DVDs: Mary and Ethel Who?
Produced by Leland Hayward and directed by Clark Jones, "The Ford 50th Anniversary Show" was televised over both CBS and NBC on June 15, 1953. Because the Ford years neatly coincided with the first half of the twentieth century, the live, two-hour TV special became a salute to the last fifty years of American life and culture.
With Edward R. Murrow and Oscar Hammerstein II as the evening's hosts, the program includes extensive clips from movies and newsreels along with a wide variety of performing talent. Contralto Marian Anderson sings "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" and "Battle Hymn of the Republic," while mild-mannered Wally Cox has a recurring skit about self-help books. In a salute to crooners, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra are seen on film, but Rudy Vallee and Eddie Fisher perform live.
TV's most celebrated puppets, Kukla and Ollie, narrate a history of American swimwear and sing a tribute to the "Model T." Howard Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney recreate their roles in one of Broadway's longest runs as they share a scene from Life With Father. There's a salute to the dance styles of the last fifty years. And at the end of the program, Murrow and Hammerstein discuss the threat of the atomic bomb and ponder the nation's responsibilities and future.
That "Model T." song comes from High Button Shoes, and that's not entirely coincidental, as Jerome Robbins was that hit show's choreographer, and Robbins staged and conceived all the musical sequences for the Ford show. Robbins also recycled for the program the exciting speakeasy-charleston number from Billion Dollar Baby. It was also recreated for Jerome Robbins' Broadway, thanks to the Ford kinescope.
But "The Ford 50th Anniversary Show" is probably best remembered for the first joint appearance of Broadway's two biggest musical-theatre stars, Mary Martin and Ethel Merman. Hayward was a wily showman, and both ladies later discovered that he had gotten them interested by promising each one full approval of everything.
As Martin related in her autobiography, "Ethel and I got on like gangbusters. Anything she didn't think of, I did. But the genius of Jerome Robbins really made the show possible. It was his idea that we do a number sitting on high stools, side by side, on an empty stage."
The celebrated duet comes late in the program. Each lady first appears next to a poster of her most recent Broadway hit, singing solo, Merman with "There's No Business Like Show Business," Martin with "Wonderful Guy." They come together and, on and in front of those stools, they do a medley of old songs, then move on to "I" songs, including "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair" and "I Get a Kick Out of You." They soon get around to "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" and "I Got Rhythm." The close-ups may not always be flattering, but both ladies are at the peak of their powers, so the sequence, which concludes with a reprise of "Show Business," is pure electricity.
Sixty million people watched, and when Decca released its live, ten-inch LP recording of the duet with the order of billing reversed on the front and back covers, it sold 100,000 copies in the first week. The ladies would reunite on stage only once more, at the 1977 Broadway Theatre gala Together on Broadway, which would include a repeat of their Ford show duet.
It's sometimes forgotten that both ladies did more on the Ford program than just that duet. Hammerstein plays the Stage Manager to Martin's Emily in a scene from the third act of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Merman sings "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and, with a quartet of soldiers, "Mademoiselle from Armentieres." One of the soldiers is Scott Merrill, who would soon be playing Macheath in the smash off-Broadway revival of The Threepenny Opera.
Robbins staged an uproarious solo sketch for Martin called "The Shape," in which the star pantomimes fifty years of American female fashion, clad in an Irene Sharaff tube jersey and various accessories. Merman and Martin appear in drag as a real-life vaudeville duo known as the Happiness Boys, lipsynching to an actual recording of the act "Your Folks and My Folks" but ending in their own voices.
VAI has just released a twenty-seven-minute DVD featuring the thirteen-minute Martin-Merman duet sequence, along with Merman's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and "Armentieres," Martin's fashion sequence, and the vaudeville pantomime. All that's missing of the Merman and Martin appearances on the Ford 50th is the Our Town segment.
The new DVD may run only twenty-seven minutes. But twenty-seven minutes of Merman and Martin are more exciting than hours and hours of just about anyone else. What with the forthcoming telecast and DVD release of the 1957 Julie Andrews Cinderella, it's clear that the field of musical-theatre-related kinescopes is at last beginning to open up.
PENNIES FROM HEAVEN Warner Home Video
Dennis Potter's miniseries Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective are considered television landmarks. Pennies from Heaven 1978's hero is a ne'er-do-well sheet music and record peddler in 1930s England named Arthur Parker Bob Hoskins. His wife, Joan Gemma Craven, is frigid, but she does have an inheritance Arthur could use to open up his own shop. On the road, he has an affair with Eileen Cheryl Campbell, a shy schoolteacher, who drifts into prostitution as a result of her relationship with Arthur. Attempting to start a new life, Arthur and Eileen run off together. But an earlier chance encounter with a lovely blind girl causes Arthur to be sought in her murder, even though an accordion-playing beggar Kenneth Colley Arthur once picked up seems to know something about the killing.
What everyone commented on in the Pennies from Heaven miniseries was its deployment of period, dance-band recordings. The grim action is frequently punctuated by fantasy sequences in which the characters lipsynch to the romantic pop recordings of the time, their promises of happiness a stark contrast to the squalid reality of the characters' plights.
The complete miniseries was recently released by Warner Home Video as a three-DVD set. Released simultaneously by the same company is MGM's 1981 film version of Pennies from Heaven, directed by Herbert Ross The Last of Sheila, The Owl and the Pussycat, The Turning Point, The Goodbye Girl and with choreography by Broadway's Danny Daniels.
For this film, Potter himself wrote the screenplay, reducing his eight-hour TV saga to 107 minutes and resetting the action in Depression-era Chicago. It was the second screen vehicle for Steve Martin, co-starring with Bernadette Peters, like Craven a musical-theatre pro here asked to lipsynch to pre-existing tracks. That's because the film naturally retained the TV version's central device of contrasting harsh actuality with the false promises of pop recordings.
The Pennies from Heaven film cast includes such theatre folk as Vernel Bagneris One Mo' Time, The Life as the Accordion Man, John McMartin, Tommy Rall, Robert Fitch, and Jay Garner. The outstanding musical numbers are Bagneris's soft-shoe routine in a shower of pennies for the title song, and Christopher Walken early in his career a singer-dancer in Daniels' off-Broadway Best Foot Forward, as a pimp performing a tap dance/striptease to "Let's Misbehave."
As you would expect, the reduction of the story to feature-film length removes some of the richness of the TV version. While it's fascinating to watch the miniseries then view the film, the film may be somewhat less satisfying to those familiar with the original. There's a certain amount of softening in the film, with the characters of Arthur and Eileen made more sympathetic and less complex. Through no fault of his playing, Martin's likable persona takes away a bit of the grimness.
Then too, because the film is a sizable production, the musical routines for the fantasy sequences have become more elaborate, including a Busby Berkeley-style number at the bank and an Astaire-Rogers number in the movie theatre. These numbers tend to be less bleak and grotesque than those in the TV production, and the film also has a tendency to spell out its themes more bluntly.
But it's a fine-looking picture, with images straight out of Edward Hopper and Reginald Marsh. For MGM, it was a daring project, one that was probably bound to be a commercial failure. Viewed two decades later, it comes off as a remarkably dark and ambitious film. The DVD bonuses include laudatory and insightful audio commentary by film critic Peter Rainer, who also hosts a twentieth-anniversary reunion symposium featuring, among others, Martin, Jessica Harper Joan, and costume designer Bob Mackie.
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