Another great review of Jeanette’s Paramount Films…

Saucy dialogue and flimsy nighties in spades

 

by WARREN CLEMENTS

February 22, 2008

Critic Andrew Sarris defined the “Lubitsch touch” as the “counterpoint between sadness and gaiety,” to which one might add witty dialogue alongside insinuating pantomime and a view that audiences should be treated as mature enough to get subtle jokes. Director Ernst Lubitsch arrived in Hollywood in 1922 after a successful career in Germany, and in 1929 made one of the first great sound musicals, The Love Parade, with Maurice Chevalier (a star of Parisian music halls) and Jeanette MacDonald, whose background in operettas perfectly complemented Lubitsch’s fascination with the genre.

The finest Chevalier-MacDonald comedy is Rouben Mamoulian’s 1932 romp Love Me Tonight, released on DVD by Kino in 2003, but The Love Parade and three other titles in Lubitsch Musicals (from Eclipse, a subsidiary of the Criterion label) remain a treat. They were filmed before the censors clamped down on dialogue of the sort spoken here, or flimsy nighties of the sort MacDonald wears, or plots that treat infidelity and caddishness with the European offhandedness Lubitsch favoured. The plots are set in artificial kingdoms where people break into song as easily as they speak and where servants echo their employers’ love affairs and spats. Sample lyrics from a Love Parade ditty sung by Lupino Lane (aide to the military attaché played by Chevalier) and Lillian Roth (handmaiden to MacDonald’s monarch): “Squeeze me once, squeeze me twice/ Most improper, but oh it’s nice/ Let’s be common and do it again.”

In Monte Carlo (1930), MacDonald leaves a wealthy duke at the altar and takes up with disguised count Jack Buchanan in a part Chevalier would have played if he hadn’t been otherwise occupied. One influential scene uses the sound of train wheels and whistles as the rhythm for MacDonald’s song Beyond the Blue Horizon. In The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), Chevalier gravitates between free spirit Claudette Colbert and wealthy, reserved Miriam Hopkins. Both Colbert and Hopkins demanded that Lubitsch photograph only the more photogenic right side of their faces; Hopkins won. Chevalier and MacDonald reunited in One Hour With You (1932), which was to have been directed by George Cukor but was handed to Lubitsch two weeks into shooting. Cukor’s contract required him to remain on set, which he recalled in 1971 as “goddamned agony for me.”

Link

Utica’s “Great Artists Series” Mentions Nelson Eddy

Immersed in music culture

Roland Chesley was born in Rochester, N.H., on July 24, 1881. He came to Utica in 1931, transferred here from Albany as an agent for a school book publisher, Ginn & Co. He retired from that position in 1949 after 40 years of service. But even when he was so employed, he immersed himself in the city’s classical music culture, a tenor singing occasionally in B Sharp Musical Club programs and associating himself with Gertrude Curran’s inspiration to bring the best of classical music to the city.

After he retired from Ginn & Co., he was able to devote full attention to the artists’ series and to the many organizations in which he volunteered, most notably, the Utica Boys Club.

During Chesley’s long tenure with the Great Artists Series, he brought hundreds of distinguished national and international performers to the city. These include names such as Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, Sergei Rachmaninov (sometimes Racmaninoff), Lily Ponds, Isaac Stern, Nelson Eddy, Van Cliburn, Mario Lanza and countless symphony orchestras from all parts of the world.

All of them performed at Utica’s illustrious Stanley Theater, which opened in September 1928.

Link to complete article 

News about Nelson’s Halvern home (which was sold to Fred MacMurray)…

Former MacMurray home gets a remodel

Fred MacMurray, a leading man who co-starred in 1944’s Double Indemnity and played the father on the TV series My Three Sons, was one of those Hollywood actors who relished investing in real estate.

He purchased a wide range of properties, including orange groves and office buildings, although MacMurray and his family didn’t move much. By one account, the family lived in their Brentwood home for 56 years.

He died at age 83 in 1991. He was married for 37 years to actress June Haver, who died at 79 in 2005.

John Cottrell, a man Architectural Digest has canonized as one of the world’s top 100 interior designers, would like to buy MacMurray’s home, but it’s not yet available, he said, and so he leased it, promptly stripping the wallpaper and installing new carpet.

“I was as happy as a pig in mud,” Cottrell said. “I love to work on good American houses.”

The MacMurray house, built in 1939 for singer Nelson Eddy, has four or five bedrooms in about 7,000 square feet. It is on nearly 2 acres.

It isn’t listed for sale, but when it is, expect to see it come on the market in the vicinity of $10 million.

Link to complete article

Note: according to Nelson’s close friend K.T. Ernshaw, Nelson began work on this house a year or so earlier than 1939, with the intention of it being the home he shared with Jeanette MacDonald – where they would raise their children. After all the work he put into it – Nelson might not have sold it as quickly as he did had things turned out differently. He ultimately moved in to it with wife Ann Franklin and her son Sidney, Jr…. he had no children with Ann.

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