Skyscraper Souls - Coming up on TCM

[MissGoddess]

I just wanted to alert those Stateside who get TCM that this fun little
precode starring Warren William and Maureen O'Sullivan is airing
on Tuesday, December 2nd at 6:15 p.m. (EST). Though ostensibly
playing the rogue, see if your sympathies won't remain firmly on
wily William's side throughout his shenanigans. It's also a wonderfully
entertaining window into the "laugh at life, don't let life laugh at you"
mentality toward the depression which cropped up in many films of
the day. You have to admire the gallantry behind these "tough" guys
and dolls as they give the mighty Depression "the bird" while at the
same time underscoring its cost.

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=2837

[Ann Harding]

This is quite a coincidence, but I watched this pictures yesterday, thanks to Fernando.
It reminded me of Grand Hotel which similarly looks at the lives of various people within the same building. Skyscraper Souls is certainly tougher than the Garbo vehicle. I particularly like Maureen O'Sullivan as the young secretary smitten with her unscrupulous boss, Warren William. I noticed Anita Page wearing a dress that looks exactly like the one worn by Joan Crawford in Grand Hotel. (perhaps they reused it?) But overall, the film was in interesting insight into the dark side of capitalism which seems to allow all sort of crooked behaviour. The film could have gained by focusing more on William, Hedda Hopper (as his wife), Verree Teasdale as his secretary/mistress and M. O'Sullivan. Though the ending has a sharp bite. It's a shame this film didn't benefit from a better director than the little known Edgard Selwyn. This Pre-Code is certainly worth catching.

[moira finnie]

Thanks for reminding me of this film, Miss G.

I enjoyed Skyscraper Souls (1932), based on a book by the prolific Faith Baldwin, enough to watch it again to relish the nifty Warren William performance, but also to enjoy the insight of a worldly wise executive secretary Verree Teasdale (soon to become Mrs. Adolphe Menjou off-screen) and--most of all--the production design of the building at the center of the film. Overwhelmingly deluxe moderne, art deco interiors dwarf the small hopes of many characters (Maureen O'Sullivan) and seem to conflate those of others (Warren William).

In the depths of the Depression, art director Cedric Gibbons (and his unseen, often uncredited minions at MGM) celebrated the audacity of architects and developers who embraced futurism, technology, and success, as seen in the spectacular interiors here. The design visions of that period led to the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building being built, as a sort of architectural coda to jazz age exuberance and excess, as much as optimism. In the movie, the fictional Dwight Building, (named after the creator, natch), as with the real world structures, were built on spec, with builders hoping that offices would soon be filled on every floor. In Skyscraper Souls audiences were able to have it both ways--a peek at the tawdry high life with William, Teasdale and Hedda Hopper (as Warren's "little woman", a society dame he keeps forgetting to ask for a divorce), and hapless youngsters such as O'Sullivan and Norman Foster, caught in the maw of big, bad business, (not to mention their own sexual frustrations and rigid attitudes).

Btw, the architect-entrepreneur played by Warren William may have been based in part on the architect-builder of the Chrysler building, William Van Alen, whose showmanship earned him the tag of ''the Ziegfeld of his profession,'' but whose buildings today are among the architectural treasures of NYC. According to those who chronicled his adventures at the time his credo was 'No old stuff for me! No bestial copyings of arches and columns and cornishes! Me, I'm new! Avanti!''

In 1928 Van Alen was hired by Walter Chrysler to design a tall building at 42d and Lexington. Construction was nearly complete in late 1929 when the magazine The Architect awarded him a ''Doctor of Altitude.'' The next year a visitor to the office of Van Alen on the 65th floor of the Chrysler Building, described it as being guarded by ''two firm and unyielding secretaries, both of them ex-shotputters from the Vassar College team.'' (That description hardly fits Teasdale or O'Sullivan, but maybe we could have recast those roles with a Patsy Kelly & a Claire Trevor?)

Mr. Van Alen would eventually have to sue Mr. Chrysler for his fee for the structure, though that did not stop the flashy architect from showing up at the annual Beaux-Arts Ball for the Institute of Design at the Hotel Astor clad in a costume modeled on the Chrysler Building, (seen below ), "made of silver metal cloth trimmed with black patent leather, flame-colored silk and flexible wood. The shoulder ornaments were the eagle heads at the 61st-floor setback."

The Depression pretty much killed Van Alen's career, though he clung to an idea for an 26 story apartment building on a lot at the corner of 56th Street and Lexington Avenue, (which he eventually lost to foreclosure). By the mid-30s he was dreaming of designing mass-produced modernistic copper-clad houses, (wonder if he'd considered what might happen to such a building in an electrical storm?). In 1936 a similar steel version of the copper house was built as a demonstration on a vacant lot at 39th Street and Park Avenue, (the model still stands at 5100 Ocean View Avenue in the Sea Gate section of Brooklyn, where it was moved around 1941). Van Alen died in 1954, and today has a Van Alen Institute and an architectural prize named after him. I suspect that his life story might be considered a bit too outrageous for the movies. Besides, we don't have Warren William to play him on screen with the proper style.


Perhaps one of the real inspirations for the "Dwight Building"--The Chrysler Building.

[MissGoddess]

Moira I really appreciate all that information on Van Alen and
the background on The Chrysler Building! My apartment is cattycorner
to the landmark and if you crook your neck at an angle that will give you a permanent injury you can just see it from my window. Interestingly, I get a better "view" of it by looking out another window at the United Nations building, the windows of which reflect an impressionistic image of the CB pinnacle. It looks just like a Georgia O'Keefe painting sometimes.

Van Alen sounds a little like Howard Roark! Maybe Warren William would have made an even better Roark than old Coop had he been younger? I love WW and look forward to recording and watching this, one of my all time favorite early thirties films.

[moira finnie]

Moira I really appreciate all that information on Van Alen and the background on The Chrysler Building! My apartment is cattycorner to the landmark and if you crook your neck at an angle that will give you a permanent injury you can just see it from my window. Interestingly, I get a better "view" of it by looking out another window at the United Nations building, the windows of which reflect an impressionistic image of the CB pinnacle. It looks just like a Georgia O'Keefe painting sometimes.

I'm very impressed with your neighborhood, April!!

Street, New York, No. 1, 1926 ~Georgia O'Keefe

Radiator Building - Night, New York, 1927 ~ Georgia O'Keefe

The Shelton with Sunspots,1926 ~ Georgia O'Keefe

New York, Night, 1929 ~ Georgia O'Keefe

Van Alen sounds a little like Howard Roark! Maybe Warren William would have made an even better Roark than old Coop had he been younger? I love WW and look forward to recording and watching this, one of my all time favorite early thirties films.

Actually, I think of the real life Van Alen sounds as though he might have been more fun and lively than Ayn Rand could shake an objectivist stick at. While I share a fondness for Gary Cooper, his character of Howard Roark always struck me as pretty insufferable, from being humorless, (at least in the movie version), to blowing up a public housing project because his "vision" had been tampered with, to raping Patricia Neal 'cause he knew "she wanted it."

Of course, demented single-mindedness often makes for great art as well as enjoyable and dramatic movies--look at all the characters played by Colin Clive in Frankenstein, or Raymond Massey in Things to Come or Orson Welles in Citizen Kane or the background of a blog piece that I'm writing about for this week's blog on TCM...which I better leave till Wednesday. I'm sure that some of our members, including you, are probably more knowledgeable about Ayn Rand and her ideas than I am, but after reading The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged and a brief biography of the author, I can understand why individualism seemed so appealing to her, (and how she might not have had a chance to develop a sense of humor living in Czarist and Communist Russia), but thought she carried the idea out the window, (how very American in some ways!).

But, gee, as someone who's worked in some art galleries big and small on a practical level, I gotta tell ya, integrity is fine stuff, but if you want anyone to ever see your "vision", you better learn about the joys of collaboration. Nobody creates something entirely alone. Of course, opinions differ, but I suspect that Ayn was really thinking more of Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson when she wrote The Fountainhead.

Okay, I know. I've gone off on a mini-tangent. It's the combo of Cooper and Neal that appeals to most people in the movie, not the ideas behind Ayn Rand's story. It's just that your response delighted me. Thanks.

[coopsgirl]

Those are beautiful paintings by O’Keefe. I don’t like The Fountainhead either. It’s a good basic plot but like you said, Rand carried the idea too far and made her characters insufferable (that is the perfect word for it). I don’t think anyone will mourn Roark’s buildings either after he blows ‘em up b/c they were ugly as sin. I definitely prefer more traditional types of architecture but I do like the modern, art deco style very much but those buildings were seriously heinous.

Even though I thought the movie missed the mark, I do enjoy watching Gary doing some manual labor at the quarry and he could break into my bedroom anytime.

On topic, I'm also looking forward to Skyscraper Souls as well as the other Anita Page movies coming on tomorrow.

[MissGoddess]

Hi Moira! I wanted to wait 'till after I watched Skyscraper Souls to reply to you. Thank you for posting those Georgia O'Keefe paintings...those are the very ones I was referring to! As I type this I have only to look over my left shoulder to see The Chrysler Building's reflection on the U.N. Building, almost like it was shimmering on dark water.

I noticed that the movie building was planted in line with Chrysler's building so as to dwarf it somewhat. It's superior height was most cleverly shown at the end when David White's girlfriend takes a walk
on the terrace and the Chrysler's pointy dome is straight ahead, slightly lower. And yet the photography of the outside entrance of his building is clearly the Chrysler's! Those wily production designers. It must have been fun planning these films.

This movie would make an interesting pairing with Counsellor-at-Law, about another success-obsessed man in a tower: John Barrymore.