Warner Bros Breakdowns

In many DVDs and Blu-rays today, the special features include a blooper reel. It's a relatively modern practice considering these takes ruined by a laughter, someone flubbing their lines, or a crew member in the shot cost next to nothing to keep and store nowadays thanks to video. At a time when each kept take meant extra money for developing the film, the director was careful to keep only the takes he figured he would actually use in the editing.
So when something triggered the crew's hilarity, the fun was usually limited to that very moment.


Consequently, you probably never saw your favorite stars of yesterday goofing around on the set, messing up or tripping on the carpet.
Would you like to, though?
Okay, then I'll let you in on a little secret.

Warner Brothers studio and the Warner Club held an annual dinner dance each year in the thirties and forties where they gathered all their stars, presented their new productions and had fun. Some of the fun was provided by a short film, usually called "Breakdowns" or "Blow-Ups" made especially for the occasion.
These little films were basically a montage of all bloopers of the year on various Warner Brothers productions.
Since they were not supposed to be shown outside of the studio, these rare little films were not censored and although the common slur at the time seemed to be "nuts!", you can hear many a star shout "shit" or "f.....".
In that respect I must say Miss Bette Davis holds up to her reputation.
 


Have you ever sen a former president of the USA having trouble putting on his pants?
I love seeing Patricia Neal loose it in the middle of a torrid love scene from The Fountainhead because Gary Cooper forgot his line. I love seeing David Niven struggling through his scene with a crying baby in his hands. I love seeing Joan Crawford's impassive face when she passes by a stage hand who candidly goes "oh oh" when he realizes he is right in the middle of the shot.


When you don't let your co-star finish his line, this conversation happens:
"Oh I'm fine! Have you been getting any lately?"
"Overtime, you mean?"
Bette Davis apparently had trouble with costuming on Jezebel: she gets caught in someone else's button and almost looses her wig when she sits down.

I don't want to spoil this for you, but these films are a unique opportunity to see alternate footage of Robin Hood, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in To Have And Have Not, Edward G. Robinson, James Stewart, James Cagney, Olivia De Havilland, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, Carole Lombard... The list goes on....
Now where can you see these films? Apparently, some of them are included on a DVD called Hollywood Bloopers. But there are also included in the special features section of some Warner DVDs and Blu-rays like The Adventures of Robin Hood, which contains "Breakdowns of 1938".
Here is "Blow-Ups of 1947". If you want to get an idea.

That's all for today folks!

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The Egyptian

This is a great month for this film. It is surprising that The Egyptian, being the epic blockbuster that it is by 20th Century Fox, was not released on DVD or Blu-ray sooner. Last week saw the release of a DVD, Blu-ray and of a complete soundtrack, which was presumed partially lost until very recently. These are an interesting releases considering all of them are limited in number and time.






Twilight Time makes The Egyptian their first HD release. According to Nick Redman's interview, the HD master was available at Fox and they must have had plans to release it themselves but somehow that plan never materialized. Hence the price is about 40 dollars but the quality of the film was supervised by Fox and should be good.

The good news is the best aspect of the film gets a royal treatment: the score is offered on an isolated track.
This glorious score has many fans and has been released many times but this is probably the best one yet. Concurrently, Varese Sarabande releases a two-CD album of the full score with this recap of the soundtrack's history:
"In 1990, Varèse Sarabande released a CD of the only score album that had ever represented this historic collaboration, but this was a studio recording done concurrently with the film's theatrical release. In 1998, conductor William T. Stromberg recorded a 71:00 album of music from The Egyptian with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. In 2001, Film Score Monthly released a 72:00 CD of the music that had survived from the original film sessions. Now, finally, and for the very first time, we are thrilled to present the complete score from The Egyptian, adding more than 30:00 of previously-believed-lost music plus a selection of never -before-heard alternate cue variations. Taking advantage of both new mixing technologies and also a newly discovered source for the original music masters"

Director Michael Curtiz on the set

This score is a unique example of collaboration between two master composers of Hollywood: Fox music department head Alfred Newman (All About Eve, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Robe, etc.) and independent genius Bernard Herrmann (Vertigo, Psycho, Citizen Kane, etc.), Alfred Hitchcock's favorite composer.

Another interesting aspect of the film is the cast. First, beautiful Gene Tierney, intelligent Peter Ustinov and last but not least, French star Bella Darvi who plays the part of evil beauty Nefer (a name that deceptively means "Beautiful in the inside and the outside"). Her life and career is a curiosity in itself. A "lost" star if there ever was one. She was Darryl Zanuck's mistress (her name is a portmanteau for DARryl and his wife VIrginia). Addicted to gambling, she finally committed suicide when she was left penniless).




At last The Egyptian came out of the Valley of the Kings. Praise Osiris!

That's all for today folks!

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The Bastille in Provence

Do you know what the French celebrate on July 14?
Bravo to all those of you who replied the "fête de la fédération" of 1790. Though if you thought of the storming of the Bastille a year earlier, you'd be correct anyway: this feast was in itself a commemoration.
Two years ago TF1 vidéo released a French DVD of a 1989 film depicting these events. Unfortunately, an American release is still to come even though the cast was international.

The French Revolution was a massive co-production which, for the first time, covered a large part of the History of the Revolution in only one film (a two-parter divided in 4 episodes when shown on TV). Hollywood actors are among the stars: Sam Neill (Jurassic Park) as Lafayette, and Jane Seymour (Dr. Quinn, Live and Let Die) as Marie Antoinette, portrayed on screen by Norma Shearer or more recently by Kirsten Dunst.

Today, I'm not so much discussing a lost film (although it IS still unreleased on home video), but rather lost monuments on film, and how to achieve that.
In this movie, many monuments of Paris are seen, but you could hardly find them if you tried. The palace of the Tuileries, burnt and destroyed in the late 19th century, was were the royal family took refuge after they left Versailles; the prison of the Temple where they were held, was destroyed by Napoleon to avoid a pilgrimage of royalists. The town hall which shares its emplacement with the current building was replaced in 1874 by a new one with a different style. Last but not least is the famous Bastille, a Royal prison whose neighborhood has kept its name.

So how is that possible? 3D animation? In 1989, don't make me laugh. To each problem a solution, to each monument its representation. Thus if the facade of the Place of the Tuileries resembles that of the castle of Fontainebleau, that's because it IS Fontainebleau.

The menacing tower of the Temple, is sometimes shown as what very much looks like a painting on glass, and other times as the dungeon of Vincennes which is still there. The booklet of the French DVD tells us that the top of the tower was built as a model, like the town hall .

But one of the best recreation is the Bastille. Haven't you wondered what the church behind the governor was doing there? With its stone rooftop so typical of southern France in a place where no ancient print keeps any record of a church? It is called Sainte-Marthe of Tarascon, a charming town in Provence, in which you can find the castle of King René.

The Bastille

This castle was ideal to stand for the Bastille: other than the fact that it resembles it, the castle is extraordinarily well preserved, located between a big lot where the sets of Parisian houses could be build and the Rhone river that could stand for the Seine. Should you be lucky enough one day to visit it, I suggest you see the Beaucaire castle facing it on the other side of the river.

For the record, if the resemblance between Marie Antoinette and her children seemed striking, it's because Jane Seymour had her own kids play the parts of Marie Thérèse Charlotte and Louis Charles of France (Louis XVII).

To conclude, I invite you to buy Georges Delerue's awesome soundtrack which themes for the Royal Family and Jessye Norman's Liberty song represent the highest point.




That's all for today folks!

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The Toy Wife

The Toy Wife is not a porn movie from the seventies. It's a French-Italian coproduction originally called "Frou-Frou". Frou-Frou is a song composed by Henri Château in 1889. It was sung by Fréhel dans La Grande Illusion, and by Berthe Sylva among many others.






Naturally, such a film had to have the title song sung by main actress Dany Robin (who later worked with Alfred Hitchcock on Topaz). She does sing a few notes in a dialog-heavy scene. But later, when she is on the stage, her voice gets considerably better in quality. Has she worked hard for that? Of course not. She is simply dubbed by a wonderful singer called Lucie Dolène.

Lucie Dolène

You may not know her, but she was the French voice of Snow White in the Disney movie from 1962 to 2001, after-which a trial regarding royalties ended her relationship with the company and the voice was redubbed. Lucie has a solid fanbase and everyone over ten years old in France remembers her singing "Un jour mon Prince viendra" ("Some Day my Prince will come"). In a recent interview, she tells how she naively refused a 5 year contract at MGM offered by Joe Pasternak because she had already signed a stage operetta contract with Luis Mariano, a famous French star whose popularity never reached the USA.

Back to Frou-Frou now. After that song, Dany Robin's character sings two more songs composed especially for the film by Louiguy, a.k.a. Louis Guglielmi, who wrote Edith Piaf's "La Vie En Rose". Naturally, Lucie Dolène dubs again.

If the versions recorded for the film are spoiled by dialogs and sound effects, there is a single from 1955 with a discreet mention of the film on the cover (God forbid anyone should ruin Dany Robin's secret). On it, Lucie sings the songs with a new orchestration.
If prefer those of the film, but the record has a definite advantage: the song "Amoureuse" ("In Love") is complete. There it is:

If the second song "Laï Laï Laï Nicholas" is of any interest to you, let me know by leaving a message. If you wish, the DVD of the film is available in France.


That's all for today folks!

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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

It's summer! Take a vacation on a boat with Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe for the musical cruise of your life. We're heading to France and their dubbing of musicals.

What's a musical? C'mon now! Even if the trend of movies where people break into song when they're in love or when they're happy or sad tend to come and go, some still meet with success nowadays like High School musical.

In France, American musicals are still dubbed in French but, probably because they speak better and better English, or maybe because the song sound better that way, they only dub the dialogs and keep the original recording for the songs. That wasn't always the case. Translators in the fifties often became lyricists and had a hard time combining lip synchronism, the musicality of the rimes and the meaning of the sentence.

 They would be frustrated to hear that their hard work was thrown away in many cases like in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In fact, when released in France, Marilyn paraded in her pink dress while singing in French. Imagine her Parisian accent. Hard to believe? Yet in this film, Lorelei Lee is in France and is supposed to sing in a Parisian cabaret. She even starts her song by an operatic "non, non, non".

As a matter of fact, the first cabaret sequence in France was supposed to be a "Two Little Girls From Little Rock" reprise sung in French by the two stars. The scene was cut and if neither picture nor sound has turned up since, you can still a glimpse of it in the trailer.

Quite surprisingly for such an important musical, there is no legitimate soundtrack, only songs spread upon various collections of Marilyn recordings. Yet masters are still extant in the Fox vault since The Diamond Collection CD offered us clean recordings of songs like "Anyone Here For Love". Interesting anecdote: this song was supposed to end with  Jane Russell being cheered by the gymnasts, but during shooting, one of them accidentaly pushed her in the swimming pool and the ending was altered musically and visually with a wet Jane Russell so that the dive be kept in the final cut. It is the original version you can hear on the CD and, here again, see in the trailer.

French singer Claire Leclerc recorded her dubbing of Marilyn on November 16 and 17, 1953. Actress Mony Dalmès dubbed her speaking voice. But the voice of the American star is now popular throughout the world, heard many times on CD, so lately when the movie is aired on French TV in a dubbed version, the songs are kept in English, sometimes with subtitles. However these French songs are not lost, you can find them all on DVD. I'm giving you here an extract of the most famous one. In it, Diamond is no longer Marilyn's best friend, it just "seduces her better".

That's all for today folks!

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