Tonight's movie was another Clifton Webb comedy, "Dreamboat" (1952), discovered in my recent search for Webb movies in the Library database. The last time we saw him (about a week ago), he was playing a Guardian Angel in "For Heaven's Sake". This time, he is an erudite English Professor at an exclusive college somewhere in the Eastern US. He lives with his 21 year old daughter (Anne Francis), who idolises him for his sophistication and his dedication to a non-frivolous life. She is a young, female version of her Dad : smart, well dressed and dead serious.
She attends her Dad's college, and one night - as the movie opens - her student friends invite her to a party. The invitation is a set up, though, because her friends only want to see her reaction to a show that is being aired on a newfangled television set. Yep, TV was a new thing only a decade before I was born. Heck, movies were still Silent a mere 31 years before. Holy Smokes! It makes me realize how fast technology has developed in the past century. I mean, good grief! - radio was brand new just 100 years ago....
So Anne Francis goes to this party only to discover that her student friends intended to put her on the spot when they showed her a new TV program that features a former Silent Film star hosting broadcasts of her old movies, sponsored by maker of cheap perfumes. Here you get a taste of what television was like in the early days, with commercials performed live in-studio. The plot was kind of neat on a personal basis for me too, because when my Dad first came to Hollywood in 1953, his first job was as a buyer for ABC Channel 7. He was supposed to find packages of films that would fill air time, because there were not enough TV shows in those days to do so. A TV schedule back then was made up of old movies, live boxing matches that came in super fuzzy, and the handful of early shows that were commercially produced with high production values like "I Love Lucy". The plot of "Dreamboat" shows this emergence of TV just as it was, an upstart technological medium that was a threat to the movies. The motion picture industry in return belittled "the Idiot Box", as it was called. Another personal anecdote is that my Dad, who was working as a junior executive in TV as early as 1953, called it The Idiot Box himself! Dad hated TV so much that he put the family television set in our garage for many years when my sisters were little.
By the time I was born, the TV was back in the house and I was allowed to watch to my heart's content. I grew up on early 60s television and loved all of the shows, so Dad must have had a change of heart.
At any rate, all of this attitude is depicted in the movie. Clifton Webb, the college professor, has been discovered by his students (who pass it on to his daughter, as described), that he was once a famous Silent Film Star. The students have mocking revenge in mind against their serious and stern teacher. Now, through the miracle of TV, they have discovered his secret : that in a former life he was a pompous movie star, and a Ham Actor at that.
He is threatened with termination by the college board, but is then saved by the president of the college (Elsa Lanchester, aka "The Bride Of Frankenstein"), who is not so secretly in love with him, in his movie persona. Now that she knows who he is, or was, she will not leave him alone.
Poor Webb is now besieged on every front. He feels he must go to New York to file an injunction against the woman who owns the rights to his old movies, and who is also the host of the tv program.
She is Ginger Rogers, so you know she has a lot of charm at her disposal, and she uses every bit of it against Clifton Webb to get him to drop his lawsuit. As she and her lawyer wine and dine him in New York - and as his daughter begins to loosen up after some time spent in the big city - Webb is reminded of just how big a Star he once was : second in Box Office popularity only to a "police dog" (likely Rin Tin Tin). He slowly begins to take pride in his former career.....but he still hates the way his movies are portrayed on this new thing called television.
And therein is the story of this 83 minute feature, which as noted has a lot to say about the crudity of the upstart tv industry at that time (which Dad concurred with, even though he worked in the medium, haha).
The cheesiness of "box office" Silent Film is also skewered, but Webb points out that there is a difference. In the movies, there are no commercials (at least at that time, lol). But in TV, the show is secondary to the ads....
I didn't see it that way myself when I was five years old. I just loved all the shows and the characters. To me, the ads must have just seemed part of the whole experience.
Now, of course, it's a whole different story.
Two Thumbs Up for "Dreamboat", then, because you can always count on Clifton Webb to deliver a strong comic performance, and in the movies I've seen him in, he is always surrounded by a strong supporting cast, as with Anne Francis and Ginger Rogers here, and Jeffery Hunter in a smaller role.
Mostly, though, Two Thumbs Up because these comedies are light and tight. They move their stories forward with verve and witty scripts that allow a personality like Webb to do his thing, and they quick edit the physical comedy and banter so that things never lag.
These are pros who know what works in a film, which is again what made Old Hollywood so great. ///
In other news, I went for my first hike of the year today at Aliso Canyon. Hooray! I hadn't been out there in the wild since my December 23 hike at Santa Susana, a span of 18 days. That length of time between hikes is unacceptable, and so I am setting a goal of 100 Hikes Minimum for 2019. A lot of them might be local jobs, like Aliso, Santa Su or O'Melveny. But I will also try to get out to Santa Clarita and Simi Valley at times, perhaps when temperatures reach into the triple digits in the Summer, which is not too far off.
i can't wait to take some pictures, and get back into shape also. All of this will take some time, given my work hours these days, but I will do it, and I will reach 100 Hikes.
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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