The French Line starring Jane Russell

The year after Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Jane Russell starred in a musical that received the CONDEMNED rating from the Catholic National Legion of Decency. The reason? Her almost-there outfits (especially THAT one in Looking for Trouble) were designed by the film's producer Howard Hughes (and the craftsmen at RKO) to display Russell's physique in the best manner. The film was first released in 3D which offered eye-poping views of Jane's assets and added to its reputation as scandalous.

Jane is a charmer: singing, dancing, and dripping the monotone sarcasm she used to her advantage in the previous musical. Also appearing are silent film's Gilbert Roland, future Tony nominee Mary McCarty and Theresa Harris who performs Well, I'll Be Switched with Jane and disappears. If you blink, you'll miss Kim Novak's first film appearance as a show girl in the Poor Andre number. Unfortunately, this is the censored (United States) version of the film.

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Blithe Spirit 1956 TV Production

Blithe Spirit is a play by Noël Coward about novelist Charles Condomine who invites eccentric medium/clairvoyant, Madame Arcati, to his home to conduct a séance which brings to life the ghost of his annoying and temperamental first wife, Elvira. In 1956, Coward directed a LIVE ON AIR American television adaptation for Ford Star Jubilee.

Coward stars with Claudette Colbert as his second wife Ruth, Lauren Bacall as Elvira and Emmy nominee for Best Supporting Performance by an Actress, Mildred Natwick as Madame Arcati. The endlessly-rushing maid is played by Marion Ross who most viewers will remember as the mother on the television series Happy Days. Fred de Cordova, longtime producer of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, is listed as having staged the production for television. Based on the thumbnail image there seems to have been a tour and record associated with this production as well although a quick search garnered no other information. Originally broadcast in color, only black and white kinescopes survive. I believe this is also a WORLD INTERNET PREMIERE! Enjoy!

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Sophie Tucker & Josephine Baker

Sophie Tucker was an American vaudeville singer whose meteoric career lasted the 80 years of her life. In 1910, after years of amateur performances Tucker was given the opportunity to perform on a legitimate vaudeville stage. The theater owner though said she could only perform in blackface. Much to her chagrin but needing to make a living, she did it. Over the ten years she performed in blackface her color went from 'burnt cork' to 'high yellow'. Once 'high yellow' she then ended her performances by removing her wig to reveal blonde hair, and her gloves to reveal white skin. One day in Chicago, she 'forgot' her makeup and went on as herself. She never used the makeup again.

Click here for information about Sophie's autobiography.

Josephine Baker was an American vaudeville performer who also performed in the legitimate theater in New York City. Her most famous theatrical performance was in the chorus of 1922's Shuffle Along (currently being revived on Broadway) but it was her blackface performances that were noticed and landed her the opportunity to open in La Revue Negre in Paris, France where Baker's erotic performances and infamous banana skirt earned her notoriety and money. Ultimately she gave up her American citizenship and became a French citizen.

In 1951, Baker was invited back to the US for an engagement in Copa City, a nightclub in Miami, Florida. She agreed to the run only if the audience would not be segregated. Baker received death threats and bricks were thrown at the club. Tucker, who was booked to play Copa City following Baker, heard this and called a press conference in which she announced she would introduce Josephine Baker so if anyone wanted to do bodily harm to Ms. Baker they'd have to go through Sophie first. Opening night went off without a scuffle, the show received rave reviews, was standing room only and Baker was named the NAACP's Woman Of The Year.

The two icons became friends for life.

For more pictures, see Sophie Tucker & Josephine Baker on Pinterest.

Follow Michael,'s board Sophie Tucker & Josephine Baker on Pinterest.

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How Gloria Swanson Broke Into The Movies

The first time I took notice of Gloria Swanson she was playing a version of herself in Airport '75. I recognized her as the actress that Carol Burnett lampooned on her eponymous television variety show. A few years later when I became vegan I read how Ms. Swanson had been a vegetarian since 1928 and helped to promote her husband's book Sugar Blues (William Dufty). But it wasn't until I moved to Los Angeles that I became familiar with her career as an actress - first in silent films and then in her iconic role as Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard.

Swanson began her career in early Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett comedies. By 1919 she was working for Paramount Pictures and with director Cecil B. DeMille. Stardom followed with films such as romantic lead in such films as Don't Change Your Husband (1919), Male and Female (1919) (based on a play by J.M. Barrie), Why Change Your Wife? (1920), Something to Think About (1920), The Affairs of Anatol (1921) and Beyond The Rocks (with Rudolph Valentino). By 1926, she was making independent films as a part owner of United Artists including Sadie Thompson (a huge hit famously remade as Rain starring Joan Crawford) and Queen Kelly (the infamous unfinished film directed by her Sunset Boulevard co-star Eric Von Stroheim).

How Gloria Swanson Broke Into The Movies continues after the
WORLD INTERNET PREMIERE of How I Broke Into The Movies by Gloria Swanson.

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How I Broke Into The Movies Gloria Swanson picture
Right click to open the image in a new tab.

How I Broke Into The Movies by Gloria Swanson
Right click to open the image in a new tab.

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Aside from the WORLD INTERNET PREMIERE of Gloria Swanson's essay, I've also uploaded Killer Bees, a 1974 ABC Movie Of The Week considered her last true acting role. (Despite being touted as her television debut, Ms. Swanson had been working in the medium since 1948 when she hosted The Gloria Swanson Hour.) She stars in Killer Bees (produced by Aaron Spelling) with a pre-Charlie's Angels Kate Jackson and Edward Albert.

Killer Bees is considered in the public domain.

In 1957, Swanson performed Those Wonderful People In The Dark written
for a musical version of Sunset Boulevard she was shopping around.
Swanson held numerous backer auditions and performed the numbers
at cocktail parties, but the show didn't progress any further than that.

A cross-dressing Gloria Swanson in
Mack Sennett's The Danger Girl 1916

These musical tracks are recordings Swanson made for her films
The Trespasser (1929), Indiscreet (1931) and Perfect Understanding (1933)

How I Broke Into The Movies was published in 1930 and contains articles on the title theme written by movie stars of the day like John Gilbert, Al Jolson, Greta Nissen, Will Rogers, and 55 other notable actors. The previously published articles are:

• How Marion Davies Broke Into The Movies
• How Colleen Moore Broke Into The Movies (also announced the WORLD INTERNET PREMIERE of the Moore's 1925 silent film Ella Cinders newly scored with jazz music of the 1920s)
• How Clara Bow Broke Into The Movies

A short film in which Swanson dispenses advice to the lovelorn.
Credits imply it was the first of a series that never materialized.

Follow Michael,'s board Gloria Swanson on Pinterest.

The CBS Radio Network broadcast Sunset Boulevard on September 17, 1951
with the film's stars recreating their roles.

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Gwen Verdon in Gentlemen Marry Brunettes

After the 1953 success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell as showgirls Lorelei Lee and Dorothy Shaw, United Artists bought the rights to But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, the 1927 novel written as a sequel to the original 1925 book by author Anita Loos.

Jeanne Crain was signed to do the movie (retitled Gentlemen Marry Brunettes) with Richard Sale directing and Mary Loos (his wife and niece to the book's author) writing the screenplay. The novel's continuing adventures of storyline was dropped in favor of a completely new story about the Jones sisters rise to showgirl prominence in Paris. When Jane Russell's contract with Howard Hughes expired in 1954, she and her husband, Robert Waterfield, decided to form their own production company Russ-Field. The couple was courted by United Artists and offered a six picture deal - with the caveat that Jane star in Gentlemen Marry Brunettes.

Jane didn't like the idea of doing the sequel nor did she like the script but she agreed because United Artists allowed Russ-Field to join Sale and his company, Voyager, as producer although they had little say in the project. Among their concerns were the film's big Cinemascope and Technicolor budget (with Travilla gowns and location shoots) and how they were going to bring in the customers. Jane liked her co-star Jeanne Crain immensely but she was also aware that Crain was no Marilyn Monroe at the box-office; this left UA dependent on Russell to make the picture a financial success.

Ultimately Jane was greatly disappointed in Gentlemen Marry Brunettes and considered it a mess. And after viewing it, I can see she was right. Her pixie haircut makes Russell look old, the cannibal/blackface production number of Ain't Misbehavin' is just too weird for words and Crain is no foil for Russell. Inexplicably Russell plays the dumb showgirl and Crain the smart one; the film might've worked better had the parts been switched to more closely resemble the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes chemistry. Audiences of the day agreed with Russell's opinion and the (jukebox style) musical did poorly at the box-office when it was released in the fall of 1955.

Amidst all of this Gwen Verdon was hired to play a sexy French maid and had one scene in which her sexy moves were considered too obscene; the scene was cut and re-shot with a non-musical performer. This 25 seconds is the only glimpse left of Ms. Verdon's sexy moves in the 1955 film.

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From Tallulah Bankhead to Mary Martin

In 1953 MGM distributed the independently produced Main Street To Broadway which (fictionally) documents the behind-the-scenes process of producing a dramatic play on Broadway from origination to opening. Despite the barest plot (attributed to Pulitzer Prize winning playwright/screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood), the producer managed to gather a stellar cast of theatre luminaries. Some of the ensemble play themselves in small scenes that have nothing to do with the plot and some play parts in the screenplay by Samson Raphaelson (Ernst Lubitsch's screenwriter).

The story concerns playwright Tony Monaco writing a play in which he hopes Tallulah Bankhead will star. (Tom Morton plays Tony Monaco, a few years before he took the stage name Tony Monaco and toured in the national company of I Can Get It For You Wholesale.) He meets actress Mary Craig (Mary Murphy from The Wild One) who is ready to quit the New York theatrical scene and go back to South Terre Haute to marry. They fight, they kiss and they fall in love only to be separated by their different worlds.

If for no other reason, this film exists to allow Tallulah Bankhead to caricature herself - something she did often in real life but rarely on screen. Monaco is persuaded by his agent (played by Agnes Moorehead) to write a play that shows off Bankhead as a normal American housewife. (At one point, Bankhead opines "Aren't they writing plays for nice people like ME ANYMORE?!?!") He goes home with Mary - actually follows her in a stalky type thing - and literally dreams up Calico and Lust after watching Mary's parents (Rosemary DeCamp and Clinton Sundberg) living their life. In the dream, Tallulah is dressed in calico and an apron, sewing and welcoming neighbors to the door (although it ultimately turns into a camp version of a Bankhead-type melodrama).

All Tallulah's scenes in a badly digitized TV rip
See below if you want a good version

Another fascinating scenario concerns the evolution of the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II song There's Music In You. From Hammerstein's lyrical inspiration after seeing playwright Tony and Mary kissing on the street to Rodgers plunking out a tune while Hammerstein sings to the final incorporation of the finished song by Mary Martin in a new (fictional) musical, these scenes mark the only time the two musical geniuses appeared on screen. There's Music In You was written especially for Main Street To Broadway and was considered a trunk song (term for a songwriter's stash of unused material) until 1997 when it was interpolated into the new television production of Cinderella and sung by Whitney Houston. The song was also used in the 2013 Broadway production of Cinderella.

From Tallulah Bankhead to Mary Martin continues after the WORLD INTERNET PREMIERE
of the Mary Martin Sings There's Music In You video compilation.

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Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Mary Martin in
There's Music In You. Note the spelling of 'Rogers' name in the call board.

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Main Street To Broadway also has the following scenes and attributes.

• Helen Hayes instructs a young actress how to focus before introducing the film and discussing the soon-to-be-demolished Empire Theatre. She returns to narrate the play's opening and list the luminaries attending.

• Shirley Booth talks with, and signs autographs for, fans and demonstrates why she is so beloved. (See Hazel: The Maid With The Most and See Miss Shirley Booth for more information.

• Cornel Wilde acts in a workshop reading of the playwright's somewhat misogynistic first play with ingenue Mary.
• Rex Harrison and then-wife actress Lilli Palmer discuss what's in their refrigerator; Rex wants a bagel and salami.
• Radio and television's Molly Goldberg, Gertrude Berg, plays Tony's motherly landlady.
• Ethel Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore and Louis Calhern bail the despondent playwright out of jail and offer him hope after Bankhead rejects the new play.
• John Van Druten works with Constance Carpenter (as Anna) and the cast of the still running The King And I which he had directed the year before.
• Al Hirschfeld draws one of his trademark caricatures.

• New York Giants manager Leo Durocher gets a dugout scolding from Tallulah.
• After having testified for the House Un-American Activities Committee, Jack Gilford was hired to play behind the bars of the theatre box office as treasurer.
• Humorist Herb Shriner, father of director Wil (Frasier) and actor Kin (General Hospital), sympathetically plays Mary's hometown boyfriend.
• Academy Award winner James Wong Howe was cinematographer for Main Street To Broadway.

Main Street To Broadway has never been released on DVD. It was released on VHS tape - a used version of which you can buy on Amazon from a third party for $100. Or you can send me an email and I can send you link to download a nice rip of the VHS for free. Your choice.

Mary Martin's studio version of There's Music In You

Whitney Houston's version of There's Music In You 1997

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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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The Friends Of The Friendless

We are friends of the friendless
Yes we are
Yes we are
We are friends of the friendless
Be they near
Be they far
We are here for the downtrodden
And we sober up the sodden
We are friends of the friendless
Yes we are
Yes we are

a future friend

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Carol Channing Can Do A Lot For A Corset

The First Traveling Saleslady is the first film in which Carol Channing sang a song. The movie is not available on DVD.


For the INTERNET WORLD PREMIERE, I set up my camera in front of the TV and, until a better version can be had, here is vintage Channing (with some faux piano help from Ginger Rogers) singing A Corset Can Do A Lot For A Lady from The First Traveling Saleslady.


In the clip, actress Molly and saleswoman Rose (progressives) try to interest
a theatrical producer in adding a number featuring their corsets -
despite his fears of reprisal from the Purity League (conservatives).

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