By Scott Ross
Note to my new “followers” in the Mossad and SBU who are unusually interested in a more or less harmless blog about old movies, presumably scheduling their visits here in between making threats to reporters, commentators, college students and international criminal courts: There is nothing in the installment below concerning either American-funded Banderite Nazis or Zionist psychotics, so you needn’t bother visiting this month… but thank you as always for your splendid interest.
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The Bohemian Girl (1936) For those of us who love Laurel and Hardy, the largest stumbling block to full enjoyment of their feature-length movies is pace. I don’t mean the comedians themselves. We accept that Stan and Ollie’s brand of humor, the way their characters react to each other, operates on a plane vastly different from most screen comics, particularly in their sound work; next to Laurel and Hardy and W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers look like a band of delinquents hopped up on speed. With their feature-length pictures, it’s that everything else around L & H is enervated which detracts from the full appreciation of their genius.
I’m not sure where the blame for this lies, although I strongly suspect it originates with their producer. Those of us who grew up watching the old Our Gang shorts (renamed “The Little Rascals” for television) recognize the long takes and reaction shots, the dead spaces that drag on unto infinity, or until the last moron in the house has gotten the joke, not to mention the stock LeRoy Shields and Marvin Hatley tunes playing endlessly and without the slightest recourse to syncopation with the action or dialogue. One can accept that this sort of filler was perhaps necessary (or deemed necessary, anyway) in the very early talkies, but by 1936 it reeked of laziness, and even incompetence. These seem to me the very hallmarks of the Hal Roach house-style, as is the repeated featuring of Roach’s biggest stars in numbingly outmoded 19th and very early 20th century operettas: The Rogue Song (1930; no complete prints of which exist), Fra Diavolo (1933), Babes in Toyland (1934) and this, the weakest of these titles still extant. It isn’t, this time out, merely the leaden pace that sinks the movie, or the terrible songs, but the constant tampering with the material and the death (a possible murder) during production of Thelma Todd, briefly seen lip-syncing to a typically maudlin ballad. Mae Busch is on hand, and that’s to the good, as is James Finlayson’s presence as an overzealous palace guard and charming little Darla Hood’s, then in her first year with “Our Gang,” as the landed child Busch kidnaps and leaves with Ollie, her cuckolded husband.
Very little else works in The Bohemian Girl, and even Stan and Ollie’s routines fail to raise more than the occasional smile. (I laughed out loud exactly once, but the prospect of running the picture a second time, even in fast-forward, to see what elicited that response would tax a well man, and I’d been under the weather for a week.) Worse, the ending involves one of those grotesque sight-gags so beloved by Stan which would be horrible enough glimpsed quickly or obliquely but which is extended in case that prototypical moron I cited above didn’t catch the meaning at first glance. Laurel often had to be talked out of these things by others, and the frequent recurrence of cruelty toward these two characters in their pictures is baffling. It’s one thing when gruesome things happen to the Three Stooges; they’re live-action cartoon characters anyway, so the pain and discomfort (and even, at an extreme, the deaths) they experience don’t hurt. But didn’t Stan understand by 1936 that he and Ollie were, however silly their actions might be, real, and beloved? You don’t want to see the heads of gentle, cherished comedians mounted on a hunter’s wall just for the sake of a laugh. That’s a gag Laurel was dissuaded from including in one of the team’s two-reelers, but the one here is nearly as horrid.
Earthquake (1974) Pauline Kael generously observed of this by-the-numbers ’70s disaster movie that it was “swill, but not cheap.” She was wrong. It’s both swill and cheap. Universal had watched while Irwin Allen raked in millions on The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and was determined to beat him at his own game. An increasingly ludicrous series of Airport sequels was in the works and this utter lox of a movie, calculated to rival Allen’s The Towering Inferno in the Christmas box-office sweepstakes, played very successfully on the national mood. Perhaps, had Mario Puzo been able to work longer on the screenplay he originated for it (he was contractually obligated to The Godfather Part II and had to leave the project before it was completed) Earthquake might have been less pointless and absurd, but I doubt it. (The other credited screenwriter, George Fox, was a magazine writer who had never written a play or movie.) I don’t know why Kael was so forgiving about them but what’s shocking to me, at a 50-year remove, is seeing now just how shoddy the special effects were. Aside from his usual painterly matte shots, Albert Whitlock’s “visual effects” could scarcely have passed muster on an ABC Movie of the Week of that era: Big obvious blocks of Styrofoam fall on screaming victims in the streets, the violent deaths of people in a high-rise elevator is represented by a sudden splash of animated blood across the field of vision and as the buildings burst open and fall apart you’re aware of precisely how calculated, and essentially phony, every move is along the way.
Even the cast, compared to Poseidon and Inferno, feels second-rate, as if they’ve wandered in from the Universal TV movie they were shooting on an adjacent lot. Aside from Charlton Heston and Geneviève Bujold, who provide the only conviction the picture can work up as hapless lovers, Ava Gardner alternately rages and swoons as Heston’s appallingly needy, termagant wife; the one-time child evangelist Marjoe Gortner snarls at everyone as a ticking-bomb psycho who is either a) a closet-case, b) a mass-killer, c) a would-be heterosexual rapist, or all three at once; George Kennedy as an LAPD cop has either to rage at the human condition or perform acts of saintliness; Richard Roundtree and Gabriel Dell storm around in desperate search of characters to play; Victoria Principal is asked to thrust out her alleged 36-inch bust and pretend to be flattered as a bunch of men drool over her; Lloyd Nolan as a doctor corralled to aid the injured of downtown L.A. barks out orders and seems roughly as compassionate toward his charges as the Orkin man would be to a nest of cockroaches; while Lorne Greene and Barry Sullivan exude, respectively, kindness and concern as… no, it’s too boring even to tell you. One of the few “A”-list stars, Walter Matthau, has an entirely unfunny extended cameo as a bewildered bar drunk wearing what looks like one of Bella Abzug’s cast-off hats.
John Williams, whose previous assignment was composing the superb score for The Towering Inferno, came to Earthquake utterly spent creatively: His music is so dispirited it depends on wholesale lifts from Inferno and contains nothing like that score’s breathtaking highs. The gifted Philip H. Lathrop could apparently do little for the look of the picture but its direction, by that hack Mark Robson, has even less flavor and flair than a typical episode of “Columbo.” Not that any of this mattered: Made on a budget of $6,675,125, the picture pulled in $167.4 million at the box-office, representing something like $154 million profit on the initial investment. Everyone must have been happy, except the stars, and the unfortunate ticket-buyers who sat through this abortion.*
Blue Sky (1991/1994) Usually when a movie sits on the shelf as long as this one (four years) it’s either because it’s a mess, or the financing studio has no confidence in the picture and doesn’t know what to do with it, or even whether to bother releasing it at all, but although Blue Sky went unreleased due to the collapse of Orion, it’s also a mess. The original screenwriter, Rama Laurie Stagner, based the characters and situation on her family and the movie has the weirdly bifurcated feel of clear-eyed reminiscence grafted onto sheer wish-fulfillment. (The credited re-writers were Arlene Sarner and Jerry Leichtling.) Blue Sky works best when it concentrates on the marriage between Carly and Hank Marshall (Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones), their relationships with their teenage daughters (Amy Locane and Anna Klemp) and the way Carly’s overpowering sexuality causes seemingly endless problems for the four. It is much less successful when it turns around and tries desperately to turn Carly into a heroine fearlessly taking on all comers in an effort to clear Hank’s name when he is unceremoniously dumped in a psych ward and kept insensible on forced psychotropic medication. A military scientist in the early 1960s whose field is monitoring radiation at nuclear testing ranges, Hank is outraged when a test is not called off despite a pair of civilians wandering into the field. His insubordination is the excuse for locking him up but what really rankles his married C.O. (Powers Booth) is his own abortive affair with Carly. The narrative’s mix of personal and political is not integrated — it’s schizophrenic, as if two different sorts of movies had been squeezed together so that the result is neither the fish of personalized drama nor the fowl of social activism. Additionally, and despite its often effective adult content, Blue Sky most resembles an idealization of a “good” parent (Hank) and the excoriation of a “bad” one (Carly). Worse, while the Marshalls, young and old, are depicted with precision, nearly everyone else comes off as a type, bloodless and not living so much as fulfilling basic dramatic requirements, the sort a first-time writer with an axe to grind is prone to. The schematism affects and detracts from everything, including the splendid performances by Lange and Jones, the good one by Locane and the direction by Tony Richardson, whose last picture this was. (He died, of, as they say, “AIDS-related complications,” in 1991, long before the movie was released.) Booth, like his character, is so unpleasant it’s nearly impossible to credit Carly’s attraction to him, and poor Carrie Snodgress, as his long-suffering wife, instead of a character is given attitudes to play, all of them eminently predictable. The icing on the cake is the typically awful score by Jack Nitzsche, complete with his usual hokey riffs on glass harmonica. Nitzsche, a fine arranger of other people’s music, was an object lesson in elevating to composter status someone whose bag of tricks was of extremely limited interest.
On a note of bizarre coincidence, Nitzsche once beat Snodgress with a handgun, threatening to kill her and, in quintessential Hollywood fashion that would never apply to you or me, got off with three years’ probation.
Let’s Dance (1950) Topic for a master’s thesis in film history: “Why Betty Hutton?” Aside from Preston Sturges’ subversive comedy The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (and she can be a trial there as well) I find that even minimal exposure to her extreme mugging and overblown vocalization causes the muscles in my jaw to tighten automatically… that is, when it doesn’t make my eyes glaze over entirely. Although she can be relatively inoffensive dramatically her basic persona, brash when not shrill, is repellant, like a distaff Jerry Lewis. My aversion to Hutton has kept me, despite my near-reverence for Fred Astaire, from seeing Let’s Dance but a new Blu-ray edition from Kino Lorber effectively cancelled my long-standing eschewal. Having finally seen it I dislike Betty Hutton as much as I ever have, but I found Let’s Dance itself surprisingly painless, if entirely inconsequential and, two good routines by him notwithstanding, a title that in no way burnishes Astaire’s filmography. He made worse musicals before this one — You’ll Never Get Rich, Blue Skies and Second Chorus are genuinely bad and only one of them has an Astaire dance worthy of his time and ingenuity — but never, I don’t think, was he paired with a female co-star with whom he had less sympathy. Although he spoke highly of Hutton (amazingly, to me, he was much more discomfited by Kay Thompson, with whom he had one of his best duets, in Funny Face) and her adeptness as a dancer is comparable to that of Judy Garland, there is not a trace of chemistry between the pair and in only one number (the comic “Oh, Them Dudes,” which she plays in cowboy drag) do they express, briefly and joyously, a sense of teamwork or real pleasure in each other’s company.
The plot, which seems rather obviously inspired by the 1930s custody battle between her mother and aunt over the child Gloria Vanderbilt, is complicated for a screen musical, and turns on a dime at the end when the condescending aunt by marriage suddenly and inexplicably relents. (That the old Boston dragon is played by the likeable Lucile Watson at least mitigates some of her character’s appalling snobbery, and she gets a brief, charming waltz with Astaire to an old-fashioned tune.) For a picture called Let’s Dance, there is very little dancing, and Fred’s best number is the “Piano Dance,” with lively music by Tommy Chambers, Van Cleave and Astaire himself, during which he performs over, under and all around an upright and a baby grand, the latter of which, when the music segues to “Hold That Tiger,” explodes with cats.
Allan Scott, Astaire’s frequent RKO scenarist, wrote the often witty screenplay, with, as they used to say, additional dialogue by Dane Lussier and the pleasing songs are by Frank Loesser, fresh off the shockingly successful Guys and Dolls on Broadway. The period Technicolor is rather more subdued than usual, although Let’s Dance indulges in the hoariest of movie-musical clichés: The theatre (or in this case, nightclub) with the impossibly large performing space on which unfold activities never seen this side of a Hollywood soundstage. Norman Z. McLeod, who in palmier days directed the peerless It’s a Gift for W.C. Fields and for the Marx Brothers, Monkey Business and what I consider the team’s funniest picture, Horsefeathers, keeps the nonsense moving at a crisp pace and the good supporting cast includes Roland Young and Melville Cooper as Watson’s attorneys, Ruth Warrick as her sympathetic daughter, George Zucco as a judge and little Gregory Moffett as the widowed Hutton’s little boy, around whom the legal machinations whirl. Moffett gives a lovely performance, entirely free of guile, at least until the final moments when he’s made to look silly.
The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964) If you accept that it bears, aside from her experience as a survivor of the Titanic and the fact she was married to the wealthy miner J.J. “Johnny” Brown, virtually no relation to the facts of Margaret Tobin Brown’s biography, the picture represents one of the few 1960s Hollywood musicals that is engaging and not just big. Tammy Grimes, who originated the role on Broadway — and was, absurdly, given a Tony as Featured Actress for her starring performance† — had no chance of reprising her role on film, and Molly Brown was planned for Shirley MacLaine, until Hal Wallis put the kibosh on that by claiming she was still under contract to him. The director, Charles Walters, didn’t want her but Debbie Reynolds got the role, for which she had campaigned strenuously, and was subsequently nominated for an Academy Award. (She lost, to Julie Andrews, for what Reynold’s daughter Carrie Fisher wittily called Andrews’ “stunning, multi-layered and moving portrayal of Mary Poppins. Ibsen’s Mary Poppins.”) MacLaine would almost certainly have given a better dramatic (and dancing) performance but her singing voice, good in its way if belty, lacked the warmth, variety and emotional vulnerability of Reynolds’. In any case, the star is well-matched by Harve Presnell’s likeable performance (and his classical baritone) as Johnny and the Meredith Willson score, although its songstack was eviscerated in the transfer from the stage is, even in abbreviated form, beautifully conceived and idiosyncratically realized, the way his The Music Man was. (He composed Johnny Brown’s arias with Presnell’s voice in mind, and it shows.) Only five of the Broadway songs made it to the movie, with an additional three (“Beautiful People of Denver,” “Dolce Far Niente” and “Up Where the People Are”) heard as underscore and a sixth vocal number (“He’s My Friend”) added by Willson to the soundtrack.
Helen Deutsch’s screenplay, based on the Broadway book by Richard Morris, occasionally indulges in bathos, and a little inconsistency, as when Molly encounters her Denver, Colorado nemesis Mrs. McGraw (Audrey Christie) in Europe just before securing a berth on the Titanic, yet McGraw is somehow in Denver to greet her at the finale, or when Johnny is introduced with the exuberant “Colorado, My Home” before we have any idea who he is. Interestingly, the number that provides the greatest audience pleasure, as the kind of elaborate song-and-dance set-piece that can work so well on stage but which seldom replicates that performance excitement on the screen, is the one Willson wrote for the movie. MGM, however, was siphoning so much money to Doctor Zhivago that “He’s My Friend” nearly went un-filmed until the cast agreed to shoot it in a single day, with three cameras. When it’s not being limited by matte shots and indifferent rear-projection (and, during the sinking of the Titanic, black-and-white clips from two pervious movies) Daniel L. Fapp’s cinematography is frequently luscious, Peter Gennaro’s choreography is lively and inventive and Morton Haack’s fulsome costumes include a rich, red ballgown for Reynolds that nearly rivals the one Walter Plunkett designed for Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. The unusually fulsome supporting cast includes Ed Begley as Molly’s adoptive father, Hermione Baddeley as his inamorata with the wonderful name Buttercup Grogan, Hayden Rorke as a prissy society columnist, and George Mitchell in a pleasant performance as a monsignor. Grover Dale and Gus Trikonis as Molly’s old friends dance energetically, and the wonderful Martita Hunt provides one of her beguiling extended cameos as a grand duchess who befriends the Browns. As a bittersweet reminder of what befalls yesterday’s darlings, the gifted silent comedienne Minta Durfee appears briefly in a party scene.
Look, by the way, for a photo of the real Molly Brown and you’ll realize instantly just how apt the casting of Kathy Bates was in Titanic.
The Incredible Journey (1963) Sheila Burnford’s 1961 novel about three pets making an impossible homeward trek across the Canadian wilderness is one of the loveliest of all fictions about animals, and while the Walt Disney adaptation loses a great deal of what makes it special, its essentials remain. James Algar’s screenplay attempts to compensate for the elimination of authorial voice with narration spoken by Rex Allen and while it is only partly successful, Burnford’s empathetic prose, her keen appreciation of the human/animal bond, and of the ways of cats and dogs, remains, in posse if not in esse; the entire project is lit with the special grace that attends movies made with loving kindness, particularly movies about animals. The trio at the center of the story (the young golden retriever Luath, the Siamese cat Tao and the elderly English pit bull terrier Bodger) are devoted to each other, especially Tao and Bodger, and that unusual affection suffuses the movie and gives it its unemphatic emotional power. Humans make their requisite appearances throughout the story, but they do so unobtrusively for the most part, at least until the satisfying finale, where the love of a boy for his lifelong pet gives the conclusion a depth of feeling that has exactly the right resonance.
Banjo the Woodpile Cat (1979) This animated short (27 minutes) directed by Don Bluth and executed by his fellow Disney animators Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy as a personal protest against recent trends at the studio is, like most of Bluth’s later pictures, attractive to the eye, annoying to the ear and insulting to the brain. (Of those I’ve seen, only his feature debut, the vivid Robert C. O’Brien adaptation The Secret of NIMH, was wholly satisfying, perhaps because unlike Bluth’s many originals, it was based on a solid, well-plotted literary source.) The story is by Bluth and his gifted brother Toby, and to a weird degree reflects their Mormon background: Early on a nasty old feedtruck driver headed for the Big Town cackles to an equally unsavory friend about the “good times” he’s going to have in… Salt Lake City, that well-known Utahan hell of fleshpots and loose women. Bluth also wrote the numbingly bad title song, which he pushes relentlessly throughout the action, and the designs of his cat characters voiced by the black actors Scatman Crothers and Beau Richards have, in contrast to all the other felines in the picture, fat, underslung lower lips. And they call Dumbo racist!
13 Washington Square (1928) Hitherto unknown to me, this comic thriller from the year that saw the end of silent pictures has been beautifully restored by Kino Lorber in gorgeous sepia tone and proves, if nothing else, that ZaSu Pitts was as funny a silent comedian as she was a sound comic. The story, adapted by Harry O. Hoyt and Walter Anthony from a novel and play by Leroy Scott, is purest late-Victorian gossamer: A wealthy widow (Alice Joyce) desperate to stop her young son (George J. Lewis) from marrying the daughter of a >>gasp!<< shopkeeper(!) becomes, inadvertently, involved with a thief (Jean Hersholt) posing as a Deacon who, unknown to her and her dizzy maid (Pitts) has plans to steal her art masterworks. (Got it?) Meanwhile… but you’re way ahead of me, or should be. 13 Washington Square is unusually complicated for a silent comedy, and more dependent on intertitles than any silent picture I can recall, suggesting that it probably should have been a talkie. Yet that would have robbed it of the pictorial beauty of John Stumar’s cinematography, half the reason for watching it. The other half is Pitts’ hilarious performance as the wide-eyed, malaprop-prone housemaid, whose solecisms would have made Archie Bunker proud… although a reliance on word-play in a silent movie says something about the material.
Alice Joyce may remind you, as she did me, of a shorter-haired Gillian Anderson, whom she strongly resembles, particularly in three-quarter profile.
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) A typically overblown, fatuous and hilariously melodramatic piece of self-regard by Cecil B. DeMille that, as usual with that shameless purveyor of spectacle, also provides a hefty dose of genuine excitement. This is mainly confined to the aerial sequences with Cornel Wilde and Betty Hutton perpetually attempting to outdo each other on trapeze and high-wire and which are so successful they ultimately gave this acrophobe a tension headache. I mean that as a compliment. The picture is, essentially, a two-and-a-half hour, intermissionless advertisement for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, with a glowering Charlton Heston as the general manager trying to keep the show rolling amid professional rivalries, competing libidos and perennially simmering catfights. This is not to mention the presence in the center ring of a fugitive mercy-killer (James Stewart) disguised as a clown, a psychopathic elephant trainer (is there any other kind?), a thief in the employ of a big-time gangster and, for extra thrills, a climactic train-wreck that permits Hutton to prove her love to Heston. All popular movies are of course products of their time, and The Greatest Show on Earth depicts the 20th century love for trained-animal acts whose gradual phasing out has seemed to me for once a wholly admirable outcome of social agitation. Even as a child taken to his first and only circus I was uneasy about elephants, those most community-minded and sensitive of large land mammals, being made to dance around the ring, balance on balls and form pyramids for my entertainment; had I known with what sadistic cruelty these animals were trained, I suspect I would have been inclined to set a match to the sawdust. (I used secretly to wish the lions and tigers would gang up on and eviscerate their whip-wielding trainers, which I suppose tells you more about the limits of my personal benignity than I meant to.)
The movie periodically dwells, with dismaying Technicolor rapture, on crowds of all ages in the stands stuffing their faces with every imaginable comestible, from peanuts, popcorn and ice-cream cones to hot dogs, candy bars and cotton candy; it’s almost a pocket depiction of the expanding American waistline. Then there are the musical numbers, warbled either by Hutton or Dorothy Lamour, performed without amplification under enormous circus tents with brass bands blazing away and which in defiance of all the principles of sound reproduction we are expected to believe are perfectly audible to everyone in the crowd. And when the action flags, as it frequently does, we are treated to fleeting pipsqueak cameos by the likes of Arthur Q. Bryan‡, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and even Bob Crosby in the audience, and all-too-brief three-ring bits by circus eminences such as Emmett Kelly as Weary Willie and Lou Jacobs, complete with tiny clown car; at least the young midget acrobat Cucciola gets a specialty number, although why he performs much of it in drag I leave to the psychologists in the audience. Somewhat astoundingly, it took four credited writers to concoct this sawdust mulligatawny, and I suspect there were also legions of uncredited scribes adding reams of DeMille-approved hokum. There are moments of amateurishness that defy credulity, as when DeMille cuts from two actors in front of a bad back-projection of monkeys clambering over an enclosure to the same pair closer to the camera while the rear-screen image exactly remains the same size. Still, it must be said that when one of the show’s principals falls from a great height, the action is achieved with shocking realism, and without a cut. DeMille himself narrates, with that patented sanctimonious/stentorian gasbaggery of his, made even more insufferable by the lines he speaks, which seem to imply that the Ringlings are closer to God than you or me and a lack of enthusiasm for their circus just might be subversive.
Billy Wilder got off one of the great back-handed compliments in movie history when after seeing the picture at the premiere he bowed to DeMille and proclaimed, “Mr. DeMille, you have made The Greatest Show on Earth.” Such are the ways of Hollywood, however, that, in the year of The Quiet Man, The Member of the Wedding, The Bad and the Beautiful, Come Back Little Sheba and Singin’ in the Rain, this was the Motion Picture Academy’s choice for “Best Picture.”
Cabin in the Sky (1943) Speaking of products of another time, this exceptionally tuneful musical fantasy preserves the work of a cast of black performers at the peak of their energy and ingenuity.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Forty-three years have not withered, nor repeated custom entirely staled, the finite variety inherent in this highly enjoyable collaboration between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan. Watching it again in the 4K UHD edition over the Memorial Day weekend I was struck by two things: That the first quarter of the picture is, as is so often the case with 4K transfers, entirely too dark, and that Karen Allen was and remains the most delightful heroine of a popular action picture in the past five decades. No one since has matched her combination of freckled beauty, spunky independence and amiable combativeness and I cannot imagine anyone, aside perhaps from the young Shirley MacLaine, negotiating the line between passionate determination and riant silliness as Allen does. That she did not become, after Raiders, one of the more important American actresses is one of those eternal mysteries, such as why Tom Cruise is still in any way relevant to life on the planet.
Airport (1970) When it comes to certain things in life, initial impressions made at an early age can, however undiscriminating they may seem to you later, carry through succeeding decades with very little change. This movie, first encountered on commercial television when I was 12, is one of those things.
*Actually, to generate those sorts of profits, even world-wide, I presume that Earthquake had many return customers. But what sort of person would want to see a thing like like twice? Even at age 13 I instinctively avoided seeing it once.
†A few other howlers in the long Tony Award history of nominating leading players in musicals as featured or supporting actor/actress, presumably based on billing: Isabel Bigley as Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls; Yul Brynner in The King and I; Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook and Mr. Darling in Peter Pan; Carol Lawrence as Maria in West Side Story (ditto Josie de Guzman in the 1980 edition); Sandra Church as Gypsy Rose Lee in Gypsy (the same thing happened to Zan Charisse and Christa Moore, respectively, in the 1975 and 1990 revivals); Theodor Bikel as Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music; Jerry Orbach as Sky Masterson in Guys & Dolls; Maureen Brennan as Cunegonde and Mark Baker (as Candide!) in the 1974 Candide; Patti LuPone in The Robber Bridegroom; David Kernan, Millicent Martin and Julia McKenzie, the entire singing cast of Side by Side by Sondheim; Lenny Baker, one of only four cast members in I Love My Wife; Alyson Reed as Sally Bowles(!) in the 1988 Cabaret; and, with Grimes as Molly Brown, the all-time jaw-droppers, Barbara Cook as Marian the librarian in The Music Man, Dick Van Dyke and Chita Rivera, the stars of the show, in Bye, Bye, Birdie and William Daniels in 1776. Daniels, quite rightly, refused the nomination.
‡The voice, if not the mind or spirit, of Elmer Fudd.
Text copyright 2024 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 