Strangler of the Swamp starring Blake Edwards

Strangler of the Swamp is a sweet ghost story with great atmosphere. It was written and directed in 1946 by Frank Wisbar as an English language remake of his earlier German film. Blake Edwards does nicely as the handsome chap. I didn't recognize any of the other actors although, as it turns out, the female romantic lead was a Miss California. The movie is a bit creaky and this print not the best but it all adds up to a fun hour...so much fun I put its poster on a tee shirt! (crew d'tees / crewdtees.com). Enjoy!

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Ladies of the Burlesque Dance

Sunny Knight, Mickey 'Ginger' Jones and Shirley Heart are not names that are remembered today but there are filmed records of these burly Q queens dances in the 1949 public domain film Midnight Frolics. Granted by the time this film was made, burlesque had already died and been buried but it is nice to have this record (albeit modified according to the film's title card). For this WORLD INTERNET PREMIERE, I've extracted Sunny's dance (the star spot at the end of the show), Mickey's dance (an act one closer) and Shirley's dance (strip opener starts like a lamb and ends like a lion). Check out these ladies and their energetic, gymnastic and naively salacious dances.

If you want a Burlesque or Bust vintage-style tee shirt I created for my crew d'tees tee shirt collection, check it out here.

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Mauthausen Concentration Camp

Photos may take a minute to download. If you see broken links, right click the frame and select Reload Image. Clicking a picture opens a slide show of all pictures with no captions. Also available on Flickr.

Midway between Salzburg and Vienna in Austria are the remains of Mauthausen, a Nazi work camp. The Mauthausen Memorial lies on the outskirts of its namesake town and has all the barracks, barbed wire and gas chambers of more celebrated concentration camps. Mauthausen fed prisoners to over 100 smaller work camps in Austria and Southern Germany as well as forcing prisoners to excavate rock from its quarry. Estimates put deaths at between 100,000 and 300,000. The staff of the memorial asked us to take many pictures and post them everywhere.

The picture above is the front of Mauthausen taken from the memorial parking lot. Note the guard tower, stone wall and camp's entrance at the confluence of the paths. To your right, the wall with black streaks is one of many memorials on the grounds of the camp.

The front entrance to the camp opens onto a large courtyard where prisoners were processed.

The courtyard.

Prisoners were assigned a cloth winkle to wear on their prison uniforms. The form and color denoted the reason for persecution.

The stairs bring you from the courtyard up to the officer's quarters (left) or the prisoner's barracks (right).

The officer's quarters (looking over the courtyard) are protected from the elements by the rocks the prisoners mined in the quarry. This building now houses administration offices for the museum.

Prisoners enter their living grounds from the entrance at the far end of this photo. To your right are barracks; three of 25 survive. To your left are the kitchen, prison, gas chambers and crematorium. The metal box filled with rocks in the middle of the picture is a memorial.

Detail of outside of wood barrack.

The prisoners' sleeping area in a barrack. Lodovico Barbizon de Belgiojoso describes his experience.

Every evening, after the noise that a hundred people can make when cramming into bunk beds, swearing and cursing in twenty languages, the order for silence was given and the lights turned off. […] Later, when the people finally started falling asleep, the concert of wheezing and hissing, coughing fits, belching and farting, snoring in several pitches, soft moaning, sobbing and cursing began. […] These noises emerged from a hundred bodies and fused into a single, terrible sound, produced as if by a giant, monstrous being that had holder itself up in the dark.

Toilets. Stand to your right. Sit to your left.

Water ... for all your needs. Roman Foster describes his experience.

In Mauthausen I stopped washing myself […]. I simply could no longer find the strength to get up early […] and pour icy water over myself. […] The time had come to ask if there was still any purpose in continuing the hard struggle for this wretched existence.

Guard tower and electric fence.

These stone walls contained the barracks in which quarantined prisoners were kept. After United States troops liberated the prisoners in 1945, the land became a cemetery. Prisoners continued to die for weeks after the liberation.

The electrified wall.

A headstone.

Guard tower.

From the far end of the prisoners area with the cemetery on your right and the infirmary/museum on the left.

Behind the infirmary with memorial plaques on the stone wall. On the other side of this stone wall was the town of Mauthausen.

A page from the graphic training guide given to all Nazi guards.

Another page from the graphic training guide given to all Nazi guards.

Stone wall and electric fence.

Disinfectant shower room for new arrivals.

In 1941 the SS construct a gas chamber and other installations at Mauthausen for the systematic murder of large groups of people.

Gas chamber.

People leave messages of peace, hope and love on the window sills of the gas chamber.

The first oven in the camp.

Building a better oven.

The Nazis would shove as many bodies as they could into an oven. It's not like bodies were cremated with respect.

I left the prisoners quarters and walked deeper into the surrounding woods (which are, ironically, quite beautiful). I walk around the outside of the chain link fence and came upon Aschen Friedhof where the Nazis dumped the ashes of those who were cremated.

Makeshift chapel above Aschen Friedhof. (Ash Cemetery)

Aschen Friedhof. (Ash Cemetery)

Guard tower and barbed wire.

The rock quarry.

The Stairs of Death lead from the rock quarry floor up to the camp. Prisoners were forced to carry roughly-hewn blocks of stone – often weighing as much as 100 pounds - up the 186 stairs, one prisoner behind the other. As a result, many exhausted prisoners collapsed in front of the other prisoners in the line, and then fell on top of the other prisoners, creating a domino effect; the first prisoner falling onto the next, and so on, all the way down the stairs.

The Stairs of Death.

Guard tower above the quarry.

Memorial Park is visible from the quarry floor.

A grotto has emerged in the rock quarry.

Memorials have been constructed by different countries in Memorial Park, the area above the quarry. There is no memorial from the United States although...

... the United States army liberated Mauthausen on May 5, 1945 and this plaque commemorates it.

A map of Mauthausen. The red buildings still stand and the pictures here are from that area. The quarry with its circular Stairs of Death is on the your left. The area between the two is Memorial Park. To the left of the circle in the top right corner is the approximate location of Aschen Friedhof (Ash Cemetery).

A chapel has been built in the room above the disinfectant shower.

The back wall of the chapel is decorated with these paintings.

The room next to the chapel has flags of all the countries that helped in the liberation of Mauthausen.

On the side of the road that leads to (and from) the Mauthausen camp is Der Weg (The Way), a memorial art piece by Ewe Kaja. It consists of rows of stone skulls embedded in the dirt. The skulls are progressively buried deeper until the last row in which the skulls are buried to the top.

Opposite Der Weg (The Way), this lovely creek continues to flow despite the atrocities it has flowed past. It amazes that people could live in the town of Mauthausen while this was happening. I learned in the museum that there were people who hid escapees from the camp so maybe it's the mob mentality - when you can get one person away from the mob, you find humanity. Well, back then anyway but there's always hope for tomorrow.

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Anna Lucasta Redefines Race in Hollywood

This racial history started innocently enough when a still from the 1949 movie Anna Lucasta was posted to a Facebook thread about character actress Mary Wickes (who co-stars). Philip Yordan, a white playwright and screenwriter (Johnny Guitar), wrote Anna Lukaska in 1936. The story of this Anna (a Polish American prostitute seeking redemption from her family) takes important plot points and characterizations from a play about another literary Anna who turned to prostitution some twenty years before: Anna Christie by Eugene O'Neill. Possibly because of its similarities, Anna Lukaska never made it to Broadway in the 30s but almost ten years later, it was discovered by Abram Hill, one of the founders of the American Negro Theatre Company.

Rumored to have hired an out-of-work black dramatist to provide
Negro dialect Philip Yordan is Anna Lucasta's sole author

In 1944, Hill reconceived the play to reflect African American life, renamed it Anna Lucasta and produced this new version in the basement of the New York Public Library on 135th Street. Its success in Harlem culminated in a quick move to Broadway where the play ran for over two years; a hugely successful American tour and engagements in Chicago and on London's West End followed. (Perennial Hollywood couple Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis met and fell in love while performing in the tour of Anna Lucasta.) Despite its sexual themes and an all-black cast, this theatrical success brought attention from Hollywood.

The Mansfield Theater was renamed The Brooks Atkinson
Click the pic to see the 1944 Playbill

Anna Lucasta was booted from studio to studio because the material was thoroughly and completely unacceptable. Yordan was desperate to see his play on the screen so he blamed Hill for the smut and cheap hokum and promised to eliminate these unwholesome elements from the screenplay. He fashioned a screenplay (with help from writer Arthur Laurents) in which the characters were (once again) white Polish Americans and the smut was implied. It was then that Anna Lucasta was filmed (via Security Pictures and producer Yordan) with (r-l) Paulette Goddard as Anna, William Bishop as Rudolf, Mary Wickes as Stella, Lisa Golm as Theresa and Broderick Crawford (not pictured) as Frank.

White Anna Lucasta is banal, stagebound and unrealistic. Goddard (a little long in the tooth) resembles Mildred Pierce and one thinks she had hoped for the same career resucitation from this film that Joan Crawford had gotten from the former. Unfortunately, her performance is more camp than credible with facial tics akimbo. Broderick Crawford as the villian acts every bit the sleazy Harry character soon to be immortalized in Born Yesterday and Mary Wickes is the perfect foil in an atypical role. Most interesting though was the casting of Dennie Moore as Blanche, Anna's compadre on the streets; I had previously seen Ms. Moore only in her rousing turn as the manicurist in the classic 1939 film The Women (also with Goddard although the two never appear on screen together). But the 1949 movie was only the first filmed version.

Watch Anna Lucasta with Paulette Goddard

In 1958, Anna Lucasta was filmed again - this time the racial switch was flipped back to African Americans. Again produced and written by Yordan, the film starred Eartha Kitt, Sammy Davis Jr., Rex Ingram and Claire Leyba. Black Anna Lucasta is a much more cohesive film despite the many similarities in the text, and the acting is much better so the characters feel more defined. Kitt especially brought tears to my eyes in any number of scenes and looked sensational while doing it. Leyba (in the great role of Blanche this go-round) proves a wonderful actress and screen personality while Davis, playing a cab driver in his first non-musical role, is still given a gratuitous hallucinatory dance sequence (with costume changes, MTV-style editing and a great Elmer Bernstein score that apes the beatnik jazz of the era).

Although Anna Lucasta has the reputation of having been inspired by (or copied structurally and plot-wise from) O'Neill's classic play, lesser known is the fact that Anna Lucasta inspired a classic play as well. Written by Alice Childress (who played Blanche on Broadway), Trouble in Mind is about a black actress appearing in an anti-lynching play directed by one white man and written by another. Seen as a dramatization of Childress' experiences in Anna Lucasta, the play was first produced Off-Broadway in 1955 and Childress became the first African American woman to be honored with an Obie Award when Trouble In Mind was selected as the Best Original Off-Broadway Production in 1956.

Alice Childress wrote A Hero Ain't Nothin' But A Sandwich
Trouble in Mind has been revived as recently as 2011

Anna Lucasta is still performed but does it, as one reviewer wrote last year, provide substantial evidence to support the notion that we’re all the same beneath the skin or is it just a broadly written play with little characterization and stereotypes? Although a (translated) Greek television movie was made in 1977, most recent productions (including this 2012 stage production in Los Angeles) retain the second generation African American cast. But might we see a revival with a white cast and the sexual themes toned down now again? Would that be racist? Or an attempt at capitalism - like the African-American version of Steel Magnolias? The Jewish Yordan has an Academy Award, and a reputation as a front during the Hollywood blacklists of the 50s. All of this belies an interesting little peccadillo.

Some quotes and data in this article have been taken from:

• AFI Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the Unted States Volume 1
• Within Our Gates: Ethnicity in American Feature Films, 1911-1960
• The Regal Theater and Black Culture by Clovis E Semmes
• Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s edited by Patrick McGilligan
• The Merchant Prince of Poverty Row: Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures

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