Tag Archives: cinema

Marilyn Monroe (and Me)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I was looking through my old scrapbook a while ago. I scanned some pages for my blog post Scrapbook Memories and quite a few of them featured Marilyn Monroe. I put my scrapbooks together years ago and even though I stopped making them in my late teens or early twenties, I continued collecting cuttings from newspapers and magazines, as well as books and videos all on the same subject:  Marilyn Monroe.

What attracted me to the persona of Marilyn Monroe? Well, apart from her obvious charms as a very attractive lady it’s her death that has always interested me. I’m a sucker for a modern mystery whether it’s the assassination of JFK, the disappearance of Amelia Aerhart or Marilyn’s own strange death. The obvious solution is that Marilyn committed suicide. She had tried suicide quite a few times before and various people along the years have saved her from death, including her acting coach Natasha Lytess and her third husband playwright Arthur Miller. Suicide is the obvious answer to her death but personally, I’m not so sure.

Anyway, getting back to my personal interest in Marilyn, I’m pretty certain the first book about her was what has come to be thought of the definitive biography, the one by Fred Laurence Guiles. Guiles published his book in 1969 and chronicled Marilyn’s life as Norma Jeane Mortensen and then Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn Monroe

Norma Jeane Mortensen was born on June 1st, 1926. She had a troubled upbringing. Her mother was mentally unstable and was in and out of various institutions leaving young Norma to be taken into care. On one occasion in her late teens Norma Jeane was living with a friend of her mother’s but this friend was moving away and rather than send Norma back into a home an idea came about which seems a little mad in retrospect. The idea was for Norma to get married to a local boy, Jim Dougherty. The marriage went ahead only eighteen days after Norma’s sixteenth birthday.

When war came to the USA in 1941, Jim joined the navy. Norma was working in a war factory when an army photographer called David Conover came round looking for a photo article for a magazine. He asked Norma to pose for him and found that she had a natural affinity with the camera. She began a career in modelling which led her to bit parts in films, then a contract with 20th Century Fox and later to film stardom.

In 1946 she divorced Jim Dougherty and Fox offered her a seven-year optional contract. She changed her name to Marilyn Monroe and began her film career. All didn’t go so smoothly at first. She was dropped from her contract but she did meet an influential Hollywood agent named Johnny Hyde.

I’ve got to say that despite her best efforts I’m not sure my interest in Marilyn had a lot to do with her acting skills as in her early days she wasn’t a great actress. What she did have was looks, looks that could turn the heads of a great deal of men. One of her early film roles came about really because of her growing reputation as a model. She was cast in the last of the Marx Brothers’ films Love Happy and had one scene in which she tells Groucho that “some men are following me.” Groucho explains more in the following video.

That of course was nothing more than a walk on part but she was asked to go on a nationwide tour in the USA promoting the film. Marilyn was determined to get on and be a great actress. She was always having acting lessons, in fact she joined the famous New York Actors Studio. The studio had been founded by theatre and film director Elia Kazan and one of the famous acting coaches there was Lee Strasberg. Both Kazan and Strasberg were interested in ‘the method’, a style of acting initiated by the Russian actor Stanislavsky which involved the actor using his own experience and memories to ‘become’ the role rather than just acting a role. James Dean and Marlon Brando were two of the more famous students of the Actors Studio.

Another of my books about Marilyn was the famous biography by Norman Mailer. Mailer actually used Fred Guiles’ book as the basis of his biography but added his own insight into Marilyn’s story as well as a huge collection of photographs. Mailer was originally hired to write an introduction to what was originally intended to be just a photo album but he was so taken by the subject matter, he wrote more and more and his ‘introduction’ became the book. He later wrote other works about Marilyn.

Marilyn: Norman Mailer

Marilyn on the cover of the celebrated book by Norman Mailer

Johnny Hyde was in love with Marilyn and asked her to marry him many times. She always declined, telling him she did not love him. He continued to press her while working hard on her behalf as her agent. In October 1950 he arranged for a seven year contract at Twentieth Century Fox. He also organised some minor plastic surgery for her, apparently, she had her chin built up slightly and the tip of her nose made smaller. In December that year she was recuperating from the surgery at his Palm Springs home when Johnny died of a heart attack. Marilyn was distraught when she heard the news, even so, his family ordered her out of the house.

She moved in with her drama coach Natasha and one day tried to swallow over 30 Nembutal capsules. Luckily Natasha came home early and found her.

Fox put Marilyn into a number of pictures playing a dizzy blonde type but then she was loaned out to RKO for Clash by Night directed by Fritz Lang. It was the first film with her name over the title.

In 1954 she married baseball star Joe DiMaggio. Maggio had retired from the game that had made him famous and Joe wanted her to settle down with him and retire from the cinema. It might be that Marilyn did intend to one day enjoy a more domestic existence. My feeling though is that she could never ever give up her film star life. It had given her all she had; her fame, her money and her status. She could never say goodbye to her creation, the film star Marilyn Monroe.

In the short autobiography published after her death, My Story, which some say was ghost written or partly written by others, Marilyn said this about her fame:

I belonged to the public and the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful but because I never belonged to anything or anyone else. The public was the only family, the only Prince Charming and the only home I had ever dreamed of.

Would she give up all that for DiMaggio or anyone? I don’t think so.

Her marriage to DiMaggio ultimately failed but Joe would continue to be a great friend. It is quite possible that in the last months of her life she was even planning to remarry him. However, before that came marriage and divorce to Arthur Miller. Marilyn idolised men like Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein and she put Miller into that same category. They had met years before, even before she married Dimaggio. Miller would write the screenplay for her final completed film, The Misfits, in which she played a character, Roslyn, which was based on herself. She became hugely disappointed in Miller after finding an open diary or notebook of his in which he severely criticised her. They divorced in 1961.

I’ve always thought that The Misfits was her best film and every so often I’ll take my DVD copy and give it a viewing. (I’ve actually only got two of her films on DVD, The Misfits and Some Like it Hot). Misfits was in fact her last completed film. In 1962 she began filming Something’s Got to Give in which she starred with Dean Martin. Marilyn missed a lot of the shoot due to illness and then left for New York where she appeared at a gala performance for the President’s birthday. The President was John F Kennedy and 20th Century Fox was not amused that with their film behind schedule its star had taken time off. They were already having financial problems with another production, Cleopatra. They were paying Elizabeth Taylor the unheard-of figure of one million dollars for her to play the Egyptian queen and their bank account must have been looking distinctly unhealthy. What was the answer? They fired Marilyn.

Fred Guiles first book on Marilyn was published in 1969 and mentions that towards the end of her life she was involved with an ‘easterner’. The man from the east was Robert Kennedy and since then many books and documentaries have mentioned Marilyn’s involvement with both John and Robert Kennedy. The accepted story of Marilyn’s death goes like this. Both John and Robert Kennedy ended their affairs with her, she had been sacked by 20th Century Fox and she became so despondent that she took her own life. Her body lay unclaimed in the morgue until the faithful Joe DiMaggio came and organised her funeral.

In 1966 however, a man call Frank Capell had published a book called ‘The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe’ which called attention to various things that did not add up. Capell also claimed that Robert Kennedy was with Marilyn on the evening of her death. The FBI forwarded a report of the book to Kennedy who was then still the Attorney General and he asked that Capell’s phone be tapped.

In the 1980’s a number of authors began to look further into Marilyn’s death and one in my collection is The Marilyn Conspiracy. The author, Milo Speriglio was a private detective who was asked by Robert Slatzer to investigate. Slatzer was a friend of Marilyn’s and has even claimed that he married the star only for the two to tear up the marriage licence in case it harmed her career. He said Marilyn had a red diary in which she jotted down notes from her conversations with RFK and contained many things that were secret at the time. Marilyn used to call him from a nearby phone box as she felt that her phones had been tapped.

In 1985 Anthony Summers published the book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe in which he also claimed Marilyn was involved with Robert Kennedy. He also explains that Marilyn was not depressed after all. Her dispute with 20th Century Fox had been settled and they had reinstated her to the movie Something’s Got to Give and she was discussing further film projects including a biopic about Jean Harlow.

Summer also collaborated on a BBC documentary film called Say Goodbye to the President in which private eye Fred Otash revealed that he had engaged electronics expert Bernie Spindell to bug Marilyn’s home. The reason? Union leader Jimmy Hoffa who was under investigation by Kennedy wanted derogatory information on RFK that he could use against him.

Eunice Murray, Marilyn’s housekeeper, admitted in an interview in 1985 for the documentary Say Goodbye to the President that Bobby Kennedy was at Marilyn’s house on the day of her death. Eunice’s son in law and Marilyn’s handyman, Norman Jefferies told Donald Wolfe, the author of The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe, that Bobby Kennedy arrived late on the Saturday evening with two unknown men and asked Jefferies and Murray to leave while he spoke with Marilyn alone. When they returned Marilyn was comatose in one of the guest cottages attached to her house. Jefferies and Murray called an ambulance but Marilyn died from an overdose.

I cannot for a moment imagine Bobby Kennedy as a murderer but he certainly would not want to be associated in any way with a movie star suicide. John Bates, a friend of the Kennedy family, claims that Bobby and his family spent the weekend with him at his ranch in Gilroy, south of San Francisco.

Marilyn died in 1962 and she must have something about her because here we are in 2023 still interested in her. In 2011 a film about her called My week with Marilyn was released and in 2022 came Blonde, starring Ana de Armas as Monroe. Blonde was a fictional version of Marilyn’s life. I haven’t seen it but when I looked it up on the internet it didn’t seem to have been rated highly although I’ll be looking out for it on my TV screen in the future.

Norman Mailer’s book about Monroe finished with a photo of Joe DiMaggio, grief stricken on the day of her funeral and he reckons we can perhaps surmise Marilyn’s true worth just by the look on Joe’s face that day. I cannot disagree.

Sources:

The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe by Donald Wolfe

Goddess by Anthony Summers

The Marilyn Conspiracy by Milo Speriglio with Steven Chain

Norma Jeane: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe by Fred Lawrence Guiles

My Story by Marilyn Monroe

Say Goodbye to the President: 1985 BBC documentary

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More Bits of a Blog (or a Blog of Bits)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

If I was a professional writer working for a magazine or a newspaper, I reckon that this week I’d be getting a bit of a telling off from the boss as I’ve not really been pulling my finger out. I’ve been feeling a little deflated lately. Maybe it’s an after effect of going to my mother’s funeral or perhaps it’s just a general feeling of disappointment. Every writer wants his work to take off and become a best seller but neither my novel, Floating in Space or this blog, look like hitting the top of the book or blogging charts. Yes, every week brings a new follower and that is good, after all every writer wants an audience, every writer wants readers but a writer needs to produce new content to put before them and just lately I’ve not been delivering the goods. The aim of this blog, as always, is to not only let people know about my books but also to give the reader something interesting enough to make him or her think hey, wonder if Floating is worth buying? (Of course it is, get yourself a copy now!)

A lot of blogs die a natural death because the blogger gets bored but in the past my deadline, my one and only deadline of 10am on a Saturday morning has actually inspired me to write more. Anyway, this week’s post is a bit of a mish mash of draft posts that I’ve started but been unable to finish. Let’s start off with a look at the weather.

Its H H Hot

Image credit: Daily Express

A few months back I wrote a blog post called It’s C C Cold so as we in the north west UK are experiencing such fabulous weather, it is only fair to write about that.

Over here in the UK we’re not really ready for nice weather. It comes along every now and again, totally unexpectedly and we are all unprepared.

In France, from where I have just returned a few weeks ago, the weather was the same but over there the French have cool houses, protected from the heat by shuttered windows and thick walls. It’s a similar thing in Spain where their whitewashed outside walls reflect away the heat of the sun. Over in the UK our houses are built to keep the heat in and sometimes it’s hotter inside than outside.

Still, I’m certainly not moaning about the good weather. I like the heat and I hate the cold and I’m happy to make sure there are a few cans of Pepsi Max chilling in the fridge. Out have come my shorts and t-shirts and sandals and for the most part Liz and I have been outside in the sun reading and relaxing. Out there in the sun when I put down my book for a moment I’ll start thinking about things to write and it’s there that the ideas for my stories, poems and blogs will come. Yes, retirement has its plus side.

Of course I live in the north west of England, not an area particularly renowned for great weather and after a couple of weeks of really rather nice hot weather, down came the rains. Funny how it always seems to happen when we are all ready for the barbecue. What we perhaps need is one of those big awnings which we could pop out whenever the rain threatens to ruin a good barbecue.

Cinema

In the post I mentioned above, It’s C C Cold, I referenced a few appropriate films, things like Ice Station Zebra which is one of mine and Howard Hughes’ favourite films. As this post is more about heat rather than cold what films could I bring up? Some Like it Hot? Yes, great film but not really appropriate. Lawrence of Arabia? Yes, great film but I’ve written about that one before. Let’s go with the Towering Inferno. Towering Inferno was a film blockbuster produced by Irwin Allen, who also produced numerous 1960s TV shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and the Time Tunnel. Another film hit for the producer was The Poseidon Adventure, a disaster film in which a cruise liner is overturned by a huge wave and the occupants, still alive on the inverted ship, struggle to survive.

In the Towering Inferno, Allen brought together an impressive cast headed by Paul Newman and Steve McQueen with numerous other stars and famous faces making appearances. It’s a pretty simple plot; a new skyscraper has just been opened named the glass tower but various electrical issues cause fires and people are trapped when the elevators fail. Paul Newman plays the building architect and Steve McQueen is the fire chief who comes to the rescue.

Both Newman and McQueen wanted top billing as well as William Holden. Holden’s request was declined as his star had waned in the previous few years but McQueen and Newman continued to haggle about the billing. The issue was finally settled with a compromise by having their names appear together diagonally with McQueen lower left and Newman top right. Fred Astaire also appeared in the film receiving his only Oscar nomination despite his many classic musical films made in years gone by.

Summer Sport

One feature of the British summer is our great sporting events. Two in particular are Wimbledon and the British Grand Prix. I can’t say I have any great interest in tennis, in fact I have little or no interest in any type of ball game although in the past I have watched some classic Wimbledon finals involving people like Martina Navratilova, Bjorn Borg and so on but the British Grand Prix is a different kettle of fish as I’ve been a fan of Grand Prix racing since I was a child. It would have been nice to have visited Silverstone and seen the race in person but when I made a few tentative enquiries about camping there in our motorhome I soon realised that it would have been cheaper to fly to Barcelona for a week in a top class hotel. Oh well, the good thing was that here in the UK the Grand Prix was live on Channel Four so I was able to settle down and watch the race including all the build up to the big event and all the hoo har and ballyhoo surrounding the race.

I’m not a great fan of Max Verstappen and because he seems to be winning everything lately he has single handedly made Formula One a little boring at the moment. His win at Silverstone was actually the eleventh in a row for the British based, Austrian owned team whose greatest asset is probably the outstanding race car designer Adrian Newey. Adrian’s cars have won championships for his former teams McLaren and Williams and today his current motor car seems unbeatable.

This year’s event was won of course by Verstappen but the McLarens of Lando Norris and former F2 champion Oscar Piastri gave a great challenge to Max and for a moment I thought the Red Bull team were in trouble. At home it was a lovely warm day and I did think about turning off the TV and going outside to enjoy the sunshine but then a huge downpour came down and I just settled down deeper into my armchair, made another brew and enjoyed the race. It was great to watch the race live instead of waiting for the highlights show and trying to avoid social media giving away the result.

Perhaps I should cough up some money and subscribe to Sky sports. Yes I’ve thought about it but happily when I’ve been close to doing just that I’ve managed to get through to the hotline provided by the National Tightwads Society and one of my colleagues there has managed to talk me round! Phew, I reckon I’d be seriously skint without their help. Thanks guys!

And Just Like That.

One of my favourite TV shows has always been Sex and The City. I love that show and enjoy all the stories and relationships of the characters. The show finally finished after six seasons and two feature films. Now the producers have rebooted the series as And Just Like That which just follows on from the last feature film. Sadly, Kim Cattrall who played Samantha declined to appear in the show due to an apparent feud with the main star Sarah Jessica Parker and a desire to move on to other things. Her departure and the addition of several new characters who are not really part of the original quartet of female friends and to be honest, don’t seem as though they ever will be a part, has given the new series a slightly different appeal. Not only that, one of the characters, successful lawyer Miranda, has now come out as gay. She left her husband and has started a relationship with a gay female stand up comedian called Che Diaz and the two have gone to live together in California.

I keep watching even though the show is only a patch on its former witty and vibrant self. Yes, they have added a more diverse cast rather than the previous WASP heavy one but none of the new characters fit in and after watching the first season, I’m still only interested in the three remaining girls and their lives. The other thing is this, I know the series is aimed at women but surely they must realise that a good percentage of viewers are like me, male. I’m interested in the girls but I also like the men. My favourite character, the outstandingly cool Mr Big was killed off in the first episode of season one. I kind of liked Stanforth Blatch played by Willie Garson. Stanforth was a gay icon but I personally saw him as an icon for balding bespectacled men. He always wore such great outfits. another favourite male was Steve, Miranda’s husband who used to be a great counterpoint to the smart and uptight Miranda, has now been relegated to a sort of stand by character who only appears on screen out of absolute necessity.

My other favourite male was Aidan. He was Carrie’s lover and boyfriend before she married Mr Big. The couple were engaged but when Carrie seemed to be reluctant to name the day, he gave her the bullet. He is due to appear soon in Series 2 which I have to say is something that has kept me watching so far.

Final verdict: I keep watching, hoping that things will get better even though I doubt they ever will. If the appearance of Aiden doesn’t improve things, I will soon be unticking the series record button. Still, we all have to let go of things sooner or later and I still have the entire Sex and the City box set on DVD. Maybe the time to uncheck that button has already come.

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More Transformations

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I’ve always been fascinated by transformations either in fiction or in real life but what do I mean by transformations? Well, I have written about transformations before in a previous post. I talked then about Professor Higgins who helped Eliza Doolittle change from a street flower seller to a lady in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion but with this new post I thought I’d start with the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson published his novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Hyde in 1886. It concerns Dr Jekyll who creates a potion which transforms himself into Mr Hyde, another personality in which he is free to enjoy his vices without fear of detection. In the book Mr Hyde must take more of his serum in order to change back to his original self. Eventually Hyde finds it is not possible to revert back and commits suicide.

The Jekyll and Hyde story was filmed many times but the most famous version was in 1920 starring John Barrymore. In one scene Barrymore as Jekyll changes into Hyde entirely without special effects. It is an extraordinary scene all achieved by facial contortions which may seem a bit laughable today but back in 1920 audiences were amazed. A 1941 version starred Spencer Tracy in the title role and there have been many other film versions.

One of my favourites was the comedy Carry on Screaming in which police officer Sergeant Bung played by Harry H Corbett is investigating some strange goings on. His investigations lead him to an eerie rest home run by Kenneth Williams as Orlando Watt and his sister Valeria played seductively by Fenella Fielding. In one scene Valeria gives Harry a potion which turns him into Mr Hyde with hilarious results.

Bruce Wayne and Batman

A pretty obvious transformation is one I could pick up from any superhero comic, that of an ordinary member of the public transformed by some accident or circumstance into a crime fighting hero. I’ve chosen two you might already be familiar with from pretty much opposite sides of the super hero spectrum.

Bruce Wayne was a young child when his parents were murdered by a criminal. The story first appeared in issue #33 of Detective comics in 1939. Dr Thomas Wayne and his wife Martha were wealthy socialites living in Gotham City. Their son Bruce enjoyed a privileged existence at the family home, Wayne Manor, until he was eight years old when the family encountered small time mugger Joe Chill on the way home from the cinema. Joe shot Bruce’s parents dead and the young lad swore to avenge his parents’ death by fighting crime.

Batman. Picture courtesy Wikipedia commons.

When he is ruminating on this decision and thinking that he must be able to strike fear into the hearts of the criminal fraternity a bat flies in through the window and Bruce wonders if the image of the bat might be something he can use.

The Batman origin story has changed over the years; in a later comic we find that the murder of the Waynes was organised by a mob boss as revenge for when Thomas Wayne gave testimony which sent the mob boss behind bars.

In the Tim Burton film Batman, we find that the killer was actually Jack Napier who later becomes the Joker, one of Batman’s arch enemies.

In the later Dark Knight Batman films things change again with Bruce travelling to Asia to learn martial arts from the League of Shadows. He later splits from the group and as Batman, he has to battle against them.

Peter Parker and Spiderman

Spiderman was a different kind of superhero made to measure for the teenagers of the 1960’s. Peter Parker was a quiet nerdy kind of teenager. He was a high school student who lived with his aunt and uncle as his parents had died in a plane crash. He was attracted to Mary Jane Watson, a gorgeous redhead but he knew he had no chance whatsoever with the muscle-bound Flash Thompson on the scene. Anyway, one day he and his fellow pupils are visiting the Midtown school of Science and Technology and he comes across a radioactive spider. Yes, not something you run into every day.

Anyway, Peter gets bitten by the spider and as a result develops superhuman powers; super strength and agility and also a sort of sixth sense he calls his spider sense. In the comics Peter makes a special gadget that shoots out a strong web on which he swings through the heights of the city. Peter uses his new found powers and becomes a wrestler, but after his uncle Ben is killed by a mugger, he decides to fight crime as Spiderman.

Back in the 1960’s there was a cartoon TV Spiderman show and I can even remember most of the theme tune.

Spiderman, Spiderman, Your friendly neighbourhood spiderman

Spins a web any size

Catches thieves just like flies

Is he strong, listen bud

he’s got radioactive blood.

They just don’t write them like that anymore.

Tobey Maguire starred as Peter Parker in a film trilogy that was quickly rebooted with Tom Holland as the web swinging hero.

Personally, I still prefer the old cartoon version.

Elton John and Reginald Dwight

Reginald Dwight was born on the 25th March 1947. He lived in Pinner in Middlesex with his mother and father, Stanley and Sheila.   Stanley Dwight joined the Royal Air Force in 1942 and elected to stay on after World War II ended. Elton John seemed to think in his autobiography that that was a good thing as together, his mother and father spent a lot of time arguing. While Stanley was away in the air force Reg lived with his mother and his maternal grandmother at 55 Pinner Hill Road, his grandmother’s council house. Elton seems to have been reasonably happy there but understandably distressed at the numerous arguments between his mother and father whenever Stanley came home.

Stanley left the air force and his mother and father divorced when Reg was 14.

One thing that had a very positive effect on the young Reginald was his parents’ love of music and records. He began tapping out tunes on his grandmother’s piano and the age of 11 won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music.

At the age of 15 Reg got himself a job playing the piano at the local pub and in 1962 he and some friends formed a small band called Bluesology and they soon picked up a regular gig supporting singer Long John Baldry.

In 1967 Reg answered an advertisement in the New Musical Express. It had been placed by Liberty Records and they were looking for new talent. Reg went to audition for the A & R manager, Ray Williams but he appeared to be unimpressed when Reg sang an old Jim Reeves hit and by way of ending the interview Ray handed Reg a sheaf of unopened lyrics written by someone who had answered the same ad.

That someone was Bernie Taupin. He and Reg hit it off instantly and Reg began writing music to Bernie’s lyrics. Six months later Reg changed his name. He took the name Elton from saxophonist Elton Dean and John from Long John Baldry and put them together to become Elton John.

In 1969 Elton’s album Empty Sky became a minor hit and was followed by the eponymous Elton John in 1970. ‘Your Song’, a single from the album went to number 7 in the UK singles chart and Elton John had arrived.

Norma Jeane and Marilyn Monroe

I should mention that one of Elton’s big hits was Candle in the Wind which leads me nicely into this next section as the song was about Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn was born Norma Jeane Mortensen on June 1st 1926. Her mother was a Hollywood film cutter and her father was a married man named C Francis Gifford who Gladys, her mother, had an affair with.

Gladys divorced her husband who had deserted her some years earlier and she reverted to her previous name, Baker, that of her first husband.

Marilyn: Norman Mailer

Marilyn on the cover of the celebrated book by Norman Mailer

Norma Jeane had a troubled upbringing. Her mother was mentally unstable and was in and out of various institutions, leaving young Norma to be taken into care. On one occasion in her late teens Norma Jeane was living with a friend of her mother, but this friend was moving away and rather than send Norma back into a home, an idea came about which seems a little mad in retrospect. The idea was for Norma to get married to a local boy, Jim Dougherty. The marriage went ahead only eighteen days after Norma’s sixteenth birthday.

The war finally came to came to the USA when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. Jim joined the navy and Norma was working in a war factory when an army photographer called David Conover came round looking for a photo article for a magazine. He asked Norma to pose for him and found that she had a natural affinity with the camera. More photo shoots came her way and soon Norma was convinced by Emmeline Snively, head of the Blue Book Modelling Agency that she was wasting her talents in a defence factory. Within weeks of quitting her job in the factory Norma Jeane became one of the Blue Book’s busiest models.

In 1946 she divorced Jim Dougherty and only a matter of weeks later she went for a screen test at Twentieth Century Fox and Ben Lyon, head of new talent at Fox, offered her a seven-year optional contract. The next issue was her name as Lyon felt that Norma Jeane was not film star material. Lyon suggested the name Marilyn and Norma Jeane provided her mother’s maiden name, Monroe. Norma Jeane had made the transformation into Marilyn Monroe and had begun the long road to film stardom.

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Even More Random Film Connections

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Back in the 1970’s. TV presenter James Burke made a TV show called Connections. It was a really fascinating series which connected various historical events to make a sort of chain which led up to something which was pretty unexpected. The episode which stands out in my memory is one about the atom bomb, various unconnected events and discoveries that together, led to the splitting of the atom. I’ve written a couple of posts in which I’ve tried to do something similar but all relating to the world of classic film so here is another collection of film connections which I hope you will find interesting.

In 1954 director Nick Ray made his classic film Rebel Without a Cause. The film remains a cult classic even today because it’s the film James Dean starred in as troubled teenager Jim Stark. The film opens with Jim’s first day at a new school. He tries his best to make friends but finds himself at odds with a gang which includes Natalie Wood as Judy, Corey Allen as Buzz, Dennis Hopper as Goon and quite a few others. The day doesn’t end well for Jim because he ends up in a deadly car race with Buzz in which the two drive towards a cliff edge and the first one to bale out is chicken. Buzz doesn’t get out in time and is killed and his friends want revenge on Jim.

Jim and Judy along with Plato, a teenager profoundly affected by loneliness and a broken family, decide to hide out in a deserted mansion. It was in fact the same mansion used in the film Sunset Boulevard, made years earlier.

Rebel was only Dean’s second film. He was killed in a car crash after his third and final film Giant.

Giant was directed by George Stevens and in it, Dean played Jett Rink, a surly ranch hand on Bick Benedict’s huge Texas ranch. Jett doesn’t get on well with Bick played by Rock Hudson but at least he has a friend in Bick’s sister Luz played by Mercedes McCambridge. When she is killed trying to ride a horse belonging to Bick’s new wife, Jett finds she has willed him a small plot of land on which he later strikes oil.

Bick’s wife was played by Elizabeth Taylor. Liz had a number of husbands but in 1957 she married for the third time to Mike Todd. Todd was an entrepreneur who was involved in various business ventures. He was also a theatrical producer and moved into films producing the classic Around The World in 80 Days starring David Niven as Phileas Fogg. Todd was killed in a plane crash in 1958. His widow, Liz, was devasted and turned to her friends Eddie Fisher and his wife Debbie Reynolds for comfort. Eddie perhaps took comfort a little too far and his friendship with Liz soon turned into an affair and he left Debbie, marrying Liz Taylor in 1959.

Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds had a daughter named Carrie. Carrie was born in 1956 and went on to play Princess Leia in the Star Wars films.

In 1989 Carrie played Marie in the comedy classic When Harry Met Sally. The film follows the slow to start romance of Harry and Sally played by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan. The two don’t seem to like each other at first but later become friends. They decide to introduce each other to their best friends Marie and Jess, played by Steven Ford, who both hit it off instantly.

The film is a really wonderful comic look at relationships with some sparklingly witty scenes and dialogue. The screenplay was written by Nora Ephron.

Nora later moved into directing and one of her best films was You’ve Got Mail. The film teamed Meg Ryan with Tom Hanks once again, the pair having worked together on Sleepless in Seattle, another Nora Ephron film. Such a pity, from a personal point of view, that Billy Crystal didn’t play the Tom Hanks role in those films. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed both of them but I’ve always thought Billy and Meg seemed to just work together so much better. Anyway, getting back to the blog, You’ve Got Mail is a romcom about two people who get involved together in an online chat room. In the chat room they use internet ‘handles’ to hide their true identities and don’t realise that in fact they are business rivals. Tom Hanks’ character owns a big discount bookstore while Meg has a small popular childrens’ bookshop.

In real life, the two are constantly at odds as Tom is opening a massive new discount bookstore just by her small shop. In anonymous cyberspace though, their relationship seems to develop and the two decide to meet but Tom Hanks arrives for the meeting in a coffee shop, peeks through the window and sees who is waiting for him.

The film was actually based on another film The Shop Around the Corner, a 1940s classic starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. In the film two employees who work together but don’t get on are actually falling for each other as anonymous pen pals.

James Stewart also stars in one of my favourite films, It’s a Wonderful Life. I love that film and my DVD copy gets watched quite a lot. The film is about George Bailey played by James Stewart who looks forward to an interesting life of travel but then finds obligations force him to stay in the small town where he has always lived. George is beset by problems and even considers suicide but then his guardian angel -literally- arrives to help him.

The secret of this film is, I think, the fact that despite the fantasy premise of the film, everyone plays their parts as if they were in a serious drama. The result is that the drama and emotion of the situation rises to the surface and we are left with a vibrant and dramatic piece of cinema.

Donna Reed plays Stewart’s love interest but another lady who sets her sights on his character, George Bailey, is Violet Bick played by the sultry Gloria Grahame. She made her film debut in 1944 and appeared in a number of films, including many film noir movies. In 1955 she appeared in the musical Oklahoma but afterwards her star began to wane a little.

She created something of a scandal in later life. After divorcing her first husband she married and later divorced one of her directors then later married TV producer Cy Howard. When they split, she married Anthony Ray who was the son of her second husband. The second husband was Nick Ray, who directed James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.

Hope you enjoyed this interconnected tour of the classic movie world. Have a great weekend and call back next Saturday for another post.

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More Random Film Connections

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Back in the 1970’s. TV presenter James Burke made a TV show called Connections. It was a really fascinating series which connected various historical events to make a sort of chain which led up to something which was pretty unexpected. The episode which stands out in my memory is one about the atom bomb, various unconnected events and discoveries that together, led to the splitting of the atom. I’ve written a couple of posts in which I’ve tried to do something similar but all relating to the world of classic film so here are another collection of film connections which I hope you will find interesting.

Leslie Howard and Gone with the Wind

I thought I’d start with Gone with the Wind and see where it takes me. Gone with the Wind was a major film adaptation of the book by Margaret Mitchell. The book was a huge hit and producer David O Selznick bought the film rights. Production was delayed for a long while as Selznick was determined to get Clark Gable for the part of the roguish Rhett Butler. Another delay was a distribution deal with MGM which couldn’t be finalised until Selznick’s then current deal with United Artists had expired. Selznick used the delay to begin a huge search for an actress to play the part of Scarlett O’Hara, the spoilt daughter of a plantation owner in the deep south of America. Scarlet has a crush on Ashley Wilkes played by British actor Leslie Howard in possibly his most famous role. The film was one of the major hits of 1939 and was the highest earning film up to that time.

Julie Andrews and My Fair Lady

In 1938 Leslie Howard played the part of Professor Higgins in the film production of Pygmalion based on the play by George Bernard Shaw. A musical version was a big hit on the stage in the 1960s. Julie Andrews played the part of Eliza Doolittle to great acclaim on the stage but when the time came to make a film version in 1964, the producers wanted a major star and so the part went to Audrey Hepburn.

Julie Andrews only had to wait a short time for film stardom though. She appeared in The Sound of Music in 1965. The film was based on the true story of the Von Trapp family singers which was also a hit stage musical. Julie Andrews played Maria, a nun who becomes a nanny to the Von Trapp children, eventually falling for the father of the children played by Christopher Plummer. The film was the hit of 1965 replacing Gone with the Wind as the highest grossing film up to that time. The director was Robert Wise who tried to reduce the amount of sentimentality and sweetness which he had seen in the stage production.

Robert Wise and Citizen Kane

Robert Wise had a great background in the film world. He was a former film editor whose first film as a director was The Curse of the Cat People in 1944. In 1941 he was a film editor at RKO Studios and was the editor on the classic film Citizen Kane.

Orson Welles often boasted about the fabulous contract he had when he arrived in Hollywood. In a BBC interview he stated the terms were not financially brilliant but gave him unprecedented creative powers. His first film for RKO was Citizen Kane. The film opens with the death of Kane, a millionaire newspaper magnate. His last words were ‘Rosebud’. The makers of a cinema newsreel decide to find out what or who Rosebud was.

To do so they research Kane’s life; his inheritance of a huge fortune, his takeover of a newspaper, his great wealth, his power and influence, his marriage and divorce and ultimately his death.

The cinematographer was Gregg Toland, one of the film industry’s top photographers. Toland asked to work on the film and Welles replied ‘Why? I don’t know anything about making films.’ Toland countered that was exactly why he wanted to work on the film because a film by a newcomer would produce something new and original.

There are some fascinating elements to Citizen Kane, especially in the special effects department. A famous one is where the camera flies through a rooftop sign and then drops down through a skylight into a restaurant. The shot was done with a sign that came apart as the camera approached and then a fade from a model shot into the restaurant set disguised in a flash of lightning. Citizen Kane was and is a classic of the cinema.

Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth

Orson Welles in a way experienced his film career in reverse, he started at the top and steadily worked his way down, ending up as an overweight although always entertaining raconteur doing voice overs for Carlsberg TV advertisements.

Welles married Rita Hayworth in 1943. She was one of the great stars of Hollywood’s golden years. She appeared in one of her husband’s films The Lady from Shanghai in 1947 but the film that was considered her greatest success came the year before in Gilda. According to Wikipedia, the film made her into a cultural icon as a femme fatale.

Welles and Hayworth grew apart and finally separated. Rita said that Welles had no idea about married life or even settling down. When she suggested buying a house together, a natural move for a married couple, Welles said he didn’t want the responsibility.

Rita Hayworth as Gilda

After splitting with Welles, Rita became involved with Prince Aly Khan, son of the Aga Khan who later became a Pakistani diplomat. Aly was a socialite and man about town. He and Rita married in 1949 and had a daughter Princess Yasmin Aga Khan. Rita gave up her film career to be with Aly but Khan’s womanising proved fatal to the marriage. Rita moved to Nevada with her daughter in order to set up a legal residence and begin divorce proceedings. The two were finally divorced in 1953. Khan offered Rita a million dollars for her to bring up their daughter as a Muslim but Rita declined.

After her divorce Rita had no income and was forced to return to film acting. Her comeback picture was Affair in Trinidad in which she starred with Glenn Ford. Rita was contracted to Columbia Pictures and fell out with Columbia boss Harry Cohn on numerous occasions during the filming. She was even placed on suspension for a while, however the picture was very successful. Her last picture for Columbia was in 1957 when she starred in Pal Joey with Frank Sinatra. She married again, this time to singer Dick Haymes who was in severe financial trouble. The marriage lasted only a couple of years and ended when Haymes struck her in the face in a Hollywood nightclub. Rita packed her bags and left him.

In the mid 1970’s, Rita’s behaviour began to become erratic. She drank heavily and was even once removed from a TWA flight because of her drinking. It was eventually found that her symptoms were masking the real issue which was the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. In 1981 when her condition had deteriorated, she was placed under the supervision of her daughter and the two moved into adjoining apartments together in New York. She died aged 68 in 1987. Her former husband Orson Welles, spoke of her in his very last interview, recorded the day before his own death. He called her ‘one of the dearest and sweetest women that ever lived.’

David Niven and Leslie Howard

Just to backtrack a little, in 1958 Rita appeared in Separate Tables. The screenplay was by Terence Rattigan and concerns a group of residents at a small hotel in the south of England. David Niven plays a disgraced former army officer who has been found guilty of apparently sexually harassing young women at a theatre. A news story in the local paper highlights this and he tries to stop the others from finding out, without success. Niven won an Oscar for his performance.

David Niven is one of my favourite actors and he wrote what I’ve always considered to the best book about the golden age of Hollywood, Bring on the Empty Horses.

In 1942 Niven was in England having left Hollywood to sign up with the army. He was asked to appear in what was a propaganda film at the time; The First of the Few, a story about R J Mitchell, the designer of the famous WWII aircraft, the Spitfire. Niven was under contract to Sam Goldwyn at the time but he allowed Niven to appear, in exchange for the US rights to the film. Niven played Squadron Leader Geoffrey Crisp who tells the story of his friend Mitchell beginning with the Schneider Trophy aircraft race of 1922. Later Mitchell visits Germany and sees how the Nazis are rearming and so resolves to design a powerful fighter for Great Britain. Mitchell died just as the government ordered the Spitfire into production and Niven as Crisp, ends his story just as he and his fellow pilots are scrambled into action.

Leslie Howard played the part of Mitchell as well as producing and directing. He was killed when the KLM flight he was aboard was shot down by the Luftwaffe in 1943.

Howard of course played Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind which brings our connections full circle.

Thanks to Wikipedia creative commons for the use of the pictures in this post.

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Transformations

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I hit on the theme of transformations whilst watching a film that I haven’t seen for years. It was My Fair Lady so without further ado, let’s get cracking.

My Fair Lady starred Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in the story of how Professor Higgins, an expert in phonetics, tries to turn working class flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a lady. The film is based on the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. The rude and bombastic Higgins played so well by Harrison enters into a wager with colleague Colonel Pickering played by Wilfrid Hyde White. Higgins boasts that he could pass the lowly flower girl off as a princess and embarks on a wearying schedule of training so Eliza can improve her speech and deportment.

I’m not a great fan of musicals but I’ve always rather liked this film. The songs for the most part are wonderful and the performances excellent. Audrey Hepburn was a controversial choice for the film as the part had been played on the stage by Julie Andrews and as this was before she shot to fame in The Sound of Music, the producers wanted a big star in the role.

The story had been filmed before of course. There was an earlier version, a non-musical version made in 1938 starring Leslie Howard. Howard is probably most famous for his portrayal of Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind but his version of Higgins was to me, much superior to Harrison’s although I love both. Wendy Hiller plays Eliza Doolittle and she is much more believable as Eliza, no disrespect to Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Howard is a bright, eccentric Higgins. What is interesting from researching the film on the internet is that a controversial (at the time) line was included in the film: Eliza saying ‘Not Bloody Likely!’ This made Wendy Hiller the first person ever to swear in a British film. Dear me, how times change! That I suppose is a transformation in itself, the language of the cinema becoming ruder and coarser by the day with the F word becoming more and more prominent in film dialogue. These days, ‘Not bloody likely’ is hardly worth a second thought.

The main transformation in both Pygmalion and My Fair Lady is that of Eliza Doolittle from common flower girl to well-spoken princess. She is the butterfly that emerges from Professor Higgins’ training although the experience does not necessarily make her happy. She returns back to Covent Garden and no one recognises her there. She is dressed differently, she speaks differently and no longer resembles the woman she used to be. Her father recognises her though as he has been transformed too. Higgins was so impressed by Alfred P Doolittle that he has written to an American millionaire advising him that Doolittle is one of the great wits and philosophers of the day and the millionaire bestows a large amount of money on him. The result is that friends and family have appeared out of the woodwork all intent on eliciting financial support from Doolittle and the tables have been turned on him. Instead of his previous happy but poor existence, now the the worries of supporting others lay heavily on his shoulders.

I of course have experienced transformations too. Some years ago, I was in full time work, now I am retired. I made the transition slowly. I first opted for semi-retirement and went from working a shift pattern of six days on and three days off, to one of three days on and six off, a much more agreeable working pattern. I had thought that the new working pattern would give me more time to myself, more time to get acclimatised to retirement. Instead, it actually made my working life more difficult. In our hi tech emergency control room, things were constantly changing and I was not always up to speed. I was using old templates when I should have used new ones, using codes that were now obsolete and so on. I missed updates and briefings that happened on my six days off. Looking back, I should have just retired fully and looked for some part time job to top up my cash flow. Anyway, now I am transformed, a retired former civil servant, writing blogs and making YouTube videos.

Age has transformed me too. In the picture over on the right you can see me as I was when I was aged 19 or 20. It was taken in France by my best friend Chris. Now I am older, at least older on the outside. On the inside I’d have to say that I haven’t really changed that much. You might think that now I’m probably much wiser with different ideas and different thoughts. Actually though, I’m pretty much the same on the inside with similar ideas and similar thoughts.

Here’s another film with transformations at its heart, Silence of the Lambs. It was the first horror film to win a best picture Oscar and it was about a serial killer nicknamed Buffalo Bill by the press. The FBI are trying to catch him and send rookie officer Clarice Starling to visit Hannibal Lector, a psychiatrist and murderer, currently detained in a high security prison in the hope that he might give some insight into the current murderer. Lector agrees to talk but only on his terms.

Jodie Foster plays agent Starling. She wants to work in the Behavioural Science Unit of the FBI and Lector, chillingly played by Hopkins, finds her interesting. He seems willing to give his information and insights about Buffalo Bill but in return he wants information about Clarice herself. He initiates a quid pro quo, he gives her information and observations about Bill and in return she must reveals snippets of information about herself, her background and her life. When Starling reveals the murder victims have something inserted into their throats Lector correctly guesses the item is a butterfly. Buffalo Bill, says Lector, wants to transform himself, in his twisted way into a female.

Much of the content of the film is terrifying but at the same time, it is a compelling film and comes together in an exciting climax. Silence of The Lambs won five Oscars.

I wrote in a previous post about another type of transformation, one achieved by using imaging technology to transform one’s own appearance. Using image editors today, it is possible to smooth wrinkled or pock marked skin and to trim away unwanted flesh. Over on TikTok recently I seemed to be bombarded on one particular day by endless videos of women using a filter for video that made them all seem younger and more glamourous.  Here’s an example below from YouTube.

The best transformation though are perhaps the ones that we make ourselves, the transformations that occur on the inside.

Floating in Space was a great achievement for me. I had always wanted to be a writer and finally completing and publishing my book was something very exciting for me. Of course, Floating has never come near to the best seller charts and is not ever likely to. If it did, I can imagine another transformation from quiet part time writer to international author. I could swap my Skoda for a Porsche. Buy some new clothes for my media interviews and join the international jet set. That might be a fun transformation but with my bad back and sore neck, I might have trouble getting into that low slung Porsche. Then there’s my strong northern accent. Would TV viewers be able to understand me? Would I need some vocal training?

Perhaps I should be looking for a Professor Higgins to help me?

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Another James Bond 007 Post

Posted on by Steve Higgins

James Bond has been in the news this week. The books by Ian Fleming are apparently being rewritten as they might be considered offensive to a modern generation of new readers and the producers are still looking for a new actor to play their famous secret agent. OK, time for another James Bond 007 post.

The publishers of the Bond books have decided that it’s time for a reissue of the best selling series with a disclaimer telling readers that the novels use language that may be considered offensive by modern readers. Of course the books were written in the late fifties and early sixties and reflect attitudes of the time. I have the entire collection of Bond books and most of them have a reference on the back saying they are outrageously entertaining, which they are, but take away the outrageous part and they are no longer outrageously entertaining but perhaps just somewhat entertaining. Of course if we begin to tamper with books written in the past where do we stop? Roald Dahl’s books are also in the news as they have been updated by ‘sensitivity readers’ although I’m not sure how these well-read children’s books can upset anyone. James Bond of course is a different matter and any sensitivity readers might have a problem with a book like Live and Let Die which is partly set in Harlem and Ian Fleming uses most of the unpleasant racial epithets which were in use at the time.

I started reading the Bond books when I was a schoolboy and unfortunately the very first one I read was the only one they had in our local library – ‘The Man With The Golden Gun’, one of writer Ian Fleming’s worst Bond books. Fleming used to write his initial drafts of the novels and then write a second one, adding in all the details which make the Bond books so interesting. Things like details of Bond’s clothes, (the Sea Island cotton shirts) his food, (Bond always had scrambled eggs for breakfast) his cars, his cigarettes (the special handmade ones with the triple gold band) and all that sort of stuff. ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ was published after Fleming had died and sadly, he had not revised his original draft. I persevered though, did some research, found the proper order of the books and began to read ‘Casino Royale’, the first in the series. April this year marks the 70th anniversary of Casino Royale and it is this anniversary which has prompted the Bond books to be reissued, complete with disclaimer.

That first book is a pretty original story. ‘Le Chiffre’, a gambler and also a member of SMERSH, a murderous department of the KGB, is engaged on a desperate effort to win a great deal of money at the casinos of Royale Les Eaux in France. Le Chiffre is desperate because he has used SMERSH funds for his personal use and his spymaster bosses will not be pleased if they find out. Britain’s secret service happens to find out about this and sends Bond to France to make sure Le Chiffre doesn’t recoup those funds as of course, as we all know, James Bond 007 is a bit of an expert with the cards.

The book is interesting in another way too. Ian Fleming sold the movie rights to Casino Royale separately from the rest of the books and this enabled producer Charles K Feldman to produce a movie independently from Eon productions who own the rights to the other books. Feeling that he could not compete with the mainstream movies, Feldman decided to make Casino Royale into a comedy version. David Niven starred as Sir James Bond and ironically, Ian Fleming had mooted Niven as a possible Bond when casting began for Dr No, the first movie in the series.

Eon Productions finally acquired the rights to Casino Royale ready for the debut of new Bond actor Daniel Craig. I’ve got to say I didn’t like Craig at first. He didn’t look like Bond and I honestly thought he would have been better cast as one of the Bond villain’s henchmen but I did warm to him eventually and although I didn’t much care for it at first, I really do think Casino Royale is one of the better Bond films. It was released in 2006 and follows the book pretty faithfully which many of the previous films rarely do. Craig’s last Bond film was No Time To Die which I really thought was the poorest of Craig’s five outings as 007 and Bond has been in the news frequently as writers, journalists, bloggers and everyone and his dog have speculated about who the next James Bond 007 will be.

Will it be the usual upper class white guy or will Bond be black? Will there even be a female Bond? What does a 21st century secret agent look like or act like?

James Bond, the character created by Ian Fleming, was a commander in naval intelligence in World War II. He learned to ski in Kitzbühel in the 1930s and fought in the Second World War. He was an officer and a gentleman. He frequented expensive restaurants and gentlemen’s clubs as well as casinos and card tables. He drove a Bentley, lived alone in a Kings Road, Chelsea flat where he was looked after by an elderly Scottish housekeeper named May. He drank a martini made with three parts gin, one of vodka, a half measure of Kina Lillet, shaken with until ice cold then served with a slice of lemon peel. Bond is a character entrenched in mid twentieth century England so making him into a character from the 21st century will not be easy. What can the film makers do? Well, they could set the Bond films back in the 1960s. That’s one option although I doubt if that will happen. They could go radical and make Bond an ethnic character; I’m forever seeing posts about Idris Elba as the next Bond in my social media feeds but then, the character wouldn’t be Bond, would he?

The first change of Bond actor was from Sean Connery to George Lazenby. I liked Lazenby and his one 007 film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, was one of my favourites. Connery returned for Diamonds are Forever and then Roger Moore took over Bond’s licence to kill. His films ranged from bad to supremely dreadful and as much as I’ve always loved Roger, I hated his Bond films.

Timothy Dalton stepped into Bond’s shoes when Moore stood down and made two pretty good films. Legal issues kept Bond off the screen for a long time but when the franchise finally returned it was with Pierce Brosnan as 007. Goldeneye was one of my favourite Bonds but his other films weren’t so good and even looked for a while as if they were going to go down the same road as Roger Moore’s Bonds into slightly ridiculous territory. With Casino Royale though things got pretty serious. The film makers played down the gadgetry which always was a staple of the early Bond films, things like cars with ejector seats, watches fitted with special magnets and belt buckles firing climbing pitons. None of that played any part in the Daniel Craig era but here’s the thing; in the previous films each new Bond has just carried on as before with hardly a nod to the previous actor, although George Lazenby did famously say ‘this never happened to the other fella!’

When Daniel Craig took over the series was to a certain extent rebooted. Bond was new to the 00 section and Casino Royale his first mission. His mission in No Time To Die was also his last, his very last because, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away here, because Bond actually dies. How could the producers start over then with the next Bond? Well, many fictional characters have come back from the dead, most notably Sherlock Holmes who author Arthur Conan Doyle killed off when he got bored with the character.  Holmes perished by falling off a cliff but a few years later Conan Doyle bowed to public pressure and Sherlock Holmes returned. It turned out, he hadn’t really died after all.

image courtesy flickr.com

Ian Fleming didn’t kill off Bond but in You Only Live Twice, Bond is seriously hurt and is rescued by Kissy Suzuki who was posing as his wife while Bond was on a mission for Tiger Tanaka, the head of the Japanese secret service. Bond had lost his memory and Kissy hides Bond away from the authorities. One day though, Bond sees something about Vladivostok in either a newspaper or a book, I can’t remember which, and still suffering with amnesia decides he must go there. You Only Live Twice ends there but in the next book, The Man With The Golden Gun, Bond returns having been brainwashed by the Soviets into assassinating his own boss, the head of the British secret service, known only as M.

The producers never used that storyline in the film adaptations of those two books so if I was the writer of the new Bond movie, that’s exactly how I would start the new era of Bond films off.

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Some More Random Classic Film Connections

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Back in the 1960’s I was a big fan of the Apollo moon missions and on UK TV one of the presenters was James Burke. Burke also did a TV show called Connections. It was a really fascinating series which connected various historical events to make a sort of chain which led up to something which was pretty unexpected. The episode that stands out in my memory was one about the atom bomb, various unconnected events and discoveries that together, led to the splitting of the atom. In today’s post, I’ve tried to do something similar but all relating to the world of film, so here are five fascinating connections.

Rebecca 1940

Rebecca is actually my favourite film from director Alfred Hitchcock. It was released in 1940 and was Hitchcock’s first American film. It is based on the novel by Daphne Du Maurier. The film stars Laurence Olivier as the aristocratic widower Maxim De Winter and Joan Fontaine as the shy young woman who becomes his second wife. The two meet in the south of France when De Winter is on the verge of jumping off a cliff top only to be interrupted by the shy young woman. The woman is never named in the film except for later when she becomes Mrs De Winter. This new or second Mrs De Winter seems to be living her life in the shadow of Rebecca, Maxim’s first wife. Later we find that Maxim murdered her after finding out that she was having an affair with Jack Favell played by the smooth and suave George Sanders.

I have to say I have always loved this film, the ruthlessly charming George Sanders, the gorgeous Joan Fontaine and the scary Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper dedicated to the dead Rebecca played by Judith Anderson. Joan Fontaine has never looked lovelier and the only blot on the film landscape are the rather poor models used to represent Manderley, the ancestral home of the De Winter family.

Joan Fontaine was actually the sister of Olivia De Havilland and the two seemed to have had a rather strained relationship. Olivia starred with Errol Flynn in the magnificent Robin Hood but is probably best remembered for her role in Gone With The Wind.

Gone With The Wind 1939

Gone With The Wind was actually being made at the same time as Rebecca and Hitchcock and producer David O Selznick, who produced both films, had numerous fallings out over Rebecca and Hitchcock was apparently happy that Selznick was preoccupied with GWTW which kept him away from the production of Rebecca. Selznick later made many edits and revisions to Rebecca which didn’t go down well with Hitchcock.

Gone With The Wind starred Clark Gable and much was made of a nationwide hunt for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara. The eventual winner was Vivien Leigh. Olivia De Havilland played Melanie who marries Ashley Wilkes played by Leslie Howard.

The film is set in the American south at the time of the American Civil War and its aftermath. Scarlett O’Hara is the daughter of a plantation owner and she has the hots for neighbour Ashley Wilkes. Wilkes marries Melanie but Scarlett is unable to give up on her romantic feelings for Ashley even when she marries the roguish Rhett Butler.

Gone With the Wind is an epic film in every sense of the word and follows the fortunes of Scarlett and her family through the devastation of the civil war and into the reconstruction era afterwards.

Leslie Howard captures perfectly the slightly wimpy Ashley. Howard was not happy in Hollywood and returned to England after the filming to help with Britain’s war effort. He was a star of many English feature films but was sadly killed when flying back to England after a visit to Portugal where he was promoting the British war effort. Some have suggested that the Luftwaffe shot down Howard’s aircraft as the Germans believed the Prime Minister was on board. Others have speculated that Howard himself was the target as he had angered the Germans with his efforts to promote the British cause as well as the success of his film The First of The Few about the designer of the Spitfire aircraft.

The First of The Few 1942

David Niven plays the part of Squadron Leader Geoffrey Crisp and he tells his pilots of how his friend RJ Mitchell designed the Spitfire. He tells how Mitchell observed seagulls through his binoculars and envisaged a new high speed era of fighter aircraft. After entering an aircraft in the Schneider Trophy, Mitchell convinces Rolls Royce to design a new and powerful engine for the new breed of aircraft and eventually, the Spitfire is born. Leslie Howard played the part of Mitchell as well as producing and directing the film.

Casino Royale 1967

David Niven had left Hollywood in 1939 and returned to the UK in order to re-join the army and fight against the Nazi menace. As well as his army duties, Niven was released from time to time to appear in a few propaganda films, one of which was The First of The Few. He was attached to a commando unit named Phantom whose job was to find out enemy positions and report back to British commanders. After the war he resumed his film career starring in a British film A Matter of Life and Death which was chosen for the very first Royal Film Performance. Niven returned to Hollywood only to encounter terrible tragedy when his wife, whom he had met and married in England, fell down the steps into a cellar when the two were playing hide and seek at a Hollywood party. Niven must have been devastated but he carried on and later remarried.

In 1967 he appeared as James Bond in the Bond spoof Casino Royale. Ian Fleming, the author of the famous James Bond series, had sold the film rights to Casino Royale separately to the rest of the Bond books and producer Charles Feldman acquired them, hoping to do a deal with Eon productions who were producing the mainstream Bond series. When negotiations failed, Feldman who had recently had a big hit with the oddball comedy What’s New Pussycat, resolved to make a James Bond comedy satire and recruited Niven to star as Bond.

The film turned out to be a critical disaster. Two of the other stars in the film were Peter Sellers and Orson Welles. Peter played the part of a card playing expert and Welles was the villain, Le Chiffre, a spy who has spent a great deal of money that wasn’t his and intends to win it back in the casino. All went well during the filming but then Sellers approached the director Joe McGrath and demanded that he and Welles should not appear in the same shot. McGrath replied that the film was in widescreen and this could not be done. Sellers then threw a punch at McGrath and a fight ensued until they were split up by a stuntman. Sellers asked for a break but then disappeared from the set which might be why his character disappears abruptly from the film. Ultimately five directors and as many screenwriters contributed to the film.

As I mentioned earlier, Niven plays Bond in Casino Royale and interestingly, Ian Fleming had wanted Niven to play Bond in Doctor No, the first in the 007 films.

Another actor approached to play the part of Bond was Cary Grant. Grant was urbane and cultured and also British. He was in many ways perfect for the part of Bond. He was also close to producer Cubby Broccoli and in fact was Broccoli’s best man at his 1959 wedding. Grant was interested in playing the part but stipulated that he would only play the role once and wasn’t willing to do a series of films.

North By Northwest

Cary Grant appeared in numerous adventure films with an espionage background, in particular North By Northwest. Grant plays advertising executive Roger Thornhill who calls over a waiter in a New York hotel bar. The waiter was paging a George Kaplan and when Grant calls the waiter over, two thugs nearby assume Thornhill is really Kaplan. It turns out that Kaplan is a fake identity, created by American Intelligence agents to trap a spy played by James Mason. The film is an exciting cold war thriller and was directed by none other than Alfred Hitchcock, who directed Rebecca, bringing our connections full circle.

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Favourite Film Directors Part 4: David Lean

Posted on by Steve Higgins

The other day I was waiting in for a repairman to come and fix something. He was due sometime between 12 and 6pm so I nipped out early, did my shopping, returned home for a late breakfast and settled down to wait. I flipped on the TV and was pleasantly surprised to see the film Hobson’s Choice about to start. Hobson’s Choice was directed by David Lean and it just so happened that the previous night, sorting out various bits and pieces, I came across a lovely book about David by his widow Sandra so without further ado I thought it must be the perfect time to write a post about another of my favourite directors.

David was born in 1908 and spent his early life in Croydon (actually 38 Blenheim Crescent, Croydon) until his parents divorced. His father moved out and left the family in 1923 which must have been an upsetting moment in Lean’s young life. Another perhaps more significant moment was when an uncle gave him a camera when David was aged 10 and then Lean began to develop and print his own photographs.

In her book, David Lean: An Intimate Portrait, by Sandra Lean, his widow tells us that David was considered a ‘dud’ at school and his headmistress wondered whether he would even be able to read and write.

When he left school he began work as an apprentice at his father’s accountancy firm and at night spent his spare time at the cinema. The Gaumont film studios were nearby and Lean managed to get himself employment there starting out as a tea boy. He later became a clapperboy and gradually rose up to become a newsreel editor.

Later Lean moved on to editing feature films and was asked to work with Noel Coward on In Which We Serve. David asked to be credited as a co director on the film and Coward wasn’t too keen at first but eventually gave way. According to an interview with Lean I saw many years ago, Noel Coward soon became bored with the process of directing the film and mostly left the job to David.

Lean directed other adaptations of Coward’s plays including Blithe Spirit, filmed in colour and the highly regarded Brief Encounter, the latter winning grand prix honours at the 1946 Cannes film festival. The atmospheric exterior shots of Brief Encounter were filmed at Carnforth Railway Station in Lancashire which still exists today.

Lean married six times and three of his films featured his third wife Anne Todd. The last of the films with Todd was The Sound Barrier made in 1952 which has a screenplay by the playwright Terence Rattigan.

Hobson’s Choice, the film I mentioned earlier, is a film that shows a different side to David Lean. It’s a character driven comedy made in 1954 with excellent performances from Charles Laughton and Brenda De Banzie and a world away from the epics that David Lean later became famous for. It was hugely enjoyable to watch and one tends to forget that in his earlier years Lean made many films of a similar nature. His reputation though, at least in part, stems from a series of epics the director made starting with The Bridge on the River Kwai and including Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter and his final film which he directed, edited and wrote the screenplay for, A Passage to India.

His great collaborators were Robert Bolt who wrote and rewrote many of the screenplays used in Lean’s films, John Box his art director and production designer and Maurice Jarre who wrote the musical score for all Lean’s films from Lawrence of Arabia to his final film A Passage to India.

Sandra Lean muses that perhaps because of his parents’ divorce, David lived mostly in a series of hotels and a few rarely visited houses. He declared that ‘I have four shirts, two suitcases and the Rolls. I need no other possessions or a home’. In his later life he bought a warehouse property named Sun Wharf, situated on the banks of the river Thames at Limehouse in the east end of London. Architects, builders and decorators were brought in and the property was transformed by David, almost as if he were building a set for a new film. A similar thing happened to a property he and Sandra bought in France.

In 1970 he made Ryan’s Daughter. It’s personally not one of my favourite films and it’s hard to see why David Lean was so interested in the story. It is set in Ireland during the time of the First World War and tells the story of a married Irish woman played by Sarah Miles, (who was actually the wife of the screen writer, Robert Bolt) who has an affair with a British officer. Robert Mitchum played her husband but the only really outstanding performance was that of Sarah Miles. Many critics felt that the small scale romantic story did not fit with the film’s massive visual scale and long running time.

The film did however win two Oscars for cinematographer Freddie Young and supporting actor John Mills. The poor reception of the film prompted David to meet with the New York critics at the city’s Algonquin Hotel. I’m not sure if David wanted to reason with them or just find out why they didn’t like the film but they spent two hours attacking his production. David came away devastated and would not make a film again until A Passage to India in 1984.

He did try to make another film prior to A Passage to India. He was very interested in the story of Fletcher Christian and Captain Bligh and the mutiny on board the Bounty. He spent a few years living in Tahiti researching and making preparations for the film which included overseeing the construction of a replica of the Bounty but when Robert Bolt suffered a stroke and was unable to continue working on the script David backed out of the project. Producer Dino De Laurentis had ploughed a lot of money into the production and he agreed that a new director, Roger Donaldson, a friend of star Mel Gibson, could continue in David’s place. The film was later released as The Bounty.

In the late 1980’s David began to work on his last film, Nostromo, an adaptation of the novel by Joseph Conrad. Various scripts were produced including one by Robert Bolt. Sets were built and a budget of 46 million dollars was allocated but sadly, David Lean succumbed to throat cancer in 1991 and the production collapsed.

His work, in particular his sweeping visual style, inspired a new generation of film makers including Steven Spielberg who took over another unfinished project of David’s, Empire of the Sun.

In Sandra Lean’s book she tries hard to get at David Lean’s inner self; his actual character. He was apparently a man who accepted that some people would go out of his life and that would be that; they would be gone just like a cut in a piece of film. Once people were cut out, like his previous wives, he would never look back but whatever he was like, he was someone committed to motion pictures and Sandra quotes a speech given by Celia Johnson from In Which We Serve, in which she thinks if we substitute ships for film, we might get a true understanding of the man.

In 1987 Lawrence of Arabia was restored by film restoration expert Robert A Harris. David heard about the project and rushed to assist. Producer Don Siegel had cut elements out of the film to reduce its running time and Lean felt that now was the time to restore them. The producers could hardly say no to David Lean.

It just so happens that I have that restored version on DVD so as I’m feeling rather chilly on this December afternoon writing this, I might just dig out my copy, make a cup of tea and give it a viewing, or should I go for Blithe Spirit, the wonderfully witty play filmed by David Lean in 1945?

Which David Lean film would you watch?

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Almost But Not Quite (Part 3)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This is the third post in an occasional series about actors who almost got the role of a lifetime, and in some cases did, but then they didn’t. I’m getting the feeling I’m not explaining it all very well so let’s kick off with the first of four case studies . .

Frank Sinatra and Die Hard.

The Detective was a novel written by American author Roderick Thorp, and was first published in 1966. It was made into a film in 1968 also called The Detective and starred Frank Sinatra, as Detective Joe Leland. Billed as “an adult look at police life”, The Detective went on to become one of the highest-grossing films of 1968 and a great box office hit for Sinatra.

A sequel to the novel, Nothing Lasts Forever, was published in 1979 and in 1987 screen writer Jeb Stuart was asked to work on a screen adaptation of the book. The essential idea for the film according to Wikipedia was that of ‘Rambo in an office building’.

The producers were contractually obliged to offer Frank Sinatra the role although Sinatra, being 70 at the time, was hardly in a position to say yes. Various actors were considered for the role of the detective, now renamed John McLane, including Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood and many others. Bruce Willis was originally forced to turn down the role because of commitments to the TV series Moonlighting but then co-star Cybil Shepard became pregnant and filming on the show was shut down for eleven weeks leaving Willis free to star in the film, the new title of which was Die Hard.

Willis was a controversial choice for the role. He was still only a TV actor and at the time it was proving difficult for TV stars to make the transition to film. Willis himself felt he wanted to distance his character from the larger than life characters played by Schwarzenegger and Stallone in similar action films and he played McLane as an ordinary guy thrust into an out of the ordinary situation.

The film was shot at the Fox Plaza in Century City, Los Angeles which was then still under construction. It was released in 1988 and was one of the year’s top films as well as being a break out film for Bruce Willis. It’s a film I’ve always enjoyed but I still can’t see Sinatra ever playing John McLane.

George Peppard and Dynasty

I can’t really say I was ever a fan of Dynasty. I watched a few episodes but I much preferred the rival show, Dallas. Dynasty was a 1980’s TV soap opera about a wealthy family, the Carringtons, living in Denver, Colorado. John Forsythe starred as the head of the family, Blake Carrington, with Linda Evans as his wife Krystle and Joan Collins as his former wife Alexis. In the pilot episode however, George Peppard played Blake Carrington but the actor didn’t like the script and clashed frequently with the producers. Peppard felt that his role was too similar to that of Jock Ewing, the family patriarch in Dallas. Before the pilot was completed, Peppard was fired and John Forsythe took over the role and all scenes involving Peppard had to be re-shot.

Screenshot from Quora.com

The first season of the series wasn’t too good but the arrival of Joan Collins for series two seemed to bump up the audience figures. George himself wasn’t too bothered about being sacked. He got the part of Hannibal Smith in the A Team.

In his personal life Peppard battled alcoholism and cancer. He died in 1994.

Dennis Hopper and The Truman Show

Dennis Hopper was a great fan of James Dean and he appeared with Dean in two films, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. Later he was part of Easy Rider, a film which supposedly kick started the American new wave of filming in the late 60s and early 70s. Hopper directed and co-wrote the film although I remember watching a TV documentary in the 1980s in which Hopper, Peter Fonda and others all claimed credit for the film. In later life Hopper appeared as a film villain in films like Speed.

In 1997 he signed on to play the part of Christof in the film The Truman Show. Christof is the TV producer of The Truman Show, a TV reality show in which the star, Truman, played by Jim Carrey, doesn’t realise he is on TV. The show is filmed using hidden cameras and actors and is funded by product placements. Hopper was fired after only two days on the shoot as the producers weren’t happy with his performance. Ed Harris, who plays the role in the finished film was a last minute replacement.

Dennis Hopper died at his home in Los Angeles in 2010. He was 74 years old.

Elvis Presley and A Star is Born

A Star is Born is a film that has had numerous remakes. The original was released in 1937 starring Janet Gaynor and Frederic March. It had a screenplay by Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell and Robert Carson and is about a young girl who wants to get into the movies. Janet Gaynor plays Esther Blodget who meets film star Norman Maine. Maine gets Esther into the film world and Esther falls for him but Maine is an alcoholic and his star is rapidly fading while Esther’s is on the rise.

Sid Luft asked director George Cukor to take the helm of a new musical version in 1952 starring his then wife Judy Garland. Cukor wasn’t keen at first but changed his mind when he found the film would be shot in technicolour and he wanted to be part of this new process. Cukor chose Cary Grant to take on the role of Norman Maine but Grant declined. Various others were in the frame for the part including Frank Sinatra. Stewart Granger was a favourite for a while but he didn’t like the way Cukor worked and finally the role went to James Mason.

In the mid seventies, Barbara Streisand and her then husband decided to produce a new musical version of the story based on the music industry rather than Hollywood. Streisand wanted Elvis Presley for the Norman Maine role and even met with Elvis to discuss the film. Elvis who was a great film fan wanted to revive his film career but the big problem was his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Parker apparently wanted top billing for Elvis and a substantial pay packet. He was also concerned that Elvis would be playing a singer whose career is on the way out thinking that might harm the King of Rock n Roll’s actual career. Eventually Elvis backed out and Kris Kristofferson played the part.

I’ve always thought that Elvis was actually a pretty good actor. OK I know a lot of his later films were dreadful but Presley was bored with the kind of films that Colonel Parker had him making. Presley was a great fan of James Dean and knew all the dialogue from Dean’s films. I reckon he would have been outstanding in A Star is Born but sadly, it wasn’t to be.

Yes, I would have loved to have seen Presley in A Star is Born. Also, I wouldn’t have minded seeing Cary Grant in the Judy Garland version either!

Elvis died in 1977. He was 42 years old. His last acting role in a film was Change of Habit, made in 1969.

A Star is Born was remade yet again in 2018 starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga.

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