Our Man in Vienna

Zarah

Dietrich stayed in the States. Goebbels tried to get her back, but is it was no go. She had a glorious career and was a foe of the Third Reich. Although Hollywood had beckoned, Zarah Leander didn’t get on the boat. She too had fame, but it was limited to the continent.

Goebbels needed a mundane low-voiced songstress who would play the other woman in films and sing melancholy songs of lost love. He didn’t like Zarah much, but she filled the bill. “Zarah” had been modified from Sara, which was the middle name the Nazis added to legal documents of women of Jewish extraction. That was a prelude of murderous things to come.

The chief ideologue of National Socialism was none other than Alfred ”Rosenberg”. What the hell, if the keeper of the faith had a name that smacked of Judaism, Zarah would have to do.

The Third Reich wouldn’t have been the Third Reich without those sad songs of lost love, elegantly rendered with a hankie within reach. Yes, Germany of the Thirties and Forties needed a a low-voiced woman who’d been around. Goebbels my may not have been convinced, but Hitler was delighted.

The seductress needed a composer for the sad songs and Hugo Balzer was the man. Unfortunately the man preferred the company of men and had fallen from favor. Worse than that, he was behind bars. Zarah snapped her fingers and she had the composer at her side.

Hit records and musical films, as well as films with music were the result. The career was fairy-
tale career in a country with a nightmare regime.

Realists realized that that after Stalingrad and el Alamein in 1943 the end of the regime would be coming after much more slaughter. Zarah, if anything was a realist. She broke her film contract with UFA and headed for home.

Her Swedish compatriots weren’t delighted with Nazi Germany, nor were they delighted with a Swede who had sung and filmed her way into Third-Reich hearts.

When the end came two years later, she was blacklisted for a while in Germany and Austria. However, in 1948 she took up where she had left off, with a little less glory and luster.

 

Garbo

Greta Garbo seemed to very unapproachable, and indeed she turned into a recluse after her retirement from films. In the early Sixties when I lived at 55 East 54th St., across from the
Monkey Bar, I’d see her now and then swiftly walking along the East Avenues.

She had said, “I want to be alone” in Grand Hotel. She had said, “I want to be left alone” in real life.
A myth had been constructed about her and she did her part to augment it. That was a professional necessity. But the myth and the woman were not quite the same thing. In her private life, she disclaimed the myth with those she hobnobbed with.

She was very realistic about contacts at close quarters. She though that the act was good for her complexion. And although she was aloof, she was not aloof in every respect. She is reputed to have told a future lover, who was shilly-shallying, to get to it.

You could say that she was a liberated woman. It seemed that marriage and a family weren’t in the cards, and she avoided tying the knot like poison. John Gilbert tried everything to make her Mrs. Gilbert, but she balked and he chose death to being her spurned lover. And of course there were others who tried to tie her down.

Not everyone is cut out for matrimony.

In Anna Karenina she says, “I face the truth…that one day I shall find myself alone.” And that shred of dialogue was prophetic.

After Two-Faced Woman, which was panned by the critics, which wasn’t really that bad, Garbo retired from the screen. She decided that it was better to leave abruptly at the age of thirty-six, than to fade into playing character roles.

The real Garbo and the film Garbo may have been similar, but she more or less wrote her own life.

 

Reality Intrudes

Grace Kelly, the cool, graceful blonde, was not quite as cool as her screen image in her real life. She had a dream-career in Hollywood, but she must have known that dreams are what you wake out of, so she chose the real dream of marrying royalty. She promptly shed her coolness, exchanging it for the ambiance of the matron.

And who would have thought that the daughter of the woman who typified grace and elegance on the screen would have a winged-tip tattoo above her posterior?!

Clark Gable was as handsome as his screen image, but he had one striking flaw, a flaw that was not visible – he wore dentures.

In Gone with the Wind Vivian Leigh detested the kissing scenes, due to his bad breath. At the time, women all over the world were dreaming of being kissed by Clark.

Gable liked to rib his image: To show that the private Gable, in contrast to the screen Gable, was just like everybody else, he’d take out the dentures as a joke. (I can’t help interjecting that in those golden film days, false teeth and toupees were expertly made. I don’t know how many identifiable wigs I’ve seen in present-day films.)

Marlene Dietrich, Garbo’s great European rival, too differed from her screen image. The vamp of vamps was a homebody who liked to cook for her lovers.

Thus reality always seems to intentionally – as well as unintentionally – intrude in the Dreamland of Cinema.

 

Love Goddesses

One thing that the Love Goddesses seemed to have in common was that love didn’t play much of a role in their private lives. They were desired by every man and were a romantic object for all men. They invariably had a cynical view of amour and were down to earth about it, at least as far as the act was concerned. It mostly amounted to nothing more than an erotic incident.

The virtue of women is a romantic myth and a petit-bourgeois notion. However, Love
Goddesses were beyond the notion, and they created their own kind of virtue and their own myth. The myth entailed being pursued by men worthy of their beauty and desirability – men like Percival of the Holy Grail – the Holy Grail being a sacred chalice, not a Dixie cup to be drunk from and then crumpled up and thrown away. And if not pursued by a Percival, then a Galahad, or at least a Lancelot, but definitely not by your average guy.

After much ado and commotion, the knight knelt at the feet of the Goddess and declared himself. His affections were rewarded by a sacrifice on altar of love in a hazy Nirvana, which was so blurry that specifics were left to the viewer’s imagination.

0In contrast, the Goddesses usually got down to brass tacks off-screen with a mogul or a plain Joe, which sometimes led to the Dixie cup syndrome.

They scoffed at the myth, while doing their best to nurture it – at least as far as their image was concerned.

They aimed at being loved for themselves, which did not mean being loved deliriously, as they were onscreen, but rather in the sense of being taken seriously by a man. That augured being
doomed to failure. We don’t want a God or a Goddess to be one of us.

 

to be continued…

 

– Herbert Kuhner

De box looks at vun fellow, and de box says
“Yes, dot vun is for me!”
It looks at annoder, and it says, “Nawww!”
– Akim Tamiroff, as related by Orson Welles

Dying young means
being young for all eternity

 

Playing Marlene

Marlene Dietrich spent her life playing herself. Not even the most avid Marlene Dietrich fan would call her versatile. She was always good since Marlene Dietrich as a person was
interesting.

I never dreamt of being at close quarters with Marlene. She wasn’t my type. The plucked, penciled-in eyebrows, the taut skin and the squeezed-lemon look did not send me anywhere but to the cinema. I simply liked watching her. She had screen presence and charisma. Her savoir-faire and her cynicism appealed to me.

Joseph Sternberg discovered her and made a series of films with her, but when he went out of her life, there was a crisis. She never found another director like Sternberg, but she went on. Her career had its ups and downs, but whenever there was a down, it was followed by an up. And in the last phase, she was a caricature of herself. When roles became sparse, the caricature sang. She was the woman who was most often played by female impersonators. And actually she was a female impersonator herself. Not that she was masculine. But being a woman was part of the role she was playing. Of course, you couldn’t play her. You couldn’t play Bette Davis or Clark Gable or Gary Cooper either. Whenever there are biopics, the actors doing those roles fall flat. Could it be that the great stars were great? You can play Winston Churchill, Harry Truman and Golda Meier, but you can’t play a great star; you can merely impersonate him.

The real Marlene was the movie Marlene. Sure, she let her hair down when she wasn’t in front of the cameras, but the character was the same.

She had her greatest moment and spoke her greatest line in Touch of Evil. She says to Orson Welles, “You’re a mess, baby.”

How true that was! That line applies to the obese corrupt cop that Orson was playing, as well as to Welles himself. And it must have taken a lot of courage for Orson to have Marlene, who’s Marlene in a black wig, say that to him. But he knew that the scene would make cinema history, so he put it in the film. It may have been embarrassing to present such an accurate assessment of himself, but Orson was willing to sacrifice his vanity for the sake of art. At that stage, Orson was not at his prime, but he never ceased being the great artist that he was.

Marlene stayed true to herself in old age. She didn’t want her fans to see what time had done to her, so cameras were taboo. In Maximilian Schell’s Marlene, you just hear her voice. And the voice is true to the legend. Asked about an afterlife, she scoffs in her old cynical manner. “Who would be crazy enough to believe that there could be billions souls floating around up there?”

And what would have happened if the Deity had appeared to do the “doubting Thomas” routine with her? She’d just have said, “You’re a mess, baby.” And, by God, she’d be right! Marlene was never at a loss of words, and she didn’t need a script for them, so she might have added, “And, baby, you made a mess!”

Da Capo for Orson

Orson was a bad boy, but he was a Hollywood man, albeit a rebel. The Hollywood rebels like Brando and Dean were all Hollywood men.

When Orson finished directing Touch of Evil, he spent three months editing it in the cutting room. That was too much for the Universal moguls, and they took it out of his hands. And good old Orson said goodbye.

Of course, the result was not what Orson wanted. So here’s my question, why the Hell didn’t Orson take a copy of the film to keep?

This story smacks of the fate of The Magnificent Ambersons. But what happened in both cases was not completely Hollywood’s fault. Orson was to blame as wel for not sticking around.

The Future in Touch

A dialogue snippet from Touch of Evil:

Welles corrupt cop to Dietrich’s gypsy:
“You’ve been reading the cards, haven’t you?
What’s my future? Come on, read my future!”

Dietrich to Welles:
“You haven’t got any. Your future is all used up.”

Marlene Assesses the Deity

Marlene Dietrich had her greatest moment and spoke her greatest line in Touch of Evil.
She says to Orson Welles, “You’re a mess, baby.”

How true that was! That line applies to Captain Hank Quinlan, the obese corrupt cop that Orson was playing, as well as to Welles himself. And it must have taken a lot of courage for him to have Marlene say that to him.

Orson knew that the scene would make cinema history, so he put it in the film.

It is an assessment of the character, but, alas, also of the director. It must have been embarrassing to present such an accurate assessment of himself, but Orson was willing to sacrifice his vanity for the sake of art. At that stage, Orson was not at his prime, but he never ceased being the great artist that he was.

After her retirement, Marlene stayed true to herself in old age. She didn’t want her fans to see what time had done to her, so cameras were taboo.

In Maximilian Schell’s Marlene, you just hear her voice. And the voice is true to the legend.
Asked about an afterlife, she scoffs in her old cynical manner.
“Who would be crazy enough to believe that there could be billions souls floating around up there?”

And what would have happened if the Deity had appeared to do the “doubting Thomas” routine with her?

She’d just have said, “You’re a mess, baby.” And, by God, she’d be right!
Marlene was never at a loss of words, and she didn’t need a script for them, so she might have added, “And, baby, you made a mess!”

Raising Kane

Raising Kane is impossible. He’s dies in the film, so you can’t raise him from the dead like we did with Frankenstein.

You can’t film a prequel to Citizen Kane because the film begins with Kane’s childhood, and you can‘t film a sequel since the film ends with his death. So The Return of Kane is out. The only other possibilities are The Son of Kane or Kane’s Daughter.

“What’s that? Kane died childless?

“Don’t be ridiculous! A son or daughter could very well show up. It wouldn’t be the first time progeny came out of the blue. The mother has to know – but not necessarily the father!

There was The Son of Monte Cristo, The Son of Robin Hood. The Son of Ali Baba and The Son of Frankenstein. There were sons galore, including the sons of King Kong and Godzilla. Ditto for daughters. There was The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady and The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, So why shouldn’t there be The Son of Kane – and maybe a daughter-sequel to that.

The intellectual crowd is a cinch, since they’ll want to see how the Kane story develops. They’re not to be scoffed at. After all they keep Woody Allen afloat, don’t they? And we’ll make the film appealing to the average moviegoer. He wants to see a classy film, now and then, just to prove that he’s not a lowbrow.

“Now Listen! Kane was shot in black-and-white, and there was no nudity in those days. We’ll shoot the Son-film in color and spice it up with some undraped ladies. We’ll see to it that the sequel is even better than the original.

Junior will be modeled on Murdoch, but we’ll be sure to show his good side. That way, we’ll avoid the kind of trouble that Hearst caused for Welles.

How can we miss? This one will be in the bag. And then we’ll see what we can do with the daughter?

 

to be continued….

 

– Herbert Kuhner