Stanwyck & Lanfield.

I’d thought the file on Sidney Lanfield had long since closed but he turns up as a reference in Ryan Murphy & Ian Brennan’s scandal raking 2021 Hollywood TV Mini Series and, then on You Tube, I discover a beautiful transfer of his hardly ever shown 1938 Barbara Stanwyck weepy Always Goodbye, which proves surprisingly involving.

Way back when I first started thinking about movies, it seemed the real criteria were not the ones I was hearing - preserving the county’s British heritage or whether they were works of art or artifacts or the contribution they made to the proletarian struggle or the employment they provided the noisy local industry lobby.

What appeared more relevant was that the same names, usually directors, kept on appearing on the films that I liked, not just the Cecil B. De Mille - Alexander Korda - John  Ford heavyweights but people who seemed to have no celebrity status. I didn’t realise it at the time but I was formulating my own crude auteur theory. Remember the auteur theory?

A few years later, I got to discuss this with some of those film makers - Jacques Tourneur, Delmer Daves, Cy Enfield - and I found that some had gone through the same process themselves a generation earlier. Andre de Toth admired Leo McCarey’s brother Ray McCarey. Michael Powell had been a fan of Roy Del Ruth.

My notion, not surprisingly, had drawn ridicule from my contemporaries, the Grierson documentary devotees, to be followed by the Sam Fuller adherents. Fuller himself threw confusion into the assembled French fan pack by stating his respect for Herbert Brennon - “Qu’est-ce que ce Herbert Brennon?”

 Lemon Drop Kid - Bob Hope & Lanfield.

To the In-Crowd, one time jazz musician and gag man Sidney Lanfield had been way beyond respectability. I’d be surprised if the more purposeful had seen any of his work but he did the best of Bob Hope’s films. (seems that I and Woddy Allen are the only  admirers of Bob Hope left) I particularly enjoyed a couple of Paramount comedies Lanfield did with Paulette Godard - Standing Room Only and The Lady Has Plans. The university film group had a palace revolution, took my suggestion and slapped on The Lady Has Plans and that one proved a hit with what passed as a sophisticated audience in nineteen fifties Australia, which I felt made a point.

Well that was then and this is now, though Sidney Lanfield’s sustained association with popular entertainment meant he did keep on popping back into view. He did the first Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes and had Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth as leads. Even after he scaled down into series TV, he directed the 1960 The Man in the Pit episode of John Casavetes’ landmark Johnny Staccato, the series where the studio executive prompted “John, John, you don’t get the idea. Your program is just a twenty five minute interval between the commercials.” I handled a copy of Follow the Sun. (Glenn Ford as  golfer Ben Hogan) which I’d thought of it as production line entertainment when I’d seen its first run, and was surprised to find how effective it remained.

So I dialed up Always Goodbye, which proved to be a remake of the Fanny (“Back Street”) Hurst story Gregory La Cava did as Gallant Lady with Ann Harding five years earlier - and to anticipate Now Voyager.

It also was unexpectedly touching for something so obviously synthetic. The plot is played out in studio settings that never convince us they are real streets, offices, homes or ocean liner and the support are painstakingly effaced to focus attention on Stanwyck’s noble suffering - which she manages impeccably - her performance is the film and everyone knew it.

Interestingly Cesar Romero and (surprise) Lynn Bari (“Women can’t fool women”) wouldn’t go along with the gag and manage to resist erasure.

Babs is found in the back projected N.Y. street, waiting outside city hall for her husband to be, who is promptly wiped out in an off screen traffic accident. That leaves her with the problem of the baby. Fortunately globe trotting Herbert Marshall happens to be sitting on the pier which she intends throwing herself off and whisks her to a spot in Binnie Barnes’ fashion house - where she thrives.

She has followed developments with adopted out young Johnny Russel (particularly bratty) whose new mum dies (off screen again) leaving new dad Ian Hunter (the men are so nice and so British) to raise the kid.

Always Goodbye - Stanwyck

On assignment in Paris, our heroine meets the boy at the Ritz and immediately signs up to ship on the Normandy on which he’s traveling back to the ‘States with admiring Italian (!) aristocrat Romero pursuing her - comic routines in the ship’s giant no sky pool and him chatting her with “You are more beautiful tonight than you were this afternoon” lines. She reads the kid “Little Black Sambo” which appears to grate with some modern sensibilities.

Marshall has taken a lab technician spot in New York to be near her but Hunter’s ambitious fiancée Bari admits she plans to ship the kid off to military school, making way for a kind of bitter sweet ending. Babs has the stars. Let’s not ask for the moon.

The saccharine material is spaced with passable comedy and lots of good living. Lanfield runs the show deftly even with peculiar touches like Hunter, who was the only one to show up on location, cycling up on back projection before we cut to doubles distant joining his character in his park-like grounds. It's like the two Bette Davises walking side by side on the process stage in Curtis Bernhardt’s 1947 A Stolen Life. It doesn’t convince but we admire the effort that went into that.

This one plays so well I kept on wondering why it was never re-issued. It made me curious about another Lanfield-Stanwyck collaboration which had been on You Tube as long as I can remember without my investigating it - Red Salute /  Her Enlisted Man Her / Her Uncle Sam, from Edward Small (The Donat Count of Monte Cristo, T-Men). This one was on the face of it more promising with its remarkable for 1935 Hollywood premise - General Purnell Pratt’s daughter Stanwyck engaged to Hardie Albright,  a radical on a visitor’s visa (freedom of speech, get it) outraging her dad who ships her South of the border, from which she plots her return to Washington, complicated when the roulette wheel swallows her last five dollars.

Serving soldier Robert Young finds himself involved in her schemes becoming A.W.O.L. when she commandeers Cliff Edwards' over-insured jalopy and trailer and runs the American border.

Best element gets to be Edwards enjoying finding himself in a chase with the border patrol, which provides the excitement he never had in the war and gets him away from wife, surprisingly strident Ruth Donnelly. He gets to sing “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now” on back projection at the wheel.

Disappointingly the political content is limited to Babs parroting a few slogans and Bob sorts out the Albright problem by turning the student rally he is addressing into the Forum Scene from “Julius Caesar” for an ending. Hollywood was jittery about depicting left wingers at this stage, though I do like He Stayed for Breakfast, made in 1940 when the political climate had shifted and Loretta Young finds Bolshevik Melvin Douglas in her bedroom, demanding how he got there to be told “I once organised the locksmiths.” The relationship between General Pratt and Young is more interesting, switching mid-scene from officer and subordinate to father and potential son in law and back.

It wasn’t till the nineteen seventies and films like Bound for Glory and Reds that we’d see the 1930s Left treated convincingly.

Red Salute is more an It Happened One Night rip-off than serious argument and the two elements compete unsatisfactorily. Edward Small musters reasonable production values with Lanfield pushing it along relentlessly - going from something moving to something moving on the edits. A comparison with Always Goodbye shows how much Zanuck's massaging the elements before and after shooting determined the quality of Fox product. Sidney Lanfield, who associates dismissed as “a front office director” for calling the bosses for decisions, fitted into that scheme perfectly and they got superior results through collaboration. Few of his contemporaries could do that as well.

This was a model for "The Golden Years" of Hollywood and, while it was rarely going to create masterpieces, it did produce the flow of agreeable entertainment that distinguished the era. Talent more prestigious than Sidney Lanfield often fell below the standard of The Lady Has Plans and Follow the Sun. I'd enjoyed those and still do - but I'm not sure whether the Hollywood series reference was admiration or just picking out a name that was too obscure for anyone to worry about.

Wake Up and Live - Ben Bernie, Lanfield, Walter Winchell & Jack Haley.

 

Barrie Pattison 2022