Ida Lupino

[Robert Regan]

Theresa, Moira, I want to share with you and the gang a story about the important part played in my early cinematic life by Ida Lupino and Jean Negulesco. Road House was the first time I was aware of movie story-telling, without dialogue or titles. When she is about to sing for the first time, she puts her drink and burning cigarette down on the piano. After the song, the camera focusses on the drink and cigarette, then there's a dissolve (as I later learned it is called) to the same spot with many stains from wet glasses and many burn marks. This made the passage of time and her success perfectly clear to my child's mind! Incidentally, I think her singing in this film is perfect and exactly in character. She is so good that it is credible that she would be a big hit up in the North Woods, but not quite so good that one wonders why she wasn't on Broadway or in the movies. However, her performance of One for My Baby is, for me, second only to Fred Astaire and Frank Sinatra. Good company!

[JackFavell]

I'm a Negulesco fan too, king! He and Litvak are my two favorite unsung directors from discoveries made this last year.

I cant believe I forgot On Dangerous Ground.

[movieman1957]

I saw a "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" that had a little blurb that said "Ida Lupino - Get off your Duff." A little 1970 humor with our star of the thread.

[CineMaven]

I haven't yet seen The Drive By Night and I haven't seen The Light that Failed for years - I do remember being shocked by her in the latter film so it could easily go up on the list.

Wendy, I hope you get to see "They Drive By Night" soon. I know your list of films to watch is really long. I loved Ida's hair-trigger anger in that movie. ( Guess the Bros. that be at Warners knew enuf not to put Ida and Bette together in a picture. ) But I do like Ida soft and gentle too. Saw her in "The Man I Love." She was worldly here...not hard-bitten. She falls...and falls hard for Mr. Mildred Pierce. I sort of don't understand it, but I sort of do. I do see that Ida has it in her to fall hard for a guy, and brush off a gangster like Alda. Max Steiner's music is wonderfully dramatic. The movie might just be an excuse to put a story around that great old song "The Man I Love." (I did catch Dane in "Hollywood Canteen" playing a kind of dopey lovable gum-chewing lug of a side-kick to newbie Robert Hutton. How come stars don't make movies anymore where they play themselves)??

Now that I'm back home and back to my computer, I'm thrilled to discover that Maven has now officially joined the DEEP VALLEY fan club. We knew this was your kind of film. There are many special moments in the film, not least the lump-in-the-throat final shot of Ida and the man she'll probably marry up in the distance on the top of the hill, so bittersweet.

I really have got to give more movies a chance. Yeah, Brother Rat...count me in as a member. I enjoyed it. Yes, she and Wayne Morris on that hilltop, she's really looking out at what might've been. Sad.

Finally finished "NIGHT SONGS." Let me get my thoughts together for that one.

[JackFavell]

I only saw a bit of The Man I Love, but I loved the way Walsh opened the movie, very musical and the cuts were done in a rhythm to match the music but not in a distracting way. I have it recorded. I suspect you are right, it was just an excuse to use the song as a draw to audiences. I liked the light and dark of it, what little I saw - in the lighting, and of course the story - good bad guy versus bad good guy, and Ida's feelings being somewhat darker and deeper than anyone really thought. Her ups and downs and choice between the two men seemed to be echoed in the way the movie was filmed, not at all typical of Walsh, but interesting.

[CineMaven]

What would you say is typical Walsh, Jaxxxon? I've never been very good at identifying directors' traits or signatures; well...except the obvious: Hitchcock.

[JackFavell]

Well, now that I've gotten myself into deep trouble here.... Walsh directed a lot of movies, many for the studio and not for himself, and many of them don't fit the curve I am pitching in the next few paragraphs. But here goes.....

I'd say that the movies Walsh is most identified with, and the ones that HE most identified with have a protagonist that is a dreamer, rather unrealistic about his own life and the fate he wishes for himself. There is something grand... noble about Walsh's heroes. Deep Valley most definitely could have been a Walsh film, it fits so perfectly into Walsh's canon, I almost wish it were, it's directed by Negulesco as if it were a Walsh film.

Walsh is perhaps the best director at natural settings that ever lived as far as I'm concerned - and that's no mean feat when you think of who he's up against - Ford and Hathaway and Stevens and many more I am sure I am forgetting. There is something so free and simple, so beautiful and heartfelt about Walsh's settings... and the way his heroes fit into these landscapes, well it's like a man can melt into nature, it is so large and he is so small. His signature shot, in his outdoor films, is a man with a wide scope of mountains or sky behind him (I'm thinking Bogie shot from low down on the ground, under his chin, looking up into the vastness of the Sierra sky, happy for maybe the only time in his life - free). Wayne also looks great against the vast swath of pines in The Big Trail. I think I've used the word VAST here twice and it's no coincidence or accident.... that's how the world feels to a Walsh hero, even in the cities of his urban, more interior films. The world is a school of hard knocks, and only love can really take the sting out of being civilized. Walsh is a bit of a Huck Finn I believe.

His pacing can be a delight, and his set-ups are unobtrusive. The only time Walsh really lets go with the camera is with natural settings, or with music. Check out the beginning of The Strawberry Blonde sometime - it's beautiful, he obviously loves those old fashioned songs, barbershop quartets, etc. Pacing and closeups are the way Walsh delivers.

His hero is up against great odds, Cagney in The Roaring Twenties and The Strawberry Blonde, even in White Heat, Bogie in High Sierra, MacLaglen and Lowe in the original What Price Glory? Gloria Swanson in Sadie Thompson... odds so great it is unlikely that they will come out as winners, but oh! we want them to! And because of their dreams and their delicate hubris they end up being very vulnerable in this large world we find ourselves in, at the mercy of those who have no dreams. In the end, they make a brave stand, do the right thing, remain free or loyal to an ideal that only exists in their mind, even if it costs them everything, their lives, doomed to be pronounced dead by someone with no soul, who never really lived.

[RedRiver]

GENTLEMAN JIM, THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON, OBJECTIVE, BURMA fit your description to one degree or another.

His pacing can be a delight

A Walsh trademark. HIGH SIERRA makes most gangster films look slow and plodding. WHITE HEAT is actually a little longer than it needs to be. But with Walsh driving, we get there in plenty of time!

[RedRiver]

I saw a "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" that had a little blurb that said "Ida Lupino - Get off your Duff." A little 1970 humor with our star of the thread.

LAUGH-IN also speculated as to the potential marriage of Ida and Don Ho.

[JackFavell]

Oh of course, Red! I don't know why I didn't think of those Walsh films. I also could add Northern Pursuit and Uncertain Glory to the list too. There is a feeling of hope, of sheer romantic hope, right up to the last minute in Walsh's films that I find irresistible. Walsh is a true romantic, and I mean that in the broadest sense of the term, not merely as a man woman thing. It's a Byronic romanticism that fueled Walsh, I suspect.

[CineMaven]

Well, now that I've gotten myself into deep trouble here.... Walsh directed a lot of movies, many for the studio and not for himself, and many of them don't fit the curve I am pitching in the next few paragraphs. But here goes....

I'd say that the movies Walsh is most identified with, and the ones that HE most identified with have a protagonist that is a dreamer, rather unrealistic about his own life and the fate he wishes for himself. There is something grand... noble about Walsh's heroes.

Deep trouble, Wen? Nope.


RAOUL WALSH

I won't gush...I won't gush...

What a wonderful essay on Raoul Walsh, Wendy. You make me want to gather whatEVAH I have in my Ollie-driven dvd collection to look up what I might have by way of Raoul Walsh films.



Aaaaah Cagney...his (anti)-heroes...so big-headed, it takes a raging inferno to bring him down. You have such an eloquent grasp on a director's philosophy, that I'm questioning must I go back and re-view their films. Have I been watching blindly? What the heck have I been doing the last
( _____ ) years? Watching what the story is at the price of the things the director uses to TELL the story? Watching at the expense of the things the director is TRYING TO SAY?? Must I question my existence?? Okay okay...let me tone it down. I don't have to do all that. But must I watch with the sound off to really GET these guys? To be able to sum them up succinctly without qualification?

I actually might have to go month by month to get these directors under my belt in a real substantive way. Like a good reporter I've got to look at the five W's: WALSH, WELLMAN, WYLER, WILDER, WELLES. And so many others of course, STEVENS, CAPRA, FORD, SIODMAK, HITCHCOCK and all those many etceteras. Listen, when you finish painting your house turquoise, and walking Lily, could you just find time to write a darned book on directors?

Apparently I need crib notes to pass myself off as a cinema maven.

[Sue Sue Applegate]

Ida was so snappy in They Drive By Night, Cinemavester, but I just adore the ending of High Sierra when she recognizes that Earle is free. There is just something about the doggie and the last great moment of hope.

Very concise, well-thought comments about Mr. Walsh, Jackie.

Robert Regan, lovely comment about Ida's singing voice.

Evidenty, Chris, Ida took their advice!

[CineMaven]

WHEN IRISH EYES ARE SMILING...THE EYES ARE THE WINDOWS OF THE SOUL... SHE'S JUST MIS-UNDERSTOOD

Ida was snappy, SueSue. She snapped alright...like a brittle twig. Her arguing with Raft in "They Drive By Night" ("I put those creases in your pants...") was just fantastic. "High Sierra" her & the little dog. What IS it about Ida that makes men die in order to be "free"??? ( Ha! ) Dane Clark was "freed in "Deep Valley." I'm baffled.

I'm-a likin' Ida. Guess I'd better finish seeing that movie she did with Francis Lederer. I'm not sure if she has the light comedy touch though in "The Man I Love" she had some cute lines. They're all lucky she didn't burn them up with her Lupino wrath--------->

[JackFavell]

Oh my gosh, Maven! DON"T turn in your Maven card! You write better than anyone on what feelings a movie evokes in you. And you notice things I would NEVER ever begin to pick up on - re: The Letter. re: The Constant Nymph. re: Out of the Past. re: ....any of the movies we've talked about. Well, I could go on and on.

I can't tell you how many movies I've watched, that I've literally fallen into, so deeply involved in the characters and story that I never once looked at the way it was directed, or lit, or the music behind it, or the script.... but lately, maybe because of these boards, I've gone back to look at the movies that moved me (and some that didn't) and searched for a reason WHY they did what they did to me emotionally.

Now I am not sure I would recommend it to everyone, because in some ways, it can take one's enjoyment down a notch. But I am kind of a picker, someone who has to dig around, root among my feelings, and I really want to figure out Walsh the director a bit more because he was one of my first movie loves. And he was definitely the first director to ever fire my imagination. I'm on a sentimental journey, but I don't want to recapture my youth with his movies, watch and cry and marvel, necessarily. I want to know what it is he does that makes me like him so. Physically as a director, how does he piece a film together? How does he impart such intangibles to the audience who cares? Even having read about him, and having watched a lot of his movies, I still don't really know what makes him tick. He doesn't rely on a style, there is no discernible Walsh 'look' so this makes what he does a little harder to distinguish. I connect with him in a mystical way, an emotional way, and I'm trying to see if it's a thread I can link through all of his movies, this feeling of kindred-ness. So I am going to pick apart his films, try to see what it is, how he meshes his films together, what makes this or that a 'Walsh film'. Where does film become feeling?

So sorry to hijack the Ida thread for these internal speculations.