History Lessons: Fashion in Film and the Hollywood Costume

Clockwise from top left: Clara Bow, Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson and Louise Brooks

Fashion in Film

Film and costume design history expert Kimberly Truhler, one of the presenting hosts at TCM’s 2013 Classic Film Festival, launched her new webinar series The History of Fashion in Filmwith The 1920s - The Jazz Age on November 17 - and I was there!

Kimberly certainly knows her stuff - she’s an adjunct professor at L.A.’s Woodbury University where she teaches a course on the history of fashion in film, she serves as a film and costume design historian for Christies of London, curates a private vintage fashion collection, manages her own website, GlamAmor (dedicated to preserving and sharing the history and legacy of fashion in film), and much more. Her impressive experience and knowledge were clearly evident throughout the nearly two-hour inaugural webinar session. And what an education I got…

Kimberly touched on the history of American film itself, from its invention to the advent of the studio system, from its beginnings on the East Coast to its move to the West Coast, from the age of the nickelodeon to the production of full-length feature films, from the silent era to the dawn of sound and from a time when costumes were often homemade to the use of European couture to the emergence of American couture.

Kimberly narrowed her focus to four films of the ‘20s that she considers essential to film fashion history because of their immediate as well as long-lasting impact on style on and offscreen. Here is a snapshot of just some of what we learned:

Cecil B. DeMille’s Why Change Your Wife? (1920), starring Gloria Swanson with costumes by Clare West

Clare West, as was the practice of the time, did not actually design costumes but traveled to Europe where she spent lavishly on clothing from couture houses. Swanson’s opulent wardrobe and signature style was created out of West’s selections – and DeMille spared no expense to dress his great star.

It (1927), from Paramount, starring Clara Bow with costumes by Travis Banton

Banton made a daring decision when he chose to showcase the “little black dress” look on Clara Bow in It only a few months after Coco Chanel unveiled her “Ford dress,” the first lbddesigned for conventional wear. Until then, women wore black only at funerals - but the look was popularized with It.

MGM’s Our Dancing Daughters (1928), starring Joan Crawford with costumes credited to David Cox (though Kimberly suggests that Adrian may well have been involved)

This film made a star of Joan Crawford and popularized the Art Deco look. The movie also promoted “women wearing pants” (a huge taboo at the time) with an equestrian look that was famously mirrored decades later in Diane Keaton’s legendary Annie Hall style.

G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), a German silent film starring American actress Louise Brooks with costumes by French designer Jean Patou

Would anyone remember Louise Brooks if not for this film? Her pared-down, low-cut, back-revealing wardrobe by French fashion icon Jean Patou signaled the direction style would take in the 1930s. And Brooks’ iconic “bob” became a haircut du jour that never went out of style.

Clockwise from top left: Clare West, Jean Patou, Adrian and Travis Banton

I have barely scratched the surface of Kimberly‘s fascinating webinar but a recording of the session is now available online. Click here for information on access to the recording and for more on the remaining History of Fashion in Film webinars:

Sun., December 15: The 1930s – Art Deco Elegance

Sun., Janaury 19: The 1940s – Film Noir Style

Sun., February 16: The 1950s – Opposites Attract

Sun., March 16: The 1960s – Revolution

Sun., April 20: The 1970s – Everybody’s All American

 

Cary Grant and Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932), costume design by Travis Banton

The Hollywood Costume

Deborah Nadoolman-Landis

Meanwhile, beginning on the 6^th of December, Turner Classic Movies will shine its Friday Night Spotlight on The Hollywood Costume all through the month. Costume designer (Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and author Deborah Nadoolman Landis will host, and every Friday evening viewers will be treated to three double features, each showcasing the work of a different top Hollywood costume designer. Here’s what we can look forward to:

December 6

Designer: Travis Banton

Films: Blonde Venus (1932), starring Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant, and Cleopatra (1934), starring Claudette Colbert

Designer: Orry-Kelly

Films: Casablanca(1942), starring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart, and Auntie Mame (1958), starring Rosalind Russell

Designer: Adrian

Films: The Women (1939), starring Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford, and Anna Karenina (1935), starring Greta Garbo

December 13

Designer: Irene Sharaff

Films: Funny Girl (1968), starring Barbra Streisand, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton

Designer: Anthea Sylbert

Films: Chinatown (1974), starring Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson, and Carnal Knowledge (1971), starring Jack Nicholson and Ann-Margret

Designer: Walter Plunkett

Films: Adam’s Rib (1949), starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and Forbidden Planet (1956), starring Walter Pidgeon and Anne Francis

December 20

Designer: Jean Louis

Films: Send Me No Flowers (1964), starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson, and The Big Heat (1953), starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame

Designer: Anna Hill Johnstone

Films: Dog Day Afternoon (1975), starring Al Pacino, and The Stepford Wives (1975), starring Katharine Ross, Paula Prentiss and Tina Louise

Designer: Edith Head

Films: Sullivan’s Travels (1941), starring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake, and The Seven Little Foys (1955), starring Bob Hope

December 27

Designer: Edward Stevenson

Films: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), starring Joseph Cotten and Tim Holt, and Out of the Past (1947), starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer

Designer: Ann Roth

Films: Silkwood (1983), starring Meryl Streep, and Klute (1971), starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland

Designer: Helen Rose

Films: The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), starring Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas, and Annie Get Your Gun (1950), starring Betty Hutton.

(check your local TV listings for times)

Faye Dunaway in Chinatown (1974), costume design by Anthea Sylbert

Read More

Sight & Sound...Classic Cinema with Live Music

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo at Davies Hall, San Francisco, November 1, 2013

A few months ago the San Francisco Symphony announced that it would kick off a season-long classic film series with Hitchcock Week, October 30 - November 2. Each night a different Hitchcock movie was to be presented with its music track scrubbed and the score performed live by the symphony orchestra. Psycho launched the series on the 30th, followed by The Lodger on Halloween, Vertigo on November 1st and, on the 2nd, a night of 'greatest hits' excerpts (To Catch a Thief, Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, North by Northwest) hosted by Eva Marie Saint. Most appealing to me among these events was the Vertigo program, not only because Vertigo is one of my favorite films of all time, but also because the symphony's musical accompaniment would be the world premiere live performance of Bernard Herrmann's full score. But the event was sold out by the time I found out about it. Only due to my good fortune in making a connection with a very considerate symphony representative did a pair of orchestra section seats come my way. And so it was that on the first Friday night in November my dear friend, Mike, and I, filled with anticipation and excitement, set off for Davies Symphony Hall to see Vertigo and hear its luscious score live. Once there, we sampled the special cocktail concocted for the evening, "The Voyeur" (sparkling wine, Grand Marnier, cognac), had a quick bite to eat, took our seats and waited for the lights to dim.

"Voyeur"

The presentation started with an informal talk by Bernard Herrmann biographer Steven Smith, an expert on the composer's music, who contends that "the pairing of a master visualist like Alfred Hitchcock and a composer like Bernard Herrmann, who set out to pull viewers 'into the drama,' remains the greatest director-composer partnership in cinema." Many consider Vertigo's score the ultimate of the composer's seven scores for the director (The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, Marnie), and Bernard Herrmann himself acknowledged that the music he composed for Vertigo was his favorite of his Hitchcock works.

James Stewart and Kim Novak, Vertigo

Within Herrmann's heady score is a deliberate nod to composer Richard Wagner, particularly the "Liebestod" from Tristan und Isolde - what biographer Smith refers to as Vertigo's "Wagner-tinged love theme." Wagner described Tristan und Isolde as "a tale of endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love...a yearning, a hunger and anguishing forever renewing itself." I can't think of a better description of Scottie Ferguson's never-ending, obsessive love for Madeleine Elster, so flawlessly accentuated by Bernard Herrmann's heart-piercing theme.

I have seen Vertigo on many screens large and small over the years, from its re-release into theaters in 1983, to countless in-home viewings, to a screening last year at Oakland's movie palace, the Paramount Theatre. As I watched Hitchcock's dreamscape unfold onscreen at Davies Hall and listened to the live performance of Herrmann's score, I thought of Diane Ackerman's poetic Natural History of the Senses and her descriptions of the visual image as a "tripwire for the emotions" and of music that "like pure emotions...frees us from the elaborate nuisance and inaccuracy of words." My experience of Vertigo with orchestra was as profoundly moving as it was unique.

My friend Mike, who was once a sound engineer for CBS Records, remarked that the symphony was so perfectly in synch with the film that he found himself forgetting that an orchestra was onstage performing the score. When he did take a moment to watch the orchestra, he said he noticed that conductor Joshua Gersen was "playing to time," keeping a close eye on a clock as well as the sheet music and musicians.

In 2011 I attended my first film with live accompaniment at the San Francisco Symphony when Casablanca was screened and the orchestra performed Max Steiner's memorable score. It was exhilarating and I hoped there would be more such events to come. When I learned the Symphony had scheduled a film series to run through its entire 2013/2014 concert season I was thrilled. The Hitchcock Week launch was a great success and four more film-with-orchestra events are still ahead. Classic film buffs in or near the San Francisco Bay Area (or who may be headed this way for business or holiday) shouldn't miss the chance to experience an evening of great cinema backed with live orchestral accompaniment  - a pleasure that nearly defies description.

Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Casablanca

Coming to the symphony on Saturday and Sunday, December 6 and 7, is the film classic voted the greatest musical of all time by the American Film Institute. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain (1952), featuring Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed's music, will be presented at 7:30 pm both nights. Conductor Sarah Hicks will lead the orchestra.

Gene Kelly, Singin' in the Rain

On Saturday, February 15, Valentine's Day weekend, the symphony will present A Night at the Oscars. The program will begin at 8:00 pm, and conductor Constantine Kitsopoulos and the symphony will accompany excerpts from The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Gone with the Wind (1939), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Citizen Kane (1941) and Ben-Hur (1959) with the music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Herbert Stothart, Bernard Herrmann and Miklós Rózsa.

Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn, The Adventures of Robin Hood

Saturday April 12, brings Charlie Chaplin's silent masterpiece, City Lights (1931), to Davies Hall. Conductor Richard Kaufman and the symphony orchestra will perform Chaplin's score, its main theme based on José Padilla's song, "La Violetera."

Charlie Chaplin, City Lights

The season's classic film series will end with Fantasia on Saturday, May 31, at 8:00 pm, and Sunday, June 1, at 4:00 pm. These presentations will feature a mix of elements from Disney's original Fantasia (1940) and Fantasia 2000. Sarah Hicks will conduct the symphony in selections including Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, Debussy's Claire de lune, Beethoven's Pastorale, Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice and more.

Fantasia

For detailed information on the San Francisco Symphony's classic film series and its "Compose Your Own" special pricing package, click here or call (415) 864-6000.
 

Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco

Read More

Remembering JFK

Personal Memories of John F. Kennedy

At 43, he was the youngest man to be elected and the only Catholic President of the United States. His youth and religion were issues in 1960 when he won the office by quite a bit less than a landslide. After his assassination in 1963, at age 46, those issues became irrelevant - and 64% of those polled at the time claimed to have voted for him when he was elected, though his margin of victory was just over 50%.

Yes, John F. Kennedy was charismatic and handsome, but as impressive and more important were his intelligence and cool head, major assets as he was drawn into intense Cold War world politics during his three years in office.

I was very young then. I remember reading in My Weekly Reader, a newspaper for grammar-schoolers, about him and other Democratic candidates in an article on presidential primaries. Little did I know that his candidacy would actually make primaries relevant to election politics. Later, when he’d won the nomination and was campaigning in Southern California, my parents took us to Lindbergh Field, San Diego’s airport, where Kennedy was to land and say a few words before delivering a major speech downtown. Dad had gotten a pass of some sort through political contacts that gave us admittance to the area on the tarmac where Kennedy would arrive. The enthusiastic airport audience was contained within a small fenced area where we awaited the candidate. Kennedy landed in a private plane and spoke briefly from a raised podium nearby. Then he began shaking hands with the crowd. I’d already moved from the back of the crowd, where my family was standing, to the front so I could hear better and get a good look. As the handshaking began, I climbed on top of a fallen papier mache donkey in front of the podium and reached for his hand. Success! I was thrilled. I’d been captivated by his eloquent words and magnetic presence. Now I’d shaken his hand.

Two months later he was elected. His iconic inaugural address and the grand inaugural ball (partly orchestrated by Frank Sinatra) followed in January. Soon came the Bay of Pigs fiasco, for which Kennedy took full responsibility – while learning just how much to trust the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There was a triumphant trip to Paris with Jackie – and it seemed the U.S. had at last attained a stature in the world that, until then, had seemed the sole province of Europe. The Peace Corps was established and ‘physical fitness’ (the 50-mile hike!) was promoted. Kennedy’s frequent televised press conferences and speeches proved him to be the true ‘great communicator’ among modern American presidents. He spoke out and proposed a bill on civil rights, he signed the first limited nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union and the UK…

And then he was gone.

It was the morning of November 22, 1963, sometime between 10:00 and 11:00am, Pacific Standard Time. I was in the language lab which was in the school's library building. I began to hear what sounded like a radio or TV at loud volume coming from the library. I wondered what was going on. My next class was gym and while I was changing clothes I began to hear rumors that shots had been fired at President Kennedy. I knew that someone had tried to shoot Harry Truman when he was in office and assumed this was the same kind of thing – an attempt. It was basketball season and we girls were on the court when the school principal’s voice suddenly came over the public address system and announced that President Kennedy was dead. My best friend was in the class with me and I remember that we sat on the court, hugging each other and sobbing.

That night, mother didn’t feel like cooking, so we went to a local Mexican restaurant for dinner. It was packed with families like ours. Apparently a lot of other mothers didn’t feel like cooking that night either. The eerie thing was that as we sat there in that restaurant full of people, no one spoke, not anyone at any table. The room was completely silent and it stayed silent.

My brother and I were glued to the TV through the rest of the weekend and, on Sunday morning, watched together in disbelief as Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed while in police custody. Then, on Monday, there was no school – it was the day of the President’s state funeral – and with it came all those never to be forgotten images…a widow heavily draped in black, heads of state from all over the world walking in the street with the family behind the coffin-bearing caisson, a riderless horse, the doleful sound of the funeral march as it played on and on, a little boy saluting his father's casket.

As I've watched some of the 50th anniversary specials about JFK's life, presidency and death this past week and mulled over my own memories and all that has transpired since, I've realized that so much more than innocence was lost 50 years ago today.

Read More

What a Character: Gladys Cooper

The What a Character! blogathon is in progress now, hosted by Once Upon a Screen, Outspoken and Freckled and Paula's Cinema Club. Click here for more information and links to participating blogs. My entry for the event follows...

~

Young Gladys

She was a beautiful child, wide-eyed and wistful, who began modeling at age six; during World War I she was the favorite 'picture postcard' pin-up of British troops; she went on tour in a musical at age 17 and by the time she neared 40 she was a star of the London stage. In 1940, at age 51, she began working as a character actress in Hollywood and would, over the course of the next three decades, earn three Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress. Her name was Gladys Cooper and she is best remembered for her performance as Bette Davis's cruel, steel-willed mother, Mrs. Vale, in Now, Voyager...

Gladys Cooper and Alfred Hitchcock launched their careers in Hollywood at the same time on the same film - Rebecca (1940). Cooper's was the small role of a tweedy aristocrat, the sister of Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), who offered warmth and kindness to the beleaguered second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine). Rebecca, Selznick Pictures' follow up to Gone with the Wind, took the year's Best Picture Oscar and put Cooper (not to mention Hitchcock, Fontaine and Olivier) on the Hollywood map. Her obvious talent and commanding presence brought two less sympathetic roles next: Dennis Morgan's disapproving socialite mother in Kitty Foyle (1940) and the spurned wife of Laurence Olivier in That Hamilton

Gladys Cooper and Frank Morgan in Green Dolphin Street

Woman (1941). Her facility in these roles paved the way for Cooper to be cast as the villain in Now, Voyager. She earned her first Oscar nomination in 1942 for her portrayal of this archetypal devouring mother. The following year she earned her second nomination as Sister Marie Therese, a severe and punishing nun in The Song of Bernadette (1943).

Typecast? Yes and no. Cooper was fortunate (and versatile) enough to be cast in sympathetic roles - in Mr. Lucky (1943), The White Cliffs of Dover (1944), The Valley of Decision (1945), Green Dolphin Street (1947) and other popular films - but she was as often cast as uppercrust autocrats. In 1947, she brought one of her most memorable wealthy dowagers to the screen as Mrs. Hamilton in the holiday fantasy The Bishop's Wife. This time, though, there was a twist; the imperious widow's hardened heart was melted by no less an angel than Cary Grant - giving Cooper the rare chance to render both harsh and tender facets of her character.

Gladys Cooper and Cary Grant, The Bishop's Wife

The 1950s brought the actress far more work on television that in films, but she would add one more notable ill-tempered and overbearing mother to her gallery of silver screen harridans. Maude Railton-Bell, her role in Delbert Mann's Separate Tables (1958), doesn't command the wealth or position of Mrs. Vale of the "Boston Vales," but she does maintain the same kind of suffocating stranglehold on her dowdy spinster daughter (Deborah Kerr).

Gladys Cooper's credits during TV's early, golden days are impressive. She appeared on two legendary drama anthologies, The Alcoa Hour and Playhouse 90; she was featured on both Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour; she guested on The Ann Sothern Show, Naked City, The Outer Limits, Burkes Law, Ben Casey, The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. (!) and was nominated for a

The Rogues

1964 primetime Emmy for The Rogues, a crime caper series in which she co-starred with Charles Boyer, David Niven, Gig Young and Robert Coote. Most often talked about among her many TV performances, though, are her appearances on the venerable series, The Twilight Zone. Cooper first appeared in a haunting 1962 episode entitled "Nothing in the Dark," in which she portrayed an elderly woman utterly terrified of death (personified by fledgling actor Robert Redford). Her second guest spot came the following year when she played one of several elderly travelers who have booked "Passage on the Lady Anne." Finally, later in 1963, came "Night Call," directed by Jacques Tourneur, in which she starred solo as an elderly woman who lives alone and begins to receive unnerving, anonymous phone calls.

Now in her mid-70s, Gladys Cooper still had a last good film or two ahead of her. She was a member of John Huston's illustrious cast in The List of Adrian Messenger (1963) and earned her third and final Academy Award nomination for her performance as Mrs. Higgins, mother of Henry (Rex Harrison), in the Oscar-winning musical, My Fair Lady (1964).

And that's not all. Before she embarked on her Hollywood career, Cooper had starred on Broadway several times. She returned to the New York stage in her late career and earned Tony nominations in her final two roles. She was nominated for Best Actress in a Play in 1956 for her performance in The Chalk Garden and again in 1962 for her performance in A Passage to India (in a role that would bring an Oscar to Peggy Ashcroft 20+ years later).

Gladys Cooper (center) in a 1971 revival of The Chalk Garden

At last, in 1967, as she approached 80, Gladys Cooper was named a Dame of the British Empire. Her life in the public eye had begun because of the great beauty with which she was naturally endowed; she was long considered the most beautiful woman in England. But Cooper was blessed with more than looks, she had striking talent and presence and profound devotion to her craft. The blush of youthful beauty would, as it always does, fade, but her power as an actress only matured and deepened through the years. Dame Gladys Cooper had been about to embark on a Canadian tour with a revival of The Chalk Garden in 1971 when she was stricken with pneumonia and died.

Bette Davis was set to tape a guest appearance on The Dick Cavett Show when she learned of Gladys Cooper's death; she shared her thoughts during the interview:
 

Read More