The Guest Writer #3: Barry Putterman returns - One Has My Name

Some years ago I invited guest writers to the blog, and published two pieces, one by Sofia Åkerberg and one by Barry Putterman. Now Barry is back with a new piece, about music, music videos, cartoons, and childhood memories, mixing it all together. Barry, who lives in New York, has previously written the book On Television and Comedy: Essays on Style, Theme, Performer, and Writer (1995), essays about Peter Bogdanovich and George Roy Hill to be found in American Directors (1983, edited by the late Jean-Pierre Coursodon), and earlier this year he published Pack Up Your Troubles: Some American Films from 1932, a massive three-volume project about Hollywood cinema in the year of 1932. His piece for me is less massive, and more autobiographical, so let's get on with it. I have decided to leave it as he wrote it so you will get the full Putterman experience, not conformed to my own style guide, such as it is.

One Has My Name – Scopitone

Recently, after finally getting a respectable computer, I decided to take the plunge and begin exploring the haphazard encyclopedia of movies and music known as YouTube. And the experience soon turned into a stream of consciousness exercise where one stray thought search led to the computer suggesting similar variations that in turn triggered related thoughts that ultimately expanded into the kind of endless parade of free associational connections that illustrates the way that the sights and sounds of movies and music become poetically attached in the psyche to two other m words, memory and mystery. There is no telling where the links in these chains will lead you since, as Bernstein tells Thompson in CITIZEN KANE just before recounting the image of a mystery woman he saw for one second on a ferry boat, a fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he wound, and they tend to reach the surface of your mind through unpredictable stimuli.

As a child I was devoted to the “Rocky and Bullwinkle” television cartoon series and faithfully watched the episodes in rerun for as long as they remained on the air to the result that even now I can recite long passages of dialogue from the stories using the same inflections that were used by the voice actors. Through the years, experience has given me a deeper understanding of the cultural allusions embedded in the jokes and the storylines but there were always a few free-floating tidbits that while continuing to be funny remained inexplicable. For instance, there was the singing competition for the affections of the 6-foot Metal Munching Moon Mice between Bullwinkle and Boris Badenov that had Boris singing excruciatingly awful parodies of rock and roll while Bullwinkle answered with what sounded like ridiculously antiquated lyrics from actual songs. He only sang two-line snatches of the lyrics, but they were strange and they stuck in my memory even though I had no context in which to understand them on a broader level. But on YouTube it only took a short stroll through connecting sites to reveal original 1915 recordings of “Auntie Skinner’s Chicken Dinner” and “There Must Be Little Cupids in the Briny.” Still, while the mystery within the memory is inevitable when connected to history that precedes your birth, it can also be retained from events you experienced in real time.

In 1965 a record called “One Has My Name (the Other Has My Heart)” by Barry Young hit the Top 40 radio station I listened to. Young was a completely unknown singer who had one distinguishing characteristic, he sounded almost exactly like Dean Martin. The song was a country and western tune that had been a big hit for Jimmy Wakely in 1948 and told a typical C&W tale of a person tragically trapped in an emotional cul-de-sac, this time a man who is married to one woman but in love with another. The Wakely record had a straightforward vocal set to the traditional fiddle and steel guitar backing of its genre. But Dot Records, a company that specialized in mainstream cover versions, accompanied Young’s vocal with a strings and chorus backing in an arrangement that imitated Martin’s then current run of hits resulting in a record that sounded as if it was Dino’s most recent release.

The ploy worked. “One Has My Name” became a big hit. But the suspicion that this was a Dean Martin record in disguise never quite left the popular imagination. There were pictures of Barry Young on record covers so the theory that this was a hoax along the lines of The Four Seasons releasing a version of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” as The Wonder Who was discarded. But Young never appeared on any of the major popular music television shows to perform and, sadly, he died of a brain abscess in December of 1966 and so never established an identity beyond somebody whose voice sounded like Dean Martin’s.

The mystery of Barry Young remained with me until I stumbled over a YouTube site called Vintage Video Clips that advertised a performance by Young of the song, so I quickly clicked on it in eager anticipation. But I was entirely unprepared for what I was about to see.

As the opening strains of the record fill the soundtrack, we immediately understand that this isn’t going to be a visual document of a live performance but rather a narrative film dramatization as we see what amounts to an establishing shot of the song’s story. In the foreground Young is seated on a park bench between two women. The woman to his right is chicly dressed, exudes the sophisticated hauteur of a fashion model, and has a small dog on her lap. The woman to his right is more primly attired, is scrunching up her face in concentration on her knitting and is indicated as Young’s wife by a literal ball and chain to which they are both attached at the ankle. Indeed, the elaborated insistence on this metaphor is sledgehammered home by the additional layer of irony of having the words “Ball and Chain” printed on the ball.

The comic overdetermination of the plot in the foreground is then set against a painted backdrop in the rear and the clashing spaces of foreground clutter and background artifice shot with such flat compression that it all but shouts to the viewer that there is nothing in the off-screen space besides empty sound stage.

As Young begins lip-synching to the record he faces directly into the camera performing for the viewing audience, pausing only once to flirtatiously glance at the other woman during the first two lines of the lyrics. Then, in a close shot of him, Young’s face takes on a look of childish disgust as he turns toward his wife while telling us that she has brown eyes, which leads to two intense closeups almost worthy of Sergio Leone as the wife’s eyes are contrasted with the blue eyes of the other woman. A return to the master shot has Young and the wife both glancing down at the ball and chain as he sings that he is tied to her which is followed by a repetition of his flirtatious glance with accompanying tie straightening gesture as he sings that he is true to the other woman.

Without transition, the scene shift’s to Young’s home. He is still seated and singing directly into the camera but is now at his kitchen table and is dressed in a casual sweater rather than a jacket and tie. The wife is standing, indeed dancing behind him in a bright housecoat and with a few curlers attached to her short hair in a half-hearted attempt to denote drabness as she angrily slams a coffee cup, a coffee pot and a box of Wheaties down on the table and Young winces as they land although the only sound that the audience hears continues to be that of the record that he is lip-synching for us. As the wife sits down at the table with an expression of mopey resignation, Young finally rises and the camera follows him as he moves from his seat at the center of the table to the left-hand corner of the kitchen setting. He is finishing up the first verse of the song by reiterating his dilemma in reverse order, now saying that one has his heart while the other has his name. And as his voice mentions the other woman, we suddenly see her dancing around in an unestablished location only to have it succeeded by a return to the wife in the kitchen with Young no longer present as she whirls about, setting the table for a different meal. These two shots at first seem only to correspond to the mentioning of the women in the lyrics but it then turns out that they are flash forwards into the next sequence.

As the chorus takes up the opening lines of the second, and almost identical verse, we see that the other woman had been dancing in her plush apartment, a stage setting once again accompanied by a painted backdrop, this time of a city at night. Young is also in the apartment, seated on the couch next to the small dog, now in formal attire but still facing forward toward the camera waiting for the chorus to end the first two lines of lyrics where he will pick up the singing of the story. The wife is not in the apartment but remains in the shot as the apartment setting takes up only about two thirds of the frame where it is cut off by a wall on the other side of which is the wife in the kitchen, thus artificially creating the illusion of a split screen.

 

The wife is wearing a different dress and as she sets the table, checks her non-existent wristwatch and mimes distress regarding the non-appearance of her husband as Young resumes singing while stealing glances at his alluring companion as she abets her mating dance by spraying the couch with perfume from an atomizer while in the kitchen the wife is spraying the table with air freshener. The apartment then takes up the entire screen in a tighter shot as the woman approaches Young, picks up and hands him the dog, suggestively parts the long slit in her dress exposing her undergarment and then slinks down next to him where the dog had been, revealing her bare leg which the camera slowly pans in response to Young’s gaze.

But as quickly as that movement finishes, the scene returns to the kitchen and Young is back sitting at the table while still singing to us, this time wearing a different colored sweater (all three characters seem to alternate bright reds and blues in their apparel). The wife is now standing in front of the table ironing a shirt at an ironing board while wearing an embroidered dress that accents her perky rather than sensual personality. Alarmed at the results of her ironing, she dances over to Young who again rises as she places the shirt against his chest and looks to the audience with an expression of comic chagrin.

Finally, as he reaches the final two lines of the lyrics, the only revision from the first verse, where he states that if he could do it over again he would also be married to the woman he loves, Young is now seen on the balcony of the other woman’s apartment. They are facing each other and he is still in the same formal attire but she is in a less suggestive dress as they return inside to a candlelit dinner, blowing out the candles to simulate a fade to black as the music on the soundtrack ends.

While retrieving my jaw from underneath the desk I ventured to reassemble my wits and make sense of what I had just witnessed. Watching a narrative version of a popular song made in the mid-1960s was astonishing enough, but a film that illustrated emotional conditions with such strenuously literalized metaphors was practically unheard of outside of animated cartoons. But ultimately, the most radical departure was that within a culture that insists on advertising aspirational ambitions as visionary dreams and an aesthetic that comfortingly telegraphs representations of dreams via distorted focus, oblique camera angles and slow motion, ONE HAS MY NAME bluntly documents with slam-bang compression the continuously disorienting shifts in time and space and the disquieting sense of simultaneously existing inside and outside of narrative events that characterize an actual dream state. (You can watch it here.)

So now the mystery changed from the nature of the performer to the conditions of the performance. Who made this film, under what circumstances and for what audience? Vintage Video Clips provided no context but there was evidence of a title card at the front of the film that, despite an attempt at erasure, still flashed for a fraction of a second. And a search for an alternative posting of the film on YouTube provided the one-word answer, Scopitone.

Scopitone, it turns out, was the 1960s iteration of the 1940s Soundies. That is, visual presentations of popular recordings made to be seen on video jukeboxes. There were individual gems among the Soundies but they generally suffered from not only World War II material shortages but also a paucity of filmic heritage on which to build. Beyond localized stage performance, musical acts were primarily known to the general public through the exclusively aural mediums of recordings and radio, and while the then most popular dance bands and singers were shoehorned into both short films and features, they were primarily looked upon by the film industry as annoying intrusions into the narrative structure and presented without much attention to discovering the visual dynamics suggested within the music.

By the early 1960s however, Scopitone had the benefit of more than a decade of interior staging of musical acts for television cameras, the spatial expansion of narrative film location shooting for musical numbers first popularized by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s ON THE TOWN and the more recent experimentations in discontinuous editing techniques.

The 1960s version of the jukeboxes were invented in France and the entertainment industry there seems to have gotten behind the project with full cultural force. As listed in Bob Orlowsky’s Scopitone Archive, well over four hundred French films were made for the jukeboxes with the participation of many of the leading figures in the country’s popular music industry. And, based on the tiny fraction of those films that I have been able to see, they appear to have taken full advantage of the stylistic advances, ranging from the embryonic use of dynamic pools of space and light that would soon become the signature look of the American rock and roll TV show SHINDIG in Sylvie Vartan’s version of Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say?” to Francoise Hardy’s singing of a song whose title translates into English as “All the Boys and Girls” set amid outdoor amusement park rides.

When the machines came to the U.S. the commitment seemed to become more ambivalent. Fewer than two hundred films were made and the producers seemed to be trying to straddle the generation gap whereby some of them featuring firmly established pre-rock television and nightclub singers like Vic Damone and Jane Morgan while others starred artists who had multiple Top 40 hits but never quite reached the front rank of pop music stardom such as Dick & Dee Dee and Bobby Vee. The indecision regarding the target audience may have had something to do with the venues since most of the jukeboxes were placed in bars and nightclubs which led to what appears to be a very conscious decision that a visual strategy of aggressive audacity was the only means of holding a viewer’s attention in such an environment.

According to Orlowsky, the creative force behind many of the American films was Harold Belfer, a choreographer with a string of undistinguished credits at Universal-International in the 1950s but for whom the particular limitations and opportunities of the Scopitone films seemed to have stimulated heretofore unexplored contours within his id. Most often this led to a vaguely unsettling sense of witnessing a well-oiled machine that has slipped a few gears, sort of like viewing the results of Russ Meyer’s day as substitute director on a beach party movie. But when the outlandish imagery was more directly tethered to the song lyric’s narrative, the wackiness could spin off in more dangerous directions.

The borderline berserk rendering of Jody Miller’s “Queen of the House” comes immediately to mind in that regard but the closest approximation to the dream state condition of “One Has My Name” that I’ve seen is the film of singer/songwriter Gale Garnett’s “Where Do You Go to Go Away?” The imagery here is more overtly abstract to harmonize with the more internalized mindset of the protagonist and Garnett, who was also an experienced actress, adds facial expressions and body gestures to her performance that projects a sense of consciously creating her dream in contrast to the more passive stasis that seems to carry Young through his. But the film ends on the same kind of literalized metaphor that opens “One Has My Name” adding the extra layer of ironic detachment that serves as mitigating deflection from the somber mood embedded in both lyrics.

The most comprehensive introduction to Scopitone on the web is “Scopitone A Go Go,” a seventy-five-minute compilation of French and American films that includes all the artists and titles mentioned above. Those still standing can then move on to the other clusters and individual examples available on the internet with the Scopitone Archive serving as your search engine.

One of the bonus features of watching Scopitones on YouTube is that many of the films offer viewer comments underneath the screening box. You get the expected run of gushy fan mail and self-satisfied stabs at snark but also the slightly befuddled responses of people who are objectively trying to reconcile their experience with their expectations, such as Stephen Smith who wrote in reaction to the Nino Tempo & April Stevens version of “Land of 1,000 Dances,” “kind of weird at different levels.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Guest Writer #2: Sofia Åkerberg on The Petrified Forest and Revolutionary Road

The blog has a new feature, the occasional guest writer, somebody who is given complete freedom to write about whatever he or she wants, and in whatever way they choose, with my job only to proofread it (and perhaps add an image, or a fact or a figure for clarity). The previous guest was Barry Putterman. This time it is Sofia Åkerberg.

Sofia, who lives in Arboga, Sweden, writes one of Sweden's best film blogs, Rörliga bilder och tryckta ord, which covers not only film but also literature, with a particular emphasis on fantasy and science fiction writing. The blog is in Swedish only but here she of course writes in English.

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The Petrifying Suburbia by Sofia Åkerberg

What does Bette Davis and Kate Winslet have in common, apart from the fact that they were both born on a Sunday, both on the fifth (April and October) and are both two degrees removed from Kevin Bacon (via Mary Steenburgen and Eli Wallach, respectively)?

Quite a lot as it turns out. To be specific, these two fine actresses have both played the character Gabrielle Maple in The Petrified Forest. The American playwright Robert E. Sherwood wrote this piece in 1935 and only a year later it was made into a movie, directed by Archie Mayo. Here, Davis was flanked by not only Leslie Howard but also a swarthy and intense actor in the beginning of his career by the name of Humphrey Bogart (both of Howard and Bogart were repeating their performances from the stage).

At the beginning of Revolutionary Road, both the book from 1961 by Richard Yates and the movie from 2008 by Sam Mendes, Kate Winslet's April Wheeler is also playing Gabrielle in a production of The Petrified Forest staged by the community theatre group the Laurel Players. But the connections between The Petrified Forest and Revolutionary Road run deeper than a mere enactment of the same play.

Gabrielle Maple is the daughter of a dirt poor owner of a service station in the middle of nowhere, i.e. the Arizona desert. Despite the uplifting sign announcing “Last Chance!” this place offers absolutely no chances for Gabrielle. While the college football player and hired hand Boze tries to pick her up (to no avail), Gabrielle reads François Villon and dreams about a real life, an exciting life, in France (where her war-bride mother is residing).

Enter hitchhiker Alan Squires, a penniless and failed writer whose only goal at the moment seems to be to traverse the North American continent. It turns out that he and Gabrielle have a lot in common, or at least that Gabrielle wants them to have a lot in common. He talks about ambitions, life and death in a way that the young woman has never heard before. His eloquent self-hatred, cultural refinement (nice going with that T.S. Eliot quote, Alan) and lugubrious disposition represents an irresistible appeal to her.

 When Revolutionary Road premiered there was a lot of talk about how Frank and April Wheeler were the sad continuation of the characters played by Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. What if, instead of one of them drowning in icy waters, Rose DeWitt Bukater and Jack Dawson had had the opportunity to survive together in suburban Connecticut? I would like to think that a more apt question that Revolutionary Road tries to answer is: what if Alan and Gabrielle had managed to create a life together?

After an enchanting romance in New York, Frank and April Wheeler does everything by the book when it turns out that a baby is on the way. They buy that adorable house in western Connecticut which naturally is close enough to the big Apple so that Frank can commute each day to the same company that employed his father.

Frank and April might do everything by the book but the important thing to them is that they do not live by the book. They see suburbia for the sham that it is, its hopeless emptiness, and Frank acquired his boring job at Knox Business Machines as a joke more than anything else. In order to maintain his identity he does not want to have a job that might be even remotely interesting while he figures out what he really wants to do with his life.

But four years on the same page and the joke is wearing pretty thin. Frank still tries to maintain that he and April are different, more aware, better, that their neighbours while April has realised that they are exactly like them. And unlike her husband, she decides to take action.

Like Alan and Gabrielle, Frank manages to woo April with self-deprecating wit and beautiful words, making her think that he is “the most interesting person I've ever met”. But unlike Gabrielle, April gets an opportunity to realise that there is nothing behind the sarcastic façade. Alan and Frank are two men lost in a rational world, without a definite purpose apart from a vague desire to do something that will make their mark.

Since Yates (and, thereby, Mendes) gives Frank more time to unveil his character than Sherwood gives Alan, we are able to realise that the man is somewhat of a smug jerk. As soon as he is opposed, be it by his wife, a temporary guest or the roommate of his mistress, he lashes out. The fights between him and April are truly vitriolic and we even understand that he is no stranger to throw a punch or two. April tries to secure Frank’s humanity by offering him an opportunity to find out what he wants to do with his life, but in reality, her determination emasculates him. He is no more fit to be a kept man by a capable woman than was Alan (who was supported by his publisher's wife for a while).

The Petrified Forest starts with a discussion on the miserable state of the republic (the great depression and dust bowl doing their bit) while a sign behind the bar claims that “Tipping is un-American”. However, this is not the kind of revolution that goes on inside the house at Revolutionary Road. A revolution is in its essence a fundamental change of power and during the time we get to follow Frank and April the power surges from Frank to April, back to Frank, only to pass over to his wife yet again. But regardless where the power lies, Frank is never truly satisfied.

When April has control he tries to take it back. But as soon as he has got his trophy he does not know what to do with it. The same goes for his wooing of April – winning her was a great achievement but he does not know how to handle the prize once he got it. In this way, Frank's mistress Maureen becomes a new Gabrielle who is as easily impressed as April was the first time they met. She makes him feel like a man again, enabling him to conjure up images of lions and eagles.

Despite how the story turns out, The Petrified Forest ends on a more positive note. Perhaps some would call it delusional. But we are still left with the impression that Alan does more good for Gabrielle when dead than alive, although she might not see it right there and then. She is alive and still able to pursue her dreams which is more than can be said for either April or Frank when we take leave of them. Maybe the complacent 1950s in reality was more demoralising than the great depression.

The Guest Writer #1: Barry Putterman on Claude Binyon

I have decided to add a new feature to the blog, the occasional guest writer, somebody who is given complete freedom to write about whatever he or she wants, and in whatever way they choose, with my job only to proofread it (and perhaps add an image, or a fact or a figure for clarity). Today sees the inauguration of this new feature.

Barry Putterman, who lives in New York, is well-known among cinephiles, not least for his regular comments at Dave Kehr's now suspended site Reports from the lost continent of cinephilia. Barry has also written books, such as On Television and Comedy: Essays on Style, Theme, Performer, and Writer (McFarland & Company 1995), and he has written essays about Peter Bogdanovich and George Roy Hill (to be found in American Directors (McGraw-Hill 1983), edited by Jean-Pierre Coursodon). There are few who know as much about American cinema, as well as American society/history, as Barry, and it is a treat to have him as my first guest writer.

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Claude Binyon, by Barry Putterman

Public acclaim is an illusion based on popular misconception which distorts ambition and ruins romantic relationships. The first part of that statement is most certainly illustrated by the critical reputation of screenwriter/director Claude Binyon. As reported in Patrick McGilligan’s book “Backstory,” when Leo Rosten polled the Hollywood community regarding the most admired screenwriters in 1938, Binyon ranked in the top ten along with such still highly visible names as Robert Riskin, Ben Hecht and Nunnally Johnson. Today, hardly a cinephile lives that has even the slightest familiarity with the man and his work. And yet his extremely vital and highly entertaining films which explore the entirety of that first statement remain ready for rediscovery and exploration.

Claude Binyon was born in Chicago in 1905 and joined the long tradition of that city’s aspiring writers by going to work for one of its newspapers; The Examiner. However, his career as a reporter proved to be short and disastrous due to his most prominently observed personal characteristics; an all but debilitating social shyness and vocal hesitancy.

His writing talent was recognized by the Examiner however, and he was recommended to the Chicago office of the show business trade paper “Variety.” Again, it was found necessary to keep him assigned to work within the office, where he rose through the ranks of the publication and gained credit for, among other things, writing the paper’s famous headline regarding the stock market crash; “Wall Street Lays An Egg.”

By 1932, his time spent moonlighting on his own fictional writing led to a request to leave the paper and ultimately to the writing staff at Paramount Pictures, where he became the eighteenth writer assigned to work on the omnibus IF I HAD A MILLION. In 1933 Binyon was assigned to work with Frank Butler on the script for COLLEGE HUMOR, starring Bing Crosby and Jack Oakie and directed by the recently arrived from RKO Wesley Ruggles. He struck up what proved to be a lifelong friendship through this professional connection with Oakie, who publicly commented on how much he admired the way that Binyon’s dialogue fit his speech pattern.

Ruggles must have been impressed as well, since Binyon was back the following year working with Howard Greene on his film version of the Ben Hecht/Gene Fowler play “The Great Magoo” starring Oakie, retitled SHOOT THE WORKS. And then, it was Ruggles again directing Binyon’s first solo screenplay THE GILDED LILY released in early 1935.

This film proved to be a major hit for Paramount, solidifying star Claudette Colbert’s dominance in romantic comedy and catapulting co-star Fred MacMurray from obscure contract player to leading man, as well as to becoming another lifelong friend of Binyon’s. But more to the point, it began an all but unprecedented series of eleven consecutive films teaming Binyon, as solo screenwriter, and director Ruggles. ACCENT ON YOUTH, THE BRIDE COMES HOME, VALIANT IS THE WORD FOR CARRIE, I MET HIM IN PARIS, TRUE CONFESSION, SING YOU SINNERS and INVITATION TO HAPPINESS follow at Paramount. Then, the team moved together to Columbia for TOO MANY HUSBANDS, ARIZONA and YOU BELONG TO ME.

If you discount the studio and/or director dominated projects; adaptions of a Samson Raphaelson play (ACCENT ON YOUTH) and a popular Fanny Hurst styled novel (VALIANT IS THE WORD FOR CARRIE) plus a large scale western (ARIZONA), and add on the two films, gracefully directed by Mitchell Leisen, he wrote after the Ruggles partnership ended back at Paramount (TAKE A LETTER DARLING and NO TIME FOR LOVE), what you have is the core of Binyon’s work. But it all starts with THE GILDED LILY.

As sometimes happens artistically, all of the themes and characters which Binyon would explore in his career are all laid out in this first film. In fact, it could almost be said that they are all laid out in the first sequence. Newspaperman Pete Dawes (Fred MacMurray) and office secretary Marilyn David (Claudette Colbert) are having their weekly Thursday meeting on a park bench across the street from the midtown Manhattan Public Library to watch the world go by, which Pete proclaims to be “big stuff.” “Oh yes, Marilyn adds, “big stuff.”

And Pete has this down to a science, to the point of knowing that the popcorn they are munching is the proper food for the occasion. He demonstrates that he can put his hand in the bag, grab some popcorn and stick it in his craw without taking his eyes off the street. Whereas with peanuts, you have to look down to crack open the shells, remove the nuts and place them in your mouth, thus missing half of the action. “Sure,” Marilyn concurs, “peanut eaters don’t know how to live.” And thus Pete is established as something of a know-it-all philosopher and Marilyn as his affectionately bemused companion.

From out of nowhere Pete then asks her; “Do you love me?” and Marilyn thoughtfully concludes “No.” Pete is satisfied; “That’s the way to talk. No jealousies, no commitments….why don’t you love me?” Marilyn responds that her idea of romance is finding a man for whom you feel such commitment that you can ignore all of his flaws and happily sacrifice whatever it takes to live happily with him.

Pete tells her that she wants to be Lizzie Glutz; “the girl who runs her own little world to suit herself because she is too unimportant for the world to run her.” But the catch is that the smarter you are, the more you realize that that is the way to live, but Lizzie Glutz becomes Lizzie Glutz only because she’s too dumb to be anything else; which Marilyn isn’t.

While Marilyn retorts “you newspapermen know everything,” they both get up to leave; Marilyn to the subway and Pete to his job of interviewing celebrities on the incoming and outgoing ships at the docks, which becomes their first steps on their long journey back to the bench.

At the subway, Marilyn is bullied by an aggressive subway guard and a gallant young man with a British accent comes to her defense. Push comes to shove and the two of them flee the ensuing melee to embark on a romantic adventure. The man is charming, but seemingly aimless; as he has no job and no stated ambition beyond courting Marilyn. Aptly, his name is Gray (Ray Milland).

They spend a day at Coney Island. And, in a scene somewhat reminiscent of the sound sequence in LONESOME, agree on a mutual desire for few social contacts beyond a comfortable and deeply affectionate marriage. But they once again literally stumble across the family of that self-same subway guide and must once again flee.

Marilyn believes that she has found her romantic ideal. But Gray is in reality a British nobleman vacationing incognito in New York who has now trapped himself between his public and private personas. He sincerely wants to marry Marilyn, but his celebrated position obliges him to return to England and both inform his family and break off his engagement lest scandal break out. And so he privately tells Marilyn a lie (that he must depart for a while to investigate a job possibility) which is actually the truth (that he intends to return and marry her). But when Pete arrives to cover his departure at the docks, he must tell the truth (that he is returning to England and his fiancée) which is a lie (omitting his intention to return for Marilyn). Reading this in the newspapers, Marilyn is heartbroken. But Pete plots revenge. He simply turns Gray’s ambiguity around and begins writing stories about The “No” Girl, the plucky American office girl who spurned royal romance and the Cinderella opportunity.

So Marilyn is now also two people, the private Lizzie Glutz, and the publicly acclaimed ‘No’ Girl, who in Pete’s words, has become: “one of those peculiar people made strangely famous through ordinary newsprint.” In other words: a celebrity. And, if that was not enough, while Marilyn is drowning her sorrows, Pete promotes her as a café entertainer to cash in on her notoriety.

Marilyn is aghast. “One schooner of highballs and I wake up with my name on a billboard. Can’t we pretend we’re sane and call the whole thing off?” But when she is shoved on stage and truthfully confesses that she cannot sing or dance and is even too nervous to remember the lyrics to her opening song, the sophisticated overflow audience accepts this as artful artifice designed to cheerfully welcome them to the inside of celebrity. And when Marilyn’s dancing literally stumbles her into a confrontation with another front page figure, her success is assured.

However, being a celebrity turns out to be a full time job. Pete has fathered The ‘No’Girl, but it leaves her no time to be a park bench companion. “Can’t you stick around every once in a while, just to see if I’m getting older or something” he pleads. And the unintended consequences now also affords Marilyn the opportunity to perform in England, where she can at last find out the truth about her romantic ideal.

In the final reversal, in reuniting with Gray, she finds that he no longer believes in the lie that was the truth of two nobodies falling in love in New York, but rather now accepts the truth which is a lie of two celebrities who can mutually benefit each other in England. So when Pete sends a wedding present of a box of popcorn with a note asking whether she has found her English park bench, Marilyn uses what celebrity has taught her to stage a very public walkout of her own.

And so, with Pete realizing that “no jealousies, no obligations” may not be the way to talk, and Marilyn realizing that romance may go beyond ignoring the other’s flaws; they both fight their ways through separate hysterical mobs to wind up battered and tattered back at their park bench---with popcorn.

All of locations of public gathering in THE GILDED LILY, (the subway, Coney Island, the café where Marilyn performs, etc.) turn out to be places of false identity, popular misconception and ultimate humiliation. There is also such a scene near the beginning of THE BRIDE COMES HOME, (a title which relates to absolutely nothing which takes place in the film) at a party celebrating Jack Bristow’s birthday on which he comes into his three million dollar inheritance. However, the film is primarily concerned with examining the three basic Binyon characters established in THE GILDED LILY in further depth. In fact, the film barely contains a story at all; just the three characters continuing whirling around each other towards an inevitable resolution.

Jack is the American version of Gray; charming, privileged and completely rootless. He is sweet-natured and genuinely caring, but since he has no concept of work, he has no fixed identity or understanding of how his actions affects other people. Jack is played by Robert Young, who would play the character again in I MET HIM IN PARIS opposite Melvyn Douglas playing a more sophisticated variation on the Fred MacMurray character. And Douglas and MacMurray would play off each other in TOO MANY HUSBANDS. Meanwhile, YOU BELONG TO ME imagines what might happen if the Young character actually married the woman, with Henry Fonda playing the part.

In THE BRIDE COMES HOME, Fred MacMurray continues what would become a career long role as the Binyon male protagonist. Here he is Jack’s hired bodyguard and former newspaperman Cy Anderson. As his split occupation indicates, this character is also two personas, but his duality is internal. He is part mug and part artist, and never completely at peace with either aspect of himself. In INVITATION TO HAPPINESS he is a prizefighter who has a poetic vision of a muse calling to him from across the river. In TAKE A LETTER, DARLING he is a painter who works as a private secretary at an advertising firm. In NO TIME FOR LOVE he is a sandhog who is also an engineer and inventor.

Cy’s duality takes the form of publicly resenting Jack’s aimless irresponsibility while privately enjoying his company. While proud of his plebian work ethic, he is constantly conscious of how his lack of refinement inhibits his social acceptance and personal ambitions. And when the now rich Jack asks him what he would want to do if he was not dependent on him for employment, Cy answers that he would like to start a magazine “for men who make their money the hard way.” So it is that “The Man: His Magazine” is born, with Jack as publisher and Cy as editor.

Enter the woman. Jeannette Desmereau is Jack’s buddy since childhood and the woman to whom he has proposed marriage about two hundred times. But as Jack has come into his money, Jeannette’s father has gone broke and so she has decided to look for work. And when Jack hands Jeannette over to Cy as assistant editor sans experience, Cy has a new target for the push and pull of his resentments and yearnings multiplied by an enormous sexual attraction.

As Fred MacMurray is the male Binyon protagonist, so Claudette Colbert is his female foil and counterpoint. With a naturally aristocratic grace and an ironic appreciation of human foibles, she is balanced between the two males with equal doses of sophistication and character strength. Colbert plays this part in person in these two films as well as in I MET HIM IN PARIS and NO TIME FOR LOVE. And it is her in spirit in INVITATION TO HAPPINESS, TOO MANY HUSBANDS, YOU BELONG TO ME and TAKE A LETTER, DARLING.

And, unlike Jack, Jeannette gives as good as she gets. When Cy assigns her the humiliating busywork of counting names in the phone book and tells her to take the desk in the corner with all of the dust on it, her immediate response is: “I could get some more dust if it would make you happy.” But she soon escalates to pummeling him with a barrage of procedural questions about the counting and ultimately forces his retreat.

In fact, it is Cy who is the one who admits to the romantic ideal when Jeannette comes calling with a rock that she only half kiddingly intends to throw at him. He describes his daydream of being the White Knight villain slayer whom Jeannette applauds only to end in disgust with the source of his internal frustrations: “But I’m not that good. Nobody’s that good.” To which she mutters in reply: “You’re more of a kid than I am.” And when, in turn, she admits to loving him, it really isn’t such a surprise that his reaction is: “Well, doesn’t it make you mad?” And hers is: “A little. I came here to throw a rock at you.”

Inevitably, this tug of war as they try to reconcile their conflicts both internal and external proves too exhausting for them, and they split apart in all conceivable ways. Jeannette is now much more susceptible to yet another proposal from Jack as she reflects: “I wouldn’t even be surprised if you told a woman she was right every once in a while.”

It is left to the woman’s father (William Collier Sr.), a recurring presence in these films (in description in THE GILDED LILY, in person here as well as in INVITATION TO HAPPINESS and TOO MANY HUSBANDS) to convince Cy that this war is his and Jeannette’s form of love as they band together to follow Jeannette’s bread crumb trail in order to invade her elopement to Jack.

While THE BRIDE COMES HOME is almost entirely about the characters, TRUE CONFESSION becomes an almost abstract meditation on the chasm between private intentions and public interpretation and the relationship between creative invention and downright lying. Based on a French play “Mon Crime” by Louis Verneuil and Georges Berr, the film is most certainly conscious of another play, by Binyon’s fellow former Chicago newspaper colleague Maurine Watkins, “Roxie Hart.” And, as the Binyon work which comes closest to all out farce rather than behavioral comedy, it could be considered his funniest. Indeed, in many ways TRUE CONFESSION is to Gregory La Cava’s LADY IN A JAM what THE GILDED LILY is to that director’s UNFINISHED BUSINESS.

Ken and Helen Bartlett (Fred MacMurray and Carole Lombard) are seemingly complete opposites who have attracted into marriage, but are actually quite similar in their inability to connect public means to private ends. Ken is a lawyer who is so entirely devoted to “the truth” that he refused to defend any client whom he is not already convinced is innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt. Not surprisingly, he is all but unemployable. Helen is a would be writer of fiction who sees no difference between inventing characters in a story for publication and inventing a story about her husband as a character who believes that her typewriter is his recently deceased baby to dissuade the finance man from repossessing it.

When Helen takes a job which seems too god to be true as a very private secretary to a stock broker who works at home, it turns out to be just that as she is forced to punch him in the stomach and run out of the house in order to escape his advances. Returning to retrieve her hat, coat and purse, she is swept up by the arriving police who demand to know why she shot the stock broker, who is now lying dead beneath his work room rug.

Taken into custody, she is grilled by the investigating detective (Edgar Kennedy) in what she assumes is a story conference. Which, in fact, it is since the police have simply taken the available evidence, drawn the logical conclusion that she is the murderer, and now must only come up with a believable motive to include in a confession. The detective throws open a number of scenarios which Helen finds unsatisfactory until he hits on the “tough dame” character. “You didn’t love him. You don’t love anybody. You’re that kind of a dame” he growls in accusation. Her eyes light up as she exclaims “Gee!”, thrilled at the role she has been given until told that in this version of the story she will either get a life sentence or the death penalty.

Unhappy with the plots she is being offered, Helen makes up her own story of why she shot the stock broker, and when told that in this version she would get practically no penalty at all, is delighted at her work. “See, I know how to do it! You offer me life or the electric chair and I give myself five years to nothing!” The detective is equally delighted until he asks her to sign this story as her confession and she responds with bafflement: “No. I was making it up just like you were.”

But Ken’s devotion to the truth is just as logical as the rest of society. All of the evidence points to Helen and Helen has, in the past, been known to make up stories. He is prepared to give her the honest defense of justifiable homicide not only in her own defense, but also in the defense of all woman kind if she will only stop insisting that she didn’t commit the crime. And Helen can see how successfully making this case will also be the making of Ken’s legal career. So rather than “pass that up trying to prove something that can’t be proven,” she relents and confesses.

So it is that Helen pretty much becomes The ‘Yes’ Girl, taking claim to a crime she didn’t commit in order to fulfill society’s need for a comforting narrative of sacrifice and martyrdom. Indeed, the trial proves to be Helen’s version of Marilyn David’s café performance (in THE GILDED LILY) as she and Ken reenact the crime as both a true account of what happened up to the time that Helen fled and a complete travesty of how it happened. Ken proves to be a woefully nervous and wooden actor in the part of the stock broker, Helen keeps throwing in additional lines of dialogue to reinforce Ken’s moral viewpoint and the prop door won’t operate, causing them both to run around in circles while playing the scene. The exasperated prosecutor (Porter Hall) may in fact be expressing the author’s most heartfelt comment regarding the public display of private experience in his outburst: “Must we submit to this three ring circus in the guise of drama? What can they hope to prove with these cornball theatrics? With every ounce of decency in me, I object! Give them the gong.”

Lombard and MacMurray in True Confession.

And just like Marilyn at the café, Ken and Helen win public acclaim. In the wake of the not guilty verdict, Helen is now the author of the newspaper column “My Life, My Struggles” and concocts novels with the same literal tongue-in-cheek concentration gesture that she used to convince the butcher than her husband was dead in order to avoid the meat bill. Ken’s law office is doing turn away business, but his unease about the success being built on his wife’s crime spills over when their new maid (Hattie McDaniel) asks if she shot her philandering husband whether Ken could get her off. “Kind of touchy,” she muses as Ken storms off.

When the whole charade finally collapses, Ken manages to repress his joy that his wife isn’t actually a murderess enough to denounce the mockery she has made of truth, justice and the American way. Helen is distraught, pleading “I tried to tell the truth but it seemed everything worked out better if I lied.” In a final desperate attempt to prevent Ken from walking out, she claims to be pregnant. And when that is also exposed as a lie, she responds with what might in fact be Binyon’s ultimate judgment on the subject: “Well, it could be true.” And this inspires Ken to carry Helen back into the house and cure her of lying once and for all.

As with many of his contemporaries who collectively defined American romantic comedy in the 1935-1945 decade (McCarey, Capra, Sturges, La Cava, etc.), Binyon did not adjust as well to the rhythms of post-World War II America. In 1948 he became a writer/director, in many cases adapting books which related to the themes and characters he had previously developed. Frederick Wakefield’s fictionalized version of his dealings with the legendary Broadway producer Jed Harris, THE SAXON CHARM, concerns a playwright who allows the lure of artistic success relentlessly erode his marriage. The conflicting demands of a public career and a private marriage is examined from another angle in MOTHER DIDN’T TELL ME, an adaptation of Mary Bard’s account of life as a doctor’s wife which plays something like INVITATION TO HAPPINESS told from the female perspective. STELLA is a rather eccentric adaptation of a Doris Miles Disney crime mystery novel which reexamines all of the black comedy themes regarding death and the legal system from TRUE CONFESSION and anticipates the movable corpse ploy in Hitchcock’s THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY by five years. And DREAMBOAT, more characteristically taken from an obscure story, is another meditation on public exposure when an upright college literature professor (Clifton Webb of course) is found to be a former Hollywood heartthrob when his old silent movies begin appearing on television.

These films, STELLA in particular, are generally satisfying. And, as a director, Binyon is effective without being distinctive. However, given his extreme diffidence, one wonders how he managed to function in this job at all. In Hal Kanter’s autobiography “So Far, So Funny,” he reports Bob Hope saying that during the filming of HERE COME THE GIRLS, by the time that director Binyon managed to stammer out “Cut,” co-star Rosemary Clooney was already back in her dressing room.

Most of Binyon’s last decade of screenwriting was taken up with collaborations, the highlights of which were his co-writing with the director on Leo McCarey’s last two films, RALLY ‘ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS! and SATAN NEVER SLEEPS. He retired to his California ranch in 1964.

Claude Binyon will never again be listed among Hollywood’s most admired screenwriters. However, a reappraisal and appreciation of his work is long overdue. Unfortunately, many factors continue to stand in that path, not the least of which being the almost complete invisibility of Paramount films beyond the top tier of what are now considered established “classics.” And that situation borders on the criminal given that the rights to these films are controlled by cable giant Comcast which, between the Paramount and Universal libraries, has a ready-made TCM style network at their fingertips, if they could only be bothered to assemble it.

The low esteem in which director Wesley Ruggles is held is also an inhibiting situation. Ironically, Ruggles’ modesty, which borders on a complete lack of directorial personality, allows the elements in Binyon’s viewpoint to shine more clearly. He should also be given credit for have a sensitive casting sense, not only for finding and staying with the right actors to inhabit Binyon’s prototype characters, but also assembling a collection of comedy character actors who make multiple appearances throughout the series (including the aforementioned Kennedy, Collier and Hall, but also Tom Dugan, Richard Carle, Donald Meek and others) which develops an almost Sturges like feel to this world. Indeed, if for no other reason, one must thank him for gracing TRUE CONFESSION with the always delightful Una Merkel, who forms a kind of Lucy and Ethel team with Carole Lombard.

Still, Ruggles’ pokey, somewhat airless direction, akin to George Stevens without any compensating composition sense, does in fact create a number of aesthetic limitations which must be ignored in order to appreciate Binyon’s work.

But then again, if Claude Binyon is philosophically accurate and rediscovery ripped him from Lizzie Glutz’s embrace, the result would only be a hysterical misunderstanding of his intentions and an artificially manufactured version of his artistic persona. A process that I may well have begun right here.