Wiseman's characterization of one of James Bond's penultimate nemeses inspired two of spy-spoofdom's most beloved takes on the concept of the evil genius ...





Ronald Bergan's excellent obit, which appeared Tuesday in The Guardian, is reprinted here ...

Despite the fact that Joseph Wiseman, who has died aged 91, appeared in dozens of movies and countless TV series and had only 20 minutes of screen time in "Dr. No" (1962), it is for his performance in that film, as the eponymous adversary to James Bond in the first movie of the series, based on the books by Ian Fleming, that he will best be remembered.

Dressed in a white Nehru jacket with a pair of shiny black, prosthetic hands, the result of a "misfortune", Wiseman was cool and calculating as the half-German, half-Chinese arch enemy of 007, played by Sean Connery, and one of the most effective of Bond villains. Dr. Julius No is a member of Spectre — the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion. "The four great cornerstones of power headed by the greatest brains in the world," he explains. "Correction. Criminal brains," says Bond. "A successful criminal brain is always superior. It has to be," retorts Dr No.

Wiseman was fortunate that Noël Coward, a friend and neighbour of Fleming's in Jamaica, where the film was set, turned the role down, saying, "Doctor No? No. No. No." Of his most famous role, Wiseman said: "I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I had no idea it would achieve the success it did. I know nothing about mysteries. I don't take to them. As far as I was concerned, I thought it might be just another grade-B Charlie Chan mystery."

Wiseman was born in Montreal, Canada, and his family subsequently moved to the U.S. He started his acting career on stage in his late teens, making his Broadway debut as part of the ensemble in "Abe Lincoln in Illinois" (1938), with Raymond Massey in the title role. There followed parts in three plays by Maxwell Anderson: "Journey to Jerusalem" (1940), "Candle in the Wind" (1941), and "Joan of Lorraine" (1946), and he was the eunuch Mardian in "Antony and Cleopatra" (1947), directed by and starring Kathleen Cornell.

But it was his role on stage in Sidney Kingsley's "Detective Story" (1949) that launched his film career, during which he typically played slightly crazy off-beat characters. Wiseman, in a loud striped suit, was both sleazy and comic as the low-life burglar, becoming hysterical when interrogated by overzealous policeman Ralph Bellamy. He repeated the role in William Wyler's 1951 film version, starring Kirk Douglas, without toning down his manic stage performance.

This coiled-up energy proved to be highly effective in Elia Kazan's "Viva Zapata!" (1952), in which he played the opportunistic journalist and agent provocateur who finally betrays Emiliano Zapata (Marlon Brando). He continued to steal scenes in two rather risible biblical epics, as an imposing priest in "The Silver Chalice" (1954), Paul Newman's debut picture, and as a wily beggar in "The Prodigal" (1955). Around the same time, Wiseman was able to reveal more of his talent on stage. He played Edmund to Louis Calhern's "King Lear"; the gangster Eddie Fuselli in a revival of Clifford Odets's "Golden Boy" (1952), and The Inquisitor in Jean Anouih's "The Lark" (1955), with Julie Harris as Joan of Arc.

In 1960, returning to movies, Wiseman had a typically flashy role as a one-eyed, deranged itinerant evangelist armed with the "Sword of God" in John Huston's western "The Unforgiven." Then, in 1962, came "The Happy Thieves," in which, third-billed after Rita Hayworth and Rex Harrison, he seemed to have some fun as a master forger, and the infamous Dr. No. It was six years before Wiseman made another movie.

Making up for lost time, he appeared in seven films within a few years. Apart from playing ruthless Italian gangsters in "Stiletto" (1969) and "The Valachi Papers" (1972), Wiseman created a niche for himself portraying a variety of Jewish characters. In "The Night They Raided Minsky's" (1968), Wiseman is the bemused Jewish owner of the notorious burlesque theatre, who disapproves of his son's introducing striptease.

"Bye Bye Braverman" (1968) saw him as a pedantic lecturer on his way to a friend's funeral. Of his performance, Time magazine wrote that Wiseman "wears an expression of perpetual disgust, as if he were forever smelling fried ham ... What picture there is for stealing is burgled by Wiseman with his portrayal of a stereotypical littérateur ... As lofty as Edmund Wilson, he pronounces Jehovah-like judgments on literature and humanity."

Back in Canada for "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" (1974), Wiseman played a Trotskyite owner of a blouse factory, who calls his nephew (Richard Dreyfuss) "a pushy Jewish boy".

On Broadway, Wiseman originated the role of LeDuc, a Jewish psychotherapist, in Arthur Miller's "Incident at Vichy" (1964), who asserts that "the Jew is only the name we give to that stranger within everyone". Also on Broadway was his Drama Desk award-winning performance in the title role of "In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer" (1969).

Wiseman continued to be active on television throughout his career, notably in "Crime Story" (1986-88) as the menacing gang boss Manny Weisbord. In his later years, Wiseman would often give readings of Yiddish writers, and his last stage performance was in 2002 at a gala concert called Yiddish in America at the New York town hall. His last Broadway appearance had been the previous year, as a prosecution witness in Abby Mann's stage adaptation of his film drama "Judgment at Nuremberg."

Wiseman's first marriage, to Nell Kennard, ended in divorce, and he is survived by his daughter, Martha, by that marriage, and his sister Ruth. His second wife, the dancer, teacher, and choreographer Pearl Lang, died last February.

(Joseph Wiseman — born 15 May 1918; died 19 October 2009.)

Henry Gibson died last Monday.

I remember him fondly from "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In," of course, but even more fondly as

• Clifford Stool, in "Evil Roy Slade" (1972)
  
• Dr. Verringer, in "The Long Goodbye" (1973)
  
• Haven "Welcome to my beautiful house" Hamilton, in "Nashville" (1975)
  
• Head Local Nazi, in "The Blues Brothers" (1980)
  
• Maurice Avocado, in "Tulips" (1981)
  
• Dr. Werner Klopek, in "The 'burbs" (1989)
  
• Shorts, in "Big Stan" (2007)
  

Most of those I've adopted as aliases from time to time, my favorite being Maurice Avocado — second only to Clifford Stool.

Hank's the short guy in the brown sportcoat, sorta dead (pardon the pun) center, directly under that lucky ladder.

Born James Bateman, I've wondered if the family butler ever called out "Master Bateman?" to summon him here or there? But I digress. Henry actually named himself — after Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, because "...if you say his name with a Southern accent it sounds like Henry Gibson." Try it!

Read the LA Times obit ...

Photo by Bob Gomel, © LIFE Magazine.

If that street sign is anything to go by, Paul and Mary are breakin' the law, breakin' the law ...

That's Mary's newborn daughter Erika in her arms.

50 Summers or so ago ...

Remembering Mary Travers ...

Or maybe that opinion is the essence of my "out of timeness" ... cue the Stone's "Out of Time" ...

She wrote this little thing ...

Best known for succeeding Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane in the "Tarzan" movies, starlet and World War II pinup Brenda died July 4 at age 92, succumbing to pneumonia. She'd also battled Alzheimer's disease since 1999.

She played the object of the jungle lord's affection five times, co-starring with Johnny Weissmuller and later Lex Barker during the height of the character's box office popularity during the 1940s.

Joyce's last movie, "Tarzan's Magic Fountain," was released in 1949. She went on to work as an immigration official.

Check her out swapping spit with Weissmuller in a clip from "Tarzan and the Amazons" (1945) ...

[ Obit ]

The Washington Post obit is here ...

Director of one of my favorite matinee movies of all time, "The Long Ships" (1964).

The BBC obit is here ...

Just five days after legendary 70s gay porn star Jack Wrangler passed away, fellow skin flutist Marilyn Chambers has joined him on "the other side." She was 56.

Maybe it's a porn thang to go out in pairs? Maybe it's only me that sees Chambers and Wrangler locked in a cosmic 69 as they go through the Pearly Gates?

Blonde, willowy Chambers was originally known as the "Ivory Snow Girl" since she was pictured oozing purity and wholesomeness as a young teenage mom on packages of Ivory Snow detergent before going on to star in the ground-breaking blue movie "Behind the Green Door" in 1972. (Where she oozed something else altogether.) I'm not sure how the detergent company reconciled the notion of a teenage mom with the concept of purity.

"Door" was one of the first pornos with a plot, produced — as it were — during the "Porno Chic" era by the infamous Mitchell Brothers, Artie and Jim, also dearly departed.

Her new X-rated career caused the laundry soap manufacturer to swap her out for another fresh-faced girl-next-door, but that only helped the enterprising Mitchells (who promoted their movie as "starring Marilyn Chambers, 99.44% pure ..."), and Chambers was well on her way to becoming one of adult filmdom's icons.

Along with Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems ("Deep Throat") and Georgina Spelvin ("Devil in Miss Jones"), Chambers helped popularize hard-core porn for the masses in the Seventies. She followed up "Door" with 1973's "Resurrection of Eve." The sexual awakening and exploration themes (opening closed doors, being resurrected or reawakened) were all the rage in these early scripted pieces, since that is what was happening socially and culturally.

The special kink of "Green Door," for the millions of hip young couples and college kids who make it a smash during an era of relative conservativism in America, was the image of a nice young lady submitting to, and ultimately demanding, some unconventional sexual favors. The plot finds Chambers inducted into a secret society, where she is put in a "sex swing" to experience untold pleasure delivered by a rotisserie of well-endowed men, including one of the first Black sex-film stars, Johnnie Keyes.

The film vaulted the triple-ex'er, once the covert staple of whorehouses and stag parties, into middle-class movie consciousness.

Following a distinctly Warholian trajectory, she hit the TV talk show circuit and much ado was made of her jump from pretty, alluring face to pretty lurid facials. An autobiography, Marilyn Chambers: My Story, sold modestly. At the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, she was a guest speaker at the first session of a new course, "Pornography Uncovered, Eroticism Exposed."

Previously, pre-porn, she had a bit part in the Barbra Streisand–George Segal comedy "The Owl and the Pussycat" (1970); but she wanted more, and set her sights on breaking into mainstream film with increasingly meatier roles. She was pulling a Traci Lords before there was a Traci Lords.

Before Hollywood came calling, however, she ended up in Canada with a young director named David Cronenberg whose stock in trade was making flicks about the human body as the ultimate nightmare and source of horror. The flick this time was "Rabid" (1977), in which Chambers played an accident victim who undergoes a surgical procedure with an odd side effect: she develops a taste for human blood. She's also a carrier for an incurable new and fatal disease, and as she feeds, most of Toronto becomes infected, and the body count starts rising. The notion of a blonde porn star as a metaphorical angel of death might have seemed misanthropic science fiction 32 years ago, but within just a few years AIDS would ravage the world (and decimate the sex-film community in the process).

She also appeared as super-secret agent Angel Harmony in the R-rated comedy-actioner "Angel of H.E.A.T" (1983), which always seemed to be on in the early days of the cable TV explosion. Angel was the leader of an elite team (actually, the trailer uses the term "tight core") of espionage professionals — known as Harmony’s Elite Assault Team — who have left the intelligence community to form their own vigilante organization.

Hollywood, as it turned out, didn’t come knocking too loudly, but nearby San Fernando Valley did. The Valley was the center of the burgeoning sex video market of the early Eighties (depicted in the final reels of "Boogie Nights"). For the next 20 years, she starred in semi-racy videos and SpectraVision-style cable-ready movies.

Later, she appeared as the leather-gusseted hostess of soft-core shorts that still play on Skinemax channels the world over.

Marilyn Chambers' career spanned the entire era of erotic films in the U.S., and she'd become a sort of Grand Dame of American Porn on the cusp of entering her AARP years. Unlike Lovelace and other Seventies porn actresses, however, she never ended up in the real or symbolic gutter, or became a pathetic victim/poster-girl of the fickle sleaze industry. She seemed in control of her career from the start, when, prior to making "Door," she countered the Mitchells' first offer with "I’ll make a dirty movie — if you pay me like a movie star." She demanded $25,000 and a percentage of the gross from the brothers on the spot. She got it, and became a huge star in the process.

A short bio is here; the Reuters obit is here.

Whitmore, who died last month, was one of the grittiest character actors America ever produced.

My favorite role of his came in only his second feature, William Wellmann's "Battleground" (1949).

In that super-realistic depiction of small-unit actions in and around Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, Whitmore played tobacco-chewing Sgt. Kinnie, a dog-faced 101st Airborne trooper right out of Bill Mauldin's Willie and Joe comics.
Whitmore's expressive face telegraphs — with each look — the story of a war-weary combat infantryman who's been on the line for long stretches ever since D-Day, with little relief.

And what a great moment when Kinnie notices his shadow against the snow near the end of the movie, after weeks of solid overcast and snow, and yells "It's shinin'!"

We realize as he looks up at the sun breaking through the cloud cover that Allied planes will soon be back overhead to help halt the German advance.

Those in the know will appreciate how much "Band of Brothers" owes to "Battleground" for its Bastogne-centered episodes, and how much Whitmore's characterization of Kinnie influenced the various portrayals of "Sarges" in dozens of war pictures — all based on the real men that held squads, platoons, and sometimes whole companies together against tremendous odds throughout the war.

MacGoohan (at left in the photo above) died Tuesday and Montalbán passed away Wednesday.

The cars are a Lotus Seven Series II kit-car from "The Prisoner" (with its famous KAR120C tag) and a 1976 Chrysler Cordoba from one of the most famous advertising campaigns in American automobile history (watch a TV spot here).

The Lotus was driven by McGoohan in the TV series "The Prisoner," but Montalbán was merely Detroit's pitchman for the Cordoba. When he touted its "soft Corinthian leather" upholstery option, he was essentially talking about nothing. There is no such thing as "Corinthian" leather and the leather didn't come from Corinth — it was a marketing term designed to telegraph the luxury of the car's appointments, and the leather itself was mass produced in a factory in Newark, New Jersey.

Funny how I prepped this image for use at some point under a series like "Rock Icons" or whatever, just a few days ago, and now I see that brutal humbucker banger Ron Asheton, has died.

Anyone who knows The Stooges knows just how big Asheton's beautifully ragged and vascular guitar contributions to the group's sound were. He was THE force behind their punky-psychedelic, wantonly swung sledge of garage rock, as sure as Iggy Pop's vocals were.

Want to take a shot to the frontal lobe? Seek out "Fun House" on vinyl.

Meanwhile, groove on The Stooges clawing out "TV Eye" at the United Palace Theater, New York, New York on April 9, 2007 while you read the Detroit Free Press obit ...

Oh yeah — fuck American Idol, Miley Cyrus, and the Jonas Brothers. And, no, there isn't room for all kinds of music.

Ann Savage, who played one of the most vicious femme fatales in film noir history, Vera No Name — in Edgar G. Ulmer’s gritty "Detour" (1945) — has died at the age of 87.

Savage died in her sleep at a nursing home on Christmas Day from complications following a series of strokes, according to her manager.

As "Detour's" wicked viper Vera, she plays twisted vixen so convincingly that she struggled to shake an image as a "Killer Queen" for years afterward. Every acid-etched nuance of character stuck to her like skunk stink. The bad-girl swagger, the clipped delivery rendering mere household words shrapnel, the vinegar-drenched quips, the emasculating snarl. Even a viewing today causes my turkey meatballs to withdraw into my body.

Savage created a hard-bitten harridan so venomous she didn’t speak, she hissed and spat. Her male victim cowered not out of fear, but because she had him dead to rights and could wreck his life with a phone call to the local sheriff. Vera was a toxic dime-store harpy who held her cards in the open, because she always had an ace up her sleeve, which is precisely where she wore her black little heart.

The gutless will find watching Ulmer's fast, scrappy cinematic kick in the nuts difficult — clocking in at a crisp 67 minutes, it's like having nitric acid thrown in your face, and then a matter of feeling the blister and burn of Savage’s scorching performance for the other 66 and a half minutes.

In the film, hitch-hiking down-and-out musician Al Roberts (Tom Neal) finds himself up shit's creek sans paddle when his ride's heart suddenly attacks, and he falls and cracks his head open on a rock. Thinking the authorities will assume the worst, he decides to hide the body, assume the man's identity, and keep driving. With classic Midas touch in reverse blindness, he picks up Savage on the side of the road. "The very last woman I should have ever met," admits Al in the trademark world-weary voice-over marking a thousand noirs. Didn't this guy see "The Last Seduction, or "Fargo," or "A Simple Plan"? Oh, that's right, he's a fictional character and those movies weren't made yet.

But before the Clown Prince of Crappy Judgement realizes what kind of bad penny's been slipped into his loafer by the God of Ultimate Cosmic Fuckovers, Al glances over at the dame napping in the passenger. "She seemed harmless enough," he says. Never underestimate the power of the booty juice, especially when the booty juice comes in a dispenser shaped like Ann Savage.

As if on cue, the broad snaps awake and bites Al’s head off — and throughout the movie’s taut, corrosive arc of destruction, this preying mantis never stops chewing until his brains and balls are so much mush in her bitch-goddess belly.

Hello, Vera. Nice to meet you.

Churned out by B-flick factory Producers Releasing Corporation, a/k/a PRC, "Detour" never quite wriggled out of the B-movie sump, despite some good notices. Yet like so many mud-caked gems overlooked in their time, "Detour" has grown a shiny patina of fan adoration over the years, and is considered by Noirists and MooTists alike to be one of the great ones. This, it commands a little bit of copy here.

Film lore holds that low-budget specialist Ulmer shot "Detour" in six days because he had to. He had a limited inventory of film stock, and couldn't afford to waste a frame, or so they say. Examination of the production records reveal it might have taken longer, but who cares? It's an anecdote that's appropriate. "Detour" is a quicksilver dagger thrust into that part of our brains that likes watching a character experience everything going to Hell in a hand-basket. It's not a matter of misery loving company — it's more a matter of "well, at least it's not me."

Most of the straightforward story takes place in a cheap apartment in Los Angeles, a pressure-cooker where the "relationship" between victimizer and victim quickly reaches a flashpoint. Though Al’s innocent, John Law's fingers would logically point to the luckless sap's guilt in the driver’s death. He knows it, she knows it ("What'd you do, kiss him with a wrench?"), and so she holds him in a classic vise-grip, threatening to call the cops unless he pays. He sweats and squirms as she joyfully squeezes him, hamster that he is, like a python playing with her food. The slightest protest from Al is cut down with vintage verbal stilettos. "If you act wise, well, mister, you'll pop into jail so fast it'll give you the bends!" Vera barks. She follows that up with "I'd hate to see a fellow as young as you wind up sniffin' that perfume Arizona hands out free to murderers!" and — my favorite bitch-school riposte — "Stop makin' noises like a husband." Sheesh, I dunno what's harder and colder on a January night — her or the lamppost she's leaning against in the poster. Tell ya what, I'd rather put my tongue on the frozen lamppost (but it'd be a tough decision).

Savage shot her scenes in three and a half days. Preparation was minimal, she recalls, as the character of Vera was written very sharply (by Martin Goldsmith, on whose 1939 novella the film is based). Ulmer had Savage speed up her delivery to make it snap and crackle, and asked her to speak "tough and hard." Each word bursts out of her lips, and the effect is menacing. But how humble its origins were, motivated by a desire to ensure that everything got onto whatever film Ulmer had left.

"I couldn’t talk from the diaphragm," Savage said. "I was delivering it right out of the throat through clenched teeth to keep that anger. She was very angry all the time. You’re very tense when you’re playing angry. It wipes you out."

Born Bernice Maxine Lyon on February 19, 1921 in Columbia, South Carolina, Savage's dad was a career Army officer who was bounced all over the country. The Lyons lived in Dallas and New Orleans, before settling in Jacksonville, Florida. He died there when Savage was only four years old.

By the time Savage was 10, her mother, a jewelry buyer, decided to move to Los Angeles. While a teenager, she began appearing in local theater productions, and started formal training at Max Reinhardt's acting school. The school's manager happened to be Bert D'Armand, who later became her agent, and, ultimately, her second husband, in 1942 (she'd gotten married to her first husband, Clark Tenneson, at age 18, but the couple divorced after only two years).

Lyon changed her name to Ann Savage before even stepping onto a sound-stage. The oddly apt moniker was inspired by her real-life temper. She later demonstrated her "spirited side" and unpredictable feistiness to future co-star Neal when they worked on "Klondike Kate," in which Savage played the lead. Neal, on a dare, stuck his tongue in the actress' ear. She socked him in the jaw.

Savage later channeled her dislike for Neal into her characterization of the venomous Vera. "I had got such mistreatment from him that when I got the part of Vera with him playing such a milquetoast, I had to go home at night and laugh, because that had to be hard for him," she says.

Good notices from a workshop production of "Golden Boy" led to a contract at Columbia Pictures. Her first appearance on the big screen came as an extra loaned out by her home studio in MGM's "The Great Waltz" (1938).

After World War II broke out in 1941, Savage was assigned unbilled parts in "The More the Merrier" (1943) and "Murder in Times Square" (1943), but she quickly moved up to featured and co-star status in such lighter-weight Columbia films as "Two Señoritas from Chicago" (1943), "Footlight Glamour" (1943), and "Saddles and Sagebrush" (1943). She also appeared in the crime story "One Dangerous Night" (also 1943). She ended up starring in more than 37 films between 1943 and 1953, running the gamut from westerns ("Satan's Cradle," "The Last Horseman"), musicals ("Dancing in Manhattan," "Ever Since Venus"), and action-suspense yarns ("Passport to Suez," "Two-Man Submarine").

Savage — tall and blonde — was one of the more popular pinups during World War II. In 1944, after appearing as an Esquire centerfold (below) shot by renowned studio photographer George Hurrell, she became an instant favorite with the troops. In addition to appearing as the "YANK Girl" the March 17, 1944 British Edition of YANK Magazine, she made numerous personal appearances at various stateside military bases and sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of war bonds. (Her YANK pinup is produced down below — it's the last one in this post.)

Her devilish dames in "The Unwritten Code" (1944), "Apology for Murder" (1945), and "The Last Crooked Mile" (1946) aside, it was her portrayal of the black-mailing, cigarette-dangling, ankle-turning, good-for-nothing Vera that she is and will forever be best known for.

She took the role after Columbia terminated her contract, making her a free agent. But what would become her defining role had more of a stigmatizing than star-making effect in the months immediately following "Detour's" release. Her acidic performance had been so indelibly burned into the memories of directors and producers, they saw only Vera when they eye-balled the glamorous Savage. Thus, the movies she made from 1946 on were chiefly of the B variety, and Savage was routinely typecast as the "other woman," or "the tough cookie." During this period, she starred in, among others, "The Spider" (1945), "The Dark Horse" (1946), "Renegade Girl" (1946), "Jungle Flight" (1947), "Jungle Jim in Pygmy Island" (1950), and "Woman They Almost Lynched" (1953), which became her last film role until the Eighties. Frustrated by an inability to break out of grade B roles, she turned to TV in the mid-to-late 1950s, guesting on such shows as "The Ford Television Theatre," "City Detective," and "Death Valley Days."

Througout the Sixties and Seventies, Savage made occasional appearances on television and worked in industrial and inspirational films. She returned to mainstream motion pictures in 1986 with "Fire with Fire," and made a guest appearance on the television show "Saved By The Bell." She also made live appearances at film festivals, especially for screenings of "Detour." But, in 2007, seemingly coming out of nowhere, she received accolades for her performance as "Mother" in Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin's portrait of his hometown, "My Winnipeg."

But it still is Vera that resonates most truly with fans. "Vera was a wonderful part. It was so strong," she said. "Bad girls are the best parts. Vera got to be drunk, maudlin, sexy. There were many wonderful little nuances about her."

"No one would wish to be remembered for things like 'Two-Man Submarine' or 'Saddles and Sagebrush,' which were typical of the kind of pictures I did," she continued. "The part in 'Detour' seemed like the opportunity every actress longs for. When I first read the script by Martin Goldsmith, I knew that I was going to be part of something very exciting."

63 years later, she couldn't have been more right.

Enjoy Savage's own take on her legendary ball-busting alter-ego, the incomparable Vera ...

Eartha was right up there with Jean Seberg in QUIETLY putting her ass on the line for political causes across the spectrum.

Let's hear "Santa Baby" purr-crooned a million more times, shall we? And in the meantime read Richard Corliss' eloquent obitribute ...

Van Johnson, 92, a disarming and popular (if a tad hammy) Hollywood star of 1940s musicals and comedies who later proved effective as a grizzled GI in William Wellmann's "Battleground" and as a conflicted Naval officer in "The Caine Mutiny," died today at Tappan Zee Manor, a senior citizens home in Nyack, New York.

Starting in the late 1940s, Johnson — who usually swung between blandly earnest and loud n' corny — took many viewers and reviewers by surprise with a series of stellar dramatic performances. He was especially good as a presidential candidate's wily campaign manager in Frank Capra's "State of the Union" (1948), with Spencer Tracy as the candidate. Johnson also portrayed a sneaky but likeable aide to a demanding Air Force general (Clark Gable) in "Command Decision" (1948). For me, his best role was as the cynical 101st Airborne rifleman Holley in "Battleground" (1949), a film praised for its harrowing depiction of combat during the Battle of the Bulge in which Johnson acts as the glue for one of the great ensemble casts in all of World War II picture-dom (featuring Jerome Courtland, Bruce Cowling, Douglas Fowley, John Hodiak, Ricardo Montalban, George Murphy, Don Taylor, Marshall Thompson, and James Whitmore in the key roles).

His most well-reviewed performance by far was as the executive officer who sells out the paranoid Captain Queeg (Humphrey Bogart) in "The Caine Mutiny" (1954), based on Herman Wouk's best-selling novel. Stars Bogart and Jose Ferrer devour all the scenery in this naval courtroom drama, but it’s Johnson’s character, the painfully ambivalent and maybe-a-little-dopey Lieutenant Steve Maryk, who binds the whole movie together. For the scene in which he relieves Queeg from command during a typhoon, Johnson manages to convey both panic and determination in his eyes. And when he takes the stand at his court-martial for mutiny, you can read his character’s racing mind from the symphony of expressions on his face. Everybody remembered Bogart playing with his ball bearings in the film (that sound!) — including the Academy, which nominated him for an Oscar — but it’s Johnson who gives the film its most nuanced, impressive turn (Johnson was never nominated for an Oscar, BTW).

All of these films almost totally reversed the screen persona Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio chief Louis B. Mayer first established for Johnson, a one-time Broadway chorus boy elevated to immediate stardom during World War II. (Jeeze, MooT-lings, the term "chorus boy" doesn't seem too flattering; I mean, Mayor Massengil's son Cody on "Son of the Beach" probably was one in Malibu Adjacent's summer stock company.)

Injuries from a 1943 car crash prevented Johnson from being drafted, so in the absence of many male rivals who'd gone into military service, he was heavily promoted and became extremely popular. By war’s end, he’d later joke, "I’d been in every branch of the service, all at MGM."

Tall and freckled, with strawberry-blonde hair, he was dubbed "The Non-Singing Sinatra" because of his appeal among bobby-soxers. His trademark for a time was wearing red socks, a practice his fans emulated.

Johnson was an easy-going fit for musicals with good girls like Judy Garland ("In the Good Old Summertime"), Esther Williams ("Easy to Wed," "Thrill of a Romance," "Duchess of Idaho"), and June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven ("Two Girls and a Sailor"). Such pairings of an "All American" boy and girl or two in a clean, sexless story were formulaic in the Forties.

He also played romantically inclined wartime pilots in "A Guy Named Joe" and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" — both dramas in which he showed he could hold his own against veteran co-star Spencer Tracy. In the second — in which he played a B-25 pilot taking part in the Doolittle raid on Tokyo — New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote that Johnson gave "a warm and brave performance and managed quite well to achieve a moving tenderness in love scenes and rigid strength in the action field." Hmmmm ... "rigid strength in the action field"? Sounds like Crowther had a crush on the chorus boy.

For the rest of his hey-day, Johnson alternated between light fare ("Brigadoon" with Gene Kelly, "The Bride Goes Wild" with Allyson) and calculated efforts to break out and expand his repertoire. He was a homicide detective in the low-budget noir "Scene of the Crime" (1949), an alcoholic in "The Big Hangover" (1950), and a blind detective in "23 Paces to Baker Street" (1956). He also starred with Elizabeth Taylor in "The Last Time I Saw Paris" (1954) and, in his most memorable romantic turn, with Deborah Kerr in "The End of the Affair" (1951).

Speaking of changing things up, he said he saddled up for the middling western "Siege at Red River" (1954) for one reason: "For 12 years, I begged Metro to put me on a horse — just once. No dice." The man simply wanted to play a cowboy.

He was born Charles Van Dell Johnson on August 25, 1916, in Newport, Rhode Island. His Swedish father was a plumbing contractor. His mother, an alcoholic housewife, walked out when he was three, and he was raised by his father, a strict man who discouraged his early interest in acting. His mother remained out of his life until 1946, when he got her a studio job. She later sued him to increase her financial support, and they settled out of court.

After graduating from high school, Johnson headed to New York with $10 to find work as an actor. Within a few months, he won a part in the Broadway revue "New Faces of 1936," which also featured comedienne Imogene Coca. He later said he got the part by mistake, when a director mistakenly ordered him to get on stage for a scene. He said he had only been in the theater to attend rehearsal with a friend in the show.

Afterward, he appeared in a series of stage and nightclub acts. Producer George Abbott cast him as a student in the Richard Rodgers–Lorenz Hart musical "Too Many Girls" (1939) and also made him the understudy to the three male leads, Desi Arnaz, Eddie Bracken, and Richard Kollmar.

The next year, Abbott rewarded Johnson with the part of Gene Kelly's understudy in the Broadway production of "Pal Joey," also a Rodgers and Hart musical.

A Hollywood screen test led to his leading role in the Warner Brothers cheapie "Murder in the Big House" (1942) with Faye Emerson, but the studio was unimpressed (so were ticket-buyers) and let his brief contract expire. He had better luck at MGM, largely through the support of actress Lucille Ball, whom he had befriended.

At MGM, Johnson underwent an apprenticeship as the second lead in a handful of pictures, including "Somewhere I'll Find You" with Clark Gable and "Dr. Gillespie's New Assistant" with Lionel Barrymore. He was also Mickey Rooney's older brother in the wartime tearjerker set on the homefront, "The Human Comedy" (1943).

While making "A Guy Named Joe" in 1943, he was in a head-on car crash that resulted in a five-inch-diameter metal plate being inserted into his head. His injuries were prodigious: a fractured skull, severe facial lacerations, a severed artery in his neck, and bone fragments piercing his brain. "They tell me I was almost decapitated, but I never lost consciousness," he remembered. "I spent four months in the hospital after they sewed the top of my head back on." He was left with a scar that was often covered up, but which he let show in some of his grittier films.

He later spoke with appreciation of "Joe" co-stars Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne for using their clout to halt filming during Johnson's hospital stay. He won positive accolades, which led to frequent work during the next several years. By 1945, only Bing Crosby was a bigger box-office star.

Though he worked steadily in the post-war years, his "type" was called for less and less on the big screen. In 1954, after 12 years with MGM, he became a freelancer. His film work continued to dwindle, save for a "comeback" movie with Janet Leigh in 1963, "Wives and Lovers."

After turning down the role of Elliott Ness in the television crime series "The Untouchables" in 1959, he increasingly turned to television for work. Over the years, he guested on such shows as "The Love Boat," "Fantasy Island," "McMillan & Wife," and "Murder, She Wrote," which starred his old MGM studio-mate Angela Lansbury. He may have pioneered the cheesy sitcom walk-on by playing himself in a famous Hollywood episode of "I Love Lucy." He even played a campy villain, The Minstrel, on TV's "Batman." In 1976 he was nominated for an Emmy for his role in the mini-series "Rich Man, Poor Man."

In 1985, Johnson returned for a small big-screen role in Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo" as a patrician 1930s film character who has trouble improvising when one of the cast members (Jeff Daniels) jumps off-screen into reality. He bowed out of films altogether with a string that included "Taxi Killer" (1988), "Killer Crocodile" (1989), and "Delta Force Commando II: Priority Red One" (1990), in which he played a police captain, a judge, and a general, respectively.

In the lean 1960s, Johnson had returned to the theater, playing "Damn Yankees" in summer theaters at $7,500 a week. Then he accepted a two-year contract to star in "The Music Man" in London. He began calling himself "The King of Dinner Theater," as he spent decades as a fixture on the regional stage.

He explained why in an interview:

"Because the phone didn't ring. Because the film scripts were getting crummier and crummier. Because I sat beside my pool in Palm Springs one day and told myself: `Van, you'll be 45 this year. If you don't start doing something now, you never will.'"

For three decades he was one of the busiest stars in regional and dinner theaters, traveling throughout the country from his New York base. In the 1980s, Johnson appeared on Broadway in "La Cage aux Folles."

"The white-haired ladies who come to matinees are the people who put me on top," he said in a 1992. "I'm still grateful to them."

A painter since his MGM days, Johnson had several one-man shows. He told People Magazine he developed a devil-may-care style that he dubbed "Van Go": "I like to paint in one swell foop." His canvases sold for as much as $10,000. In a 1988 interview, he told of an important art lesson:

"I was on the Onassis yacht with Winston Churchill. He got his canvas out and so did I. He was working away, and he growled at me, 'Don't just sit there and stare! Get some paint and splash it on!'"

Johnson had a famously difficult private life. He married Evie Abbott Wynn in Juarez, Mexico in 1947 just four hours after her divorce became final from actor Keenan Wynn, who had been Mr. Johnson's best friend. Johnson taking himself "off the market" had a profound effect on his fan base. A widely circulated joke at the time said that when Johnson’s young female fans found out that he had gotten married, they wore their bobby socks at half-staff.

Studio chief Mayer had encouraged the union to quell rumors about Mr. Johnson's alleged homosexuality, according to Mayer scholar Scott Eyman. Mayer also gave Keenan Wynn a better movie contract so he would not complain. Years later, Evie Wynn Johnson said that Mayer had threatened not to renew Keenan Wynn’s contract unless she married Johnson. Wynn didn’t blame Johnson for the divorce and remained on good terms with the couple. Fan magazines labeled Johnson a home wrecker, however, and his box-office appeal declined.

The Johnsons, who were known for hosting sumptuous Hollywood parties, were divorced in 1962 in a bitter proceeding that wasn't resolved until 1968. "She wiped me out in the ugliest divorce in Hollywood history," Johnson told reporters. Their only child, a daughter, Schuyler, became estranged from her father. She later provided a scathing first-person account of him in a 2005 article in the Sunday edition of London's Daily Mail.

In recent years several biographers have reported that Johnson was gay or bisexual. "Johnson's orientation was probably more homosexual than heterosexual," observed Ronald L. Davis in Van Johnson: MGM's Golden Boy, adding that the star became particularly attracted to younger men as he grew older.

Johnson's professional reputation was that he was a mediocre performer at best, that his fame was built squarely on being in the right place at the right time (his 4-F status in World War II leaving him with virtually no competition for leading male roles for four years). Many believed that his appearance in the annual list of Top 10 Box Office draws during that period should have an asterisk on it and a footnote that puts his rise in context. But, let them watch "Battleground" and "The Caine Mutiny" first and still see if they feel that way.

"I’m the luckiest guy in the world," Johnson said in a 1997 interview. "All my dreams came true. I was in a wonderful business, and I met great people all over the world."

Boopish Bettie Page, the brunette pinup queen with the porcelain skin and shoulder-length pageboy hairdo with the kitschy bangs whose saucy photos helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, has died. She was 85.

Page, whose later life was marked by depression, violent mood swings, the occasional arrest, and several years in a state mental institution, died Thursday night at Kindred Hospital in Los Angeles, where she had been on life support since suffering a heart attack Dec. 2, according to her agent, Mark Roesler.

A cult figure, Page was most famous for the estimated 20,000 4-by-5-inch black-and-white glossy photographs taken by amateur shutterbugs (the notorious-sounding Irving Klaw among them) from 1949 to 1957. The photos showed her in high heels and bikinis or negligees, bondage gear, or nothing at all.

Over the course of her short career, she conquered both over-the-counter girlie magazines and under-the-container brown packets of glossies, which were collected like baseball cards by curious adolescents and the sex-crazed.

She was known as "The Tease from Tennessee," "The Queen of Curves," and "The Dark Angel." And even "The Dark Marilyn." But she never really fit into the stereotype of a corn-fed American pinup girl. She was not as zoftig as Jayne Mansfield or even Monroe; she was far too athletic looking — I mean you could actually see her ribs. Her lips were to thin, and if you looked closely, you'd notice a lazy right eye. There was also something homespun about her bikinis. And there was a reason for that — she designed and sewed them herself.

In 1955, she was dubbed — in a typically goofy and American hyperbole — "Miss Pinup Girl of the World."

In 1957, she quit, quite literally, "while she was ahead."

Decades later, her iconic images — defining the Fifties as surely as Marilyn Monroe's and James Dean's — were inspiring biographies, comic books, fan clubs, web sites, and commercial products — including playing cards, fridge magnets, stationery, action figures, Zippo lighters, shot glasses, posters, and Halloween costumes. A film about her life and times, "The Notorious Bettie Page" (starring Gretchen Mol as Bettie), debuted on HBO in 2005.

Most familiar are idealized portraits of her multiple naughty personas — among them Nurse Bettie, Jungle Bettie, Voodoo Bettie, Banned in Boston Bettie, Devil Girl Bettie, Maid Bettie, Crackers in Bed Bettie, Bondage Betty — memorialized by such artists as Olivia de Berardinis.

"I'll always paint Bettie Page," De Berardinis said upon hearing of Page's passing. "But truth be told, it took me years to understand what I was looking at in the old photographs of her. Now I get it. There was a passion play unfolding in her mind. What some see as a bad-girl image was in fact a certain sensual freedom and play-acting — it was part of the fun of being a woman."

"The origins of what captures the imagination and creates a particular celebrity are sometimes difficult to define," Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner said Thursday night. "Bettie Page was one of Playboy magazine's early Playmates, and she became an iconic figure, influencing notions of beauty and fashion. Then she disappeared ... Many years later, Bettie resurfaced and we became friends. Her passing is very sad."In an interview 2 1/2 years ago, Hefner described Page's appeal as "a combination of wholesome innocence and fetish-oriented poses that is at once retro and very modern."

According to her agents at CMG Worldwide, Page's official website, www.BettiePage.com, has received about 600 million hits over the last five years.

"Bettie Page captured the imagination of a generation of men and women with her free spirit and unabashed sensuality," said Roesler, chairman of the Indianapolis-based CMG Worldwide, who was at Page's side when she died. "She was a dear friend and a special client and one of the most beautiful and influential women of the 20th Century."
A religious woman in her later life, Page was mystified by her influence on modern popular culture. "I have no idea why I'm the only model who has had so much fame so long after quitting work," she said in an interview with The Times in 2006.

She had one request for that interview: that her face not be photographed.

"I want to be remembered," she said, "as I was when I was young and in my golden times ... I want to be remembered as the woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form."

Bettie Mae Page was born April 22, 1923, in Nashville. She was the oldest girl among Roy and Edna Page's six children. Her father, an auto mechanic, "molested all three of his daughters," Page said in the interview.

Her parents divorced in 1933, but life didn't get any easier for Bettie.

"All I ever wanted was a mother who paid attention to me," Page recalled. "She didn't want girls. She thought we were trouble. When I started menstruating at 13, I thought I was dying because she never taught me anything about that."

After high school, Page earned a teaching credential. But her career in the classroom was short-lived. "I couldn't control my students, especially the boys," she said.

She tried secretarial work and marriage. But by 1948 she had divorced a violent husband and fled to New York City, where she enrolled in acting classes. She was noticed on the beach at Coney Island by New York police officer and amateur photographer Jerry Tibbs, who introduced her to camera clubs.

Page quickly became a sought-after model, attracting the attention of Irving Klaw and his sister, Paula, who operated a mail-order business specializing in cheesecake and bondage photos.

Under contract with the Klaws, Page was photographed prancing around with a whip, spanking other women, even being hog-tied. She also appeared in 8-millimeter "loops" and feature-length peek-a-boo films with titles like "Betty Page in High Heels."

"I had lost my ambition and desire to succeed and better myself; I was adrift," Page recalled. "But I could make more money in a few hours modeling than I could earn in a week as a secretary."

Her most professional photographs were taken in 1955 by fashion photographer and fellow(?) cheesecake model Bunny Yeager. They included shots of Page nude and frolicking in waves and deep-sea fishing, and a January 1955 Playboy centerfold of her winking under a Santa Claus cap.

At 35, Page walked away from it all. She quit modeling and moved to Florida, where she married a much younger man whose passions, she later learned, were watching television and eating hamburgers.

Page fled from her home in tears after a dispute on New Year's Eve 1959. Down the street, she noticed a white neon sign over a little white church with its door open.

After quietly taking a seat in the back, she had a born-again experience. Page immersed herself in Bible studies and served as a counselor for the Billy Graham Crusade.

In 1967, she married for a third time. After that marriage ended in divorce 11 years later, Page plunged into a depression marked by violent mood swings. She argued with her landlady and attacked her with a knife. A judge found her innocent by reason of insanity but sentenced her to 10 years in a California mental institution.She was released in 1992 from Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino County to find that she had unwittingly become a pop-culture icon. Disney's "The Rocketeer" (1991) and the comic book that inspired it contained a Bettie-esque character, triggering a revival, among women as well as men, that continues unabated to this day.

With the help of admirers including Hefner, Page finally began receiving a respectable income for her work.

In an interview published in Playboy magazine in 2007, Page expressed mixed feelings about her achievements. "When I turned my life over to the lord Jesus I was ashamed of having posed in the nude," she said. "But now, most of the money I've got is because I posed in the nude. So I'm not ashamed of it now. But I still don't understand it."

She spent most of her final years in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, reading the Bible, listening to Christian and country music, watching Westerns on television, watching her weight and exercising, and sometimes perusing the racks of local second-hand clothing stores.

Occasionally, however, Page was persuaded to visit the Sunset Boulevard penthouse offices of her agents at CMG Worldwide to autograph pinups of herself in the post-World War II years of her prime. CMG controls her image and those of Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana, among others. (Talk about a license to print money!)

During one such event in early 2006, Page needed about 10 minutes to get through the 10 letters of her name. As she pushed her pen over a portrait of her in a negligee with an ecstatic smile, she laughed and said, "My land! Is that supposed to be me? I was never that pretty."

"I was not trying to be shocking, or to be a pioneer," Page explained. "I wasn’t trying to change society, or to be ahead of my time. I didn’t think of myself as liberated, and I don’t believe that I did anything important. I was just myself. I didn’t know any other way to be, or any other way to live."There's something to be savored about these photographs beyond the obvious, beyond their value as titillation, which falls somewhere between innocence and "infamy" (in their time, anyway).

The bondage photos surely appeal to darker appetites, what with their cheap hotel-room settings, ball-gags, ropes, torn stockings, well-worn garters, and pantomimed spanking scenarios. Such low-grade elemental porn, even the purely visual sort Bettie made (though I'm not sure she'd appreciate the word used in connection to her), is in need of a plot. Sex needs only action, but pornography needs story. Klaw's photos suggest all sorts of things, but it's apparent that Bettie was the story, harkening back with her face and body to a long tradition of illustrations for pulp detective stories, especially what was known as "Good Girl" artwork.

Bettie had a special talent for posing. There are some pictures where she seems almost caught off-guard, were she reveals for a possibly unintended moment, an expression of some strange gravity. It's tempting to imagine this as the true Bettie — and rationalize the smiling Bettie as a commercial trademark, forced upon her by exploitation. Even when she's trussed up like a wrangled hog, on her belly, wrists, elbows, and ankles tied together, with a gag in her mouth, she's smiling!

But, I ask, what really lies beneath?

She came from a poor family and was sexually abused from a very young age by her father. Was her "modeling career" another case of a woman with low self-esteem seeking to please men and gain their acceptance in the only way she had been taught, with her body. I'm not qualified to know, ultimately.

The Fifties was a special decade alright, marked by post-war optimism and the birth of The MooT, and other weirdnesses, including paranoia and heightened Puritanism in the face of relaxing morality — and amid it all the notion of the cheerful bondage queen was a rare thing. The innocence of that scant and sweet clothing of her own design, together with occasional whips and ropes, made her at the same time both good and bad. But the off-guard pictures seem neither good nor bad; they just signal some kind of danger, but I doubt many imagined how that danger ultimately would manifest, or what the next photo in the sequence might be. Of course, as the story the photos told played out to their conclusion, perhaps in the onlooker's mind, the camera was put away.

The beach pinups are the best. I think it must have to do with the feeling of youth and exuberance that is evident as she cavorts in those girl-next-door bikinis. The overt celebration of the time of life when the body and mind is hitting on all cylinders, when everything seems possible and nothing physical comes with pain. The muscles seem to sing. She's a woman happy in her own skin.

And those pics of her as "Jungle Girl Bettie" will always make me hear "Sheena is A Punk Rocker" in my head. She would've been perfect for a video of the tune shot in the Rockaway surf in her hey-day. I wonder if Bettie inspired Joey Ramone to write the tune (if not, I'll accept Irish McCalla as his inspiration, but NOT Tanya Roberts).When everything else begins to show its age, including us, there'll always be raven-tressed, curvaceous, smiling Bettie Page — in her black bra and heels.

It's a normal urge to want to spell her name backwards.

Amy Camus?

Read the Washington Post obit ...

One of the many "older" women in my Rolodex, Edie passed away yesterday.

Got obit?

I was utterly sad when I heard the news last night.

I can't say anything better than Manohla Dargis did in The New York Times yesterday in her appraisal An Actor Whose Baby Blues Came in Shades of Gray.

Other favorite Newman roles of mine ...

Rocky, in "Somebody Up There Likes Me"
Billy the Kid, in "The Left-Handed Gun"
Ben Quick, in "The Long, Hot Summer"
Brick Pollitt, in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"
Eddie Felson, in "The Hustler"
Chance Wayne, in "Sweet Bird of Youth"
Larry Flint, in "What a Way to Go!"
Andrew Craig, in "The Prize"
Juan Carrasco, in "The Outrage"
Luke, in "Cool Hand Luke"
Harry Frigg, in "The Secret War of Harry Frigg"
Judge Roy Bean, in "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean"
Hank Stamper, in "Sometimes a Great Notion"
Henry Gondorff, in "The Sting"
Lew Harper, in "The Drowning Pool"
Reggie Dunlop, in "Slap Shot"
Frank Galvin, in "The Verdict"
Eark K. Long, in "Blaze"
Sidney J. Mussburger, in "The Hudsucker Proxy"

My favorite from the list ... why, "Slap Shot," of course.









Paul Newman was more than just an Oscar-winning actor, a humanitarian, a handsome devil, an accomplished race-car driver, and a family man.

I cannot think of a more likeable actor, and certainly not one who managed to be cooly iconic at the same time.

A few thoughts ...

"Slap Shot" — that fur coat, those leather pants, the "Suzanne sucks pussy!" scene. When he pulls off the side of the road and mumbles "What a fuckin' nightmare" near the end ... wonderful.

"The Verdict" — is there a better example of an actor getting better with age?

Anita, who aroused the envy of Joan Crawford and the lust of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and who was the last surviving mega-star of the silent movie era, died Saturday in Los Angeles. She was 98.

She began her career in films at 15, and played opposite some of the leading male actors of the silent period, including Lon Chaney, William Haines, and Ramon Novarro. In 1929, she co-starred in "The Broadway Melody," the first talkie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

For a brief period, she played second fiddle to only Greta Garbo at MGM, her home studio. But when producer Irving Thalberg told her that if she slept with him he would arrange for her to star in three pictures that the MGM studio head, Louis B. Mayer, had assigned to superstar Garbo, she refused.

Not surprisingly, her star began to wane in the wake of rejecting Thalberg. The expected ritual trashing started in the press, and the studio quickly delivered the ultimate slap in the face, and made plans to loan her to a smaller studio for the remainder of her contract.

When she stormed into Mayer's office to demand a return to star billing, she was shown the door. Her career at the top was effectively over at age 23.

After six months in seclusion, she returned to Hollywood and spent several years making B-movies for some independent companies. She retired in 1936.

Oddly enough, she will be seen later this year, as Elizabeth Frankenstein, in the horror film "Frankenstein Rising".

Wanna know more? Read the LA Times obit ...