Wonder Man: Potato Salad Days!

It’s been said that our late loved ones are always with us, watching over us in the hereafter—but Danny Kaye takes the concept and runs with it in 1945’s supernatural RKO/Samuel Goldwyn comedy Wonder Man (WM)!  If you thought Danny was hilarious on his own, wait’ll you see him in the dual roles of famous nightclub star Buzzy Bellew and his brother Edwin Dingle!  As the Doublemint gum commercials, say, it’s double your pleasure, double your fun!

Directed by H. Bruce Humberstone (I Wake up Screaming, Sun Valley Serenade; several Charlie Chan films, among others), WM’s screenwriters included Up in Arms’ Don Hartman; Melville Shavelson from Kaye’s 1946 boxing romp The Kid From Brooklyn; Philip Rapp, creator of Fanny Brice’s Baby Snooks; Arthur Sheekman, gag writer for The Marx Brothers; and Jack Jevne, Eric Hatch, and Eddie Moran from Topper and Way Out West. If these fellas didn’t know their comic ghosts, I don’t know who would!  They say that too many cooks spoil the broth, but in this case, WM turned out to be a musical-comedy smorgasboard and a hip, hilarious, tuneful romp indeed!

From Borscht Belt tummler to Broadway star to multitalented movie star, Danny’s  secret weapon was Sylvia Fine, Danny’s brilliantly talented lyricist, composer, manager, and his wife from 1940 until Danny’s death in 1987.  Sylvia was truly the woman behind the man.  With her brilliant lyrics and wordplay, and Danny’s unbeatable talent and energy, they were an amazing power couple!

Sylvia & Danny:
They're so fine!

Danny’s first film, the 1944 service comedy Up in Arms, was a box-office hit. But with the theatrical release of WM in June 1945, Danny really knocked it out of the park—Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, that is!  As I’ve said in other TotED blog posts, as a native New Yorker, I enjoy watching movies where the action is set in any of New York City’s five boroughs.  I don’t even mind that WM was actually filmed at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios in California and not NYC, since the cast, writers, and sets all have that New York feeling (not to be confused with that Barton Fink feeling).  Even better, the cast includes Huntz Hall, one of our favorite Bowery Boys, as a young sailer who unwittingly gets entangled in the wacky, ghostly hijinks.

We viewers first meet Buzzy Bellew (Kaye) as the star attraction at New York City’s posh Pelican Club (what the world needs now are more affordable swanky nightclubs!  But I digress….).  The brash and brassy Buzzy is as likable as he is zany and hyper, likable, bursting with energy.  To borrow a line from Steve Martin back in his stand-up comedy days, Buzzy is a wild and crazy guy (in the most entertaining ways, of course)!

Enough bad news! Where's the sports page?

Buzzy and his Pelican Club co-star, singer/dancer Midge Mallon (dynamite dancer and former Radio City Music Hall Rockette Vera-Ellen in her movie debut, followed by The Kid from Brooklyn; On the Town; White Christmas, and so much more!) have been a couple for a long time.  Although it’s clear that Buzzy and Midge are both into each other, somehow the cute, talented couple never quite manage to actually get hitched at any of their attempted weddings.  But Midge is a good sport about it, perhaps because Buzzy is always funny, sweet, and apologetic—or maybe because their Pelican Club colleague Monte Rossen (Donald Woods from Watch on the Rhine; True Grit; The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and more), is a decent, patient joe who’s willing to wait until Midge finally comes to her senses and realizes the devoted Monte is a better bet when it comes to building a life together. 

*POP* goes the marriage proposal!
Buzzy and Midge are betrothed at last!

Ah, but Buzzy’s serious this time, giving Midge a jack-in-the-box attached to a diamond ring!  Vera-Ellen is adorable as Midge, and she and Danny have delightful chemistry.  And what a dancer she was!  Ironically, according to the TCM Web site, even though Vera-Ellen had a perfectly swell singing voice, her numbers were dubbed!  I guess it was like when Audrey Hepburn’s singing voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon for Breakfast at Tiffany’s and My Fair Lady:  they could sing, but apparently not quite well enough for the movies.  Go figure!

People can’t help loving Buzzy—except for notorious mobster, counterfeiter, and killer Ten-Grand Jackson (Steve Cochran, also making his film debut here)!  See, DA O’Brien (Otto Kruger of Murder, My Sweet; Saboteur; High Noon) and the Assistant DA (Richard Lane, best known to Boston Blackie fans as Inspector Farraday) needs Buzzy to testify in the murder trial, one of whose victims include one Choo-Choo Laverne, a fan dancer who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Our antic, overly optimistic entertainer is too overconfident to let New York’s Finest provide him with police protection—not a smart move for a high-profile witness in a murder case, especially when Ten-Grand has just been released on bail!

What's this? Inspector Farraday in league with Jules Amthor?!

Alas, Buzzy realizes too late that he should’ve taken advantage of that police protection, or at least taken the time to read those ominous newspaper headlines splashed all over the news.  Instead, Buzzy makes a fatal splash as Ten-Grand’s strong-arm boys Chimp (Allen Jenkins of Ball of Fire, but this time in funny-yet-sinister-villain mode, as he was in Lady on a Train) and Torso (Edward Brophy, ditto, as he was in The Thin Man and All Through the Night) send Buzzy to sleep with the fishes in Prospect Park’s lake. You have to hand it to the writers for being able to make cold-blooded murder funny without being depressing!

Onstage, Buzzy and Midge are on a Bali high!

Enter Buzzy’s twin brother Edwin Dingle (also played by Danny, natch), a quiet, bookish librarian and researcher.  Edwin and Buster (Buzzy’s real name) haven’t been in touch since young Buster ran away to try his hand at show business, rechristening himself as Buzzy Bellew.  Well, the Dingle boys are about to have a family reunion to catch up with each other, avenge Buzzy’s death, and put Ten-Grand Jackson behind bars for good—but that doesn’t mean ectoplasmic Buzzy won’t liven things up with merry, macabre hijinks along the way!  This isn’t Hamlet, you know! What’s more, romance is blooming between Edwin and his charming co-worker Ellen Shanley (Virginia Mayo, my favorite among Danny’s leading ladies since I saw her in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty).  Keep your eyes peeled for Natalie Schaefer—yes, Gilligan’s Island’s Lovey Howell herself!—appearing briefly and amusingly as a pesky patron of the local library who’s both bewildered and fascinated by Edwin’s ambidextrous abilities.  But Edwin’s date with Ellen takes a hilariously crackpot turn when Buzzy’s ghostly music gets Edwin all farshimmelt on the way to pick up potato salad for their dinner date, and…well, you may never look at deli food with a straight face again, especially with the hilariously frustrated S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall as the deli proprietor!   Another highlight: Danny’s madcap sneezy rendition of the classic Russian song “Otchi Chornniya,” and the climactic opera that collapses into a side-splitting free-for-all!  Hey, wouldn’t WM and A Night at the Opera be a swell double-feature? 

I love a man who can cook and wear an apron with confidence!

Fun Fact:  In addition to WM, Steve Cochran and Virginia Mayo also co-starred in such Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning classics as White Heat and and The Best Years of our Lives.  Cochran also co-starred in many of Chester Morris’ aforementioned Boston Blackie movies (a favorite here at Team Bartilucci HQ).  I love the charming chemistry between Kaye and Mayo!  WM was Virginia Mayo's first leading lady role with Danny; before that, she had a brief uncredited role in Up in Arms.

"You can lose your mind/
When brothers are two of a kind!"

Exasperated S.Z. Sakall is his usual "Cuddles"-some self! 

WM did very well indeed come Oscar time, winning for the Best Special Effects for John Fulton’s cinematography and A.W. Johns’ sound effects. Leo Robin and David Rose’s number for Vera-Ellen, “So in Love,” got an Oscar nomination for Best Music, Original Song, as well as Best Music Scoring for a Musical Picture, under Ray Heindorf’s direction.  But I can’t complain about  Heindorf losing, considering the Best Music Scoring Oscar that year went to another of my all-time favorites, Miklós Rózsa for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound!   According to the TCM Web site, at one point in WM, Buzzy impishly slips his torso (no, not Edward Brophy’s character!) on a bust at Prospect Park, quipping, “What is this, trick photography?”  Definitely not “palpably inadequate!”  WM is one of  Danny Kaye’s very best movies!

Dead or alive, Buzzy sure knows how to make an entrance! Hiya, Bro!

Sailor Huntz Hall & pals are gobsmacked at Edwin's supernatural powers, courtesy of Buzzy!

All right, opera singer dame, give someone else a turn!

Aw, don't you just love a happy ending?

X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES: I’m Looking Through You

In honor of the Roger Corman Blogathon, created by fellow blogger Nathanael Hood of Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear, Team Bartilucci is blogging about X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963).

Dorian's View:
The X... DVD includes a great commentary track by the sepulchral-voiced Corman himself, as well as the movie’s trailer and its original prologue, which comes across like a well-done documentary about people and their senses. Vinnie quipped, “This could turn into a nudist flick any minute!” In voice-over, we learn how people compensate when any of their senses no longer function (we see a deaf man using sign language and a blind man with his Braille Reader). Suddenly Ray Milland stumbles onto the screen, and we’re startled to see that his eyeballs are pitch-black—not as freaky as the opening Corman eventually opted for in the theatrical release, a long tight shot on a bloody eyeball, but either way, X… grabs your attention and doesn’t let go!

 

I can see for miles and miles: Ray Milland

Ray Milland had always said that The Lost Weekend and X… were the films that he’d been the most proud of during his long acting career. I can understand why; both movies hit you in the gut, the heart, and the mind. Milland plays Dr. James Xavier, a dedicated doctor and medical researcher. As is often the case in Corman’s movies, Jim’s an outsider, a maverick. His unorthodox but brilliant experiments in ophthalmology attract wary looks and accolades in equal measure. He’s developing an eye-drop formula that could bring human eyesight to another level, one that would enable physicians to help their hospital patients by literally “seeing inside them, as if they were windows…seeing their sicknesses with a clarity that would make X-rays a tool fit only for witch doctors.” Jim and his supportive, attractive colleague Dr. Diane Fairfax (stage actress Diana Van der Vlis) test Jim’s eye-drop formula on a cute little monkey in their lab—but the poor critter dies after getting, um, super-vision. “What did he see? What did he see?” the worried Diane wonders. She and their friend and colleague Dr. Sam Brant (Harold J. Stone) are supportive, but the skittish higher-ups who run their hospital cut off Jim’s funding. Jim decides to eliminate the middleman by experimenting on himself. Didn’t he learn anything from The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll, Andre Delambre, and so many other well-meaning but ill-fated scientists who came before him?

It’s all fun and games when Jim is able to see through party guests’ clothing thanks to the magic of Spectarama, a photographic gimmick that makes Jim’s X-ray viewpoint look kinda like those colorful crystal prism suncatchers you find in New Age novelty shops. Kudos to Diane for having a sense of humor about this wacky episode! (I got a kick out of the doctor guests using syringes to mix their cocktails.) Milland and Van Der Vlis have a charming, sophisticated chemistry together, making them a delightfully urbane couple. But when a fatal accident propels Jim into the life of a fugitive (director of photography Floyd Crosby does a great job here, especially with the suspenseful, claustrophobic scene where Jim flees down flights of stairs), X… becomes increasingly tense and thought-provoking. Jim doesn’t have a moment’s peace one way or another; he can’t even close his eyes to sleep because of his X-ray vision (note the progressively larger, darker, clunkier sunglasses he wears over the course of the film). When Jim snaps, “Get out of my sight,” you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, because that’s literally impossible for him now! The peril of playing God is a time-honored trope, but Corman and screenwriters Robert Dillon and Ray Russell do a great job of blending parables, suspense, and science fiction. Les Baxter’s quicksilver musical score ably covers the many moods of X… In addition to being a box-office hit, X… won the 1963 Best Film Award, The Silver Spaceship, at the First International Festival of Science Fiction Films.

This tight, tense, thought-provoking science fiction thriller packs a wallop, with excellent performances all around. Don Rickles was a revelation in a rare dramatic role as Crane, a sleazy carnival barker who makes the most of our beleaguered hero’s X-ray vision by casting him as “Mentallo” in a mind-reading act. Keep an eye out for Corman regulars Dick Miller and Jonathan Haze in the Mentallo scene, as well as an earlier scene with uncredited bits by character actors Morris Ankrum (I Wake up Screaming, Lady in the Lake) and John Hoyt, the most angular man in show business (My Favorite Brunette, When Worlds Collide, The Bribe, TV’s Gimme a Break).

How Dr. X. sees the world: This is Spectarama!

Vinnie's View:
This is rather an interesting change for us, 'cause it's the first time The Wife and I are writing about the same film. While her milieu is more the noir films, tongue-in-cheek thrillers, and other more respectable genres of film, I lean more towards the science fiction and fantasy areas, with a sub-major in comedy. So upon hearing about the Corman-a-thon, I took the initiative and suggested this film. I knew there'd be a dogfight for Little Shop, but X had always held a place in my heart for being a great example of what can be done under the guise of a simple B-picture.

After quite a bit of television work, Ray Milland made three films in rapid succession over two years for American International: The Premature Burial, one of Corman's Poe adaptations; Panic in the Year Zero, a classic Cold War thriller in which the bomb drops on L.A. and the people must do the best they can afterwards (which Milland also directed, and another film which I could go on about for quite a while) and the film we're discussing today, X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes. Milland took to the fast-paced world of independent film-making easily; Corman describes him as a good man to work with, and utterly professional.

Co-writer Ray Russell came out of the gate with a first script that was also a far better film than it's remembered being, William Castle's Mr. Sardonicus, based on Russell's own novella. He followed this up with The Premature Burial, and another all-but-forgotten madcap classic for Castle, Zotz! So he came onto X with a short but solid resume. Corman's initial concept was for a jazz musician to gain the titular powers after excessive illegal drug use; the final idea of a research scientist experimenting on himself gave them the ability to examine the question without being forced to portray the drug as "evil".

Milland does not play Dr. Xavier as a "mad scientist." His experiments are solely for the benefit of mankind, as he displays early in the film, where he corrects John Hoyt's diagnosis of a young girl's heart ailment by looking into her and finding a tumor that escaped being caught on x-rays. The implication is that continued use of the drops may cause mental instability, which seems the case when in a fit of anger he knocks his friend and fellow Doctor Sam Brant (played by character actor Harold J. Stone) out a window.

A theme throughout the film are the ways that people would use the ability to see beyond the visible spectrum. Diane has to ask what the practical uses would be; Xavier uses them to save the young girl's life. It's only after he's forced to play the fugitive that he explores the more mercenary advantages of the power. He hides out in a carnival, hiding in plain sight as a mentalist; people naturally assume his ability to see people's secrets is a simple sideshow con. One carny presumes that the power couldn't be real; if it were, such a person could rule the world with it. But Don Rickles (who damn near steals the film as the carnival barker Crane) realizes that the trick is no trick at all, and has an idea on how to exploit it. He opens up an office in the Skid Row area and lets the word spread that Xavier is a "healer", and doesn't charge for a consultation, but will happily take "Donations." It's an interesting scenario; he's taking advantage of the poor people's simplicity and fear of hospitals, but Xavier is giving them solid medical info. Dr. Fairfax tracks him down after a number of people come to her practice with exactingly correct diagnoses for their ailments. As he grows more desperate, only then does he use his abilities where everyone else would have gone first: Las Vegas. By this point the pressure is getting to him, and he grows swaggering and arrogant as he wins hand after hand. Bad move, as when they challenge him on his skills, he loses his protective goggles and reveals his transformation, shown through a pair of Sclera lenses that must have hurt like hell.

This film was shot in a mere 15 days of principal photography, a schedule Corman describes as luxurious for him, as most of the time he would shoot in 10. But even there, he had the time to make the film look bigger than it had a right to be. He drove to Vegas and the Long Beach carnival pier with his cameraman to get enough B-roll footage to make the end of the film look like the cast were there as well. To show the way Xavier saw the city, Corman got second-unit footage of buildings still under construction, cutting them together to make it look like the doctor was seeing the facades vanish, revealing the girders beneath.

Corman is legendary for his work, and for the people he's mentored into Hollywood's upper echelon. Ron Howard got to talk about him when he got his honorary Oscar in 2009. I include the speech here as a testament to a man who can squeeze a nickel and get two dimes, and take an idea about a guy that can see naked people and get a classic.


2009 Governors Awards - Ron Howard toasts Roger... by dreadcentral

DEAD MEN DON’T WEAR PLAID: “You Put on Your Black Dress, and I'll Go Shave My Tongue!"

Steve Martin’s comedy-mystery Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (DMDWP) is as loopy and hilarious as it is affectionate in its salute to the noir mysteries of the 1940s. There isn’t a moment in the film that doesn’t make me laugh out loud or put a big goofy grin on my face. Here at Team Bartilucci H.Q., it’s not uncommon for us to quote the running gags about our hero’s “famous java,” our heroine’s versatile snakebite/bullet-extraction technique, and of course, the dreaded “cleaning woman,” among others. Even better, most of these pay off plot-wise as well; now that’s good writing!

Written by director/co-star Carl Reiner, the late George Gipe, and Martin himself, DMDWP hit movie theaters in May 1982, near the end of my sophomore year at Fordham University in the Bronx. Unless my memory is hazier than I think it is (always a possibility!), I saw it at the (now-closed) Allerton Theater with Rosemarie DiCristo, my dear longtime pal and fellow Fordhamite and film aficionado. We were both Steve Martin fans as well as overall movie buffs, and we weren’t disappointed! DMDWP is not only great fun, it’s also a dazzling technical achievement. Reiner and Martin cleverly interspliced scenes from 18 classic detective thrillers into the 1940s mystery plot bedeviling our narrator hero, private investigator Rigby Reardon (Martin). No static talking heads here; the film hits the ground running—or rather, driving, as noted scientist and cheesemaker Dr. John Hay Forrest (George Gaynes) loses control of his car and hurtles off a cliff in uncredited footage from the noir-ish 1942 Tracy & Hepburn drama Keeper of the Flame.  

Rigby loves the smell of java
in the morning, and lots of it!

We meet Rigby in his P.I. milieu, narrating in fine tough-guy voiceover, considering closing his office for a few days since business is slow—but it picks up pronto when beautiful, smoky-voiced Juliet Forrest (Rachel Ward, after Sharky’s Machine made her a star) literally falls into his arms (lots of comic fainting, slipped mickeys, and other forms of entertainingly-rendered temporary unconsciousness, as befits any good detective flick!). After Juliet comes to, thanks to Rigby’s breast-adjustment technique, she hires him to investigate her father’s apparent murder, which seems to be tied in with two lists she’s found, identifying “Friends of Carlotta” and “Enemies of Carlotta.” (Any resemblance to Vertigo’s Carlotta Valdes, My Favorite Brunette’s Carlotta Montay, or Twitter’s own @carlotta_valdes is purely coincidental.)  

Don't mess with a "Cleaning Woman!"

Don't monkey with Rigby!

I remember seeing DMDWP director Carl Reiner on a talk show (The Tonight Show, I think), pointing out the joy of seeing footage of movie stars like Ingrid Bergman woven into the film’s scenes in their prime, when they were “young and juicy.” Reiner was so right; almost every character Rigby meets while investigating the Carlotta Conspiracy is played by a major 1940s movie star, thanks to the magic of film editing. Martin and Ward, who have smoldering yet sweet romantic chemistry, are almost literally playing opposite an all-star cast with Ms. Bergman, Ava Gardner, Alan Ladd, Bette Davis, Lana Turner (forgiving Rigby for abandoning her at Schwab’s while recruiting her in the case), Charles Laughton (as sly derelict: “Know who I am?”  Rigby: “The Hunchback of Notre Dame?”), Humphrey Bogart (as Rigby’s mentor, “Marlowe”!) and, as MGM used to say, more stars than there are in Heaven, aided and abetted by Oscar-nominee Michael Chapman’s atmospheric new black-and-white cinematography.  According to the TCM Web site, Chapman spent six months researching, making sure the new film stock would closely match the classic film stock. I was especially wowed by the scene with Rigby outfoxing a Hitchcockian stranger on a train—played by Cary Grant (not Robert Walker, sorry; that would have been a 1950s movie). 

Juliet and Rigby find fun ways to spend a rainy day

Rigby and Von Kluck play "Duelling Solutions"!

Bud Molin, who worked with Reiner for years on Your Show of Shows, seamlessly edited the old and new footage together; mind you, this was in the years before CGI, when editors had to cut and paste and splice everything by hand. Production Designer John DeCuir had his work cut out for him; 85 sets were required to replicate all the sets in all those scenes from all those wonderful films! Much work and care went into making sure the costumes and hair styles on the body doubles, who were cleverly shot from behind or over their shoulders, successfully created the illusion that Martin really was interacting with all those classic movie stars.Well-done though this gimmick is, it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well without the straight-faced, spot-on comic performances of Martin, veteran Reiner, co-star Reni Santoni, and Ward at her most luscious, all doing justice to the daffy, witty screenplay. 

As is the case with the best comedies of Mel Brooks or the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team, if you took out the jokes, DMDWP would still be a solid genre film—always a sign of real quality! It certainly didn’t hurt to have talented veterans on hand, such as costumer extraordinaire Edith Head (it was her last film; there’s a touching dedication to her in the end credits) and one of my favorite composers, Miklos Rozsa (who composed many more superb scores until his death in 1995 at the age of 88).  If you’ve already seen any of the classic films used in DMDWP, the jokes are even funnier, but even if you haven’t seen them, this slyly wacky, winsome salute to the mysteries of yore is a fun way to spend an hour and a half of your time! I only wish that the extra footage I’ve seen in the film when it's shown on broadcast TV would turn up in some kind of special DVD edition; among other things, it explains just why dead men don’t wear plaid. Or maybe TCM might want to run a night of the films used in DMDWP, since most if not all of them are in the TCM library anyway!