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You only see the jump cuts and the close-ups
An adventure in secondhand pattern recognition, with a chaser.
While browsing TCM, I encountered an object entitled Singapore Woman (1941), one-line summarized as "A woman who believes she's cursed, takes refuge on a rubber plantation." Pinged by the part about the curse, I poked at the synopsis and saw the set-up of the derelict with a jinx and the man impelled by love to save her and immediately wondered if Daniel Fuchs had had anything to do with the production.
As the title suggests, Fuchs' Low Company (1937) is a crime novel, but as the title also suggests, it is a novel about people who are rarely if ever at their best, not to mention their best can still be pretty crummy, and at one point a couple of them go to see a movie at the Mermaid Theater in Brooklyn. The date they are on, like most other endeavors in the novel, winds up badly, but it isn't the movie's fault; it doesn't sound exactly the height of Hollywood itself, some soft-focus glurge about a fallen actress and the architect who takes it upon himself to rescue her:
The glamorous blonde raised her saucer eyes and said in her tinkling voice, "Don't touch me. I'm not fit to be near decent people." She blew the cigarette smoke defiantly, a woman of the streets, down and out with her shabby fur piece, but yet proud. The handsome gentleman in the full-dress suit gazed at her, pity and regret in his expression, and he said: "You're coming to my home. I won't hear another word said. We're going." The waste of her loveliness appalled him, he couldn't stand it another minute, and besides he knew already that he was destined to a passionate love with her. Over her objections he brought her to his home. A mansion in the country. They drive under the porte-cochère, there are eight servants, mystified by the appearance of the bedraggled woman but respectful, and the derelict of the streets is tossed plumb into the lap of luxury, soft cushions, chaise longue, silk bedclothes. Wistful expression: gratitude but still pride.
[. . .] A thousand men and women of Neptune Beach sat in the leather-covered chairs of the Mermaid Theater, tired after the day's work, their faces glazed, their mouths opened with concern and absorption in the affairs of Joyce Darline, the glamorous blonde derelict. Joyce, it is discovered, has once been a sensational actress, the toast of New York (champagne glasses, grinning sleek old men in top hats, bubbles, bubbles as the recollection comes). But she has one fatal flaw. Everyone with whom she has been associated immediately encounters misfortunes, death, accidents, domestic troubles, financial ruin. Joyce has been shunned by producers and her former friends (shoulders, guilty looks, shoulders) who fear her sinister influence. Down, down the scale she goes (penthouse to cheap boarding room); beauty changes to lined despair (bum sitting in bare joint, legs apart, looking miserably at her whiskey glass. Gulp! Haah!). She forgot her calamities in drink. "That's my story," she says, sighing insouciantly over her cigarette, a veritable picture of loveliness. "Now you can leave me like the others." But the handsome gentleman, wearing full dress day and night, bears a stern visage. "We'll see about that," he declares. "First we have to get you back in shape again, shan't we?" "I'm warning you," she says, affection peeping through her air of indifference. In spite of all degradation, in spite of her lowness, love plays its magic over her heart. "You'll be no exception. I'm a hard-luck piece to anyone who ever knew me."
A thousand people shifted their weight in their seats, stirred to the marrow by this depiction of human souls in action. Will the handsome gent get his? He is an architect, working on skyscrapers exclusively, at this very moment designing what is to be the masterpiece of his career. Will his efforts succeed in spite of the evil spell of Joyce Darline? And the blonde, what will happen to her? It was a problem.
Eventually, as the architect teeters on the brink of ruin as the actress fails to open the play in which he has backed her with every last cent of his fortune and endangered his own career in the process, she sweeps back into his life with the realization that will enable their happy ending: "'I have always lived for myself. I have been selfish, Gary,' she says, her saucer eyes tearful but determined on restitution. 'Only by living for others can I lose my fatal flaw.'" Thus closes the picture with their glowing embrace backstage of her triumphant return to the theater and Shorty the soda jerker has not managed to cop a single successful feel of Madame Pavlovna, the corsetière with the shop next door to the soda parlor whom it has taken him three months of determined flirtation just to get to agree to the date.
Even allowing for the sarcasm with which the plot and production values of this never-named film are detailed, I assumed Fuchs had invented it. I re-read the novel last month and didn't give it a second thought. But the rescue complex over the self-convinced jinx of Singapore Woman sprang out at me as too close for complete coincidence give or take a rubber plantation and since Fuchs in 1937 had moved to Hollywood where he spent the rest of his life as a scenarist and screenwriter, I figured it was worth checking out if he had perhaps sardonically recycled one of his own ekphrases. No dice. He hadn't written the screenplay; he didn't have a story credit. But in the process of acquiring this information, I found that Singapore Woman was a remake of another picture of which I had never heard—Dangerous (1935), starring Bette Davis as a tragically alcoholic actress and Franchot Tone as the successful architect who mortages his life to rehabilitate her in spite of her conviction that she's fatal to anyone who gets near. He goes by the name of Don Bellows, but she is Joyce Heath, "the great actress who has become a drunken and friendless failure because of her intense selfishness which ruins every play she acts in or any man she likes," according to Graham Greene in his skeptical review for The Spectator. Davis won an Oscar for the part, considered even by the actress herself to have been a consolation prize for losing out on Of Human Bondage (1934). I should have known it from the saucer eyes. Shorty trying to score with the zaftig Madame Pavlovna even hopefully disparages the glamorous blonde: "Take me, I don't know why, but I can't go for these skinny dames, I don't care if it's Myrna Loy or Bette Davis." Fuchs gives his version of the film a differently sentimental ending than the one released by Warner Bros., but it is such a recognizable takeoff I'm not surprised he went to work for RKO. I feel like the time I discovered Daniel Pinkwater hadn't made up Laird Cregar.
The chaser is simply that on discovering the existence of the world premiere of Philip W. Chung's Unbroken Blossoms, without ever having seen D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919) I was right in my guess of the actor to portray Richard Barthelmess, although if the production had used non-traditional casting I would have been entertained that he was playing someone else. He has the most Barthelmess-like eyebrows.
While browsing TCM, I encountered an object entitled Singapore Woman (1941), one-line summarized as "A woman who believes she's cursed, takes refuge on a rubber plantation." Pinged by the part about the curse, I poked at the synopsis and saw the set-up of the derelict with a jinx and the man impelled by love to save her and immediately wondered if Daniel Fuchs had had anything to do with the production.
As the title suggests, Fuchs' Low Company (1937) is a crime novel, but as the title also suggests, it is a novel about people who are rarely if ever at their best, not to mention their best can still be pretty crummy, and at one point a couple of them go to see a movie at the Mermaid Theater in Brooklyn. The date they are on, like most other endeavors in the novel, winds up badly, but it isn't the movie's fault; it doesn't sound exactly the height of Hollywood itself, some soft-focus glurge about a fallen actress and the architect who takes it upon himself to rescue her:
The glamorous blonde raised her saucer eyes and said in her tinkling voice, "Don't touch me. I'm not fit to be near decent people." She blew the cigarette smoke defiantly, a woman of the streets, down and out with her shabby fur piece, but yet proud. The handsome gentleman in the full-dress suit gazed at her, pity and regret in his expression, and he said: "You're coming to my home. I won't hear another word said. We're going." The waste of her loveliness appalled him, he couldn't stand it another minute, and besides he knew already that he was destined to a passionate love with her. Over her objections he brought her to his home. A mansion in the country. They drive under the porte-cochère, there are eight servants, mystified by the appearance of the bedraggled woman but respectful, and the derelict of the streets is tossed plumb into the lap of luxury, soft cushions, chaise longue, silk bedclothes. Wistful expression: gratitude but still pride.
[. . .] A thousand men and women of Neptune Beach sat in the leather-covered chairs of the Mermaid Theater, tired after the day's work, their faces glazed, their mouths opened with concern and absorption in the affairs of Joyce Darline, the glamorous blonde derelict. Joyce, it is discovered, has once been a sensational actress, the toast of New York (champagne glasses, grinning sleek old men in top hats, bubbles, bubbles as the recollection comes). But she has one fatal flaw. Everyone with whom she has been associated immediately encounters misfortunes, death, accidents, domestic troubles, financial ruin. Joyce has been shunned by producers and her former friends (shoulders, guilty looks, shoulders) who fear her sinister influence. Down, down the scale she goes (penthouse to cheap boarding room); beauty changes to lined despair (bum sitting in bare joint, legs apart, looking miserably at her whiskey glass. Gulp! Haah!). She forgot her calamities in drink. "That's my story," she says, sighing insouciantly over her cigarette, a veritable picture of loveliness. "Now you can leave me like the others." But the handsome gentleman, wearing full dress day and night, bears a stern visage. "We'll see about that," he declares. "First we have to get you back in shape again, shan't we?" "I'm warning you," she says, affection peeping through her air of indifference. In spite of all degradation, in spite of her lowness, love plays its magic over her heart. "You'll be no exception. I'm a hard-luck piece to anyone who ever knew me."
A thousand people shifted their weight in their seats, stirred to the marrow by this depiction of human souls in action. Will the handsome gent get his? He is an architect, working on skyscrapers exclusively, at this very moment designing what is to be the masterpiece of his career. Will his efforts succeed in spite of the evil spell of Joyce Darline? And the blonde, what will happen to her? It was a problem.
Eventually, as the architect teeters on the brink of ruin as the actress fails to open the play in which he has backed her with every last cent of his fortune and endangered his own career in the process, she sweeps back into his life with the realization that will enable their happy ending: "'I have always lived for myself. I have been selfish, Gary,' she says, her saucer eyes tearful but determined on restitution. 'Only by living for others can I lose my fatal flaw.'" Thus closes the picture with their glowing embrace backstage of her triumphant return to the theater and Shorty the soda jerker has not managed to cop a single successful feel of Madame Pavlovna, the corsetière with the shop next door to the soda parlor whom it has taken him three months of determined flirtation just to get to agree to the date.
Even allowing for the sarcasm with which the plot and production values of this never-named film are detailed, I assumed Fuchs had invented it. I re-read the novel last month and didn't give it a second thought. But the rescue complex over the self-convinced jinx of Singapore Woman sprang out at me as too close for complete coincidence give or take a rubber plantation and since Fuchs in 1937 had moved to Hollywood where he spent the rest of his life as a scenarist and screenwriter, I figured it was worth checking out if he had perhaps sardonically recycled one of his own ekphrases. No dice. He hadn't written the screenplay; he didn't have a story credit. But in the process of acquiring this information, I found that Singapore Woman was a remake of another picture of which I had never heard—Dangerous (1935), starring Bette Davis as a tragically alcoholic actress and Franchot Tone as the successful architect who mortages his life to rehabilitate her in spite of her conviction that she's fatal to anyone who gets near. He goes by the name of Don Bellows, but she is Joyce Heath, "the great actress who has become a drunken and friendless failure because of her intense selfishness which ruins every play she acts in or any man she likes," according to Graham Greene in his skeptical review for The Spectator. Davis won an Oscar for the part, considered even by the actress herself to have been a consolation prize for losing out on Of Human Bondage (1934). I should have known it from the saucer eyes. Shorty trying to score with the zaftig Madame Pavlovna even hopefully disparages the glamorous blonde: "Take me, I don't know why, but I can't go for these skinny dames, I don't care if it's Myrna Loy or Bette Davis." Fuchs gives his version of the film a differently sentimental ending than the one released by Warner Bros., but it is such a recognizable takeoff I'm not surprised he went to work for RKO. I feel like the time I discovered Daniel Pinkwater hadn't made up Laird Cregar.
The chaser is simply that on discovering the existence of the world premiere of Philip W. Chung's Unbroken Blossoms, without ever having seen D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919) I was right in my guess of the actor to portray Richard Barthelmess, although if the production had used non-traditional casting I would have been entertained that he was playing someone else. He has the most Barthelmess-like eyebrows.
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Agreed! It feels like the sort of thing that should play the ART.
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I assume it's the setting of the 1941 film, but to be honest I didn't try to watch it and find out!
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I unfortunately believe it. One of the reasons I keep evangelizing about Daughter of Shanghai (1937) is that even if its tropical port is done with ferns, its leads are Asian-American, full stop, and
it's always disorienting to see Singapore as an exotic location in the past.
Especially when it's represented by California rhododendrons!
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The story is treacle-y and objectifying, and I dislike that about it, but I think what got my goat most, reading about it, was the switch from the fairy-tale rules of a curse (namely: that the curse is visited on someone for a singular careless act, and its lifting more often than not has nothing to do with making amends) to rules of humanistic determinism (the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings--"gosh, lady, if you'd just realized you were toxically selfish and done some moral improvement, all this could have been avoided"). Verdict: unlikely! Her toxic selfishness didn't twist his arm into ... oh what's the point! It's a dumb plot. Maybe it does come back around to the objectifying misogyny. "I am just a helpless bad-luck object that people keep on ruining themselves over--oh wait, no: it's my magical inherent selfishness, actually!" Gross.
But Fuchs's telling of it was hilarious. Thanks for sharing!
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You're welcome! I too am amazed there is any reality to the film-within-a-novel. Even if Fuchs is burlesquing the details, he doesn't seem to have fudged the lineaments or the conceit!
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"Put the blame on Mame, boys . . ."
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Reportedly, the Chicken Man was real too, although Pinkwater might have made up the flamenco performance.
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I keep forgetting about the Chicken Man! I remember René Daumal because of
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You may be pleased to know that, given this information, I was also able to correctly pick him by eyebrows alone.
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I am delighted!
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Their casting director should be so proud.
And it actually makes sense to think that Laird Cregar was fictional! In his biography, his niece is quoted saying that he was always making up stories about himself, and I can't blame him.
Maybe he just fooled everyone into believing he existed.
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Is it any good?
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That's still so neat that you've seen it.
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Thank you! It was unexpected and made me happy!
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And, btw, I do not have much in my internet cheer-up bucket at the mo, because I really mainly have just been watching too much Jeremy Northam lately, but then I remembered this bit in A Cock and Bull Story made me smile in passing, because of Gosford Park, so it might you too:
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Absolutely! Thank you.
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