What’s New in Old Movies: July 2024
by Don Stradley
There was a time when the major movie studios always kept an eye on Broadway. The plan was simple and nearly foolproof: find a play that had already proven popular, and then cast it with the actors you had under contract. That golden era ended long ago, but it yielded a few decades worth of excellent films based on plays, from the heavy dramas of Arthur Miller to the wisecracking comedies of Neil Simon. This summer a trio of Blu-rays from Kino Lorber will celebrate the peak of this period. The three films, all from Paramount Pictures, nicely represent a time when the studio system constantly found inspiration on the American stage.
Burt Lancaster played against type in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952). The brawny Lancaster is a shambling wreck as “Doc” Delaney, a recovering alcoholic whose life has become a disappointment. Meanwhile, his frumpy wife Lola (Shirley Booth) spends her days pining for “Sheba,” her runaway pup, and reminding Doc about the good old days when they were young. He’s celebrating one year of sobriety, but we get the sense that the moody Doc could relapse at any second, especially with Lola being such a noodge. The arrival of a young, pretty college girl who moves in as a boarder creates even more tension in this fragile household. Generally regarded as the first film to depict Alcoholics Anonymous, Come Back, Little Sheba is the sort of well-crafted drama that was the forte of playwright William Inge, a sometimes-forgotten figure of the era.
If Tennessee Williams was the Beatles, then Inge was certainly the Dave Clark Five, not as colorful or newsworthy, but capable of churning out hit after hit after hit. He wrote such blockbusters as Picnic, which won a Pulitzer Prize, Bus Stop, which became a vehicle for Marilyn Monroe, and Splendor in the Grass, which earned Inge an Oscar for Best Screenplay. Yet it was Come Back, Little Sheba that ignited his career and made him the toast of Broadway. It was written at a time when Inge was teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. In those days he was tormented by alcoholism, homosexual yearnings, and a desk drawer filled with unfinished works. In the late summer of 1948, he completed Sheba, injecting some of his own neurosis into the character of Doc. It landed on Broadway where it ran for 190 performances. The success of Sheba turned Inge into that rare animal of the 1950s, the celebrity playwright. He remained one of America’s leading dramatists for more than a decade, though by the late 1960s his Midwest melodramas were out of fashion. Overwhelmed by a world he felt was “very ugly,” and fearing his talent had dried up, Inge died by his own hand in 1973.
Hal B. Wallis’ film version of Come Back, Little Sheba was directed by Daniel Mann and photographed, with great creativity, by James Wong Howe. With only minimal changes from stage to screen, Inge’s scenario remained compelling. It was, proclaimed the New York Daily News, “a deeply moving story of a fruitless marriage,” while the Brooklyn Eagle cited Lancaster for giving “no doubt the finest performance of his career.” Indeed, Lancaster is very fine as the volatile Doc, but most memorable is Booth as Lola. It is heartbreaking to watch this emotionally exhausted woman use the last of her strength to save a marriage that already seems hopelessly broken. The film won a special award at the Cannes Film Festival, and earned accolades for Booth, including an Academy Award and Golden Globe to go along with the Tony Award she’d already won for playing Lola on stage. Booth was also declared Best Actress by the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle. (99 min, available July 9)
By the time of The Country Girl (1954), playwright Clifford Odets was near the end of his prime, having already authored such successes as Golden Boy, Awake and Sing! and Waiting for Lefty. Earning his bones in New York writing for The Group Theater, Odets had mixed feelings about Hollywood. His 1949 play The Big Knife, which was given the screen treatment in 1955, portrayed the movie industry as a heartless environment that specialized in corruption and betrayal. Of course, that didn’t prevent Odets from making some big bucks in Hollywood, money he would not have made writing for the New York stage. Odets once told the Associated Press that he’d signed a lucrative deal to write and direct films but got “fed up.”
“For over a year I did nothing,’ Odets said of one Hollywood stint. He finally asked his agent to cancel his contract. “He told me I was crazy, and I had to threaten him before he would do it.” It was during a long hiatus from Hollywood that he wrote The Country Girl, which ran for 235 performances on Broadway and is generally considered Odets’ last important work for the stage.
The film adaptation stars Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and William Holden in a show business tale about an alcoholic singer trying to resurrect his career. Produced independently but distributed by Paramount, The Country Girl arrived on screens at Christmas time, 1954, ready to match muscle with other hits of the period such as The Caine Mutiny and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Crosby is rather brilliant as the has-been entertainer, but it was Kelly who won an Academy Award for portraying his wife. (Was it a given that playing the spouse of an alcoholic earned you an Oscar? It certainly worked for Booth and Kelly.) Meanwhile, Crosby was nominated for an Oscar, as was director George Seaton. The play has been mounted many times over the years with celebrity casts, but the 1954 film is hard to surpass. The Los Angeles Times reported on the film’s premiere in that city, marveling at the customers’ “ringing applause” and declaring The Country Girl “will stand out as one of the year’s finest.” And it did. (104 min, available July 9)
Completing Kino’s trio of play adaptations is The Rose Tattoo (1955), a Hal Wallis production of a Tennessee Williams play. The stage version ran for 306 performances in New York’s Martin Beck Theater in 1951 and was a natural for the movies. Like Come Back, Little Sheba, it was directed both onstage and for the screen by Daniel Mann. A big, loud melodrama about a strong-willed Italian widow (Anna Magnani) and the bighearted slob trying to win her heart (Lancaster), The Rose Tattoo was one of the year’s most critically acclaimed films. Though cinematographer James Wong Howe won an Oscar, while Marisa Pavan took home a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress, the film’s success was generally credited to 45-year-old Magnani. Williams praised her in his memoir as “magnificent,” and no one would argue. For her work in The Rose Tattoo, Magnani picked up an Oscar and a Golden Globe, plus the National Board of Review’s award for Best Actress. It was her year.
It’s hard to describe Magnani’s impact on moviegoers nearly 70 years ago. The Rose Tattoo was her first American film, and she blew audiences away. Though the hotblooded Italian “Anna Magnani type” quickly became a cliché in movies, her performance felt revolutionary at the time. “There has never been anyone like her in recent years,” wrote the L.A. Times. “She veritably hurtles through the picture, knocking aside everything that stands in the way of her overwhelming intensity.” (117 mins, available July 9)
From the reading room: You may think you know Tim Matheson, but you might be thinking of someone else. Judge Reinhold, perhaps, or Daniel Stern. Matheson is one of those durable actors who is probably in some of your favorite movies – he played “Otter” in National Lampoon’s Animal House, and has worked opposite the likes of Clint Eastwood, Lucille Ball, Dick Van Dyke, and Chevy Chase –plus he was a two-time Emmy nominee for portraying Vice President John Hoynes in NBC’s The West Wing. If you’re still not sure of who he is, you should read Matheson’s new memoir, Damn Glad to Meet You: My Seven Years in the Hollywood Trenches. Why not? Anyone who has appeared in both The Bionic Woman and The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again probably has some good stories to tell. (Hachette Books, 384 pages, hardcover, audiobook or kindle, available November 12).
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