DVDs: Kaufman and Ferber, From Broadway to Hollywood
Like their previous collaboration, The Royal Family, George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's Broadway play Stage Door is a salute to the theatre, and to the ambitions, glories, and heartbreaks of the profession. The play is set entirely at the Footlights Club in the West '50s, a boarding house for aspiring actresses.
It opened in 1936 at the Music Box Theatre, where it ran 169 performances. The star was Margaret Sullavan, playing Terry Randall, who gets the opportunity to go to Hollywood but rejects it in favor of attempting to establish herself as a stage star, which, in Stage Door's terms, means a real actress. Much of Stage Door offers anti-Hollywood sentiment, with the film capital viewed as the place where people go to betray their talent, and also where less-than-gifted actresses sometimes make it big.
As you might expect, the play's anti-film bias was excised in Morrie Ryskind and Anthony Veiller's screenplay for the 1937 film version of Stage Door, now available on DVD. In fact, the screenplay featured a radical rewrite of the Kaufman-Ferber play, retaining only the title, the setting, a few character names, and a few incidents i.e. a suicide from the play. Kaufman found the difference so vast that he quipped that the film should have been called Screen Door.
Katharine Hepburn is the heroine, but where Sullavan's Terry was poor, Hepburn's comes from wealth. Where the character of Jean in the play goes off to Hollywood and becomes a star, Jean in the film, as played by Ginger Rogers, is a Manhattan chorus dancer and Hepburn's antagonist.
The film of Stage Door is notable for its richly enjoyable cast, which also includes Lucille Ball as Judy, Eve Arden as Eve, and with a cat draped across her shoulders, seventeen-year-old Ann Miller as Annie, veteran Constance Collier, and Andrea Leeds as Kaye, one of the few characters retained from the play. As directed by Gregory La Cava, the film is also celebrated for its rapid-fire badinage, the characters trading wisecracks, insults, and witticisms with dizzying speed. It's said that some of the film's dialogue was improvised by the actresses during rehearsal.
A major character created for the film is Anthony Powell Adolphe Menjou, a Broadway producer. In the play, Kaye is fired from a job and commits suicide. In the film, Kaye's suicide is motivated by her loss of a role to Hepburn's Terry. Also invented for the film is the notion that Terry's rich father backs the play that will give his daughter a starring vehicle.
When we see Hepburn on stage in this play, called Enchanted April, she's suddenly transformed by Kaye's death into a real actress. And she's spouting the words about how "the calla lillies are in bloom again," words that were for generations used by every Hepburn imitator and that, in fact, were lifted from an actual stage play The Lake in which Hepburn had recently appeared.
Although Hepburn and Rogers are superb in their sharp scenes together, it was Leeds, playing the tragic Kaye, who got the Oscar nomination, for supporting actress. Also nominated were the picture as well as its direction and screenplay.
The film marks a considerable improvement over the play, giving it a stronger plot and greater vitality. And its collection of actresses makes it hard to resist. For its recent DVD premiere, Stage Door comes with two significant bonuses. There's an amusing 1937 Vitaphone two-reeler, a musical called Ups and Downs about a dancing elevator operator who becomes a financier. It stars tap whiz Hal LeRoy, with Phil Silvers and a very young June Allyson.
The other bonus: a 1939 Lux Radio Theatre broadcast of Stage Door, closely modeled on the screenplay, and featuring Rogers and Menjou repeating their film roles, with Rosalind Russell in Hepburn's part.
DINNER AT EIGHT Warner
Kaufman and Ferber's play Dinner at Eight has had three Broadway productions, the first in 1932 at the Music Box Theatre, directed by Kaufman for a run of 232 performances. Constance Collier of the Stage Door film played grande-dame actress Carlotta Vance. In 1966, Dinner at Eight was back on Broadway in an unevenly cast Arlene Francis, June Havoc, Walter Pidgeon, Pamela Tiffin, Darren McGavin production that lasted 127 performances. And it received a mostly first-rate revival by Lincoln Center Theater in 2002, directed by Gerald Gutierrez, with a cast that included Christine Ebersole and Marian Seldes, the latter replacing an ailing Dorothy Loudon as Carlotta.
But it may be true that Dinner at Eight is best enjoyed in its classic 1933 MGM screen adaptation. This was specifically a follow-up to MGM's success with its all-star casting for the previous year's Oscar-winning film, Grand Hotel. For Dinner at Eight, producer David O. Selznick assembled another all-star MGM company, including three men-- John and Lionel Barrymore and Wallace Beery-- who had also appeared in Grand Hotel.
With a screenplay by Frances Marion, Herman J. Mankiewicz, and Donald Ogden Stewart, the film of Dinner at Eight stuck a great deal closer to its source play than did the screen edition of Stage Door. Beautifully combining the comic and the melodramatic and with the Depression weighing heavily on most of its characters, Dinner at Eight concerns the guests invited to Mrs. Oliver Jordan Billie Burke, later good witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz's soiree for a pair of British aristocrats.
Lionel Barrymore plays Jordan, gravely ill and with his shipping business in deep financial trouble. Beery is a vulgar, politically ambitious tycoon, Jean Harlow his crude, social-climbing wife. The stylish, imposing Marie Dressler is Carlotta, former flame of Jordan's. There's Edmund Lowe, as Jordan's doctor, involved in an affair with Harlow. Most bravely of all, John Barrymore grandfather to Drew plays fading matinee idol and alcoholic Larry Renault, a character dangerously close to his own "great-profile" self.
Like many early talkies, particularly those adapted from plays, Dinner at Eight can be stagey, with extended scenes of dialogue between just a couple of characters. But it's also beautifully guided by director George Cukor, who creates a genuine ensemble from a bunch of glorious hams. Stay tuned for the famous Harlow-Dressler exchange that ends the film with a comic bang. And avoid the 1989 television remake, with Lauren Bacall, Harry Hamlin, Marsha Mason, Ellen Greene, Charles Durning, and John Mahoney.
For the film's DVD premiere, there's a Sharon Stone-hosted documentary on Harlow, and a twenty-two minute Vitaphone short subject, Come to Dinner, a fairly lame spoof of Dinner at Eight.