The fabric of old Hollywood: the Rat Pack, Martin and Lewis, and Roddy McDowall’s home movies

Show-business documentaries are often intended to serve as introductions for the uninitiated. They also drive diehard fans a little crazy, because, if made well, they introduce them to a wealth of footage that they would like to watch at full length, without a narrator or talking heads “situating” the action — or in the case of most horrific current-day talking-heads series, simply describing the very thing we’re seeing.

One pair of documentary filmmakers, a mother and son, have “laid bare” their archives to a fascinating extent on (where else?) YouTube. Carole Langer and Luke Sacher have made a number of independent documentary features, but what concerns us here is the series of show-business profiles they created for A&E’s Biography. In putting these shows together, they utilized a number of rarely seen clips (not the public-domain specialties that appear in just about every straight-to-DVD docu), as well as one-of-a-kind reels of film that came from the stars themselves.

Thus, we can now see “above ground” some extremely rare footage that we never would’ve laid eyes on before, as well as having access online to clips that I have indeed seen before, but only on “mail-order” cassettes and discs (I’m all for using polite terms for that nastiest of phrases, "bootleg").

The uploads that are the singular possessions of Langer and Sacher are her interviews with a host of aged celebrities for the show-biz docus. Their YouTube account features her talks with Juanita Moore, Lizabeth Scott (right), Jackie Cooper, Jane Wyman, and Ann Miller.

For information and anecdotes about acts that played Las Vegas in its heyday, they turned to Shecky Greene. This interview is particularly fascinating, as it finds Ms. Langer telling Mr. Greene nearly as many stories as he tells her (she also never seems to laugh at the many, many jokes and silly voices that Greene includes in his answers). It’s an informal and informative chat, but I was kinda taken aback by her mini-lectures to Shecky:



One of the seminal figures that Langer and Sacher interviewed for their documentaries was Roddy McDowall, who, as I discussed in my interview with Carol Lynley, seemed to know everyone who mattered in Hollywood from the Fifties to the Seventies and was obviously in possession of the secrets they carried around.

More on him below, but I will note that I was extremely impressed by his encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood movies and players in this interview (and rather surprised by the instance in which Ms. Langer tells him “let me finish” when she’s giving him a mini-lecture). One only wishes he had written a memoir — but the keepers of secrets never do:



The most impressive “get” for the duo interview-wise was clearly Robert Mitchum who, even though he looked seriously ill when Ms. Langer talked to him, still had an incredibly macho deep voice and the same mixture of bravado and apathy that distinguished his best performances:



The Soapbox Productions YT account provides hours and hours of viewing material, including the indie docus that Langer and Sacher made, but most show-biz fans will be drawn in by the plethora of material about Las Vegas, like the promotional short “Las Vegas, Playground USA” from 1964; silent newsreel-style footage of the Ritz Brothers when they played Vegas, also Joe E. Lewis and Noel Coward at the Desert Inn (being visited backstage by various couples, including David Niven and Judy Garland, and Sinatra and Bacall).

In this same vein are Janet Leigh’s silent home movies, which were used for an A&E Biography ep that Sacher and Langer did on Leigh. Of course, Leigh was an uncommonly lovely actress, whose best-known relationship was with husband Tony Curtis. They were a “star couple” without question, and two of their best show-biz friends were a certain Dino Crocetti and Joseph Levitch, aka Martin and Lewis.

Langer and Sacher made a very good portrait of Jerry for Biography, called “The Last American Clown.” It is filled with tantalizingly rare footage they uncovered, and other items that surely came from Lewis’s own deep stash of home movies documenting his every move. The whole show, running 90 minutes, is up on YT:



If you’re curious about what was really special (and insane) about Martin and Lewis’s act, check out this footage of them guesting on the U.S. Olympic team telethon in 1952. They call hosts Bob Hope and Bing Crosby “old timers,” generally run amok, and wind up doing a bit of gay humor (Jerry’s stage character often slid from Yiddishisms to crazed-kid behavior and gay jokes):



The pair are a bit more serious in this interview with Edward R. Murrow for “Person to Person.” They’re sitting in a room that Jerry had constructed as a screening room and an archive for the duo — they’re on friendly terms on camera, but the most interesting note is when Jerry notes that Dean ditched an appearance in Jerry’s home-movie at the very last minute:



The Soapbox YT account has a load of Martin and Lewis rarities, including:
—a promotional short for The Stooge in which they wind up pretend-pummeling their producer Hal Wallis;
— a greeting to movie viewers in Detroit from the set of one of their pictures; and
— newsreel footage of the opening of Jerry’s camera store in L.A.(Dean did show up for that).

The lengthiest M&L rarity that they’ve uploaded is the best record of what the team looked like in a nightclub, the film of them playing the Copacabana in Feb 1954. The act is fast and loose and kinda dopey, but they certainly go at it with a fervor, and had some great moments:



The best M&L rarities show them ad-libbing their lines, and often tripping over them. As in this TV promo for The Colgate Comedy Hour, and this clip where they accept an award from Redbook magazine, along with Leslie Caron and some chick named Marilyn:



The solo Jerry rarities are just as eye-opening:

—a promo for his 1960 TV special;
— a behind-the-scenes short about The Nutty Professor (oh, Stella, Stella…); and
— character-based TV ads Jerry shot for The Big Mouth

Jerry clearly enjoyed having making-of theatrical shorts created to promote his films. Here’s one for his sex farce Three on a Couch:



This 1968 short film about the making of Hook, Line and Sinker, is called “The Total Filmmaker,” and it indicates that even though Jerry wasn’t directing the picture he did everything on it, to the extent of editing the sound during his lunch break. It’s an amazing short and will be appreciated by both those who love and those who hate Jer (since it supplies them both with more fodder):



The rarest thing Langer has put up is a film of Jerry teaching his filmmaking class at USC in 1967. I have no idea what he’s talking about, but it is pretty mindblowing to see him in front of a classroom:



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Langer and Sacher’s four-part Biography documentary about the Rat Pack, which aired for four nights, is here:



The raw footage used to create that docu provide some fascinating slices of show-biz history. Here Frank, Dean, and Sammy crash Danny Thomas’s gig at the Sands (silent newsreel footage):



And the night that the Rat Pack consisted of Frank, Danny, and Jerry — this is only one of two times I know that Jerry got to be in a modified version of the Pack:



More than two decades after his death, Sammy Davis is still the biggest ass-kicker in show-biz — here he’s touring Vietnam in a short film created for the Army called “Peace, Togetherness & Sammy”:



As with the M&L Copacabana footage, there have been “mail-order” copies of the only footage that exists of the legendary “Summit at the Sands” gig with the full Rat Pack onstage goofing around at the same time; now the footage is on YT thanks to the Soapbox folks.

The secret of these gigs is that they were loose and not the group’s best — the best moments for Frank, Dean, and Sammy as a team were when they went out as a trio. But they still had a helluva a lot of fun, and the footage is truly historic and a must-see for fans. Here’s an EXTRMELY politically incorrect bit where Frank impersonates an Asian (Frank was far from the funniest guy in the Pack; he trailed Dean, Sammy, and even Joey):



The core trio do their thing. Sammy’s dancing is only at half-strength here, and he’s still pure dynamite:



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The most extraordinary thing that Langer and Sacher share with us on their YT channel is a trove of home movies shot by Roddy McDowall from approximately May to September 1965 at his beachfront home in Malibu. Offering further proof that Roddy really was a personal friend of an incredible amount of stars, these silent home movies show the stars interacting at the beach, chatting, drinking, being bored, playing with the their kids — in other words, just hanging around and being normal folk (who look incredibly gorgeous and in several cases happen to be immaculately talented).

Among Roddy’s guests are those he worked with on the just-perfect Lord Love a Duck (Tuesday Weld, Ruth Gordon, George Axelord) and Inside Daisy Clover (Natalie Wood, Robert Redford, Christopher Plummer). Each time you think you recognize someone (from Jason Robards to Dennis Hopper to Judy Garland), it is who you think it is.

Among those glimpsed at Roddy’s beach parties are:

— a dancing, eyepatch-wearing Sal Mineo, Tuesday, Natalie Wood, Juliet Mills, and Jack Warden ;
— Lauren Bacall, James Fox, Merle Oberon, David McCallum;
— the sex-kittenish Jane Fonda and prim mum Julie Andrews ;
—Fonda and Andrew again, Natalie Wood, Mike Nichols, James Fox, Hope Lange, and Jennifer Jones
— Simone Signoret
—Ed Wynn, shoehorned amidst views of L.A. streets and Whisky a Go-go

At some times Roddy brought his camera to other people’s houses, including Jack Lemmon and Rock Hudson:



One beach gathering finds old-guard stars Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall hanging out with Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, and a dinged-up Newman (had he been racing?):



An August ’65 gathering had Paul Newman and Natalie Wood on the guest list:



Roddy’s camera did wander over to the young and attractive ladies, as here with Tuesday Weld, Hayley and Juliet Mills, Lee Remick, and Suzanne Pleshette. The one and only Ricardo Montalban supplies the beefcake:



Those who watch the Funhouse TV show know I dearly love Tuesday Weld. Here is a sort of “solo study” of her at a time when she was the only guest:



And finally one of the busier star-studded beach bashes. It took place on May 31, 1965, and the guest list included Tuesday, her future Pretty Poison costar Tony Perkins, Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara, Suzanne Pleshette, Judy Garland, Dominick Dunne, and Lord Love a Duck auteur George Axelrod:



These snippets from Hollywood’s (and Las Vegas’s) glamorous past are kinda mind-warping. It’s one thing to see images from them embedded in a documentary, it’s quite another to see the entire source element. And for that I thank the Soapbox productions duo.

A "nurse" to the end: Deceased Artiste Zina Bethune

A death was announced this week that was very sad in its particulars, yet quite invigorating as a story of survival and reinvention in show business. The death was that of dancer-actress Zina Bethune who, to most reading this blog, will be best remembered for being the female lead in Scorsese’s first feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1967). She was a doe-eyed blonde actress (and that phrase was very appropriate for her) who was quite good in Knocking, but who had become, as far as many of us were concerned, a “whatever happened to…?” figure.

Her death was tragic enough to be reported on gossip blogs (by the likes of the annoying Perez Hilton) without any mention of her accomplishments, and important enough in show business to merit a New York Times obit that curiously didn’t mention her work for Scorsese. The details are this: she stopped her car on Forest Lawn Drive in L.A. to look after an animal that she thought was injured (one obit said it turned out to be a dead possum). She was struck by one car, and then hit by another, which ran over her and dragged her 600 feet. One driver stopped and reported the story; the other driver kept on moving.

To step beyond the sad essentials of this story (the fact that Ms. Bethune’s love of animals cost her her life — I know quite a few ladies who would go to the same lengths, and would sadly end up in the same situation), the obituaries revealed that, as both an actress and a dancer, she had had quite a rich career that saw her reinventing herself and having several personal triumphs.

The first of these triumphs was the fact that she went from having scoliosis as a child to studying at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, and performing in his production of the Nutcracker. After having soloed at the New York City ballet, she went headfirst into an acting career that found her appearing on many dramatic TV series — I recently reviewed the Criterion release of The Fugitive Kind on the Funhouse TV show and was pleased to air a clip of one of the extras, a 1958 “Kraft Television Theater” presentation of short plays by Tennessee Williams (directed by Sidney Lumet, introduced by a higly uncomfortable Tennessee) that included “This Property Is Condemned” starring Bethune.

During this period she appeared as one of FDR’s kids in Sunrise at Campobello, had a regular role on The Guiding Light, and appeared on various dramatic series, including the wonderful Naked City, in which her mom takes credit for a murder she committed by mistake (in a switch on what was believed to be the “real” story of the Lana Turner/Johnny Stompanato case):



And this find, an episode of Cain’s Hundred (1961-62) called “The Swinger,” written by the show’s star Robert Culp, and guest starring none other than Sammy Davis Jr.:



Her biggest success on television was a starring role in the soap The Nurses (1962-65), which got her on the cover of TV Guide and found her being booked as a guest to sing, dance, and make silly small talk with the host on The Judy Garland Show in 1963. The cutesy opening (where Zina B. affirms that, yes, that is her real name and, no, she was not a real nurse). The intro is here. Judy and Zina do “Getting to Know You” here (with a booze joke from Judy!):



Judy, Zina, and Vic Damone do an “all-purpose holiday medley”:



After The Nurses went off the air, she was a regular on Love of Life from 1965-70. It was at this time that Scorsese cast her as the female lead in his first feature, which was initially called on “Bring Out the Dancing Girls” and “I Call First,” before it became “Who’s That Knocking…” with the addition of a sequence intended to get the picture a more “adult” audience (and provide the first big-screen visualization of the Doors’ “The End”). More on that below, though.

Her acting career continued with small roles on TV in the Seventies and Eighties, but her biggest success onstage in her later career was a role in the Broadway show Grand Hotel from 1989 to 1992:



Bethune kept moving in other directions as well. She became the founding director and choreographer of an L.A. dance company and also ran a dance/performance program for kids with disabilities called Infinite Dreams. She is seen here in a recent interview for a documentary called L.A. Woman (she’s at 1:07):



Since I was a devout Scorsese follower for many years, I will close out on the film that most of us knew Ms. Bethune (married name: Zina Feeley) from. Her scenes in Who’s That Knocking…? were shot in 1965, and it is noted in an interview with Mardik Martin that is online that she was an established TV actress, so they had to do her scenes all at once — the film’s lead, Harvey Keitel, was an unknown at this point, but Zina Bethune was a star and was getting the highest salary in the film.

She first appears in the film in the scene that basically put Scorsese on the map (since Ebert loved the picture when it was titled “I Call First”) as a visual innovator, the meet-cute moment where Harvey Keitel talks her up in the Staten Island Ferry terminal, discussing John Ford movies with her and being the first chatty, charismatic, and slightly dangerous Scorsese protagonist. The scene is most definitely inspired by Godard and the other New Wavers, but the visuals come from Scorsese’s own restlessness and invention:


A bit later on in the pic, Harvey and Zina walk to the insanely catchy “I’ve Had It”:



Her death was tragic, but it is indeed nice to know that she enjoyed not only a second act in her career, but also a third and fourth.