Reflections on ... Death at Love House (1976)

 

Recently watched: 1976 ABC Movie of the Week Death at Love House. Joel and Donna Gregory (Robert Wagner and Kate Jackson) are a husband-and-wife writing duo collaborating on a biography of the doomed Hollywood star Lorna Love, who died tragically young in 1935. (Coincidentally, Joel’s artist father had an impassioned affair with Lorna and painted a portrait of her). And for reasons never fully explained, the couple move into Love’s totally intact Hollywood mansion to research their book (Love House was shot on location at the former estate of silent movie star Harold Lloyd). 

Creepily, Lorna’s perfectly preserved, eternally youthful corpse is on permanent display – Snow White-style - in a shrine on the premises. Strange occurrences immediately start happening. Who is the ethereal “woman-in-white” Donna glimpses in the garden? Why are there macabre occult symbols everywhere? Who was Father Eternal Fire, Lorna’s satanic looking “spiritual advisor”? And who tried to kill Donna in the locked bathroom by carbon monoxide poisoning? 

Obviously, almost anything produced by Aaron Spelling is bound to be campy fun. Raspy-voiced, gorgeous young Jackson is always an engaging screen presence. With its emphasis on occultism, golden age Hollywood and lurid showbiz tragedies (Lorna is clearly inspired by Jean Harlow), Love House suggests a page torn from Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. It will also remind you of other, infinitely superior movies: Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), Fedora (1978). And like 1944 film noir Laura, characters spend a lot of time staring, mesmerized, by an oil painting of a dead woman. For verisimilitude, supporting parts are played by actual classic Hollywood veterans like Sylvia Sidney, Joan Blondell, Dorothy Lamour and John Carradine. (The Gregorys’ literary agent is played by Bill Macy - Walter from Maude!). 

Less happily, zero effort is taken to make Lorna 1930s “period appropriate”. (She’s seen in flashbacks portrayed by Marianna Hill - cult movie fans will recognize her from Messiah of Evil (1973) and The Baby (1973) - with a feathered blow-dried 70s Farrah Fawcett coiffure). And the ending is worthy of an old episode of Scooby-Doo! Smudged, murky prints of Love House are easy to find on YouTube.

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 ... Mae West: Dirty Blonde (2020)

 

/ Mae West in 1928 when she was appearing in her play Diamond Lil (which she later adapted for the screen as She Done Him Wrong (1933)) / 

Recently watched: the 2020 documentary Mae West: Dirty Blonde, a breezy, stylish and concise (only 52-minutes) valentine to cinema’s high empress of sex. Among the hipper than usual talking heads:  Dita Von Teese, Lady Bunny, Natasha Lyonne, Candace Bergen, gossip columnist Rona Barrett, Sex and the City’s Mario Cantone and the late Andre Leon Talley (who disappoints by lamely suggesting West foreshadowed “women who dare to be sexy” like Cher, Madonna, Rhianna and Beyonce. Let’s be grateful he didn’t include a Kardashian), plus film historians Jeanine Basinger and Molly Haskell. (And Bette Midler is an executive producer). 

/ Portrait of  Mae West by George Hoyningen-Huene, 1933 /

As Dirty Blonde underlines, West was already 40 years old when she made her film debut in Night After Night (1932). By the time she arrived in Hollywood the Brooklyn-born daughter of a bare-knuckle prizefighter and corset model turned vaudeville performer turned censor-baiting playwright (one review of West’s scandalous 1926 play Sex wails that it’s “a monstrosity plucked from garbage can, destined for sewer!”) had already amassed over three decades of show biz experience. This gave West the confidence to demand creative autonomy from Paramount, and her first starring vehicle She Done Him Wrong (1933) was such a smash it saved the studio from the brink of bankruptcy.

/ Mae West when she appeared on The Red Skelton Show on 1 March 1960 /

You can’t help but get the impression directors Sally Rosenthal and Julia Marchesi (understandably) yearn to hail the tough, independent West as a protofeminist, but she resists that interpretation. (They include audio of West explaining to an interviewer she’s always preferred male company and finds other women hard to relate to).

/ West with young male starlet Tom Selleck in 1970 when they both appeared in the film Myra Breckenridge /

Highlights: Dirty Blonde nicely scrutinizes the complicated depiction of Black maids in West’s 1930s films. While Talley notes that they are kindred spirits and co-conspirators who joke with West and have romantic lives of their own, someone else argues these characters speak in a “Hollywood version of Black vernacular” and Mel Watkins asserts there’s nothing to indicate West supported the civil rights movement in the sixties. But then West fought to have Duke Ellington cast in Belle of the Nineties (1934) and – although not mentioned – it’s widely understood West enjoyed interracial sex relationships long before they were deemed acceptable. And the doc also makes you reappraise West’s reviled later films Myra Breckenridge (1970) and Sextette (1978), asking the viewer why we are so horrified by West still flaunting her sexual appetites into old age. As Basinger claims, “There’s a wonderful courage and defiance” to West’s sheer stubbornness in taking what she had in the 1930s and trying to make it work in the 1970s.  Finally, Dirty Blonde frames West’s long-term relationship with bodybuilder Paul Novak as the great love of her life. (Novak met West when he was one of the oiled muscle men in her Las Vegas revue in the early 1950s and stayed loyal right up to her death in 1980). I watched Dirty Blonde on the streaming platform NOW TV. 

/ Mae West and Paul Novak in the early 1950s / 

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!”