas it’s much closer to a musical comedy than anything else. Much of the show actually revolves around an eccentric radio personality (played with appropriate panache by Frank Morgan) desperately trying to stay relevant in a changing marketplace. He’s skilled at celebrity impressions (which are really the real people, dubbed over his voice), leading to an alien-invasion broadcast that’s a bit too successful for his own good—but there’s another half of the film to go at that point. The focus then shifts to his daughters from three different marriages, and we understand that he’s looking out for three alimony payments as his motivation… and that drives the rest of the film. It all ends suitably well, especially when his older daughter’s new beau takes up some of the most level-headed decisions. As usual, the fun of films like Hullabaloo is more in the historical details, small jokes and bit performances—I was really happy to see one of my favourite bit players for the era, Virginia O’Brien, have two small numbers singing her usual deadpan version of songs that had just been sung seriously by conventional performers. While I was deceived by Hullabaloo’s TV Guide description, I’m really happy with what I ended up watching in the end.

  • Lady Be Good (1941)

    Lady Be Good (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Mashing together the comedy of remarriage with the Broadway retrospective, Lady Be Good may feel familiar, but it does have its share of good moments. From the framing device (as a woman recounts events to the divorce judge) on to Eleanor Powell’s anthology-worthy final dance number (as spectacular to film as it was to see, as shown in That’s Entertainment III), it’s a typical musical of the period, blending gentle romance with musical numbers often blatantly presented as part of a show. While Powell is billed as the lead, her presence here is closer to a supporting role, as much of the screentime goes to a couple of writers/composers with a complicated relationship, slipping in and out of marriage with an ease only seen in show business movies. Still, don’t feel too bad for Powell, as her two numbers are by far the standout of Lady Be Good: In the first, she tap-dances alongside a trained dog taking part in the routine—by the time it ends with the dog jumping on her and them falling onto a bed giggling, we feel much of the same exhilaration at the success of the routine. Her other big number goes to the tune of “Fascinating Rhythm,” and first includes tap-dancing alongside a deep succession of pianos, followed by a more freewheeling number that ends with her being flipped over head over heels eight times before making as many spins on herself and her grinning at the camera—it’s absolutely flawless. Other good numbers include a great dance routine by the Berry Brothers, and a cute short deadpan number from Virginia O’Brien taking on “Your Words and My Music” as only she could. (MGM was still figuring out what to do with her in 1940-41—her best numbers would come later.) The story itself is fine, the leads (Robert Young and Ann Sothern) are adequate despite being blander than they should, and Red Skelton pops up in a supporting role. There’s also a cute montage in which the song climbs the charts and spins off many versions, giving us a glimpse into the nature of pop music at the beginning of the 1940s.

  • The Big Store (1941)

    The Big Store (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Nearly every Marx Brothers film is worth a few laughs, but there are still clearly superior Marx films and then the others. While The Big Store is not one of their worst, it doesn’t rank as a particularly good one. Made during their MGM years, it features three of the brothers wreaking havoc in and on a department store, as Groucho plays a detective asked to uncover a plot against the owners. Everyone plays their part, including Margaret Dumont as the rich older lady pursued by a gold-digging Groucho. As usual for Marx films of the period, the plot serves as a way to hang the sketches, and to provide a break from the comedy with easily skippable musical numbers that borrow a lot from operettas and feature the featureless Tony Martin and Virginia Grey.  (Virginia O’Brien, as usual, is more distinctive with a monotone take on a lullaby.) Harpo plays the harp, Chico does his wiseguy and Groucho plays with words. For fans, the two standout sequences of the film are a demonstration of increasingly wilder beds popping out of the walls, and a final chase through the entire store that finely upholds the Marx Brothers’s tradition of visually anarchic movie climaxes. As with all of their movies, it’s worth a look and possibly a box-set purchase. But it’s not one of their best, and the MGM structure clearly differentiates between the fun scenes and the dull ones in between.

  • Virginia O’Brien: MGM’s Deadpan Diva, Robert Strom

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    BearManor Media, 2018, 304 pages, C$45.00 hc, ISBN 978-1629332208

    One of the most charming afflictions of digging into Hollywood history is getting crushes on long-dead actresses, their fleeting likenesses captured in fuzzy black-and-white video and scratchy monaural audio. It’s almost tradition to look up their filmography and immediately get an overview of their careers and deaths. They may be gone, but their performances live on.

    Such is the case with Virginia O’Brien (1919–2001), a very distinctive performer with a short career: she appeared (sometimes briefly) in less than twenty movies, most of them from 1940 to 1947 while she was under contract to MGM. I first encountered her during a broadcast of Ziegfeld Follies (1945), a revue film in which the plot takes a distant second place to a series of musical and comedy numbers. After an introduction featuring no less than Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse and then Lucille Ball cracking a whip over chorus girls dressed as panthers (!), the first thing that struck me about the film was the next performance: An unexpectedly hilarious song in which a cute brunette with a bored air but wickedly funny gestures sang about “Bring on Those Wonderful Men” from atop an obviously fake horse. I immediately watched the number again, because I wasn’t prepared for it the first time.

    That, in a nutshell, was Virginia O’Brien: a beautiful woman with a gift for song and comedy who could instantly become the highlight of any film with a two-minute performance. As I deliberately tracked down her screen appearances, the pattern would repeat itself. She would appear in the middle of a film, slay the audience with a deadpan rendition of a comic song, and leave us wondering why the rest of the film couldn’t be as good as she was. Most of her movie credits are one-scene appearances, sometimes two scenes if the producers wanted a little bit more fizz. More rarely, she had more substantial roles: She played second fiddle to Eleanor Powell in Ship Ahoy, to Lucille Ball in Du Barry was a Lady and to Judy Garland in The Harvey Girls — that last being the best-known of the films she played in. Her only starring credit is Merton of the Movies, in which she (ably) plays the romantic lead to frequent co-star Red Skelton, doesn’t sing but gets a great romantic comedy scene in teaching him thirty-seven kinds of kisses. O’Brien’s voice and style were so distinctive that it happened more than once that I’d perk up and pay attention when movies playing in the background featured her. (For more appreciations, have a look at my “Virginia O’Brien” tag.)

    That, if you only paid attention to the movies capturing her performances, would be all you’d know about Virginia O’Brien. Beautiful face, tall-and-slim figure, lovely brunette curly hair, great comic instincts and a decent voice made even more remarkable by her deadpan style. But “deadpan” undersells the effectiveness of her comic style: the bored voice is enlivened by lively interjections, quick facial expressions (eyebrows raised, eyes rolling, grimaces) satirizing the song and, in her best performances such as Du Barry Was a Lady’s “Salome” or Two Girls and a Sailor’s “Take it Easy,” hand gestures and full-body comedy to an extent that you’re missing more than half the fun if you’re only listening. Most of her work is in bite-sized song performances ideally suited to a YouTube binge, but quickly going through her filmography in that way does remove the element of contrast from her performances — she was remarkable because she did things very differently from other featured players of the time.

    It’s wonderful to realize that thanks to the Internet and film institutions such as Turner Classic Movies, people can still appreciate someone born a hundred years earlier, especially one who never achieved superstardom. There is no fan club for O’Brien, but there are plenty of fan pages. If you wanted more, your options were limited until 2017, when Robert Strom’s full-length authorized biography Virginia O’Brien: MGM’s Deadpan Diva became available for purchase. I couldn’t help myself — I had to learn more than the cursory biographies available online and so got myself a hardcover version of the book.

    As a piece of work celebrating O’Brien, Strom’s book has the essentials: A birth-to-death narrative, pages of sources, excerpts from contemporary articles, a stunning number of pictures, as well as recollections from her daughter and late-life acquaintances. If you’re looking to expand your knowledge of O’Brien’s life, you have plenty of material here.

    Unfortunately, you’re going to have to work and suffer for it because MGM’s Deadpan Diva is a frustrating biography. The issues are numerous, and they can be found at all levels, from the words to the structure.

    BearManor is a small publisher with a large catalogue, but based on this book I’m not sure that they have the resources to properly do justice to what they publish. Typos, errant spacing and typography errors abound. One of them is even on the back cover, failing to distinguish between two titles from the same author; some of them interrupt the flow of reading (such as when a piece of narrative is formatted as a quote on page 116); and there’s one oddly misplaced more on page 188 that makes me suspect that the editor’s notes were not completely removed from the printed manuscript. Such errors fall squarely in the realm of the publisher more than the author, but they don’t inspire confidence in the rest of the work.

    But the problems get worse when you get to the sentence-by-sentence writing of the book, which is straightforward at best, irritating at worst and clumsy most of the time. Ambiguous syntax abounds, failing to distinguish between O’Brien and other people. Many sentences have to be re-read to be understood. Crucial connective passages are missing, making the narrative feel like sentences simply strung together. The narrative flow is frequently absent, and Strom can’t always tell a story effectively due to a lack of structure in his paragraphs. Did anyone even try to improve the manuscript? Such editing errors are a disservice to the author: Awkward sentences without context make Strom sound dumber than he is (Such as the bit on page 225 where he praises Wikipedia at the expense of IMDB’s completeness… what?)

    Nearly every page has an issue. Some of them are obscure: the one French quote in the notes is garbled beyond full understanding, which probably won’t bother most of the book’s audience. But some of them are more spectacular than others, such as the dumb mistakes of repeating the same paragraph almost verbatim on successive pages (see “…articles began to appear about Virginia’s return to movies…” on pages 222 and 223). It’s enough to make anyone wonder if BearManor simply reprinted the first draft sent by the author. Any good editor would have done something to improve the result — and if one did, I shudder at the thought of what the initial draft looked like.

    But all of this pales in comparison to the biography’s more substantive failings. While I believe the Strom has assembled almost everything ever published or broadcast about O’Brien (most likely through having access to her personal archives), he hasn’t synthesized or analyzed much. Much of MGM’s Deadpan Diva reads like undigested press clippings, going from one article summary to another in an attempt to tell a life through media echoes of public appearances. The trivialities and repetitions are exasperating, especially in tangents that contribute nearly nothing to O’Brien’s biography nor the context in which she worked. Strom too infrequently cares to comment on the material he collects, leaving readers to wonder what’s important, what’s false and what’s normal.

    It doesn’t help that the chronology of the book seems focused on media appearances rather than O’Brien’s life. Some fundamental questions are addressed late in the book, as O’Brien reflects on her past career in interviews and Strom summarizes her recollections — but the best place for that information would have been earlier in the narrative, informing our understanding of O’Brien’s state of mind in the thick of her brush with stardom. As it is, Strom has produced a biography that never gets in O’Brien’s head and seems content to look at it from the outside, a hands-off approach that remains intensely frustrating throughout.

    Biographies don’t have to be like that. By happenstance, I ended up reading Scott Eyman’s superb Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise in parallel with Virginia O’Brien: MGM’s Deadpan Diva, alternating chapters from both books and… well, Eyman isn’t known as one of the best biographers of classic Hollywood for no reason. Eyman succeeds everywhere Strom falters: A Brilliant Disguise is a joy to read, dramatizes Grant’s life from the available documentation, does not spare its subject from criticism and actually gets into a very complicated man’s head in a way that answers troublesome questions. Coming back to MGM’s Deadpan Diva after that felt like having to do homework, trying to assemble a coherent picture of O’Brien from the breadcrumbs collected by Strom.

    It doesn’t help that Strom appears to be more of an admirer than an honest biographer. MGM’s Deadpan Diva is a hagiography. He doesn’t want to question his subject. He doesn’t even seem interested in presenting a full picture. One of the rare moments where his text becomes animated is in criticizing a negative but provocative review of O’Brien’s tribute show that more even-handed biographers may have used to explore her late career. Strom refuses to explore O’Brien’s life beyond lavish praise at everything she did and so I’m left at the end of his book with more questions than at the beginning. Even from the outline of her life, I want to ask — why the three marriages? How did she feel when at the mercy of the studio? What was it to be on set in MGM’s legendary backlot? Did she resent Judy Garland’s breakdown affecting the end of her MGM contract? (O’Brien may have had a very different career if Garland’s personal issues hadn’t delayed the filming The Harvey Girls beyond the date at which O’Brien’s risky first pregnancy required cutting down her role.)  Was her post-1947 life really entirely dedicated to recapturing her glory days at MGM, or is this just the impression left from Strom’s media-centric research? How did she feel after the end of her Hollywood experience, balancing family life with memories of quasi-stardom? How was Virginia O’Brien away from the stage? Strom barely answers, sometimes with a mere unquestioned line or two. Even later-life highlights, such as being designated honorary mayor of Wrightwood, CA, are barely covered. So many questions, not all of them comfortable.

    I can understand the reason behind some of these choices. 1940s Hollywood was a long time ago from an oral history perspective. Unlike other Hollywood superstars, O’Brien did not leave much in terms of interviews, writings, a lengthy body of work or critical commentary about her. You can’t just ring up Red Skelton and ask what he thought of her off-camera. The official early record is tainted by the work of MGM publicists, and later record filtered through people who wanted to be nice to her. Even being able to interview her daughter and a few other people who knew her in the 1980s (a point at which Strom’s portrait finally becomes less media-centric) is not like having access to contemporary recollections from third parties or private diaries —although I gather from the acknowledgements that Strom had access to O’Brien’s personal memorabilia and worked closely with her daughter. Strom took on a tough assignment, and at times I felt that getting rid of the book’s trivial minutia would probably not leave a viable work to publish.

    But there are ways around some of that, and you can see in the book a few ways in which it could have been improved. A structure that doesn’t clumsily begin with a dull exposition of what happened in the world in 1919 would have helped — considering that Strom repeats a few versions of O’Brien’s origin story (she discovered her gift for comedy when she was stage-struck in front of an audience, started singing with a stone-cold lack of facial expression, and got such a great reaction that she made that her shtick.), all of this could have been distilled in an opening chapter dramatizing her Big Moment.

    Strom also largely fails at the art of providing context. There’s a reason why “The Life and Times of X” have become such a cliché biography subtitle: understanding a person is only possible in understanding what was normal and what was not about them and their environment. There was an ideal opportunity to explore the life of a minor studio contract player through O’Brien. Glimpses of this appear in MGM’s Deadpan Diva, as Strom assembles the publicity material required of the studio’s marketing machine and hints at what was expected from those under contract. But there’s very little context. Even in introducing the movies in which O’Brien plays, Strom barely provides any descriptions of those films that would make it easier to understand O’Brien’s place in Hollywood. In fact, by highlighting O’Brien at the expense of the system of which she was a part, Strom gives a misleading impression that does a disservice to her accomplishments. (Again: the perils of a fannish biography.) I read more intriguing takes on O’Brien from quick blog posts commenting her performances without the depth of media clippings and friendly recollections that Strom assembled. What a missed opportunity — Superstar biographies are common, but this was a chance to do something more interesting about a regular player and, in doing so, explore the studio system from a different perspective.

    After so many paragraphs eviscerating the failings of MGM’s Deadpan Diva, you could be forgiven for thinking that I hate it… but I don’t. Oh, I was frequently annoyed, frustrated and even exasperated throughout the entire book, but I still think that its very existence is wonderful. I like that, even with its numerous problems, there’s an entire book dedicated to a minor MGM star born more than a hundred years ago.

    I certainly have issues with the way it’s presented, but I actually learned quite a bit from MGM’s Deadpan Diva: One particularity that short profiles of O’Brien undersell is how she was a rare Los Angelino to make it to the movies: She didn’t come to Hollywood from other areas of the United States seeking fame and fortune, but grew up around the city’s best-known industry and arguably fell into it by happenstance. Her father was a well-known policeman, her aunt (momentarily) married into the movie business and she was discovered by MGM because she was playing at a theatrical venue in town. Even left to my own conclusions, the repetitious detailing of O’Brien’s performances for the troops throughout World War II and radio appearances adds an intriguing dimension as something you can’t really know from the movies themselves. It’s amazing that we get a good chunk of the book dedicated to what happened to her after the cameras stopped rolling for the big screen, as she goes on to capitalize on her past fame by performing in small cabaret venues and for tribute shows with other aging celebrities. As someone with a deepening understanding of classic Hollywood history, I got quite a thrill learning that she was friends with Groucho Marx, met fellow-deadpanner Buster Keaton at least once (the book showcases a photo of him sitting on her) and was photographed next to other favourite MGM players such as Ann Miller and Cyd Charisse in their later years. Speaking of which — the book probably has the ultimate collection of Virginia O’Brien pictures ever assembled.

    In other words, I really enjoyed MGM’s Deadpan Diva even despite its hair-pulling problems. I’m actually proud to own the book — There probably aren’t that many printed copies out there, and the subject matter is so specific that the book can become a conversation piece by itself. I’d love to get the book autographed if I could. I may have a lengthy list of things that I wish Strom had done better, but the effort required to get all of that information must have been substantial, and I’m indescribably glad that someone did it. The flip-side of that is that you have to be a Virginia O’Brien fan before cracking open the book — Unlike other biographies, MGM’s Deadpan Diva presumes that you already love her and doesn’t make much of an effort to explain why she warrants your attention. It’s a biography for fans with the huge proviso that this entails, but if you’re hungering for more about O’Brien, steel yourself for bad writing and get the book anyway: it has everything that’s possible to dig up about her, even if there’s still quite a bit of assembly required.

  • Merton of the Movies (1947)

    Merton of the Movies (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) My primary interest in watching Merton of the Movies was to find out if this remake of the 1932 film Make Me a Star (itself one of many adaptations of Harry Leon Wilson’s novel Merton of the Movies) was any better than the rather disappointing original. That objective took a backseat the moment I saw Virginia O’Brien’s name appear on-screen: O’Brien has become a favourite of mine following a few striking musical/comedy supporting numbers, and one of the happy surprises of Merton of the Movies is how she gets a rare leading role: no singing, no dancing, just looking gorgeous and acting as a foil for Red Skelton. While I’m far from having seen all of Skelton’s movies, I’m struck by how many of them are remakes of earlier (often silent) movies – something facilitated by his friendship with Buster Keaton. This being said, I’m not complaining because Merton of the Movies fixes nearly every single complaint I had about Make Me a Star: the script improves nearly every aspect of the story from the finale to the budding romance, the pacing is much better, Skelton’s take on the character is immensely more likable, and O’Brien is a more distinctive performer. Most of the original’s strengths in taking us back to the silent film comedy era are also preserved. The upgrade of the character alone is worth the remake—while the original sad-sack protagonist was too dumb to live, Skelton plays his character as situationally dim-witted, and occasionally shows flashes of cleverness. O’Brien gets a chance to prove what she could do outside her usual comedy singing routines, and she nails it—if nothing else, her take on the “thirty kinds of kisses” scene is just wonderful. I’m not going to maintain that Merton of the Movies is a great movie: it’s obscure even in Skelton’s biography and the version shown on TCM is one of the poorest transfers I recall seeing on the channel. But it’s good fun; it’s a redemption act for the previous film and it showcases O’Brien as more than a novelty act.

  • Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)

    Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) Nominally a biopic about the life of composer Jerome Kern, Till the Clouds Roll By is perhaps best seen as an anthology showcase for MGM’s roster of musical talents. The story itself is perfunctory, largely fictional, and revolves around Kern’s best-remembered Show Boat. (Amusingly enough, Till the Clouds Roll By begins with a twenty-minute recreation of several of Show Boat’s set-pieces, years before MGM’s official adaptation—which also featured Kathryn Grayson in the same role.) There’s some additional resonance knowing that Kern died during filming—it’s too bad that his Hollywood years were scarcely covered here, the climax of the fictionalized story having occurred earlier. But that overall plot quickly gets forgiven and trivialized when you get down to the meat of the film, which is a series of nearly thirty musical numbers (some of them very short) featuring some very well-known names and fan favourites. The film gets off to a very strong start during its Show Boat sequence with performances by Kathryn Grayson, the always-funny Virginia O’Brien and a spellbinding Lena Horne. Later highlights include a surprisingly saucy Angela Lansbury, Dinah Shore, a trio of numbers by Judy Garland, Lucille Bremer with Van Johnson, a very short but still impressive dance number with Cyd Charisse, and a final rendition of “Ol’ Man River” by none other than a young Frank Sinatra. When you have such a strong cast of performers, the plot itself becomes inconsequential. While Till the Clouds Roll By doesn’t manage to create the alchemy required to become a great movie musical, it’s a strong collection of material and performers, and it will be best appreciated by those with some understanding (and appreciation) for the roster of mid-1940s MGM musical performers. [December 2021: Now that I’ve seen the 1951 version of Show Boat and read about its production, Till the Clouds Roll By becomes a precious document: a glimpse into an alternate reality where Lena Horne would have played the part that was so well suited to her rather than Ava Gardner.]

  • Du Barry was a Lady (1943)

    Du Barry was a Lady (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2020) Like many other hobbies, movie-watching gets more rewarding the more you put into it. If you’re the kind of person who watches a film a year, then go ahead and enjoy the film on its own merits. But if you’re the kind of cinephile who enjoys tracking down filmographies, sub-genres and how movies exist in context, then a film can become far more than the sum of its parts. While watching Du Barry Was a Lady, for instance, I was struck by how it brings together many people that I liked elsewhere. It has one of Gene Kelly’s earliest roles, for instance—and even at this early stage, he gets play the likable cad, singing and dancing even if it’s not (yet) to his own cinematography. It has one of Lucille Ball’s foremost movie roles, where she gets to be strikingly beautiful and funny. It has Red Skelton, semi-restrained from his usual comic tics and funnier for it. It has one of my favourite supporting actresses of the era, Virginia O’Brien, lovely and hilarious as she sings in her usual deadpan style. (“Salome” has funny lyrics, but half of the song’s many laughs come from O’Brien’s side glances, facial expressions and hand movements.) It has Zero Mostel playing small-time hustler, Tommy Dorsey as (what else?) a band leader and an entire song dedicated to Vargas pin-ups girls (Happily, Miss September is the best). Du Barry was a Lady is also, perhaps more significantly, one of Arthur Freed’s early MGM musicals and you can see bits and pieces of it as inspiration for the tone and content of his later movies. Compared to this thick web of associations and context, it does feel as if the film itself is not as good as its components. Much of the first half is a nightclub comedy (giving generous time to the on-stage acts) paying particular attention to Ball, Kelly and O’Brien, while the second loosens up by going back to Louis XV-era France for some sillier comedy focused on Skelton. It’s not bad, but the film is more interesting for its numbers and showcases than by itself—as mentioned before, “Salome” is worthy of an anthology reel, and it’s a treat to see Ball, Kelly and Mostel in early roles. I liked Du Barry was a Lady a lot, but I suspect that I’m getting a lot more out of it by virtue of having seen, in rapid succession, many of the other movies with which it shares a web of associations.

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, November 2021) What I like about revisiting classic Hollywood films is that even a few months can mean a world of difference in how you approach a film knowing more about its stars and their careers. You can watch Du Barry was a Lady (as I did the first time) without knowing much about its players and still appreciate the film on its own terms. But come back to it with a greater appreciation for Red Skelton, Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, Virginia O’Brien, Zero Mostel and Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, and the film becomes nothing short of a quasi-miraculous union of distinctive talents. Skelton delivers another of his usual performances here, and stays (mostly) under control for the first half of the film. Ball was on the upswing at the time, distinguishing herself as a dependable comic performer – but this was the film (her first as an MGM star) that changed her hair colour to red… a distinction she’d keep the rest of her career. Kelly was barely known at the time, but here gets a terrific solo dance number that clearly wowed others enough to give him bigger roles as a dancer. Gorgeous O’Brien gets an anthology number in “Salome” (sung deadpan, but complete with hilarious acting) as well as a decent supporting role. Zero Mostel makes his big-screen debut here, whereas Tommy Dorsey (aka D’Orsay in the French Royalty sequences) and his orchestra get a welcome showcase. Finally, who can resist the rather wonderful “I Love an Esquire Girl” featuring no less than twelve terrific Vargas girls? (Miss September being my favourite, even the second time around.)  The film itself is uneven: the first present-day half is not bad, but the second historical one is rather dull. But it’s by bringing together several talented performers that Du Barry Was a Lady finds its true calling. It’s not a completely satisfying film, but it’s well worth another look, possibly fast-forwarding from one great sequence to another.

  • Ziegfeld Follies (1945)

    Ziegfeld Follies (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2019) For fans of golden-age Hollywood musicals, it’s easy to get excited about Ziegfeld Follies from the get-go, as the names pile up the opening credits: Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Cyd Charisse, Lena Horne, Lucille Ball in the same movie? Well, yes, but don’t expect a full narrative: As the opening number makes clear (featuring William Powell reprising his titular role in the Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld, looking down from paradise and wishing he could assemble another revue), this is a series of unconnected musical numbers and comic sketches featuring some of the era’s biggest stars. First number “Here’s to the Girls/Bring on the Wonderful Men” gets going with a bang, with Fred Astaire introducing Cyd Charisse leading to Lucille Ball in full grandiose Ziegfeld choreography, with a cute and very funny spoof from the deadpan Virginia O’Brien to wrap it up. The comedy numbers that follow have nearly all aged poorly—the comic style is broad, repetitive and laid on far too thick. The exception is the half-comedy, half-musical number “The Great Lady Has an Interview” in which a great-looking Judy Garland sings and charms her way through a satire of interviews—the number concludes with an extended comedy/dance/song tour de force from Garland. Still, there’s a lot more: Astaire features in three other numbers in the film, all of them quite different. “This Heart of Mine” starts on a conventional note with Astaire as a gentleman thief sneaking his way in a jewelry-heavy ball, where he dances with Lucille Bremer—but then the floor under them becomes a pair of treadmills and then a giant turntable and we see Astaire’s gift for innovative dance choreography take flight, leading to a cute conclusion. “Limehouse Blues” is something different, billed as a “dramatic pantomime” with a tragic storyline that takes Astaire (in yellowface, alas) through a vividly imagined Asian-inspired dance. But the kicker is “The Babbitt and The Bromide,” the sole golden-era joint performance by Astaire and Gene Kelly: the number plays up both the sincere admiration and the playful audience-imposed rivalry between the two screen legends. It’s everything such a joint performance between the two should be. For fans of more classical dancing/singing numbers, Esther Williams, Lena Horne and Kathryn Grayson all get standard numbers showing both their beauty and talent. A few other numbers and sketches round the film, perhaps the only other highlight being a half-funny comic sketch featuring Fanny Brice (one of Ziegfeld’s original 1910s girls) with Hume Cronyn (an actor still remembered in the 2010s for roles in 1980s films)—an astonishing duo. Disconnected, uneven but very impressive at times, Ziegfeld Follies is a real treat for golden Hollywood musical fans.