The hands have it

We have a theory that goes like this: Old movies and foreign films have something key in common. Even if the picture is a pedestrian one — so-so script, by-the-numbers direction, hammy acting — it still serves as a form of escape.

When watching an old movie, one experiences another time, a different way of speaking and thinking. We love watching for the sort of details that shed light on life as it was lived back then—the fashions they wore, the slang they used.

One thing we particularly watch for when watching Thirties movies is gesticulative salutations—the kind of hand gesture that can alternately mean, “How’s tricks, pal?” or “So long, sister!” (kind of like the word “aloha” in Hawai’i). James Cagney‘s demonstrating just such a gesture in the movie poster on the right.

Dick Clark has typically used one of these gestures when he signs off at the end of a television program. As we recall it, Clark holds two fingers up (as if to signal, “Two more, please, bartender”), places those two digits on a spot between his upper forehead and his temple, and then briskly points those two fingers outward with a flick of the wrist.

There are many such gestures in old movies, and we have come to appreciate the subtle differences between them. Our favorite, which we have dubbed the “Hiya Chum!,” is difficult to describe without breaking it down, but we think we can help you perform it if you’ll closely follow our directions. We regret to say we don’t remember who it was we saw perform this gesture or even which movie it was in, but we remember the gesture quite clearly, which speaks to its effectiveness, we think.

We do remember the character as the sort of wisecracking second banana that Allen Jenkins assayed so effectively in so many pictures, so imagine him performing the gesture we’ll describe below, if it helps.

As we recall the scene, the leading man and woman are making their way down a corridor when the second banana passes going the other direction. He makes the alluded-to gesture, says something snappy like “Hiya kids!” and continues along the corridor.

Now, the gesture (and, yes, you may try this at home—in fact, we insist you do):

First, breezily swing your right arm (or the left, it doesn’t really matter) as if to shake someone’s hand but continue the motion until your arm is at shoulder height. The elbow is jutting forward, the upper arm is parallel to the ground, and the forearm is pointing due north at a 90% angle. Your wrist should be bent, so that your palm faces downward and your fingers point back at your face.

Now, with a flick of the wrist, flip your hand outward from its palm-down position to a palm-up position, as if you were a waiter carrying an invisible tray of drinks.

We’ve broken it down into parts so that you can give it a try, but with a ilttle practice, all those parts should meld into one smooth gesture. And don’t forget the insouciance, and plenty of it!

Practice this gesture in the privacy of your home, and when you can toss it off as if it’s second nature to you, spring it on your friends.

We can assure you that the fellas will think you swell, and the dames will go dizzy for you.

Or vice-versa.

Cinematic Slang: A bunch of violets

Hollywood pictures of the early 1930s are often interesting in the attitudes they exhibit toward gay men and lesbians. The presentation of gay characters are sometimes very matter of fact, offering no particular judgment or attitude, and even when the depictions are a bit demeaning, at least the fact that there are gay men and lesbians in the world is acknowledged. In pictures from the late ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, one rarely sees a gay character depicted at all (Peter Lorre‘s Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941) is one notable exception to this rule).

Jews underwent a similar cinematic fate in Hollywood, it seems to us. In the 1920s and early ’30s, there were many Jewish characters depicted in Hollywood movies. Were those depictions sometimes stereotypical? Undeniably, but not all were, and at least Jews had a prominent presence in the Hollywood movies of the era. That seemed to change drastically in the ensuing decades.

We were watching a pre-code James Cagney film not long ago (Picture Snatcher, 1933), and in one scene, for reasons not salient to this account, Cagney is on the phone pretending to be a woman. A dame he’s scamming walks in, hears his end of the conversation, and asks, “Want to borrow one of my dresses, dearie? Who was that on the phone?”

“Ah, just a bunch of violets,” Cagney answers. “He had the wrong number. I egged him on for a laugh.”

“A bunch of violets”—as an old euphemism for “gay man,” that was a new one on us.

Goodbye to another glorious gal

We just learned of the passing yesterday of the wonderful Gloria Stuart. Stuart, who turned 100 on July 5 of this year, lived a nice, long life, of course, but we’re feeling blue nonetheless.

As some regular readers will recall, we were fortunate enough to interview Ms. Stuart eleven years ago on the occasion of the publication of her memoir, I Just Kept Hoping [you can read the interview here], and we found her utterly delightful. She was, at age 89, as witty and as sharp as one could hope to be at that age. She was also charming and engaging and not a little flirty, and we have harbored a little crush on her ever since.

Ms. Stuart had an impressive, if brief, Hollywood career in the 1930s, acting opposite the likes of Claude Rains, James Cagney, Nancy Carroll, Walter Pidgeon, Lee Tracy, Pat O’Brien, Melvyn Douglas, Dick Powell and many others, and she was friends with many other luminaries, Humphrey Bogart and the Marx Brothers among them. And we were pleased to learn that she had gotten a kick out of the career resurgence she experienced late in life.

Screen Play magazine once named Ms. Stuart one of the 10 most beautiful women in Hollywood, and we think that honor still holds today, even all those beautiful women later. But as By Aljean Harmetz and Robert Berkvist wrote in an obituary that appeared in The New York Times, Stuart was “more than a pretty face. She was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild and helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, an early antifascist organization.”

She also undertook a career as an artist, teaching herself to paint. Her first one-woman show was at NYC’s Hammer Galleries in 1961. Beginning in the 1980s, she began a new career at a printer, designing hand-printed artists’ books, even organizing her own imprint, Imprenta Glorias.

What a gal.

We’ll remain ever grateful for our brief encounters with Ms. Stuart, and we sincerely hope and pray that she will rest in peace.

Past Paper, pt. 5: At the Drive-in, ca. 1958

Drive-in movies theatres are connected in the minds of many with the 1950s and ’60s, and those decades might certainly be fairly considered the heyday of the “ozoner,” which is the term Variety has used for drive-ins for many years.

But as drive-in buffs and regular readers of Cladrite Radio well know, the first drive-in opened way back in 1933, and by the 1940s, outdoor theatres had cropped up all over the country.

You can even catch scenes in drive-ins in some movies of the 1940s (we know of no such scenes in the 1930s, though we’d love to be corrected if some exist). Perhaps most memorable is the scene in White Heat (1949), when Cody Jarrett, so memorably portrayed by James Cagney, pulls into Burbank, California’s San-Val Drive-in as he tries to elude capture by a pursuing police car with sirens at full volume.

(The San-Val, by the way, was the second drive-in ever built in California. It opened for business in 1938 and was shuttered in the mid-1970s.)

There are many today who believe the drive-in to be all but extinct, but that’s simply not the case. There are far fewer today than there once were, it’s true, but there are still between 400-450 ozoners in operation, and many of those are thriving.

There are dearly held clichés about the drive-in experience that have been around since the 1950s and may never die, chief among them being the idea that the drive-in is a place where teenagers congregate to get away from their parents and misbehave in various and sundry ways, that the average drive-in is more a passion pit than a movie theatre.

But today’s drive-ins are relying more on family fare than the exploitation pictures and troubled teen epics of yesteryear. And in doing so, they are actually returning to their roots, for the drive-in wasn’t always a place for restless youth to meet and mingle.

One of the strongest selling points for early drive-ins was that they eliminated the need for a baby-sitter. Parents could dress the kids in their PJs and enjoy a night at the movies, with Junior and Sis nodding off in the back seat long before the second feature started.

Drive-ins also sold the idea that you could “come as you are.” Folks still dressed up a bit to go to the movies in the 1940s and ’50s—at least, if they were attending a downtown movie palace, they did—but they could patronize their local ozoner in their shirt sleeves.

We love finding advertising flyers for drive-ins, like the one pictured below.

Hi-res view	Hi-res view
Hi-res view	Hi-res view

We’re not entirely certain which drive-in this flyer is from, as Laurel, Mississippi, appears to have played host to four different ozoners over the years—the Crossley, the Northside Twin, the Original, and the Rebel Drive-In—and we’re not entirely certain whether all were in operation in 1958, when this flyer was printed.

But the flyer does shine an interesting light on the unnamed theatre’s booking policies.

There are eight pictures listed on the flyer—four double features—and only four of those eight pictures—I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, The Lady Takes a Flyer, Jet Attack, and Suicide Battalion—came out in 1958. Revenge of the Creature and Rebel without a Cause were released three years earlier, in 1955; The Last Wagon came out in 1956; and Blood of Dracula was a 1957 release.

It’s as if you went to see, say, Toy Story 3 at your local drive-in, and it was paired as part of a double-bill with The Simpsons Movie or Superbad.

On the other hand, the four older movies are available today on DVD, while the same is true of none of the 1958 releases. What that says about the quality of movies released in the year we were born (and possibly about us, too), we’ll leave to you to decide.

A century of Stuart

We don’t know how we let it sneak by us, but Monday, July 5, was the 100th birthday of the wonderful Gloria Stuart, best known now for her work in James Cameron‘s Titanic, but a woman who’s led a remarkable life and was a pretty big movie star in the 1930s, to boot.

In 1999, when she was just a kid of 89, we got to interview Gloria on the occasion of the publication of her memoir, I Just Kept Hoping. The interview was conducted over the telephone, though we did get the chance to meet Ms. Stuart when she came to NYC for her book party.

We considered it quite a thrill, we don’t mind telling you, to get to interact with Ms. Stuart. After all, this is the women who starred opposite Claude Rains in James Whale‘s The Invisible Man, who appeared with Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, and Charles Laughton in The Old Dark House, who worked with greats such as Irene Dunne, Ralph Bellamy, Pat O’Brien, Lionel Barrymore, Lee Tracy, Nancy Carroll, Frank Morgan, Paul Lukas, Edward Arnold, Eddie Cantor, Ruth Etting, and dozens more.

So, to mark her centennial (a few days late, alas), we thought we’d share with the Cladrite Radio Clan the interview we did with her in 1999. Enjoy!

It’s been a long, eventful life for former and current movie star Gloria Stuart. She had her first go-around at stardom in the Hollywood heyday of the 1930s and ’40s; then, after taking off 30 years or so to pursue painting, travel, and political activism, she again began to act in the 1970s, eventually garnering a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role in “Titanic.” Still going strong today at the age of 89, Stuart has now added authorship to her list of achievements. Her candid memoir, I Just Kept Hoping, is peppered with anecdotes about such memorable figures as Shirley Temple, Groucho Marx, Dorothy Parker, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. I spoke to Gloria about her life, her two careers in the movies, and her secrets for living so long and so well.

An Interview with Gloria Stuart

You made three films with director James Whale: “The Invisible Man,” “The Old Dark House,” and “The Kiss Before the Mirror.” What can you tell us about him?

I’m very happy I was in those films. You know, James is a cult figure in England. There are a lot of James Whale fan clubs. Actually, right after I had read for Jim Cameron for “Titanic,” I had booked a month in London. I went right away, and there were two wonderful James Whale organizations that I met with. He’s getting his due now, thanks to “Gods and Monsters.”

What did you think of “Gods and Monsters”? Was it, in your view, an accurate portrayal of Whale?

Oh, yes, it was. Ian McKellan captured James’s elegance, the beautiful manners, the beautiful tailoring, the precision, the whole thing. Of course, no one could be James, but he came awfully close.

The special effects in “The Invisible Man” hold up remarkably well today for a film that was made in 1933.

Yes, people who see it today—it runs every so often—they say, gee, it’s not an old hat movie at all.

I’m wondering—did the processes that went into creating those special effects slow down the pace of moviemaking at all?

It was never evident. Only James and the cameraman and I guess all the process people at Universal—the rest of us never had any inkling of what was going on. We did do a lot of shooting in front of black curtains. Now, I wasn’t on the set when the bandages came off or anything like that, so I have no idea about that. But it was very, very secret. I wasn’t on the set when they were finagling the bandages off, and so forth.

That would’ve been fun to see.

Yes, it would’ve! Claude [Rains] may have known [how it all worked] but he never said so.

You and your second husband, Arthur Sheekman, were good friends with Humphrey Bogart and Mayo Methot, his wife at the time. What can you tell us about Bogie that we might not know?
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