Michael Caine made his first appearance as novelist Len Deighton's bespectacled British-spy Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File. Palmer has no real love of espionage, but he doesn't really know any other life. With studied insolence, he takes on the case of locating missing doctor Radcliffe (Aubrey Richards), who has in his possession a valuable file that would prove injurious to the Free World should it fall in the wrong hands. The government also fears that Radcliffe will be brainwashed by the enemy, as has happened to two previous British scientists. While Palmer is off doing everyone else's dirty work, his superior, Nigel Green, is making a deal with duplicitous information "broker" Frank Gatliff to win Radcliffe's release. The price for this would seem to be Palmer, who is captured by the enemy and subjected to a grueling brainwashing session. Palmer escapes, whereupon he confronts a traitor in his midst in the climactic exchange of gunfire. Advertised as "The Thinking Man's Goldfinger, The Ipcress File offered a far more realistic view of the morally ambivalent world of espionage than did the like-vintage James Bond films. Music by John Berry set the standard for spy movies.
The Ipcress File(1965), Funeral in Berlin (1966) and Billion Dollar Brain (1967). Decades later, Michael Caine returned his Harry Palmer character in Harry Alan Towers' Bullet to Beijing (1995) and Midnight in St. Petersburg (1996).
Rashomon (羅生門, Rashōmon?) is a 1950 Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa, working in close collaboration with cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa. It stars Toshirō Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Machiko Kyō, Masayuki Mori and Minoru Chiaki. The film is based on two stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa — ("Rashomon" provides the setting, while "In a Grove" provides the characters and plot).
Rashomon can be said to have introduced Kurosawa and Japanese cinema to Western audiences, and is considered one of his masterpieces. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and also received an Academy Honorary Award at the 24th Academy Awards.
This is my favorite of all times. I can watch it over and over.
I'm not a big fan of musicals, but Oliver is on my Top 5 list. I enjoy the movie version so much, and I can still watch it over and over after 40 years. Everything in this movie is excellent starting with songs, choreography … to magnificent Ron Moody as Fagin. I still remember when I saw him for the firs time I couldn’t believe that it’s a real man and not a cartoon character. No one can repeat the way Ron is moving and walking. Check on youtube for more Oliver clips, buy DVD or if you are lucky see it live.
Henry Hill: You're a pistol, you're really funny. You're really funny. Tommy DeVito: What do you mean I'm funny? Henry Hill: It's funny, you know. It's a good story, it's funny, you're a funny guy. [laughs] Tommy DeVito: what do you mean, you mean the way I talk? What? Henry Hill: It's just, you know. You're just funny, it's... funny, the way you tell the story and everything. Tommy DeVito: [it becomes quiet] Funny how? What's funny about it? Anthony Stabile: Tommy no, You got it all wrong. Tommy DeVito: Oh, oh, Anthony. He's a big boy, he knows what he said. What did ya say? Funny how? Henry Hill: Jus... Tommy DeVito: What? Henry Hill: Just... ya know... you're funny. Tommy DeVito: You mean, let me understand this cause, ya know maybe it's me, I'm a little fucked up maybe, but I'm funny how, I mean funny like I'm a clown, I amuse you? I make you laugh, I'm here to fuckin' amuse you? What do you mean funny, funny how? How am I funny? Henry Hill: Just... you know, how you tell the story, what? Tommy DeVito: No, no, I don't know, you said it. How do I know? You said I'm funny. How the fuck am I funny, what the fuck is so funny about me? Tell me, tell me what's funny! Henry Hill: [long pause] Get the fuck out of here, Tommy! Tommy DeVito: [everyone laughs] Ya motherfucker! I almost had him, I almost had him. Ya stuttering prick ya. Frankie, was he shaking? I wonder about you sometimes, Henry. You may fold under questioning.
"There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems! One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting multi-variant, multinational dominion of dollars! Petrol dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reich Marks, Rins, Rubles, Pounds, and Shekels!" "It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone! Am I getting through to you Mr. Beale?" "You get up on your 21-inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT and AT&T and Du Pont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today." "What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do." "We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime." "And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit in which men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused." "....At the bottom of all our terrified souls, we know that democracy is a dying giant. A sick, sick, dying, decaying political concept, writhing in it's final pain. I don't mean that the United States is finished as a world power. The United States is the richest, most advanced country in the world, light-years ahead of any other country, and the Communists won't take over the world because the Communists are deader than we are. What is finished is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of you out there that's finished. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of some 200 odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston rods. Well, the time has come to say is "Dehumanization" such a bad word. Whether it's good or bad, that's what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid. Creatures that look human but aren't. The whole world, not just us. We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first. The whole world's people are becoming mass produced, programmed, numbered......"
"......I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their jobs. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. The banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep guns under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street. Nobody anywhere seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. We sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides, and 63 violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be! We know things are bad. They're worse than bad, they're crazy! It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world were living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "please at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, and my TV, and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything, just leave us alone!" Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest, and I don't want you to riot, and I don't want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression, and the inflation, the Russians, and the crime in the streets. All I know is that first you've got to get mad! You've got to say, "I'm a human being godamit! My life has value!..... So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"
This is one of my personal Top Ten movies, and Robert Duvall is on my Top Five Best Actors List. I don't remember seeing him in a bad movie, or in a bad role.
"The Apostle" is a 1997 movie, written, directed and produced by Robert Duvall, who stars in the title role. It was filmed in and around Dallas, Texas, as well as in Louisiana. Duvall wrote the script in the 1980s but could not find a studio willing to film it. He eventually decided to direct and finance it himself. It was first screened at the Toronto Film Festival. The film went on to have a $21.3 million worldwide theatrical gross, with a combined production and advertising budget of $8 million.
Duvall plays main character the preacher, good man with a bad luck and temper. For his performance, Duvall was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. I cut from the movie only scenes where Duvall is preaching. It's so impressive and he looks so natural in the role of preacher. I can't decide is it improvisation, or written and well executed scenes.
The major themes of The Apostle include forgiveness and accountability. Duvall sympathetically portrays Sonny as a sincere gospel preacher whose passions get the better of him. After fleeing from Texas, he re-baptizes himself -- symbolizing a fresh start -- and seeks to accomplish as much good as possible before his inevitable capture. Sonny's arrest closes the moral circle of the narrative, showing that evil acts do not go unpunished. Yet, his final sermon motivates the fledgling church to carry on a life of faith and good deeds.
"The Apostle": An Interview with Robert Duvall
by Bill Blizek and Ronald Burke
[1] The JOURNAL editors recently had the opportunity to interview Robert Duvall about his new movie, "The Apostle". The interview was especially interesting because it is so much Duvall’s own film. He wrote the script, starred as the lead character, and directed the film. When no Hollywood studio would produce it, he also turned to his own production company (Butchers Run Films), put up his own money (five million dollars), and produced the film himself.
[2] Many people have interviewed Duvall in recent months about the film and about his entire movie and stage career. We focused our interview more narrowly on the picture of religion in the film and on the morality of the lead character Duvall plays, the preacher, Eulis "Sonny" Dewey.
Some Fake; Some Great
[3] What does Duvall think of southern Christianity and revivalist preachers in general? He has a fascination for them which began more than thirty years ago when he visited a Holiness church in the small town of Hughes, Arkansas. He says that he was intrigued by the cadence, rhythms and honest faith he witnessed in the songs and tent-meetings there. For Duvall, these revivalist tent-meetings are "an important part of American culture." The preaching is "a distinct American art-form."
[4] "The best preacher I ever met," says Duvall, "was a 96 year-old black man from a little church in Hamilton, Virginia. He seemed to me more spiritual than the Dalai Lama or Mahatma Gandhi. This guy was great. He had a great cadence of preaching, a great honesty." Duvall invited a Jewish film-director friend and his Catholic wife to hear him preach. "It was terrific," Duvall recounts. "The director told me a year and a half later that he could never get the preacher entirely out of his mind. He was that impressive."
[5] "A lot of these preachers are phony, but a lot of them are not."
[6] It was from the same black preacher that Duvall borrowed an introduction and a song. The preacher ended every sermon with the same words: one day he expected, he said, to get into a little airplane. He would fly off not to London or Chicago or New York or any earthly city. He expected on that day, his last day, to fly past the sun and the stars and directly into heaven. Then the preacher would pause and the whole congregation would begin to sing, "I’ll Fly Away."
[7] That kind of borrowing, from the actual preachers and congregations of Holiness churches, is typical of the film.
Sonny is an ordinary guy
[8] What about the lead character, Sonny himself? Sometimes he seems pretty good, sometimes he is pretty bad. What was Duvall saying about Sonny?
[9] He pointed out there have been other movies about Pentecostal religions, but they never gave the people and their religion their due. Movies such as "Leap of Faith" (Steve Martin and Debra Winger) and "Elmer Gantry" (Burt Lancaster) were fakes. "They patronize," Duvall says. "They put quotation marks around the preacher. They don’t give the minister or his congregation their due."
[10] "Some religious people might ask why I would make such a movie and emphasize that this evangelical preacher has weaknesses. And my answer is that we either accept weaknesses in good people or we have to tear pages out of the bible. I would have to rip the Psalms out of the bible and never read them again. Because no one less than the greatest king of Israel, King David, the author of the Psalms, sent a man out to die in battle so that he could sleep with his wife. And that was a far more evil thing than anything Sonny would ever, ever do.
[11] "So here’s King David, the great poet of the Psalms that we laud and he did something that was far worse than anything this present preacher would do. But because this is today, and not removed romantically to the past, we judge Sonny quickly and harshly. But, you know, he’s just an ordinary guy. He did not commit premeditated murder. He didn’t go to that church social and the baseball game with the intention of killing the young preacher. It just happened. Smack!
[12] "I still wanted to show that crime doesn’t pay. He didn’t have a great lawyer, and he didn’t get off without punishment. No more than Karla Faye Tucker should have gotten off without punishment in Texas, despite what Pat Robertson might have thought. Crime does not pay. If you are saved and accept the Lord, you cannot use that as an excuse to avoid punishment.
[13] "Sonny doesn’t escape punishment. But he’s a man of action. After killing the man, guys like us would probably wait around to be caught, but Sonny takes action. He knows he’s done something wrong. It happened involuntarily, and so he leaves. He kneels at the crossroads and prays, ‘Lord, lead me.’ He abandons his car and goes off to do something to make himself better.
[14] "No, he was never a bad guy. He was a good guy. But he did something bad. So he is full of good and bad. Sonny’s a good guy; he believed he had a calling from the time he was twelve; and he errs like most characters do, you know?
[15] "He’s a kind of percentage mixture at the beginning and at the end. There’s a certain percentage chance he will do good and a percentage chance he will again err. But he knows he has erred and that he needs confession and redemption.
[16] "He’s working in the restaurant in Bayou Butte, Louisiana and he sees his new woman-friend, Toosie (Miranda Richardson), whom he has dated a couple of times. She’s together again with her family at the restaurant. That really hits him. He suffers a broken heart. Humanly, he knows he has defeated himself. He has himself sent her back to her husband, back to her family. But that "success" hurts him. He has the pain of a man losing something, his relation to Toosie. It was something he had thought might become beautiful. But he knows it’s right that she’s back with her husband and her children.
The Power of the Holy Ghost
[17] We asked what Duvall thought about the value of the Pentecostal revivalist religions. In the movie’s beginning, Sonny stops at an accident scene, finds a wrecked car, and a guy and girl lying motionless inside it. He reaches through a window, puts the girl’s hand on the boy’s, prays for them, and then her hand moves. Was there a message in that?
[18] Duvall: "Definitely. When we did it, I said to the cameraman, ‘Frame down to her.’ And so we showed her, and I put her hand on her boyfriend’s hand so we are all connected. And I wanted that look: her hand to move, to show that the power of prayer works. The healing of someone. The movement of something. God moving in mysterious ways. Exactly. This power is based on the biblical authority, ‘Where two or more are gathered in my name, I am there’. Every time I saw that I got goose pimples on my arms. That scene really tells a lot: that Sonny is doing good work and that the power of the Holy Ghost was there.
[19] "Sonny knows he is serving the Lord. He walks back over to his own car, where his mother is waiting. ‘Mama,’ he says, ‘we made news in heaven this morning, we made news in heaven!’ Yeah, that scene was meant to be there. It was the power of the Holy Ghost.
[20] "There was a guy there, a tough old Holiness church guy, watching us film. And he said later that when he heard Sonny say those words he also got chill bumps. That told me those were the right words. It meant something to those people themselves, in their churches. It was definitely meant to be there. The power of the Spirit.
[21] "The scene sets the stage for the rest of the movie. Sonny tries to help people and God can heal. God does guide the lives of individuals and does fill them with the Holy Ghost."
People’s Own Religion
[22] In "giving people their due," Duvall used many non-actors who were part of the small-town Holiness churches. What was the objective there?
[23] Duvall: "I tried to mix the non-actors with the actors. I tried to turn the whole film-making thing around as much as possible. I didn’t want to come in and tell them what to do. I wanted them to show me what they do. That is why we used non-actors with that kind of background.
[24] "The assistant director, who helps coordinates the scenes, holds the non-actors within certain limits, but within those limits their performances are a very spontaneous thing. Like those little twin boys, playing in the church aisle. How are you going to direct them? You don’t direct them. They were born into these churches. So when they want to jump up and down, they are going to jump up and down. That’s why we used so many non-actors. We tried to let the story come out from their own community.
[25] We asked Duvall about two of the most prominent characters in the church scenes, Sister Johnson and Sister Jewell. We learned that neither was a professional actor and that both exemplified the religion to which they belonged.
[26] Duvall: "One we got from one of the Holiness churches in Lafayette and one came from Shreveport. There was a state-wide convention of churches. Ed Johnson, the casting director, and I went there and watched. And the whole Louisiana mass choir -- we got them for the movie. We chose a guy who had just been confirmed as a minister and another from way out in the country in Louisiana. We tracked him down after he had been at the state convention.
[27] "And Sister Jewell, who gave testimony, that was all her own testimony. She came up with it herself. That is what the people in the Holiness churches do. So we just planned it as much as we needed. We put the camera on long lens and just let things happen. We wouldn’t say ‘Now it’s your close-up time. Are you ready?’. Instead of doing it that way, like in most movies, these people never necessarily knew when the camera was coming on them."
Off the bulldozer and accept the Lord
[28] We asked where Duvall had gotten material for the script. Again it came from the people themselves. He said he had been collecting stories and phrases for more than thirteen years, in pretty disorganized fashion. But he collected a lot of stories and phrases he used in the film.
[29] Duvall: "Yeah, I know a preacher, Paul Baggett, who was with us in the team-preaching scene (in New Boston, Texas, outside Fort Worth). He told me that years ago a guy came on a bulldozer, planning to destroy his meeting tent. So Paul took out the bible and put it in front of the bulldozer. He said, ‘Go ahead and go over my bible.’ And the guy wouldn’t do it. He had a pistol and everything, but he wouldn’t do it. Later he was saved, but the reason he was coming there with the bulldozer was because his girlfriend had already come to the tent and been saved. And so now she wouldn’t shack up with him anymore! That’s why he was so mad.
[30] "So I pieced Paul's story together with another one that reinforced it. This story was about a guy who was going to put a firebomb in a church in the Bronx. The preacher dared him to come in and the guy got down and accepted the Lord. So maybe we are all on a kind of search . . ."
Sonny’s strength
[31] We asked about Sonny’s strength. He seemed to weather so many storms and disappointments and yet come out with happiness and re-dedication.
[32] Duvall: "Yeah, he does. He sees things positively. You are the first ones to say that, but I remember way back, when I first thought of the character, I knew I wanted him to be really sanguine. I envisioned a guy who would just keep going, seeing the will of the Lord, and not be like those that might just sit on their hands.
[33] "Sonny always has one foot in really trusting what he believes in, even though he errs. If someone took your church, like Jessie took his, and if someone took your wife, like the youth minister took Jessie, it would be a hard thing to deal with. He didn’t intend to kill anybody, but it happened on the spur of the moment. ‘Oh, my God!’, he knows he’s done something wrong.
[34] ‘I gotta leave,’ he thinks; ‘what do I do?’ ‘Lord, lead me,’ he says. He still depends on the Lord, you know, even though he has sinned. So he begins an odyssey, the whole film is an odyssey journey.
Both loud and soft
[35] We saw there was a lot of shouting in the film, loud singing and Sonny shouting personally at God. And yet there also were some important moments of quiet. Did that have special meaning?
[36] Duvall: "You’re sure right. It did. Sonny shouted as loud as Job ever did. There was nothing wrong with shouting at God. I like that scene where I go through the commandments. And then I say, ‘The 11th commandment, "thou shalt not shout," (pause) does not exist!’ Yeah, I made that up. Right there. That’s the way he felt and the way these people felt.
[37] "But I wanted to make something else obvious. Sometimes these people yell and carry on, and sometimes they get quiet and are sincere. There’s that time I was sitting alone in the borrowed pup-tent. We re-edited that scene to make it clear. I am sitting there, meditating, listening for "the still, small voice" [I Kings 19] of Jesus. As it says in the bible, there is a time to ‘Go in thy closet and the Father will reward thee openly.’ There are two sides to these guys.
[38] "And then, just before I go into the church to preach with Brother Blackwell (John Beasley from Omaha), I step back. I just want a moment to myself. I got that from watching these preachers. They often want to be alone for a second. They turn around and bow their heads. And then they go to do something."
Different religions, same goal
[39] "Another thing I want to emphasize is the cultural contrast I saw between religions. By the time we were finished cutting, that was not obvious. Like Catholics have a lot of mediators, going through saints and Mary or whatever. But I love the directness of these people. They relate directly with God, not going through anything.
[40] "Protestants in general, but especially these people, say things to God directly, like I do in the film: ‘I always call you "Jesus"; you always call me "Sonny".’ ‘I’m on the devil’s hit-list; I’m gonna get on Jesus’ mailing-list!’ ‘Holy Ghost explosion,’ ‘Short-circuit the devil!’ ‘I’m a genuine Holy Ghost Jesus-filled preaching machine here this morning!’ I use those phrases in the film. I heard them from the preachers and from the people. These were their terms. God is immediate to their lives.’
[41] "Sonny sees a Catholic priest blessing fishing boats as they leave the harbor. He says, ‘You do it your way, and we do it mine. But we get it done, don't we.’ That’s the tension between religions. There are different forms and prejudices, but I wanted Sonny to show an acceptance of another religion because both were trying to achieve the same end.
[42] "Faith helps Sonny feel positive about the future. That was something I wanted to show in the movie. We all have a cradle-to-the-grave journey to make and, in between, what do you do? There’s got to be something hereafter. And I think, underneath, what Sonny wants to do is constantly to make amends so that he is ready for that day when he is called home. So that’s kind of like the underlying thing and we all think of it."
The Final Product
[43] Last of all, we wanted to know if Duvall was happy with the final product. How did the final editing go?
[44] Duvall: "Just before release, we got another opinion, and thirty minutes were cut, but the cuts stung me. We lost the ethnic points, the religious differences. Previously, things had added up and it’s so easy to mess them up. So it was a tough time for me. I had painted myself into a corner: the shorter the film the more showings you can get and the more money it would make. But some things I didn’t want to lose.
[45] "So, I sat down and addressed sixty things I didn’t like about the cuts, explaining them, and so on. Then the final version went to about two hours and fourteen minutes and it was, to my eye, like a trimming process rather than a degutting, which is what I felt before had happened. That would’ve been death. I would’ve gone crazy.
[46] "But this way I like it. It’s more trimming than slashing. Cutting here, this, that, taking a little out of the flat patter scene. Oh, it’s okay. It’s better.
[47] "But the thing about it, which is really nice, is that people understood the film. Like in New York, in hip New York, they got it. And then I was worried about the religious side, but the 700 Club wants me to talk on it. So like, you know, it’s being accepted. It is a strange crossover. Very often some of the religious miracle plays you see on television can be very corny, I find. And so simplistic. But here’s one that’s different.
[48] "Somebody said, ‘Well, maybe you’re finally showing the south the way it is instead of making L’il Abner out of it.’ And you know, that was my intention. I wouldn’t even want to go near the subject if I didn’t give people -- these people -- their due. Whether you totally agree or not, you don’t have to. There’s a lot of it I do like, a lot of it, but I want to give them their due and once again turn film-making around so that the story comes out from them. It is very important to me.
[49] "I even heard that David Denby, in the New York Review, said it was the best film ever made in America on a religious subject. He’s a guy who usually rips everything and he really ripped Tender Mercies. But he knows you can’t write those people off. You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it’s so rich, so deeply rich in many things. So why not try to get it right if you’re going to make a film of southern religion? That’s what I wanted to do."
Conversation Charlie Rose with Robert Duvall January 29, 1998
OK, here's a question. What do you get when you mix Ginger Rogers, Doris Day, Lucille Ball, Drew Barrymore and energizer bunny?
Well.... it's a super star singer, dancer, actress, funny face.. the girl you have to love.
Here's a hint: Bob Hope called her once "a vitamin pill with legs."
Yes, it's amazing Betty Hutton.
I watch her videos, and wonder does she ever get tired. Can't she just stand there, look pretty and sing? She must be one of the first diagnosed with ADD. I don't think they spent any money on her choreograper. All that shaking, and jumping was so natural for Betty. It was swing era, and the jitterbug was a free (street) style of dancing. Betty was born for that. I can't stop watching her. She always leaves a smile on my face.
There was no one with more energy than Betty Hutton. She could out run Energizer Bunny. Her frantic, manic, comic style was totally unique. She was known as the "Blonde Bombshell" and "Bouncing Betty", and became the musical queen of Hollywood. She was beautiful, sexy, and a dynamo who could act, dance and sing better and certainly louder than almost anyone.
Life story that only Hollywood can make.
Betty was born Elizabeth June Thornburg in 1921 in Battle Creek, Michigan. Her father walked out when she was two and killed himself sixteen years later; her mother was a factory worker turned bootlegger turned alcoholic. When Betty was three, she and her five-year-old sister Marion began to sing for the customers, and, when Betty was eleven years old, the sisters sang in the streets and in other speakeasies for coins. They joined Vincent Lopez's band at 15. Glen Miller hired Marion Hutton away and she became lead singer of the Modernaires with the Glen Miller Orchestra. For a short while, Marion became the bigger star. In 1942 at age 21 Hutton was signed to starring role in The Fleet's. She made 14 films in 11 years during the 1940s and early 1950s, including Annie Get Your Gun for MGM in the role of Annie Oakley. Her career extended into the '60s, what with drugs, booze, bankruptcy, a failed suicide, and, eventually, God, it didn't get better. Married four times with three daughters, Hutton lived near Palm Springs, California until her death in 2007. None of her three daughters attended the funeral.
It was not an auspicious debut. Mom strummed the ukulele in the blind pig that she operated in Lansing, Mich., and out onto the floor came a skinny, freckled five-year-old named Betty June Thornburg, with her sister Marion, seven. While the speakeasy customers sipped needled beer, the blonde moppets sang and wriggled their way through Black Bottom and other favorite anthems of the year 1926.
"Mom didn't do anything real bad," recalls Betty Hutton, as larger audiences have since come to know the freckle-face. "How is a woman supposed to make her living with two kids when her husband deserted her? Mom just ran a joint on a small scale. We'd operate until the cops got wise. Then they'd move in and close us down, and we'd move somewhere else. Marion and I would entertain the customers by dancing and singing. We really lived that way until we were 12 and 14 years old . . . Things were really tough. At one time we were down to one can of beans."
When she could get it, Betty's mother, Mabel Lum Thornburg, took daytime work on the assembly lines in automobile factories at 22¢ an hour. For a time, after she and the children had begun to share a Detroit basement flat with two other families, she worked as a "tackspitter," tacking upholstery into car seats. She would come home at night "with nails in her fingers where she'd missed." Says Betty grimly: "I made up my mind then that no one—no one—would keep us like that."
No one has. Last week 29-year-old Betty Hutton was a $260,000-a-year movie star on the verge of her splashiest success. She was still going strong on the momentum she had picked up on the wrong side of the tracks. Her relentless determination to get to the top had flung her from speakeasies to street-singing to bandstands, then onto Broadway and into the startled public eye as the frenzied high priestess of a nameless chaos-with-music that has been wrongly called jitterbugging.
It has been nine years since she zoomed into Hollywood. All but bursting with vitality, she tore into her film career with a bellicose zeal and a tomboyish winsomeness that suggested a cross between one of the Furies and Little Orphan Annie. Last year, having made two duds in a row (Dream Girl and Red, Hot and Blue), she decided, probably correctly: "My career needed a jolt."
Plotting & Prayers. Within the fortnight, U.S. moviegoers will see the jolt her career has gotten: MGM's Annie Get Your Gun, 1950's biggest, costliest ($3,200,000) musical. The star: Betty Hutton. As something extra, Actress Hutton will pop up as co-star with Fred Astaire this summer in another brightly colored song & dance film, Paramount's Let's Dance. Though Hollywood's box office has been slumping, there are still surefire receipts in a lavish Technicolored musical—and not enough surefire cinemusical stars to go around. As the cinemusical girl of 1950, Betty holds just about as firm a grip on the immediate future as Hollywood can offer.
Impatient but determined, Betty had prayed, pleaded and plotted for the role of Annie from the time she saw Ethel Merman do it in the 1946 Broadway hit. She never doubted she would get it, even after M-G-M outbid Paramount, her home studio, for the film rights. With Judy Garland cast in the lead and shooting already begun, Betty still insisted on betting an M-G-M executive that she would play the part.
After 30 days of expensive shooting by two directors, MGM's Garland had a nervous breakdown, and the studio had to start again from scratch. Betty sent emissaries scurrying to MGM's Louis B. Mayer, who said: "We'd be silly to give the part to somebody on another lot." But after rummaging around among its own players, the biggest star constellation in Hollywood, M-G-M decided that it needed Betty just as badly as she needed the part.
It was a decision that audiences are likely to approve. Originally tailored to Broadway's first lady of musicomedy, Annie Get Your Gun demands a star with high-voltage showmanship and an earthy flavor. Betty Hutton, who is not remarkably pretty, by movie standards, nor a remarkably good singer or dancer, has a vividly unique personality in a town that tends to reduce beauty and talent to mass-produced patterns. Watching her in action has some of the fascination of waiting for a wildly sputtering fuse to touch off an alarmingly large firecracker.
Annie Get Your Gun breaks no new ground. But thanks to irrepressible Betty, Irving Berlin's fine ten-song score and a showmanlike production, it should leave moviegoers feeling that they have been roundly entertained. The picture sticks close to the original musicomedy book by Dorothy and Herbert Fields, takes all its music & lyrics from the original Berlin tunes. It loses a few laughs getting by the censor, as well as five of the show's lesser songs. It gains trom jettisoning a conventional romantic subplot and from the broader canvas of the screen.
Brimming with colorful costumes and extravagant, Hollywood-style Wild West shows, the film is a fictional embroidery of the romance and rivalry between Sharpshooter Annie Oakley and Crackshot Frank Butler (Broadway's Howard Keel). Annie, who can't miss anything she shoots at, eventually learns that You Can't Get a Man with a Gun. She gets him by learning how to shoot and miss.
Betty carries the show with such riotous energy and eagerness to please that she threatens to carry it too far. She plunges into her first two numbers like a bronco out of a rodeo pen, filling the screen with so much motion that it is hard to listen for the words—and impossible to ignore the singer. She lacks Ethel Merman's craftiness with comedy, but along with her unbridled vitality, she gives the role something that brassy Ethel Merman never attempted: she kindles the love story with poignancy, makes it seem something more sincere than a musicomedy plot. In a slow, sentimental number like They Say It's Wonderful, performed with breathless tenderness, she puts together the rare blend of singing and acting talent that makes lyrics carry emotion as well as melody. And, toward the end, when she bounces back into animal spirits to join Keel in Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better, her strident comic style and Berlin's flamboyant duet seem to have been made for each other.
"Hiya, Dollface!" Betty's all-out assault on an audience is a trademark that she carries into every appearance, public or private, that might conceivably make the world more Hutton-conscious and thus advance her career. Her clarionlike entrance into a restaurant ("Hiya, dollface! Hey, got my table?") is one of the digestive hazards of eating out in Hollywood. During a wartime bond tour, she stole the headlines in most of 20 cities from a trainload of more prominent stars by rushing to kiss the mayor on arrival; in one city she had to leap onto a police motorcycle to beat the rest of the troupe to City Hall.
When she is working on a picture, Betty makes it a point to be in bed by 9 p.m., turns out before 6. On the rare occasions when she is not playing to the crowd, she is likely to be quiet, moody, tortured by self-doubt. During the filming of Annie, she would telephone Director George Sidney at night: "Were you really satisfied with that take? . . . But you didn't smile at me very much. Are you sure you aren't mad at me?" Or she would telephone Sidney's wife to ask fretfully if the boss had come home in a good mood. Betty cries easily, suffers insomnia, confesses at times that her success has not brought her happiness. Once, with the candor that makes her pressagents tremble, she-blurted to an interviewer: "You know what I think I've done? I think I've loused up my life."
A Real Bad Hurt. Betty's life began on Feb. 26, 1921, in Battle Creek, Mich., "by the railroad tracks between Postum and Kellogg." She was two when her father, a railroad brakeman named Percy Thornburg, drifted off to California with another woman. Soon after, the mother took Betty and Marion to Lansing. They did not hear of Thornburg again until 1937, when he killed himself in a Los Angeles suburb and left the two girls $100 each.
"Betty was jealous of her sister right from the start," says her mother, who has since remarried and lives in Hollywood not far from Betty. "She was always in my lap, always after affection. She would stand on her head, do cartwheels, yell or do anything to attract attention away from her quieter sister." As the girls grew up, Betty envied Marion her more luxuriant hair and her pretty face.
When she was five, an older boy playfully threw Betty off the end of a pier. She hit a nail in one of the pilings and snagged her left cheek, near the eye; the scar is still faintly noticeable. "It made my inferiority complex worse," says Betty. "The kids called me 'Bad-eye Bodie' and nicknames like that, that hurt real bad. So I acted fresh and tomboyish, as if I was tougher than anybody on the block."
The family moved to Detroit when she was eight, but it was still the wrong side of the tracks. "I'd do anything to escape," says Betty. "I got broody and bad. I'd dance and sing on street corners. I never did anything real wrong, but I landed in juvenile hall sometimes." At eleven she played Mae West in a school theatrical, and began doing well on amateur nights in Detroit theaters. At 14, she became a vocalist for a band of high-school boys. At 15, tired of waiting to be discovered, she packed off with some musicians to dazzle Manhattan, which refused to be dazzled. Somebody gave her the fare to get home. After that, Betty, just past her first year in high school, went to school no more.
One night in January 1938, her future finally beckoned. Bandleader Vincent Lopez, playing in Detroit and looking for a new girl singer, saw her performing in a nightclub. He gave her the job at $65 a week, and she celebrated by eating steak for the first time—at breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper. But she soon began to worry tearfully that she was not getting over. Then, at dinner one night in Philadelphia, a trombonist in the band confided that she was going to be fired. Betty gulped three brandy-and-benedictines and went to the theater in the reckless conviction that she had nothing to lose.
That night the Hutton style burst upon a relatively powerless world. Between choruses of Dipsy Doodle, she began to throw her body around as if she had no further use for it. She mugged, turned somersaults, hopped on musicians' laps and pulled their hair, fought off imaginary adversaries, tore up sheet music, swung Lopez off his feet, made a flying tackle at the microphone. In a favorite metaphor, Betty says: "I murdered the people."
Lopez decided that his vocalist, whom he had first billed as Betty Jane, deserved a new name. A firm believer in numerology, he let the numbers lead him to "Hutton." "I tried to get a vibration that would make her a lot of money," he says. "It was a five-eight vibration. After that she did fine." By the time the band played Billy Rose's Casa Mañana, Betty had whipped her own vibrations into enough of a frenzy to dazzle Manhattan at last—and to make Rose caution her not to "tear down my theater."
The Dangerous Life. In her new glory as "America's No. 1 Jitterbug" ("As a matter of fact," she says, "I couldn't jitterbug"), Betty worked up to $175 a week for Lopez. Then she quit him, though their contract still entitled him to 20% of her earnings. She went into a Broadway revue, Two for the Show, and got rave reviews.
During the show's run, hardworking, hard-cussing Actress Hutton spared her fellow performers no more than she spared herself. She thrashed about so violently that once she catapulted off the stage and onto a drummer in the orchestra pit. In a number that required her to maul Keenan Wynn, she once toed him into a dead faint, forced him to take to protective padding. Among her later victims: Bob Hope, whose teeth caps she sent scattering over a soundstage floor during a bit of jujitsu; Cinemactor Frank Faylen, whom she knocked out with a right to the jaw when the director demanded realism; Eddie Bracken, who, in a saloon scene, caught a Hutton slap on the back that looped him over the bar and into a heap on the other side. "When they work with me," crows Betty, "they gotta get insurance policies."
After Two for the Show closed, Bandleader Lopez inadvertently helped Betty to get her next big break. She had stopped paying his 20%, and he sued her for $646.50. Betty stormed into the office of Theatrical Attorney A. L. Berman, whose clients included Buddy De Sylva, the Broadway and Hollywood producer and songwriter. While she was in the office, De Sylva telephoned Berman from California to get "someone like Betty Hutton" for a supporting role in Panama Hattie, the musicomedy he was then casting for the Manhattan stage. "Why not Hutton herself?" asked Berman. "I've got her right here." Betty won both the part and the lawsuit.
$10 Down. With her talent for a nonstop fireworks display and her brash, kid-sisterly appeal, she also won something more important: the role of De Sylva's protégée. He soon became Paramount's executive producer, a post he held for four years. One of his first decisions was to take Betty out of Panama Hattie and on to Hollywood.
During her first weeks in Hollywood, in 1941, Betty sobbed over the telephone to friends in New York about her feelings of loneliness and rejection. But Hollywood caught no glimpse of that mood. She quickly bought a mink coat (on $10 down) and a Buick convertible, sampled two apartments and then leased a penthouse—all without being quite sure how she would meet the monthly payments. At Paramount she insisted on the services of the head make-up man as well as a downstairs dressing room (just between those used by Bob Hope and Bing Crosby). She made pressagents tear up her first publicity stills and shoot another set. When she visited the music department and was asked what sort of thing she did, she leaped onto Composer Johnny Mercer's back with a wild yell: "I do something like this. Get it?" She greeted dignified Cecil B. DeMille with "Hiya, dreamboat."
On her first picture, The Fleet's In, Betty complained to De Sylva that the director and cameraman were leaving her out of things. They politely explained: "We can't keep her in the camera." De Sylva had a camera dolly rigged up and told the director to follow her all over the set if necessary. "You can't keep her quiet," he said. "You'll lose her." But as he brought Betty slowly along to starring parts, De Sylva tried to impress her with the need for channeling her energy instead of letting it run all over the lot.
Qualms & Classics. In her fourth film, and her most memorable, Betty showed convincingly that it could be done. Having asked for her to star in his The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Writer-Director Preston Sturges exploited not only her comic verve but her unsuspected capacity for pathos in a non-musical part. Says Sturges: "She's a full-fledged actress with every talent the noun implies. She plays in musicals because the public, which can do practically nothing well, is willing to concede its entertainers only one talent."
After Miracle, Actress Hutton got choosy about her scripts for the first time. As her stature in Hollywood grew, so did her qualms over her meager education. When De Sylva asked her what she wanted for Christmas one year, she asked for good books, got a set of 100 classics, and actually started reading them. She also became irked with her "blonde bombshell" publicity and engaged Margaret ("Maggie") Ettinger, one of Hollywood's higher-powered press-agents, to give her more tone. Maggie introduced her to the right people and schooled her in how to get on with them.
In September 1945, after many a romantic attachment, Betty married a wealthy, handsome Chicago camera manufacturer named Ted Briskin, then 28. They had met in a nightclub and "it was love at first sight." Six months later they separated, and quickly reunited as Betty explained: "Ted has been after me to give up my career . . . I love Ted very dearly, but I have worked all my life to get where I am, and I can't give it up . . . Ted understands now." They had two daughters, Lindsay Diane, 3½, and Candice, 2. After another separation last year, Betty and her husband parted again three months ago. This month she got a California divorce for "mental cruelty."
Living It Up. Last week Betty was hard at what she calls "living it up." She had bought a complete new wardrobe, spent a frenzied two days in San Francisco singing for the fun of it at nightclubs she visited. Every night she was out on the town, mostly with different escorts. In the daytime she burned up excess energy by taking golf lessons. Buoyed by the raves of the movie trade press for Annie and her performance, she treated nightclubbers (including her ex-husband) at Hollywood's Mocambo to an impromptu performance of the whole score. Then she impulsively grabbed customers as dancing partners and swung half a dozen of them around the floor.
She decided in midweek to stop seeing Cinemactor Robert Sterling for a while, "because I'm not in a position to get too serious, and we were seeing each other, y'know, every five minutes." For weeks she had been showering Sterling with gifts and public displays of affection, and had had her friends trying to dig up better jobs for him. Openhandedly generous, Betty gives heavily and anonymously to charities, has given cars to her mother and her ex-secretary, once gave her hairdresser a mink coat. But she never mixes generosity with her career. De Sylva, who, after a long illness, has been trying to get back into movie production as an independent, stopped speaking to her last year. She had refused to do a picture "for him because she did not like the script.
Betty has worried some lately about her special problem of getting the right husband. "I could marry someone in the business who was higher up than me, or making more," she says thoughtfully. "But when a real man comes up against the situation where he gets second billing, he walks. I don't know how I'm going to be happy."
On Top. This side of happiness, Betty seems to have just about everything. She has far outstripped sister Marion, who borrowed the Hutton name and made her own show-business success as vocalist with Glenn Miller's orchestra and in radio and movie jobs. Betty's children have all the things she went without, including a nurse to change their beautiful dresses five times a day. After moving ten times in five years to successively grander Hollywood living quarters, she has an eleven-room ranch-style house in Brentwood
Here we go. I'm starting this blog with an idea to write about things I love(like). I want to put together the list of my favorite people, books, music, cities, events ....
I decided to sign my blog with Tin Cup. You know the movie "Tin Cup" with Kevin Costner. The movie is romantic-golf comedy with swings and kisses. I like it. If you didn't see it run to Blockbusters and rent it. The main character is a good golfer and he can make amazing shots like the famous “pelican shot”.
I don’t play golf but I saw something in the final scene of the movie that reminds me on the way I go trough the life. It’s all about taking chances. Easy way is sometimes too easy and boring. ‘Tin Cup’ style is fun. Look how much the crowd loves Roy when after 12 attempts he makes the shot.
