Payne, who died at age 77 in 1989, would have turned 100 on May 28th.  Though Miracle will keep him visible indefinitely, there are other reasons to remember Payne and seek him out.  His debut film was a big one, William Wyler’s very fine drama Dodsworth (1936), featuring Walter Huston’s superb title-role performance (which he had created on Broadway).  The role of Huston’s son-in-law is a minor one, but is surely was nice to start a film career with one of the year’s best movies.  True stardom came to Payne in the early 1940s as a top musical-comedy leading man at Fox, looking swell in Technicolor, even revealing a pleasant singing voice.  His musicals had escapist titles with words in them like Tin Pan Alley, Frisco, Havana, the Rockies, Sun Valley, and Iceland.  You can guess that his leading ladies were Alice Faye, Betty Grable, and Sonja Henie.

The 1950s Payne was barely recognizable as the guy who had romanced his way through all those lightheaded musicals, or even as the guy who had helped out Santa.  Payne was now a much more roughened fellow, a western and film-noir star, not having to smile nearly as much as he did in a typical Fox musical.  Not that the ’50s revealed new depths in Payne.  Though he could be sturdily effective, always getting the job done, he was never much more than a capable actor.  His standout noir is Kansas City Confidential (1952), which you can read about elsewhere on this blog.  As for his westerns, the winner is Allan Dwan’s Silver Lode (1954), one of those oaters in which a good guy spends the whole movie trying to clear his name.

As in High Noon, Silver Lode is set on the wedding day of its main characters, played by Payne and Lizabeth Scott.  (The title is the town’s name.)  Baddie Dan Duryea arrives, passing himself off as a U.S. marshal and accusing Payne of murder and robbery.  The townspeople stand behind Payne, for a while, but then things start to disintegrate.  This is a fairly undisguised comment on Senator Joe McCarthy, as the movie shows how easy it can be for good people to believe in and be roused by bad guys and then betray their friends.  (Duryea’s character is named McCarty.)  If Silver Lode is a stand-in for all of the United States, this is augmented by the fact that the film is set on the Fourth of July.  It’s a potent, scary little western, despite often trite dialogue and a supporting cast so lame that they appear to be in a spoof, right out of Blazing Saddles.  Payne’s stolid rigidity doesn’t inject much excitement, and Ms. Scott was never much of an actress.  As for Duryea, well, he does one of his stock “slimy” villains.

There is some stunning camerawork as Payne runs through this backlot western town, suddenly up against the terror of mob violence.  The vitality in the plot and director Dwan’s filmmaking inventiveness trump the primitive supporting characters and the low budget.  Payne was no longer the glossy dreamboat of simpler times, but a haggard and emotionally numbed fellow dealing with the injustices and cruelties of the world.  Whether out West or in darkened urban settings, Payne had abandoned Hollywood magic and was attempting to expose some of the harshness that Fox had shielded him from, say, on his Week-end in Havana (1941).

Lost amid Brooks’ more popular and highly touted pictures is The Catered Affair, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal based on a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky.  Coming on the heels of the multi-Oscar-winning Marty (1955), also based on a Chayefsky teleplay, The Catered Affair was the next entry in the modest “ordinary people” genre, with Chayefsky doing for Irish New Yorkers what he had done for Italian New Yorkers in Marty.  It’s a likable, absorbing little drama, perhaps as underrated as Marty was overrated.  Marty himself, Ernest Borgnine, was back, now as an Irish cabbie instead of an Italian butcher.  Borgnine was pretty much the go-to Chayefsky actor of the moment, crowned with the Best Actor Oscar that was part of Marty‘s haul.  Though he is not playing the central character, as he did in Marty, Borgnine gives a fine, low-key, believable performance.

Thelma Ritter created the role of the cabbie’s wife on television, and it’s easy to imagine how marvelous she would have been in the film version, the kind of opportunity for her that might have resulted in her only Best Actress Oscar nomination.  But this was not to be.  The role went to Ritter’s All About Eve co-player, the great Bette Davis.  This is a textbook example of miscasting.  For all her formidable gifts, Davis, try as she might, cannot convince anyone that she is a plain, ordinary Bronx housewife, something Ritter would have accomplished on sight.  The character wants to give her daughter a wedding she’ll remember, even though they can’t afford it.  There’s no denying Davis’ commitment to the role, but the effort shows, in her bad accent, her clipped line readings, her mannered movements.  It’s so obviously an actress acting that you never accept anything about her as authentic.  She’s incapable of loosening up, much too tense and self-consciously controlling her performance, never “throwing away” a single moment.

And yet this poor man’s Father of the Bride still works, thanks to Brooks’ sensitive direction, John Alton’s black-and-white photography, and Debbie Reynolds’ performance as the daughter.  Reynolds was perhaps headed for the mid-’50s musical-comedy oblivion of many of her MGM co-workers, women like Jane Powell, Ann Blyth, Kathryn Grayson, Ann Miller, and Esther Williams.  But her dramatic performance here proved that there was much more to Reynolds than perkiness and spunk, and her stardom thrived for another decade.  Her simple, honest acting is a revelation, one deserving of an Oscar nomination.  Engaged to a glasses-wearing Rod Taylor, a schoolteacher, Reynolds doesn’t want any fuss, especially as Davis’ plans snowball out of control.  Reynolds is so fresh and natural, so effortlessly touching and true.  It’s a real breakthrough performance, and you start wishing that the colossal Davis would take some acting tips from Reynolds, who just lives and breathes inside her character.

Ultimately, this is a feel-good kitchen-sink drama, with everything working out a bit too neatly, even though Davis doesn’t get her catered affair.  Despite the flaws in the casting and the too-easy resolutions, The Catered Affair is a good, honorable movie, a worthy directing credit on the filmography of the impressive Richard Brooks.

The plot is simple, variations of which have been used in dozens of action movies, but the execution is ingeniously and meticulously crafted, making you feel not only as if you are sharing the intimacy of Leterrier’s cell but also as if you have crept inside his mind.  With stark black-and-white cinematography, and consisting of many short scenes ending in blackouts, the film builds a phenomenal tension, remarkable not only for its suspense but its relative quiet.  The thrills come in its realism, in its no-frills approach, becoming all the more gripping for its lack of sensationalism.  Call it an art-house genre picture.

Leterrier has wonderful eyes, so large, so sad.  It is quite enthralling to watch him use his wits and ingenuity with the only materials at hand in his cell:  a spoon, a mattress, bed springs, and some clothing.  Even after he’s ready to go, he waits and waits for just the right moment.  The film’s deeply satisfying final fifteen minutes are the escape itself.   Bresson’s film is something that many other great movies simply are not.  It is flawless.

Alongside Cooper is Walter Brennan as Judge Roy Bean, the role that brought Brennan his third Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (and the only one of his trio of awards that he actually deserved to get).  He is outstanding in possibly the best role he ever got.  His Roy Bean is a hard, mean, mangy fellow with an unexpectedly soft center aimed solely at Lily Langtry, the actress who is the dream girl of his fantasies.  Scary (especially when he’s quiet), cagey, always smart, and surprisingly sympathetic, Brennan is a human villain who comes to a moving end.  And Cooper is his perfect foil, with his appealing confidence and casual humor.  The relationship between the men is far more complex and interesting than the love story involving Cooper and forgettable Doris Davenport.

As Cooper moves from saddle bum to heroic involvement in the local warfare, he engages in a good dusty brawl with Forrest Tucker, in his film debut.  An even more auspicious debut comes from Dana Andrews (in a small role), with Wyler rewarding him six years later with the central role in The Best Years of Our Lives.  Despite the quality of the cast and the beauty of Gregg Toland’s black-and-white photography, The Westerner seems a modest work, probably because the so-called big scenes are inferior to the simplicity and satisfaction of the Cooper-Brennan conversations.

The Westerner is one of seven Cooper-Brennan movies, the others including two Cooper biggies:  Sergeant York (1941) and The Pride of the Yankees (1942).  And Cooper worked with Wyler again fifteen years later in Friendly Persuasion (1956), a much-admired if much-overrated film from the last phase of Cooper’s stardom.  For all its admittedly ordinary elements, The Westerner has a lot more to offer than its generic title suggests.

I have to say that it was an unusual treat to watch High Noon on the big screen while Coop’s Oscar was resting in a bag next to my left foot.  Not that I didn’t have plenty of other time with Oscar over the weekend!  Maria let me have custody of him on Saturday afternoon between screenings, so, yes, there are lots of pictures of me with this Oscar, probably more than there ever were of Coop (especially because he was on location filming Blowing Wild the night he won it, meaning there are no onstage or backstage Oscar-night shots of Coop brandishing the award).  And, following our post-screening Q&A sessions and Maria’s signing copies of her book, Gary Cooper: Enduring Style, many others of all ages got their picture taken with Oscar, all of whom immediately registered how heavy Oscar is, and then felt the uncontrollable urge to start thanking someone.

One of the missions of this festival was to reawaken interest in Cooper’s achievements.  I must say that it was mightily impressive to watch him, in less than forty-eight hours, in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, A Farewell to Arms, High Noon, and The Pride of the Yankees.  It really gave you the feeling that he was a screen actor with a bigger range than is usually acknowledged.  Several audience members told me that they had never seen any of these films and were knocked out by them, instantly becoming new Cooper fans.  Mr. Deeds still got lots of laughs; A Farewell to Arms dazzled with its shimmering black and white and poignant performances; High Noon retained its elegant suspense and spare beauty; and you could hear plenty of sniffling through the last reels of Yankees.

The tribute ended with a big round of applause for Gary Cooper, with the audience feeling a communal closeness to this man after watching four of his best movies in the presence of his beloved daughter.  After this quartet of classics, I suspect that there were quite a few festival-goers who went over to Netflix or their TCM guide to seek out the dozens of other Cooper films to be discovered.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) – One of the great delights of ’30s comedy, a beautifully constructed, perfectly paced, and emotionally balanced work.  Cooper proved himself here as a marvelous light comedian, an irresistible mix of charm, humor, and romance, as well as a childlike sweetness and a subtle wit.  As a postcard poet who inherits twenty million dollars and decides to give it to the poor, he’s a low-key eccentric, a man who loves fire engines, sliding down bannisters, and playing the tuba.  All of which leads to his sanity hearing.  Radiant Jean Arthur is the cynical newspaperwoman who sets out to mock Cooper but instead falls for him.  She and Cooper are a sensational team, both offering delicately conceived performances, as touching and intimate as they are funny and adorable.  The overall mood of director Frank Capra’s film might be called patriotic leftism.  You could say that the Capra-corn quotient here is a bit heavy, with small-town values trumping big-city corruption a tad obviously, which makes the film not quite as ageless as Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934).  But this is still a wonderful picture, one of the best Cooper ever made.

A Farewell to Arms (1932) – At the peak of his physical beauty, Cooper gives a sensitive, gentle performance in this WWI love story based on Hemingway’s novel.  Co-star Helen Hayes was never better on-screen, and she and Cooper appear to bring out the best in each other, connecting in a genuine, graceful manner.  Marked by fluid, inventive black-and-white photography, and direction by Frank Borzage that’s infused with feeling, the film is a poignant look at war’s insensitivity to love and individual desires.  People lead sped-up lives, grabbing what they can.  The film itself may seem rushed, but it’s nonetheless a powerful anti-war statement and a moving love story.

High Noon (1952) – This landmark western may not have the emotional complexity of an Anthony Mann western or the poetry of one by John Ford, but it fuses many impressive elements into an impeccably crafted film.  Director Fred Zinnemann expertly combines an iconic tale of courage with ingenious editing, outstanding use of sound, striking closeups, an offbeat tune used throughout, with each of these elements heightening the suspense and the tension.  Cooper won his second Best Actor Oscar as the marshal on his way out, newly wed to Quaker Grace Kelly.  But a man he put away is returning for revenge.  Cooper is ideally cast and gives a thoughtful just-right performance, but this is more of a director’s film than an actor’s film.  Played in real time, it uses clocks throughout, as we impatiently wait for the bad guy’s noon arrival.  A once-controversial McCarthy-era allegory about standing by your friends, High Noon is a fine example of essential simplicity embellished with intelligent craftsmanship.

The Pride of the Yankees (1942) – One of the best of Hollywood sports movies, this biopic about Lou Gehrig contains one of Cooper’s finest and most beloved performances.  It’s a big, handsome (if overlong) commercial entertainment, combining hero worship with national mourning.  Though conventional, sentimental, and manipulative, it works as well as it does because it’s so persuasively acted, not just by Cooper but by lovely and gifted Teresa Wright as his wife.  The portrait of Gehrig isn’t complex—more tribute than character study—but Cooper’s acting really pays off in his superb handling of Gehrig’s farewell speech, possibly the finest moment of Coop’s career.  The film bypasses any realistic dealing with the nature of Gehrig’s illness, making its mission purely mythologizing.  But on its way to mythologizing Gehrig, it ended up mythologizing Gary Cooper at the same time.  After all, as Gehrig, Cooper found one of the key roles that helped make him a Hollywood icon.

Friday, April 20, 8pm: MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN (1936), the wonderful Frank Capra comedy classic co-starring delightful Jean Arthur, the film for which Cooper received his first Oscar nomination.

Saturday, April 21, 2pm: A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1932), on its 80th anniversary, with Ms. Cooper Janis in attendance.  Cooper co-stars with Helen Hayes in this moving adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s beloved novel.

Saturday, April 21, 8pm: HIGH NOON (1952), on its 60th anniversary, with Ms. Cooper Janis (and her father’s Oscar) in attendance.  Cooper’s Best Actor Oscar was his second; the first was for SERGEANT YORK (1941).  Newcomer Grace Kelly is Coop’s leading lady in Fred Zinnemann’s landmark western.

Sunday, April 22, 1:30:  THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES (1942), on its 70th anniversary, with Ms. Cooper Janis in attendance.  As Lou Gehrig, Cooper received another Oscar nomination, and he was never better than when delivering Gehrig’s farewell speech.

I’ll address these four films in greater detail in the weeks ahead.

Callahan’s valuable reclamation project is a beautiful tribute to an actress celebrated for her naturalism.  She arrived at the dawn of the talkies and helped to advance the cause of realistic acting in a new age.  A particular pleasure of this critical biography is its smart approach in dealing with Stanwyck’s movies, not by chronology but by category, sometimes grouping her films by their particular director (such as Frank Capra, William Wellman, and Douglas Sirk), or a writer-director (Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder), or a genre (Screwball Comedy, Westerns, and Film Noir).  Examining her associations with individuals or with genres is especially rewarding, far more intricate and absorbing than a straight chronological ride through the Stanwyck filmography.

Stanwyck’s three most acclaimed triumphs were each in a different genre:  the soap Stella Dallas (1937); the screwball comedy The Lady Eve (1941); and the film noir Double Indemnity (1944).  Add my two personal favorites, the comedy-drama Remember the Night (1940) and the western The Furies (1950), and you’ve got quite a quintet at your disposal if you ever decide to turn someone on to Stanwyck’s worth as a versatile, no-nonsense, probing actress.  The fact that she never won an Oscar ranks as one of the Academy’s most embarrassing oversights.  I agree with Callahan that she should have gotten an Oscar for The Lady Eve, a knockout performance that blissfully combines peerless confidence with unexpected vulnerability.  Oh, and she also happens to be hilariously funny.

Even among the not-so-good Stanwyck movies (and there are lots of them), Callahan makes you want to see them again (or for the first time) just for the handful of moments worth catching.  He is able to criticize his subject (as in Sorry, Wrong Number) when she deserves to be panned or appears to be going through the motions.  But his assessments, both positive and negative, are always sensitively rendered, and he’s keenly alert to the nuances he so treasures in her work.

Depending on the role at hand, Stanwyck, Hepburn, and Davis all shared that magical, indefinable ability to look gorgeous or unattractive, seemingly at will, without significantly altering their looks.  This may be one of the greatest gifts an actress can have (Meryl Streep has it, too).  Film fanatics may be tempted to engage in the Barbara vs. Kate vs. Bette debate, the one about who was the greatest of the greats.  Of course, your choice may be subject to change, depending on your mood, or, more likely, the movies freshest in your mind.  I’d go with Hepburn, particularly for her matchless trio of Bringing up Baby (1938), The African Queen (1951), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962).  But Callahan not only gives Stanwyck her due, he may have you soon placing her above Kate or Bette as the foremost First Lady of the Screen.

Probably the most startling example of a film highly influenced by Streetcar is one that, interestingly enough, was released before the actual film version of Streetcar, meaning that the marked similarities would have gone unnoticed by all except those who had seen or read the play.  I’m not accusing the screenwriters of Storm Warning (1950) of plagiarism, but it’s reasonable to assume that they would have been familair with the plot of one of the theatre’s most sensational dramatic successes of the last few years.  One of these writers, Richard Brooks, would coincidentally go on to adapt and direct both Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth for the screen.

Storm Warning was filmed at Warner Brothers, not too long before the actual Streetcar film was shot on the same lot.  I wonder if anyone working on Streetcar was invited to a rough cut of Storm Warning and was a bit floored by the similarities.  So, what exactly does Storm Warning do?  It takes the basic domestic situation of Williams’ play and grafts a KKK melodrama around it.  Warner Brothers was combining a modern, adult three-character situation with their old tradition of socially conscious dramas, going back to their 1930s heyday with movies like Black Legion and They Won’t Forget.  Okay, what are these so-called similarities between Williams’ play and Storm Warning?  The following is true in both:

We’re in the South.  An older, single sister arrives to visit her younger married sister.  The older sister is more refined, while the younger sister is married to a brutish, sometimes violent, but physically attractive fellow, a blue-collar mug often wearing a T-shirt.  There is almost instant antagonism between the older sister and her brother-in-law who have never met until now.  The younger sister is madly in love and lust, and she’s pregnant.  The older sister moves in for a while, disrupting the status quo, even encouraging her sister to leave this guy.

Ginger Rogers plays the “Blanche” figure, a model.  Doris Day is convincingly cast as her baby sister.  Steve Cochran is sexy enough to play the brute, who also happens to be a KKK member.  Ronald Reagan shows up, not as a Mitch stand-in, but as the district attorney.  The Streetcar influence continues well into the movie, with Cochran physically assaulting Rogers, determined to show her that he’s still the boss around here.  In this version, “Blanche” is rescued by “Stella.”

Rogers is well cast but not at her best, sometimes too tight, sometimes pushing for emotion.  Day gives a good try, but she’s hopelessly lightweight for her surroundings.  The script could use more character development and less pulpy melodrama.  Poor Rogers ends up having one of the worst family visits ever, inadvertently leading to her sweet sister’s gunshot death and her own whipping by Klansmen.  It’s not a bad movie, though it falls far short of its apparent reach.  Its main point of interest today is in its unmistakable reworking of Streetcar, conceivably hoping a little of the magic would rub off.  Directed by Stuart Heisler, Storm Warning is a footnote, a fascinating oddity, one that wasn’t even able to gain an advantage by beating the play to the screen.  What remains is a bizarre joining of Williams, Reagan, movie-musical legends Rogers and Day, and the studio that was about to make one of the screen’s greatest dramas, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

Screen Savers II is John DiLeo’s three-part “grab bag of classic movies,” beginning with his extensive essays about ten remarkable and underappreciated movies, as in the first Screen Savers, and representing a variety of genres and stars such as Barbara Stanwyck, James Stewart, Ginger Rogers, and DiLeo favorite Joel McCrea.  Part Two collects and categorizes posts from DiLeo’s classic-film blog screensaversmovies.com, containing his musings on classics revisited, sleepers and stinkers, films old and new, plus his memorial tributes to Hollywood notables.  Part Three might be called a delayed bonus round to DiLeo’s 1999 quiz book, with all-new matching quizzes.  Can you identify the films in which a character writes a book titled Hummingbird Hill; Fred Astaire dances with Betty Hutton; a character named Sean Regan is important but never seen?

The cover of the book has a sensational photo of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Holiday (1938), a film featured in the book’s mid-section.  Plus ten other glorious film stills inside, including pictures of Alan Ladd, Joan Fontaine, Claudette Colbert, and Randolph Scott.  Much more to come about this book as the publication date approaches.  By the way, this is the project I had originally announced as an e-book last fall.  It still will be available in the e-format but, I’m happy to say, the book got more ambitious along the way and will be the worth the wait!  It’s very gratifying to see this five-years-later Screen Savers sequel, with its many frills, at last come to be.