Next Lobotomy Room Film Club ... Desire (1936) on 15 February 2024

“Marlene Dietrich, with her pencil-line arched eyebrows, as the most elegantly amusing international jewel thief ever. She steals a pearl necklace in Paris and speeds toward Spain; on her way she has a series of encounters with Gary Cooper, a motor engineer from Detroit who is on holiday. Produced by Ernst Lubitsch, for Paramount, and directed by Frank Borzage, this is a polished light comedy in the "continental" style - a sophisticated romantic trifle, with Dietrich more chic and modern than in her von Sternberg pictures. When she eyes Cooper, she's so captivating, you almost feel sorry for him; there's an image of her standing against French doors that is simply peerlessly sexy. But you can also see why this European sophisticate longs for the American innocent. Cooper is a bit coy and rambunctious in his Americanness but wearing narrow-tailored suits and with his hair sleek he's the ideal Art Deco hero. And he's great when he leans close to Dietrich and says, dreamily, "All I know about you is you stole my car and I'm insane about you." When he's being threatened by her crooked associate (John Halliday), who remarks, tauntingly, "One mustn't underestimate America - it's a big country," he bends forward and says, "Six foot three."”

/ Pauline Kael’s review of Desire (1936) /

Considering the February film club almost coincides with Valentine’s Day and to prove that even Lobotomy Room can occasionally raise the tone, on 15 February we whisk you away to The Spanish Riviera for sumptuous 1936 romantic screwball comedy Desire! Gary Cooper stars as Tom Bradley, a naïve American automotive engineer who becomes entangled with Marlene Dietrich’s enigmatic Madeleine Beaupré – described by Pauline Kael as “the most elegantly amusing jewel thief ever.” Directed by Frank Borzage, with lavish costumes by Travis Banton and songs by Frederick Hollander (who wrote all of Dietrich’s best musical numbers – including “Falling in Love Again”) and featuring the two leads at the height of their considerable beauty, Desire is an Art Deco gem of a movie! Join us to wallow in sheer glamour over cocktails in the splendour of Fontaine’s in Dalston.

Lobotomy Room is the FREE monthly film club devoted to cinematic perversity! Third Thursday night of every month downstairs at Fontaine’s cocktail lounge in Dalston. Numbers are limited, so reserving in advance via Fontaine’s website is essential. Alternatively, phone 07718000546 or email bookings@fontaines.bar. The film starts at 8:30 pm. Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8:00 pm. To ensure everyone is seated and cocktails are ordered on time, please arrive by 8:15 pm at the latest. Facebook event page.

Some fun facts about Desire: it was originally meant to be directed by Ernst Lubitsch – and entitled The Pearl Necklace! Marlene Dietrich stars as a glamorous and amoral jewel thief who - due to wacky screwball hijinks - becomes entangled with unworldly vacationing American-in-Paris automobile engineer Gary Cooper. Desire reunites Dietrich and Cooper for the first time since their triumphant pairing in Morocco in 1930 (which was Dietrich's Hollywood debut). As Dietrich’s definitive biographer Steven Bach asserts, “Cooper was not just her first American leading man, but her best.” Decide for yourself on 15 February! 

/ Below: find someone who looks at you with the same delight as Marlene Dietrich contemplating these pearls! /

Trailer:

Reflections on ... Arlene Dahl (11 August 1925 – 29 November 2021)

 / Coiffeur-to-the-stars George Masters styling Arlene Dahl’s hair poolside in 1961 /

Farewell to Arlene Dahl (11 August 1925 – 29 November 2021). The star of stage, screen and television, beauty advice columnist, astrologist, authoress of fifteen books, surprisingly durable glamour queen and kitsch icon (and one of the last survivors of Golden Age Hollywood) has died aged 96.

/ Glamour shot of Arlene Dahl featured in May 1957 issue of Modern Screen magazine via /  

Renowned for her flaming red hair and trademark beauty spot, Dahl was routinely cited as “one of the most beautiful women in the world” in the fifties. Most of her movie roles were decorative, but the lurid film noir Slightly Scarlet (1956) is genuinely great, and I need to properly re-visit Wicked as They Come (1956). (Both of these are viewable on YouTube last time I checked). Like many an aging star, in the seventies and eighties Dahl cropped-up as a celebrity guest star on TV shows like Love Boat and Fantasy Island and then the soap opera One Life to Live.

/ Dahl with Rhonda Fleming in Slightly Scarlet (1956) / 

In addition to acting, Dahl diversified into journalism (writing the newspaper column “Let’s Be Beautiful”) and business (as an entrepreneur, she launched Arlene Dahl Enterprises, marketing her own range of cosmetics, negligées and perfume. In the early seventies she hawked wigs for Sears!).

Dahl married six times. Her former husbands included screen Tarzan Lex Barker and suave Argentinian actor Fernando Lamas (Their son Lorenzo Lamas starred in 1980s soap opera Falcon Crest). She also had a fling with John F Kennedy in the forties.

Her most noteworthy literary effort - Always Ask a Man: Arlene Dahl’s Key to Femininity (1965) - rivals Joan Crawford’s 1971 volume My Way of Life as a camp sacred text. Let’s charitably say Dahl’s tips are “of their time.” “It’s a man’s world!” she preaches. “Don’t fight it – the key to happiness and success is femininity! You may be healthy, attractive, intelligent, witty, athletic, personable and rich but it just isn’t enough – for that man – if you’re not feminine!”

At Home with Zsa Zsa Gabor

At home with Zsa Zsa Gabor in 1967 in her palatial Bel Air mansion! For aficionados of kitsch, this represents a goldmine and a fascinating oddity - 28 minutes and 20 seconds of pure bliss!

The TV show Good Company was apparently some kind of atomic-era variation of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or MTV Cribs with celebrities inviting you behind the security gates into their private inner sanctums. It begins with the Hungarian glamourpuss, famous-for-being famous movie diva, glorified courtesan and camp icon addressing the viewer directly (“Hello, darlings!”) from her bubble bath with soap suds up to her décolletage. Her décor is spectacular: check out the golden cherubs festooning the bathtub – a testament to her baroque / rococo taste. While waiting for Zsa Zsa to dress, host F. Lee Baily interrogates her queen-y gay male private secretary Karl. Is it a difficult job? Karl breaks into a sweat, attempting tactful diplomacy. “I can’t say it’s not difficult,” he stammers. “I guess it is. She’s very complex.” Read between the lines: she’s a temperamental nightmare! Karl backpedals, adding, “She really is this beautiful, this chic, this exciting, this witty, this unpredictable!” Phew!

/ Zsa Zsa Gabor’s ultra-glamorous passport, issued in 1966: I love that her passport photo is a beautifully lit and re-touched soft-focus Hollywood portrait and that she’s clearly doctored her birth date with a pen (which in theory should make the document invalid!). For the record, Gabor was apparently born in 1917! /

/ If this blue gown isn't the actual ensemble Zsa Zsa wears in this episode of Good Company, it's an awfully good facsimile! /

Post-bubble bath, fragrant chatelaine Zsa Zsa sweeps down the staircase and joins them. She’s donned a powder-blue, fur-trimmed floor-length muumuu and bouffant ringleted wiglet for the interview that Lady Bunny herself might covet. Zsa Zsa graciously takes Baily for a tour of her ostentatious nouveau riche home. Her closest neighbor, we learn, is Nancy Sinatra! We see the swimming pool, the Steinway gold grand piano (the one borrowed later for the 2013 Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra) covered with family photos, Zsa Zsa’s ultra-flattering idealized portrait above the fireplace, her collection of original Renoirs and various objets d’art and antiques.

/ This is the portrait of Zsa Zsa with her young daughter Francesca above the mantelpiece she contemplates with Baily /

Things turn seriously interesting and awkward when Zsa Zsa’s 18-year old aspiring actress daughter Francesca joins them. Dressed like a matronly socialite and looking like an escapee from Valley of the Dolls, the ultra-poised Francesca is one world-weary teenager.  Baily asks Francesca some outrageously intrusive, lecherous and tactless questions like if she’s “going steady” and what age of men she’s attracted to. “Between 25 and infinity,” she snarls. Zsa Zsa think Francesca says, “Between 25 and 70” and admits she doesn’t understand what “infinity” means. When Francesca leaves the room, Baily complements Zsa Zsa on how well-bred she is. “It’s not “groovy” to be polite nowadays,” Zsa Zsa laments. Postcript: the troubled Francesca’s acting career never took off and she never managed to carve a satisfying niche for herself. Later Francesca would repeatedly clash with Zsa Zsa’s ninth and final husband (the parasitic gold-digging ersatz “Prince” Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt) and she pre-deceased her mother, dying in 2015. (Wracked with ill health and dementia by then, Zsa Zsa herself died in 2016 without ever having been informed of her daughter’s death).

/ Zsa Zsa's bed - an exact replica of  Empress Joséphine’s. apparently /

/ Zsa Zsa and Francesca lounging on mama's bed. This is very how much how they both appear in this episode /

Zsa Zsa coquette-ishly invites Baily to see her boudoir, guiding him by the hand upstairs. “If I don’t come back after this next commercial, you know where I am,” Baily leers to the camera. Her bed, draped and canopied in lurid green, is an exact replica of Empress Joséphine’s, Zsa Zsa claims. Baily asks if the bed expresses her personality and Zsa Zsa nonsensically responds, “Well of course it does! It’s blue and green. Sometimes I’m blue and most of the time I’m green!” Huh? Lounging in bed, Zsa Zsa then lists the men she thinks are sexy: Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, Frank Sinatra. Turning to Baily she flutters her false eyelashes: “I’m sure you are a very sexy and glamorous man!” Watch and squirm!

/ Little sister Eva Gabor (1919 - 1995) and Zsa Zsa (1917 - 2016) sharing a laugh - and a wig /

/ Now that's what I call art: trompe l'oeil portrait of Zsa Zsa by Margaret Keane / 

Pretty much all of the photos illustrating this post are swiped from the Heritage Auctions' website for The Estate of Zsa Zsa Gabor Signature Auction later this month. The video below is a handy guide to the deluxe glitzy trash on offer / 

Anna Sten: A Noble Failure

/ Exquisite Russian actress Anna Sten (1908-1993) in the film Nana (1934) /

"Prior to the advent of Dietrich, studios had been scrambling for a Garbo in their backlot. Now they wanted a Dietrich as well. Browless, languid, chain-smoking creatures poured into Hollywood from every corner of the globe. If they weren't born with a foreign accent, they quickly acquired one. They appeared through screens of cigarette smoke and vanished into them as quickly as they arrived … Hollywood talent scouts rummaged through Europe, returning with waves of exotics in their tow. In the search for substitutes many talented actresses were sacrificed."

From the book Marlene Dietrich by John Kobal (1968)

"Accents have always had it tough in Tinseltown. For every Garbo and Dietrich there are dozens of Franciska Gaals from The Buccaneer and from Hungary. That faraway quality in their voices sent them far away after casting directors ran out of foreign outposts in which to station them. (Samuel) Goldwyn tried hard with Anna Sten, or Anna Stench, as she was known to his stockholders. He spent a fortune promoting Sten, but in glamorizing her he buried her natural beauty under doll-like make-up. She’s remembered as a famous flop, Goldwyn’s very own Edsel.”

From the book Flesh and Fantasy by Penny Stallings (1978)

In an ideal world, Sten would be remembered as a radiant, sensitive, fragile and intense actress who was unlucky to be constantly unfavorably compared to Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich (who could measure up to them?). John Kobal would recall how Sten “… spoke in a series of semicolons and dashes, pauses that reflected the Russian soul of this half-Swedish actress who was the method in the eye of the method.” Her key Hollywood vehicles Nana (1934), We Live Again (1934) and The Wedding Night (1935) were all commercial failures, but they’re interesting failures and worth catching.




Above: Sten crooning the sultry torch song "That's Love" in Nana. It's fascinating to see how she's been painstakingly coached to mimic Marlene Dietrich (the world-weary half-spoken delivery, taking insolent drags from the smoldering cigarette) - and yet her own charisma shines through.

Update: tragically, the beautiful clip above has since been deleted! Try watching it here. 

Rachael's Birthday 2010

Everyone’s favourite gritty Yorkshire lass Rachael turned 32 on 2 July 2010. She celebrated her birthday with a boozy and raucous party on Saturday 3 July at the appropriately louche and theatrical Phoenix Artist Club in the heart of London’s glittering West End. The hostess looked radiant in a faux-vintage halter neck black dress, her hair styled by Miss Betty of It's Something Hell's on Carnaby Street. Take a peek at these exclusive pics!