Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Movie break: A rags-to-riches story with a patina of shady local color: Jersey Boys (2014), Part 1 of 2

Eastwood’s adaptation of the popular stage show, a review of an old group’s hits and story, hits home better than a thumbnail sketch of the idea might have seemed

One of the top-selling pop groups of the later twentieth century had career help from the Mafia in starting out, but its sound remains distinct and popular

Seventh in a series: The Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking askance at pop and political culture of 2011–now


Subsections below:
A “turgid” brief history shows how the group was mainly a singles band, with esthetics shaped by “mono” sound
The group’s success and distinction
The development of rock music left the Four Seasons behind
The Mafia connection, and the constellation of major players sets up the story
The players
The story, acting, tone (a foretaste of Part 2)…

To come in Part 2 (rough sketch of subheads/themes): (1) The mob connection: a big deal? (I’m not out to “Sinatra” Frankie Valli); (2) Story problems: in what order did certain things happen?; (3) The bane of pop (a fun observation): stupidity in how certain listeners understand (or not) lyrics

[Edit 10/5/15. Part 2 of this entry is here.]

Groucho Marx once said, from what I read, that an audience member about to see his and his brothers’ stage show asked him, “Will this show be sad or high-kickin’?” Groucho said many years later than was one of the best criteria to judge a show by.

When I heard in about early 2014 that late-life-productive Clint Eastwood was directing a film version of Jersey Boys, the Broadway presentation of the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, I kind of thought a bit skeptically, “Hmm, let’s see how this ends up.” (An earlier blog entry I did on the stage form of Jersey Boys is here.) It turns out the film is more high-kicking than otherwise, but it does have some problems.

(Interestingly, on the issue of whether pop music is ephemeral, or do some examples of it last for many years, there is this: On the morning of September 28, when I was in the midst—among other activities—of working on this entry, including [while on my feet] planning what I hadn’t already written for it, I heard the Four Seasons’ “Who Loves You” in a supermarket. And I heard most of that song, including [muffled by ambient noise] the instrumental break. It’s amazing it’s been almost exactly 40 years since that song was a hit on AM radio. And I remember pretty clearly when it was out [I was in eighth grade]. But when I heard it this day, I concluded why the Four Seasons stopped releasing decided hits after 1976: the age for doo-wop, which they are an example of—and they really were primarily a band of voices, not of instrumental fanciness—was over by 1976. Their sound was more of a “retro” one. And “Who Loves You” tried to update their harmonizing-vocals sound for a new age, and didn’t really sound like their early hits.)

I had wanted to view the film’s DVD when it came out late last year, and never got around to it. Lately, unable to borrow another DVD that I preferred to look at (to serve a set of writing “irons on the fire” that I’m more warmed up to), I suddenly picked up the Jersey Boys DVD, as a sort of time-passer.

The film winds you through a lot of preliminary story before, about 35 minutes through, the Four Seasons’ singing sound starts to gel, and the familiar hits start being marched out. After viewing the whole film once, a song or two was enough in my head, with memories triggered of what I knew of the group years ago, that I was apt to write a blog entry. We’ll see if I do a rough job here; I intend to do a Part 2/follow-up.


A “turgid” brief history shows how the group was mainly a singles band, with esthetics shaped by “mono” sound

To understand the Four Seasons’ place in pop-music history, it helps to understand how American popular music developed from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. This was arguably the period of richest ferment for this music, as it was distributed by electronic means and tended to cater to young, often teenage, audiences. Some book whose title I can’t recall sees the greatest period of modern U.S. pop to have been from about 1947 (?) to 1977. About in the middle of this period was the “reign” of The Beatles, from 1962 to 1970.

By the mid-1950s, certainly by the late ’50s, the genre of “rock ’n’ roll” had developed enough that it was a marketing tool (in days when marketing wasn’t yet the “science” it is now) in terms of a music niche that was starting to catch on fire with American youth, which radio stations and record-manufacturing companies had to heed. Very briefly, rock music developed as a hybrid of Black music—especially blues, gospel, and a general category you could call “R & B” (rhythm and blues), which includes the (later) area of “soul”—and the white genre of country music, which was a little more uniform in style (though subcategories could include the likes of bluegrass), with its recording epicenters in Nashville, Memphis, and elsewhere.

Earlier in the century (say, from about 1925 to about 1955), popular music ranged from the more sophisticated, urban-oriented stuff of Cole Porter to the more “jazz-singer” type material (aimed at white audiences) that was popularized by Frank Sinatra, with Black music being an undercurrent limited to mainly Black artists (blues and jazz musicians) and their audiences and venues. (It is interesting to note that the Four Seasons’ “doo-wop” style was associated in no small part with Black artists, and the group’s background as individuals as well as for their own take on the music was urban—in their case, the New Jersey variety; white country music had very little to do with their style of vocals-centered music. But they still are usually slotted into the rock ’n’ roll category more than anything else.)

By the early 1960s, rock ’n’ roll—whose first “mega-star” was Elvis Presley, whose recording history started in a country-music milieu—was a sort of fusion of Black and white “folk”-and-“underground” kinds of music, with the genre becoming valued by young audiences as a way to express their youthful jubilance, causes for concern (trying to gain love, expressing sadness over loss of love, etc.), and (less directly) a sort of alienation from larger technological culture (then defined by the white-collar world and the military-industrial complex, let’s say). Rock music was a way of thumbing the nose at “the Establishment” and yet providing a space for life-affirming common ground—whites and Blacks could, in a sense, borrow from each other’s styles, and to that extent assert a common thread in terms of what pop music should proclaim. (The fact that there was something inherently political about interest in rock music in the 1960s and ’70s is a theme I could say a lot on; but suffice it to say here that David Chase, creator of the TV show The Sopranos, remarked, apropos of a film he directed about the pop-music world a few years ago, about how allegiance to certain rock groups in the 1960s was partly a matter of a sort of [noisily callow] political allegiance, which I can pretty much vouch for based on my own experience of this phenomenon from the later 1970s.)

The main form of media by which such pop music was transiently broadcast was radio, and the main way it was sold—kids didn’t so much buy sheet music for playing on the piano, as was more popular among older music fans—was via recordings, usually on vinyl disks (i.e., records, including 45 r.p.m. records for singles, and 33 1/3 r.p.m. “long-playing” [LP] records for collections of songs called albums). Many of us age 65 and younger are probably well familiarized with this.

From, let’s say, 1960 to about 1968 or ’69, as a matter of what simply the technology was—what broadcasting companies were willing and able to do, or which consumers owned what, etc.—AM radio was the main route for broadcasting, and singles happened to be the favored way of buying music. These technical underpinnings were in place in the 1950s, too, but the arguable high point of these means’ being exploited (with the best work promulgated) was in the early-to-mid 1960s. (Records, of course, existed in other forms earlier, such as in 78 r.p.m. form and [more-brittle] shellac disks, but I’m addressing the “world” in which post-1954 rock music flourished.)

As it happened, because of the dominance of AM radio for much of the 1960s, monaural or “mono” sound was the predominant mode—as opposed to stereo, where the sound is divided between two channels (left and right), and hence you could have a richer presentation of sound, including “separation” of instruments, voices, etc.

Sidebar: The way pop was piped to you in the old days: If you weren’t alive and growing up in the early 1970s (or 1960s, for those older than I), you might not appreciate how AM radio gave a certain stirring, yet presumed-clarion-call, semi-cheesy quality to pop music (which people’s privatized ways of taking in music today, with the likes of ear buds from an iPod, have eliminated): many hits of the time I first heard on the radio on the school bus, via AM radio, which had its high-rotation way of repeating the same songs through the day; and WABC, the big AM station of the day in the New York metro area, added reverb to all the music it played, so that it was later something of a shock to hear some long-memorized hits of the 1970s in their original form from a CD or such, without the reverb, and sounding much better for that.

As a measure of how the marketing changed so that stereo started to predominate, The Beatles’ album The Beatles (1968; a.k.a. “The White Album”) was the last of their albums mastered in both mono and stereo versions, to suit the market; 1967-68 was about when favorite groups’ records started being made more often with the design of sound oriented to stereo rather than mono, and by the 1970s, basically no rock artists released mono albums.

To sum, in the early 1960s, you had:

(1) AM radio as a dominant broadcasting force (and all the stories of how record-producing companies might have manipulated [via “payola,” which became a big scandal, or otherwise] how new releases got played to spur audience interest, which is a story touched on very briefly in Jersey Boys, which I prefer not to delve into here);

(2) mono sound as the way most rock fans got and enjoyed their music, especially if they focused more on singles than on albums; and, as another area I can’t delve into much here

(3) how the music-producing business was a sort of factory opting, as many industries do, to shape product that was suited to the currently hot market. This business was such as represented in the Brill Building, the famous New York location (also depicted in Jersey Boys) that housed many pop-music-producing luminaries and molded many recording stars. (Meanwhile, some songwriters like Carole King and producers like Don Kirshner, with whom King worked, were located not in the Brill Building itself, but nearby in the city, yet they still added something of the same concerted manufacturing ethos to the overall type of industry that popular songwriting was then.)

In line with the factor of molding stars, producing concerns that focused on a song’s sound weren’t just defined by something distinct and appealing about singers’ voices, but by how the musical instruments were arrayed on the recording, too. In this context, you had the ascendancy of the likes of music producer Phil Spector, who shaped many bands (not least, “girl groups”). You also had, working on the West Coast, Brian Wilson, who was a sort of disciple of Spector; Wilson worked with his own band (including two of his brothers) of which he was a member, The Beach Boys. Wilson was basically the producer of that band, especially in its later 1960s albums. (Famously, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album was, to an extent, an attempt to equal the producing quality of Wilson’s masterpiece, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album.) The resulting music could be dense, rich, and catchy, all tailored to meet our tastes via monaural sound and AM radio’s rather simplifying way of presenting music.

All this semi-academic heavy-breathing is by way of saying how the Four Seasons fit into pop-music history: they brought a sort of doo-wop vocal sound, which was associated mainly with Black singing in the late 1950s, and which the band’s members had (as aspiring artists) honed in their lives “on New Jersey streets”—and this was eventually combined with rich production (recording of instruments in line with the parameters noted above). Their first hit was “Sherry” (1962), before The Beatles’ first singles even landed in the U.S., and the Four Seasons had, as the film presents it, three number 1 singles in a row: these included, after “Sherry” as the first, “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Walk Like a Man.”


The group’s success and distinction

These songs—indeed, the group’s signature sound—are so distinct and infectious that they give a good example of what is meant by pop-music “hooks” being key to having hit singles: for instance, they linger ringingly in your mind after you’ve heard them for the first time in a long while. The song that seemed to haunt me the most after I first watched the film was “Rag Doll” (1964), which has enough of a poignant theme lyrically and is stately enough in its rich production that it almost sounds like something that could have come off the Beach Boys’ later Pet Sounds album. “Rag Doll” seems, actually, to have a sad (or half-sad) theme buried inside a cheerful-ish sound, and this seems fitting, in that the Four Seasons’ story, while accented by colorful incident and rather invigorating for delivering a sort of rags-to-riches tale, also strikes me as having a sad overlying tinge, which I’ll get back to.

(The crossbreeding of contrasting tones can be seen in numerous ways in the Four Seasons’ music and the film’s [and stage show’s] story. I will look in Part 2 at the sadness aspect of the story, which seems not readily apparent when people take in the story of a successful band with cheerful-vocal music. One aspect that stands out for me is that the song “December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)”—which both the film and commercials for the stage show have trotted out as to suggest “Oh what a night you’ll have” of entertainment fun—actually has a jaunty, deceptively light tone, but the story the semi-seamy lyrics tell is of a 1976-germane sex story. I remember when I was 14 and hearing this song—and of course, I was a callow, pre-puberty kid at the time—it seemed surprisingly [or disconcertingly, to silly me] sex-oriented for a bouncy hit you routinely heard on the school bus radio. Even the less pointedly risque song “Who Loves You” has very streetwise lyrics of the time: “Who loves you, pretty baby? / … Who’s gonna love you, momma?”—all very ’70s, no?)

The Four Seasons sold over 100 million records in its career, according to The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (hereafter, RSE), third edition (New York: Rolling Stone Press, 2001), p. 346. This has to be counted over the decades since the group’s first hits, because no one, not even The Beatles, sold a total of 100 million records in the 1960s. (As one measure, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, which was considered a monster hit of the time, sold only about—if I recall what I read—two or three million copies in its first year or so of release.) (RSE adds that the Four Seasons’ record of sales “mak[es] them the most long-lived and successful white doo-wop group” [p. 346].)

The Four Seasons’ doo-wop sound could be called, in retrospect, one that appealed to “teeny-boppers”—somewhat as did (without the specific doo-wop quality) the early hits of The Beatles’ (and those of other circa-1964 “British invasion” groups’). And you don’t have to have been a music follower during the 1960s to know this sound. I was too young in the early ’60s to be aware of the Four Seasons, but by 1975, when the group, unlikely in the overall scheme of things, suddenly had two new hits—“Who Loves You” and “December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)”—I knew these sounded different from the early-’60s form of the group, which had been so recognizable by Frankie Valli’s falsetto amid the harmonies. And I knew as a mid-teen in late 1975 that the earlier Four Seasons sound was old-fashioned by the “wised-up” mid-1970s.

One hint of the type of influence the Four Seasons had in the early 1960s, which of course may be suggested by some observers with more “creative retrospect” than actual reflection of the history (and which in The Beatles’ case could have meant little in terms of what they went on to accomplish) is this: Ian MacDonald, in his Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994), notes regarding The Beatles’ song “From Me to You” a possible inspirational source for the falsetto in the second phrase of each verse (“delivered by [John] Lennon with a rasping upward slide into falsetto, harmoni[z]ed by his partner [Paul McCartney] a pleading third below”): “The New York [sic] quartet The Four Seasons, then climbing the UK charts with ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry,’ employed similar falsetto and almost certainly influenced The Beatles in this respect” (p. 59). He footnotes this remark with “In October 1964, Vee Jay [the not-red-label record company that the Four Seasons had signed to] wrung the last drops out of their licensed Beatles material by combining them with a side of songs by The Four Seasons in a hybrid album entitled The Beatles vs. The Four Seasons.” If this sounds like an amazingly cheesy thing to have done with both groups, it was, business-wise, a sign of those times. Actually, among my books on The Beatles, I thought I recalled there was a picture of the cover of this album, or a promotional item for it, but I couldn’t find it—but MacDonald’s footnote about the album suffices here. (End note)


The development of rock music left the Four Seasons behind

The old-fashioned quality of the Four Season’s sound brings up another point. The group’s heyday was from 1962 to about 1968. This was also the heyday of AM radio (though WABC was still a big deal well into the 1970s) and of the single and mono sound as the main modes for recorded pop music. By the very late 1960s, stereo, and the focus on albums as the way rock fans preferred their music (though groups like the Beach Boys and The Beatles had been moving albums [more or less valued as such] since the early or mid ’60s), were starting to leave the Four Seasons behind. The Beatles also exemplify the change in rock music’s “favored form” in their career, which also explains why The Beatles have remained popular ever since their breakup.

The Beatles grew during their career; and they showed—with Sgt. Pepper (1967), however mixed various people’s views are today about it—that the album can be the unit in which fans start to prefer their favorite group’s music. As well, as they aged, The Beatles included more adult themes in their lyrics: loneliness, workaday concerns, personal stirrings about religious (or quasi-religious) issues (the Beach Boys touched a bit on this in Pet Sounds, too, and started to head further into it with the aborted Smile album, which didn’t get fully finished, and that by Brian Wilson, until decades later). (I’m leaving out discussion of the influence of Bob Dylan, who remains, for Baby Boomers, what seems a sort of patron saint of not just popular music but the whole self-expressive ethos of their generation, but I didn’t count on tracking his more refined kind of influence here. Anyway, The Beatles and the Beach Boys, by virtue of their popularity, were more what defined popular music in terms of the sensation of what was going on, not so much what the intelligentsia valued in the 1960s.)

The Beatles’ growth as individual songwriters in their last few studio albums, as well as the style of musical production’s foreshadowing the typical music-producing styles of the 1970s, effectively made them a bridge between the early ’60s and the 1970s in terms of the form pop music would take as the music, its fans, and technology matured. They even were the first group to show it could still have a strong, long-lasting fan base even after they disbanded as a functioning group. This was arguably true for the Four Seasons, too (though how they have been valued has been different than the case for The Beatles).

Then, as the British group The Rolling Stones produced their four best albums—from Beggars Banquet (1968) to Exile on Main St. (1972), and Led Zeppelin came along in late 1968 and early 1969, who built a career almost entirely devoid of hit singles but who were still a monster success in the 1970s—and this just gives two of many measures of how rock music changed post-1968—the days of any pop group that focused on catchy mono singles, mostly about teeny-bopper-type love issues, and basically did no full album that is noteworthy as such, had to be over. This was basically true for the Four Seasons as a four-voice group by about 1968.

(Another measure of where the Four Seasons stood is that their distributing record companies were never top-flight places—I mean, Capitol served The Beatles in the U.S., and Capitol also distributed the likes of Sinatra. Vee Jay, an admittedly small-scale firm, distributed the Four Seasons at first, to about the end of 1964; then from 1965 the group recorded for Philips. They signed with Mowest, a subsidiary of Motown, in 1971, when Valli and Bob Gaudi, on whom more below, were the only remaining members of the original group. Today, the Rolling Stone Album Guide, revised edition (Simon & Schuster, 2004) lists the collected editions of the group’s work, some of which the guide rates quite highly [p. 308], as distributed by Rhino, which is a sort of oldies-distributor.)

But we also know that Frankie Valli, the lead singer of the group—and a nice enough tenor voice when he doesn’t do the falsetto—had his own hit records, including in 1967 and 1974-75, before the group—in a somewhat different lineup—had the unlikely hits in 1975-76. Then, when U.S. pop music was essentially defined by the alternatives of big-English-group rock (e.g., Led Zeppelin), disco, nascent punk music, and country rock (Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Outlaws, the Marshall Tucker Band, and many others)—which all show the fragmentation as well as sophistication-within-genres of the music—the Four Seasons were done, at least as a group producing new material of any note.

(Today, some critics might say that the 1970s exemplified the developed self-importance, and self-indulgence regarding some audience segments, of rock and pop music, while the Four Seasons represented a more innocent time, which may be a central factor of their appeal through today.)

Valli, as the film goes to pains to relate, was talented enough that he had a solo career, which sometimes overlapped with the group’s career when it was still a mutedly successful going concern—and when Valli used his natural tenor voice, he sounded OK, when he dropped the falsetto voice that (among harmonizing other voices) was a main hook of the Four Seasons’ sound in the early 1960s and may be the single thing that seems most gimmicky about them through today. Valli was the solo artist for such hits—many of which are very recognizable, and help explain his group’s staying power—as “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” (1967), which has a classic, middle-of-the-road pop sound for 1967—and the later songs “My Eyes Adored You” (a number 1 hit in 1975), which I very much remember from when it was out (and never cared for a lot), and “Swearin’ to God” (number 6 in 1975), which I also remember. The Four Seasons had its two anomalous 1970s hits in late 1975 and early 1976, as I mentioned above; in these, Valli’s voice is recognizable (a tenor in “Who Loves You” and a bit falsetto-y [“Oh, I had a funny feeling…”]  in “December 1963”), but the true falsetto quality is downplayed or eliminated in both. He also had a hit with the title song “Grease” (1978) for the film (that song went to number 1, selling more than seven million copies).

There’s no doubt Valli on his own had a successful career in the 1970s, and he did it while stylistically occupying a sort of middle ground between the “grungier” elements of rock music and the more square types of “Latin [or Italian] singer” (like Sinatra, Dean Martin, or Tony Bennett), whose stuff could be slotted into “cabaret” or inoffensive-pop genres. I would say I was never a real fan, but the Four Seasons’ sound, and Valli’s hits of the ’70s, stick in your mind (if you heard them on the radio when they were first distributed) like the best (or most clinging/cloying ) of pop does. (Though “My Eyes Adore You” turns me off the more I mull it over; it’s just not to my taste.)

The film’s story goes to a length to show how Valli aimed toward being more of a hero to his band and, in particular, toward redeeming the missteps of a fellow bandmate than any fans might have expected, when he assumed the burden of repaying a big debt. What exactly this meant, in real-business and moral terms, I will look at in Part 2.

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This heralds the fact that, as we naïve consumers of pop music at the time didn’t (and couldn’t) know, there was another reason (aside from changing audience tastes) in about 1968 why the Four Seasons stopped pursuing a creative career as a group, while Frankie Valli continued with a solo career (while the group, with new members entering, did forge on through the 1970s, but as a decidedly not-strongly-creative, not-edgy, maybe-oldies act)—and the movie (as well as the stage show, I presume) tells us why, and this adds some shadows to the group’s story.

This same factor is perhaps why the film project appealed to Clint Eastwood, whose main late, directorial work seems to focus not just on the strength and peculiar qualities of Americans but also on the presence of guilt, pain, consciousness of coming death, and other such “religious” concerns that Eastwood had previously to eschew when doing his spaghetti-western and Dirty Harry work.


The Mafia connection, and the constellation of major players sets up the story

The film presents the group’s story as a pungently “New Jersey” one, and this aspect sort of knocks on an open door with me. But the group had more of a mob association than I think any of its fans could know, yet this had a peculiar effect on their career, unlike with, say, Frank Sinatra, about whom a mob association was talked about with some indignation by various onlookers for years (I deal with the Sinatra issue in this earlier blog entry).

There is also, among rock stars, the more accidental situations such as ex-Beatle John Lennon’s being required to record certain songs for his Rock ’n’ Roll album (1975) as a condition for settling a copyright infringement lawsuit (partly indicated in Roy Carr and Tony Tyler, The Beatles: An Illustrated Record [New York: Harmony Books, 1978], p. 114). The suit was brought by Morris Levy, a copyright owner of old hits (including a Chuck Berry song that Levy had alleged Lennon had plagiarized in his 1969 song “Come Together”); Levy is noted as the “publisher” at the time for Berry’s songs, with his plagiarism suit against Lennon discussed briefly, in Nicholas Schaffner, The Beatles Forever (Cameron House, 1977, p. 175). Levy, it would be noted years later, was also linked to the mob (indicated in a story on a very separate matter in The Sunday Star-Ledger, September 23, 2012, Section One, pp. 1, 5). And in 1975 he seemed to take liberties with his agreement with Lennon. After an initial out-of-court agreement in 1972 whereby Lennon would record a couple Berry songs to settle Levy’s infringement suit, with the songs slotted for Lennon’s anticipated Rock ’n’ Roll album, Levy tried, in early 1975, to address the Lennon matter by releasing a differently constituted version of Lennon’s album, differently titled, via Levy’s Adam VIII mail-order record label (Carr and Tyler, p. 114; also Schaffner, p. 175). Then Lennon sued to block release of this version, and prevailed in court (RSE, p. 559). Presumably, royalties from Lennon’s album, related to the relevant songs, were funneled to Levy to settle the complaint Levy originally made.

(The 2012 Ledger article says that Roulette Records, not at issue in the Lennon case, was, as quoted in the article, “a front for the Genovese crime family,” according to singer Tommy James, whose work—such as the 1968 song “Mony Mony”—was released on Roulette.)

This all makes us wonder just how much the Mafia was infiltrated in the pop music business from the 1950s through the 1970s (at least), and I’m sure this topic has been studied copiously by some number of people.

Well, what do you know: a character in Jersey Boys named Gyp DeCarlo is a Mafia sort who helped the band (more on him below), and he is apparently based in part on a real person who was a member of the Genovese crime family.

This is part of the background for appreciating the more anecdotal story of the Four Seasons; and as I recount all this, I take the film on faith for what it says, at least much of it. The Broadway show had a book written, by no less than Marshall Brickman, who was also one of two screenwriters for the film (the other is Rick Elice). But how much the stage and film stories deviated from real life is unclear—and I will note a few qualms about minor details below, as just a start of questioning; but for any formerly teeny-bopper-marketed group like the Four Seasons to admit to the messy involvement it had with the mob in the 1960s suggests—on the basis of the presumption of “wanting to come clean”—that whatever deviations from reality are in the screenplay could well be minor, but as we study the story against other sources, we may find we’re not so sure.

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The players

The band formed in 1956 (according to RSE). In the following list of “major players,” we see some historical discrepancies—the type of thing you would never see with, say, The Beatles—that exemplify some of the problems (what is the true story here?) that I will look at in Part 2, while I don’t want to discourage those interested from getting enjoyment out of the film. The original band as hit-makers—shown about in order they joined the band, per the film—consisted of the following (and the birth dates show this wasn’t an average bank of 1960s vintage, who were usually of about the Baby Boomer generation, born in 1940 or later; also, several of the actors’ ages often aren’t of the callow twenties, which helps explain the earthy edge to the performances in the film, which also helps the story):

* Tommy DeVito (born in 1936 according to RSE, but in 1928, according to Wikipedia [a big discrepancy]), who was both a guitarist/singer for the band and its de facto manager (he is played by Vincent Piazza, born in 1976). Tommy left the band in 1970, according to RSE. (Also, Tommy’s brother Nick DeVito, whose story-correlate briefly appears in the film, and who played guitar, was with the band but left in 1960);

* Nick Massi (ne Nicholas Macioci) (1927-2000, according to both RSE and Wikipedia), the band’s electric-bassist and bass singer; he left the group in 1965, according to RSE (played by Michael Lomenda);

* Frankie Valli (ne Francis [per RSE] or Francesco [per Wikipedia] Casteluccio [RSE spelling; Wikipedia spells it Castelluccio]) (born in 1937 [RSE], or 1934 [Wikipedia], which latter date would make him about 81 today), lead singer for the group, who also had a solo career, and is the only Four Seasons member still active as a performer on the road even this year; he is played by John Lloyd Young, born in 1975; Young also performed the Valli role in the stage show, hence his well-etched performance here;

* Bob Gaudio (born in 1942 [RSE and Wikipedia agree on this]), who joined the group in 1960; he was songwriter (mainly of lyrics) and keyboard player as well as singer (played by Erich Bergen, born in 1985; his being the youngest actor for the original group brings a sort of callow quality to his character that seems suited to him as the most “earnest-student” type within the group).

In its earlier days of association with a music producer in New York City, the group performed backup for acts produced by Bob Crewe (on whom more below), before the group started recording its own songs at the urging of Valli.

Valli and Gaudio happened to form a business partnership during their participation in the band that provided for their future ventures outside it, which the film suggests didn’t appeal entirely to the understandably role-conscious Tommy DeVito; and Valli and Gaudio men also, today, are executive producers for the film. Indeed, their being owners of the group’s material and name continued even when the group as performers had periods of not existing, such as in the mid/later 1970s.

Also key to the group’s sound was Bob Crewe (1939-2014), a record producer at New York’s Brill Building; he is played by Mike Doyle. Crewe is listed in printed credits, wherever you see them, as a cowriter of some of the group’s songs.

Per the film, rounding out the story’s main characters is a sort of father figure to the boys, Gyp DeCarlo, whose name belonged, Wikipedia says, to a real person, Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo (1902-73), a member of the Genovese crime family. From what I heard in a review of the film last year, the Gyp character in the film is a fictionalized amalgam of real-life mobsters the group was involved with. Gyp is played by Christopher Walken, and helps the group in some key ways, especially when things come to a sort of dark climax, centered on Tommy DeVito, about two-thirds through the film.

(I can picture, during the film’s production, director Eastwood, his face as weathered as unpainted, 100-year-old barn wood, approaching Walken, Eastwood speaking in his almost-preposterously sough-y voice: “Now Chris, when you speak, don’t do that stroke-victim thing with the unexpected long pauses—between words. Like the spirit is willing, but the flesh—is weak. This guy is a can-do Jersey mobster. Keep the words flowing.” As it happens, Walken does his pause-y thing a few times in the film, but not so much that it sticks out.)


The story, acting, tone (a foretaste of Part 2)…

Tommy DeVito, as portrayed here by Vincent Piazza—who, aside from how we feel about the character, does the acting quite capably—depends a lot on our willingness to have such a character routinely unfurl his mannerisms in our lap. Some might not be ready to see a rather crass Italian delivery if they might anticipatingly react as to say “Neanderthal!,” “peasant!” But Piazza’s DeVito, piece by piece, comes across with all the Italian spark and rough manners of a grubby lizard tail slapped down on our clean dinner plate.

To be continued.

##


End note.  A general note on Ian MacDonald’s book: while I have thumbed through it many times in the insouciantly hungry way of a Beatles fan, using it to brace some of whatever I happened to be interested in checking facts on, the book actually suffers in a way I am not alone in noting. It is a trove of facts, opinions, claims, and so on, but it has various inaccuracies, and some of its interpretations are peculiar, such as MacDonald’s suggesting, simply because the Salvation Army property that Lennon took inspiration from for the song “Strawberry Fields Forever” had allegedly served girls, that the narrator of the song was female (p. 172), which is neither necessary for understanding the song nor typical of how Lennon wrote. The book is otherwise interesting for the musical sophistication MacDonald brings; when he looks at things via musical-theory terms, he can be elucidating, such as talking about how the time signature richly and repeatedly changes in the 1968 song “Happiness is a Warm Gun” (p. 255). But his dubious or seemingly gratuitous interpretations—many of which you can pick out and “chuck aside” like a pit from a piece of fruit—comprise a detracting feature of this book that other critics have noted.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Drinking at college: Something I did for a time, but which I didn’t love then, and dislike even more in retrospect

Developing fellowship skills in young-adult life—when drinking or the like was a common enough “default” mode for this in my hometown, and when (in my college period) developing workplace skills and friendships at work was the healthy way

Subsections below:
Prefatory note on a forward-looking work-related theme
Changing times on pot remind me of a lost sense of why there was an oblivion around the use of alcohol in my town 35 years ago
Developing not as a party animal
Trying to come up with “what better road there could have been”
A positive conclusion


This entry might seem like a spell of murky old memories packaged importunately for your dubious “benefit,” but actually it has some unexpected relevance in one way, as I work on other material. For one thing, I am mulling how I will start an entry or two on my experience with Prentice Hall Higher Education in 2001 and 2002—and I know some of my readers will find some interest in this, as my earlier entries on Prentice Hall showed greater interest than I expected. (Was it all due to PARCC?)


Prefatory note on a forward-looking work-related theme

One theme that seems to resonate with one aspect of the PH Higher Ed story is the disadvantage you can expect from supervisors (or colleagues) in editorial departments who have no formal education above high school.

Something like this theme also applies to another set of material I am working on, whose implications for my blogs are less clear (at least to you): chapters of the old (1998) manuscript (a memoir shaped like a novel) The Temps, which I am preparing for modern-day use. The Temps story still has some solid relevance in terms of what I would want to say about the publishing world: though the job experience it is about (in 1995-96) is now almost exactly 20 years old, it was such a viscerally affecting experience—in terms of the deep, numerous insults and trials it put me (and others there) through, as well as the distressing problems posed by the psychological bizarreness of at least one temp there—that when I retype and edit the material today, the old emotions I had (often pertaining to defending in very tough terms certain positions I would have had regarding screwy issues then) come back almost as raw and “insatiable” as they were then. And in an abstract way, the story of the female temp “Alison” still holds interest, because it represents a sort of “worst-case scenario” of the implications of classically young-female excess in a publishing context.

One aspect of Alison is that she did not yet have a college education; but some other features of her make her sound like a satirical portrait more than a real person. For instance, though she could affirm that she was just looking out for herself as a worker, when I tried to appeal to her decency to allow others (like myself) the ability to get a permanent job there (i.e., do not smear me in management’s eyes), her idea of “looking out for herself” still included complaining or reporting to management about us other temps—about several of us, and more than once about more than one of us—as if it were part of her job description. So she was someone hypocritical whose corrosive effects on our job prospects—never mind the sheer subjective anxiety she posed—made her an extreme version of the kind of young woman in an editorial office who, under pressure, is a monster of practicing the “zero-sum game” that such people tend to operate in. Combine this with her not yet having a college degree, and you see why—among other reasons—this job was a tough crucible in which to try to get somewhere (beyond it).

(By the way, the same set of companies—while the ownership has changed [more than once]—is one I have done seasonal freelance editorial work for nearly every year from 1999 to this year. But originally getting this work meant my getting over hurdles with the company between 1996 and 1999.) 

So one rule of thumb about “what to look out for in young coworkers at media firms” would be lack of college education. (In the case of PH and the supervisor, the problem was less obvious and less objectively effective than in the Temps case. Actually, I can, offhand, think of four cases of this, three of them having paid diminishing returns over the time of my involvement with them, in good part because of their limited education’s—generally speaking—making them less hearty or resourceful as workers.)

Another desideratum in a young coworker is something that I can only make the formulation I do here in long hindsight, and it is a good premise for the blog entry below. This desideratum is that the person values developing fellowship in terms of being a coworker, instead of in terms of being a “partier.” This may seem obvious, but it’s remarkable—you might think of examples in your own life, if you’re older than, say, 30—how often a young coworker who is more imbued with being a “party animal” than in being a solid professional turns out to be rather prodigious trouble when the chips are down in a work situation. And the fundamental reason has to do with one’s developing “fellowship skills” along the lines of being a solid worker—which I think can be cultivated if students (in college if not also in high school) had jobs outside their schooling’s area of endeavor, in which to develop simple work skills—rather than being, more than anything else, about “knowing how to have a good time,” especially if this “skill area” is centered on substance abuse.

Now to the blog entry (which might seem a little repetitive at times, due to how it was composed)….


Changing times on pot remind me of a lost sense of why there was an oblivion around the use of alcohol in my town 35 years ago

When I see newspaper coverage including a photo of a young person today working earnestly in a marijuana-growing facility that is legal in the few states that allow this, showing no self-consciousness as if there is anything socially untoward about this, I think about how “allowing public exposure of your allegiance to the pot-smoking ethos” used (in the 1970s) to be more of a matter of antisocial (or “subterranean”) culture; and those of us (like me) who didn’t warm to it in the clashing-values days of the 1970s were rather in the wilderness in some ways, in the practical matters of social eddies and the clattery proclamations of where young peers stood, when it came to getting our own preferences honored. (The way this sentence rounded off originally seemed satisfactory, but now it doesn’t seem bad.)

(Also note: I am warm to the idea of medical marijuana for those who are judged by a doctor to need it or whose problem can’t adequately benefit from anything else remotely similar to it. When you consider the epileptic girl in New Jersey whose sad story is put in the state newspaper now and then, the position of those like Chris Christie who think that “Any use of marijuana—even medical—is toying with a ‘gateway drug’” is naïve. After all, there are widely used pharmaceuticals that also have deleterious side effects over long-term use, which side effects can seem like marijuana’s in some respects, and no one wags his or her finger over the propriety of those drugs.)

Here I’m adapting an entry I drafted about two and a half years ago, and had considered fixing in order to post it for some time, and only recently decided to tackle it—but I’m working it differently from how it originally (in 2013) was angled. For one thing, when I talk about my having engaged in drinking, this was not extreme, not like that engaged in by close others I knew. When I give a whiff of regret in the overall tone of this entry, it is more a fastidious type based in part on acknowledging today that I didn’t like drinking at all, rather than a reflection of the quantity (or any habitual dimension) of drinking I’d done.

When I had read in my early-1980s diary in early 2013 (when, in that period, I was doing the Marvin Center series that is mostly on this blog—the first installment is here; the MC was my college’s big “student union” facility), I was reminded of the good, bad, and ugly of my drinking during college. This brings up a number of things worth clarifying: (1) I was never a big “partier” as if I loved doing it, but there was a period from about 1979 to 1985 when I occasionally drank with friends, as a sort of “default” way of “being social”; and (2) even when I got pretty drunk, the whole “scene” was something I didn’t warm to, and when I look back, the whole idea disgusts me all the more—that is, I would especially be staunch if an old friend (from about 30 years ago) said today, “Why don’t we go out drinking, like we did during college”: I would feel that was about as desirable or in good taste as going to a kindergarten with a friend my age and daring each other to eat a garden snail, as if we were six. In the early 1980s I was willing enough to drink, and this (on rare occasion for me) went to excess, but to me today, the whole thing reeks of “total lack of imagination for what might be a good way to have quality time,” though others I was with in those days didn’t dislike it this way.

More relevantly, the idea that the only way an old friend could nowadays have a good time, if we met up again, would be at a local bar—just turns me off. As if it shows total impoverishment regarding what it would mean to honor an old friendship, old times, or whatever. In fact, I haven’t had a friend suggest this for quite some time, and even when I have (in the last 10-15 years or so) been together with an old friend with whom I drank many years before, actually drinking again doesn’t quite coalesce for me, or I do it minimally.

Part of my antipathy toward drinking follows the fact that, in the very late 1970s and early 1980s, I had a few friends (from different circles) who liked to drink, and I willingly drank with them to some extent, in ways that varied as to how regrettable this seems in retrospect (with one circle, it was more regrettable—never mind how). In a way, it was part of being young (late-teens, early-twenties) goofballs, as I think is a “necessary stage of life” that we middle-class Americans in different eras all go through. It also was “the only way to have fun together,” as was the general thinking.

In part, I was not a very sociable person, and so—partly issuing out of my own thinking, and issuing a bit out of others’—the idea was to drink in order to “live it up” (I seem to recall this involved a lot more of a sense of “obligation” on my part than following what I really enjoyed doing). We could also do things like go to movies (drinking sometimes preceded that), or (in the case of one set of friends, and not that this usually involved drinking) playing music (i.e., instruments—we “jammed”…). There was no social club or social activity that did not involve something other than drinking.

The fact that no such thing was around in my county, or opted for, shows the impoverishment of the “kid culture” then. (This all has some of the same banality as the explanation of “peer pressure” that some in their older years will cite as a possible reason for an episode of substance abuse, happening in their younger years or otherwise.) I realize that this same problem—it seems the reason some say “There’s nothing to do around here; that’s why drugs get a foothold”—still dogs young people today in the area (and of course, broadly through the country).

Also, explaining my position today, and as may seem a “wimpy, idiosyncratic” reason in my own case for taking an apparent toughly moral stand on drinking, I actually have been more (unhelpfully) sensitive to alcohol since 1986. (My theory as to why this developed is that I went through a serious internal strain in 1986 based on a very difficult objective passage I was going through regarding my career, and not only did I seem to become more sensitive to alcohol that year, but I started to develop a fear of heights I never had before. As a measure of this latter, when in a summer job in 1983, I could stand near the edge of a roof of a 10-story building without much concern; but after 1986, I could never do that without feeling nervous, and wanting to buttress myself against falling more than might seem realistic. This invites the question, what kind of intense experience did I go through that resulted in these conditions? It’s a long story, and why I developed them, technically and specifically, is hard to say; the before-and-after global phenomena are clear enough.)


Developing not as a party animal

I think the best way to explain my more recent stand on drinking has to do with how I’ve developed as a person. For years, when I was small, through about age 15, I had tendencies to depressive and obsessive-compulsive disorders that manifested themselves fairly clinically and dysfunctionally, and I was generally (in less clinical terms) a bit of a wimp. I was the second-smallest kid in my grade, and got made fun of at times for being a “fag” and so on—this most apt to come from a small set of students who were by fairly common consent bullies. Starting in 10th grade, just as I turned 16 (and as I physically went through puberty), I went through some rather grim emotional changes, and then, amid all else, I was rather un-social for a few years—I had trouble with making small talk, “feeling myself” around others, and so on. At the same time, I focused on academics as my only route to any sort of worthwhile adult life (which was quite realistic).

So from about sophomore year in high school to graduation from college, about 1977-84, I was a rather singlemindedly hard-working student, while feeling the need (both from others’ comments and from my own tortured self-criticism) to “be more social.” As it turned out, “being social” in my “exurban” community in Vernon Township, N.J., usually meant “partying”—though I was always amid a particular social group (not a tightly associating one) that was considered a nerdy type, and not among the fairly large group (not a tight clique) of “potheads” or “heads” at our school, as they were commonly called.

Once I got to college, there was a real strong expectation from peers that one should drink as part of socializing, and in that milieu, that meant going to bars (if anyone from those days at GW remembers, there were bars in D.C. called The Exchange, Abbey Road, the 21st Amendment, and a few others I can’t remember that were popular among GW dorm residents).

There were also different mutually exclusive circles of friends with whom I drank from about 1980 through about 1982: mostly dorm-mates at GW (and that mostly in freshman year), and (when I was home on summer vacation in New Jersey) a small clique of friends in Vernon, who were younger than I. Then, in 1983, the first year I spent summer in Washington, D.C., I tended to drink with a Ron Diaz, who was my roommate that summer—he had also been one of my dorm mates during junior year (1982-83). He was finishing up at the business school at GW; I remember typing one of more of his papers for him. It is a few accounts of the ridiculous drinking situations the two of us got into, which I find in the early-1980s diary, that (in 2013) reminded me of my drinking years enough to want to clarify something about them, while also having rather irritable thoughts, and a sense of staunch “position-taking,” about them.


Trying to come up with “what better road there could have been”

All this is summary and rough about whom I drank with and when. And mind you, I was no more a classic partier at college than I had been at high school. (In fact, at high school, which for me was 1976-80, partying was so prevalent that I think among the top four students—I ended up number four—I know I drank now and then, and I’m sure one or more of the others among the top three did—but that was pretty self-restrained compared to what went on among others, especially those who were not serious students, at the high school. I’m not sure if anyone in my high school class completely refrained from any drinking. Marijuana is another story—but even there, I think of the top four in my class, maybe two of them never tried pot, but I’m just guessing. As for my use of it, it was so limited (and, if I recall, it was only in 1979) that, by late-1970s standards, it was like not doing it at all. (Just like Chris Christie taking a position against contraception even though he admits he’s used a non-rhythm method a bit himself [OK, we’re not calling him hypocritical].)

Anyway, when I look back from my late forties and up to age 53 (this originally said “51” when I first drafted this; the retrospective view has a somewhat different mood now), and think about the long roads I’ve traveling career-wise, life-experiences-wise, personal-growth (and –alteration)-wise, I wonder if there couldn’t have been a better way to “have quality time with peers I could really identify with” than to drink—especially when there were the excessive episodes that occurred. (One episode, in late 1981, when I was with my younger friends in Vernon, involved my drinking so much brandy that I couldn’t stand up, and one of them drove me home—and he didn’t have a driver’s license! Don’t ask….)

I wonder, If my family had been brought up with more traditional religious life—such as going to church regularly, etc.—would that have staved off any phase of drinking I (or a relative, far worse) went through? Could there have been a sort of social club I could have been in (that could have emotionally supplanted the “need” to drink, on others’ parts if not mine), apart from what was offered at school?

About the only thing I did that came close to this was my creative writing, but this was largely something I did in my privacy, not something I shared with friends.

It’s really hard to say. One of the big lessons that I’ve learned, and that I find others learning—and it is actually one important theme of my writing overall—is that you get what succor, “spiritual help,” inspiration, etc., from whatever sources are available as you grow up—at whatever level, or however incomplete, they are. If they’re insufficient for you, that’s the breaks—and maybe you make up for their loss with character-building developments in your life later.

Is there a better way to look at having gone through “a phase of the accidental, deficient fellowship offered by drinking and drinking buddies” than with a kind of regret, lamenting, or retrospective indignation (if this is exactly what I’m exercising)? I don’t know.


A positive conclusion

What seemed to work for me as the 1980s started and went on was getting opportunities to advance my career, and these came either by hard work (I can see something in the pragmatically-minded notion—I wish I could recall who originated it—that the harder you work, the luckier you get) or by happening upon opportunities simply because they were among a smorgasbord of these offered by some larger community you were in. In this regard, GW offered me a lot.

In particular, the Marvin Center, where I worked for nearly all of my college years (and for a year-plus afterward), turned out to be a very good help, because not only did it give me the structure and discipline of a work schedule—and income—but I had learning experiences there from the types of colorful people and situations you encountered there. (And this work didn’t even have to be in a field I expected to be in all my life.)

And more generally, I learned the value of developing professionalism, which latter doesn’t mean just developing petty skills like getting to work on time and writing coherent night’s-end reports, but developing a voice in a community of workers that helps you shape, if not the philosophy of some of what is done there, then at least part of the culture for how problems are regarded and how you can contribute to maybe some of them being solved.

Though the MC would turn out to have a tendency not to resolve some of its intransigent problems, which is part of the reason I left, there were other ways in which your voice on this sort of thing could be accommodated. In this regard, the media world, in which I was ensconced from 1990 through about 2010 (as far as in-office work goes), seems less receptive to hearing your complaints about intransigent problems and is more about having you shoulder the same old burden until your indignant noise about the problems tapers off because you leave, or the work project ends.

This might seem that, by about 1985, the only source of fellowship, of a type that would promote building of adult skills, that I grew to have was tied to work (not always career-aligned, which is healthy), but that is pretty true, though (especially in 1984-85, as far as peer relations went) I also engaged in creative activity that was centrally tied to partnering with someone, such as in the form of writing songs with a housemate of mine from that time.

Once I returned to New Jersey in 1986, my life entered a more peculiarly isolated phase, at least isolated from age peers, and my “socializing” would largely mean going to movies, whether with someone else or alone. (There was a band of a mixed set of “peers” I hung out with in 1989 and 1990.) There would be plenty of people I might engage in everyday talk of various kinds with, but these were usually at workplaces, in stores or the like, or with friends I might run into at random and rare times.

Of course, in my post-1990 editorial-work years, I met new work friends, several of whom are now LinkedIn connections. But also the way these people are “friends” is, obviously, different from how your peers are when you’re in your school years.


Just a few notes. Get back to work!

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Movie break: A postwar noir/thriller that’s become a wide-audience classic: The Third Man (1949)

A sort of chocolate-tinged tough-history story for adults, with a buffered glimpse of fascism and bittersweet romance

Subsections below:
Getting my hands on what was once a hugely popular film
As lots of us might date ourselves regarding how we became familiar with The Third Man
The film aimed to fit a developed tradition and social good
Certain staples of noir shape the story, but to its continuing interest today
Reed worked brutally hard, probably a sine qua non to the film’s achievement
A set of character actors adds essential flavor


With the Syrian-and-other-country refugee crisis in Europe right now, it’s said in news reports that it’s the biggest refugee phenomenon in Europe since World War II. But there are some key differences; most notably, in the 1940s, in the era of what was called “displaced persons,” part of the problem was the heartbreak posed by the extreme war that had taken place in the European lands as to result in people’s being refugees there, which isn’t the case now, with the refugees coming from outside Europe, from relatively distant foreign countries (and from more-different cultures from Europe today than existed between European ones in the 1940s). So the film at hand both may seem a bit relevant as to mood, and not so…


Getting my hands on what was once a hugely popular film

It was a little strange having a bit of trouble getting hold of a definitive DVD of this film, considering that, as a DVD commenter for The Criterion Collection version of it says in some way, it was “the Sound of Music of its day [the early 1950s]”—meaning, immensely popular. (If this isn’t said on the DVD, Orson Welles says it in the Leaming biography, to be referenced below, on p. 363. But the analogy isn’t a stretch.)

While I got up to my neck in working on a review of Mr. Arkadin—which may have made more than a few of my readers say, “Why bother about this one?”—I’ve seen enough references within the orbit of that film to The Third Man (1949) that I ended up looking at it. (And actually, my subhead for one entry on Mr. Arkadin, including “…postulates a dark personage behind machinations in mottled postwar Europe,” seems to fit The Third Man better—but that’s because Arkadin, by Welles’ very conscious intention, assumed the set of recent-history-and-thriller premises that Third Man was built on—which may be why that film struck such a chord that it became popular worldwide, and now has an iconic status similar to that of Casablanca [1942].)

And after trying to get The Third Man in a not-long-ago prepared Criterion Collection edition—which I thought should have a lot of tasty extras—I was given, by the New York State library network I devotedly get DVDs from, a single-disc, Korean-market DVD (everything—soundtrack, and most words on the cover—was in English, except a few bits on the cover), which had no extras. I watched it about one and a half times, then (per the due date) I had to bring it back. Then I got and viewed the Criterion Collection version, which has two discs that include extras. Hence, when I talk about what’s on the DVD hereafter, I mean the Criterion version, which also includes a booklet.

(The extras include two docs—one 90-minute piece in English [first shown at Cannes in 2005] that explains the making of the film, which is very interesting if you’re into that sort of thing; the other doc, about 30 minutes, is an Austrian-made, German-language thing from some years ago—with English subtitles—that looks at the film in part for how it meshed with Austrian cultural/PR interests in ~1949, and how aspects of the film look today. It’s basically respectful of the film, and somewhat quaint in its European way.)

##

This film is classified as noir (to judge from its Wikipedia article, anyway), but it deviates from the formula, most notably in that it really doesn’t have a femme fatale or some other way that the protagonist is a dupe who gets roped into a horrible, domino-effect downfall situation by a simple (if “tragic-flaw-type”) mistaken choice. In some ways, it seems like a western with some fairly clear delineation between the good guys and bad guys (and its main hero, Holly Martins, is a writer of pulp western novels), though the overall atmosphere and story-“fact” conditions are the tattered state in which things are (infrastructure, social and economic conditions) in Europe post-WW II, and the moral ambiguity of some local Austrians who are allied with a character (Harry Lime) who turns out to be a more dastardly number than either his former best friend in America (Holly) or his European love in Austria had known.

British novelist Graham Greene, who was long a respected man of letters but who might arguably be said to have occupied a niche between popular-type books and good literature (he authored, among other things, what some have said to be his best work, The Power and the Glory, and  the Vietnam-related novel The Quiet American). His Wikipedia article points out the extent to which he was a Catholic novelist, especially in his more serious work, while he wasn’t above doing more popularly oriented thrillers at times. He developed the start of the Third Man story of this film (he first floated it to the film producer Alexander Korda, who was Hungarian-born and Britain-based, and who was key to this film). The story was then shaped—in a movie-development way that seems rather modern—by the input of American producer David O. Selznick and British director/producer Carol Reed. In the film titles, Reed is listed as director and producer, while Selznick’s and Korda’s developmental roles aren’t specified.

Greene, over the years, also worked with Reed on the films The Fallen Idol (1948), writing the screenplay based on his story (which, to my ignorant look at Maltin’s guide, seems similar to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt [1943]), and on the later satire Our Man in Havana (1960), with Greene adapting his novel to the screen. Thus, for The Third Man, he was good for writing a screenplay that could conform with adult concerns of doubt or guilt, malfeasance in the world, and romantic relationships compromised by same (and it turns out, from one DVD extra, that the character of Harry Lime, who adulterated penicillin in his black-market work—to the detriment of patients—was based on a real person in Austria who did the same thing).

In a way, The Third Man, which seems like very smartly made semi-pulp, not only is unsurprising for being adapted by Greene to a novella after the film was made, but this history allows us to see how Orson Welles took the approach a step further, to making a Harry Lime–like story like Mr. Arkadin (1955-56, ’62), which, all that film’s flaws aside, pushed the trope of the European black marketer (and the mysteries he spurred) further toward pulp. It’s ironic to consider how this genre approach suited audiences in the 1950s, who were dealing with the recovery from the trauma of the war, while in much more recent years, genre work making it to the big screen much more often aims for sci-fi and fantasy tropes than the likes of addressing the dark figures or historical phenomena that made a mess of things mid-20th-century.

By the way, the British version of the film—which has Carol Reed doing spoken narration at the start, rather than actor Joseph Cotten, who did the preface narration in the American version—is the only one available on DVD today. The American version, under the hand of producer Selznick, had some bits cut and some story elements that added darkness/ambiguity to the mix washed away. But clearly the genuine version of this story is the pre-Selznick British version.


As lots of us might date ourselves regarding how we became familiar with The Third Man

I’ve seen The Third Man before, a few times (the first time may have been on Turner Classic Movies). I admit it took me years to get acquainted with it, then come to really like it. Its excellence is brought into relief after I’ve (unexpectedly) done graduate-school-type work on Mr. Arkadin, which (as to certain story premises and aimed-for style) you can’t really understand (and, also, as to why it was made) unless you understand the basics of The Third Man (End note 1). And I am pleased to say that I am won over to The Third Man the more I view it, which I don’t think I can say about Casablanca, which was striking to me for its triteness when I first saw the whole thing within the past two or so years.

Another preliminary note to make about The Third Man is that its theme music, played on the zither on the film by Anton Karas, was so popular (and that for well over a decade; it sold some 40 million records, according to a bit on the DVD), that a version called “The Third Man Theme” was covered by the pop group Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass on one of their 1960s albums—and as you know, Alpert and his band did Mexican-styled, trumpet-featuring pop. So while the Karas music was famously played on a zither, Herb Alpert’s group did it with acoustic guitar (among other instruments, including maybe mandolins), which isn’t a stretch in terms of adaptation, because the zither looks, surprisingly, half like a guitar neck and half like a small harp, the two joined almost like a bizarre “mashup.” The instrument is laid on a table, and played with two hands—one hand (for right-handed people, the left hand) playing the rhythm/bass on the harp-like strings, and the other (the right hand) on the guitar neck playing the melody. (This is why someone can play “The Third Man Theme” on the piano—the playing on a mechanical level is fairly similar.)

My family had several of Herb Alpert’s albums in the 1960s, and we had them, to listen to, at least into the 1970s; for a spell, that music was more familiar to me, during our little 1960-70s lives, than The Beatles’ was. (I only started gluttonously getting into Beatles music in 1976, when I was 14 going on 15, and since then, they’ve been my favorite pop/rock band, cultural dinosaur that I am.) And when I hear the zither music on this film, I am reminded more of the Alpert version, in a way (i.e., I “interpret it for myself” in that style)…or maybe I should say, when I think of this music in my head (it sticks in there like the most infectious hook-laden pop), I think of it being “Hispanic,” or like mariachi music like the type Alpert specialized in. Yet I’m sure the people who snapped it up in the 1950s saw it as “Mitteleuropean”—central-European folk stuff that, really, is what it was.

This is one way of saying that The Third Man is an example of how the best pop art bridges—with our enjoying something in a sort of “shared sensibility”—not only different subgroups, but across decades or even longer. Another measure of this is that one character actor in the film, Hedwig Bleibtreu (there’s a Germanic name for you)—who plays the landlady in Anna’s apartment house complaining in German about the way the police invade buildings like hers—was born in apparently 1868; she is noted on the DVD by perhaps Carol Reed as having been 82 when the film was made. That means (similar to Rosemary’s Baby [1968] being a film still enjoyed today, though two of its stars were born before 1900) The Third Man features an Austrian actress who was born just a few years after the guns of the U.S. Civil War had cooled. That’s bridging the centuries for you.


The film aimed to fit a developed tradition and social good

In many ways, The Third Man seems about as iconic in its trend-following and trend-setting style, as does Casablanca and its like: it’s like an old standard that may seem charmingly “right in every way” to some, and respectable enough but maybe strikingly trite to others. Apparently there were rumors or suggestions in past years that Orson Welles had a hand in directing it (though Carol Reed basically has his remaining reputation based on The Third Man more than on the numerous others films he did over decades [End note 2]). (Welles says in an interview [done in the late ’70s, it seems] that is sampled on the Third Man DVD, that—as seems the truth—he didn’t help Reed direct his ferris-wheel scene, but the speech he gives in the ferris-wheel gondola, he basically wrote himself. [End note 3])

The striking visual style

There is the standard noir-type photography, fine use of black-and-white that got cinematographer Australian-born Robert Krasker an Oscar. (The film as a whole also won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for film year 1949.) Vienna, both intact and in war-ruined aspects, is so much key to how this film looks, especially at night, that it is considered by some to be another notable character in the film. Most strikingly, the film uses a slanted approach to many of the shots, which some have thought Welles originated. (Actually, Welles didn’t make a trademark use of this sort of slanting until his Mr. Arkadin, which of course he made to capitalize on what, by the early 1950s, had become a Harry Lime franchise.)

The probable truth about the visual look is that Reed and his executive associates (perhaps Krasker and also producer Korda [?]) wanted the film to fit squarely (at least visually) with the noir tradition that had developed in the U.S. in the 1940s. Actually, to hear it from the 90-minute making-of piece on the DVD (as well as another, 30-minute, German-language Austrian piece), the film was made in a very earnest, workmanlike way to serve some noble ends: to foment some goodwill among different European nationalities in the wake of the war. In the process, this project was the first British film to include location work in a foreign country (and ended up becoming regarded possibly the greatest British film ever made).

The Austrian linchpin

To get help from Austria, there was key support coming from a film executive in Austria, Karl Hartl, who ran Sascha Films and who was the only (or among the only) such executives in Austria who was cleared of damning collaboration with the Nazis (both the U.S. and the Soviets signed off on him, in presumably the last years that the U.S. and the Soviets were still operating as allies). Hartl’s studios would provide some facility support for Reed’s film, which was officially being made by London Films, headed by producer Korda. (End note 4)

Also in the mix was the British government, which partly financed the film. Of course, as a historical matter, Vienna, similarly to Berlin, was occupied by the four Allied powers in 1948—Britain, France, the U.S., and the U.S.S.R. Some formal activities of this somewhat cumbersome alliance are glimpsed duly (and early) in the film, giving it a newsreel effect.

The slightly illusory Welles angle

Today, this film’s interest seems often to be partly couched in terms of it being associated with Orson Welles, which is a little unfair, as Welles was not majorly responsible for its success in 1949 or later. But in terms of people’s thumbnail ways of classifying it—aside from the fact that Welles’ role as Harry Lime was a smallish but important component—Welles’ qualities as an artist manage to dog this film. But Peter Bogdanovich, who probably due to the Welles connection turns up in an intro piece on this DVD, comments that while Welles obviously didn’t have any directing role here, the look of The Third Man wouldn’t have existed were it not for Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), The Stranger (1946), and The Lady from Shanghai (1948).

Bogdanovich also considers this film—and this could well not be hyperbole—as one of the best, if not the best, non-auteur films ever made (which is partly to say that it almost has an “auteur-made” quality about it). Of course, other practitioners of the noir genre (with that genre’s staples like venetian blinds shaping the way light looks in a room, etc.) were turning out trend-setting work, like Billy Wilder (with Double Indemnity [1944]). (Welles, by the way, in agreeing to appear in this film—and engaging in some brinksmanship to up his fee—did this to raise money for his next film project in Europe, Othello [Barbara Leaming, Orson Welles: A Biography (Viking, 1985), p. 362; some details are also on the DVD].)

The American angle extended to stars

In view of all this, you could say that, on the esthetic level, Reed with this film was merely fitting squarely, and in workmanlike way, with a well-established genre of the time. Further, there was an intent to craft it in as much of an American-looking way as possible, including in who starred in it (this while key to its starting was input from an American producer, David O. Selznick). Selznick would help fund the project; but, as a historian named Charles Drazin says in the DVD package, by May 1948, a deal was struck whereby London Films (headed by Korda) and Reed would make the film, while Selznick would extend some production money, along with some American stars (he especially wanted Joseph Cotten for the Holly Martins role and Alida Valli for the Anna Schmidt role)—in return for distribution rights in the U.S. Selznick, of course, ended up editing the American version of the film his own way for release in the U.S. with its more innocent-minded audience.

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Thus what in some formative phase was the film’s being a British goodwill gesture to make a life-affirming-enough story, with a relatively small “production scope,” and the story shaped by dire conditions in Europe (with crucial production aid from an Austrian filmmaker), and with the whole thing meant to put noir features onto a fairly workmanlike production—became a creative process more conducive to an American major release, which would furthermore be a worldwide hit. This combination of somewhat mismatched factors may be why Bogdanovich calls the film, in the best light, a “happy accident.” And more than one DVD commenter notes in some fashion that the resulting film seems a bigger work than what Reed would later do, in a more intended ostentatious production, that would actually be less successful, such as the award-winning Oliver!

In the formative stages, Selznick apparently wasn’t keen on Welles being in the Harry Lime role (he felt Welles would hurt the box-office prospects), but Reed was in favor of Welles, and Reed won the day on this. (Interestingly, both Greene and Reed would remark years later on Selznick being an “overbearing” and “philistine” film mogul, according to an essay by Drazin in the DVD-package booklet. But Selznick also contributed to the story development in a way that shapes how we remember the film, including in how it doesn’t have a happy ending: Greene’s original idea was to have Anna and Holly be a couple at the end, which is not what happens in the finished film.)


Certain staples of noir shape the story, but to its continuing interest today

In some ways (though these are limited ways, as I’ve suggested), the film seems so standard a type of noir that it might induce yawns in the more jaded. Anna Schmidt (Valli) is the newly melancholy former lover of Harry Lime, who at first isn’t aware of how dastardly a racketeer Harry was. Her fealty to Harry is such that when she learns of his crimes, she still harbors an attachment to him. (Valli is an Italian-style surname—it was actually the actress’s stage name; she was born at least partly of Austrian stock, and even by today’s standards, in this film, looks quite attractive, rather like an aunt of today’s Jennifer Lawrence [End note 5].)

Holly Martins (Cotten) is the former friend-in-youth of Harry from America, and in his American earnestness he tries to find out the truth about Harry, as the newly delivered story that he was killed by a traffic accident starts to unravel fairly quickly. Thus both Holly and Anna have an idealistic sort of attachment to the absent Harry (while they develop a mild attachment to each other) that gives them an impulsion to do something more to preserve Harry’s interests, so to speak, amid the postwar-occupied semi-ruins of magnificent Vienna, and while various Viennese whom Holly meets are multiple-agenda about Harry (Harry is still alive, for one reason), in ways that leave us in suspense about how the story will unfold.

The staple of a sort of love triangle, and a mystery amid excellent black-and-white shots of an old-Europe city, probing one’s way along through night and doubt/un-full-knowledge—all may seem almost too-trite yet still makes it worth watching—almost like a best example of what Hitchcock, Welles (when more straightforward), and others could do at their best: a story that might seem shallow in some ways but is emotionally rich and suspense-making in others.

This goes along with how the film moves along rather quickly, with every shot seemingly storyboarded to move the story along at each step: shots often convey an emotionally rich and/or intriguing development, making The Third Man seemingly one of the best-constructed films of its era. If you’re seeing it for the first time, you may be confused by it at times; but see it a second or third time, and you may be quite pleased how so much is telescoped into shots in an efficient yet tasteful manner. By the film’s end, you may feel it was longer than it is.


Reed worked brutally hard, probably a sine qua non to the film’s achievement

Reed may not have been a conscious artist; he seems to have impressed people with being a warm-hearted sort, and various shots and other hints suggest he was a solid example of British good sense and competence. But the materials he had for this film—a tight story well-made by Greene, good actors who could articulate their impressive characters well (even the Viennese character actors are memorable), photography that is well executed (e.g., with water sprayed on cobblestone streets making for fine shots)—all combined, in a well-edited mix, to make for a film that still attracts us today, more than 60 years after it was made.

Reed also seems to have done a sort of 1970s-style crazyman thing in directing: due to the fact that (with production starting in Vienna in October 1948) the coming winter meant he had to speed up getting finished footage, he had three crews (or “units”; each with its own photography director, though Krasker was in charge during the night street scenes) for what was more or less three “shifts” of work (day, evening, and “graveyard shift”). So Reed took benzedrine (a new drug at the time) in order to be awake and present for all shifts of production, which in Vienna went on until roughly late December. (He was lucky he didn’t make himself sick with this.)

Further production work (presumably with Reed operating more moderately health-wise) was done at Shepperton Studios in England, in early 1949 (in which period Welles was more exclusively employed for a time), with film editing starting in April. (By the end of May, after Reed had played some samples of his zither tunes during rough assemblages he watched on Wednesdays during the Shepperton phase of production, Anton Karas was brought to London to more deliberately perform music to accompany the film; he couldn’t read or write sheet music, so he performed and apparently “created music on the spot” while watching the film on a movieola.)

Reed’s use of benzedrine seems to have been not quite as bad as what producer Selznick reportedly routinely did in his life, which (from what I could gather from remarks in a DVD extra by who I think is his nephew) he took for six days a week, only catching up on sleep (for 20-odd hours) on Sundays. He also was a chain-smoker (and routinely had women taking dictation in various situations); this apparently contributed to his seeming overbearing to the likes of Greene and Reed. Selznick was half-manic with his drug-influenced, “Type A” way of living his life. (A remark is made on the DVD, which accords with others, that Selznick was an interfering kind of producer, while Alexander Korda would step in to offer input just when it was needed.)


A set of character actors adds essential flavor

Actors in this film depict vivid characters that are types without being too corny:

* Trevor Howard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Howard) as Major Calloway, the locally assigned Brit in command of Holly’s situation—quick with dry or wry comments, but not cold-hearted;

* Bernard Lee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lee) as Sergeant Paine, something of a “good cop” to Calloway, more simpatico—and he’s read Holly’s books, so he speaks to him as a fan;

* Wilfrid Hyde-White (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfrid_Hyde-White) as British Council representative Crabbin—a sort of focus of comedy; he lines up Holly to, at a thoroughly unexpected time, give a public-educational lecture, which saves his hide at a crucial juncture (otherwise Crabbin is a bit of a clown, and Greene is said on the DVD to have always depicted such British Council types in his work in a negative light, having had an experience with one that was not terribly unlike Holly’s);

* Erich Ponto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Ponto) as Dr. Winkel—a Germanic type (the actor is ethnic German) and, as an ally of Harry Lime’s, he’s somewhat ambiguous, but not a coldhearted “ve haff vays of makingk you tdalk” kind of Germanic type;

* Ernst Deutsch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Deutsch), an Austrian, as Baron Kurtz, another ally of Lime’s and somewhat similar in the ambiguity department to Dr. Winkel, but an amalgam of, in appearance, a sort of “Euro-creep” and an unctuously appealing sort; with his little pet dog he seems both exotic and ambiguous as to trustworthiness;

* Siegried Breuer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Breuer) as Popescu, said to be a Romanian and another ally of Lime’s;

* Paul Horbiger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_H%C3%B6rbiger) as Karl, the porter; Horbiger was a favorite actor in Austria at the time, it seems, and he cuts an interesting figure in his limited but colorful role here (and he had to utter his English lines without being able to speak English fluently, it is said on the DVD);

* Hedwig Bleibtreu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedwig_Bleibtreu)—discussed near the start of this entry;

* Herbert Halbik (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0354752/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t32) as the little kid with the ball, who later mistakenly, innocently, suggests Holly was involved in the murder of Karl the porter. This kid is both cute and annoying; nicely, the actor about 55 years later is shown on the 2005 90-minute doc, at the time in a wheelchair but giving a bemused comment related to the film. As a middle-aged man he has basically the same round head as the little kid, though otherwise you wouldn’t recognize him.

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End note 1.  There is something amusing that happened in about 1953, among the interesting “backstory” bits noted in Barbara Leaming’s bio of Orson Welles (Viking, 1985, pp. 390-91): when Welles lined up actor Robert Arden to have the lead role in his Mr. Arkadin, he extricated Arden from the stage role he had at the time (in a version of Guys and Dolls done in Britain) with seemingly-too-unlikely, but readily-coming help from Carol Reed. Reed contacted Arden with the news that he was now available for Welles after Welles had told Arden—in a phone call in a break in the middle of Arden’s performing in the show—that his, Welles’, “London representative” would be in touch with him. Arden inferred that Welles must have requested of Reed that he get Arden freed from the stage show for Welles, which Reed was then able to do.

End note 2. Reed also directed Odd Man Out (1947), which gets mentioned along with The Fallen Idol as among his early successes. He also, 20 years later, directed the musical Oliver! (1968), a take on the Dickens novel Oliver Twist (the film had the popular song “Consider Yourself”); and his stepdaughter Tracy Reed plays the only female—a secretary to General Buck Turgidson, indoor-sunbathing—depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964). There’s your trivia fix for the day.

End note 3. Welles’ speech includes the remarks ending with his saying (in whatever specific words) that, in the history of Italy, the Borgias did all their violence but ended up with the country’s producing Michelangelo, etc., while Switzerland, for all its peace and democracy, produced all of the cuckoo clock. In this way, Welles summed up the fascism that was definitive of what the character of Harry Lime had turned into; this was the only material in The Third Man not written by Greene, and this is the verbiage people most remember of the film today. (Also, this theme seems to foreshadow a thematic point that Welles would do more floridly, arguably more powerfully, and not always successfully, in Mr. Arkadin.)

End note 4. It was Hartl, throwing a party for the film’s executives, who furnished a zither player, Anton Karas, whose music so appealed to the party that he ended up doing the film’s soundtrack, to his enormous record-selling success—and to our still having the music in our heads almost 70 years later.

End note 5. The DVD package has a remark where her birth surname is given as Von Altenburger, or something like that; but the Wikipedia article on her gives her full birth name as Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein u. Frauenberg.